Time and Time Again (7 page)

Even when we had kids of our own and you still kept on doing what you did. Even though you weren’t just risking leaving me without a husband but our children without a father, I still didn’t mind.

Because that was the man I signed up for.

Just like you knew you married a girl who’d rather lie in bed and watch daytime TV than go hiking up a mountain in a storm.

A girl who didn’t want to get her scuba ticket. Or go paragliding (or watch you doing it either).

We both knew who we were getting and we were fine with it.

But who’s this new guy, Hugh?

I don’t know him? Do you?

Really, Hugh? Seriously?

A security guard? A hired gun? A glorified minder?

You leave me and Tess and Bill at home to go off and be some billionaire’s bitch? Would you really take a bullet for those people, Hugh?

Is that how little we mean to you?

She was right. It was crazy. Why had he done it?

Bitterness? Boredom? Pride?

All three. But pride was the big one of course. Stupid male pride. After they kicked him out of the army and the webcast thing went sour, he just hadn’t known what to do with himself. Hanging around the house, fighting with Cassie, shouting at the kids. He’d felt … unmanned.

And there was the money. He’d never cared about it before and nor had Cassie. They’d always had enough, always got by. But then
Guts Versus Guts
made them briefly wealthy, or so it had seemed. Wealthy enough to make the down payment on a proper family house in a really nice area. There was a second baby on the way, they’d needed more room and he’d just
done
it. Without even telling her. She was angry at first, of course, but he knew she’d love it. That house had been the first real home they’d ever had. Before that it had been just short rentals and army housing.

He couldn’t just let it go.

He couldn’t tell Cassie and the kids that they had to pack their bags because he could no longer meet the payments on the mortgage. He was too … proud.

So we can’t pay the mortgage! We’ll move. We’ll get something cheaper, or rent, or live in a tent! You’re good at that. If you’re bored, read a book. If you need a job, go and stack shelves at a supermarket! Wash cars if you love them so much. Sell hamburgers. Do you think we’d care? That Dad isn’t a hero any more? Do you think you’re a hero now? Maybe you imagined yourself rescuing terrified princesses from sex traders or saving stolen school kids from crazed warlords. You always were an overgrown boy scout and we loved you for it. But the truth is you’re just a bodyguard to the most selfish people on earth.

She’d been right of course. When Stanton had been approached by an old SAS comrade to join an international ‘security’ company, there’d been a lot of righteous talk about protecting the vulnerable from predators. Doing the tough jobs that the authorities couldn’t or wouldn’t do. Fighting pirates, guarding crusading education ministers from fundamentalist assault.

But when Cassie’s emails had reached him he’d been leaning on the rail of a superyacht in the Aegean. Suit, dark glasses, earpiece. For all his big pay cheque, he was just another goon, riding shotgun for the Boss man. Working for the new master race in their floating world. The twenty-first-century boat people, that evergrowing flotilla of billionaires and trillionaires who had taken to living at sea where they could be isolated and protected from the rapid social breakdown their own activities had played a large part in causing. Climate-change refugees in the truest sense of the word.

I was proud of you when you risked your life on peacekeeping missions, saving children who were just like your own.

I was proud of you when you risked your life making your videos to help inspire kids who weren’t as fortunate as ours.

But risking your life for media moguls? Oil tycoons? Real-estate parasites? So they can fiddle about on their yachts while the rest of the world burns?

Forget it!

Bill and Tess deserve a dad who cares more about them than about dealing with his own stupid demons.

If ever you bump into the guy you used to be, get him to give us a call.

That last line had been the glimmer of hope. He hadn’t called. He’d run. Resigned his job that minute. Gone ashore and headed for the nearest airport. He was going straight to London. To get down on his knees and promise to be the man Cassie wanted him to be. The father Tess and Bill needed.

But he never got the chance to make those promises, let alone keep them. They never even knew he was coming home …

Stanton drained his second coffee and poured himself a glass of water.

Then he heard a voice. An English voice.

‘
Garçon!
Coffee and cognac, and be quick about it!’

His whole being froze.

