Frozen in Time (10 page)

Uncle Jerome nodded and smiled. ‘All in good time, Benedict! All in good time. There are ways and means. I agree, it’s most important to first acclimatize your great-aunt and uncle to the ways of 2009. Gently, of course. Most of your unlovely generation will shock them rigid. We can tell everyone that they are your cousins—come over from … um … South Africa?’

‘But we don’t know anything about South Africa!’ protested Freddy. ‘Come
on
, JJ! There’s got to be a better cover story than
that
!’

‘I know! I know!’ Rachel jumped up and down. ‘A commune! A hippy commune! They were brought up in the remote woods somewhere and—you know— taught at home. There are some children who are, you know! I read about it. They don’t know anything about
anything
—not even
EastEnders
!’

‘What’s
EastEnders
?’ asked Freddy.

‘It’s a soap,’ said Ben. ‘It’s a waste of time.’

‘Oh,’ said Polly. ‘Well, you should try Knight’s Castile. It’s jolly nice and keeps your complexion youthfully clear. And it’s got lovely paper wrapping which you can draw on.’

Ben and Rachel looked at each other. ‘Another time,’ said Rachel, and Ben nodded.

‘I say—can we get out of here now?’ said Freddy. ‘I’m dying to see what the twenty-first century looks like! Have you got a television set we can have a bit of a squint at?’

Ben sighed. ‘We have got one—but it’s broken. It blew up this morning.’

‘Well then—a wireless?’

‘A wire—? Oh—a radio? Yes. We’ve got two or three of those,’ said Ben.

Uncle Jerome gave a cry of joy. He had just found the notebooks which Ben had looked at before the door locked, earlier that day. ‘Shall we leave you to it for a bit, Uncle J?’ Ben offered. ‘Get some tea on for Freddy and Polly?’

Uncle Jerome was flipping through the notebook pages madly, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose and going ‘Aha! Aha … aha …’ He glanced up quickly at Ben and Freddy. ‘Yes … yes, of course. Get some decent food into them. They’ve not eaten for half a century. You can leave me here for a while.’ Ben grinned. He knew that ‘a while’, in Uncle Jerome’s case, might very well be days.
Literally
days. When he got
that
excited he was liable to forget to eat or sleep. They must remember to pop down with food for him.

‘You boys go on ahead,’ said Polly, as they went through the bunk bed room, ‘and take Bess out into the garden for a few minutes. Rachel and I will pack some clothes to bring.’

‘Righto,’ said Freddy and scooped the puppy out of Rachel’s arms. She pulled a face. She didn’t want to stay behind and pack.

Polly pulled two battered leather suitcases out from under one of the lower bunks and then went to the shelving on the far wall. There were drawers in the lower parts of the storage racks, filled with neatly folded shorts and blouses and dresses and jumpers, which Polly deftly gathered and pressed into the open cases. Rachel tried to help, but Polly shook her head at once. ‘No! You can’t put a jumper on top of a blouse! The heavier items are packed first … then the lighter items, such as blouses and petticoats, go on top. Or else they’ll get creased!’ She carefully placed the jumper under the lighter items of clothing. ‘You do Freddy’s. He won’t mind creases so much.’

‘Polly—we’re only going up the garden!’ said Rachel but Polly lifted her chin.

‘If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. I could do with some tissue paper, really, to roll up my frocks in … Didn’t your mother ever teach you to pack properly?’

Rachel had a vision of her mother, blonde and pretty, wildly flinging sparkly magic act outfits into a large trunk from across the other side of the room. Her method of packing was more like playing volley ball. The idea of her rolling anything up in tissue paper actually made Rachel laugh out loud. Polly looked a little offended, so Rachel coughed and answered: ‘Um … well, we don’t go away that much. Who taught you, then? Uncle J’s mother?’

‘Oh no, I learned all I need to know from
Girl
,’ said Polly, snapping shut the top of the little brown suitcase. ‘From the Mother Tells You How pages. They’re frightfully good. Only last week I made my own laundry bag from an old pyjama jacket. It hangs up in the wardrobe and is really rather good. At least Father thought so.’ At the mention of her father Polly fell silent and Rachel feared she might start crying again, but the girl just took a sharp breath, lifted her chin and stood up with her case. She gave Rachel a shrewd look. ‘It’s quite all right, you know. You needn’t worry that I’m going to start blubbing again. I’m really not that kind of girl. It’s just been a rather shocking day. I think I’ve got it out of my system now.’

Back in the house Ben and Freddy were looking for a working radio, Bess following them on unsteady legs, which hadn’t had its batteries nicked to power their hand-held computer games. Rachel and Polly went to the kitchen to sort out tea. While Rachel rifled through the freezer for ready meals, Polly attempted to lay the table.

‘Where are the place mats?’

‘Place mats? Um … you could try the second drawer down,’ suggested Rachel, hauling out some packets of Indian convenience meals.

Polly went to the second drawer down, opened it, reeled back a little in shock at the tangled mess she found there, and then gamely began to search through it for place mats. At length she retrieved some raffia weave things which someone had given their mother for Christmas some years ago. They were still in their box. It would simply never occur to Ben and Rachel’s mother to put place mats out on a table. Having cleared the rectangle of scrubbed pine of mugs and odds and ends of junk, Polly swiftly wiped it down with a wet cloth and laid out four mats. She guessed at the cutlery drawer—correctly—and began the next stage of sorting out knives and forks that didn’t have smears on them.

‘Sorry, Polly,’ said Rachel, glancing across at the girl’s dismayed expression. ‘The dishwasher ran out of salt and it always makes stuff go all smeary when that happens. It’s quite safe though.’

‘You have a dish washer?’ Polly raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘And she ran out of salt and just didn’t bother to go and get any more? Mrs M would have sacked her on the spot.’

