The Ministry of Time, page 9
“I promise that ketchup won’t give you food poisoning. Probably the winkles had cholera or something, which we don’t have anymore, and certainly not in condiments.”
“Hmm.”
I started tapping at my phone, which was, incidentally, an instrument he hated.
“Put that machine away. We are lunching.”
“I was looking up the White Hart in Greenhithe. It’s called the Sir John Franklin now.”
His cutlery clattered on his plate.
“Ah. Sorry. What a thing for me to bring up at lunch.”
“There’s no need to apologize.”
He put down his knife and fork carefully, and stared at his fish.
“You can’t bring them here. As you brought me.”
“No. I’ve not been involved with the technological part of the project, but I’m told this isn’t possible.”
“Yes. I do not mean to make you repeat yourself.” (He had asked twice before if he could be returned to the same spot.)
“I know you feel… sorry for them.”
“I feel responsible for them. I was the third most senior officer after Sir John passed on. And I was with them for two and a half years. They were decent, deserving men. I wish you could have known them.”
“Yes. So do I.”
“I cannot imagine—what you say happened. That they walked, and starved. Left the bodies where they fell. I knew those men. They had good souls.”
He passed his hand across his forehead, then shielded his eyes, head bowed.
“Sometimes, when I see something that strikes me, I imagine trying to explain it to the wardroom. Radios, for example. I think they would have been tickled by those. Or feminism. They’d have found that very good fun too.”
“Unusual use of the word ‘fun,’ but I’ll allow it.”
He unfolded his arms to bother his peas with his fork tines.
“Your heat wave,” he said.
“It wasn’t my heat wave. It was a multinational responsibility. But yes. The heat wave.”
“You said it was caused by historic… emissions? Pollution?”
“Yes. Fossil fuels and so forth.”
“Can you go back and stop it from happening?”
* * *
The bridges were due to have a six-month progress meeting with the Vice Secretary, but Ralph called it early.
Adela took bridge meetings in a soundproof room deep in the Ministry’s chest. She always arrived first, and we’d find her sitting at the top of a long table like a mannequin awaiting the gift of demonic possession. But this time I arrived a quarter of an hour early and she wasn’t there.
I trotted down the corridor to the nearest kitchen. Kitchens in restricted areas are farcical, by the way. All paperwork that enters restricted areas has to be accounted for, which means that if people put Post-its on their lunches, e.g, SANDRA’S. DON’T TOUCH, PLEASE, they had to be stamped with UNCLASSIFIED. The project’s operators and administrators couldn’t even start a Ping-Pong league without getting Secretary approval—which they did, and which the bridges were explicitly not invited to join.
Adela was standing at the sink and anarchically disobeying the water ration by running her wrists under cold water. She looked unwell, but God alone knows how her plastic surgeon thought she was supposed to look.
“Ma’am.”
“Oh. You’re early. How unlike you.”
“Could I ask a question about the time-door?”
“No.”
“If the expats survive, are we going to experiment with using time-travel to change history?”
Adela turned off the water, then ran her thumb along the spigot, her finger squeaking on the metal.
“You misunderstand how history works,” she said. “History is not a series of causes and effects which may be changed like switching trains on a track. It is a narrative agreement about what has happened and what is happening. I am astonished you have worked in the civil service for as long as you have without understanding that.”
“So we’re not going back in time to strangle baby Hitler.”
“You’re a stupid girl.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“History is what we need to happen. You talk about changing history, but you’re trying to change the future. It’s an important semantic differentiation in this field.”
Adela’s hands were already dry by the time she’d delivered this splendid work of didactics, but she scrunched a paper towel and pulled open the under-sink cupboard to drop it in the bin. As she did, she revealed a frill of paper edges. They were in a distinctive procedural green, with black seals. I recognized them because they were the files which the bridges used to deliver their core reports on the expats—the observations that we’d been told were so vital. The seals weren’t broken. Adela had thrown them into the bin without reading them.
* * *
“Congratulations,” she said to us at the meeting. “They’ve all made it through half a year without dying. I’ll save the briefing for the end of the session, as several of you have asked me to attach urgent business to the agenda.”
Adela talked to us as if we were pissing lavishly all over her time. Why she applied for the position of Vice Secretary, or how she got it, was a mystery. She didn’t enjoy the prestige, as the Secretary did, and she seemed bizarrely overworked for the proxy boss of a project in its pilot stage.
Ed said, “Thanks, Adela. I think we should reconsider post–bridge year goals. I appreciate that this year is intended to give the expats the skills to live independently in this era, but I think they would benefit from extended, structured contact—”
“Noted,” said Adela. “We’ll return to the matter in three months.”
“That doesn’t give us much—”
“That’s the Secretary’s decision. Simellia?”
“I’d like to raise what I believe is a labor issue,” said Simellia.
Adela unnerved Simellia too; she hadn’t made a single superfluous noise or movement, with the perspicacity of a prey animal.
“Speak.”
