The Ministry of Time, page 24
“Do you know where his safe house is?”
I shrugged. I knew where everyone’s safe houses were. Adela had made it known to me that Graham and I were considered, by the Ministry’s bellicose hierarchy, the senior bridge–expat team. We deserved more access, required more access, as Graham’s adjustment was so pivotal and promising. If it was unfair, it was also useful. Certainly Adela’s insistence that we were special in some way tallied with my experience of being in love.
“My key card has stopped working on Ministry property, and Adela has canceled our last three meetings,” said Simellia. “I’ve been trying to get Arthur’s benzodiazepine prescription reevaluated, and his own Wellness team is blocking me. Do you know why this is all happening? All we’ve been told is ‘emergency procedures’—”
“Someone tried to kill me,” I said. “The Brigadier.”
Watching what happened on Simellia’s face was like watching a paper cut fill with blood. I saw the shock of impact, the brief beat of perhaps nothing, the welling. She reached for me and, I think, would have embraced me, but her hand brushed the gun beneath my jacket. She pulled back.
“I can speak to Adela about Arthur, if you like,” I said, holding her gaze. “I’m going to see her now.”
“Thank you,” said Simellia, very coldly. “That would be kind. Look after yourself.”
* * *
One pleasant spring afternoon, I arranged to go with Arthur, Margaret, and Graham to a Turner exhibition. The expats played a game that they called ghost hunting. They would visit a place—a pub, a monument, a stately home—or a gallery or exhibition, to see if they could spot anything or anyone they recognized from their own era. In this instance, they expected Graham would see the most ghosts, as the exhibition was devoted to Turner’s marine paintings. In fact, I’d organized the jolly little trip—haunted by plainclothes agents and signed off by Adela—partly because I wanted to test the limits of my special status, but also because I felt responsible for them. After the move to the safe houses, it became abundantly clear that Arthur and Margaret were not enjoying the same meaningful cultural integration as Graham, or even as Cardingham—by which I mean, the Ministry simply found them less interesting. Fewer and fewer meetings were devoted to their adjustment, their long-term goals. Only the “readability” experiments continued to run with any degree of consistency. Besides that, I knew Graham—who kept up a supervised and frequently curtailed program of visits—had told them something about what was happening behind our doors, in our beds—I didn’t know what—Graham was vague and evasive when I asked him—but he must have found a word for “lovers” that didn’t make him feel excessively Victorian and ashamed, and now I had no control whatsoever over how Margaret and Arthur might be receiving this knowledge about me. I had to fix it.
Margaret, who understood how to sneak soft-drink cans and snacks into cinemas, was not impressed by the idea of the gallery trip. Consider how much she’d had to learn: negotiating supermarkets, brands and flavors, the invention of the aluminum can, the basic untrustworthiness of the popcorn counter, the invention of film.
“We’re hence to look at pictures of boats?” she asked, exasperated, in the car.
“Ships, Sixty-five, ships,” said Graham. “The finest of the line.”
“Big boats,” Arthur supplied.
Graham’s shoulders stiffened.
The exhibition was divided into several rooms, which charted Turner’s developing practice throughout his life. I stared listlessly at detailed and virtuosic paintings of “big boats” at sea, tilting horribly in the wind.
“Were you ever seasick?” I asked Graham.
“Not since I was a boy. A Gore stomach is a nigh unturnable one.”
“I feel sick just looking at these.”
“You could not be a ship’s cat, poor little cat.”
It wasn’t until I walked later into Turner’s century—the 1830s, the 1840s—that I started to see what all the fuss was about. The forensic detail of the early paintings was gone. In their place, the sensory drama of the rain, the wind, and the waves was portrayed in sweeping, fuzzy strokes, more suggestion than depiction. I stood and gawped stupidly in front of The Fighting Temeraire, irradiated by its impossible orange sun. I felt a gentle hand on my jaw. Arthur was closing my mouth.
