Toward the end of the summer, two important things occurred.
The 1rst thing. We were on our bikes and had stopped at some traffic lights when a motorbike sped across the road in front of us, a midnight-blue metal blur. We were cycling home from an exhibition at the Natural History Museum. The motorbike was the 1rst thing to distract him from the theory of evolution, about which he had produced some exceedingly early-Victorian opinions.
He said, “Now there’s a good reason to invent the internal combustion engine. Why is it so much faster than a delivery motorbike?”
“DiPerent type of bike, I guess.” “And it is breaking no laws?” “No…”
“How fast can it go?”
“Now look. You’ve only just learned how to ride a bike!”
“Did Bellerophon, on seeing Pegasus, say, ‘Oh, no, thank you, terrestrial horses will be sufficient?’”
I emailed Quentin—guess what he wants now—and my email bounced back. The address auto1lled and had always worked before. I tried several diPerent iterations of Ministry email domains. None of them delivered.
While I was biting the skin oP my thumb and rereading the “Undeliverable” notice, I got a phone call on my work phone from an unknown number. All phones assigned to the project had private, protected numbers and there was no way it could have been a spam call, or even a casual one. I picked up. On the other end was the Vice Secretary for Expatriation.
“Good afternoon,” Adela said.
Her voice was quiet as cloth. She told me that my email had been forwarded to the 1nance department for approval, as Quentin was currently “unavailable.”
“Where is—”
“Are you enjoying your work?” she asked me. She sounded like she was reading from an autocue that had been placed just beyond comfortable distance. It occurred to me this might be a delicately oPered threat. I mumbled that I was very happy to be part of the project.
After I hung up—a varnish of sweat in the palm of my hand—I opened my work laptop. Theoretically, I knew that my internal emails were monitored, but I’d sent those messages only ten minutes beforehand, for Christ’s sake. I deleted the harmless Google account I had been using in a Chrome browser, then I deleted the browser.
It wasn’t punishment I feared, so much as the disempowering ePect of punishment. Every step in my career had been toward becoming the monitor rather than the monitored. It wasn’t that I didn’t have moral qualms, but I felt there was something sophomoric, unpragmatic about raising personal qualms in the jaws of the state machine. And so, in the back of my mind, an hourglass turned.
The second important thing that happened was: the movement restrictions on the expats were conditionally lifted. If they could pass an examination, set by Control, and demonstrate sufficient familiarity with the twenty-1rst century, then they had leave to travel within mainland Britain.
Another time-travel hypothesis from the early days of the project was that the dimensions of time and space were linked, not inextricably but like a lymphatic and circulatory system. Both were needed for the universe to function in a way hospitable to human survival, and both could be fatally damaged at discrete points while the rest of the “system” appeared to function. We needed to see the expats move through broader geographical space without atomizing into the scenery (or the scenery atomizing around them) to know for sure that the twenty-1rst century had accepted their presence.
The expats were envisioned as either foreign bodies against which the universe might launch an immune attack, or cells that could be recognized and incorporated by the “systems” into the body of the world. We used, once again, the word “assimilation,” but instead of survival we meant a sort of sublimation, a permeable boundary between the individual and the world they’d entered. To belong, the hypothesis suggested, is to have a stake in the status quo.
So I was anxious about Graham’s disdain for the twenty-1rst century, because never mind that I felt rejected by it, I was worried that the universe would feel the atemporal sting of his contempt and take him away. My England wasn’t like this, he’d told me—but this was the natural evolution of his England. I was the natural evolution. I was his lens if he would only raise me and look with me.
Graham told me that when the conditional lift of the movement restrictions was announced to the expats, they’d started “wagging their tails.”
“Oh yes? Are you insinuating that you were exempt from tail-wagging?” “I was very restrained. I only jumped up and licked the man’s face a little.”
He pronounced this “leetle,” with great tartness and vinegar. My nose went numb.
I persuaded Graham to use the tiny office, in which I ordinarily worked, to cram for the test. The Ministry gave no indication of what format the test would take, or what manner of questions would be asked, or tasks set. I thought this was unfair, and suggested as much to him.