“Much of the data gathered from the expats is contributing directly to the time-travel project, but they’re making a significant contribution to other schemes. I’m thinking of the History of Britain project in particular, and Department for Education analytics. They’re essentially working as consultants for the archivists, especially Eighteen-forty-seven and Nineteen-sixteen—”
“Excuse me,” said Ralph, loudly. “I called this meeting early because I have an immediate problem.”
I tried to catch Simellia’s eyes to roll mine, but she’d powered down. Ralph was the only bridge she did this with. She’d once told me it was because she couldn’t even find the energy to despise him.
Ralph was another former old-school field agent—a dinosaur, really. He was stiff as a train track with a thin, awful, manta ray mouth. For some ungodly reason he had been assigned Margaret Kemble. I expect he thought he’d get a nice old-fashioned girl who’d read him Donne and do the laundry.
“I find myself in a position I am eminently unqualified to handle,” Ralph continued. “It’s about Sixteen-sixty-five’s… predilections.”
* * *
Graham was already home that afternoon. He’d had a “day off,” a telling term that bolstered Simellia’s labor argument, and had spent it at the Tate Modern with the other expats, trying to understand contemporary art.
“I have some questions for you,” he said severely as I came through the door.
“Well, I have some questions for you.”
“Oh?”
“About Miss Kemble.”
He emptied his face of all expression.
“Yes?”
“Well,” I said. “Did you know that she’s a lesbian?”
“This is a sitting-down conversation, isn’t it?” said Graham. “Oh dear… what a revelatory day I’m having….”
He made two cups of tea. A packet of cigarettes fell out of the cupboard where we kept the cups, and he shoved it into the bread bin.
“A lesbian,” I said, “is a woman who is only attracted to other women.”
“Attracted to…?”
“You know what I mean. Come on. You were in the navy, I’m sure you’ve come across the concept of—I’m not even sure what word you were using—‘homosexuality’?”
“No…?”
“Carnal and romantic desire for members of your own sex.”
Graham put down his mug. He was blushing in that watercolor way that I found so beguiling, and I caught up with what I was looking at: an isolated man who had just discovered that a woman with whom he was spending a lot of time would never be interested in him. I frowned, and he frowned, and we were frowning into our tea.
“I think this era ascribes too much importance to what people consider of themselves in private,” he said, very coolly. “What you are referring to, as far as the service was concerned, was—well—it was punished harshly, if you were caught. But to make an identity out of a set of habits does not strike me as wise or even very useful.”
“We think about it differently these days.”
“Evidently.”
For the rest of the day, Graham treated me as if my recipe had been changed and my flavor was unpleasant. He cut restlessly around the rooms, running his fingers along the spines of books. I should have used this as a teaching moment that would improve Margaret Kemble’s quality of life, but I was hurt in a manner I couldn’t examine.
It was my turn to cook. I made the dish I thought was most likely to symbolically kill a Victorian child with the ingredients I had on hand, which was mapo tofu with a belligerent amount of garlic and mala. It had an effect, though not the quasi-fatal one I anticipated. He stopped morbing and started touching his lower lip with amazement. He had a second helping.
Afterward, he fetched his cigarettes from the bread bin and lit one, pushing the packet across to me with the edge of his hand. I watched him get down half a cigarette in silence.
“You told me that Robert McClure discovered the Northwest Passage,” he said at last.
“Yes. You knew him. From Sir George Back’s Frozen Strait expedition.”
“A dreadful expedition. Did you know we had to wrap Terror in chains to stop her falling apart on the journey home? The officers had to help pump out the seawater. No one got more than four hours of sleep at a time, and the ship screaming all the while. To say nothing of the ten months trapped in pack ice—”
“I know.”
“Mm. Well. When we made port at Lough Swilly—in sinking condition—they couldn’t find temporary lodgings for everyone. He and I had to share a room. I don’t know how much you know about Robbie—”
“Grim and opportunistic. Well, don’t pull that face. History records and all that. He almost killed himself and all his men on the expedition where he found the passage.”
Graham blew smoke out through his nose reflectively. “I see,” he said. “I’m not sure it’s fair to call him ‘grim,’ though you wouldn’t be the first to say it. He was a severe disciplinarian, it’s true. Held grudges. But he was a very lonely person. Romantic, too, which made his loneliness worse.”
“He went out after you twice. He must have been lonely.”
Graham had reached the end of his cigarette, but he kept pulling at it restlessly.
“He said he’d never go back,” he said. “In Lough Swilly, he—I think he really believed we’d die out there, which I never did, and—well. He clung to me. Every night. And wept.”
He ground out the cigarette and said, quickly, “I was posted to the Modeste two months later and I never saw him again. So when you say that he came out after me—”
I waited. He absently touched one of the curls by his ear. But his color was quite cool. Drained, even.
“He was very lonely,” Graham repeated.
I didn’t write the story up in my weekly report. I couldn’t tell what it was supposed to mean. Whether he was giving me an excuse or giving me an example.
* * *
It was around this time that different parts of the project started to individually, in tandem, and at random get on my fucking nerves.
