Tyme's End

by B. R. Collins

  The door burst open, almost knocking me off my feet. I hung on to the edge of it, still laughing. Bloody hell. It hadn’t even rained in the night. Nothing had changed, to make the door stick, but it had stuck.

  Not that it mattered now it was open. I took a great breath of early-summer-morning air and puffed it out. My lungs felt double their normal size. I thought, I have never been this happy.

  Then I took off towards the break in the wall, running for the sheer hell of it.

  .

  I went to the bakery first, then wandered down Falconhurst High Street, eating a bun out of a paper napkin. It was still early, and there weren’t any people around. Once I’d had something to eat I felt more solid, as if someone had turned the volume knob back up.

  I finished the bun, chucked the rubbish in a bin and paused, wondering whether to go straight back to Tyme’s End. I could feel it tugging at me like an anchor, wanting me back. It was telling me there wasn’t anything else worth looking at here – nothing that compared to Tyme’s End. There were Granddad’s letters to look through, and the rest of the house to explore, the gardens, the woods . . .

  Granddad . . .

  For a moment, standing there in the sunlight, I just wanted him to be here. If only he’d been at home when I found those letters. I could imagine how he’d have sat me down, and it would have been too serious for champagne – serious enough for brandy, or a tiny glass of absinthe. He’d have looked at me like I was the same age as him and explained why, exactly, he’d hidden all the stuff from my father.

  I was staring absently into the window of a bookshop. There was a display of hardbacks. The Owl of the Desert, Walks in East Sussex, H. J. Martin: A Biography.

  I swallowed. It was the same book that Dad had bought me, that Granddad had stolen.

  I looked over my shoulder, down the High Street, towards the station. I could go back to London. Or – I checked my pocket – or I could just phone Granddad right now, wherever he was. I imagined his voice, saying my name: Olly, old chap, how delightful to hear from you.

  No. For a moment I was there, in his study again, staring down at Dad’s letters, frozen. No. Whatever he said, however he said it, nothing could make me forgive him that.

  I said to him, in my head, I don’t owe you anything. Screw you.

  Watch.

  I walked into the bookshop, leant my elbows on the counter, and said, ‘Could you give me a copy of every book you’ve got about H. J. Martin?’

  The bloke glanced up from his newspaper and took a swig of his tea. He didn’t smile until after he’d swallowed. Then he said, ‘You sure? All eight biographies? That’ll be about hundred and sixty quid, boyo.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘OK. Just two or three, then.’

  In the end I left with a hefty plastic bag of books. I went into a little grocery shop and bought a couple of bottles of water and some other stuff, and then I made my way back to Tyme’s End, loaded down with bags. I’d only been away an hour or so, but I felt like I was coming home after a long journey. The front door opened almost smoothly, giving at my touch as if it was trying to make up for sticking before.

  I went back into the drawing room, dumped everything beside the sofa and stretched out on it, putting my feet up on the arm. I rummaged in the bag of books for my new copy of H. J. Martin: A Biography. It felt strange to be holding it in my hands again, knowing that the face on the cover was the man who had lived here, the man that Granddad knew. He’d probably sat here, sixty years ago; everything that was in front of me had been in front of him. It made me feel giddy for a moment, as if I was as close to him in time as I was in space.

  Then I reached for one of the eclairs I’d bought from the bakery, and started to read.

  .

  I read for hours, eating my way through an eclair and an apple turnover and another eclair, until when I looked up it was hot in the room and the light had narrowed and brightened as the sun went overhead. I felt like I’d been miles away, and I stretched, surfacing slowly. I couldn’t believe I’d never got further than the first few pages. How could I have thought it was boring? Right now it felt like – it was amazing. H. J. Martin was . . . I grinned up at the ceiling. He was . . . great. I felt as if he was in the room with me, making jokes, talking me through his adventures, making me hang on his every word. I was hardly even reading; it was going straight into my ears, as if I was there, living it, falling in love with the desert and the war and – I could almost hear his voice: clipped and upper-class, like Granddad’s, but warmer, deeper, nearly-but-not-quite familiar, as if I’d heard it before.

