But my body wouldn’t obey me. I watched my hand – pale skinned, smudged with dust – reach for another book. The Odyssey. But this time the handwriting was different.
It was –
To Jack, from Oliver, Cambridge, 1936.
I stared down at it. Oh, God. The familiar-unfamiliar shapes, the words that were taller, untidier, younger than they should have been but were still, unmistakably, Granddad’s. To Jack . . .
I didn’t understand. The house shifted around me, creaking almost silently.
Jack. Hugo John Martin. H. J. Martin.
This was his house. Had been his house. But –
I shut the book and held it to my chest, bending my head to breathe in the old-book smell. It was only a coincidence. H. J. Martin wasn’t relevant. He didn’t matter. I was here because of Dad and Granddad, and H. J. Martin was just someone from long ago, from the book that Dad had bought me. He was just someone Granddad had met, and disliked, and made me promise not to read about . . .
I lifted my head. I wasn’t sure how I felt, except sick. But there was something . . . A coincidence. Yes. Maybe. But of all the places I could have run away to, I ended up here.
And the door was damp and swollen, and it had taken all my strength to get open. But it had closed behind me of its own accord.
I nearly panicked then. I nearly dropped the book, grabbed my rucksack and made a dash for the front door; and if it hadn’t opened I’d have smashed a window, broken the door down – anything, just to get out. I’d have sprinted to the station and caught the next train back to London, and maybe I’d have got there in time to go to the party and get plastered on Granddad’s absinthe. That’s what I nearly did.
There was a cool gust of perfume from the open window, and somewhere, distantly, the faint bitter fragrance of a cigarette.
And it was as if Tyme’s End said to me, Don’t go.
I turned my head, as if I expected to see someone behind me. But I wasn’t scared. I felt . . . curious, detached and safe, like I wasn’t really there. None of this was to do with me. I was an observer, that’s all.
I opened the book and looked again at Granddad’s writing. To Jack, from Oliver . . . And that clear, emotionless part of me noted coldly that Granddad must have lied about this as well. He’d said he hardly knew H. J. Martin, and that he’d disliked him. But he’d given him this book. And what about the letter in my rucksack, that he’d kept for years? And –
Why did Granddad have the key to Tyme’s End? Why hadn’t he given it back to whoever owned it these days? Granddad was conscientious about things like that, always orderly, methodical.
And somehow I knew then that it wasn’t a coincidence that I was here. Not exactly. I knew that out of everywhere in the world, this house was the one place that Granddad had tried to keep me away from. And that filled me with a kind of burning gladness, like acid. It served him right for all those lies, those betrayals, those days when he must have watched me praying that Dad would answer my letters, when all the time he knew about that little cache of envelopes.
Stay, Tyme’s End whispered. You’re welcome.
I slotted the Odyssey on to the bookshelf. My hand was steady, and for a moment I looked at it and thought it was someone else’s.
Then I bent down and swept the sheets away from the furniture, pulling armful after armful of pale cotton off chairs and little tables and a gramophone, loitering in the shadows, that I didn’t notice until the ivy tapped on the window again, drawing my attention to that corner of the room. And then I was coughing on the dust and there was a pile of sheets at my feet like laundry, and the room was awake.
Something was strange, though. I stared round at the room, trying to put my finger on it. It looked lived-in, as if someone had just walked out and never come back, like a photo. And there was something odd about that.
I took a step backwards into a table and heard it rock, and a clink as the stopper rattled in a decanter. I looked round, and then I knew what was bothering me.
There was a dark stain round the middle of the decanter, as if there’d still been something in it when the dustsheets were thrown over it. And there were other things on the tables – a photo in a frame, a box of cigarettes, the paper sleeve for a gramophone record. There was even a folded newspaper on the sofa, yellowed and densely printed. No one had even bothered to pack any of it away before they covered everything up. That was odd. Wasn’t it?
