Teena Thyme (2 page)

There used to be a railway bridge, too, back in the days when I was a little girl, but they scrapped that, along with the railway proper, sometime back in the late sixties, if my memory serves me right (which it often doesn't). Apparently they now have a sort of railway there again, but as I tend to spend most of my time not just in somewhat more interesting places, but in more interesting times, I really couldn't give a flying fuck, if you'll pardon the unladylike expression.

Actually, although my present-day friends might refer to me as a bit of a tomboy (what a quaint expression that is!) I do know how to be a real lady - and why not? After all, to date I've been a lady in, let's see now, a total of nineteen different centuries and girls, I tell you this now, you don't know how lucky you are to have been put on this earth
after
the demise of corsets, not to mention witchcraft trials, bashing your washing on rocks by river banks and Attila the Hun.

No, belay that, as Captain Hornblower was wont to say. Attila wasn't that bad a guy and if his mother had really understood him then history might have read a whole lot different today. But what an
artiste
with a whip!

There you go, I'm off the track again - but then so was that Hayling Island railway engine for several years! - and you really don't want to listen to all this stuff without I take you right back to the beginning, do you? So, back to the beginning we shall go; back to the beginning of my adventures, anyway - after all, who wants to go back to the
real
beginning, whenever that was? Attila and his whip I could handle, but a few thousand bloody great dinosaurs, or even a few hundred sweaty cavemen, well that's a different story.

But first...

(Oh rats, I didn't explain, did I? The reason I look nearly twenty years younger than I really am, that is. Well, it's quite simple: whenever I spend time in a different era, that time doesn't seem to count towards the aging process and when I return to the present, even if I've been away for months, not an extra wrinkle is to be seen.

Actually, you're right, that's not really simple at all, but if you think I'm going to try to explain that further, you've got another think coming. I mean, do you think I understand it? Don't be silly. Girls aren't supposed to be any good at that sort of thing, are they? Ask good old Albert, he'll tell you. It's got something to do with relativity, he reckons.

Oh sorry, I forgot, you can't ask him, can you? He's been dead for years in this time zone).

1. Fortune
Favours

I suppose I ought to begin by telling you a bit more about myself. Don't worry, there's plenty of juicy stuff still to come; sex and drugs and rock and roll - apart from the drugs, that is - but I did say I'd start at the beginning and it will help you understand a bit about me and how everything that's happened to me over the past quarter of a century and more has come about, so be patient.

You already know my name and the fact that I was born in December, 1956, which momentous event actually took place a few miles from the house where I grew up, which was - and still is - in an area known as Sandy Point, on Hayling Island. It was quite a nice area then, before the developers got busy sticking little shoebox houses onto every bit of land they could find, but it was nothing really remarkable and though some people might have considered the area to be 'posh', we certainly weren't especially well off.

Dad worked as an engineer for the sewage people; that didn't mean he spent his days up to his neck in muck and pellets - his job was to tell less fortunate men where and when to hit things with hammers, what size hammer to use and, when all else failed, to get out the oxyacetylene stuff. He earned quite good money but, like I said, nothing exceptional, so mum also worked, albeit part-time, teaching in the local infants school.

I came along quite late in both their lives. Mum was forty-two, dad forty-seven, and I suppose I was actually a bit of a surprise, in that they'd given up the idea that they could ever have a family some two or three years before. So when I arrived, precisely one week before Christmas, cute and blonde and full of wind as most babies are and, apparently, not resembling Winston Churchill at all, I was a sort of gift the way they saw it, and they had this idea that I should be named to reflect the season.

Mum thought of Noele. Dad fixed on Christina (probably spelt Christeena in his way of things). My granny, Felicity, who was by then somewhere in her seventies, didn't agree with either of them, but then that was nothing unusual, so I later learned. They considered Mary (for obvious reasons), Josephina (oh, please no!) and even Gabriella. Quite how they ended up with what they did, no one was ever able to explain lucidly and then, as I've already said, dad went and misspelled it anyway, so ever since I've been Teena, with the Felicity bit tagged in there to appease a basically unappeasable granny.

I grew up and my hair stayed blonde. I did okay at school, was good at English and history, rubbish at needlework and played netball and hockey, eventually representing the county in the former, where my unusual height - I'm five feet eleven and a bit (in this time zone, anyway) - more than compensated for any lack of skill I might have suffered and, in any case, I
was
quite good.

Our full name was Spigwell-Thyme, as I've already mentioned, and we still used the full moniker then, though none of us really knew anything much about our family tree. Dad's dad had been killed in a bombing raid at the beginning of the war and another German bomb had put paid to most of the local records soon after, but in any case, we weren't too fussed about our lineage, so we didn't have a clue about any of the things our ancestors were responsible for.

It therefore came as a bit of a surprise to me, to say the least, when, upon reaching my eighteenth birthday late in nineteen seventy-four, I received a letter from a firm of solicitors based in nearby Chichester, asking me to present myself at their offices at my earliest convenience, together with proof of who I was, where I would learn something to my advantage.

Oh-ho! The old mercenary antennae started to twitch immediately. I knew that phrase, 'something to your advantage', from books and films and it meant someone had left me something. It wasn't Granny Fliss, because she was still very much alive and kicking, even though she was by now well into her nineties, and it wasn't anyone from mum's side of the family, as she had frequently told me that she had been one of eight kids, born in the East End of London, where they had been 'poor as church mice' and where, in 1944, when the Blitz was supposed to have been finished, a lone German bomber crashed into the family home, killing all within.

