of a man who insists he has a system. He was a cloudpuff of a person who must have put on weight recently, because he was still wearing a waistcoat that was too small for him. He was mumbling under his breath, a kind of gravelly bumble that didn’t sound like he knew he was doing it.
‘Hello,’ he said when Joe stepped in. ‘Here about the welding job? I’ll tell you now, it’s yours if you’re sober and you speak in sentences.’
‘No.’ Joe hesitated. ‘I have a funny thing to ask. Do you … happen to know this place?’ He showed de Méritens the postcard. He kept hold of it, his thumb covering the English message on the back.
De Méritens put on a pair of glasses. ‘The Eilean Mòr light, yes. Why is that a funny question?’
‘Do you know if anything – has happened there recently? Three months ago, say.’
‘Happened? No. It’s only just been built. How do you mean? Have you got a complaint? Christ, if you’re from the Lighthouse Board—’
‘I’m not, I’m not,’ Joe said, embarrassed. It was bizarre to talk to someone who spoke to him as though he knew things. He felt like a fraud. ‘I’m nothing to do with anything, my name’s Joe Tournier. I was found at the Gare du Roi three months ago with no memory of anything until then. But this morning, someone sent me this, and I think I know it.’
De Méritens looked intrigued. ‘You’re one of those amnesia cases? Remarkable. I don’t think I can help you, though, it’s … as I say, it’s a brand-new light. It was only finished six months ago.’
Joe frowned. ‘Brand new. Was there another lighthouse there before this one?’
‘No. Why?’
‘The …’ He had to laugh. ‘The postcard is from eighteen hundred and five.’
De Méritens had a brilliant laugh; he actually said ho ho ho. ‘Someone’s having you on, I’m afraid,’ he said.
Joe folded the postcard back into his pocket, still smiling the cinders of that first laugh. He’d known it would never be so easy as looking up an address and asking someone. He hadn’t expected anything enough to feel too disappointed. ‘Well. Thank you anyway, sir, I’ll – hang on. Did you say welding job?’
4
Londres, 1900 (two years later)
The Psychical Society sent Joe an invitation to their annual dinner, again. It was tomorrow.
Apparently the Society, who had heard about his case from La Salpêtrière, were ever so interested in people with his kind of epilepsy. They’d invited him last year too, and the year before. They always sent him a free copy of their quarterly journal. He couldn’t look at them at home. It made Alice think he was dwelling on things he shouldn’t. Instead he stuffed the journals in the spanner drawer at work to read in tentative snatches over lunch. Everyone else hid dirty magazines there. The invitation, though, was too suspect even for that, so it stayed in his pocket, along with the postcard of Eilean Mòr.
The invitation had sharp corners that kept catching his hand all week. He didn’t know why he’d kept it. The Society was based in Pont du Cam, so he couldn’t go. It was seventy miles and half a day on the train away, and train tickets cost too much. And he would have had to come back here on the midnight train to make it to work on Friday. But he kept thinking about it. He didn’t normally go in for anything that called itself ‘psychical’, but the doctor at La Salpêtrière was no use, and these people did seem like proper scientists. He had ten of their journals now and everything in them seemed sensible.
He couldn’t believe it had been two and a half years since that morning at the Gare du Roi. He still felt like he was hurrying to catch up with himself and all the things he didn’t know.
Two and a half years since the Gare du Roi. Two years and two months since he’d started work for M. de Méritens. Sixteen months since Lily had been born.
It was only just light as Joe walked into the workshop yard, Lily in his arms because he couldn’t stand the idea of letting her walk through all the men and machines. Whenever she shifted, the corner of the Society invitation nicked his hip. The whine of saws and welding torches was tempered, sometimes, by the shouts of the stonemasons on the broken dome of St Paul’s. When the scaffolding had gone up