“Oh, it’s not so diPerent from the lieutenants’ examinations. One had an idea of what one was expected to know, and the written portion was tolerable, but the oral portion depended on the mood of the men in front of you….”
“Were you nervous?”
“No. I was cocky, if you still use that word. I don’t think you would have much liked me at nineteen.”
We were having this conversation in the office. It was a tiny, south-facing room, stuPy in the August heat. In deference to the weather, he had rolled up his shirtsleeves, and the erotic charge of his bare forearms was giving me a
headache. There were two pale brown beauty marks on the inside of his left arm, and a Aimsy net of pink scars in the palm of his left hand. He 1lled the room like a horizon.
At thirty-seven, he was only a little less cocky than he was at nineteen, but more adept at hiding it. He had made friends with a couple of the range masters and quartermasters at the Ministry, and occasionally went down to the shooting ranges to unnerve the junior 1eld agents by besting them in target practice. By the time of the examination, he was also cramming the Highway Code, determined as he was to get on a motorbike and make mischief outside the boundary lines. He was spending more time at the Ministry, getting under people’s feet and asking questions, in that mild, impossible, unperturbable way of his. I had the feeling that I thought must aAict parents when their children start to grow apart and answer back. He was moving outside my observation, graduating from my guidance, 1tting this new plastic world around him.
The sunlight became acerbic. At midday it shone down vertically, so that, when I ventured onto the pavement, I walked into a world burned clean of shadows. I missed the shadows and the long English rains.
The expats were still struggling. Graham moved into crisis-management mode, though I’m sure he thought of it as keeping up his crew’s morale. With the permission of Control, and with the help of administrative staP, he organized a series of lecture soirees. On Tuesday evenings, a member of the Ministry would give a lecture on contemporary British culture, and then we’d all eat sandwiches with the crusts cut oP and drink lemonade and rum punch. On Thursday evenings, one of the expats would give a short presentation on something that interested them, and then we’d all eat bits of ham with cocktail forks and drink tepid beer and lukewarm Coca-Cola. It freed Margaret from doing all the cooking for the group dinners, which was, by the way, what had happened.
The Ministry lectures were, to a sentence, dreadful. Control handed down a series of prewritten presentations, and they were so didactic as to be oppressive.
They made me read a lecture on multiculturalism, the bastards, leaving blanks for insert own experience here. I gave it in a monotone without lifting my eyes from the page, then drank 250 milliliters of white wine at a quaP; Simellia gently clinked her full glass against my empty, her jaw set (she’d been asked to deliver a lecture on postwar migration from former colonies and the Windrush generation). Control’s lectures were nakedly about getting the narrative right. In their much-edited correctness, their placid-voiced hectoring, they bankrupted the energy in the room. Ideas are frictional, factional entities which wilt when pinned to Aowcharts. Ideas have to cause problems before they cause solutions.
The expats did much better. Contrary to what the simpleminded among us had expected, they did not give presentations on their eras. Margaret, who had responded far better than Graham to the magic of cinema, amazed us by putting together an actual PowerPoint presentation about why Charlie Chaplin “appears a fool but is verily a philosopher.” Cardingham climbed the podium with soldierly grace, 1xed us with a sneer, and, in language even more obscure than Margaret’s, delivered a summary of the Manson murders which was also, somehow, a deranged excoriation of vegetarianism. (His bridge, Ivan, was pulled into an emergency meeting the next day.)
Arthur Reginald-Smyth’s presentation was the talk of the Ministry. Reginald-Smyth was in his mid-thirties and quite handsome, in a washed-out, wipe-clean Anglo-Saxon way. He was over six foot tall but held himself as if he thought he should be shorter. He had a faint rhotic impediment, and his “r’s” Aattened into “w’s,” which may be why his presentation went the way it did.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “I’m afraid I’m a rotten public speaker, and so I won’t be speaking this evening.”
There was an embarrassed silence, then: “Shame!” yelled Margaret from the audience. “Fie! Rhubarb, rhubarb! And diverse other curses!”