“You’ll catch flies,” he said.
“Ha. It’s very impressive, isn’t it?”
“Very. Even Maggie has stopped complaining. Forty-seven is transfixed—over there—”
I glanced over. Graham was staring hard at a canvas I’d recently pulled away from, The Slave Ship.
“Ah right. Let’s—let’s leave him to it.”
“He’s told me a little about his time sailing with the Preventative Squadron. Is that the correct terminology, ‘sailing with?’ ” Arthur added, embarrassed by the affection he’d loaded his voice with.
“Beats me. ‘Floating around with’ is about my level of expertise. Here. Let’s sit down.”
Margaret was already sitting on the padded benches in the middle of the room. She gave us a wave.
“I caused the sounding of the bell,” she said.
“You set an alarm off?”
“Yes.”
“Well done!” said Arthur. “How long did it take?”
“I felt my ‘hereness’ readily! The guard was most vexed. I’faith, I would not steal these pictures. I am not so fond of boats.”
“Big boats,” I said.
Arthur laughed and settled between us.
I was shy of Arthur. Most friendship quartets don’t function in squares but in lines, and Arthur and I were the furthest away from each other. I liked him, and in any other circumstances it would have been impossible not to adore someone with as good a heart as he had. But he was in love with Graham. It was all over him like chicken pox. I felt myself going harridan and crooked when Graham looked longer than usual at Margaret, so I couldn’t imagine what it cost Arthur to be around me. Still, he was the most forgiving soul I ever met. I suspected he blamed himself: his gender, his era, his heart.
“Have you come to a decision on your film schools, Sixty-five?” he was asking.
“Prague,” said Margaret promptly. “It is not so far. You may visit me.”
Margaret’s primary skills were of the household-running variety, chores she had barely engaged with since arriving in the future and which she had no intention of picking up again. She “had her letters,” as she put it, but she was still attending adult literacy classes. She’d fixated on the notion of film schools—that she lived in a world where she could be trained to create cinema, her favorite thing in the twenty-first century. The Ministry did have a budget for retraining the expats. But there was no way they would let Margaret out of London, let alone Britain. Perhaps Ralph had been wringing out some daydreams for her.
“Where will you be apprenticed, Sixteen?” asked Margaret.
“Do you have any sense of what, in this brave new world, you’d like to do?” I asked.
“Have a rest,” said Arthur.
“Ha. Yeah, wouldn’t we all. You could try something scandalously outré instead. Joining the circus? Professional go-go dancing? Accountancy?”
Arthur smiled. He was twisting the signet ring on his finger. Margaret reached out and took his fidgeting hand.
“Speak it,” she said.
Arthur sighed. Then he said, “I think the suffragettes did bally well. I can see there are famous career opportunities for a bright and ambitious young lady. But I can’t help noticing that the exchange has not been all equal. I rarely see chaps taking care of old folks or scrubbing the floors. People still look at a man ferrying a child without a wife alongside with something like suspicion. Or pity.”
“You want to work with children?” I said, alarmed. We didn’t have material on how to deal with the expats if they got broody, and I wasn’t much good at it with normal people either. Arthur gave me a despairing look.
“You see? You’re surprised. Maybe disappointed.”
“No, that’s not what—Arthur, of course that’s possible—”
“Is it? I’ve read all sorts on the liberation of the queers—do you say it like that, ‘the queers’?—anyway, and the working woman and the feminist revolution and so on and so forth. But… you know, I’m not Forty-seven, I stay awake through everything I watch, and I can see what your era likes. You use the same patterns as we did, as Gray’s people did and Maggie’s too. You just expect women to do more of it, that’s all.”
“But you’re not a woman, Arthur,” I said.
He threw me an amused look—not in one-upmanship, but playfully, for me to catch—and said, “But I’m not the blueprint for the perfect man either.”
“You are the print of a perfect egg,” said Margaret.
“Thank you, Sixty-five.”
“I love you very well, egg.”