‘Umm … not a dishwasher
person
.’ Rachel bit her lip and tried not to giggle. Polly really was very funny—and she had no idea of it. ‘A machine.’

‘Like a tabloid?’

‘No—no that’s a newspaper, remember?’

‘Oh yes.’ Polly turned back to the knives and forks, found a tea towel, and began to polish them furiously, while Rachel turned her attention to violently stabbing the plastic seals of the frozen ready meals with a kitchen knife. After a few seconds she became aware of Polly at her shoulder, watching. ‘Is that … food?’

‘Yes,’ said Rachel. ‘Chicken tikka massala and rice. You’ll like it. It’s great. We have it all the time.’

Polly looked doubtful. ‘It’s a TV dinner, isn’t it?’ she said, unexpectedly.

‘Um—yes. I suppose so.’

‘They have them in America, all the time.’

‘Well, they have them in England all the time now, as well.’ Rachel stacked the plastic punnets inside the microwave, calculated the time, entered it on the greasy control pad and then set the microwave going. It hummed tunefully and shone a little light out through the spatters on the glass door.

‘This really is a dirty kitchen,’ said Polly. Rachel couldn’t disagree. Housework wasn’t a big concern at Darkwood House, although they did clear up from time to time. Usually about once a week, when Uncle J couldn’t get past a pile of rubbish and got cross. Most of the time he didn’t really notice. Rachel did make a point of not preparing food on mucky surfaces—she had learnt that much from health and safety lessons at school—but as most food preparation only involved heating stuff up in plastic tubs, it really wasn’t much of an issue. Now she saw the kitchen through Polly’s eyes and she was embarrassed. The kitchen in the underground chamber was much better than this, and nobody had cleaned
that
for fifty-three years.

‘Come on,’ said Polly, briskly. ‘We’ve got twelve minutes before the microwaving is finished. Let’s set to!’ To Rachel’s amazement, Polly was rolling up her sleeves and then emptying out the washing-up bowl (a swamp-like mess with orange scum floating around the edges) and stacking dirty crockery up on the side and running the hot tap. ‘I’ll wash—you dry,’ she instructed, handing Rachel the tea towel. She briskly scrubbed the plastic bowl clean under the tap before filling it with hot soapy water. ‘Washing-up water should be just hot enough to sting,’ she said. ‘Any cooler and it won’t do the job. Now. Dirty cutlery— fill this jug, like so, and put it all in, handles up, to soak, while we get on with the rest. Always wash the least dirty things first—that way you make your hot water last longer. Do you have a long-handled washing-up mop?’

‘A long-handled
what
?’ gasped Rachel. ‘Look— you don’t have to worry about all this. We’ll just sling it in the dishwasher.’

‘Has it got any more salt?’ asked Polly, crisply.

‘No. Not yet.’

‘Then it won’t do. Come on. Start drying. And putting away. We’ve only got nine minutes now. We want everything on the table for when the boys come in, don’t we?’

‘Do we?’ Rachel asked, faintly, but Polly gave her a look which silenced any further protest. She got wiping.

When Ben and Freddy and Bess came in ten minutes later, with a radio but no batteries, Ben was astounded to see four hot meals laid out in bowls on place mats, forks to one side, dessert spoons along the top, clean tumblers of water and a small vase of hand-picked honeysuckle gracing the centre. Polly looked pleased and Rachel, as she put Ben’s dish on his place mat, looked as if she’d been abducted by an alien.

The food made Freddy and Polly cry. It was only a mildly spiced dish, but it had them reaching for their cotton handkerchiefs (neatly folded in their shorts pockets) almost immediately.

‘What do you think?’ grinned Ben. ‘Twenty-first century food all right then?’

‘Oh! It’s marvellous!’ spluttered Freddy, and loaded his fork again immediately. ‘I’ve never tasted anything like it!’

‘And there’s so
much
meat,’ said Polly. ‘This must cost half your housekeeping!’

‘Not really,’ said Ben, giving a morsel to Bess, who was under the table, to stop her nibbling on his socks. ‘Everyone eats chicken. Loads of it.’

Polly and Freddy exchanged awed glances. ‘We only get it on Sundays, a few times a year,’ said Freddy.

‘Elbows off,’ said Polly, and Ben and Rachel did as they were told—and sat up straight as well.

Polly sighed. ‘Father loves roast chicken. If only we knew what had happened to Father,’ she said, scooping up the last of her food. ‘If only there was some way to be there, on that last day, and see what
really
happened. I can’t bear to think we won’t find out. It would be just too awful.’

Freddy suddenly put down his fork with a clatter and stared at Polly. She raised her eyebrows at him and said: ‘What?’

‘You said …’ He gulped and blinked. ‘You said … if only there was some way to see what happened … well … what if there was? Polly! What if there
was
?’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said, putting her own fork down and gulping some water from the glass tumblers she had polished clean a few minutes earlier.

‘Polly! Have you forgotten the Ampex?’

She froze and then put her hand to her mouth. ‘The
Ampex
!’ she whispered. ‘Do you think it could … did he? I mean, could it be …?’

‘What
are
you two on about?’ demanded Ben and Freddy turned to him and grabbed his arm, his dark blue eyes gleaming with excitement.

‘Ben, old chum,’ he said. ‘I’m going to take you back in time!’

The man in the grey trench coat was surprised to see someone else come to the graveside. As the priest muttered something in Latin, anxious to be off to his lunch on this cold winter’s day, there was a crunch of frosted grass and another man arrived, wearing dark glasses and an unreadable expression. The only other mourner was a woman who had been Richard Tarrant’s cleaner in the last few weeks of his life. She gathered her blue nylon coat around her, shivered, and then stepped forward to throw a handful of dirt onto the coffin before smiling at the priest and walking away.