‘Why?’ she began, looking at the activity around her and trying to formulate the right question. ‘Why here? Why now?’
‘Correct. It was actually two questions. Well done.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome,’ he replied, turning back to his monitoring gear and adjusting some dials.
Ruby looked in exasperation at the other people around her, but they were mostly staring into the heavens. She tapped Rocco on the shoulder.
‘So, Rocco, are you going to elaborate?’
‘Not yet. Too much to do. Very tight window.’
‘Window?’
‘A one hour slot. Right here. It’s all in the time capsule.’
‘Tell me,’ she ordered.
‘Otherwise we’ll be up here for months,’ said Rocco, still with his back to her. ‘The message in the capsule asks the future people to send a signal to this spot between three and four in the afternoon, on any May first until 2050. So we come here for one afternoon a year.’
‘How long have you been doing this?’
‘Since 2000.’
‘And there’s been no message from the future in all that time?’
‘Not yet. But the message will come,’ stated Rocco.
‘Unless you missed it.’
‘Someone has been here every year. We can’t have missed it.’
‘What if it came before 2000?’ asked Ruby. ‘Perhaps this fictitious method of time-travelling e-mails isn’t very accurate?’
‘The earth spins and moves constantly,’ explained Rocco. ‘It never occupies the same patch of space twice. The solar system is drifting. The universe is expanding. If someone is able to send a message through time in any meaningful way, they have to pinpoint the precise spot in the universe where the earth used to be at the time they want the message to arrive. Otherwise it will get delivered into the vacuum of space. Therefore space and time calculations are inextricably linked and must be utterly precise. You can’t have one without the other. When they send the message, it will be to the exact time and place that they intend to send it.’
‘So why this spot?’
‘Lots of reasons. We’re precisely twenty kilometres due north of Perpignan train station. The air is clear and unpolluted. We have a panoramic view of the sky.’
‘This is all crazy,’ said Ruby. ‘There’s nothing in the sky and there isn’t going to be.’ She looked down at the car park instead. ‘What’s happening down there?’
A couple of people from the group of official chrononauts in the gazebo had broken away from their monitoring of the empty sky to chase someone away. They started throwing rocks at him. The man ran towards the Spanish car and jumped in, screeching away with wheels spinning and with his door still open. A plume of dust and grit enveloped the tent and the car park. People were coughing and wiping their eyes.
‘Did you see that?’ Ruby asked.
‘See what?’ asked Rocco.
‘Down in the car park. It looked like those other chrononauts tried to stone someone.’
‘Probably another splinter group,’ said Rocco. ‘We don’t always get on particularly well.’
‘Different groups of people fighting each other over a non-existent message in the sky. Remind you of anything?’
‘This is science, Ruby. If the people of the distant future send us a message, we’ll get it.’
Thursday 2nd May 2013
The Patient was seated in the heart of an ancient oak tree in the grounds of Stiperstones Manor. Secure on a low and wide branch, lit by the opaque light of dawn, he was devouring downloaded prose from his Kindle when Ratty knocked at the gnarled bark.
‘Been searching for you all night, old chum,’ gasped Ratty. ‘Where have you been?’
‘I have hitchhiked across the Galaxy, and yet I have not moved from the branches of this oak,’ replied the Patient, proudly showing Ratty a screen filled with the prose of Douglas Adams.
The Patient had displayed an obsession with trees in the months following his arrival in England. Ratty assumed it to be a rebound reaction from the unfortunate man’s unnatural upbringing, incarcerated from birth by an abusive and twisted father deep under the volcanic soils of Guatemala City. Having spent his first forty-five years where even roots failed to reach, the Patient now appeared intent upon redressing the balance by passing his days in a woody embrace.
‘Please come down from that branch, Patient chappy,’ Ratty continued. He found it uncomfortable to say his friend’s name in full. The words refused to trip lightly off his aristocratic tongue. Addressing the Guatemalan-born German as ‘the Patient’ to his face felt discourteous. And yet, having been conceived and cocooned as part of an unofficial – and utterly illegal – medical experiment there was only one label to which Ratty’s friend would answer. He had grown up nameless, regarded as a collection of organs, a bank of spare parts for the high-flying twin he had never known. He had been a human being cultivated in laboratory conditions, denied the basic dignity of a name, referred to coldly by his father – a doctor – as ‘it’. Nevertheless, ‘the Patient’ and even ‘it’ were distinct improvements upon the tarnished name he had inherited from his Teutonic family line: Mengele. And so the nickname of ‘the Patient’ had stuck. The Patient had no problem with it. The cruelty that defined his life could not be undone by changing his name, and so he simply accepted his identity. Ratty would have preferred something a touch more conventional, such as George, but if the British viewing public could follow the weekly science fictional exploits of someone called ‘the Doctor’ for five decades, Ratty was convinced he could eventually get used to calling his friend ‘the Patient’. But, for now, he had to morph it into something that felt less impersonal.