I Ainched, but Reginald-Smyth smiled and made a sort of cheerful 1dgeting gesture, a bad actor ostentatiously preparing for his next line. There was a smattering of laughter as the audience realized they weren’t about to watch an unwell man humiliate himself by running away. How strange that it hadn’t occurred to me that the expats might be friends with one another, regardless of what I was doing.
“Er, Simellia,” said Reginald-Smyth, “could you…?”
Simellia was leaning against the wall, by the door that led to the lecture theater. She swung open the door with a fun little nudge of her hips, reached outside, and pulled something in. It was a Casio keyboard, on wheels. Another amused, appreciative murmur ran round the auditorium. She helped Arthur lift it onto the stage.
“Um, Forty-seven…,” said Reginald-Smyth.
Graham unfolded and ambled with studied nonchalance to the stage. He was holding what I brieAy mistook for an épée but was in fact his Aute. He leaped lithely up, beside Reginald-Smyth, who was glowing rose and trying hard not to corpse.
“We are going to oPer you eine kleine, er, ‘disco.’”
“We have rehearsed a little,” said Graham, “but not, I would say, copiously.” “We’d be telling you a tall one if we said ‘copiously,’” said Reginald-Smyth. “Indeed. Or, in fact, ‘well.’”
“Yes. We have not rehearsed well, or much. We are fairly dreadful.” “We are,” Graham con1rmed solemnly. “Godspeed to you all.”
They launched into a hornpipe, one that I’d heard Graham occasionally playing in the morning around the hour that he thought I should get out of bed (I didn’t), but after a few bars the song morphed into a Jackson 5 song. They were very good.
“Rhubarb!” Margaret shouted again.
There was more laughter. I felt, through the Aoor, a dozen feet begin to tap. Simellia slid onto the seat next to me. “Hi,” she whispered.
“Hey. You’re not going to ask me to dance, are you?” “Well, now you mention it…”
In fact there were a couple of members of the operative and administrative staPs hopping about in front of the stage, very young people who had been selected and fast-tracked from degrees at Oxford and Cambridge into the Ministry. I wondered how scary their NDAs were. One of them looked like he’d heard the term “throwing shapes” and was trying out some interpretative mime to realize it.
Simellia, in all other matters a restrained woman, couldn’t resist a wiggle to a tune. She shoulder-bopped in her chair. I side-eyed her.
“Did you know about this?” I whisper-demanded.
“Not until the last minute. They’ve been rehearsing in secret in a spare office. They came and found me yesterday, after my catch-up with my handler, to ask for help setting up.”
“Mm,” I said.
“They are likely to have asked me instead of you because they both know me, and the situation is not a reAection on your relationship with Eighteen-forty- seven,” said Simellia, who, in addition to being in thrall to rhythm, was also in thrall to doing best practice at me.
“Uh-huh.”
“You should both come over some time. We could play board games.”
“You do not want to play board games with me. I ruin every Christmas with Risk. Julius Seize-Her, my family call me. There isn’t a single board game you could name that I couldn’t suck the fun out of.”
“Shall we dance?” said Simellia, who had been watching the makeshift dance Aoor all through this intimate and vulnerable confession.
“No.”
“Come on. It’ll be nice for Arthur.” “No. Oh God.”
Simellia pulled me by the elbow toward where the back office staP were gyrating and started doing what I can only describe as cool-mum-at-a-concert swaying.
“Yeah, get in, ladies!” yelled Ivan, earning an indelible presence on my shit list. I looked wildly around, because there was nowhere in the room to look at that wasn’t, alas, in the room, which meant I was still in the room. I was in Graham’s sightline and I wanted to be eaten alive by a shark from the feet up.
“Oh, who’s that?” I said desperately.
Simellia did an outrageous winding thing to follow my gaze. “You’ve not met Salese?”
“No. Or if I have—mind my feet!—I don’t remember.”
The person I was referring to was lurking at the far edge of the auditorium, with hair the color of wet earth under moonlight and a pinched, unhappy expression. I don’t think Salese could have looked more disapproving if we’d all started sucking at one another’s Aeshly parts and chanting “Hail, Satan!” The Brigadier was standing beside Salese. They were speaking, heads close together. They looked as if they were in an invisible bell jar of gloom which blocked out the room’s miniature festivities.
