Time and Time Again

10

STANTON TOOK A sip of his beer and ate a pretzel. He was sitting in the Orient Bar of the Hotel Pera Palace on the Grande Rue de Pera on the European side of the Golden Horn. After his near escape at the little cafe outside the mosque he had decided to risk no further encounters and had taken a horse cab straight back to his hotel.

He looked about him at the fashionable pre-lunch crowd and wished he still smoked. Absolutely everybody smoked in 1914. Free cigarettes were offered on the bar; for a few pennies he could have a cigar. There were cigarette adverts framed on the walls. One, for a brand called Moslem, featured a sinister-looking character in a fez, and another depicted a very self-satisfied Sultan figure in a huge turban with an Islamic crescent on it, surrounded by a group of scantily clad dancing girls. Stanton amused himself for a moment trying to imagine which group would be most offended in the twenty-first-century world from which he’d come: health campaigners, feminists or devout Muslims.

The barman had spotted where Stanton’s eye had fallen.

‘Turkish or Virginian, sir?’ He pushed the beautiful inlaid box towards Stanton while simultaneously proffering a light.

They looked so nice, those neat lines of perfect little white sticks. He’d smoked twenty a day until quite recently and enjoyed every one of them; more on active service. Most of the guys did. Who cared if you might die in thirty years when you had every chance of dying tomorrow from a concealed bomb? Smoking had been a kind of two-finger salute to the enemy. We’re not scared of you. Look, we’re killing ourselves anyway.

Stanton almost took one. To smoke a Turkish-blend gasper in the Orient Bar at the Hotel Pera Palace in Old Constantinople when the Ottoman Empire was still tottering was about as romantic a thought as a man like Stanton could have.

‘No thanks,’ he said.

He’d given up after he got Cassie’s letter.

She hadn’t asked him to but he intended it as absolute proof of his commitment to being a better man. Cassie herself had smoked when they’d first been together but had given it up when she got pregnant. Ever since then he’d known she desperately wanted him to give up too. She’d never hassled him about it but of course he’d known. Particularly after Tessa started noticing all those adverts with the rotting lungs and diseased eyeballs.

‘Just another beer, please,’ he said. ‘No, wait. Scotch. Laphroaig.’ Normally he preferred richer, more soothing malts, but right now he wanted something challenging and aggressive. He bolted the smoky, peat-flavoured shot down in one. It reminded him of the lichen, boiled roots and charred stag he’d survived on during his weeks sheltering by Loch Maree.

And it reminded him of McCluskey.

She’d given him Laphroaig on Christmas morning five months before. A little miniature in the toe of the stocking he’d woken up to find at the end of his bed. There’d been a chocolate orange, too, and a keyring from the Trinity College souvenir shop.

Also a letter of identification stamped ‘GR’ in the name of Captain Hugh Stanton, giving his year of birth as 1878.

‘Little Christmas present,’ she’d said through the cigarette that was clamped between her teeth as she brought in a breakfast tray. ‘They didn’t have passports as such in those days. If you thought you might get into strife you carried a letter and photo ID from the Foreign Office telling Johnny Foreigner to damn well leave you alone. Pax Britannica. don’t y’ know. Happy days, eh? They did a good job photo-shopping your picture, didn’t they? I think the moustache suits you. So rakish. You’re going to break all the little Suffragettes’ hearts. Anyway, tea, eggs, toast and a shed-load of swotting for you. It may be Christmas but you have to work.’

On the tray, alongside the breakfast, were two computers, a tablet and a laptop.

‘The tablet’s got an excellent German language program on it.’

‘Actually I speak pretty good German. Did my first three years’ service on the Rhine.’

‘Duh! We know that, Hugh. It was one of the requirements. Every bit as important as your practical skills. But “pretty good” isn’t good enough if you’re going undercover. Also don’t forget that early twentieth-century German was a bloody sight more formal than what the slappers you’ll have met in the bars of Lower Saxony spoke. So get swotting. Of course it’d be great if you could learn Turkish and Serbian too but they’re absolute swines of languages. All in all we think absolutely fluent German is better than a half-arsed smattering of all three. You speak French as well, don’t you?’

‘Just schoolboy. And a bit of Pashto and Urdu.’

‘Oh well. German’s the thing. Native languages of both the Archduke you’re going to save and the Emperor you’re going to pop off.’

McCluskey sat on the bed and took a toast soldier.

‘So you’re keeping this up then?’ Stanton asked.

‘Keeping what up?’

‘This massive and highly elaborate joke that for some reason you have chosen to play on an ex-student.’