The bond between the two men had been formed in an instant the previous year. Ratty, whilst on the trail of an archaeological prize in Guatemala, had encountered the Patient and his father, and had intervened to prevent the doctor assaulting his son. In so doing, he had helped to set the Patient free. Until that point, concepts of friendship and kindness were theoretical constructs that the Patient had merely encountered in books. In Ratty, he had seen those human faculties come alive for the first time.
At Ratty’s invitation, the Patient had come to live in the dilapidated, gamekeeper’s cottage at the periphery of the Stiperstones estate, finally free from the long shadow of his dysfunctional upbringing. The Patient adored this location. He could observe the wildlife and touch the textures of the mosses and ferns and weeds that grew around him, and he had the peace to read modern literature. Thousands of texts had been available to him in the Guatemalan basement in which he grew up. The collection of philosophical works in particular had made a deep impression on him, and it was from these books that his entire perspective of the world had been gleaned. But the private library contained little that was published post-1970, and he therefore had a certain amount of literary catching-up to do.
‘This tree is most comfortable,’ said the Patient. ‘It is as if nature has grown an armchair for me.’
‘Yes, but do tootle on down, old Kindle-worm. An urgent tête-à-tête is required.’
Ratty’s peculiar take on the English language often perplexed the Patient. The aristocrat seemed to enjoy conveying his meaning within a package of beautifully wrapped prose. Sometimes it made no sense. Sometimes it made Ratty appear trite and trivial. But the Patient understood his friend, if not always his words, and he knew that the veneer of joviality hid a soul that was deeply troubled and hurting. A kind and warm soul, but one that struggled to make sense of the world.
‘We are already engaging in discourse,’ replied the Patient.
‘Well yes, I know, but a topic other than trees would be preferable.’
‘There is much to be learned from matters arboreal,’ stated the Patient, climbing down and rubbing the moss stains from his blue jumpsuit. ‘Publilius Syrus said you should go to a pear tree for pears, not to an elm.’
‘Well quit
e. Glad that’s cleared up. Listen, Patient chappy, I opened that room in the manor yesterday. The one granny locked up before she buried the key.’
Ratty looked fervently around him, as if this act of defiance had surrounded him with a fog of guilt through which retribution would come charging at any moment.
‘And did that particular metaphorical tree provide you with the fruit that you expected?’ asked the Patient.
‘I went to a pear tree and found a banana,’ replied Ratty, not really confident that the analogy worked in any meaningful way.
‘A banana?’
‘Well, a curved piece of information. An unexpected twist. Hence “banana”. Look, can we just talk in plain English, old persona grata?’
The Patient looked at him in a way that made clear his opinion that Ratty rarely spoke plain English.
‘So the room was empty?’ asked the Patient, shuffling sideways into a patch of shade, taking care to remain beneath the protection of the generous spread of leaves above him. His skin had lost little of its neoprene transparency and would not fare well in any battle with the rising sun.
‘How could you possibly know that?’
‘It has to be symbolic,’ the Patient replied. ‘The power of ceremony is in its symbolism, not its function. You have read to me your grandmother’s diary and the theatrical energies she employed to celebrate the closure of the room. She was sealing away an idea, a piece of knowledge that frightened her, not an object. It is a reasonable deduction to make.’
‘Golly. Well, yes. It was somewhat Spartan inside. A minimalist paradise. That’s why I wanted to have this little chinwag. I dashed over to West Dean House in Sussex after I opened the room. Frightful place, West Dean. Flint turrets. Not a patch on the flaking limestone bartizans here at Stiperstones. Spoke to a lovely young receptionist filly about the history of the place –not a natural blonde, as far as I could tell, but a kindly face. Didn’t pay much attention to what she was saying once I started imagining myself reading Homer to her on a firelit, winter’s evening – but she did know about Granny Ballashiels. They have records that corroborate Granny’s diary entries when she writes that she used to hang out at West Dean with Salvador Dalí and the Sitwells and wotnot. Sometimes even with the Mitford sisters when they weren’t busy having tea with Adolf or supper with Winston. But Granny’s diaries are peppered with vexatious lacunae. Her account of 1937 is particularly perfunctory.’
‘That being the year she sealed that room?’
‘How veracious you are. I had no record of her thoughts and movements leading up to that moment. But at West Dean House they have a visitor’s book that shows she departed on the same day as Dalí, one month before the room here at Stiperstones was sealed.’
‘Presumably Dalí was at West Dean as a guest of the owner of the house, the poet Edward James?’ asked the Patient.
‘I believe James was sponsoring Dalí to produce some pieces around that time. James was frightfully keen on helping the surrealist types, and he seemed to have a particular fondness for Dalí. There are still some Dalí creations in West Dean House. All locked away, lamentably, after that recent run of thefts of Dalí’s paintings in New York and London.’
‘I wasn’t aware of those thefts. Is your art collection safe?’
‘We have no Dalí doodles here. Unless, of course, the empty room thingummy was a Dalí surrealist wotsit. Now that would be rather splendid. If he left West Dean with Granny Ballashiels on the same day then it’s possible that they came here.’
‘It is entirely possible, as are many other destinations.’
‘Quite, quite. So how are you getting on in the gamekeeper’s cottage?’