“They make me sad,” murmured Simellia. “They weird me out.”
“Yes, that too.”
Each presentation was half an hour long, so the nightmare was over before I started wondering whether I should suggest the Electric Slide.
“Well done,” said Simellia. “You almost looked like you were about to start enjoying yourself.”
“For the most part, Simellia, I bow to your good judgment, but around anything with a rhythm you seem to think we’re in a musical.”
“There is no revolution without joy,” said Simellia. She’d switched back to her reAective counselor voice and seemed to be about to impart a life lesson. I wondered how many times she’d advised the radicalized teenagers she worked with in Kooks and Killers to keep a list of things they were grateful for, though I recognized the thought as spiteful.
“Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’d ask Seventeen-ninety-three about revolutions and the joy therein. Anyway, what revolution? We work for the government.”
Graham and Reginald-Smyth had clambered down from the stage and were standing just at the periphery of our conversation.
“Good lecture,” I said. “Unique.” “You did wonderfully,” said Simellia.
“Thank you,” murmured Reginald-Smyth. “The, er, the old light-fantastic tripping was much appreciated.”
“Yes, tripping is how I’d put it,” said Simellia.
I moved slightly sideways to jab her in her ribs.
I said, “Cambodia holds the Guinness World Record for the largest Madison dance in the world, I’ll have you know. I mean, I wasn’t there. But I’m claiming it.”
“That’s jolly nice,” said Reginald-Smyth. “What’s a Madison?” “What’s a Guinness?” asked Graham.
“The Madison is a line dance. It got very popular in Cambodia in the 1960s and never stopped being popular. Well, except during the—Anyway, my parents had a couple of Madison dances at their wedding, I’m told. My mother’s great at dancing. When she was a little girl she wanted to learn traditional folk dance, but she was sent to a lycée in Phnom Penh and it wasn’t on the curriculum, quelle surprise.”
“A lycée?” Reginald-Smyth echoed politely. During my speech he had looked more at sea than perhaps even Graham had been as a lifelong career sailor.
“A French school. Cambodia used to be a French protectorate. My grandfather was in politics, and he wanted her to be évoluée. Evolved. To the French system.”
Neither the Victorian nor the Edwardian seemed surprised by this, though Simellia breathed deeply through her nose.
Graham and Reginald-Smyth wandered oP to get their fair share of the room’s congratulations.
Simellia said, “My mother liked a party too. She used to organize the Easter ball for our church.” She had turned to look at the clock on the far wall, so I couldn’t see her expression, but I heard the way her voice shivered on the past tense.
“Évoluée,” she muttered. “Remind me to lend you my Frantz Fanon.”
“I won’t. Another do-good second-gen whose mother used to party, huh?
Does this country have a factory setting for them or what?”
“Well, we’ve both got eldest-daughter disease,” said Simellia, turning back to me. “My siblings went in other directions. My brother’s in the music business, and my sister makes fancy cakes. They call me the Cop. Every time I ring up my brother he goes, ‘Hello, Officer.’ When he was a bit younger he used to call me Babylon, but he stopped when I threatened to tell his producer he’d gone to private school.”
I laughed and let Simellia slip her arm through mine. I was thinking: two siblings, dead mother, no mention of her dad as yet. Put that in the 1le and remember it. And I was thinking: Why is it always the eldest daughters?
I never did read the Fanon, though I don’t think I would have understood it. I didn’t understand that my value system—my great inheritance—was a system, rather than a far point on a neutral, empirical line that represented progress. Things were easier for me than for my mother; things were easier for me than for my father; my drugs were cleaner, my goods were abundant, my rights were enshrined. Was this not progress? I struggled with the same baAement over history, which I still understood in rigid, narratively linear terms. I should have listened more carefully to Adela about history. I know Adela would say the same.
I traveled in with Graham for his acclimatization examination, in hopes of seeing Quentin, whose phone no longer connected. We’d both become habitual cyclist commuters, but on that day, we took the tube, imagining it would be less sweaty. Foolish, guileless us. The tube was a sauna in August. For the examination, he had put on a suit (sixties style, slim-cut, painfully becoming). He was suPering.
