Tyme's End (14 page)

Someone had been in here just a moment ago.

I didn't know how I knew. There was nothing moving – no dust swirling or cobweb drifting to the floor, no footprints, not even the tiny noise of the floorboards settling – but I
knew
. Someone had been there. I'd only just missed him. If I'd been a second quicker . . .

But there was only one door: the one I'd come in through.

And no one lived here. There was no one here.

I stood still, frozen to the spot. I could smell fresh air, dry grass and flowers, and still that bitter trace of tobacco smoke. It should have smelt musty, a room that had been closed up for years, but it didn't. The silence settled like dust.

There was the sound of someone tapping on the window.

I jumped violently and stumbled backwards. My back smacked into something hard, and something dropped palely over my eyes, wrapping itself round me. I panicked, fighting to get free, until I was panting and sweating. Oh, God, there was someone trying to get in, someone – I stood still, shaking, with a dust sheet still draped over me like a toga. I clung on to the bookshelf behind me and stared at the window.

The casement was slightly open. There were tendrils of ivy moving in the breeze, beating gently against the glass. That was what had made the noise.

I started to laugh. My voice hit a high note and stuck there. I pulled the dust sheet off my shoulder and bundled it up, still shaking with laughter. The tension went out of my body and I sagged over one of the hooded chairs, limp with relief and embarrassment.
Honestly, Olly
. An empty house with an open window could reduce me to hysterics. I coughed and shook my head, dragging the air into my lungs. Of course there was no one here.

When I stood up again it was as if the room was bigger than before, as if the walls had all taken a step backwards. The breeze from the open window played on the back of my neck and in my hair. I could smell flowers.

I shrugged my rucksack off and leant it against the nearest chair. The huddled, bulky shapes underneath the sheets seemed to inhale slowly, like sleeping animals. I felt floppy and hot, holiday-ish, half tired, half excited. I didn't know what I was doing here, but it felt . . . right.

There were more windows in the opposite wall, and I went over absently and opened them, pushing against the friction of rust and damp-swollen wood. More outside smells flooded in, and the warm air billowed round me. The loose corners of the dust sheets fluttered and moved, as if the furniture underneath was waking up. I turned my back to the windows and looked at my shadow falling across the dusty, bright floorboards. I felt as if I was waiting for someone; as if the owner of the house had just popped out for a second to get something. Without really thinking about it, I wandered back to the bookcase and stared at the spines of the books. There was a thin veneer of dust, but the sheet had kept the worst of it off and the titles stared back at me. There were gold-lettered leather books – Dickens, two volumes of
Middlemarch
, a lot of Shakespeare – but there were mouldy-looking canvas hardbacks too, that looked as if they'd been read over and over. The
Odyssey
,
Le Morte d'Arthur
,
Treasure Island
. . . I slid
Le Morte d'Arthur
out and held it gently in my hands. Then I let it fall open on the first page and brought it up to my face, smelling the old-book tobacco-and-dust fragrance.
Le Morte d'Arthur
was one of Granddad's favourites, and for a second, in spite of myself, I could hear his voice reading it aloud to me years ago, when I couldn't sleep. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, clearing my mind. It hurt to think about Granddad. If I didn't concentrate hard I'd be back in his study, kneeling over his shoebox of papers, reading the letters from my dad over and over again.

I thought,
Stop it
.
You're here, now
.
You're miles away from all that
. I took a deep breath, tasting the pollen in the air. This wasn't London, this was another country. It was as if none of that had happened yet.

I glanced down at the flyleaf of the book in my hand before I put it back. There was a line of dark brown handwriting, thin and clear.

H. J. Martin, August 1923
.

The book missed the shelf and fell on the floor.

The noise was so loud that I stood frozen. What if someone heard? What if the owner was coming down the stairs at this very moment, to see who was in his house? What if –? Even though I knew the house was empty, I felt my whole body prickling.

But there was nothing. Nothing happened. No one came; the dust rippled round my feet and came to rest again. The book lay face down, its covers spread like wings.

I picked it up. It felt heavier in my hands than it had done, warmer, like something alive.

H. J. Martin, August 1923
.

I put it back on the shelf and slid the next one out.
Treasure Island
. This one was older, but sturdier too, covered in thick ash-coloured fabric that might have been another colour once. I flipped it open to the fly leaf.
Hugo JoHn MArtin. His Book. The Year of Anno Domini, 1899.

My stomach felt funny, and my knees. I reached out and leant on a dust sheet-covered chair. It seemed to rock gently, pressing itself into my palm and then pulling away. I thought,
I'm dehydrated
.
I need to sit down
.

But my body wouldn't obey me. I watched my hand – pale skinned, smudged with dust – reach for another book. The
Odyssey
. But this time the handwriting was different.

It was –

To Jack, from Oliver, Cambridge, 1936
.

I stared down at it. Oh, God. The familiar-unfamiliar shapes, the words that were taller, untidier,
younger
than they should have been but were still, unmistakably, Granddad's.
To Jack
. . .

I didn't understand. The house shifted around me, creaking almost silently.

Jack. Hugo John Martin. H. J. Martin.

This was his house. Had been his house. But –

I shut the book and held it to my chest, bending my head to breathe in the old-book smell. It was only a coincidence. H. J. Martin wasn't
relevant
. He didn't matter. I was here because of Dad and Granddad, and H. J. Martin was just someone from long ago, from the book that Dad had bought me. He was just someone Granddad had met, and disliked, and made me promise not to read about . . .

