Time and Time Again

15

IT DIDN’T TAKE him long. The dockland residential area was no longer poor and run-down. It was utterly transformed from the dilapidated and neglected place he and McCluskey had arrived in an hour or so earlier.

In the very next street he saw a horse-drawn cab being paid off and bundled Professor McCluskey towards it. She staggered along beside him, Stanton suddenly acutely aware that her attire, which only an hour before had been the deeply conservative dress of an old-fashioned matron, was now positively indecent in as much as her skirt reached only to her knee.

‘Pera!’ he shouted to the driver, pushing McCluskey into the carriage as the previous occupants vacated it. ‘Pera Palace Hotel. Grande Rue de Pera.’

He knew almost no Turkish but on the previous day he’d made some effort to learn how to pronounce place names.

The cabby would have known where to go anyway. There weren’t too many hotels that catered for feringi in Constantinople and they were all clustered in the same small area of the European quarter.

Stanton sat back on the hard, leather-cushioned seat and tried to take stock. Not of the bigger picture, the shocking truth that he was in a horse-drawn hansom cab riding through Constantinople in 1914. That was such a vast and existentially strange notion that he was fearful to focus on it in case it drove him mad.

As might a proper understanding of his personal loss. That too was hovering on the edge of his brittle emotional defences, like a hammer above an egg. Because if history really had been rebooted and a previous loop in time begun again, then Cassie and Tessa and Bill had never existed. Nor indeed ever would exist, because the very nature of his mission was calculated to change entirely the course of future generations. He couldn’t dwell on that. A second bereavement was more than he could handle at present. Better simply to ignore those deeper thoughts and focus instead on negotiating each second as it came before moving on to the next.

That had been his rule when making Guts Versus Guts, in those happy days when he’d dropped himself gleefully into life-threatening situations for the sake of a thrill and a webcast. Never consider the bigger picture, because if you do you’ll just give up. If you’re hanging on a precipice, there’s no point worrying that the precipice is in a desert five days from water. Just get out of the precipice, then worry about the water.

The cab had left the dock area and was rattling over the Galata Bridge back up through the streets of Pera, which were mostly empty and quiet, it being past midnight. It occurred to Stanton that he and McCluskey were making the exact same journey in reverse that they had made just a couple of hours before. The same journey, except in 1914.

Once more the thought threatened to overwhelm him. He forced himself to focus on the moment.

He took stock of McCluskey, who was slumped beside him. She’d slipped back into unconsciousness and there was blood on the leather upholstery behind her head. That Turkish party girl had hit her hard. It takes a lot of force to shatter a champagne bottle.

He needed to get her into bed and to ice that wound.

Which meant checking her into the hotel. Could she pass muster? Her cardigan and blouse were just about all right but there was no doubt that her skirt would draw serious attention. He doubted that any lady had ever entered the Hotel Pera Palace on the Grande Rue de Pera with her calves and ankles fully displayed. Elderly lady or not, it was indecent. If then McCluskey were found to have sustained a serious blow, questions would certainly be asked. Questions Stanton did not feel equipped to answer.

The head injury was easy to cover. McCluskey was wearing a silk scarf round her neck and Stanton simply knotted it round her head and under her chin. Coupled with her cardigan it was a look more suited to a breezy day on Brighton Pier than a top-class hotel at one in the morning but it would do.

The skirt was a trickier problem. There was a neatly folded rug attached to the door of the cab. He took it and with considerable difficulty was able to tie it round McCluskey’s waist, using his own belt to secure it.

He almost didn’t have time before the journey was over. Despite the fact that they were travelling at only the speed of a trotting horse, the journey from Newton’s house to the hotel had taken considerably less time than had the one in the big Mercedes from the hotel to Newton’s house.

As Stanton struggled with the belt buckle they were already drawing up outside the very hotel in which the two of them had dined a few hours before. Stanton pulled the belt tight around the blanket and did his best to conceal the whole arrangement beneath McCluskey’s cardigan. Then he gave her another whiff of the ammonia which brought her partially back to the surface.

