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, from hills and dips to flat, flat fen. The fields were flooded. There were no trees, no walls; only drowned hedgerows. When the train pulled in, the station looked run-down, and in places the water had puddled between the tracks. The whole place looked like it had only been reclaimed lately from the fen, which was doing its best to take everything back again.
Joe had never been this far from home. As he stepped down on to the platform, he expected the station guard to demand to see his freedom papers and then declare that for whatever reason he wasn’t allowed to travel, but no one stopped him. The engine blew steam around disembarking passengers. People here looked much less smart than they did in Londres. Londres might have been the Black City, but it was alive, and busy, and full of people like de Méritens, with their expensive suits and brisk walks. Here, there was no one like that. Everyone was very English; all lumpy bones and clayish skin, wearing heavy shapeless clothes and the graven expressions of people who still had miles to go before they could sit down. In his properly tailored coat – he still couldn’t remember where it was from and he still missed the tartan lining – Joe stood out.
Wooden houses lined the station road, covered in graffiti so thick there were layers of it, like it had grown and died and grown again, a sort of ivy of paint; old English flags, scrawls of GOD SAVE THE KING, gang tags, and just like in Londres, Where is everyone?
From every roof protruded a short pole with a scrap of calico tied to it. The scraps were yellow, red, and blue. Yellow for a place that sold beer, red for a spare bed, blue for food. M. Saint-Marie had told him not to stop for any of it, looking like he did.
‘Like what?’ Joe had said, not understanding.
‘Valuable.’
He walked well away from the house fronts.
There were women outside, a good few of them, older ladies, selling meat on skewers and waving them at passers-by. Fried chicken hearts, tripe in paper cups. Behind them, children and younger women sat propped against the walls of the houses, with baskets of vegetables arranged on the pavement in front of them. Potatoes and swedes mainly, which they weighed out on rope scales hanging on hooks from the window ledges. At the cooking stalls, doomed chickens cocked their heads and scratched inside little cages. The air smelled of animals and damp, and hessian sacking. Discarded vegetables floated in the puddles.
Joe had memorised the route so that he wouldn’t have to keep stopping and looking at his map; that, said M. Saint-Marie, was asking to be mugged or worse. Town was to the right. It was about a mile, but M. Saint-Marie had forbidden him to take a Pont du Cam cab. There were all kinds of stories and they all ended up face down in the river.
Parts of the way were flooded. People had made ramshackle bridges with old crates. There were no street lights. Children with lamps skittered to and fro instead. A whole firefly swarm of them shone from the shell of what had once been a post office, where they must have had their headquarters. In ghost letters still visible on the brickwork, probably upwards of a hundred years old now, the facade said in English, Cambridge Sorting Office. Joe smiled at that. Pont du Cam; obviously it meant Cambridge, but he’d never translated it in his head.
The streets between the colleges were tiny. All the signposts were still in English, even though on the map the names of the colleges were the modern ones. The Sidgwicks – there were two – were professors at Napoleon College, and he’d assumed it wouldn’t be hard to find an entire college, but he got lost twice. It took him a while to work out that Napoleon College used to be Queen’s.
The address Mme Sidgwick had given him wasn’t only hard to find, but hard to get to. Their part of the college looked straight onto the river, the front door only a foot above the water. The invitation said to show it to the man who rented out punts on the millpond. When he did, the man saw him on to the far end of a river tour with five students polite enough to offer him some of their beer, and who laughed when the riverman stopped to let Joe climb out on to the broad step that served as a landing bay. He knocked, then waited with his back to the door.
On the opposite bank, the willow trees stirred and a pair of swans settled down near the roots. There must have been a lot of birds, because the grass was thin and full of down. Along from him, bay windows that came to Turkish points painted their own shapes in light on the water.
The door opened inward and a woman in a rich blue dress smiled.
‘You must be Monsieur Tournier,’ she said. ‘You’ve come at exactly the right time, the place is populated but not crowded. I’m Eleanor Sidgwick.’ She put her hand out and he didn’t understand why for a second, then did and shook it. ‘May I ask if you speak English?’
‘Yes. I do.’
‘Because we’re having something of a revivalist fad. Some of the linguistics men are getting quite tendentious about it.’
Joe frowned. ‘Are they sure the gendarmes won’t think you’re recruiting for the Saints?’
‘Yes, now you see, you and I are in exact agreement, but I can’t say that because then I’d seem ignorant and not in support of the Cause.’ She must have seen him tip back, because she touched his arm. ‘Not that kind of cause, I’m being facetious. Good heavens, is that bag all you’ve brought? I thought you said in your telegram you were going to Scotland after this?’
‘I am, but I didn’t want to carry too much on the train. Um – Mrs Sidgwick,’ he said, and it felt rude to say Mrs and not Madame. ‘Why am I here?’
‘Mainly for dinner. Come in, let’s find my husband. He wanted to meet you.’
‘I see,’ said Joe, wondering if he ever would, but then decided that if he didn’t find out it would be funnier when he told Alice.