As if someone had done it as quickly as possible. As if they hadn’t cared about any of it, as if all they’d wanted was to leave. Or as if they’d been told to do it, but whoever had told them to do it didn’t care, didn’t want to think about it, never wanted to come here again.
I leant over and picked up the newspaper. It ripped as I pulled it, and the last page stayed stuck to the leather of the sofa. I didn’t unfold the rest in case it fell apart in my hands. A phrase in the dense print caught my eye: Italy’s disregard of her obligations under the Covenant of the League of Nations . . . The date was 15 June, 1936.
I thought, No one’s been here since 1936. But it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. It felt as if someone had only just left. And, anyway, it wouldn’t happen. Why would someone cover everything up and leave it for sixty years? A house like this would be worth – well, millions, surely? No one would just leave it to rot.
But they had. I looked down again at the newspaper. AGGRESSION AND ECONOMICS. THE WARPATH IN CHINA . . .
1936. Slowly, gently, I laid the paper back on the sofa, lining it up so that it covered the page that was still clinging to the leather. I stood back and looked round the room, taking it in. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was about to walk in and pick up the conversation where he left off, sixty years ago. H. J. Martin. Jack.
And out of a deep, forgotten part of my mind, something surfaced from the biography Dad had bought me. It was strange how clearly I could see it, the one page I’d managed to get through, that I hadn’t looked at since. On June 21st 1936, at half past five in the morning, a motorcycle and its rider hurtled along the long, straight road that still runs from Falconhurst in East Sussex north-east towards Tunbridge Wells . . . The house must have been closed up immediately after his death and never lived in again. Whoever owned it never came here; and Granddad kept the key . . .
I walked back to the door and slipped through it quietly. I wasn’t scared, but all the same I trod carefully as I walked past the cowled chairs in the entrance hall. There was another door on my right and I opened it. There were more dust sheets in here, but I could see the shape of a chair and bookshelves and a lumpy desk. I tugged gently on the sheet, and the desk was exactly as someone must have left it: a notebook, a half-addressed envelope, one of those brass-and-green-lampshade lamps. A fountain pen rolled on to the floor, and an open bottle of ink tilted and toppled as the sheet caught it. I swore and reached out for it, but it was empty. There was a photo in a silver frame: two men, grinning, in a stone archway. The older one had a face that I thought I’d seen somewhere before: he had to be Martin. He had his arm around the other man, who –
Was me.
No. I laughed aloud, although it sounded strange, as if I was out of practice. Of course not me.
It was Granddad. Granddad sixty years ago, a few years older than I was now. He was leaning towards Martin, and beaming – his familiar wide, unfakeable smile – at the camera. He was wearing a tweed jacket and tie, but his top button was undone and the tie-knot was sloppy and crooked. It gave me a pang to see him like that, not just because he’d hidden Dad’s letters and I was furious with him, but for some other reason. He looked so happy.
I picked the frame up and tilted it this way and that, watching the reflected sunlight blank them out. The way they were smiling; that easy, paternal arm draped over Granddad’s shoulders . . .
He really had lied to me.
Not an exaggeration or a little white lie, but proper, deliberate lies. Granddad, who wouldn’t even say it was all right, the injection wouldn’t hurt a bit. About Dad, yes, but about this too – and why, why would he lie about this? It was so pointless. As if I’d care about H. J. Martin. Somehow it made me even angrier than the other lies.
But I was here now. He’d lost. Whatever he was trying to do, he’d failed.
I dragged the last corner of the dust sheet off the desk, then put the picture back. I narrowed my eyes at it, imagining that it was me. I could almost remember being there, in an archway in Cambridge on a summer’s day, Martin’s arm over my shoulder, making jokes at the person behind the camera. Martin would have liked me, I knew that.
I took all the dust sheets off so the room looked lived-in again, ready for the owner to come back.
