Tyme's End (16 page)

It was a photo – black-and-white, of course – and the caption said it had been taken in 1902, but the house looked the same as it did now. Then there were a couple of pictures of Martin's parents, one of him as a child, two whole pages of desert scenery, another page of other faces I didn't know. I turned the page again, and I saw the same photo that I'd seen in Martin's study: him and Granddad, laughing.
HJM and Oliver Gardner, May 1936.
It was strange, seeing my own name there, even though I was used to it. I slid my finger over the glossy paper. So Granddad was important enough to be in the biography. On impulse, I flipped to the index.

I glanced down, running my finger over the entries.
Fortescue
. . .
Fraser, James, 32-33; suicide note, 408
. . .
Frobisher
. . .

He was there.

Gardner, Oliver, 393-5, 402; and HJM's will, 405-7; Tyme's End, 409.

Something made me pause then – a flash of unease or guilt or . . . It felt like spying. And I could remember my thirteen-year-old self giving Granddad my word of honour that I wouldn't try to find out more about Martin.

But he'd forfeited any right to expect me to keep that promise when he took all Dad's letters and hid them, and I didn't pause for very long.

.

On the same evening Martin made the acquaintance of Oliver Gardner, then a student of Philip Langdon-Down at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. Gardner, now a popular historian of some standing, has been somewhat taciturn on the subject of his relationship with Martin (understandably, perhaps, given the amount of attention he received after Martin's will became public knowledge) and has commented that ‘while I was, as most people would have been, impressed by Martin's celebrity and charisma, it was – as far as I was concerned – an unemotional, social, superficial friendship.'(2) While this may be slightly disingenuous, it seems clear that Martin, uncharacteristically, was the more emotionally involved of the two; although, if we are to believe Gardner's statement, Martin seems – more characteristically – to have hidden his feelings extremely effectively. Apparently the extent of his attraction was only revealed, even to Gardner himself, after Martin's death.

However, that evening in the Lent Term of 1936, Gardner's reaction when he was introduced to Martin was no doubt flattering enough, and Langdon-Down noted in his diary that the evening had been a success. A few days later, after he returned to Tyme's End, Martin sent Gardner a copy of
The Owl of the Desert
, which he mentioned in a letter to Langdon-Down: ‘Sent your young protégé a 1st Ed of the Ood [i.e.
The Owl of the Desert
] . . . should really have sent him something better, but I didn't like him
that
much
. . .
'(3)

.

There was more, on the next page, but I was already flicking back to the index . . .
and HJM's will, 405-7
. . .

.

Given that Martin had no immediate family, there was no question of his will being contested; nevertheless, the mere facts were enough to raise the spectre of scandal in the popular press and among some of Martin's less charitable friends. For him to leave his entire fortune – including Tyme's End, the house that had been in his family for generations – to a young man, not yet twenty-one, whom he had known for only a few months, seemed at best extraordinarily capricious, generosity raised to rather histrionic level. At worst – as Edie Quincey pointed out, in rather more robust terms – it implied an unsavoury element to their relationship. Gardner himself denied all suggestions that Martin had been infatuated with him. When the will was made public, he commented: ‘Martin was notoriously unpredictable. I'm naturally very glad of the money, but I really can't say what his motives were for leaving it all to me.'
On the rare occasions in recent years when he has been questioned further on the subject, Gardner has shown the same reluctance to speculate, and has restricted himself to pointing out the current laws regarding libel
. . .

.

I stopped reading because I couldn't take it in. Part of me wanted to laugh, because – well, I could imagine Granddad answering impertinent questions with a courteous, point-by-point summary of the libel laws. But the rest of it was . . .

I looked down at the page again and the room seemed to shift and slide around me. Granddad had been left all Martin's money when he wasn't even twenty-one, only a few years older than me . . .
denied all suggestions that Martin had been infatuated with him
. . . I couldn't get hold of the idea; it kept slipping away, like a bead of mercury. The
spectre of scandal
? It couldn't be the same Oliver Gardner . . . But I knew it was.

So Granddad
owned
Tyme's End.

It made sense, now I thought about it. Of course. Why else would he have the key? But to have kept it all that time, for sixty years, not living here but not selling it either – why would he do that? He must have had to employ someone to do the repairs, to mow the lawn, to make sure no one broke in. He must have gone on paying the electricity bills, and the water, and . . . Why would he
bother
? It didn't make sense, any more than it made sense that someone had chucked the dust sheets over everything without even emptying out the sherry decanter first.

And there was something else. I could hear Granddad's voice, talking about Martin, the afternoon when he'd given me my book back:
He was . . . not a good man
. . . It was a strange thing to say about someone who'd left you his entire fortune.

Not that it mattered now. I shut the book. The breeze from the window ruffled my hair, smelling of warm grass, and I suddenly realised how thirsty I was. I thought,
So I
can
stay here
.
No one's coming to chuck me out
.

And –
I hated myself for thinking it, but I couldn't help it –
one day Tyme's End will be mine
. My heart gave a great joyous thump at the thought. I wanted it so much – even more than before, now I knew that one day it could be,
would
be mine. It was as if nothing mattered – not home or school or Adeel, not Dad, not Granddad – except being here. As if my whole life had been leading up to this moment.

Yes,
the house said to me.
Yes
.

.

