He curled up under his coat on the way, cold right to the marrow now. More of the black streets glided by, the terraces like widow’s lace. Then there was the Tamise: black too, and so packed with cargo ships that a limber person could have got across the whole breadth of it jumping from deck to deck. Normal, all normal. Except he felt like someone had left him on the surface of Mars.
The second hospital was called La Nouvelle Salpêtrière. It was a much nicer place than Joe had expected. South of the river, in Southwark, it was an impressive building that looked much more like a museum or a bank than a hospital. He had imagined it would be grim and white inside, but in fact it was hard to tell that it was an asylum at all. The entrance hall was all marble and pillars, nice couches, and chandeliers of electric lights. Someone deep in the building was playing the piano.
On the way upstairs to the consultant’s office, the nurse took him past two cells lined with cork, but the doors were open and nobody was inside. There was, said the nurse, a criminal wing, where the cases were far more serious, but it was separate. The only other sign that perhaps not everyone was to be trusted was the cages around the fireplaces.
While he was waiting outside the consultant’s office, a man lent him a copy of Le Monde and claimed to control the weather. Joe sat holding the paper, looking at the words and the typeface, and trying to trace why it was all wrong. It didn’t say anything extraordinary. There was the weather in one column – it didn’t match what the man predicted – an advert for silk shirts, one for a M. d’Leuve’s brand-new invention, an electric corset which was apparently very good for feminine discomforts. He wondered at that, because Madeline had never seemed so uncomfortable that she would need electrifying. He frowned at his knees when he realised he had remembered a name, and her face; a small woman with dark hair, who suited dark green. He couldn’t think of a last name, or if she was a sister or a wife, or neither.
The doctor’s office was airy, with a bleak, beautiful view over the hospital’s frosty lawns. On the wall was a certificate from an academy in Paris. The desk had bite marks on one leg, near the top. Joe looked round for the dog that must have done that but couldn’t see one, which was a lot more disconcerting than it should have been. All the details landed in his mind like bright pins, sharp and pricking and very unpleasant.
The doctor explained that he would be there for a week, on the understanding that the accommodation fees would be waived. ‘Now, you’ve been referred from the Colonial Free, I see. I can tell you now exactly what you’re suffering from. It’s a seizure; a form of epilepsy. With any luck, it will go off soon.’
‘A seizure?’
The doctor set the notes down and smiled. He was young and smartly turned out, Parisian; on colonial placement, probably, to rack up experience before returning to France. Joe felt hopeless. The more he thought about it, the more he realised he knew general things, but nothing specific.
‘Yes,’ the doctor said. ‘I’m personally very interested in this particular epilepsy type, so I’ve been asking for cases, hence your referral. It’s what we’re calling silent epilepsy; it doesn’t come with convulsions, only the symptoms we would usually associate with an epileptic aura – amnesia, paramnesia, visions. Had anything of the latter two?’
‘What does paramnesia mean?’ Joe asked. The doctor’s voice was so posh that he could feel himself furling up inside with the urge to keep his answers short, and not to ask questions or to waste time.
‘The blurring of something imaginary and something real. Most commonly, déjà vu; the sense you’ve seen something new before. And its opposite, jamais vu, which is when something that should be familiar feels wholly alien.’
‘Yes!’ Joe said fast, and felt his eyes burn, desperately grateful to hear someone name the feeling. ‘Yes, that second one, ever since that man found me at the station! I didn’t think the Gare du Roi was in London, all the streets looked wrong, the – newspapers look wrong …’
‘Textbook,’ the doctor said gently. ‘Absolutely. Now, I can promise you that you do know Londres, because you’ve got a very strong Clerkenwell