“Love you too. That’s a fine example of what I mean, by the way! I am supposed to hatch into something—very useful and effective—to make all of this palaver with bringing me over here worth its salt. Even back home—excuse me—back in my era, there was always a sense that money and effort had gone into mixing my preparation, and I’d jolly well better bake and set in the right mold and not go off my onion in any way. The reward is, well, all the finer things—children, a family, some peace of mind—but the cost is matching the recipe. And I am a little off my onion, you know.”
“So you—want children?” I asked, audibly floundering.
Arthur tossed me another look, but this one was opaque. I’d feel terrible shame about that, in the weeks and months and years afterward. I couldn’t find the right words to answer him, couldn’t even imagine—high-achieving poster child of an immigrant preserved by the benevolent British state that I was—what the answer might be, but I was saved by Graham’s arrival at the bench. Arthur turned his face up to him.
“Hallo, Gray. Have you finished looking at the big boats?”
“Ships. I am done with this room, yes.”
“Did you see any nice boats?” asked Arthur pleasantly.
“Ships,” Graham said, and stalked off.
We got up and adjusted our clothes. We were all wearing sheepish, excitable expressions, like children caught drawing on walls. We followed Graham into the next room and crowded around him, clucking annoyingly.
“This sail has the aspect of a cloud! ’Tis wondrous fair. Did you ever mistake an enemy sail for mere weather, Forty-seven?”
“I like this guy’s cool little bandanna. Did you ever wear a cool little bandanna? Something… groovy?”
“This one is rather good. With the burst of light. As if the big boat is coming to collect passengers to Heaven. God’s own dear little ferry.”
“You are all tedious people,” he said calmly. “I should have you flogged for insubordination.”
“Did you ever order floggings?” I asked. He ignored me to read the painting’s legend. Quite suddenly, he straightened up, eyes blank, and moved off without speaking.
“Oh,” said Arthur, distressed. “Do you think we went too far?”
I read the legend:
Hurrah! for the whaler Erebus! Another fish! (1846) Turner seems to have borrowed the name of this whaling ship from HMS Erebus, which with her companion vessel, the Terror, had sailed for the Arctic the previous year. In one of the greatest disasters in polar exploration, neither ship nor any of their company returned.
“Ah,” I said.
* * *
He brushed off all attempts to comfort or question him, of course. He arranged the conversation so that his momentary lapse of face was obscured. It was a trick of his, as expertly wielded as his perfect cogency with his “hereness” and “thereness.” He would build sentences around the rooms where burnt and broken things squatted, and I would never be able to see the damage for the bars.
Cars took us back to our separate safe houses. Margaret and Arthur wilted as they retreated into the vehicles. Their days of free wandering were over. The twenty-first century was a thing that was happening outside their windows. Of course I felt sorry for them. They’d been at the mercy of the Ministry since they arrived. Every in-breath and shed tear was monitored. But the Ministry had saved their lives. It had some small say in how those lives continued.
At home, Graham, his jaw set and his eyes dull, pushed me against the door.
“Do you remember,” I said, “that this is more or less how we first kissed?”
“Don’t ask me about the things that I remember,” he muttered.
I put my hands through his hair and he put his face in my neck.
“Please,” he murmured.
When he was inside me and his breath was dewing my throat, I wondered what was going through his mind. I kissed him until my lips hurt, and I tried to hear his thoughts. What was it like, to be the only one who came back? The only one who still had a body to touch, to hurt, to yearn with? The last one still able to die?
* * *
The crumble and leak of our new lodgings were as uncomfortable as wearing ill-fitted clothing. I became acutely aware of the vulnerability of my body, as if it were a rented house with locks I hadn’t had the chance to change. The field agent program included a course in unarmed combat and, at Adela’s insistence, I signed up to see if it would make me feel any better. After I’d attended six sessions, Adela appeared one day, in expensive athleisure.
“Spar with me,” she said. “I’d like to see what you’ve learned.”
