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 yet. A Senegalese soldier in the marines’ winter uniform paced by, scanning the new arrivals.
Joe hoped that the marines were making the traditional rotation round random parts of the Republic – but the longer he let himself think about it, the more conspicuous it seemed, and the more logical to man the border with regiments who were unlikely to know the people they sometimes had to shoot. The same soldier pulled a pair of boys out of the queue. They hadn’t been talking; he couldn’t tell what they’d done. They were too sensible to argue. All three disappeared into a side office.
At the checkpoint, another soldier looked over Joe’s papers, then asked with a grim politeness to see his letter from de Méritens. Joe kept quiet while it was handed back to another man, with more chevrons on his uniform. Like he’d known they would, they took him aside, but not to the same office as the boys a minute ago. He couldn’t tell if that was good or bad.
‘You’re English,’ the officer said, in that old-fashioned Senegal French that made them all sound so courtly.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Freedman. How long have you been out of indenture?’
‘Two years.’
‘Explain the purpose of your visit again.’
The letter had already explained, but Joe nodded and explained again. Behind him, another soldier was looking through his bag. The lighthouse postcard was hidden in the lining. He couldn’t believe he’d done that. It was beyond stupid to try and get that across the border, and he’d be arrested if anyone found it. That would be possession of a document in handwritten English, which was newspaper and government code for in the Saints. But he still hadn’t been able to throw it away.
‘Is it usual, for an English person to become an electrical engineer?’
Joe arranged his expression into the blandest he could make it. Alice had made him practise questions like this before he left, to make sure he wouldn’t get flustered. He closed his hand round his rosary, to make sure the man had noticed he was wearing one. He had put a Latin bible in his bag, at the top. The soldier behind him had found it, and now he was flicking through to see if anything would fall out.
‘There are plenty of English engineers, sir. Often we begin as welders.’
The officer studied him. His uniform coat had a fur trim. Joe was starting to feel the cold, even inside. ‘Very specific thing, lighthouse engines. What else does the de Méritens workshop make?’
Joe swallowed. It was a famous enough workshop to be common knowledge. ‘Locomotive engines. Artillery.’
‘Are you involved in the production of artillery?’
‘No.’
‘Have you ever been?’
‘No,’ he lied. ‘Never.’
The soldier behind him finally finished searching his bag. Joe tried not to look too relieved.
‘Tell me once again about the problem at the lighthouse.’
Joe took a deep, slow breath. ‘The lighthouse is very remote; it’s off the coast of Lewis and Harris, on an island called Eilean Mòr. The lamp has been extinguished. It shouldn’t be, not at this time of year. The locals went out to look. They found that the lighthouse keepers are missing, and that the lamp couldn’t be turned on again. Someone then reported the problem to the Lighthouse Board. The Board administers all the lighthouses in the Republic, but the de Méritens workshop builds all the machinery, so when there’s a technical fault, M. de Méritens sends a mechanic out. In this case, I’m supposed to fix the fault and stay at the lighthouse for the winter, as a temporary keeper.’