‘Here, let me get you a chair!’ The runner ran off and returned with another chair, a very nice one, better than the others, fashioned from leather and with wheels. Sofia smiled at him. ‘Thanks.’ She did not sit down but walked towards the makeup truck instead.
Hot, nauseating embarrassment bubbled up through her torso. She could feel the back of her neck prickle and sweat. Maybe the brown paper bag was still somewhere around; she could blow into it. She felt so stupid, playing the lovesick girl, trying to restore her marriage on a film set. It would be all right if it worked, but Jack had paid her efforts no attention. He appeared ensconced in his job, as he should be. She reached the edge of the sound stage and ran straight into Jack, reading his pages alone beside another, smaller monitor. She cursed herself for choosing this route off the stage and tried to avoid him, but he’d already looked up. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.
Sofia swallowed, attempted breeziness, though she felt like crying. ‘Back to the truck,’ she said lightly. ‘I prefer it there. My crib,’ she joked.
Jack nodded and looked back down at his script. She swallowed and walked on.
‘Sofia,’ he called to her as she walked away.
She turned to him.
‘You look great, by the way,’ he said. He looked up from his papers; their eyes met. He gave her a smile and she recognised the look: it was the smile he used to give her when they first met, a crooked smile from the corner of his mouth, brazen and cute. He suddenly looked ten years younger, full of energy.
‘Oh, thanks,’ she said, as casually as she could muster. She turned away from him and walked on. She waited until she was well clear of him, then allowed herself to smile. She didn’t know if Derek usually received obscene tips from his clients, but he would do so today.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jane attempted to conquer London. She approached a giant undercroft of metal and bricks. A sign above read Underground. She held the card with oyster printed across it in bold blue letters, which Fred had given her earlier. A man in a ticket booth had taken four pounds of her remaining money and somehow added their value to the card, or so he alleged. He squinted at her when she asked him, ‘How long is this tube?’ But then he exhaled and explained in a bureaucratic register how to use the card.
‘Put the card on the circle. The gate will open,’ he told her, in a slow deliberate tone, as though talking to an invalid, which she felt horrendously grateful for. ‘Take the brown line and change at Oxford Circus onto the red line. Down there,’ he said and pointed to a tunnel. ‘First time in London?’ he asked with a smile.
‘First time in a while,’ Jane answered.
Jane walked down the tunnel and searched for the elusive circle of which he proclaimed. She felt unsure as to what size sphere she should be looking for. The size of a saucepan? The size of a pond?
She reached a row of steel fences. On one sat a yellow circle, the size of a gentleman’s palm. Jane placed the card on the circle. A gate retracted with magic between two of the fences, inviting Jane inside. Jane hurried through. The gate shut behind her with a crash and she grabbed her bottom on instinct. The gate behaved the way of a farm gate on springs, with a mind of its own, opening and closing whenever it deigned to. She exhaled with relief at not having been taken into its jaws.
More people entered through the maniacal farm gates behind her. One man fared not so lucky; the gate snapped shut before he could enter. He smashed his loins into the gate, barred, and rolled his eyes. He cursed and complained to a man wearing some sort of uniform. Jane’s fear redoubled. Even people from the twenty-first century were no match for these capricious gates. She looked up. A maze of signage hung above her. One sign announced Bakerloo Line with a brown line painted underneath. Jane recalled the ticket seller’s directive and followed the sign. As she shuddered at what might lie in store next, a river of bodies engulfed Jane in their current, and she was rushed down the tunnel, her feet barely touching the ground.
Up ahead, people walked forward then disappeared downward into thin air, though they moved too slowly to be falling. Jane approached the area with trepidation and gasped at the sight of people riding a moving staircase down to a lower level. Jane stood back and observed. People stepped onto the beastly contrivance with a concerning nonchalance. Huge steel teeth lined the edge of each step. The silver jaws glinted in the lurid yellow light of the tunnel, like the neatly aligned fangs of a metallic animal. How did people avoid the staircase eating them? She paused, held her breath and leapt onto to it. She had a stair in mind, but she misjudged the landing and ended up on the same stair as an old man in a checked suit.