He knew that voice.

THE MORNING RAIN
and hail had long since turned again to snow as Stanton and McCluskey made their way across the Cam towards King’s College chapel, which rose up before them through the icy mist cloaked in white.

‘Did you ever
see
anything so fine?’ McCluskey remarked as they paused for a moment on the King’s Bridge. ‘Doesn’t it lift your soul just a little?’

‘Sorry,’ Stanton replied. ‘Just makes me think how much Cassie would have loved it.’

‘Ah yes.’ McCluskey sighed. ‘Such is the terrible irony of bereavement, turning every familiar joy to misery. Each smile a twisting knife. Each thing of beauty an added burden of pain.’

‘Thanks.’

The service was indeed agonizingly beautiful. Like a second funeral. The many flickering candles. The swelling voices of the choir. The readings in the mighty poetry of the King James Bible, strangely moving even to a non-believer. The unbearable majesty of a ritual that had remained almost unchanged for three hundred Christmas Eves.

After the service McCluskey didn’t take Stanton straight to the lodge at Trinity as he had expected but instead she put her arm in his and led him through the freezing wind across the quad to the Great Hall. Stanton noticed that quite a number of other members of the King’s congregation were heading in the same direction, all venerable College figures, stooped with age, holding their various forms of fringed and tasselled hats to their heads while their gowns billowed in a gale that threatened to blow the frailer ones away.

Two porters were standing at the entrance to the Hall and others had taken up positions around the Great Court. They wore the traditional bowler hats (made somewhat ridiculous by the compulsory high-vis jackets) but something about their manner suggested to Stanton they weren’t porters at all. Too focused, too likely looking. Stanton had briefed enough security details in his time to know one when he saw one.

Inside the five-hundred-year-old building, however, the peace and serenity of the fusty old College remained. In fact, it felt to Stanton almost as if he was attending a second Christmas Service. A string quartet was playing seasonal music and there was the same atmosphere of whispered reverence. Lines of chairs had been set out before a little lecture platform like pews set before an altar. And once more there were many candles, although these seemed only to increase the gloom, failing entirely to illuminate the beams of the great ceiling, which lowered above them deep in the shadows.

When McCluskey, who had been bustling about with a clipboard, had satisfied herself that everyone was present she led Stanton to the place reserved for him in the centre of the first row in front of the podium. Then she mounted the little platform and turned to address the room.

‘Good evening, everyone, and a merry Christmas to you all,’ she boomed. ‘Each one of you knows the purpose of this gathering save for our newest and last Companion, Captain Hugh ‘Guts’ Stanton, late of the Special Air Service Regiment and renowned webcast celebrity. Captain, your fellow Chronations bid you most welcome.’ There was polite applause, which Stanton did not acknowledge. He did not feel remotely that he had joined any order or that he was a companion to any of these people. ‘Captain Stanton has been very patient with me,’ McCluskey went on. ‘I have told him scarcely half the story, so far being scarcely qualified to do so. I now call upon Amit Sengupta, Lucian Professor of Mathematics here at Cambridge and Newton’s direct successor, to explain the matter further.’

Stanton knew of the corpulent Anglo-Indian academic who now rose from his chair and took the stage. Everybody in Britain knew Sengupta because besides being an eminent physicist he was also, as so many eminent physicists are, an appalling media tart. A man who appeared regularly on news and documentary shows commenting on any matters even remotely related to science and the cosmos. He was always introduced in the most breathless and epic terms as ‘the man who has looked into the eye of God’ or ‘the man who has travelled in his mind to the edge of space and the beginning of time’. Sengupta himself, of course, always affected amused modesty at this sort of hyperbole, looking uncomfortable and claiming that he had in fact only journeyed back as far as fifteen seconds
after
the beginning of time and making it very clear that the first quarter minute of the life of the universe remained as much a mystery to him as it would to his driver or his cook. Professor Sengupta was also a hugely successful writer, having produced a work of ‘popular’ physics called
Time, Space and other Annoying Relatives
, which purported to explain relativity and quantum mechanics to ‘the man in the pub’ and of course didn’t. In scientific circles it was said of Sengupta’s book that it was easier to find a Higgs Boson particle without the assistance of a Hadron Collider than it was to find anyone who’d got past the third page.

