since then, without even noticing.
‘Now, we had an Albert d’Vigny write to us, saying that for an entire morning he was convinced he was really called Albert Shale and he had a sister called Madeline, who had gone missing along with her son and no one was looking for her. It happened to him about five weeks before it happened to you. He’s that gentleman over there. If it’s the same Madeline, he would have been your brother-in-law. Do you recognise him?’
Joe looked. ‘No,’ he said quietly.
Her son.
His son too?
‘No, and he didn’t recognise you. But, same name. A woman of the same age, from the same place; it’s simply too much of a coincidence that you produced identical information.’
‘It – well, we probably both read something in the same newspaper.’
‘No. There’s never been any such person. We checked newspapers, parish records, we spoke to Albert’s parents. She never was.’
Joe stared down at his wine. ‘Are you telling me it was – real?’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said, as if it wasn’t important. ‘What we find of particular interest in your case is that you felt it far more, and much later than the main cluster of cases. Everyone else remembered their real lives again after a few hours. But your memory never came back. At all?’
‘No.’
Sidgwick adjusted his glasses. ‘Because the thing is, you see – what all this implies is that something very particular happened, and that it happened in or around the end of October two years ago. That’s when the first set of these episodes cluster, almost to the day. There have been waves of it since but not much to speak of before.’
‘What could do that?’
He saw them both shift, now that they were having to say it aloud and unshrouded in academic language. He understood now why the dons were pushing to use English. Science words were French words. English was a test to see if an idea made sense without decoration.
‘We don’t know.’ Mrs Sidgwick paused. ‘Nothing like it has ever been recorded before.’
‘Your case is unique,’ her husband said. He spoke like he was talking to students, slightly too loudly. ‘Something was different, for you. Either you yourself are far more susceptible, or the circumstances were different somehow.’
Joe felt drunk, but he hadn’t taken more than a sip of wine. His eyes kept slipping to the man across the room, Albert. This time they slipped at the same time Albert’s did. All he saw was the blankness that must have been in his own face too. There was nothing familiar about the man.
‘Do you remember anything?’ Sidgwick was saying. ‘Anything at all, of what you were told were false memories?’
‘No – I’m sorry.’ He hesitated. The man in the visions was too precious to hand over like an old library book. More than that, he did not want to give Sidgwick any more reason to imagine it was worth talking to him. ‘Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.’
Mrs Sidgwick put her hand on his arm. A flicker of alarm went across her face when Joe flinched. ‘What we’re saying is that the missing people must have gone somewhere.’
Joe had a strange, building urgency deep in his chest, the same as the kind that woke him up every night at four o’clock. ‘Where?’ he asked helplessly.
‘We have no idea.’ She was watching him too closely. ‘But the scale of all this is astronomic. These epileptic episodes – or what’s being called epilepsy – are common. We estimate about one in four people in England has experienced it. Which means we might be looking at hundreds of thousands of people missing, just like Madeline. Our counterparts in Chartres have collected similar data all through France too.’
Joe nodded. ‘But they existed. In some …’ He didn’t know how to finish. In some other place, so close to this one that people could remember it.
‘Yes.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘We have no idea what’s happened, none at all. We were wondering … if there was anything else you’ve remembered since you spoke to the doctors?’
Joe shook his head. He looked down at the reflection of his own eyes in his wine, and wondered if the man who waited by the sea had been real once too.
Or perhaps was still.
7
Scotland, 1900
The border was just north of Glasgow. The train stopped, and everyone had to queue at the checkpoints. Joe put his bag down while he waited, because no one was moving