I carried on reading and reading. I didn't remember eating lunch, but when I got up to go to the loo, hours later, there were crisp packets and banana skins scattered around, and the water bottle I'd opened was empty. The sun had dropped out of sight behind the trees, and there was only just enough light to read. It was hard to stand up, and I was aching from being in the same position all that time. I had to keep blinking to stop the world spinning.

But I still felt that elation, that wonderful sense of being in the right place, doing the right thing. My heartbeat was fluttering in the roof of my mouth. It was extraordinary, like the barrier between then and now had worn thin, almost to nothing.

I felt someone's eyes on the back of my neck. I swung round and for a fraction of a second I thought I saw a movement near the window, but it was only the ivy leaves fluttering in the breeze. Nothing. Just my brain playing tricks.

There was that smell of cigarette smoke again, and a gust of air ruffled the pages of the biography I'd left on its back on the floor. The pages turned slowly and then stopped, open on the photo of Granddad and H. J. Martin. I crouched down and looked at it again.
HJM and Oliver Gardner, May 1936.
It must have been taken in Cambridge, a few months after they met, almost exactly sixty years ago. I stared down at them, standing together, laughing at the camera, and I felt an odd twist of hatred in my stomach. How could Granddad have lied about that? How
could
he? Even after Martin had left him all his money – left him Tyme's End, for God's sake! – Granddad couldn't say what a great man he was, couldn't even be grateful.

I thought,
If I knew someone like Martin I'd
– But I didn't know what I'd do, except that I wouldn't let him leave, like Dad or Granddad. And I wouldn't let him get killed, stupidly, for no reason, on a flat, straight country road.

I stared so hard at the picture, narrowing my eyes, that I half believed it was me. I could almost remember the photo being taken, the smell of hot stone and the flash of the sun on the camera lens. It was what I wanted more than anything in the world: to be there, in Granddad's place.

And suddenly it was as if something clicked inside me.

I stood up and took a quick look round at the mess I'd made; then I picked up the rubbish and gathered my rucksack into my arms so that the room was back to how it had been before, except for the papers on the table. I went upstairs and put my stuff in one of the bedrooms – not the biggest, that was Martin's – and if I ignored the musty smell, I could pretend I was here by invitation and this was where I was supposed to be sleeping. The garden below was shadowy and dim, the last fingers of shade creeping past the house. I turned the light on and the room leapt into stage-set brightness. It was amazing that the bulb still worked, but maybe the caretaker had replaced it – if there was a caretaker.

I went from room to room, turning the lights on. I worked my way round the bedrooms until I was back where I'd started, standing outside Martin's room, my heart hammering. Then I knocked, feeling stupid, and slowly opened the door.

There was a movement by the window that made me jump, but it was only a curtain swaying in the draught.

I said, ‘I'm here. If you want me, I'm here.'

And then I laughed, because I was talking to myself, and switched the light on, and went back downstairs.

.

And the house felt different. There was a new scent in the air – a sweet, musty smell that I couldn't identify – and the floorboards creaked as if there was someone moving around upstairs. But it wasn't creepy. If anything, it felt friendly, comforting, like having someone I trusted around.

I went back into the drawing room and started to look through Granddad's papers, while the darkness got bluer and thicker and the reflections in the windows solidified. Most of the stuff wasn't important – letters from his mother, my great-grandmother, letters he'd written to her from his boarding school, a couple of brief notes from Martin –
Am in town, lunch today? Porters' lodge, 1 o'clock, J
– that I didn't know why he'd kept. I tossed them aside, picked up the exercise book, and opened it at random. There were loads of blank pages. I flipped to the beginning.

It was a diary; which was strange, because Granddad's other diaries were hardback notebooks that he kept in a glass-fronted cabinet in his study.

.

12th June, Cambridge. Last day of full term – lunch with Marian – wonderful as always, but couldn't concentrate for thinking about seeing J tomorrow. She was talking about the Crusades
. . .

15th June, Tyme's End. Got train down here, must bathe before dinner so more later, only trying to capture moment of seeing Tyme's End: gorgeous weather, house like a picture postcard, J coming out to meet me, smiling . . . Others here, Tony Morton-Smith, Edith Quincey, Dr Langdon-Down . . .

.

There was a noise overhead like a door opening, and I half rose to my feet, automatically, as if I didn't want to be found reading Granddad's diary when someone walked in on me. Then I caught myself, and sat down again. There was silence, as though I'd imagined the noise, but the diary had fallen to the floor, its covers spread out like wings. I picked it up and paused, looking down at it.

Part of it had been ripped out: neatly, methodically, each page torn away separately, close to the margin. I ran my thumb along the rough edges. Twenty pages? Fewer, possibly. I checked the dates. Every entry from 17th June to –

To 21st June.

The breeze brushed my face like a hand, pushing my hair off my forehead. I could smell the fresh evening air coming in from the window – cooler now, damper – and hear the cars coming and going along the road. The wind sighed in the trees and I heard a motorcycle drone past and cut off. I took a deep breath. Something was nagging at me. There was something wrong. Something I'd read . . .

21st June, Tyme's End.

I stared at the entry without seeing it. Then I blinked, and saw what I was looking at.

The date was written at the top of the page, and below it there was nothing but blank space, except for one word. It was in pencil, dug so heavily into the paper that it had almost gone through the page, and it was big, in block capitals, hardly recognisable as Granddad's handwriting.

It said,
REMEMBER
.

I ran my finger over the word, and even though he'd written it sixty years ago my fingertip came away grey with graphite.