‘Do you mind!’ he said.
‘My apologies, sir,’ Jane said. ‘I am not from these parts.’ She jumped up to the next step. ‘These things are a danger.’ The moving staircase descended for no short time. Soon, she must have stood at least 30 feet below the earth. She looked down. The staircase ended up ahead; the stairs flattened and disappeared into the ground. She feared being eaten once again. The people ahead of her stepped off without looking up. ‘Here we go,’ Jane said to the old man. She inhaled, and the stairs levelled. She closed her eyes and stepped off and landed on solid ground. ‘Well done, everyone!’ she said to the people in front. The old man in the suit shook his head. The others ignored her and continued moving forward.
She followed the signs to the brown line and arrived on an underground platform. A red and white train, smaller than the Bath train, pulled up to the platform. The doors opened like sentient beings, the same as the others. Jane stepped inside the train and gripped a pole running from floor to ceiling. The doors closed themselves and the train pulled away from the platform. It then entered a tunnel, plunging the view out the windows into darkness.
Jane studied the people. Once again, almost every person in the carriage seemed to possess a small thin rectangular box, which they cradled in their hands and gazed at. They smiled at these boxes, laughed at them, worshipped them. Jane shook her head, filled with curiosity at what wonders these little rectangles possessed. She glanced at one and found a theatre production playing inside the box. She felt flabbergasted and terrified. Actors reduced to tiny proportions moved inside the screen and waved and spoke to each other. She shook her head and stepped away, gripped with shock. More magic. She understood now why people paid these enchanted boxes such attention.
Next, she studied the faces. Either flower sellers filled the carriage, or people no longer considered face painting obscene. A woman in a spotted coat was painting her mouth red. Another who read a novel had lined her eyes with black, like Cleopatra. One woman exposed the top of her bosoms. A man in a striped evening suit glanced at them, then returned to watching his little rectangular box. How did women and men interact in the twenty-first century? Had things changed? Did marriage still represent the goal? Before she could delve deeper into her anthropological study, the tube train arrived at the station for Oxford Circus. Jane alighted the carriage.
As soon as she did so, Jane wished she could jump back into the safety of the warm train. A scene of mayhem greeted her, with more people rumbling and streaming through the confined space than Jane thought humanly possible. Bodies pushed in and out of the carriages, through and across the stone platform in every direction, like rats escaping a sinking ship. As Jane again looked upwards for signs, a sea of people swept her along and moved her forward, whether she wanted to go or not. A sign with a red line loomed overhead. Jane fought her way out of the seething wave of bodies and followed it.
She boarded another two moving staircases at great peril and walked down another tunnel, then arrived at the red line. A train pulled up. Jane boarded the train and found a seat. Before she had time to catch her breath, the tube arrived at St Paul’s station and Jane alighted again. She exhaled, bewildered at the pace and the noises, the heat and the people. She mounted yet another locomotive staircase, this one travelling upwards. She touched her card on the circle once more, exited the gate
s and was spat out into the daylight.
Once her eyes adjusted, she fixated on the facade of St Paul’s Cathedral, which seemed to bloom before her from the ground into the sky. For a moment, she thought she had returned to 1803. The baroque structure stood as it had the last time she was there, but then she turned around in a circle and found monsters of glass and steel now surrounded it on all sides. Giant red carriages with two floors carried dozens of people through the street. Horseless monsters moved everywhere, up and down the street, sounding horns of alarm and anguish.
But if she momentarily thought she had returned to her own world at the sight of St Paul’s, she banished the mistake when the next building lured her inside. The smell of fresh bread wafted from its doors, and she walked towards it, her stomach sucking with hunger.