“If I expire, will you bury me at sea?” “I promise. Irish? Channel? Atlantic?”
“Arctic,” he said, maudlin. “At least it’s cooler there.” “Take oP your jacket.”
“Believe me when I say that you do not want me to take oP my jacket.”
I wished him luck at the staP entrance and watched him pass a handkerchief over his sweat-damp curls. I walked up to Quentin’s office, but it was empty. Not even a laptop charger remained. I put my head around the aquarium door of another handler (formerly a member of the intelligence services, assigned to Thomas Cardingham’s team).
“Sadavir!”
“Hey! How are you doing? Heard your expat’s taking the exam today.” “Yep! He’s… con1dent, I think.”
“Seems he’s adjusting well. Idiosyncratically, but well.”
“He killed all the squirrels in the garden. And he won’t watch TV.” “Uppity bastard.”
“Ha!”
“Could be worse. Our boy’s mainly interested in Minecraft and s*x workers.
It’s been a real fucking pain to get that squared on the budget.”
“Ah, yeah, I can imagine. Quentin’s been on me to get Eighteen-forty-seven to cut down on smoking.”
“How is Quentin? I heard he was reassigned.” “Is that what’s happened?”
Sadavir frowned and stood up. For a moment I thought he was about to reprimand me for losing track of my handler—which surely was my handler’s responsibility, not mine—but I realized he was directing the frown over my shoulder. I turned.
“I hope I am not disturbing you.”
The Brigadier stood in the doorway, accompanied by Salese. “Can we help you, sir?” Sadavir asked, stepping in front of me.
“I’m looking for the Vice Secretary. I have heard there have been some issues with one of your free travelers.”
“Do you mean the expats?”
“Yes,” said Salese quickly, “that’s meant. We rec see her.” “We would like to see her,” the Brigadier said.
I tried to catch Sadavir’s eye, but he was looking between the Brigadier and Salese.
“I hope you understand why I am asking, sir,” he said, “but could I see some identi1cation?”
The Brigadier pulled a Ministry-issue ID card from his pocket and handed it to Sadavir. He was looking worse than when I last saw him—he had that inePable air of someone who has to boil hot water on his stove for bathing, which was surely incompatible with his rank. He saw me staring, and I lowered my eyes.
Sadavir handed the ID back. “Vice Secretary Adela is in a Control meeting,” he said carefully, “and so, of course, none of us know where she is exactly. But
yes, the meeting is about Seventeen-ninety-three proving the space-time hypothesis right. The twenty-1rst century appears to be rejecting her. This was in the reports to Defence, sir,” he added reproachfully.
“Oh, it’s not the century, it’s the soul,” said the Brigadier. “Her ‘hereness’ and ‘thereness’ have no consistency, no continency, and she is beginning to slip out of time. It is unusually accelerated in Seventeen-ninety-three. She does not even try to bring her ‘thereness’ in line, you see. Because she is grieving, and grief will always take one out of time.”
Sadavir looked worried. “Is that what Defence think?” he said. “Have you told the Vice Secretary?”
“I’m afraid I’ve only ever met the Secretary,” said the Brigadier. “But I would very much like to meet Vice Secretary Adela.”
He considered me again, cold and curious. I felt a boyishness about him— not playfulness or youthfulness, of which he had neither—rather the quality of his focus, which was as intense as a child experimenting dispassionately with the limbs of a pet, to see how far they turned before they broke.
I went home and, on arrival, checked my emails. As with a driving test—or the lieutenants’ exam—the acclimatization exam results were delivered immediately. Graham had passed.
I cycled up to the nice grocery store to buy a bottle of champagne, pausing on the way home for a soft-serve ice cream. I sat on the bench to lick the ripple into a mound and think about the Brigadier. A man of bivouac experience, I felt; there was something disturbingly makeshift about both him and Salese, as if they’d been dropped behind enemy lines and were mimicking familiarity while waiting for the right moment to cut a throat.
