Joe did as he was told, though he wanted to duck away. Up close, Saint-Marie was like crêpe paper someone had scrunched up, ironed, and then left out in the sun too long. He smelled of old cologne, and it had a way of sticking to you a good while after you’d touched him. Idiotic to get on his wrong side, though. The gendarmes were never far away.
Henrique was unsympathetic. His mistress wanted unreasonable things all the time and he would have been very grateful, he said, if all she’d wanted was the odd peck on the cheek. He could swap if Joe wanted, but darkly, he opined that Joe would want Saint-Marie back on pain of death after he’d had a week trying to find where in God’s name you could buy hummingbird down for a doll’s-house cushion.
‘Mallard ducks have got feathers the same colour,’ Joe said, which surprised him. He was still getting to know himself, and he hadn’t realised he was that crafty.
Henrique told him that if he was too sharp he’d cut himself, but Joe caught him looking speculatively into the butcher’s window.
On the wall of the butcher’s shop, there was graffiti in English. It said,
WHERE IS EVERYONE??
Joe had a strange drop right in his stomach. He didn’t know what did the dropping, but some internal lift-shaft had just gone wrong. ‘What does that mean?’
Henrique only glanced at it. ‘Uh. Crackpots,’ he said crossly. ‘It’s election time. You know what happened to you, the epilepsy, and then the remembering things wrong? Happens to a lot of people. Except some of them are too stupid to understand what epilepsy is. They think they’re missing relatives and the government has drugged them and erased all the records.’
‘Could they have, though? Been drugged, or …’
Henrique snorted. ‘Well, my mistress is seeing a gentleman who sits in the Senate, and if he’s anything to judge by, the government couldn’t get opium to a Chinaman, never mind drug all of England.’ He gave Joe’s shoulder a squeeze and said nothing else about it.
Joe had to admit he couldn’t see how or why anyone might have pulled that off. But now that he had seen the writing on the wall once, he kept seeing it in other places: on the sides of old carts, in public toilets (there was a stamp on the Responsibility Card even for that) and then, once, outside St Paul’s Cathedral. Every single time he saw it, he wondered about Madeline.
After another three months, the mortgage labour on the attic was all paid off, and Joe was officially free after thirty-five years of service. M. Saint-Marie threw a small party and cried over his wine. Joe hugged him, feeling guilty. Saint-Marie was getting older, and poorer, and he didn’t go to Paris for the season any more. Most of his friends had left him behind, and now it must have felt like his household was doing the same thing.
‘I know you’re a grown man now, I know, but I’ve had you since you were tiny. I hate the idea of booting you out in the world and no one responsible for you but yourself …’
‘You silly hen,’ Joe said, touched. ‘You’re not booting me anywhere. I’ll still be living in the attic. I worked long enough for it.’
‘You won’t leave?’
‘No,’ Joe said, and smiled when Saint-Marie let out a relieved laugh. It was the first time since the Gare du Roi that he felt like he belonged.
Alice was overjoyed with freedom – she burned all her old Responsibility Cards in a pot on the windowsill and then dyed her grey day dress maroon with wine – but Joe didn’t like it. He felt exposed going out without the stamp card or Henrique. In the week he went out job hunting, just as the weather turned bitter, he was stopped and searched twice by the gendarmes for no reason. On the second occasion, he got a baton in the ribs for asking why. When he told Saint-Marie, Saint-Marie cut out the tartan lining of his coat. Losing it upset Joe a lot more than he wanted to say – that tartan was one of the few things that had been with him, wherever he’d gone in that lost time – but the gendarmes didn’t stop him again after that.
He didn’t want to leave the house for the next couple of days, but he had to gut up and do it on the following Monday. It was the middle of December, dim even at nine o’clock in the morning. The fires that burned at the top of the steelworks chimneys made an orange constellation above the weak street lamps, which were popping; there was always something wrong with the gas line.
Just outside the back door, he walked straight into the postman, who squeaked. The postman looked annoyed to have made such an unmanly noise, and thrust a piece of paper and a pen into Joe’s chest.
‘M. Tournier? Sign.’
‘What for?’ said Joe, who hadn’t ordered anything and didn’t know anyone. He squinted at the form. There was a line to sign on, and underneath in small transparent letters, recipient/recipient’s responsible citizen. He hesitated, because he didn’t have a signature yet, and just wrote J. Tournier in his normal writing.
‘A letter,’ the postman said unhelpfully. He did look curious, though. ‘They’ve been holding it for ages at the sorting office. Ninety-three years.’
‘What? Why would …?’
‘Because it was to be posted on the date specified and now it’s the date specified,’ he snapped, and stamped off once Joe had signed, as if giving in to curiosity would have been even worse than the unmanly squeak.
Perplexed, Joe looked down at the letter. The envelope was old enough to have yellowed. He opened it as neatly as he could. Inside was the front page of an old news-sheet. The date on it said 1805. It was one of those very early editions, from just after the Invasion, when they’d first started printing in French and they’d had to keep all the words short and easy because English people hadn’t understood yet.
And then there was a postcard. The picture on the front was an etching of a lighthouse. Beneath it, a label in neat copperplate read,
EILEAN MÒR LIGHTHOUSE
OUTER HEBRIDES
The message on the postcard was short, in looping, old-fashioned writing that Joe could only just read. He had to stare at it for a while, because he never saw written English except in graffiti.
Dearest Joe,
Come home, if you remember.
M
Without meaning to, he looked left and right down the street, and flinched when he saw a gendarme on beat not far away. He swung back inside and snapped the door shut, and had to lean against the edge of the kitchen table for a while. If the postman had stayed and chatted, if he’d seen the postcard with English written on it and a Scottish place on the front, that gendarme would be pounding down the street now.
M; perhaps for Madeline. Except, he knew Madeline now, not from a book or a painting a century old.
The lighthouse in the picture was so familiar he was sure he could have named it even without the label. Eilean Mòr; he knew that. He knew the shape of it. And more than that, something in him had been looking for that shape for a long time now.
He turned the postcard over again and touched the handwriting on the back. His instinct was to say that it couldn’t possibly have been posted over ninety years ago, and that it was some kind of odd mistake. He was not ninety years old and the Joe Tournier on the envelope couldn’t have been him. Half of London was called Joe Tournier. Tournier was what all the old gentry had changed their surnames to, during the Terror. It was the commonest slave name in the Republic now.