“Mainly that it’s almost always better to run away.”
“That’s a start,” said Adela, then kicked my feet out from under me. I hit the mat with an embarrassing grunt-woof.
“You didn’t say we’d started!”
“Attackers generally don’t,” said Adela placidly. I rolled out of the way just before her heel came down on my stomach and scrambled upright.
“No, if it’s the Brigadier, he’ll just shoot me with—He’s got this weapon that makes blue light and—”
“You’ve escaped once. There, why did you strike so slowly? Now I have your wrist.”
I wrenched free and skittered backward. “What does that mean, I’ve escaped ‘once?’ ” I panted. “Is he coming back? Do you have information on that? Where is he? Ow! Jesus!”
“I was merely remarking upon it. You are more capable than you realize. How is Commander Gore?” Adela asked, easily blocking two weak punches. “I understand the quartermasters filed permission to train him on long-range weapons. You are telegraphing your punches.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re not going to,” she said, and landed a meaty blow into my shoulder.
“Ow!”
“Block.”
“Ow! I’m trying! Yeah, he’s at the Ministry almost as much as I am. Not just for training either. For historical context too, I think. Aah! Like. No one explains the Cold War better than the archivists. Fuck! Ow! Also a while ago I dropped some big history on him with no context and he’s working his way backward through declassified missions.”
“Blitzkrieg and 9/11.”
“Ha. Ouch! The trenches and Auschwitz, actually.”
Adela froze, the edge of her hand arrested mid-strike.
“What?”
“I said the word ‘Auschwitz’ out of context and he spent all night looking up the Holocaust.”
“You didn’t tell him about the attack on the Twin Towers?” asked Adela. She seemed genuinely confused. Her hand hovered in midair. I hesitated, then decided this must mean the sparring was over, and relaxed.
“No. God, can you imagine? He’d already spent 1839 blowing up the sultanate at Aden. I’m not sure how much I’d trust him to keep the whole war on terror thing in, like, non-racist proportion.”
“Yes,” said Adela, in a flaking voice. “If he’d come to the news abruptly, he would have converted to the Ministry on the spot.”
She met my eye and added, “I imagine.”
Slowly the look went rancid.
“I had my guard down. It would have been sensible to attack then,” she said, and punched me in the face.
* * *
Beating the shit out of me put Adela in a good mood for several days. I wrangled permission from her to take Graham for a monitored bike ride to Greenwich, to see the Franklin expedition memorial. “We can’t expect him to adjust without closure,” I’d said. “And it might improve his grip on his ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness.’ I know he’s already scoring highly on voluntary readability, but there’s no harm in reinforcing it.” She’d looked at me as you might a cat that, with unusual perspicacity, has brought home a ten-pound note instead of a dead mouse.
The day I’d chosen was, in fact, fair. The light was even and soft, like carefully sifted flour. Deranged by the heat shift, unseasonal roses were bursting and shedding luminously in front gardens and public squares. A cool breeze ran alongside us as we cycled; it resembled nothing so much as a handshake. As with every time I experienced clement weather, I was overcome with the sense that my troubles and pains had been put on hold, and would resume after an interval break in which I could, spiritually speaking, use the bathroom and get a drink and generally fix myself.
Under the March sunlight, the buildings of the Old Royal Naval College looked scrubbed and canvas-clean. He stared out over the long green lawns, frowning.
“It’s a monument to itself.”
“Yes. But a very beautiful one.”
“How curious that I have survived to watch my obsolescence grow old enough to be celebrated as legendary.”
He walked slowly up the path, looking around as if he’d never seen a building in the wild before.
“Little cat,” he said, and I obediently trotted to his side. There were at least two other people in sight distance, which meant we were in public, which meant he wasn’t going to kiss me or embrace me, but he reached out and quickly squeezed my hand. For him, this was a scandalous display of affection.
We walked side by side to the chapel, at a chaste and proper distance, and up the steps.