I was lightly haunted—at the level of a chronic but manageable digestive complaint—by the memory of those “vital” files in the bin, seals unbroken. But Adela didn’t issue any new orders. The bridges kept turning in their core reports, and the experiments kept running. Given how much of our working day the data collection took, we all assumed that the time-travel project was running to the stated purpose. Every day I had to record his heart rate, his blood pressure, his temperature; every day a written record of what he wore, what he ate, how much exercise he took; every week checking progress against the imaginary benchmarks set by Control, use of phone, use of transport, use of media and the assessment of how harmful or useful each medium was; all the time the corrective tests for vocabulary and habit; novelistic observations on his character and temperament. It seemed that the job continued. I suppose if you switch on your lights and boil your kettle with energy provided by a nuclear power station, you don’t spend much time reflecting on the fact that the atom had originally been split to kill cities.
Not long afterward, I received three emails in a row: first, from the Wellness team, indicating that there were irregularities with the results of some of the medical scans done on the expats; then a second from the Secretary for Expatriation, denying the existence of irregularities and demanding forgetfulness of the first email; then a third heavy-handed message reminding its recipient list of the consequences of breaking the contract of the Official Secrets Act as it pertained to our work.
Graham hadn’t exhibited any behavior more eccentric than usual, but as he was a difficult man to read, I didn’t know whether I was witnessing a series of neurological events. He’d lain motionless in the garden for two hours, on a wet and putrid night, to shoot a fox, and pulled out one of his own rotting teeth (he showed it to me afterward; it was the color of a tombstone, caped with gelatinous red)—was this Victorian, or was this “irregularities”?
I called my handler.
“Quentin. Accepting as I do that you’re unlikely to tell me what the fuck is going on: What the fuck is going on?”
“Seventeen-ninety-three has stopped showing up on scanners.”
“What?”
“Did you call me from your work phone?”
“I—yes? This is a work matter?”
He hung up.
I got off my chair and sat on the floor, chewing at the skin around the nail of my thumb. Anne Spencer (Seventeen-ninety-three) had been picked up from Paris. Her husband, a Frenchman, had already been guillotined. At the bridge meetings, Ed reported that she was responding badly to expatriation. I had understood this to mean she was mentally unwell. Now it seemed he’d been referring to the physical effects of time-travel.
I opened my contacts on my work phone, wrote Quentin’s personal number on the back of my hand, and cycled some five miles to a phone box. The phone box only accepted contactless payment cards. I called the phone box a bastard and cycled another mile until I found one that still took coins.
“Quentin. I’m on a pay phone. Costs like a quid now. I used to phone home from school for twenty pee.”
“Right.”
“You need to tell me what’s happening.”
“Seventeen-ninety-three isn’t showing up on scanners anymore. Body scanners. Metal detectors and things. We put her through another set of MRI scans, and they’re coming out blank.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither do we. She’s been recalled to the Ministry. Her bridge is standing down.”
“Does this have anything to do with Commander Gore?”
“I don’t know. I hope not. I have to say, he’s not really the most important thing on my mind right now. Listen, did he tell you anything else about that device he sketched? Who was holding it? What they looked like? What they were facing?”
I’d barely thought about the sketch since I’d handed it off. “Quentin,” I said, “you’re not talking about the—the glorified Nintendo console?”
That was a mistake—a pebble flicked at the scalp of an avalanche, though I didn’t know it yet. Quentin swallowed sharply. He must have been pressing the phone to his face, because the sound was large and liquid, the sort of noise someone makes when they’re trying to choke down tears.
“Are you even aware—” he began, then broke off and barked, “Do you hear clicking?”
“Um. Could be the pay phone?”
Another stressed, esophageal noise. “This line isn’t secure,” said Quentin. “For God’s sake. Hang up.”
* * *
I hope you will forgive me. I couldn’t take him seriously. I thought the high stakes of the project—the potential of the universe to eat its own tail and swallow us for dessert—had made him hysterical, paranoid. I didn’t need him to embroil me in a conspiracy theory. The fact that I lived with a Victorian naval officer was astonishing enough for me. I hung up the phone, heard my coins splash against other coins—the phone box was in use. What had other people needed it for? I wondered. An adulterous tryst, a whispered plea to the Samaritans? In an era of mobile phones, there were only a few things that mouthpiece would have heard. Love and endings. Panicked calls to the emergency services: Please, please, I don’t know if he’s breathing. I don’t know if he’ll make it.
IV
It is cold the next day. Of course it is cold the next day. They are in the Arctic. But they sometimes have days of glorious sunshine. The stewards hang the laundry on ropes outstretched from the rigging. At least one man aboard Erebus has red flannel underwear. (Gore, taking McClure’s decade-old advice, wears leather breeches beneath wool.)
The sunny days also induce snow blindness, as the summer rays bounce up from the ice like a tossed knife. The broad emptiness of the landscape (seascape rather—they are locked in pack ice) makes sound and movement travel weirdly. Taking a daily constitutional around the ship is to risk hallucination, to see hoards of assassins and phantom guests where a tin or a boot lies lumpen.
