in a mist of steam. It was inching towards her, too slowly for her to have noticed.
He snatched her up. The engine hissed past them, and in the future that hadn’t happened, he saw the beak shape of the air-breaker knock her over, and then a shattering noise he would never forget, even though, really, he had never heard it. He didn’t realise he had been backing away until he bumped into the wall of the coal shed. It was corrugated iron, so it juddered and whooped.
Lily was staring at him, shocked to have been grabbed like that.
‘Don’t put her down or I’ll punch you in the face,’ the welder snarled. He was shaking too. As he spoke, he slung a mallet so hard onto the floor that it bounced twice, even though it must have weighed as much as a cannonball. Lily jumped.
Joe jolted back from him, sorry and furious at the same time. ‘Jesus, you’re scaring her!’
‘I’m scaring her? Get her out of here! You stupid bastard!’
He hurried to the gate and stood by the road, waiting to calm down, but it didn’t come and he still couldn’t remember, even under the steam-powered panic pressure, who he had thought the man was. He never could.
5
Joe lay looking at the gas lamp, which had been stuttering lately. It smelled chemical even when it was off. They kept the window open now, just in case, and so the long attic room was always cold.
The headboard bumped the wall. He had to concentrate not to wince. M. Saint-Marie could hear downstairs, he was sure. Alice pushed her hands under his shirt, pressing down on his collarbones. It added nastily to the feeling that there was a breeze-block right over his heart. He tried to think about something else.
He’d gone to St Paul’s on the way home, still shaken up about Lily and the engine. The inside of the cathedral had been loud with the work on the dome, and through the weave of the scaffolding, dull light from the steelworks’ lamps came down in tines. Pinned to the confession booths were printed signs that said, Confession available between the hours of 3.30 p.m. and 6 p.m. He was too late for it, which was a relief. M. Saint-Marie always wanted him to go, but Joe couldn’t look Père Philippe in the face these days.
He wished Alice would hurry up.
The cathedral had new electrical wiring. The dean had gone a bit far; the shrine of Maria had an electric halo now. But Joe liked the new prayer-candle set-up. Instead of lighting a taper and candle, you put a coin through a slot and an electric candle lit automatically. He’d put in a centime and prayed, like always, that he wasn’t going mad.
Alice stopped and sighed. There was a tiny moment when she saw him properly and looked sad, because he wasn’t Toby. She had never said that, but he knew it was true. He had spent a long time studying photographs, and he and Toby looked uncannily alike, or at least, they did if you could see past Joe’s being older and smaller. It must have been pronounced in twilight, because twilight was always when Alice seemed to catch the similarity strongly enough to want to see if he was like Toby to touch as well as to look at.
He wished she wouldn’t, but he wished for a lot of things and you couldn’t go round getting your own way all the time.
‘Is there any kind of insurance?’ she said, which was only a continuation of the previous conversation. ‘For if anything happens to you out there?’
‘No. But I’ll be all right.’
She hmmed as she got up. ‘You’ve got to wonder what it’s like up there, haven’t you,’ she said pensively. ‘No slavery. Women allowed to work properly. Everyone with their own choices. They can’t be how the papers say they are.’
Joe sat up slowly, not wanting to seem in a rush, though like always, he felt filthy. Alice smiled to say she was only complaining, not trying to say he shouldn’t go, and disappeared into the next room. The sound of running water exchanged places with her. He looked sideways at the floor while he righted his clothes and looped his scarf back on, and then gloves, so that he wouldn’t be able to feel anything.
Being married to someone he didn’t know had been fine at first. They’d been polite to each other and kept everything meticulously tidy, and that was