  I let the book fall gently on to the floor and lay down. The back of my neck stuck to the leather of the sofa. I shut my eyes and imagined that Martin was here, smoking at the open window, tapping the ash absent-mindedly into the ivy. God, I wished he was here. When I’d been reading it was like I knew him already, as if the book was just reminding me. I knew him, as well as I knew Granddad – better than I knew my father. And Martin wasn’t like them – he was . . . special. My stomach twisted and my throat tightened. Why had I got stuck with Dad and Granddad? Why hadn’t I been born sixty years ago? If only . . .

  I wanted to stay here for ever.

  Well, I thought, that’s tough, because I can’t. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. I grabbed an apple and reached for the book again.

  When I turned the next page, I was looking at Tyme’s End.

  It was a photo – black-and-white, of course – and the caption said it had been taken in 1902, but the house looked the same as it did now. Then there were a couple of pictures of Martin’s parents, one of him as a child, two whole pages of desert scenery, another page of other faces I didn’t know. I turned the page again, and I saw the same photo that I’d seen in Martin’s study: him and Granddad, laughing. HJM and Oliver Gardner, May 1936. It was strange, seeing my own name there, even though I was used to it. I slid my finger over the glossy paper. So Granddad was important enough to be in the biography. On impulse, I flipped to the index.

  I glanced down, running my finger over the entries. Fortescue . . . Fraser, James, 32-33; suicide note, 408 . . . Frobisher . . .

  He was there.

  Gardner, Oliver, 393-5, 402; and HJM’s will, 405-7; Tyme’s End, 409.

  Something made me pause then – a flash of unease or guilt or . . . It felt like spying. And I could remember my thirteen-year-old self giving Granddad my word of honour that I wouldn’t try to find out more about Martin.

  But he’d forfeited any right to expect me to keep that promise when he took all Dad’s letters and hid them, and I didn’t pause for very long.

  .

  On the same evening Martin made the acquaintance of Oliver Gardner, then a student of Philip Langdon-Down at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Gardner, now a popular historian of some standing, has been somewhat taciturn on the subject of his relationship with Martin (understandably, perhaps, given the amount of attention he received after Martin’s will became public knowledge) and has commented that ‘while I was, as most people would have been, impressed by Martin’s celebrity and charisma, it was – as far as I was concerned – an unemotional, social, superficial friendship.’(2) While this may be slightly disingenuous, it seems clear that Martin, uncharacteristically, was the more emotionally involved of the two; although, if we are to believe Gardner’s statement, Martin seems – more characteristically – to have hidden his feelings extremely effectively. Apparently the extent of his attraction was only revealed, even to Gardner himself, after Martin’s death.

  However, that evening in the Lent Term of 1936, Gardner’s reaction when he was introduced to Martin was no doubt flattering enough, and Langdon-Down noted in his diary that the evening had been a success. A few days later, after he returned to Tyme’s End, Martin sent Gardner a copy of The Owl of the Desert, which he mentioned in a letter to
Langdon-Down: ‘Sent your young protégé a 1st Ed of the Ood [i.e. The Owl of the Desert] . . . should really have sent him something better, but I didn’t like him that much . . .’(3)

  .

  There was more, on the next page, but I was already flicking back to the index . . . and HJM’s will, 405-7 . . .

  .

  Given that Martin had no immediate family, there was no question of his will being contested; nevertheless, the mere facts were enough to raise the spectre of scandal in the popular press and among some of Martin’s less charitable friends. For him to leave his entire fortune – including Tyme’s End, the house that had been in his family for generations – to a young man, not yet twenty-one, whom he had known for only a few months, seemed at best extraordinarily capricious, generosity raised to rather histrionic level. At worst – as Edie Quincey pointed out, in rather more robust terms – it implied an unsavoury element to their relationship. Gardner himself denied all suggestions that Martin had been infatuated with him. When the will was made public, he commented: ‘Martin was notoriously unpredictable. I’m naturally very glad of the money, but I really can’t say what his motives were for leaving it all to me.’ On the rare occasions in recent years when he has been questioned further on the subject, Gardner has shown the same reluctance to speculate, and has restricted himself to pointing out the current laws regarding libel . . .

