Time and Time Again (6 page)

‘Well, I don’t know that I’d—’

But McCluskey was brooking no argument.

‘Beautiful!’ she insisted. ‘And then – suicide. The insane, perverse,
wilful
self-destruction of a collective culture that had been
four thousand years
in the making, smashed
utterly
almost overnight. Never to rise again, and giving way in its stead to a genocidal global hotchpotch of half-baked fanaticism from both left and right. The Soviet Union corrupting Marx’s great idea into a contagious global nightmare in which entire populations would be murderously enslaved. And the United States destined to take the worship of competition, consumption and excess to the current point of planetary extinction.’

Stanton stood up. It seemed the only way of getting a word in edgeways.

‘Now hang on!’ he said. ‘You can’t blame the Americans solely for the collapse of the environment.’

‘Not any more we can’t, but they started it. Who taught the peoples of the world to consume beyond their needs? Beyond even their
desires
? To consume simply for the
sake of consuming
. The world’s greatest democracy, that’s who! And look where
that’s
got us. I tell you, the Great War ruined
everything
. The lights went out and the brakes came off. Just try to
imagine
what the world would be like now if it had never happened – if the great nations of Europe had continued on their journey to peace, prosperity and enlightenment; if those millions of Europe’s best and finest young men, the most highly educated and
civilized
generation the world had ever known, had not died in the mud but had instead survived to shape the twentieth century.’

Stanton could see her point. All those names on the chapel wall just metres from where he sat and on every town memorial and village cross. What good might those young men have done had they lived? What evil might they have prevented? And in Germany? And Russia? Had their lost generations also survived, surely they would have stopped those morally bankrupt mediocrities who emerged from the rat holes and drove their nations towards absolute evil. Without the corrupting catalyst of industrial war, where might those countries have gone?

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Can’t fault your argument. 1914 was the year of true catastrophe. So you answered Newton’s question. You got to delve further into his papers. What did you find next?’

‘What we found next was a sequence of four numbers.’

‘Numbers?’

‘Yes, numbers that were the end result of a lengthy and complex equation. Newton had written them on a slip of paper and sealed them in another envelope three centuries ago. And the sequence of those numbers was One Nine One Four.’

‘1914?’

‘1914 indeed.’

‘Isaac Newton predicted the Great War?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! How could he have done that? He wasn’t a soothsayer! He was a mathematician, a man of science. He dealt in empirical evidence. He didn’t arrive at those numbers via some Nostradamus-style mystical mumbo-jumbo. He did the maths.’

‘I’m really not following, prof. Agreed, 1914 is a year of vast historical significance, but what’s that got to do with maths?’

‘All in good time, Hugh, all in good time,’ McCluskey said, draining her teacup and stretching broadly. ‘That’s enough for now. I need a nap. Can’t handle boozy brekkies like I used to.’

‘But wait a minute on, you can’t just—’

‘I’ve told you everything I am qualified to tell, Hugh. Bigger brains than mine must take over from here. Don’t worry, all will be explained after the service.’

She was already disappearing towards her bedroom.

‘Wait a minute,’ Stanton called after her. ‘What service?’

‘It’s Christmas Eve, Hugh. Carols at King’s, for God’s sake. Even a bloody atheist like you can’t miss that.’

‘
BAYıM BAYıM, DURUN!
’

Stanton heard a little girl’s voice behind him and turned to see that the Muslim child he’d saved from the speeding car was running after him. Struggling with something. His bag.

He’d forgotten his bag.

His bag!

How could he have been so stupid?

He’d left the majority of his money and equipment in his room at his hotel but he still had with him a handgun and a small computer, water purifiers, antibiotics and a state-of-the-art field surgical kit. Items which, if lost, would take at least a hundred years to replace. And he’d walked away without them.

Sure, he was disorientated but it was still an unforgivable lapse.

