The Ministry of Time, page 22
“Is it possible to make you do that when I—when I am with you?”
“ ‘With’ me, eh.”
“Don’t be saucy,” he said, and twisted one of my nipples. I gasped and tugged him up by his arms.
“It’s possible. Doesn’t always work.”
“What needs to be done for it to work?”
“For a start, you’ll need to take off the rest of your clothes.”
He rolled his eyes and started to fumble, one-handed, with the button and zipper of his fly.
“Don’t stare,” he murmured.
“I want to see.”
He leaned down and kissed me so that I couldn’t raise my head. The bed jounced under the movement of him kicking his trousers off.
I reached down, floundering a little because he still wouldn’t let me lift my head to look properly, and wrapped my hand around him. He groaned before he could clamp his mouth shut.
“Will you—”
“Yes—”
“There—”
“Is that—yes—?”
He started slowly, watching my face. It was if he was using a machine on me, and he was testing its efficacy by my reaction. That the machine was his body didn’t appear to move him. But I tilted my hips and started to match him, meet him. His expression tightened.
“Please—”
“This—like this—you want this—”
“Yes—”
“Did you—think about this—tell me—”
“Yes—I wanted to—watch you—give in—”
He bit me sharply on the shoulder and some other animal noise escaped me. He started to dig his thumbs into tender places while he moved in me. I bucked insistently into the pressure. A certain thrilling pain, which lived in my body like another body, woke and opened its long series of tributaries through my ribs. He put his lips to my ear:
“I used to—hear you—tossing and turning—at night—I couldn’t—sleep—your body—a wall away—”
“You wanted—to do—this—to me—”
“Yes—”
“Tell me—what you did—”
Into the wet heat between us, in jolts and gasps, he started to tell me about those nights, when God and the world felt far away and I felt so dangerously near, and neither prayer nor reciting the Articles of War nor squeezing his eyes shut stopped his mind from brimming with the thought of me, and he’d have to do to himself the only thing he could think of to help him sleep.
He said, softly, as if surprised by a sudden burst of rain, “Oh. God.”
Later I examined my body and saw a line of thin crescent moons where he’d dug his nails in, flushed the same color as my mouth.
* * *
Afterward, we lay on our sides, facing each other. The clumsy metallic bonking of the radiators announced the arrival of the central heating. It was very dark—the sun had dissolved, and I hadn’t yet turned on my lamp—but I thought his eyes were twinkling.
“Well,” he said, “that was interesting.”
“Ha!”
“Will you turn on the lamp, please?”
“Yes… there. Hello. So you’re very… talkative.”
His ears—now visible—turned red. “Yes, well,” he muttered. “You make terrible noises. Like an alley cat.”
“You didn’t seem to mind.”
“It’s an amusing way to go deaf. Would you mind if I smoked?”
“Only if I can have one.”
“A fair trade. My cigarettes are in my pocket—”
I reached over the bed and fished his cigarettes and lighter out of his discarded trousers. He lit two and handed me one.
“Graham, can I ask you a question?”
“You may. I reserve the right to dodge it.”
“Do you—hmm. Trying to think of a way to put this subtly. When you said you didn’t have much experience with courting…”
“I don’t.”
“You don’t strike me as… inexperienced.”
He shrugged and settled back on the pillows, ashing into the mug on the bedside table. I rummaged around the scant supplies of my diplomacy.
“What did you usually do when you, er, if you got interested in a woman?”
“I would break into a cold sweat and put myself on the nearest ship.”
“Were you—I mean, was there anyone…?”
He continued to smoke reflectively. Then he said, “You understand that, in my era, a man would have to be a villain and a scoundrel to do—any of this—with a woman he wished to court.”
“Are you a villain and a scoundrel?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I am hurt that you have to ask.”
“Was there someone?”
“Not in a way that would have tarnished either of our reputations.”
“Ah. So. Right. Who?”
I puffed crossly on my cigarette. My heart had dropped two inches down my chest, or so it felt.
“It simply didn’t progress that far—”
“What was her name?” I said, louder than I would be able to bear when I remembered this conversation later.
He frowned at me. At length he said, “Sarah. Please don’t feel the need to offer me the names of any of your ghosts. I don’t want to know.”
He cautiously proffered the mug. I’d been drawing so hard on the cigarette that there was a precarious worm of ash hanging off it. I tapped, and it dropped into the thin scum of old tea still silting the bottom of the mug. These details were large and terrible to me. I said, “The two of you never—?”
“Little cat. Please.”
“You’re dodging this question very strenuously—”
“Because it’s making you upset. No, we did not. At most I may have kissed her hand, and even that would have been rather giddy and ill-advised.”
I hated hearing this. I said, “You strike me as someone who’s done a fair bit more than that.”
“What a threatening observation.”
“Well?”
“I suppose so. Not with—women I would have wished to court. My experience with women generally is limited.”
I was almost at the filter and my throat hurt. “And with men?” I said, more because I felt like being annoying than because I had noted his wary syntax.
To my surprise, he went quiet again, and regarded the end of his cigarette. Eventually he said, “Well. One is a long time at sea.”
