Time and Time Again

12

IN THE EARLY hours of the morning of 31 May 2025, Hugh Stanton left Trinity College Cambridge in a small motorcade which he was surprised to see was travelling with a police escort. The Companions of Chronos might have been past their prime but they clearly still counted some pretty influential people among their members.

‘Best to be safe,’ McCluskey said. ‘Imagine, Isaac Newton arranges a time-precise rendezvous with history across a distance of three hundred years and we miss it because we’re stuck in traffic. We’ve got cops in Turkey too. God knows how it’s been arranged but I do know that some of our people are still pretty well connected with the Foreign Office.’

As the little column of cars and motorbikes drove out of the college gates, Stanton glanced out of the window and saw the motorcycle he had parked near the porter’s lodge. He’d scarcely ridden it since arriving at Cambridge five months earlier. The alarm signal had probably bled the battery dry by now.

He didn’t think it was even still insured. The reminders were no doubt among the rest of the many months of post that would be piled up on the inside of the front door of the house that he had never returned to.

He wondered now if he ever would.

They left Cambridge behind and headed for the motorway. McCluskey was the only Companion of Chronos who was travelling with him. The others had said their goodbyes at a farewell dinner on the previous evening during which many emotional and increasingly drunken speeches had been made in Stanton’s honour. He himself had drunk moderately but declined to reply. It was all too weird. They treated him as some sort of messiah figure, a hero ready to cleanse and redeem the earth from wayward humanity. Stanton didn’t feel that way at all, not least because he simply could not believe in what they all thought was going to happen in Istanbul that night.

‘I know deep down you don’t actually believe any of this, Hugh,’ McCluskey remarked.

‘Look, I’m prepared to accept that something might happen,’ Stanton conceded. ‘Newton obviously believed it and he was pretty much the cleverest man who ever lived. Perhaps I’ll be vaporized by a thunderbolt. Or else gravitational pull will tear me in half or suck me up into a black hole.’

‘But you don’t believe you’re about to embark on a journey to the past?’

‘Well, come on, do you? The Great War started a hundred and eleven years ago this August. Do you really think we can stop it now?’

‘All I know is that I pray we can.’

They both lapsed into silence but Stanton could see that evangelical zeal still shone in McCluskey’s eyes. She really believed. They all believed, those crazy old men and women who called themselves Chronos; imagined that they were all going to be genetically reassembled, young and lusty once more in the sun-lit uplands of a Britain reborn.

‘Time will tell, eh?’ McCluskey said, almost under her breath.

‘Yes,’ Stanton agreed, ‘so you keep telling me. Time will tell.’

They flew from Farnborough by private plane. Most of the equipment Stanton had been supplied with travelled with them. But the weaponry was already waiting in Turkey.

‘Even we Chronations can’t get a telescopic-sighted rifle through airport security,’ McCluskey explained.

The flight took almost four hours, during which McCluskey ate everything that was offered and as ever drank considerably. Then she managed to get herself stuck in the tiny loo.

‘You know, they had one of the most famous seasons ever at Drury Lane in 1914,’ she said once the stewardess had freed her and she’d waddled somewhat shakily back to her seat. ‘The Diaghilev Company came from Russia and just blew London away. They did ten operas and fourteen ballets through the spring and summer and nobody had ever seen anything like it. Or, in fact, ever would again. Sets and crowd scenes on a truly epic scale, impossible to do today, nobody could afford it. You really ought to try and see a couple, maybe even slip one in before you go to Sarajevo. You’ll have a month to kill, after all. But I’d send a telegram ahead from Istanbul if I were you because it was a very hot ticket. You’ll probably need to go on the list for returns.’

‘I’ll bear it in mind,’ Stanton said.

‘And Pygmalion’s just opened at His Majesty’s. Imagine it! You can go to the very first ever production of Pygmalion. With Mrs Campbell as Eliza and Shaw himself directing! Isn’t that almost too wonderful to imagine?’ McCluskey had a faraway look in her eye. ‘The London Theatre in 1914,’ she whispered almost to herself, ‘now that is a dream.’

Then she fell asleep and didn’t wake up till they’d arrived in Istanbul.

They were driven to the Hotel Pera Palace on the Grande Rue de Pera where rooms were waiting for them. As the porters helped McCluskey out of the car she paused for a moment and looked up at the imposing building.

‘They restored it a few years ago,’ she said. ‘Got it right back to its original glory. So in fact this is just how it’ll look tomorrow whatever happens. Whether you’re in 1914 or boring old 2025.’

‘I’m sorry to say I really do think it’ll be 2025,’ Stanton said, ‘because there’s no such thing as time travel, as we’ll be forced to accept at midnight. When you and I are feeling pretty stupid standing alone in a cellar in the old dockland quarter of Istanbul.’

‘Well, if that’s the case we’ll just have to find a late bar to toast Sir Isaac Newton and the fact that even geniuses can get it wrong.’

It was mid-afternoon and having checked in and deposited their bags in their rooms, Stanton and McCluskey returned to the lobby where they met up with members of a local security company who had been engaged to take them to the property the Companions of Chronos had recently purchased.

‘I thought we should have a bit of a reconnoitre while there’s still some light,’ McCluskey said. ‘Don’t want to be stumbling around in the dark tonight with no idea where we’re going.’

They were driven over the Galata Bridge and down into the old dock area of Stamboul. There they found a street filled with houses that had once been wealthy but were no longer so. They pulled up outside a derelict building that in its heyday must have been an impressive city mansion.

A security man stood at the front door ready to let them in.

‘Just one guard,’ McCluskey explained. ‘Don’t want to be ostentatious. There’s nothing here worth stealing and it wouldn’t do to draw attention to ourselves.’

They picked their way in the gathering gloom through the ruin, stepping over shattered glass and bits of broken furniture. Quite recently the place had been squatted and there was much graffiti on the walls. Since then only tramps and vandals had ventured in and now the place reeked of piss. Not a single window remained whole in its frame.

Guiding themselves by torchlight they found their way via a precipitous stairwell down to the cellar, a much larger space than they had expected, with arched vaults disappearing into the darkness.

‘It extends beneath the next house,’ McCluskey explained. ‘It was a wine cellar when Newton’s agents bought the place and they just locked and barred the door. The wine was still there when the hospital closed after the war. It will still be there when you arrive tonight. Revolting, of course, after two hundred years but you should try one for fun. I know I would. Not many people get the chance to taste wine laid down in the early eighteenth century. Imagine that. Wine laid down more than a generation before Marie Antoinette was born.’

Stanton didn’t reply but instead took out a satellite navigation device and, following it, found his way to a place about seven metres from the door they’d entered by, halfway between it and the deeper darkness of the wine vaults. Then, using the coordinates Sengupta had supplied, he took a piece of chalk and marked out the relevant surface area.

‘Newton’s sentry box,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ McCluskey said. ‘Bit bloody tight, better mark the centre.’

There was a broken chair nearby and in the torchlight Stanton took it and placed it carefully in position.

‘So this is where you’ll be standing at midnight,’ McCluskey said. ‘Just think how pleased old Isaac would be to know that his message got through and that somebody acted on it.’

Standing in the silent cellar in the light of just two torch beams it suddenly all seemed very real to Stanton. As if this place really could be the gateway to another universe.

McCluskey seemed to read his thoughts.

‘It has to be true,’ she said firmly. ‘Mankind deserves a second chance. A better twentieth century than the one we were born into.’

‘Well,’ Stanton said, ‘I don’t agree we deserve it. But right now I truly do hope that we get it.’