Above the doorway, brilliant white letters before a bright orange background read Sainsbury’s. Magic glass doors slid apart as she approached. Her nose followed the wafting smell of hot sweet bread, but her eyes concerned themselves with the most abundant and grotesque display of food she had ever seen. Some sort of indoor market place happened inside, like the one in her own world on Stall Street, but at least ten times the size. In one direction, a field of exotic fruits and vegetables bloomed across a giant floor. A mountain of oranges spilled forth from a giant wooden crate. Jane had seen an orange once, sitting next to Queen Elizabeth in a painting. Apples liberated from a thousand trees bloomed from another leviathan mound. Giant domes of lettuce squatted across the landscape. Tremendous iceboxes were filled from floor to ceiling with paper cartons, with each carton bearing an Italian title. Bellissima Gourmet Pizza, one read. Huge cases of cold glass encased rows of haddock, salmon, and sea creatures she knew only from storybooks: octopus, crab and lobster.
Corridors of shelves were stacked row upon row, with boxes and packages of dried foods, biscuits, bottles, sauces and grains spewing from each ledge. She walked down one corridor at random and the sight of at least 100 pound-bags of sugar wrapped in brightly coloured paper assaulted her eyes. A wall of sweetness. If any lingering doubt remained that this was all a dream, she now firmly knew she had travelled through time. Not even in her wildest fantasies could she conjure such a biblical plethora of food. Jane needed to sit down.
‘Can I help you with something, love?’ a woman in an orange shirt asked her.
‘What is that?’ Jane replied. She pointed to the woman’s chest, where a name hung on a little sign.
‘That’s my name tag. My name is Pam.’ Jane felt astounded at the brevity and forwardness of the introduction. People now wore their names on their clothing and introduced themselves before you met them.
‘Why does no one guard the sugar?’ she asked Pam with wonder. Pam looked at her curiously. Jane walked further down the corridor.
‘And where did all of this milk come from? Where are the cows?’
Pam studied the icebox stuffed with bottles of creamy white liquid. ‘I honestly don’t know,’ said Pam. ‘No one’s ever asked me that.’ They walked back to the sugar section. Jane had reached El Dorado, the city of gold, the land of milk and honey, and it was named Sainsbury’s.
‘Pam, you are a genius,’ Jane said. ‘You must have abolished starvation with your indoor market.’ At least four children had starved to death in Bath the month prior; Jane knew this because her papa had christened each of them before they died. ‘Enough food now exists to feed everyone,’ she declared.
‘People still starve,’ Pam said.
Jane turned to her with surprise. ‘How is that possible?’
‘Not around here,’ Pam said, shaking her head. ‘I’ve heard children starve to death in Yemen, though, poor darlings.’
‘How is that possible?’ Jane repeated. She picked up a sugar bag.
Pam shrugged. ‘People are still people.’
Jane sighed. ‘You are wise, Pam. How much is this sugar?’
‘Fifty p for the bag,’ Pam replied.
‘Do I have enough?’ Jane asked. She offered her handful of remaining banknotes and coins. Pam nodded. Jane had felt happy to forgo buying a book, but it equalled the utmost of follies to walk past sugar in such abundance and not buy some. ‘I shall take one bag, Pam.’ She offered Pam her money. Pam offered her another curious look.
‘Pay at the front, miss. At the check-out.’ Pam showed Jane how to purchase the sugar. There were more silver boxes and ringing sounds and mayhem and confusion, but finally, together, they completed the transaction. Pam packed the sugar in a shiny reticule which also read Sainsbury’s and Jane exited the building.