“What does that mean?”
“Enough,” he said, suddenly sharp. He flicked his stub into the mug and pinched mine, damp with the sweat of my fingers, out of my hands. I could see in the momentum of his movements that he was one twitch away from getting out of bed, leaving the room, pretending none of this happened—but then he jolted toward me, took me by the shoulders and pulled my head onto his chest.
“Put your arms around me,” he instructed.
He held me firmly. My nose was squashed against him, tickled by the black curls over his sternum. He smelled, attractively, of sweat. I folded the arm not crushed between us over his back.
“I’m not trying to keep secrets from you,” he said quietly. “It’s simply that—these matters—I have tried to separate from the rest of my life. Had I ever married, I imagine I would have kept up the fiction of a perfectly chaste life, if only not to humiliate my wife. You will learn nothing special or important about me from asking me questions that can only hurt you.”
“In this era, I think we’d call that ‘dishonest.’ ”
“In my era, it might have been considered a kindness.”
I ran my fingertips over the white, curved place between his shoulder blades. I could just feel, below the skin, the toothy fragment of the microchip the Ministry had implanted in him when he first arrived, which had enabled them to monitor his movements with the closeness he’d found so inexplicable.
“Perhaps you’re right,” I said. I kissed him.
Axioms have us sealing all sorts of things with kisses. Vows. Envelopes. Fates. But parents don’t always tell their children what the slurs and curses mean, for their protection. I thought it would be better, for now, that I didn’t mention the microchip. To tell you the truth I tried not to think about it at all.
* * *
The next morning, when I woke up, I was alone in the bed. I lay there feeling bereft and sorry for myself until I heard a gentle knock at the door.
“Are you awake?”
“Oh. Hi. Yes.”
“Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Yes. Thanks.”
He brought the tea up and put it on the bedside table, rather than approach the bed and hand it to me. I wriggled upright. I was naked under the bedsheets. He didn’t move to touch me, but he didn’t leave the room or look away either.
“Adela’s sending a car from the Ministry. I need to get dressed…”
“If you would prefer not to travel alone, I can come with you.”
“I’m all right, thanks. She and I need to talk.”
He nodded. He looked awkward. I was moved to wonder whether he had ever actually had a “morning after,” or whether he was improvising action and reaction, caught between his era’s expectations and mine. If you are surprised that, so soon after a secret agent tried to kill me, I was wondering whether the man with whom I’d had sex liked liked me, remember that being in love is a form of blunt-force trauma. I was concussed with love for him. I bent my head to the cudgel.
* * *
I was not such a fool as to imagine the Vice Secretary for Expatriation had become my handler because she liked me. Adela had a plan that had something to do with Graham. Her brusque mentorship, its delineation uncanny but forcibly indicated, suggested that she wanted a workplace proxy, a daughter-in-case-file. It looked like she wanted me to be Graham’s handler, and for Graham to be—what?
I arrived at the Ministry sweaty and vibeless. It was another dank toothache of a day, barely qualifying in its chromatic dullness for “gray.”
Adela was sitting at her desk, hands stacked. She was so neatly posed that I found myself wondering what meme she was referencing. She didn’t look at me, but through me. Instead of her usual abrasion, she spoke with cool diffidence. She acted like I was an ex she hadn’t seen in a very long time, one engaged to a much younger woman.
“Ma’am. The Brigadier. Did he murder Quentin?”
“Inquiries are ongoing.”
“Why,” I said, “does the Brigadier want Commander Gore?”
“He wants to go home.”
“Eh?”
The time-door, explained Adela, supported a limited number of what the Brigadier called “free travelers.” That was why the Ministry lost two of the seven original expats—there wasn’t enough capacity for them to be moved through time, it was like they’d tried to breathe through oxygen masks after other people had depleted the tank. But it was possible to make a space in the door—refill the tank, as it were—by taking a free traveler “out of time,” viz, killing them.
“How does the Ministry know that?” I asked.
“That information was extracted by the intelligence agents.”
“Torture.”
“You know we don’t use that word.”
“That means there are other ‘free travelers’ from the future around,” I said. “If you found one to torture.”
Adela gave me a ghastly grin. “Oh yes,” she said. “Not just the Brigadier and Salese, I mean. They already know about the door’s operational capacities. It was made in their era. Those two were never equipped for a long stay in the twenty-first century, incidentally. I believe they were part of a blitz assassination campaign.”
I tore a filet from my thumb with my teeth.
“The Brigadier used my fingerprints to access and disable the CCTV system at Parry Yard,” I said. “That’s why there’s no CCTV footage of Quentin’s assassination.”
Her one eye clicked into focus like a camera.
“That is a serious breach,” she said slowly. “One that I had not anticipated. I’ll deal with it. I’ve signed you up for a firearms refresher course. As a preventative measure. You ought to be able to bring your score up quickly. After all, you still have your depth perception.”
This was a macabre joke, and even Adela seemed to sense that. She lifted her hand self-consciously to her eye patch. I stared at her slender hand, its narrow ropes of vein. Her hand looked older than her face—around a decade older, in fact. She noticed me noticing.