I shrugged. I knew where everyone’s safe houses were. Adela had made it known to me that Graham and I were considered, by the Ministry’s bellicose hierarchy, the senior bridge–expat team. We deserved more access, required more access, as Graham’s adjustment was so pivotal and promising. If it was unfair, it was also useful. Certainly Adela’s insistence that we were special in some way tallied with my experience of being in love.
“My key card has stopped working on Ministry property, and Adela has canceled our last three meetings,” said Simellia. “I’ve been trying to get Arthur’s benzodiazepine prescription reevaluated, and his own Wellness team is blocking me. Do you know why this is all happening? All we’ve been told is ‘emergency procedures’—”
“Someone tried to kill me,” I said. “The Brigadier.”
Watching what happened on Simellia’s face was like watching a paper cut fill with blood. I saw the shock of impact, the brief beat of perhaps nothing, the welling. She reached for me and, I think, would have embraced me, but her hand brushed the gun beneath my jacket. She pulled back.
“I can speak to Adela about Arthur, if you like,” I said, holding her gaze. “I’m going to see her now.”
“Thank you,” said Simellia, very coldly. “That would be kind. Look after yourself.”
* * *
One pleasant spring afternoon, I arranged to go with Arthur, Margaret, and Graham to a Turner exhibition. The expats played a game that they called ghost hunting. They would visit a place—a pub, a monument, a stately home—or a gallery or exhibition, to see if they could spot anything or anyone they recognized from their own era. In this instance, they expected Graham would see the most ghosts, as the exhibition was devoted to Turner’s marine paintings. In fact, I’d organized the jolly little trip—haunted by plainclothes agents and signed off by Adela—partly because I wanted to test the limits of my special status, but also because I felt responsible for them. After the move to the safe houses, it became abundantly clear that Arthur and Margaret were not enjoying the same meaningful cultural integration as Graham, or even as Cardingham—by which I mean, the Ministry simply found them less interesting. Fewer and fewer meetings were devoted to their adjustment, their long-term goals. Only the “readability” experiments continued to run with any degree of consistency. Besides that, I knew Graham—who kept up a supervised and frequently curtailed program of visits—had told them something about what was happening behind our doors, in our beds—I didn’t know what—Graham was vague and evasive when I asked him—but he must have found a word for “lovers” that didn’t make him feel excessively Victorian and ashamed, and now I had no control whatsoever over how Margaret and Arthur might be receiving this knowledge about me. I had to fix it.
Margaret, who understood how to sneak soft-drink cans and snacks into cinemas, was not impressed by the idea of the gallery trip. Consider how much she’d had to learn: negotiating supermarkets, brands and flavors, the invention of the aluminum can, the basic untrustworthiness of the popcorn counter, the invention of film.
“We’re hence to look at pictures of boats?” she asked, exasperated, in the car.
“Ships, Sixty-five, ships,” said Graham. “The finest of the line.”
“Big boats,” Arthur supplied.
Graham’s shoulders stiffened.
The exhibition was divided into several rooms, which charted Turner’s developing practice throughout his life. I stared listlessly at detailed and virtuosic paintings of “big boats” at sea, tilting horribly in the wind.
“Were you ever seasick?” I asked Graham.
“Not since I was a boy. A Gore stomach is a nigh unturnable one.”
“I feel sick just looking at these.”
“You could not be a ship’s cat, poor little cat.”
It wasn’t until I walked later into Turner’s century—the 1830s, the 1840s—that I started to see what all the fuss was about. The forensic detail of the early paintings was gone. In their place, the sensory drama of the rain, the wind, and the waves was portrayed in sweeping, fuzzy strokes, more suggestion than depiction. I stood and gawped stupidly in front of The Fighting Temeraire, irradiated by its impossible orange sun. I felt a gentle hand on my jaw. Arthur was closing my mouth.
“You’ll catch flies,” he said.