She returned to the road which stretched beside St Paul’s Cathedral and took one last detour to walk inside the grand church and look around; she could not help herself. The monstrous dome loomed over her head, and glorious dusty light streamed downward into the church in shards of yellow. The giant naves of the structure stretched out like the lungs of a whale. Twenty-first-century people wandered about in pairs and trios, whispering and pointing at statues and paintings, dwarfed by the monumental stone walls. Each of them in turn stopped and looked upwards, turning their head to stare at the giant dome and the circular opening it offered overhead, a window to the heavens. Jane had done the same once, on the date of her twelfth birthday, when she travelled with her father to London. She had felt compelled to peer aloft, on instinct, as they did, and she repeated the act now, looking upwards, smiling at the warm sun on her face, and sending a prayer of thanks up there for having made it across London alive.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Jane exited the church and walked the three blocks east down Cheapside as she had before. Her thoughts turned to what Mrs Sinclair had told her: she would be gone now, but there would always be someone like her in that house. Questions filled Jane’s mind. Why was she sent here? Had Mrs Sinclair simply made a mistake? Sorceresses likely erred as much as the next profession, especially the ones who lived in Cheapside. But above these, one question stood for which she required an answer – how could she reverse what she had done and return home?
As Jane arrived at Milk Street, her heart raced. The ale house on the corner was still called the Duck and Waffle. A smooth black laneway replaced the cobblestones, but the public house was the same brownstone building as in 1803. She continued down the street. The same military church and warehouses sat there, cleaner than before, but they remained. Apart from the refurbished road, the frame portrayed a scene almost identical to the one she had left.
She quickened her pace, her heart skipping with excitement. She turned the corner and stepped into Russia Row.
The sagging Tudor building was gone.
Jane shook her head in disbelief. She confirmed the address on the paper, with its strange numbers and letters that Sofia had added. She stood in the correct place, but the house had departed. In its place stood a block building of glass and mortar, five storeys tall. The ground floor of the building appeared to be a restaurant; a blue sign out the front read Pizza Express. Jane stepped back in shock. She felt sure the house would remain; all the other houses in the street did. Some mistake must have occurred.
Jane walked inside the restaurant.
‘For one?’ a woman said to Jane.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Jane. ‘Is this the address of 8 Russia Row?’
‘Yes,’ said the woman. ‘Just you for lunch?’
‘What happened to the house that was here?’
‘I’ve only worked here two months. I know nothing,’ the woman replied. ‘What do you want to order?’
Jane looked at the woman and tried not to cry. She had salivated with hunger before in the indoor market but had now lost her appetite.
‘I’ll give you a minute.’ The woman walked away.
Jane sat down at a table. She could not understand it. She had crossed twenty-first-century London and not been killed once. She had earned the right to arrive at this house and find it intact after navigating her way through underground trains, maniacal farm gates
and crazed drivers of horseless steel beasts. Jane felt nauseated with worry as the waitress returned. What could she do now?
‘I am sorry. I still do not know my order,’ Jane said.
‘I’ve just come to tell you this is a new building. My manager told me.’
Jane sat up. ‘Thank you. And what happened to the house that stood on this plot before?’
‘It fell down. Last year.’
‘That cannot be,’ said Jane. ‘That house was always supposed to be here.’
‘It was in the newspaper,’ the woman said.
‘But I came all this way,’ Jane said. Tears formed in her eyes. ‘I am stuck.’
The woman touched her arm. ‘I came to this country too. I don’t know anybody. I am so lonely.’ She spoke in a sad, deep accent Jane did not recognise. The woman scratched her brow. With her long face and high cheekbones, she resembled Catherine the Great. ‘But then I made friends. Okay?’
Jane smiled at the kind, futile words and thanked the woman. She told her she had lost her appetite and walked back outside. She stood on the corner and exhaled, all hope faded.
‘Can you take our picture?’ a voice asked.
Jane turned her head to the voice’s source. A man of about twenty-five addressed her; he was pointing to himself and a woman standing beside him. ‘Yes,’ Jane answered, unsure of what he meant but relieved to be distracted from her despair by a smiling face. The man held out a shiny, thin rectangle of steel. ‘Everyone has these things,’ Jane remarked. ‘I am unversed in their operation, with regret.’
‘Here,’ he said, standing next to her and holding the object in front of his body. It contained a frame like a painting. The man’s companion stood by the wall of 8 Russia Row. She appeared in the frame. The man pressed a white button and a painting appeared by magic in the frame. It was a picture of the woman who stood by the wall in front of them.
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