Despite the group dinners, despite the empathy exams and the language tests and the jolly little Aat with Ed, the jolliest and youngest of the bridges, the Ministry had more or less agreed that Anne Spencer—Seventeen-ninety-three— was a failed experiment and probably dying. Her blank MRI scan was one of many examples Ed had glumly 1led of her body failing to register with modern
technology before he stood down. She was invisible in recorded time to all things but the naked eye. The Brigadier’s contention that this invisibility was internally rather than externally wrought was interesting. It might bring a new facet to identity politics: “What time are you?” “Are you multi-temporal or stuck in a time warp?” Or maybe a mismatch of internal and external experiences of time was more like carrying cancerous cells. “Do you have the time?” we could ask, and mean, “Do you think you’ll survive?”
I 1nished my ice cream and watched the evening slide around. The sun started slipping oP the sky, and breezes patchworked the air. By the time I’d cycled back, Graham had returned. He had stacked several ice cube trays and was taking them upstairs.
“Congratulations!” “Thank you!”
“Bought this to celebrate.” “What a kind thought.”
“Where are you taking those ice cubes?”
“I am going to have the coldest bath that modern technology can muster.”
“If I put this in the freezer for 1fteen minutes, do you want a glass in the bath? I can leave it outside the door.”
“You are a dreadful decadent. Yes, please. I am also going to smoke half a packet of cigarettes, I think. One after the other.”
“They gave you a grilling, then?”
“Apparently I can pass as an eccentric. I suggested that somewhere like Scotland, Arthur and I might simply pass as Englishmen. One of the panel was a Scotsman, and I think he liked that.”
When I brought the glass up—stoppering the rest of the bottle for dinner—I could hear Graham singing “I love to steal awhile away,” occasionally muAed by his drags on a cigarette. Water plashed against the tub. He dropped to humming and presumably soaping. I slid quietly to the Aoor and leaned my head against the wall. I wasn’t going to see a Ministry therapist. I knew I should, and I knew I wouldn’t.
The following week, we had Margaret and Captain Reginald-Smyth over for dinner. Graham decided to make a spaghetti Bolognese, as we both reasoned that it was easy, delightful, and modern.
With the exception of naval rations meted out during Discovery Service expeditions, cooked over camp1res and valued for their fuel rather their Aavor, Graham had never so much as heated a bowl of soup before arriving in the twenty-1rst century. On ships there were cooks and officers’ stewards; at home, on the few occasions he was at home, there were women. Nevertheless, he had taken to cooking in a way he had failed to take to television or texting or the use of deodorants (“I bathe every day,” he’d said to me with hurt dignity). Tonight, he hummed with a busyness that hardly shielded nervousness. He burned the onions and automatically reached for his cigarettes. I took them away—I didn’t want ashy Bolognese—and he accused me of “nanny-stating” him, a turn of phrase I found very alarming because I certainly hadn’t taught it to him. Where was he picking this stuP up?
The doorbell rang while the sauce was reducing. He handed me the wooden spoon and went to answer the door.
“Hello, Sixteen. Hello, Sixty-1ve. Welcome.”
“Forty-seven!” exclaimed Margaret. “This is a bold adventure! I arrived on a ‘bus.’”
“Evening, Forty-seven,” I heard Reginald-Smyth say. “That smells nice.” “Kind of you to say so. I’m afraid I’m going to have to get you both very
drunk. I’m not a much of a cook.”
He brought them into the kitchen.
Margaret was wearing high-waisted cerulean bell-bottoms and a white blouse clocked with lace. She looked like a disco goddess, an astonishing concoction given that she was only barely older than the piano, never mind the synth.
“Hello,” I said, stunned.
“Hello!” she said, in her unplaceable accent, and surged into my arms.
She beamed up at me, and I must have swallowed loud enough for my throat to click in her ear, because she said, “Am I mistaken? I have seen folk greet each other like this. Though Forty-seven will not let me.”
“No, no, this is 1ne. Feel free to stay here. I’ll have his hug for him.”
Reginald-Smyth (“Call me Arthur”) forwent the hug and shyly shook my hand. “Ripping to see you,” he murmured. He pronounced this in a way that was close to “whipping,” and I saw Graham suppress a twinkle.
I dropped the wooden spoon back into the pan and said, “Would you like a martini? It’s the only drink I know how to mix. This is a classy household.”
