accent, the doctor had said; that must have been code for scummy. She put him in a narrow room with a bed and a desk and a view over the gardens, berating him all the while.
He thought she was just being rude at first, but then realised that he was making her nervous, so he put himself in a corner and tried to think small thoughts while she explained where everything was and what time meals were. He felt disconcerted, because he wasn’t a big enough man to loom. What the doctor had said about the tartan lining of his coat chimed again. Carefully, like it might be on a fuse, he took out the idea that he might have something to do with terrorists. It still didn’t sound right. He was pretty sure hardened terrorists would have to be angry people, and though he wasn’t confident of many things, he knew he had about as much inclination towards explosive rage as a Joe-shaped pile of salt. Not everyone would want a lot of it, but it was, basically, neutral.
That, part of his mind pointed out, was a chemistry joke. How does English scum of the earth from Clerkenwell know chemistry?
No use wondering that for now.
‘Um,’ he ventured, ‘are there any books?’ If he couldn’t get away from it all, going somewhere imaginary seemed like the next best thing.
‘There’s a library. It’s designed to be improving.’ Her whole posture made it clear he could do with improving. ‘French classics of course.’
Classic sounded a lot like it would be about the horrors of life in slums, and Fallen Women who were never interesting enough to actually fall off anything. ‘Anything English?’ he said, not with much hope.
The nurse stared at him. ‘What kind of place do you think this is?’
She didn’t let him speculate before she strode to the open door and vanished into the corridor with a disgusted huff.
He put his hands into his pockets and turned them out on the desk.
He had a few francs, new-minted, with Napoleon IV looking the age he was. There was a case of cigarettes. They were home-made, but the tobacco smelled good. From the same pocket came a tin with an enamel lid and a tiny picture of a ship on the front. He thought it was a snuffbox until he opened it and found matches inside. Last, from his inside pocket, there were two train tickets. They were both singles to the Gare du Roi, from Glasgow. The ticket inspector had clipped out the ‘Glas’.
His heart missed a gear and crunched. Two tickets.
He turned towards the door, meaning to go after the nurse, but then realised he didn’t know who he wanted her to look for. He put the tickets aside uneasily and tried to let it go like the doctor had said, and went downstairs to explore. But no matter how often he reasoned that the man who had helped him would have noticed someone else, or that it was possible he had just picked up a stray ticket by accident, he couldn’t shift the certainty that he had wandered off oblivious from someone who had been looking for him. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was.
He strained again to think of the train, the carriage, whether there had been a woman with dark hair who suited green, but he couldn’t remember a single person.
‘Madeline, come on, she’s called Madeline,’ he said aloud, trying to trick his brain into letting just a corner of that forgetting-shroud slip.
Nothing.
He hoped she was looking for him.
Feeling only half there, he spent the rest of the day ghosting around the open rooms downstairs and the gardens, which were full of cherry trees. That he was taken with the latter made him think he wasn’t used to gardens, but it was only a guess. He tried to read a book later, unsuccessfully, because the tight feeling in his chest wouldn’t go away for long enough to gather up much concentration. He stuck to the papers. They were full of ordinary things. The Emperor was in residence at Buckingham Palace for the season, having just arrived from Paris; there were festivities open to the public at St Jacques’ Park all week, with fireworks. After a lot of work underground to properly heat the vineyards, the price of plantations in Cornwall was rocketing, and so was the price of slaves because the owners got through so many, what with the digging and maintenance of