‘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 it. But then Alice had started to see Toby in him. He’d said no; even the idea had scared him in a way he couldn’t trace. It would be betraying whoever he had left behind, and it wouldn’t be any less a betrayal just because he’d forgotten who that was, but it was more visceral even than that.
She’d told Père Philippe, who had dragged Joe to the doctor for pills and an examination, and then all but supervised. And then afterwards Joe had had to go outside and cry for a while.
He couldn’t understand why. Alice was beautiful, and he should have been glad, but all he felt was dirty. He had tried to explain. She’d been furious. She even asked him coldly if he just hated women, if he couldn’t bear to be near one. That had made him want to scream, because she would have punched him if he’d accused her of hating all men just because she didn’t want to sleep with one in particular. He had wanted to know how she’d feel if someone she’d only met a few times had demanded sex and called in the Church when she said no. There were whole societies for women who objected to that.
He didn’t say that. Père Philippe said that it was unnatural in a man, and anyway, you had to want to do it in order to do it, right? Joe had had to murder the urge to say that actually, it could be pretty bloody involuntary, which you would know if you weren’t professionally celibate.
But more than any of that, he stayed quiet because none of it was Alice’s fault. Toby was dead and she missed him, and she missed him alone, because Joe couldn’t remember him. It must have felt like being abandoned. Whatever Joe thought about it, they were married, she was his wife, before God, and he owed her anything that could make it better, even if it was only better for ten minutes. His own bizarre feelings on the subject were irrelevant.
He realised he hadn’t said anything yet. ‘No. I doubt they are.’
‘It just makes me angrier, the older I get. I don’t understand why the government can’t just see that if they admitted the Saints are what they are – this … amazing tiny shard of England like it used to be before the invasion – we wouldn’t be so bloody furious all the time. If they just said, yes, they’re not terrorists, or pirates, or criminals; they’re the last of a proper nation with its own laws and those laws are different to ours … are you listening?’
All Joe could think was that she sounded young. ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re furious when you can’t vote.’
She leaned around the door. She had taken her hair out of its daytime knot, and now it was a tawny halo. Anyone normal couldn’t have kept his hands off her. ‘We, Joe, not you. It’s your life too; you might like to start giving a fuck what happens in it.’
He nodded and didn’t say that it still didn’t feel like his life.
‘Speaking of your life, do you know anyone who can look after Lily on Wednesdays?’
He looked up. ‘No, I’ll take her with me.’
Alice gave him the look she usually deployed when she caught him gazing at someone imaginary. ‘To a lighthouse where the sea freezes, where the previous keepers might have been killed.’
He frowned. ‘I – thought you’d be happy for the break.’
‘You’re insane,’ she said factually. ‘You’re not taking a baby to Scotland.’
‘I’m not insane,’ he said, struggling, because he knew she didn’t mean it to stab so deep as it had. ‘It will be fine, we’ll be fine—’
‘No,’ she said. ‘She stays here.’
‘But you …’ He trailed off, because he couldn’t think of any tactful way to say that Alice had never put Lily to bed, never given her a bath; that they both knew Alice resented Lily for not being Toby’s, in an involuntary way that clearly upset her as much as it did Joe. ‘She doesn’t know you very well,’ he tried.
‘Well, she’ll have to get used to me, won’t she. Because she damn well isn’t going off to Scotland with you. Joe, come on. You don’t understand the world enough to take her into it. You trust anyone who’s kind to you. You can’t do that, not with a little girl. I don’t mind the workshop, the people there keep an eye on you, but not Scotland.’
There was nothing he could say to that. She was right.
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.