“Ha. It’s very impressive, isn’t it?”
“Very. Even Maggie has stopped complaining. Forty-seven is transfixed—over there—”
I glanced over. Graham was staring hard at a canvas I’d recently pulled away from, The Slave Ship.
“Ah right. Let’s—let’s leave him to it.”
“He’s told me a little about his time sailing with the Preventative Squadron. Is that the correct terminology, ‘sailing with?’ ” Arthur added, embarrassed by the affection he’d loaded his voice with.
“Beats me. ‘Floating around with’ is about my level of expertise. Here. Let’s sit down.”
Margaret was already sitting on the padded benches in the middle of the room. She gave us a wave.
“I caused the sounding of the bell,” she said.
“You set an alarm off?”
“Yes.”
“Well done!” said Arthur. “How long did it take?”
“I felt my ‘hereness’ readily! The guard was most vexed. I’faith, I would not steal these pictures. I am not so fond of boats.”
“Big boats,” I said.
Arthur laughed and settled between us.
I was shy of Arthur. Most friendship quartets don’t function in squares but in lines, and Arthur and I were the furthest away from each other. I liked him, and in any other circumstances it would have been impossible not to adore someone with as good a heart as he had. But he was in love with Graham. It was all over him like chicken pox. I felt myself going harridan and crooked when Graham looked longer than usual at Margaret, so I couldn’t imagine what it cost Arthur to be around me. Still, he was the most forgiving soul I ever met. I suspected he blamed himself: his gender, his era, his heart.
“Have you come to a decision on your film schools, Sixty-five?” he was asking.
“Prague,” said Margaret promptly. “It is not so far. You may visit me.”
Margaret’s primary skills were of the household-running variety, chores she had barely engaged with since arriving in the future and which she had no intention of picking up again. She “had her letters,” as she put it, but she was still attending adult literacy classes. She’d fixated on the notion of film schools—that she lived in a world where she could be trained to create cinema, her favorite thing in the twenty-first century. The Ministry did have a budget for retraining the expats. But there was no way they would let Margaret out of London, let alone Britain. Perhaps Ralph had been wringing out some daydreams for her.
“Where will you be apprenticed, Sixteen?” asked Margaret.
“Do you have any sense of what, in this brave new world, you’d like to do?” I asked.
“Have a rest,” said Arthur.
“Ha. Yeah, wouldn’t we all. You could try something scandalously outré instead. Joining the circus? Professional go-go dancing? Accountancy?”
Arthur smiled. He was twisting the signet ring on his finger. Margaret reached out and took his fidgeting hand.
“Speak it,” she said.
Arthur sighed. Then he said, “I think the suffragettes did bally well. I can see there are famous career opportunities for a bright and ambitious young lady. But I can’t help noticing that the exchange has not been all equal. I rarely see chaps taking care of old folks or scrubbing the floors. People still look at a man ferrying a child without a wife alongside with something like suspicion. Or pity.”
“You want to work with children?” I said, alarmed. We didn’t have material on how to deal with the expats if they got broody, and I wasn’t much good at it with normal people either. Arthur gave me a despairing look.
“You see? You’re surprised. Maybe disappointed.”
“No, that’s not what—Arthur, of course that’s possible—”
“Is it? I’ve read all sorts on the liberation of the queers—do you say it like that, ‘the queers’?—anyway, and the working woman and the feminist revolution and so on and so forth. But… you know, I’m not Forty-seven, I stay awake through everything I watch, and I can see what your era likes. You use the same patterns as we did, as Gray’s people did and Maggie’s too. You just expect women to do more of it, that’s all.”
“But you’re not a woman, Arthur,” I said.
He threw me an amused look—not in one-upmanship, but playfully, for me to catch—and said, “But I’m not the blueprint for the perfect man either.”
“You are the print of a perfect egg,” said Margaret.
“Thank you, Sixty-five.”
“I love you very well, egg.”
