Time and Time Again (14 page)

She was very woozy and certainly not entirely in the moment but she seemed to understand the instructions, or at least she followed them.

Still with the torch between his teeth he hauled her to her feet, then, clasping the handles of all three bags in one hand, he put his free arm around McCluskey’s waist and half dragged her towards the door. Once there, he leant her against the wall and felt in his pocket for the skeleton keys Chronos had supplied him with. They’d promised that these keys could open any lock on earth in 1914. Of course, as far as Stanton knew, this particular lock had last been turned in the early eighteenth century. The quartermaster of the Companions of Chronos had considered this possibility and supplied Stanton with a tiny aerosol can of silicone lubricant, which he now applied.

The key turned and the door opened inwards: fortunately, since a cupboard had been placed against it on the other side that Stanton was forced to move out of the way.

At once he was hit by the smell of disinfectant. And vanilla … which Stanton guessed indicated morphine. He was in a hospital.

McCluskey sensed it too.

‘That’s morphine,’ she mumbled. ‘We’re in Newton’s fucking hospital!’

‘I
said
don’t speak, OK!’ Stanton hissed. ‘If we are banged up in Istanbul as housebreakers we’ll miss Sarajevo, you stupid woman.’

McCluskey’s head lolled forward and she put a finger to her lip. It seemed she understood him but she was so shaky and distracted Stanton could not be sure how long that understanding would last.

For a moment he thought again about leaving her. It was just so ridiculous. He should be calmly taking stock, pausing for a moment to assimilate the mind-boggling conclusion that Newton had been right, that every single thing he had ever known was gone. Time had rebooted itself and the last one hundred and eleven years were once more in the future.

But he didn’t leave her behind. He couldn’t bring himself to do that, any more than he could bring himself to kill her. Instead he got her and the bags out through the door, closed and locked it behind him, then leant her against a wall while he repositioned the cupboard and ascended the steps.

They were the same steps. There could be no doubt about that, although in much better condition than they’d been forty-five minutes before. Perhaps it was a blessing that he had McCluskey to struggle with, stinking of cigarettes and wine and dinner. It was a pretty effective distraction from the millennial-scale strangeness of his situation.

At the top of the steps there was another door, also locked, but which sprang easily open on application of the skeleton keys. Moments later the two of them were on the ground floor of the building. Once more Stanton pressed his finger gently to McCluskey’s lips.

‘Shhh,’ he breathed gently.

He heard music. Opera of some sort, scratchy and poorly amplified. Somebody was listening to a gramophone.

He shone his torch along the passageway.

There were nurses’ capes on hooks on the walls. A wheelchair and also a bed trolley. Rooms led off the corridor on either side, from one of which a shaded light shone through a half-open door.

Stanton crept slowly past, one careful step at a time, supporting McCluskey and trying not to bang his bags. Glancing in, he saw a young nurse working at her desk. It was fortunate for him she was an opera fan.

It occurred to Stanton that he was looking at a living, breathing soul who had died many decades before he was born. Truly no human being in all time had experienced such a thing.

The young woman shifted in her seat. For some reason Stanton felt that he would have liked to get a proper look at her face, the first face from a new world. An old world. But the girl did not oblige him by turning round; her cheek remained firmly in her hand as she concentrated on her work. Stanton and McCluskey crept on.

The geography of the old mansion was, of course, completely different to that of the derelict tenement the two of them had barged through an hour before, but the orientation of the building was the same and Stanton knew the direction in which the street lay.

All was quiet as they made their way through the house. As the gramophone music faded behind them Stanton was aware of some moaning and the occasional restless cry from elsewhere in the building. But the ground floor seemed to be deserted apart from the nurse at her desk.

Moving as quickly as he dared, he found the front door.

He was in the process of laying his hand on the handle when it opened in front of him. Suddenly and shockingly he found himself face to face with a neatly bearded man in top hat and tails, who was clearly even more surprised than Stanton was.

The cold night air focused Stanton’s thoughts.

‘My mother seems much better,’ he said in English. ‘I think perhaps an overnight stay isn’t required after all.’

Then he bundled McCluskey past the startled man, down the front steps and hurried off up the street.

He was a soldier in open country supporting a wounded comrade and with three bags to carry.

He needed to find a cab.

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.