  .

  I stopped reading because I couldn’t take it in. Part of me wanted to laugh, because – well, I could imagine Granddad answering impertinent questions with a courteous, point-by-point summary of the libel laws. But the rest of it was . . .

  I looked down at the page again and the room seemed to shift and slide around me. Granddad had been left all Martin’s money when he wasn’t even twenty-one, only a few years older than me . . . denied all suggestions that Martin had been infatuated with him . . . I couldn’t get hold of the idea; it kept slipping away, like a bead of mercury. The spectre of scandal? It couldn’t be the same Oliver Gardner . . . But I knew it was.

  So Granddad owned Tyme’s End.

  It made sense, now I thought about it. Of course. Why else would he have the key? But to have kept it all that time, for sixty years, not living here but not selling it either – why would he do that? He must have had to employ someone to do the repairs, to mow the lawn, to make sure no one broke in. He must have gone on paying the electricity bills, and the water, and . . . Why would he bother? It didn’t make sense, any more than it made sense that someone had chucked the dust sheets over everything without even emptying out the sherry decanter first.

  And there was something else. I could hear Granddad’s voice, talking about Martin, the afternoon when he’d given me my book back: He was . . . not a good man . . . It was a strange thing to say about someone who’d left you his entire fortune.

  Not that it mattered now. I shut the book. The breeze from the window ruffled my hair, smelling of warm grass, and I suddenly realised how thirsty I was. I thought, So I can stay here. No one’s coming to chuck me out.

  And – I hated myself for thinking it, but I couldn’t help it – one day Tyme’s End will be mine. My heart gave a great joyous thump at the thought. I wanted it so much – even more than before, now I knew that one day it could be, would be mine. It was as if nothing mattered – not home or school or Adeel, not Dad, not Granddad – except being here. As if my whole life had been leading up to this moment.

  Yes, the house said to me. Yes.

  .

  I carried on reading and reading. I didn’t remember eating lunch, but when I got up to go to the loo, hours later, there were crisp packets and banana skins scattered around, and the water bottle I’d opened was empty. The sun had dropped out of sight behind the trees, and there was only just enough light to read. It was hard to stand up, and I was aching from being in the same position all that time. I had to keep blinking to stop the world spinning.

  But I still felt that elation, that wonderful sense of being in the right place, doing the right thing. My heartbeat was fluttering in the roof of my mouth. It was extraordinary, like the barrier between then and now had worn thin, almost to nothing.

  I felt someone’s eyes on the back of my neck. I swung round and for a fraction of a second I thought I saw a movement near the window, but it was only the ivy leaves fluttering in the breeze. Nothing. Just my brain playing tricks.

  There was that smell of cigarette smoke again, and a gust of air ruffled the pages of the biography I’d left on its back on the floor. The pages turned slowly and then stopped, open on the photo of Granddad and H. J. Martin. I crouched down and looked at it again. HJM and Oliver Gardner, May 1936. It must have been taken in Cambridge, a few months after they met, almost exactly sixty years ago. I stared down at them, standing together, laughing at the camera, and I felt an odd twist of hatred in my stomach. How could Granddad have lied about that? How could he? Even after Martin had left him all his money – left him Tyme’s End, for God’s sake! – Granddad couldn’t say what a great man he was, couldn’t even be grateful.

  I thought, If I knew someone like Martin I’d – But I didn’t know what I’d do, except that I wouldn’t let him leave, like Dad or Granddad. And I wouldn’t let him get killed, stupidly, for no reason, on a flat, straight country road.

