He got up and washed when she came out of the bathroom, looked in on Lily, who was asleep, then went to sit in the kitchen, which was really just the far side of the bedroom. The floor there was just the boards, so he could see down into the study below through the gaps. M. Saint-Marie must have heard every word Joe and Alice said, but he had never complained.
He leaned forward against one elbow and held the other shoulder, which was sore. It took him a while to notice that he was digging his nails hard into the space above his collarbone and that it hurt. When he stopped, he could feel the crescent marks.
Three months without Lily. God, he was stupid. He should tell de Méritens he couldn’t go after all.
Only, he had to. He had to, or he’d go mad with not knowing. He would sink deeper and deeper into this certainty that nothing was right and he didn’t belong. He would keep racing after visions until one day he chased them in front of a carriage and killed himself.
‘Moo,’ said Lily, who was biting the rail of her crib and looking like she might explode if she didn’t tell her joke. She flapped her arms.
‘A flying cow?’ he smiled, glad she was awake. Alice had gone to bed, curled up in a ball. ‘Are there flying cows?’
Lily grinned and hid. She wasn’t too good at hiding, because she had a perpetual snuffle from the smog. He pretended to have lost her and he hunted around, then knelt down to settle her again once he’d found her under the blanket. He stayed there a good while after she’d gone to sleep, his back against his own bed and one hand on her chest to feel her ribs lift and fall. He’d sewn a picture of a duck on her nightshirt and the stitches were already faded, because she kept stroking it as if it were a real duck. Looking at her made him feel clean.
He heard that crack again, the sound of her going under the engine, clear as any other memory for all it hadn’t happened.
Maybe three months away from her was for the best.
Like always, he jerked awake at quarter past four in the morning with raging panic kneeling on his chest. He sat up and lit a cigarette, the base of his skull resting on the steel bar at the top of the bedstead. Nothing helped, but smoking was something to do.
The night-time panics had come on after that first epileptic attack at the Gare du Roi and never improved. Aching, he wished, again, that the man from the hallucination would reappear. Nothing was forthcoming. The purple electric lights from the club over the road flashed on the gloss paint on the skirting board.
He felt sick of the way the epilepsy infected everything. He left a baby girl to be run over by steam engines, he’d chosen a whole career because of a postcard, he pined for people he didn’t know and couldn’t bring himself to love the ones he did. It was cancerous.
A flash from the club caught on the gilt invitation poking from his coat pocket where it hung from the door. He could just make out RSVP Prof. E. Sidgwick, Secretary. If he set out in the morning and went north to Eilean Mòr straight from Pont du Cam, he would be able to go. He could find out why they were so interested in epileptic amnesia. Even better if they could help.
He wished Lily would wake up so he could have something to do, but she had slept like a rock since she’d been ten weeks old and now she scowled if you disturbed her before eight.
He calmed down after a couple of hours, and like he had done every few months, he dreamed about the man from his visions. He was always in the same place. It was a beach, cold and misty. The shore was full of old flotsam – bits of rope that had turned the same colour as the dull pebbles, pale spars – and black weed. The man was waiting on the tideline up ahead, and though there was nothing at all to say so, the dream always came with the perfect certainty that he was waiting for Joe.
6
Pont du Cam, 1900
Pont du Cam was much colder than Londres. The land changed on the way,