“Love you too. That’s a fine example of what I mean, by the way! I am supposed to hatch into something—very useful and effective—to make all of this palaver with bringing me over here worth its salt. Even back home—excuse me—back in my era, there was always a sense that money and effort had gone into mixing my preparation, and I’d jolly well better bake and set in the right mold and not go off my onion in any way. The reward is, well, all the finer things—children, a family, some peace of mind—but the cost is matching the recipe. And I am a little off my onion, you know.”
“So you—want children?” I asked, audibly floundering.
Arthur tossed me another look, but this one was opaque. I’d feel terrible shame about that, in the weeks and months and years afterward. I couldn’t find the right words to answer him, couldn’t even imagine—high-achieving poster child of an immigrant preserved by the benevolent British state that I was—what the answer might be, but I was saved by Graham’s arrival at the bench. Arthur turned his face up to him.
“Hallo, Gray. Have you finished looking at the big boats?”
“Ships. I am done with this room, yes.”
“Did you see any nice boats?” asked Arthur pleasantly.
“Ships,” Graham said, and stalked off.
We got up and adjusted our clothes. We were all wearing sheepish, excitable expressions, like children caught drawing on walls. We followed Graham into the next room and crowded around him, clucking annoyingly.
“This sail has the aspect of a cloud! ’Tis wondrous fair. Did you ever mistake an enemy sail for mere weather, Forty-seven?”
“I like this guy’s cool little bandanna. Did you ever wear a cool little bandanna? Something… groovy?”
“This one is rather good. With the burst of light. As if the big boat is coming to collect passengers to Heaven. God’s own dear little ferry.”
“You are all tedious people,” he said calmly. “I should have you flogged for insubordination.”
“Did you ever order floggings?” I asked. He ignored me to read the painting’s legend. Quite suddenly, he straightened up, eyes blank, and moved off without speaking.
“Oh,” said Arthur, distressed. “Do you think we went too far?”
I read the legend:
Hurrah! for the whaler Erebus! Another fish! (1846) Turner seems to have borrowed the name of this whaling ship from HMS Erebus, which with her companion vessel, the Terror, had sailed for the Arctic the previous year. In one of the greatest disasters in polar exploration, neither ship nor any of their company returned.
“Ah,” I said.
* * *
He brushed off all attempts to comfort or question him, of course. He arranged the conversation so that his momentary lapse of face was obscured. It was a trick of his, as expertly wielded as his perfect cogency with his “hereness” and “thereness.” He would build sentences around the rooms where burnt and broken things squatted, and I would never be able to see the damage for the bars.
Cars took us back to our separate safe houses. Margaret and Arthur wilted as they retreated into the vehicles. Their days of free wandering were over. The twenty-first century was a thing that was happening outside their windows. Of course I felt sorry for them. They’d been at the mercy of the Ministry since they arrived. Every in-breath and shed tear was monitored. But the Ministry had saved their lives. It had some small say in how those lives continued.
At home, Graham, his jaw set and his eyes dull, pushed me against the door.
“Do you remember,” I said, “that this is more or less how we first kissed?”
“Don’t ask me about the things that I remember,” he muttered.
I put my hands through his hair and he put his face in my neck.
“Please,” he murmured.
When he was inside me and his breath was dewing my throat, I wondered what was going through his mind. I kissed him until my lips hurt, and I tried to hear his thoughts. What was it like, to be the only one who came back? The only one who still had a body to touch, to hurt, to yearn with? The last one still able to die?
* * *
The crumble and leak of our new lodgings were as uncomfortable as wearing ill-fitted clothing. I became acutely aware of the vulnerability of my body, as if it were a rented house with locks I hadn’t had the chance to change. The field agent program included a course in unarmed combat and, at Adela’s insistence, I signed up to see if it would make me feel any better. After I’d attended six sessions, Adela appeared one day, in expensive athleisure.
“Spar with me,” she said. “I’d like to see what you’ve learned.”