‘I found some books under the stairs,’ said the Patient, as they strolled back to the half-derelict building. ‘The previous inhabitant appears to have had a penchant for the works of an author called Timothy Lea. Confessions of a Window Cleaner was most beguiling.’ His elastic face adopted a Mona Lisa smile. No wrinkles were apparent in his pale and supple skin, no matter what expression his features attempted to portray. Ratty often felt he was conversing with a teenager rather than with a man at the threshold of middle age.
‘Ah, the gamekeeper. Huxtable, I think he was called. No one was better versed in bawdy fiction than he. Wonder what became of the fellow? Hey ho, Patient chappy, the reason I was looking for you was that I have formed a theory about Granny. Unlocking her forbidden room has started me off on a little historical quest. I think I know what might have happened in the weeks prior to locking the empty room. I think Granny Ballashiels might have gone to Spain with Salvador Dalí.’
‘No she didn’t,’ the Patient replied.
The confidence with which the remark had been made caused more than a few of Ratty’s hairs to stand to surprised attention.
‘Why make such an impudent pronouncement, old acorn?’ asked Ratty, smoothing down his hair. ‘Have you dipped your nose in the Dalí canon?’
‘Scarcely. Barely a dozen or so books, including his only novel and his autobiographical volumes. But it was enough to know that Dalí did not return to his homeland during the missing period of your grandmother’s story. Probably because his friend, the poet Lorca, had been shot by a firing squad in the early days of the Spanish Civil War.’
‘What rotten luck. Poor fellow. So Dalí had the good sense to keep away from well-armed philistine oiks? A policy I have always striven to endorse.’
They reached the cottage and stepped inside through the gap in the front wall where there should have been a door, carefully avoiding the gap in the floor where the boards should have been, and finally climbing onto rickety stools in the kitchen.
The full wrath of an English country garden had begun to undermine the building soon after the gamekeeper had left the service of the Ballashiels estate in the late Seventies. With no plans – or funds – to replace him, there had been no point in attempting to arrest the sinister encroachment of ivy and assorted delinquent weeds. The clean-up prior to the Patient’s arrival had been superficial. Ratty assumed his chum would have continued the fight back against the allied forces of nature, but the Patient was simply too fascinated by everything to want to change it. Like a toddler, he would find wonder in the simplest mould, the oddest smell, the smallest insect. Within the cottage, these sources of fascination were to be found in abundance.
‘Dashed peculiar business, don’t you think, Patient chappy?’
The Patient said nothing, quietly waiting for Ratty to elucidate.
‘First the key, then the room, then the chocolate,’ Ratty continued. ‘And so to this cottage. Somewhat unsuitable, I’m sure you’d agree. How would you like to move in to the main house?’
‘Did you say chocolate?’
‘Did I not mention it before? The room was devoid of chattels save for the wrapper of a chocolate bar in the fireplace. From the Seventies. Actually from the same year Mother went missing. And the chocolate was French, to boot. So what do you say? Come over to the manor.’
‘And this is in a room that had been sealed since 1937?’ asked the Patient.
‘Supposedly, yes.’
‘Could someone have eaten the bar upon the roof and dropped the wrapper down the chimney?’
‘I dare say many is the time when my family took tiffin up on the roof for no apparent reason, but no one from my lineage would eat a vulgar, mass-produced bar of chemically enhanced cocoa. So what do you think? About moving out of this tumbledown ruin?’
‘Someone entered the room when you were a child,’ said the Patient. ‘They left that wrapper behind. That is the only conclusion. May I see it?’
Ratty fumbled in the inside pocket of his leather jacket and produced an unimpressive wallet. In the slot that would have sheltered some of Her Majesty’s promissory notes – had Ratty possessed any – sat the carefully folded confectionery wrapper. He passed it to the Patient, who gently opened it out.
‘It is a message,’ the Patient announced.
; ‘A message? Well, yes, it’s a message that says what kind of servant-grade chocolate is to be found within its inner lining.’
‘The room was sealed immediately after your grandmother’s involvement with Salvador Dalí in 1937. Correct?’
‘Indeed. Shall I bring a trolley for your bags?’
‘Therefore it is not unreasonable to assume a potential connection between your grandmother’s experiences with Dalí and this forbidden room. Correct?’
‘Well, yes. Exactly.’
‘And yet this chocolate bar dates from the same year that your mother vanished? 1975?’
‘Again, yes. But that has nothing to do with it.’
‘On the contrary. I believe it has everything to do with it. It was your mother who entered the room. I cannot say what she found in there, but she left a message for you. She left you this chocolate wrapper.’
‘Whilst one is disinclined to assume an antipodean position, Mother could not have entered that room. The key has remained buried since the Thirties. And she would not have eaten that chocolate bar. She had standards to maintain. This chocolate was French, don’t forget. Now, we could just carry your things over to the manor.’
‘No one is saying that she ate the chocolate, Ratty.’
‘So, what did she do with it?’
‘I mean that the fate of the chocolate itself is of no significance. Your mother chose that wrapper for a reason. And it appears that I was wrong.’
The Dali Diaries (The Ballashiels Mysteries Book 2) Page 2