‘She’ll be by soon,’ lied Joe. Alice was on the day shift at the hospital. She couldn’t admit to being married there, so she couldn’t take Lily, or ask around for anyone who might be willing to look after her. In a way which made Joe worry about them, the senior doctors and nurses seemed to think that married women shouldn’t work, as though husbands were nervy creatures one shouldn’t leave unsupervised for too long. Middle-class people, Alice explained, hadn’t been in the world enough to know anything, and it was best to smile and nod and ignore them.
Usually Lily stayed with M. Saint-Marie in the daytime, but he went to his bridge club on Wednesdays.
Joe scooped Lily up again. She opened and closed her hand, which was how she waved.
‘How come you’re not in Paris, sir?’ he asked, hoping he didn’t sound too strained. Everyone liked M. de Méritens, but everyone did also look forward to Tuesday and Wednesday, when he was generally in France. He didn’t have to be, as far as Joe could tell; the Paris office ran itself, but the brand-new tunnel crossing between London and Paris was de Méritens’ favourite thing in the world, and he always came back thrumming with the wonders of modern engineering, and exactly the same story about how the mathematics behind its building had been so accurate that when the two teams of diggers – one from Dover, one from Calais – had met in the middle, they’d only missed each other by a foot. Everyone suspected a mistress in France.
De Méritens waved back at Lily, then seemed to remember what he was saying. ‘I’m not in Paris: no, I’m not. Because. We’ve had a letter about an engine from the Lighthouse Board …’ He trailed off, like he often did, into mumbling. He could keep up an incomprehensible background buzz for hours at a time. Joe had had to teach himself not to listen. De Méritens was fishing around his desk now.
‘… coffin for two hundred francs.’
‘Pardon?’ Joe said.
De Méritens didn’t hear. ‘Here we are. An engine has broken down. They want an engineer out there.’ He paused, reading over the letter again. It was watermarked, and the hazy light behind him filtered through the government’s eagle crest at the top. ‘It’s urgent. It’s on a shipping route and we must send someone soon, or we’ll hit the winter and the sea freezes out there.’
Joe frowned. ‘Where is it?’
‘The Outer Hebrides.’
Frost went down his spine. ‘That’s the Eilean Mòr light.’
‘Quite.’ De Méritens looked uncomfortable. ‘I’ve got to send Atelier, but he’s already cross with me because I got drunk at his wife’s party – do me a favour and break it to him, will you? You’re all …’ he motioned at Joe generally ‘… charming. And you’ve got your special charm baby. So it should be easy, hey? Just, um – tell him he’ll have to leave on Friday. Back by mid-March. Long haul, but the sea freezes, you see. And it is rather foolish to have an unmanned lighthouse over winter. Our machines would generally look after themselves, but the temperatures up there – that’s steel-fissuring cold.’ He pattered his fingertips over his own stomach, which was his way of saying that he was pretty certain he had made an inarguable point, but then he crumpled. ‘You’re laughing,’ he said defeatedly.
Joe was. ‘I am not charming enough to persuade M. Atelier that he wants to go to an island off Scotland for three months.’
He was laughing, too, partly to cover over just how much his entire soul had snapped to attention. His free hand clamped of its own accord over the Eilean Mòr postcard in his pocket. This was it, the reason he had wanted to work here; the chance to go, to see if there was anything in the north that he remembered, or maybe even to find the person who had sent the postcard, why it was a hundred years old, all of it. Maybe Madeline was still there. If she had waited – he didn’t even know. The idea of seeing the lighthouse had so much gravity he already felt like he was falling towards it.
He had to concentrate to keep smiling. If he could just make it sound casual, it might work. ‘Can I go instead?’
De Méritens took a breath, stopped, then tried again. ‘Can you what?’
The postcard was much softer and more dog-eared than the Psychical Society invitation. Every morning, he thought he should get rid of it. Carrying written English around was stupid. Every morning, he put it off.
He hugged Lily nearer, because holding her made him feel obscurely protected. ‘I don’t know if you remember, but I came here asking you about that lighthouse. I … would like to go and see it, if it’s all right to send me. I passed the keeper’s exam,’ he added, his insides screwing tight with anticipation of being brushed aside. It wasn’t normal practice to send out an ex-slave. Ex-slave sounded a lot like ‘unqualified’ to most people, even if that ex-slave had passed all the same exams as everyone else and spent a lot of his time quietly talking the citizen engineers through the harder mathematics.
But de Méritens really did look like he was thinking about it. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘Before you decide one way or another, there’s something else. That lighthouse shouldn’t be unmanned. It should have three keepers. But they’re missing.’
Joe lifted his eyebrows. ‘Was it the Saints?’
‘I said that,’ de Méritens said, a touch defensive. ‘But the Board says not. It’s the Outer Hebrides, there’s bugger all there. No one to terrorise, nothing to steal. The Saints concentrate on the docks at Newcastle. Other side of the country.’ He paused. ‘Given all that, are you sure you want to volunteer, on your salary? I can’t promote you. We’ll pay expenses and all that, but …’ His eyes flickered over Lily.
‘No, I want to go.’ Joe’s heart was straining against his breastbone as though it thought it could go by itself even if the rest of him didn’t. ‘I know it sounds mad, but … I don’t know. If I see it, I might remember something.’
De Méritens gave him a half-sympathetic, half-wary look. It was a familiar one; Alice aimed it at him all the time. People could see it was a nasty thing to live with, damn all memory of anything prior to a couple of years ago, but it made Joe different, in an unsettling way. He was living the thing that people feared, and they worried it might rub off on them.
‘Well. I won’t forget this, pun intended. It’s very good of you to volunteer, whatever the reason. You’re a braver man than me. Mme de Méritens would give me hell.’
Joe stopped himself before he could say aloud that Alice wouldn’t mind one way or another, because he would sound like he was complaining, even though he wasn’t. The idea of living with a twenty-four-year-old who was in love with him was much worse than being married to one who perceived him more as a piece of useful furniture. If she had been in love with him, he would have felt terrible for not loving her back. He couldn’t. Part of his mind was always waiting for someone else, whoever he had left behind, Madeline, or … whoever.
‘Alice is happy by herself,’ he said.
De Méritens nodded and faded into his background buzz as he looked over his desk for the paperwork.