I lifted my head. I wasn't sure how I felt, except sick. But there was something . . . A coincidence. Yes. Maybe. But of all the places I could have run away to, I ended up
here
.

And the door was damp and swollen, and it had taken all my strength to get open. But it had closed behind me of its own accord.

I nearly panicked then. I nearly dropped the book, grabbed my rucksack and made a dash for the front door; and if it hadn't opened I'd have smashed a window, broken the door down – anything, just to get out. I'd have sprinted to the station and caught the next train back to London, and maybe I'd have got there in time to go to the party and get plastered on Granddad's absinthe. That's what I nearly did.

There was a cool gust of perfume from the open window, and somewhere, distantly, the faint bitter fragrance of a cigarette.

And it was as if Tyme's End said to me,
Don't go
.

I turned my head, as if I expected to see someone behind me. But I wasn't scared. I felt . . . curious, detached and safe, like I wasn't really there. None of this was to do with me. I was an observer, that's all.

I opened the book and looked again at Granddad's writing.
To Jack, from Oliver
. . . And that clear, emotionless part of me noted coldly that Granddad must have lied about this as well. He'd said he hardly knew H. J. Martin, and that he'd disliked him. But he'd given him this book. And what about the letter in my rucksack, that he'd kept for years? And –

Why did Granddad have the key to Tyme's End? Why hadn't he given it back to whoever owned it these days? Granddad was conscientious about things like that, always orderly, methodical.

And somehow I knew then that it
wasn't
a coincidence that I was here. Not exactly. I knew that out of everywhere in the world, this house was the one place that Granddad had tried to keep me away from. And that filled me with a kind of burning gladness, like acid. It served him right for all those lies, those betrayals, those days when he must have watched me praying that Dad would answer my letters, when all the time he knew about that little cache of envelopes.

Stay,
Tyme's End whispered.
You're welcome
.

I slotted the
Odyssey
on to the bookshelf. My hand was steady, and for a moment I looked at it and thought it was someone else's.

Then I bent down and swept the sheets away from the furniture, pulling armful after armful of pale cotton off chairs and little tables and a gramophone, loitering in the shadows, that I didn't notice until the ivy tapped on the window again, drawing my attention to that corner of the room. And then I was coughing on the dust and there was a pile of sheets at my feet like laundry, and the room was
awake
.

Something was strange, though. I stared round at the room, trying to put my finger on it. It looked lived-in, as if someone had just walked out and never come back, like a photo. And there was something odd about that.

I took a step backwards into a table and heard it rock, and a clink as the stopper rattled in a decanter. I looked round, and then I knew what was bothering me.

There was a dark stain round the middle of the decanter, as if there'd still been something in it when the dustsheets were thrown over it. And there were other things on the tables – a photo in a frame, a box of cigarettes, the paper sleeve for a gramophone record. There was even a folded newspaper on the sofa, yellowed and densely printed. No one had even bothered to pack any of it away before they covered everything up. That was odd. Wasn't it?

As if someone had done it as quickly as possible. As if they hadn't cared about any of it, as if all they'd wanted was to leave. Or as if they'd been told to do it, but whoever had told them to do it didn't care, didn't want to think about it, never wanted to come here again.

I leant over and picked up the newspaper. It ripped as I pulled it, and the last page stayed stuck to the leather of the sofa. I didn't unfold the rest in case it fell apart in my hands. A phrase in the dense print caught my eye:
Italy's disregard of her obligations under the Covenant of the League of Nations
. . . The date was 15 June, 1936.

I thought,
No one's been here since 1936
. But it wasn't true. It couldn't be true. It felt as if someone had only just left. And, anyway, it wouldn't happen. Why would someone cover everything up and leave it for sixty years? A house like this would be worth – well, millions, surely? No one would just leave it to rot.

But they had. I looked down again at the newspaper.
AGGRESSION AND ECONOMICS. THE WARPATH IN CHINA
. . .

1936. Slowly, gently, I laid the paper back on the sofa, lining it up so that it covered the page that was still clinging to the leather. I stood back and looked round the room, taking it in. I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was about to walk in and pick up the conversation where he left off, sixty years ago. H. J. Martin. Jack.

And out of a deep, forgotten part of my mind, something surfaced from the biography Dad had bought me. It was strange how clearly I could see it, the one page I'd managed to get through, that I hadn't looked at since.
On June 21st 1936, at half past five in the morning, a motorcycle and its rider hurtled along the long, straight road that still runs from Falconhurst in East Sussex north-east towards Tunbridge Wells
. . . The house must have been closed up immediately after his death and never lived in again. Whoever owned it never came here; and Granddad kept the key . . .

I walked back to the door and slipped through it quietly. I wasn't scared, but all the same I trod carefully as I walked past the cowled chairs in the entrance hall. There was another door on my right and I opened it. There were more dust sheets in here, but I could see the shape of a chair and bookshelves and a lumpy desk. I tugged gently on the sheet, and the desk was exactly as someone must have left it: a notebook, a half-addressed envelope, one of those brass-and-green-lampshade lamps. A fountain pen rolled on to the floor, and an open bottle of ink tilted and toppled as the sheet caught it. I swore and reached out for it, but it was empty. There was a photo in a silver frame: two men, grinning, in a stone archway. The older one had a face that I thought I'd seen somewhere before: he had to be Martin. He had his arm around the other man, who –