‘Was it hard this time?’ Kite asked after a while.
‘No. I lost my memory while I was in Harris. The vicar there took me in until the sea ice melted and then we went to a doctor in Glasgow. Toby and Alice came up to fetch me.’ He frowned when he remembered how things had been when he’d left. ‘How is it in Edinburgh? Was there a siege?’
‘No. It’s all right. Better.’ Kite eased away and walked further from him, just out of reach. ‘Although I hope we aren’t making everything even worse than before by bricking up the gate.’
‘No, that sounds sensible – why would it?’
Kite pointed upward. ‘The design of all the light bulbs just changed while we were standing here.’
‘It … has,’ Joe said slowly.
‘It’s all the people going to and fro at the gate. I’ve tried to stop the crew going ashore too much, but we have to make supply runs and everyone wants to see what a hundred years in the future looks like. I think there’s a lot of flotsam from both times floating around between the two now. It must affect things.’ Kite was watching the string of lights above them, like he was daring them to change again. ‘We keep getting visits from the future-side whalers. They know what the gate is, more or less, so they keep coming to lecture us about modern shipbuilding.’
Joe laughed.
Kite smiled too, and Joe suspected he had a soft spot for the whalers. ‘But, every time someone from your side comes to my side, something changes, doesn’t it, however small, because they shouldn’t be there. I’ve been worried all week that someone from your side will call the wrong person from my side a moron and I’ll wake up to find everyone here is speaking Russian or Hindustani or God knows.’
‘I’m sure it’ll be all right. We can live with different light bulbs,’ Joe said, although now Kite had pointed it out, he felt uneasy.
At Knightsbridge, the hotel room was airy and simple, with a broad fireplace and coal in the grate, waving heat across the hearthrug. Kite stayed downstairs to fetch some wine – the night manager was keeping it hot – so Joe went up alone to stoke the fire. He had flames flickering over it again by the time Kite opened the door with his elbow and came through as if it were Joe’s space and not his. He set the wine glasses down carefully on the table where, anticipating the wine, the housekeeping people had left a bowl of oranges and a sharp knife. He took an orange and began to cut it up, and shied back when Joe touched his arm.
‘Do you mind if I take the wine with me? I can sneak out with the glass I think, then I’ll be out your way,’ Joe said, aware how monstrously strange it must be to have him in the room at all, when he remembered being Jem Castlereagh and Joe Tournier but wasn’t either of them.
‘No – stay. You’ll freeze.’
Joe didn’t point out that Kite could hardly look at him. Kite was better when you didn’t call his attention to himself. More and more, Joe had a feeling that when he wasn’t standing on a quarterdeck, what Kite most wanted was to be allowed to sit quietly in the corner of a conversation and go unnoticed. ‘When’s your train?’ Joe said instead.
‘Seven. In the morning.’
It gave Joe an unpleasant bolt of alarm. He had hoped Kite would be around for another week yet; or not even hoped, expected, because it was hard to travel anywhere between Christmas and New Year. ‘I’ll – are you okay at railway stations, do they make sense?’
‘No, they’re terrifying, but it’s all in English now, so that helps,’ Kite said. ‘I can’t accidentally go to Paris.’
There was a painful silence.
‘I can see you off?’ Joe offered.
‘No, I’m all right.’
Joe was starting to feel urgent about finding a reason to see him again. ‘I could bring you something to read for the way? There’s a lot you’d like, published lately. Nothing that can hurt.’
Kite shook his head. ‘No, better not. I’m honestly contorting myself into passions of anxiety already about things changing.’
‘Passions of anxiety. You.’
‘But thank you.’ Kite tipped some of the orange slices into a wine glass and slid it across to Joe. He looked, now, much more like someone who had been in a war than someone who was in the middle of one. His hair was short, and the scars down his neck had turned silver. There weren’t any new ones. He raised his eyes when he felt Joe looking at him. He was so familiar and such a stranger that it was like meeting an actor. He was the man from the sea, the one who waited, and looking at him here, Joe could finally remember the beach. It was where Jem and Agatha had been married.
He could remember that Kite had slipped away after the celebrations, which had been on the deck of the Victory. He must have thought he was giving the newlyweds some privacy. It had always been impossible to make him understand that he was wanted; having been told all his life that he was nothing but human jetsam attached to his famous sister. So they’d run down after him onto the beach. The three of them colliding had sent them all tumbling into the sea.
He could remember grasping Kite’s hands, unbroken then, and promising there was always space for him, and how Kite had never believed it, though he had pretended; and how Agatha, guiltily, had been glad her brother had never believed it. In bed that night, she’d confessed how badly she wanted something – someone – who was just hers, not who she cultivated for her brother’s career or the benefit of a hospital.
He could remember how his heart had splintered when he understood that, far from