‘Still finding it hard to believe that five months from now you’re going to step into 1914?’ McCluskey said, swallowing toast while pushing smoke out of her nostrils. Stanton wondered where she’d learnt to chew and inhale at the same time. It was a skill he’d noted among the tribesmen out in the hills but it was unusual in Cambridge professors.

‘Well, just a bit perhaps,’ he admitted, unscrewing the top from his little whisky miniature and breathing in the rich, dirt-flavoured aroma. ‘I mean, you know, seeing as how the whole business is clearly insane.’ He replaced the cap. ‘Is it some kind of thing for rag week? Get Guts Stanton to imagine he’s preparing for the ultimate mission and stick it on the net for a laugh, Guts Versus History?’

‘Do you really imagine I’d punk you, Hugh?’

‘Well, it would be a surprising thing to do, I’ll admit. But not as surprising as sending me back in time.’

‘All right,’ McCluskey said, rolling herself another cigarette and dropping bits of tobacco on to Stanton’s sheets. ‘Here’s the thing. Of course we don’t know for sure that you’re going to make a quantum leap in the space–time continuum, but what we do know for sure is that Sir Isaac Newton believed you could. And that Sir Amit Sengupta says the mathematics on which that belief was based are sound. That’s it. That’s all we know and all you know. Now it may be that it doesn’t happen. But surely, Hugh, surely as the inheritors of Newton’s legacy we have a duty to at least accept the possibility and act accordingly? Can’t you see that?’

Stanton ate his egg but didn’t reply.

‘And why not, for God’s sake? You’ve told me yourself you’re just killing time till you can get yourself killed. Well, kill it with me. It can’t be any worse than sitting on the shores of a Scottish loch or trying to get the internet in a budget motel. Live here in the Master’s Lodge. Improve your German. Study 1914 with a passion and steep yourself in the fascinating and varied expertise of the Companions of Chronos. What else do you have to do? What would be any better fun? What remotely do you have to lose?’

Stanton smiled. She had him there of course.

‘You certainly chose the right bloke,’ he said eventually. ‘No ties. No life. No future. Not many like me about.’

‘And a resourceful adventurer, German-speaking, with a keen interest in history to boot! Blimey, Hugh, it’s like Newton himself sent you.’

‘All right, prof,’ Stanton said, smiling. ‘I’ll go along with it, for the time being at least …’

‘Woohoo!’ McCluskey said, shaking her head gleefully and sending a shower of dandruff fluttering down to join the layer that was already dappling the shoulders of her greatcoat. ‘All right if I pinch another toast soldier?’

McCluskey grabbed one without waiting for a reply, took a bite, then leant forward to dip the remaining end of it into Stanton’s egg. Stanton managed to get his hand over the egg in time.

‘You can have a bit of toast, prof,’ he said, ‘but double-dipping someone’s egg is not acceptable. In fact it’s revolting.’

‘I can see you’ve never had a midnight feast in a school dorm. You get rid of all that squeamishness pretty sharpish. I’ve taken second chew on another girl’s bubble gum a hundred times.’

‘I didn’t have the advantage of a private school education.’

‘That chip you have on your shoulder is going to get a lot heavier in 1914, you know. Posh people really did run things then.’

‘Whoever has the money runs things, prof. Always has done, always will.’

‘Well, anyway, to business. The tablet’s for your German. The main computer is bedtime reading. A snapshot of Europe on June the first 1914 with particular emphasis on Central Europe and the Balkans. Every single thing we know from the price of sausages in Budapest to the staff of the British embassy in Belgrade, from train timetables out of Waterloo to the tensions between the Kaiser and his English mother, who he blamed for giving him a withered arm. Hindsight is our trump card and you need to cram it all. As we get closer to blast-off you’re going to be spending a lot of time in the History faculty. It’ll be during term time so for God’s sake don’t go falling in love with some winsome undergraduate with a short skirt and a burning interest in Renaissance Italy. Because I’m damn certain they’ll all fall in love with a devilishly dishy mature student like you.’

Stanton shot her a glance.

‘One thing I know is that I’ll never fall in love again.’

McCluskey shrugged. ‘Can’t imagine that’s what your Cassie would have wanted.’

‘I’ve told you before, she’s dead, she doesn’t get a vote.’

‘You could at least allow yourself a shag or two. You’ll be swatting totty off like flies.’

‘Prof,’ Stanton said, ‘let’s just stick to Chronos, eh?’

‘Right you are,’ she said heading for the door. ‘First German tutorial at eleven thirty. Fortunately your teacher doesn’t mind missing his Christmas lunch. Call if you need anything, fags or whatever.’

‘I still don’t smoke.’

‘Bet you will in 1914.’

‘If ever I find myself in 1914, prof, maybe I’ll have one for you.’