‘When I say walk, walk,’ he hissed. ‘Don’t say anything.’

Her eyes opened but she said nothing.

Glancing out of the window as the driver brought the cab to a halt, Stanton noted that McCluskey had been right. The façade was pretty much the same as it had been when they left it, only the line of black limos was missing.

The cabby leapt down to open the door and Stanton reached into the smaller of his two bags and produced the colour-coded envelope that he knew contained early-twentieth-century Turkish currency. Nodding towards the blanket, which he was clearly intent on taking, he gave the driver five times its value. The driver wasn’t going to argue his luck and he helped Stanton manhandle McCluskey out of the cab.

Instantly porters appeared from the doorway of the hotel. Stanton flashed more currency and waved them away from McCluskey, pointing at his bags. He then supported her through the doors while a porter followed with the luggage.

Inside the building the reception desk was in a different place to where it had been when he had checked in that morning but he could see that the Orient Bar was still tucked into the corner of the great atrium, the same place it had been when he had his drink with McCluskey before what she called her ‘last supper’.

Last supper? Yeah, right. The outrageous old cheat.

He approached the reception desk with McCluskey stumbling along beside him; it being so late the foyer was almost empty, which was fortunate. Only the porter following behind with the bags and the staff at the desk were present to witness the arrival of this strange check-in party.

‘My mother has had a fall,’ Stanton said loudly and authoritatively in English. ‘I need adjoining rooms. Do you offer private bathrooms?’

‘In our suites, sir,’ the receptionist replied, also in English.

‘Then I need a two-bedroom suite. The best you have. Also ice, I presume you still have some in your cellars? Have two buckets sent up at once.’

At first the receptionist seemed pretty dubious about the new arrivals. McCluskey with her blanket for a skirt looked far from being a society lady and Stanton was not dressed in anything remotely resembling evening wear. But they were carrying letters from the British Foreign Office requesting and requiring they be afforded due assistance, and when Stanton insisted that the manager be called while casually playing with a gold sovereign in the palm of his hand, a suite of rooms was secured. The British were, after all, internationally recognized as being pretty eccentric and impervious to the opinions of foreigners. Mad old English ladies supported by sons dressed for what looked like hillwalking were probably not such an uncommon sight in the best hotels in Europe at the time.

A porter accompanied them in the splendid lift to the seventh floor and carried their bags into the suite.

A fumbled tip, a mumbled thank-you and Stanton was alone in a gilt and crimson-velvet sitting room dripping with luxurious Edwardian excess.

Again, Stanton decided to focus on the moment. McCluskey was running a fever now and muttering incoherently. He got her into the bathroom and bathed the wound on her head. It was a pretty deep cut and being on the scalp had bled profusely. The back of her cardigan was soaked in matted blood.

He sat her on the toilet and checked her pupils and her respiratory passages.

‘What’s your name?’ he said.

‘Professor Sally McCluskey,’ came the reply. It was slurred but clear enough.

‘Where do you work?’

‘Cambridge. I’m the Master of Trinity.’

He thought about asking her what year it was but decided to leave that; the answer could provoke a brainstorm even in someone who wasn’t concussed. McCluskey was functioning mentally, and as long as the brain didn’t swell inside the skull she’d probably get away with a nasty headache. Nothing he could do about that till the ice arrived.

Of course, he needed to get her into bed, which wasn’t going to be an easy task. She was conscious but not physically able and she was pretty fat and old. He struggled with her clothes, wrestling with the tightly knotted brogues and thick woollen tights, terrified of toppling her off the toilet. Eventually he got her down to her vast bra and industrial-looking pants and decided to stop there.

It occurred to him to look further into her bag and he found himself whistling at the brazen deceit of the woman. She’d come fully prepared. There were three sets of underwear, a plain black ankle-length dress of late Edwardian design and a brushed cotton nightie, all tightly rolled and packed Girl Guide-style. There was also British and German paper money, plus what looked like treasury bonds. There were various pills and medicines and, to Stanton’s surprise, a small handgun, a Ruger LCP Six Shot in pink polymer. He wouldn’t have imagined she’d tote such a girly piece but, pink or not, he knew the make and it was lethal at close range. He cracked it open and emptied the chamber, pocketing the bullets. His old professor had done a pretty bad thing barging into his mission and she was also severely concussed. For the time being at least he decided he’d prefer to have such an unpredictable associate unarmed. There was much else besides in the bag, which seemed to be bigger on the inside as ladies’ bags often were, but Stanton had no time to explore the limits of his old professor’s audacious duplicity.