Allowing emotion to cloud his judgement and losing contact with essential equipment was about as ill-disciplined and unprofessional a mistake as a soldier on active service could make. In fact, he absolutely should never have intervened to save that family at all. Quite apart from the possible repercussions on history of saving a family who had been destined to die, he could quite easily have been killed himself by that careering car, thus ending his mission before it had even begun.

But when he turned round and looked into the big jet-black eyes of the little Turkish girl who was struggling up behind him with his bag, her broad smile framed between outsized loop earrings and cascades of coal-dark silken hair, Stanton was glad he’d let instinct be his guide. Somewhere in that big dusty city there was a father who would be spared the death in life that he himself was living.

The bag was quite heavy for a little girl to carry, although not as heavy as it looked, being made of Gore-tex disguised to appear like old leather and canvas. She held it up to him, grinning a big gap-toothed grin. He took it and turned away. He couldn’t speak to her or even look at her for long. For all that she was oliveskinned and dark-eyed and her hair was shiny black, she reminded him too much of Tessa.

He made his way off the bridge. Leaving the broad modern thoroughfare behind him, he plunged at once into the matted tangle of ancient streets and alleyways on the south side of the Golden Horn.

Despite the disorientation and confusion he was feeling, Stanton could not help but be intoxicated by the magic of his situation. He was in Old Stamboul, fabled city on a hill. Ancient soul of Turkey. The gateway to the Orient where East met West and for twenty-six centuries the heartbeat of history had been heard in every wild cry and whispered intrigue. Where enchanting music played all down the ages as swords clashed and cannons roared and poets told their tales of love and death. Armies had come and armies had gone. First Christian, then Muslim, then back, and back again, but Stamboul had remained. Church had given way to mosque and mosque had given way to church then back to mosque. And through it all, the people of Stamboul had gone about their business just as they were doing now. Unaware of the fact that there had now arrived among them the strangest traveller in all the city’s long history.

Stanton gave himself over to the romance of the moment. Kicking his way through the stinking piled-up rubbish. Tripping on erratic, uneven paving stones laid down when Suleiman the Magnificent was Sultan. Avoiding the mass of dogs that snarled and whimpered as they scavenged for food at the little bread and fruit stalls lining the tiny streets. He was lost almost at once within a labyrinthine warren of alleys and passages. Dark, shadowy flights of steps disappeared into tiny cracks between sagging buildings, up towards half-hidden doorways or down into stinking, dripping cellars. And sometimes, enchantingly, into fragrant sunken gardens. How Cassie would have loved to glimpse into those gardens.

Quite suddenly Stanton found that he couldn’t recall her face.

He stopped dead in his tracks and was roundly cursed for it by a fierce bearded man in a keffiyeh who was driving two skinny, bleating goats with a stick. Stanton stood stock still, ignoring the man and his animals as he struggled to bring to mind the most precious memory he possessed.

It was the panic. He knew that. The sudden fear that she was fading, like some figure in a photograph in a time-travel movie. He struggled with his confusion, desperate to bring her face to mind but just making matters worse, like trying to remember a familiar word but chasing it further away by trying to retrieve it. He forced his brain to place her in a familiar situation. There she was! He’d found her. Picnicking on Primrose Hill when the children were tiny. Smiling up at his camera phone.

Bang!

‘
Çekil yolumdan!
’

The alleyway was crowded and another passer-by in a hurry had cannoned into him, a big man in a bright blue turban, a flowing white tunic and loose pyjama-y trousers. A man with two pistols and a knife stuck in his belt. Stanton mumbled an apology and moved on.

One corner, then another. A darkened passage then a burst of light and a tinkling fountain in a walled square. Horse dung on his nostrils then delicate perfume. Tobacco, hashish, oranges, fried meat, rose water and dog piss. There were so many dogs.

He heard shouts and clattering and the squeal of metal on stone.

Just in time Stanton jumped to avoid a sweating carthorse as it skidded down the street in front of him. Stamboul was a city on a hill and the gradients of some of the alleyways were almost precipices. The foam-mouthed beast was struggling to restrain the heavily laden cart which theoretically it was pulling but in practice now threatened to push it down the steep hill. The drover cursed Stanton and pulled on the horse’s reins. The man knew a
feringi
when he saw one, an obvious foreigner in his Norfolk jacket and moleskin britches. A man out of place and out of time.

