‘I’m not going to see you again, am I?’ His heart was juddering. ‘After this. That’s it.’
‘No.’ Kite was quiet for a second. Joe thought he was going to change the subject or close in on himself again, but he did the opposite. ‘Are you all right? You’ve gone white.’
‘Of course. I’m …’ He trailed off, because he wasn’t. ‘You could stay.’
‘I can’t. I’m on leave for now, but I have to be back next week—’
‘You can’t tell me all this and then just vanish!’ What had begun as the steam from a small worry was building and building, powering whole pistons and mechanisms that were well on their way to firing full panic.
‘Then what am I supposed to do?’ Kite said, quite gently. ‘I can’t stay here, I have eight hundred people to look after. You have people here who need you too, the twins and your brother. I don’t know what—’
‘Then take me with you,’ Joe said, before he had decided to. He swallowed hard. ‘Look, those visions – those memories, those are the best things I have. Please.’
‘Your family, Joe—’
‘You’re my family! You were family before any of them. I’ve missed you even when I didn’t remember you. Everything I’ve done since losing you has been about getting back to you. And I know I’ve left you behind before for other families, but not this time. I can’t do it again.’ He swallowed when he noticed how much he was saying I. ‘Sorry. If you don’t want me to – look, I’d understand if you said you never want to see me again. I didn’t mean to just invite myself.’
Kite said nothing for a while. But then, ‘Seven o’clock, platform three. King’s Cross.’ He inclined his head, careful and full of courtesy. He was holding himself at a distance from the idea. ‘I’ll expect you if I see you. Don’t worry if you change your mind.’
Joe pulled him close. Kite turned to stone, but little by little he unstiffened, and hugged him back.
Home was a painting. There was a thinness to everything and sometimes he could see the canvas through it. He walked around the whole house, all the way up to the attic; the same attic where Joe and Alice Tournier had lived, in that other version of now, where M. Saint-Marie had not gone home to France, fed up with all the post-independence paperwork and restrictions designed to discourage Parisians from moving here, and left it to Joe. The view beyond its round window had been of a London blackened by the steelworks. Now, the towers were sandy-coloured, even in the dark, uplit by the street lamps. He stood in the place where Lily’s crib had been. The attic was just an attic now, full of the accumulated rubbish of past Christmases.
It had been real. There had been a real little girl who he’d fought to come back to. Kite was real, and had waited for him years ago by the sea.
He went slowly back downstairs. He passed the sun room, where the fire was still burning and their father was still going strong with the mince pies, and the regiment were ineffectively hushing each other as they sang a drunken song about a lion and a unicorn.
‘Boo!’ Toby caught him from behind and squashed him into a vice of a hug. ‘How are you, small bear?’
Joe was older, but he was a head smaller. Toby was a monster person. ‘I’m all right.’ He hesitated. ‘This is going to sound mad, but I need you to tell me whether or not someone was really there, or if I was just hallucinating.’
‘Who’s this we’re talking about?’ said Toby, who did a good impersonation of someone who found epilepsy visions only of mild interest. It wasn’t true, but he didn’t know Joe had heard him talking to Alice at night.
‘The man who came here today, the one who wasn’t from your regiment, the sailor. White, red hair. I think he sat with Sanjeev.’
Toby nodded. ‘Burn scars.’
Joe sagged. Toby squeezed him again, more gently this time.
‘Friend of yours?’
‘Yes. I thought … well, he serves in Scotland and I thought I’d go back up with him for a bit.’
‘Send me a haggis.’
‘Will do.’
‘Everything all right?’ Toby said, scrutinising him now.
‘Yes … yes.’ Joe looked up at him and wanted to say, I remember that in another life, you died in a field just beyond the Scottish border. But that changed; because a hundred years ago now, there was no siege at Edinburgh, no massacre. No genocide that set off the fury of the last surviving dregs of the English army, who became the Saints. They don’t exist any more. They didn’t shoot you this time.
It was all there, like a map.
‘Love you,’ he said.
Toby kissed his forehead. ‘I love you too, you tiny oddball. Last glass of wine?’
Joe agreed. Toby walked him to a sofa, both hands on Joe’s shoulders, probably to keep him from changing his mind.
‘What happened to the Taj Mahal?’ Joe asked, because there were just a lot of empty wine bottles now where it had stood.
‘Is that the start of a joke? I don’t know, what did happen to the Taj Mahal?’
‘No, the … model, the fountain.’
‘What?’ Toby said, looking confused in the edgy way he’d carried around with him ever since he and Alice had had to fetch a memoryless, bewildered Joe from Glasgow.
‘Nothing,’ said Joe. He wondered if it was possible to drop a brick in 1809 and, by some convoluted process of history, cause a demented potter not to think of making a ceramic Taj Mahal fountain a hundred years later.
Like an oil-slick layer, Joe became aware of a new memory, of Toby bringing back chintz for Alice, not a tasteless fountain. But that oil-slick memory was very, very thin. Everything else