Then I made my way through the rest of the house, taking all the sheets off the furniture, until it was as if I’d gone back in time, right back to the moment sixty years ago when Martin closed the door behind him and started up his motorbike. There were musty, moth-eaten clothes in the bedrooms, beds still made up and stinking of mildew, enamel baths centimetres deep in crumbly, gritty dust; but even so, Tyme’s End was awake. I felt reckless. I whistled as I worked through the rooms one by one, half dancing in the sunlight that streamed in. None of the windows were broken, the water from the taps ran clear after an initial spurt of red, and some of the lights worked. Nothing was quite as bad as you’d expect, after sixty years of neglect. It was as if someone had been here, quietly fighting the worst of the decay, keeping everything going, just in case.
But all the same, every room in the house was fiercely, hungrily happy to be uncovered again. Tyme’s End had been starving to death, only just clinging to life as it stifled under dust sheets. And now I was here. And I thought of Granddad, oblivious across the Atlantic, and that made me feel even better.
At last I came down the back staircase and into the drawing room. I’d left my rucksack there beside the pile of dust sheets, and I sat down, dug out an apple and started to eat it.
Then I stretched out, put my hands behind my head and shut my eyes. I could feel the sunlight on my face, and smell the breeze and the scent of smoke that must have been clinging to the furniture. I remembered the first time I’d walked into the room, as if it was a long time ago. I’d been scared. But I couldn’t remember what that felt like. I didn’t believe in it, somehow. There was nothing to be frightened of here. I was welcome; I belonged.
I heard myself say drowsily, ‘Thanks for inviting me.’
But if there was an answer, I was asleep before I heard it.
.
.
V
.
.
When I woke up it was dark. Something jolted me out of sleep so suddenly that it felt as if my brain hit the front of my skull. For a while I looked blankly at the darkness in front of my face, bewildered. I didn’t know where I was, or my name, or the year.
Then I felt the sticky leather of the sofa against my face and remembered. My arm was trapped underneath me and I had pins and needles down the side of my body. I was cold, too. There was a draught playing round my neck, making my scalp prickle. And it was so dark – darker than London, where there was always light coming through my curtains – and so still.
Then I knew what had woken me.
Quietly but clearly, I could hear something: a soft, regular sound coming from the other side of the room. It was so faint I could only just make it out. But I wasn’t afraid. It was something I’d heard before, something familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
I stared up at the shadowy ceiling, not moving. I felt disorientated, heavy-eyed, as though I had been dreaming. That intriguing, gentle sound went on and on, tantalising me. What was it? I strained my ears in the silence, wishing my heartbeat would quieten down. It wasn’t the breeze: it was too rhythmic, too repetitive. I closed my eyes again, puzzled. I held my breath until I ran out of oxygen and had to inhale; then, suddenly, I realised.
It was someone breathing.
There was someone there, standing by the window. I knew that if I rolled over to look I’d see him, outlined dimly against the glass. But I didn’t move; I listened to the soft sigh of air: in, out, in . . . Perhaps I was wrong – perhaps it was the wind, or an animal outside the window, or cars going past on the road – but I didn’t believe it. There was someone else in the room. I gazed at the smooth leather blackness in front of my face and wondered how he’d got there, and who he was. What was going on? I eased my arm out from underneath me, ready to roll over as quietly as I could.
Then there was a kind of rustling, a brief papery noise and a clink.
I recognised that sound too; I knew what it was. My mind fumbled, moving too slowly for me to put a name to it. Something I’d heard hundreds, thousands of times at home. Then I heard the breathing resume more deeply, and a creak, a half-footstep, as he shifted his weight.
He’d lit a cigarette.
I could smell the smoke instantly; the same scent that had been in the air when I first came into the room. I’d thought it was on my clothes, from Granddad – but how could it have been when Granddad hadn’t been at home for weeks? No, it was here, in the room. Maybe there really was someone there – a real person, a burglar. Maybe someone sneaked in every night to stand there and smoke. Maybe it was the caretaker, who got a kick out of breaking the rules.