“Mainly that it’s almost always better to run away.”
“That’s a start,” said Adela, then kicked my feet out from under me. I hit the mat with an embarrassing grunt-woof.
“You didn’t say we’d started!”
“Attackers generally don’t,” said Adela placidly. I rolled out of the way just before her heel came down on my stomach and scrambled upright.
“No, if it’s the Brigadier, he’ll just shoot me with—He’s got this weapon that makes blue light and—”
“You’ve escaped once. There, why did you strike so slowly? Now I have your wrist.”
I wrenched free and skittered backward. “What does that mean, I’ve escaped ‘once?’ ” I panted. “Is he coming back? Do you have information on that? Where is he? Ow! Jesus!”
“I was merely remarking upon it. You are more capable than you realize. How is Commander Gore?” Adela asked, easily blocking two weak punches. “I understand the quartermasters filed permission to train him on long-range weapons. You are telegraphing your punches.”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You’re not going to,” she said, and landed a meaty blow into my shoulder.
“Ow!”
“Block.”
“Ow! I’m trying! Yeah, he’s at the Ministry almost as much as I am. Not just for training either. For historical context too, I think. Aah! Like. No one explains the Cold War better than the archivists. Fuck! Ow! Also a while ago I dropped some big history on him with no context and he’s working his way backward through declassified missions.”
“Blitzkrieg and 9/11.”
“Ha. Ouch! The trenches and Auschwitz, actually.”
Adela froze, the edge of her hand arrested mid-strike.
“What?”
“I said the word ‘Auschwitz’ out of context and he spent all night looking up the Holocaust.”
“You didn’t tell him about the attack on the Twin Towers?” asked Adela. She seemed genuinely confused. Her hand hovered in midair. I hesitated, then decided this must mean the sparring was over, and relaxed.
“No. God, can you imagine? He’d already spent 1839 blowing up the sultanate at Aden. I’m not sure how much I’d trust him to keep the whole war on terror thing in, like, non-racist proportion.”
“Yes,” said Adela, in a flaking voice. “If he’d come to the news abruptly, he would have converted to the Ministry on the spot.”
She met my eye and added, “I imagine.”
Slowly the look went rancid.
“I had my guard down. It would have been sensible to attack then,” she said, and punched me in the face.
* * *
Beating the shit out of me put Adela in a good mood for several days. I wrangled permission from her to take Graham for a monitored bike ride to Greenwich, to see the Franklin expedition memorial. “We can’t expect him to adjust without closure,” I’d said. “And it might improve his grip on his ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness.’ I know he’s already scoring highly on voluntary readability, but there’s no harm in reinforcing it.” She’d looked at me as you might a cat that, with unusual perspicacity, has brought home a ten-pound note instead of a dead mouse.
The day I’d chosen was, in fact, fair. The light was even and soft, like carefully sifted flour. Deranged by the heat shift, unseasonal roses were bursting and shedding luminously in front gardens and public squares. A cool breeze ran alongside us as we cycled; it resembled nothing so much as a handshake. As with every time I experienced clement weather, I was overcome with the sense that my troubles and pains had been put on hold, and would resume after an interval break in which I could, spiritually speaking, use the bathroom and get a drink and generally fix myself.
Under the March sunlight, the buildings of the Old Royal Naval College looked scrubbed and canvas-clean. He stared out over the long green lawns, frowning.
“It’s a monument to itself.”
“Yes. But a very beautiful one.”
“How curious that I have survived to watch my obsolescence grow old enough to be celebrated as legendary.”
He walked slowly up the path, looking around as if he’d never seen a building in the wild before.
“Little cat,” he said, and I obediently trotted to his side. There were at least two other people in sight distance, which meant we were in public, which meant he wasn’t going to kiss me or embrace me, but he reached out and quickly squeezed my hand. For him, this was a scandalous display of affection.
We walked side by side to the chapel, at a chaste and proper distance, and up the steps.