He wrestled her into her nightdress and with some effort carried her to bed in one of the rooms that adjoined the sitting room, just as the ice arrived. Using a towel and a pillowcase to make a pack, he laid her head against it and took further stock. As long as the ice contained the swelling, he reckoned she’d be all right. A blow like that against a person in their early seventies was a serious thing, but for all her unhealthy lifestyle McCluskey was a tough old war horse. With luck she’d pull through. Not that he ought to care, of course. She was a lying, cheating traitor who had deliberately put the entire mission in jeopardy for her own personal gratification. But he did care. He liked her and always had. Now that she had made the leap with him and they were together on the strangest adventure in all of human history, he hoped she’d get to see whatever stupid ballet it was she’d set her heart on.

Her breathing was easier now. He felt that she was more asleep than unconscious. Apart from anything else they had both been up now since 4 a.m. the previous morning. He glanced at the beautiful carriage clock that stood on the mantel above the fireplace: 2.15 a.m. Allowing for a two-hour time gain for Central Europe, that was more than twenty hours.

And a hundred and eleven years.

No wonder McCluskey needed some sleep.

When she woke she was going to be in for a shock. A shock that he knew he himself must now begin to assimilate. It was time to accept it. Newton had been right. It was the early hours of the morning on the first of June 1914.

Not one shred of his life existed any more.

Apart from McCluskey, which was little comfort.

He took out his smart phone, looking for a signal despite knowing full well there could be none. But who knew? Those techy guys in LA were so clever that perhaps they’d downloaded him an app that could facilitate calls across separate dimensions in space and time. But of course they hadn’t, and there was an empty pie shape where that morning four black bars had been.

He pressed music and scrolled through his library. Perhaps he would listen to some tunes. He didn’t. It was just too strange.

He went out on to the balcony and stood against the railing. The Pera district was on a hill and Stanton could see the whole of Istanbul and the waters of the Golden Horn stretched out below. Lights twinkled then dimmed as slowly the last remnants of the city he must now call Constantinople went to sleep.

If history were to run its course, within three months the city would be at war. Europe would have embarked on the bloodiest and most terrible conflict the world had ever known. Only he and McCluskey knew that and only he could do anything about it.

He felt very small.

He didn’t feel like sleeping so he sat on the balcony looking at the city for most of the night, going back inside only to check on McCluskey and change the ice until it had all melted. At about five in the morning dawn began to glimmer on the distant horizon.

The dawn of his first day.

He decided to go for a walk. McCluskey seemed OK. The signs of fever that she had exhibited earlier had disappeared. She was sleeping easily and soundly as her body readjusted to the shock. He dressed her wound, put water and a bowl of fruit on her bedside table and wrote her a note, which he left on her pillow.

DON’T PANIC! Newton was right and it has happened as he said it would. You have suffered a concussion and must rest. Do NOT leave the room. There is fruit and water and a Mars Bar (which I found in your cardigan) on the bedside table. I will return by lunchtime. Your watch is set to the correct time and there is a clock on the mantelpiece. You are a very bad woman but I guess I’m stuck with you.

Hugh

For the briefest second he almost added, P.S. I’m on my mobile.

Next he bundled up McCluskey’s blood-stained jacket and scarf in preparation for disposal. He took up the smaller of his two bags and went out into the corridor locking his suite door behind him and hanging out the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign. Then he headed for the lift.

He thought he would wander down to the Bosphorus and watch the sun rise from the Galata Bridge.

Within a few hours he would have saved the lives of a young Muslim family and narrowly avoided sabotaging his own mission by confronting a group of British officers in a cafe.

History had begun anew. The future was already changing.