“Botox,” she said dryly. “My jawline’s been shaved. Nose job, that’s a few years old now. Had my tear troughs and my cheeks done. This isn’t my natural eye shape either. Brows are microbladed.”
“Oh,” I said. “I always assumed it was reconstructive rather than cosmetic. Not that it’s any of my business. Everyone should get to do what they want with their face.”
Whatever the test was, I failed it. Adela’s face misted with disappointment.
“I’ll handle the CCTV breach,” she said. “Until I have personally lowered the security status, all bridge–expat teams are confined to their safe houses. Journeys to and from the Ministry must be taken in Ministry-issue vehicles, accompanied by an armed guard. Any communication or movement between safe houses needs sign-off from both halves of Control.”
She gave me an almost maternal look and added, “Though, as your handler, all of your requests need be signed off only by me. Don’t worry about the Secretary.”
* * *
A Ministry car took me back to my new, horrid home. I heard Graham call, “What are your orders?” before I’d even taken off my coat. I scrubbed at my face, pushed to fidget by his rare urgency.
“None. Sit tight. We’re confined to the house, except for Ministry business.”
“Surely not. You are in danger!”
“Yeah. I’m taking a firearms refresher course. They know, Graham. They’ve known all along. They were trying to keep an eye on him.”
I flopped onto the sofa. He came to sit beside me, leaving a careful and charged channel of two feet between us.
“I am reluctant to ask you my next question,” he said, “since it seems so comparatively trivial. But.”
I waited. He sighed.
“Well. Some time ago, I asked Maggie about ‘dating.’ ” (He said this in the same disdainful way he once said “housemate.”)
“You asked the lesbian from the seventeenth century about modern-day dating.”
“Yes. I am aware of the irony of the situation.”
“Wow. What did she say?”
“Well, she laughed at me for a while. But. My understanding of ‘dating,’ ” he said, “is that it is like trying on clothes for fit, except that the clothes are people.”
“That’s a pretty brutal way of putting it, but I suppose so.”
“What happens if the fit is wrong?”
“Well. People break up. They stop seeing each other. And start over with someone else.”
“And if the fit is right?”
“Depends on what the people involved want, I guess.”
“At what point is that discussed?”
“There’s… not really a set timeframe. You just feel your way along. Even as I say that I can see how deeply messed up modern dating must sound. But it’s supposed to grant more of a sense of freedom and personal choice. No one has to commit to anything they don’t want.”
He ran his hands through his hair. The curls flattened and sprang back. I was overwhelmed with the desire to touch him. So it was a shock, the psychic equivalent of biting down on bone, when he said, very quietly, “I want to touch you.”
“Jesus,” I said, and surged across the sofa.
* * *
In addition to the firearms refresher course, Adela also insisted that I sign up for unarmed combat classes, basic cipher, and an international relations refresher for my “region of expertise” that all field agents were required to attend every four months unless in the field. Graham and Cardingham, too, were granted special movement rights and dedicated transport to continue their field training at the Ministry. Arthur and Margaret did not enjoy the same level of freedom. I was relieved. My work with Adela meant that I soon had access to their safe houses’ whereabouts—but I wanted them both stowed away safely until I had the mental wherewithal to work out next moves. In a game of chess, I reasoned, one does not rush the board with all the pawns and burn down the rooks. This analogy tells you everything you need to know about the level of depersonalized detachment I enjoyed after my attempted assassination.
I attended training sessions at the shooting range with Adela. There was an unofficial scoreboard tacked to a wall. It was updated weekly, and I couldn’t fail to notice that “G. Gore” was always in the top four, clambering over and under the scores of two field agents and one of the quartermasters. It was inevitable that Adela and I were going to bump into the center of our project at the range. Sure enough, one porridge-mild Wednesday, there was Graham and Thomas Cardingham.
“Poxy maumet weapons,” Cardingham was saying (loudly—he was wearing ear mufflers). “Better to break a man with my yard than slay him with this scurvy arm.”
“You are a very bad loser, Thomas,” Graham said. I was amazed he hadn’t told Cardingham off. Perhaps that was just how men talked to each other when women weren’t listening.
“Marry, sir, with a musket in my hand thou wouldst find me a sweet foe indeed.”
“You’re going to fall off the scoreboard. Oh, except you aren’t on it this week. Or last week, I seem to recall.”
“Aye, my hand’s not oft on such small pieces. Perchance thou art more familiar with the size. I ought to ask your bridge.”
At this, Graham colored. He said, coldly, “Mind how you tread, Lieutenant.”
Cardingham subsided and scowled with boyish embarrassment.
“Hello,” I said, because I wanted to see what would happen. The men turned around.
“We are graced,” said Cardingham with vicious irony, and bowed. “Thou wast but lately on our tongues. With my full respect to the good commander, thou art often on his tongue.”
“I hope he has good things to say,” I murmured, eyeing Graham. But Graham appeared not to have heard me. He was staring, bemused, at Adela. I glanced at her and was baffled to see a sudden softness on her face. Though, knowing Adela, maybe her silicone fillers were melting.