But there should have been a spark.
I’d have seen it. If there’d been a light, I’d have seen it – a flicker reflected in the leather in front of my eyes, or just a golden tinge to the darkness. There’d been the clink of a cigarette lighter. He’d lit his cigarette; I could hear him smoking it. But there hadn’t been a flame.
I took a deep breath, thinking how strange it was; very strange. But I still wasn’t scared. There was nothing threatening about it: I knew nothing could hurt me. It was like a dream, like it was happening to someone else.
The breathing paused, and resumed. There was a footstep: someone turning to look over his shoulder at the sofa, where I was lying.
And a voice said, ‘Oliver?’
The voice was . . . old. It was a skeleton of a voice, dusty, brittle, but it had a kind of friendliness to it. It didn’t sound quite right; but it wasn’t frightening.
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t know what to say.
It coughed. ‘Oliver,’ it said. ‘I knew you’d come back.’
The floorboards creaked. I heard the tap of shoes on the wood, moving in my direction. The voice – whoever that voice belonged to – was coming towards me.
I thought, I don’t understand. What’s going on?
I sat up. There was no one there.
There was no one in the room except me. There was silence and dim blue light from the windows, and the only thing I could smell was damp leather and my own sweat. There was a gentle, fragrant gust of wind, and the rattle of ivy against the window.
Had I dreamt it? Maybe I had. If it had been real I would have been terrified, surely? And I wasn’t; I wasn’t even uneasy.
A wave of tiredness hit me. I shifted slowly until I was lying down. The leather sucked at my skin, making a farting noise, and I felt myself smiling. I was safe here – safer here than in London, probably. There was nothing to be afraid of.
I shut my eyes, and the darkness and silence were comforting, luxurious. They rose round me like a sea until I was asleep again.
.
I woke up in a haze of orange, half blinded by the sun shining through my eyelids. My T-shirt had got rucked up around my shoulders, and the skin of my lower back was stuck to the leather of the sofa. It made a ripping noise as I pulled away and sat up, rubbing my eyes. The light from the window was green-tinged, flooding flatly through the ivy. It showed up the dus
t on everything, but it made the room look beautiful, like something from a museum, all leather and books and old wood. I thought, I’m staying here, and smiled. My night’s sleep left me with a clean, serene feeling, as though I’d recovered from an illness. And it was the first day of the summer holidays.
I laughed aloud. I couldn’t think of anywhere else I wanted to be. Far better to be here than in London, or in LA with Granddad, or even Casablanca or Paris or Sydney . . . I glanced at my rucksack, remembering my letters from Dad, but now the pain was dulled, as if Tyme’s End was an anaesthetic, surrounding me with warmth and welcome-ness. I thought, deliberately, about the other papers – Granddad’s letters and photos and exercise book – but all I felt was curiosity and anticipation. On an impulse I bent forward and pulled them out of my backpack, and put them in a precarious, yellowing pile on the nearest table. They fitted in; I’d enjoy going through them later, discovering all Granddad’s secrets.
But first things first. I needed breakfast and a shower. Well, maybe a wash would have to do if there wasn’t hot water, but breakfast was important. There was food in my rucksack – but there was Granddad’s emergency stash of money too, and I was ravenous. I stood up, stretched, and shoved my wallet into the back pocket of my jeans. I’d get breakfast in the village – and anything else I felt like, because Granddad’s idea of an emergency was something that cost five hundred quid.
The drawing-room door groaned when I opened it, scraping along the floor as if it had swollen in the night, and the front door was worse, refusing to open. I braced myself to pull at it, laughing. The sun was throwing a thin grating of shadow on to the floor. Something rustled outside the window.
I said, ‘Oh, come on. For God’s sake.’ The floorboards creaked again, as if there was someone watching me, listening. ‘I’m coming back – I only want to get breakfast – I’m coming b—’
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