The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August(55)

He puffed impatiently. “You know how it is, Harry. Can’t risk introducing too much new technology into the course of the linear timeline without being able to control the consequences. Risks drawing attention, rocking the boat–you’re Cronus Club, you must know all about that. Speaking of which…” he flicked a fingernail casually against the ridge of its neighbour, making a soft thwap-thwap noise “… should I be expecting the combined forces of the world’s Clubs to descend on me any second now?”

“The Clubs know my suspicions, if that’s what you’re wondering, and are under orders to pursue the matter if I vanish.”

He groaned, throwing his eyes up to heaven in exasperation. “That’s incredibly tedious, Harry, actually. What people never realise about the Soviet Union is how much bureaucracy there is at the middling level. It’s all very well if you’re the general secretary–people know better than to take notes then–but for anyone further down than Politburo there’s a huge amount of documentation that has to be accounted for whenever shutting down or moving these projects.”

“Doesn’t sound very secure,” I admitted.

“Politics,” he spat. “Everyone is always looking for material to use against everybody else–my point being, Harry, I could really do without the frustration of having to move bases again. Do you think the Club will find you, if you vanish?”

“Maybe,” I replied with a shrug. “Is that the situation we’re looking at here? Am I going to vanish?”

“I don’t know, Harry,” he murmured thoughtfully. “What do you think?”

For the first time our gazes locked, and there was no student there, no young man wanting to go punting on the Cam with a girl called Frances to embarrass a rival, but an old, old man in a young man’s body, staring out from those still-round eyes. I pulled the gun from my coat, laid it quietly in my lap, finger inside the trigger guard. The movement caused his eyes briefly to flicker, before settling back on me.

“Not for me, I trust?”

“Just in case reporting back becomes difficult.”

“Of course–a bullet for your brain. How determined of you. Although…” he shifted gently in his seat, shoulders twitching in what might have been a shrug “… what do you really have to report?”

I sighed. “I don’t suppose it would be too much for you to tell me what’s going on here?”

“Not at all, Harry. Indeed, it is my hope that, once you are aware, you may even join us.” He stood, gesturing courteously towards the door. “Shall we?”





Chapter 46


My father.

I think of my father.

Both of them, in fact.

I think of Patrick August sitting silently across from me by the fireside, peeling the whole skin off an apple, one twist of the fruit at a time.

I think of Rory Hulne, an old man with a great swelling in his left leg, who in one not so special life in 1952 sent a letter informing me that he was holidaying on Holy Island; would I join him? I was a professor of mathematics, married to a doctor of English literature, Elizabeth. Lizzy wanted children and berated herself for the fact that we seemed unable to have them. I loved Lizzy as a loyal companion and a kind soul, and stayed with her until her death in 1973 from a series of strokes which left her largely paralysed down the left-hand side, and did not seek her out in future lives.

I am on Holy Island, the letter said. May you join me?

“Who is this Mr Hulne?” asked Lizzy.

“He was the master of the house where I grew up.”

“Were you close?”

“No. Not in this life.”

“Why in God’s name does he want to see you now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Will you go?”

“Maybe. He will be dying by now.”

“Harry,” she chided, “that’s an awful thing to say.”

It was seven hours by train to Alnmouth, the train pausing at Newcastle to let the black-faced driver take his deserved break on the green wooden benches of the red-brick station. When he pulled his cap off, there was a line of soot across his forehead, stopping at the headband, and two owl-circles around his eyes when he lowered his goggles. A child waved at me excitedly from its mother’s lap on the opposite platform. I waved back. The infant kept waving for the fifteen minutes we were in the station, and, wearily, I felt obliged to return the gesture. By the time we left, my arm ached, as did my smile, and the feeling that this journey was a terrible mistake grew on me. I flicked through the newspaper on my lap, but had read it some few lives ago and grew irritated by its na?ve coverage of events yet unfolding. The crossword in the back frustrated me–I had answered nearly every clue three lives ago, when I attempted this same crossword during a break from the Europe desk at the Foreign Office, and three lives ago I had been stumped by the very same clue which now I could not penetrate: “Hark–a twist in the road, I perceive”, eight letters and, I was infuriated to find, as impossible now as it had been those centuries before. Maybe, for one life only, I could be the man who wrote to the newspapers to complain.

The tide was in, Holy Island cut off from the mainland, the causeway visible only as a few sticks protruding above the surface of the water. I paid an old man with a rowing boat full of crab cages and no crabs for a ride across the water. He said nothing the entire length of the journey, and rowed with a rhythm so steady you could have set a pacemaker by it. As he rowed, the fog rose up across the water, smothering land and sea, obscuring the black remains of the castle that crowned the island’s hill. By the time we reached the shore, the fog had cut visibility down to a few white cottages peering out from the edge of the hill, through which the mournful call of the thick-fleeced lost sheep wailed. The island was yet to discover its role as a tourist temple, selling almost-home-made jam and practically-hand-made candles, but had a reputation as a place where people went to be alone, to forget and, yes, even to die beneath the old Celtic crosses. It wasn’t hard to find my father–the strangers in town were all well noted. I was directed to a room above a small-doored cottage owned by a Mrs Mason, a cheerful, rose-faced woman who could crack a chicken’s neck between thumb and forefinger and who didn’t believe in this new-fangled NHS business, not when there were gooseberries in the garden and rosehip cordial in the kitchen cupboard.