  I stared so hard at the picture, narrowing my eyes, that I half believed it was me. I could almost remember the photo being taken, the smell of hot stone and the flash of the sun on the camera lens. It was what I wanted more than anything in the world: to be there, in Granddad’s place.

  And suddenly it was as if something clicked inside me.

  I stood up and took a quick look round at the mess I’d made; then I picked up the rubbish and gathered my rucksack into my arms so that the room was back to how it had been before, except for the papers on the table. I went upstairs and put my stuff in one of the bedrooms – not the biggest, that was Martin’s – and if I ignored the musty smell, I could pretend I was here by invitation and this was where I was supposed to be sleeping. The garden below was shadowy and dim, the last fingers of shade creeping past the house. I turned the light on and the room leapt into stage-set brightness. It was amazing that the bulb still worked, but maybe the caretaker had replaced it – if there was a caretaker.

  I went from room to room, turning the lights on. I worked my way round the bedrooms until I was back where I’d started, standing outside Martin’s room, my heart hammering. Then I knocked, feeling stupid, and slowly opened the door.

  There was a movement by the window that made me jump, but it was only a curtain swaying in the draught.

  I said, ‘I’m here. If you want me, I’m here.’

  And then I laughed, because I was talking to myself, and switched the light on, and went back downstairs.

  .

  And the house felt different. There was a new scent in the air – a sweet, musty smell that I couldn’t identify – and the floorboards creaked as if there was someone moving around upstairs. But it wasn’t creepy. If anything, it felt friendly, comforting, like having someone I trusted around.

  I went back into the drawing room and started to look through Granddad’s papers, while the darkness got bluer and thicker and the reflections in the windows solidified. Most of the stuff wasn’t important – letters from his mother, my great-grandmother, letters he’d written to her from his boarding school, a couple of brief notes from Martin – Am in town, lunch today? Porters’ lodge, 1 o’clock, J – that I didn’t know why he’d kept. I tossed them aside, picked up the exercise book, and opened it at random. There were loads of blank pages. I flipped to the beginning.

  It was a diary; which was strange, because Granddad’s other diaries were hardback notebooks that he kept in a glass-fronted cabinet in his study.

  .

  12th June, Cambridge. Last day of full term – lunc
h with Marian – wonderful as always, but couldn’t concentrate for thinking about seeing J tomorrow. She was talking about the Crusades . . .

  15th June, Tyme’s End. Got train down here, must bathe before dinner so more later, only trying to capture moment of seeing Tyme’s End: gorgeous weather, house like a picture postcard, J coming out to meet me, smiling . . . Others here, Tony Morton-Smith, Edith Quincey, Dr Langdon-Down . . .

  .

  There was a noise overhead like a door opening, and I half rose to my feet, automatically, as if I didn’t want to be found reading Granddad’s diary when someone walked in on me. Then I caught myself, and sat down again. There was silence, as though I’d imagined the noise, but the diary had fallen to the floor, its covers spread out like wings. I picked it up and paused, looking down at it.

  Part of it had been ripped out: neatly, methodically, each page torn away separately, close to the margin. I ran my thumb along the rough edges. Twenty pages? Fewer, possibly. I checked the dates. Every entry from 17th June to –

  To 21st June.

  The breeze brushed my face like a hand, pushing my hair off my forehead. I could smell the fresh evening air coming in from the window – cooler now, damper – and hear the cars coming and going along the road. The wind sighed in the trees and I heard a motorcycle drone past and cut off. I took a deep breath. Something was nagging at me. There was something wrong. Something I’d read . . .

  21st June, Tyme’s End.

  I stared at the entry without seeing it. Then I blinked, and saw what I was looking at.

  The date was written at the top of the page, and below it there was nothing but blank space, except for one word. It was in pencil, dug so heavily into the paper that it had almost gone through the page, and it was big, in block capitals, hardly recognisable as Granddad’s handwriting.

  It said, REMEMBER.

  I ran my finger over the word, and even though he’d written it sixty years ago my fingertip came away grey with graphite.