Stanton felt exposed. Eyes peered out at him from deep within dark and barred recesses. Others flicked a glance through niqabs. A young soldier strode past, chest out, eyes front, but he too stole a glance at the foreign stranger. It felt to Stanton as if those eyes could see through him and knew his secret.

He needed to pull himself together. He’d already been nearly killed twice that morning, first by a car and just then by a horse. He might even have been killed by the man with the pistols in his belt. Life was clearly cheap in the old city and offence, once taken, was mortal.

He had to concentrate. Whatever his personal sorrows might be, he had a mission to accomplish and one he truly believed in. Cassie and the children were gone, evaporated like the morning mist on the Bosphorus, along with the century in which they’d lived. He couldn’t save them but it was in his power to save
millions
of others. Young men who would very shortly be choking on mustard gas, hanging limp on barbed wire and vaporized by shells. Unless he changed their fate.

But to do that he needed to keep his head.

He decided he would drink some strong Turkish coffee, and found a cafe on a tiny square in the shadow of a mosque. Everything in Stamboul was in the shadow of a mosque. Or else jammed up against some decayed and rotting palace which in its days of glory had housed a prince or potentate with his eunuchs and his harem. Nowhere else on earth, Stanton thought, could current decay have lived so entirely within the shell of past glory.

It reminded him of London in 2024.

The little cafe had just two small tables and a counter but it was scrupulously clean and well ordered. There was a splendid hookah pipe on display in the window and neat little rows of pink and green sweetmeats lined up in a glass cabinet on the counter. Each table had a well-brushed, tasselled velvet cloth on it, a clean ashtray and a small bowl of salted almonds. Such calm and order amid the seemingly random chaos outside allowed Stanton his first moment of reflection since the Crossley 20/25 had thundered on to the Galata Bridge.

He was shown to a seat and brought coffee and bottled water. Whatever suspicion of
feringi
he had felt out in the street was not evident in the cafe. Business was always business, whatever age or town you were in.

Speaking in Turkish, the cafe owner pointed at the cakes and pastries. Stanton made an expansive gesture as if to say that he was happy to be served as the proprietor wished.

He was brought some marzipan and a kind of semolina doughnut in a sticky syrup, the first food he had eaten since dinner the evening before, a hundred and eleven years ago. It was a strange sort of breakfast but he was grateful for it. He laid a ten-lira note on the table and indicated that he didn’t need change. The man smiled and returned to his coffee, newspaper and cigarette.

Prayers were being called in the mosque outside. Stanton could see the devout beginning to assemble in the little square outside the window, beyond the hookah pipe. Reaching into his pocket he pulled out his wallet. Slimmer now than he was used to, no plethora of plastic cards, no photo ID. Just some post-Edwardian Turkish currency.

And two printouts.

Letters which better than anything else could remind him of his duty and focus his resolve.

Cassie’s last two emails.

The one asking for a divorce.

And then the final one. The one that had offered a glimmer of hope. The one she had written in reply to his pleas and his promises. The one he’d been rushing home to answer face to face.

If you can just change a little.

No, not even change. Just be yourself again. The man I married.

The father of our kids.

That man was every bit as passionate as you are. But not as angry.

Every bit as tough. But not as hard.

Every bit as cool. But not as cold.

Stanton swallowed his coffee and held out his cup for a refill.

He’d wanted so much to prove to her that he could be that man again. But four drugged-up hooligans had denied him the chance. Cassie had died thinking him unredeemed. Tess and Bill had died thinking that Mummy was leaving Daddy.

Because Daddy was a stupid selfish bastard who didn’t deserve their love.

I never minded being married to a soldier. Because I knew you believed in what you were risking your life for. What you were taking lives for.

I never minded being married to an idiot whose idea of inspiring kids was to see how close he could get to death without actually dying.