The professor waddled up on to the stage like a seal taking possession of a rock. He wore a pinstripe suit beneath his gown and a yellow-spotted bow tie of the type favoured by professors who like to be thought of as a bit mad. On his head was his trademark Nehru hat, to which he had pinned a badge that said ‘Science Rocks’. Sengupta opened his briefcase and made a great show of arranging certain papers on a small table before taking a quite deliberately long, slow sip of water. Finally he began.

‘Newton’s great leap of the imagination,’ he said in his pedantic-sounding, sing-song voice, which was half Calcutta lecture theatre and half London gentlemen’s club, ‘was to understand,
hundreds
of years before Einstein, that time is
relative
.’ Here he paused for theatrical effect and also to dab rather primly at the water on his lips with the enormous, brightly coloured silk handkerchief he kept stuffed flamboyantly in the breast pocket of his suit. ‘Time is not
straight
or
linear
. It does not progress in a regular and ordered fashion, and the reason for this is because it is affected by
gravity
. Yes! Just as are motion and mass and light, and indeed all the properties of the physical universe. It is, of course, generally believed that Einstein first proposed the idea of universal relativity but we in this room and we
alone
now know that in fact the first man in the world to make this leap of thought was our own Sir Isaac Newton. And we know also that Newton leapt further and with surer foot than Einstein ever did. For just as Newton showed the world that gravity explained the circular and elliptical courses of the
planets
, he also understood that
time
moved in a similar manner, twisting and ever turning,
shadowing
the expansion of the universe, bound by the gravitational pull of every atom contained therein. To put it plainly, Newton saw that time was
coiled
, and just as an understanding of gravity allowed him to track and map the course of planetary motion, it also enabled him to track the movement of
time
. And so
predict its course
.’

Here Sengupta paused briefly for another sip of water. He knew he had a sensational story and clearly did not intend to rush it.

‘So what? I hear you asking yourselves,’ he continued. ‘Coiled or straight, time progresses and there is nothing we can do about it. Why in the blinking blazes was old Isaac getting his knickers in a twist? I will tell you why! Because gravitational pull is not
uniform
! Just as the planets deviate slightly from the perfect symmetry of their ancient courses, so it is with time. We must think of it not as a
perfect spiral
but more as a
disobliging Slinky
in which, once in a while, coils get crossed. Time will, on rare occasions, pass through the same set of dimensions
twice
. The coils of the Slinky touch only for a moment, within the most limited parameters, after which the spiral of time continues on its merry way. No harm done … But what, Newton asked himself in the tortured journeying of his fearful imaginings, if someone were
present
at that point in space–time when the coils of the Slinky touched? That person would exist at both the beginning and the end of a loop in time. And so now the spiral does
not
continue on its merry way. It turns
back
on itself. For simply by drawing breath, our intrepid time-
straddler
reboots the loop. All that had been in the past is now once more
yet to come
. History is unmade. The loop is
begun again
.’

Sengupta mopped his brow with his handkerchief and took yet another sip of water. The flickering of the candles cast a ghostly ripple across his face. The assembled Companions of Chronos leant forward on their walking sticks and Zimmer frames, hanging on the great physicist’s every word.

‘And Newton really
did his sums
,’ Sengupta continued. ‘It is scarcely possible to credit but this divine genius, working alone and without modern equipment, was able to tell us
when
and
where
time would next cross its own path. No wonder he went a bit loony. I think
I’d
be looking for secret codes in the Bible myself if I’d just written a map of time when everybody else was just starting to think about mapping Australia. Sir Isaac’s conclusion was most specific. He calculated that the next closed loop in the space–time continuum would be one hundred and eleven years long, and that the point at which the beginning and the end would cross would occur at midnight on the thirty-first of May 2025 and at a quarter
past
midnight in the very early morning of the first of June 1914. I’m sure all of you can see the reason for the fifteen-minute time lag.’