Mum escaped because she was off working as a Land Girl, my uncle Jim was away in the navy, chasing Japanese aircraft carriers somewhere in the Pacific and my uncle Tom was giving Jerry hell in Italy, so they were the only surviving family members. Sadly, Tom then died just as his unit got off the beach on D-Day and Jim, who decided to stay in the navy after the war, died of something he caught off a Japanese lady of easy virtue, sometime in 1949, so I never knew either of them.

Hands trembling with excitement, I dialled the number on the elegantly headed note paper and asked for Mr Swann, he of
Swann, Upping and Ditchford
, the partner who had signed the letter.

'I'm sorry, madame,' the arch female voice on the other end replied, in a tone that had about as much regret as I've got testicles, 'but Mr George Swann is away for the Christmas and Mr Graham Swann is off with the flu at the moment. Which one was it you needed to speak to?'

Did it matter which one, I asked myself? If neither of them was there, what bloody difference did it make anyway? However, I held my impatience and my temper in check and explained the purpose of my call.

'Oh, that will be Mr George,' the woman said. 'Would you like me to make you an appointment?' I heard a rustling of paper in the background, accompanied by a slightly off-key, hummed rendition of Peter Sarsted's
Where Do You Go To My Lovely
. I drummed my fingers - not in time - on the telephone table in our hallway.

'January the fifth, three-thirty?' It was meant to sound like a question, but she said it in a way that left me in no doubt that it was almost a take-it-or-leave-it thing. Leave it and the next offer would probably be somewhere in February.

I took it.

Angelina twisted against her bondage, in a vain attempt to ease the growing strain on her arms, but there was no real hope of relief, for the maids had stretched her tall in order to shackle her wrists and whoever had determined the lengths of the cords which held the leather straps had apparently intended that she should be forced onto tiptoe, so that her feet arched even more than the delicate shoes required.

Tears trickling down her exquisitely powdered cheeks, she tossed her head in anger and frustration, the now tangled mane of blonde curls sweeping about her bare shoulders with a mocking whisper. She groaned, biting her lip savagely, and then the groan turned to a whimper of fear as she heard the scuttling sounds from somewhere behind her in the shadows. She threw back her head and screamed with all her might.

'Gregory! Help! Gregory!' The sound echoed around the blank stone walls and out through the open door of the corridor beyond, but as her screams died away there came no answering shout, no sound of booted feet upon the paved floor beyond.

'Infamy!' she muttered between clenched teeth. 'Oh, such cruel infamy, but you shall pay for this, Sir Gregory Hacklebury, or my name is not Angelina Thyme!'

Chichester in January. Much the same as it is all the rest of the year round, though there are fewer tourists, the culture vultures who descend on cathedrals and Roman ruins and suchlike. Also, it tends to be colder in January, though not always.

I'd taken the bus up to Havant, on the mainland, and then the train, passing through the small stations that were mostly little more than halt stops, and then walked my way up to North Street, carefully avoiding the puddles where the paving stones had sunk somewhat, though my new platform-soled boots would have kept my feet at least two inches above the waterline. They also drew a few looks from the more conservative shoppers who were on the streets that morning.

Swann, Upping and Ditchford
. Obviously Mr Graham Swann hadn't yet served his half century apprenticeship that would one day entitle him to be part of a
Swann, Swann, Upping and Ditchford
, or maybe they were just saving money on gold leaf and sign writing, working on the premise that Mr George would die (solicitors never retire) and therefore there would only be one Swann to worry about anyway.

Their offices were situated in a very old converted house, tucked away in one of the myriad lanes that form a maze for the unwary who stray from the four main, compass-point named streets that form the centre of Chichester. Former front parlour, small desk, vapid looking girl behind a desk marked
Reception
. I got rather a bland one - reception, that is - but then I suspect she greeted all prospective clients in much the same disinterested fashion.

Take a seat.

Wait.

Upstairs. Second door on the left.

The corpse of Mr George Swann. No, the corpse moved.

Mr George Swann rose from behind his desk, like Dracula arising from his coffin. He smiled. No fangs, at least. He held out a white and skeletal hand. I shook it and it felt cold, like ice.

'Miss Spigwell-Thyme?' he greeted me. Well, his voice was warm, at least. 'Do please take a seat.' He came around the desk and ushered me into an ancient, leather-backed chair, the leather cracked and worn, the seat dented by God knows how many generations of backsides.

I passed over my birth certificate, the passport I'd sent off for but never used when a sudden bout of flu put paid to my intended holiday in Spain the previous summer. I handed him the envelope with my school reports in, my parents' wedding certificate and two gas bills addressed to my dad at the house at Sandy Point. Mr George Swann extracted a pair of half moon glasses from his jacket pocket, perched them on his gothic nose and peered.

And peered some more. He was pretty thorough with his peering, was Mr George Swann, and I found myself wondering, somewhat irreverently, whether he ought to have been a Peer of the Realm. Well, you think funny things when you're just sitting there, looking and feeling like a stuffed daisy.

'Well, everything seems to be in order, Miss Spigwell-Thyme.'

'Please,' I said, 'do call me Teena.'

'With two "e's",' he said, smiling at me over the top of my latest school report. So, he was human after all. I nodded.

'My dad,' I said, shrugging, by way of explanation.

'Ah,' he said, and I could see he understood completely. He lowered my report and placed it back with the rest of my identification kit, which he then pushed gently back across the desk towards me. He sat back, twined his long fingers together and smiled at me.

'I expect you're impatient to learn the reason for my asking you to come here?' he began. Stupid question. I smiled back and nodded. He reached down, opened a drawer and took out a manila folder that was not just bulky, but untidily stuffed. He laid it on the leather top between us and I peered at the upside-down writing on the cover, but it was a waste of time. The handwriting was so scrawly I'd have struggled to decipher it even the right way up.