“‘Classy’?” asked Margaret.
“Fine and noble, here applied mockingly,” said Arthur. “As you should know of any household that contains Forty-seven.”
“Belike I’ll be Auent after a ‘classy’ martini.” “I like those trousers,” I said to her.
“Many thanks! I do like the zipper—see?” She demonstrated unzipping her pockets. “The time I might have saved on trussing myself in stays had I but a single zipper…. Did you have the zipper?”
“No,” said Graham.
“No, though they were coming into use in my time,” Arthur said. “They are a goodly invention.”
“A little… dangerous, sometimes,” said Arthur carefully. “Dependent on their placement.” He caught Graham’s eye, and they grinned sheepishly at each other. Graham forgot to put the spaghetti on, and Margaret started hiccuping at the 1rst mouthful of her martini. The men smoked copiously in our not overlarge kitchen, and I’d forgotten to wash up all the matching plates. Nevertheless, the little party was very pleasant. I opened a bottle of wine (Margaret couldn’t 1nish her martini), and we toasted the only thing we could all agree was good about
twenty-1rst-century Britain: music when you damn well wanted it.
They were friends, I saw—not incidentally, but real friends. Margaret had tried to befriend Anne Spencer but had been thwarted by her reticence and by what Margaret called her “sorrows.” Margaret loathed Cardingham, and Arthur stiAy referred to him as a “difficult chap.” This interested me, as Graham often boxed with him.
“He is a pizzle-headed doorknob,” said Margaret.
“Very colorful,” said Graham. “But he is as stranded as we all.”
“I don’t know, Forty-seven,” said Arthur. “I don’t particularly want to spend my rescued life around him.”
“He mun be returned to the cowpat whence they dragged him. How do you stand him, Gray?”
“One develops a great deal of patience at sea.”
“You make the navy sound like the priesthood,” said Arthur. “Hmm.”
Arthur was happy and Aushed. He was one of those unusual extroverts who have all the attributes of an introvert, save that they like being around other people. He had a gift for gentleness too, one of the rarest virtues in any gender and especially in the kind of man Arthur was supposed to be. I eased some biography out of him: half-decent public school; classics at Oxford, where he’d had a lot of fun and failed his exams; retraining as a doctor.
“Made a mess of that too,” he added.
“Not good with wiggly internals and so on?” I asked.
“No, I quali1ed all right. But I didn’t much care for the other chaps. Brutish breed. The profession makes a man hard in the heart, or it did in my time. They get rather superior. You can’t be superior about other people’s pain. I threw that in after a few years. Started over in the Raj; some school fellow of my father got me a job. Oversaw the building of some unwanted railways, which bene1ted nobody but the company. Dreadful stuP. I was transferred to our London office about six months before Germany invaded Belgium.”
I saw Graham’s eyebrow quirk in a rascally way as he did the math. “You became a captain extremely quickly, Sixteen. Found your forte?”
Arthur grimaced. I saw his hand shiver momentarily on his glass, and then he swallowed everything in it with a wet click. “Promotion was—fast—in the war,” he said shortly.
He added that he probably would have been happy as a teacher or a vicar but he’d come from the sort of family where the former was an embarrassment and the latter a punch line. I 1led these desires away as “professionalized fatherhood”; some days later, taking a long lunchtime walk around Bloomsbury with Simellia, she described Arthur as having “a deeply moral sense of his duty of care” and I felt ashamed of my absent-minded cruelty to someone I liked.
Margaret, incidentally, listened to the men talk about their careers with a suPused urgency that only I noticed. In her own era, she’d slept in the room next
to the one where she had been born. She thought Scotland was far-Aung and semi-barbaric. When we came round to talking about my time working as a translator in Cambodia, I felt her attention all over me. I may have talked slightly too much.
How the topic of weed came up I couldn’t remember—probably during one of the vigorous debates about what the twenty-1rst century had genuinely improved, which in the opinion of the expats was a mixed bag. I was shortly handing my grinder and papers to Graham (who was far more adept at rolling).
Meeting Margaret made me vivid and receptive. Sentences weighed more. I kept a half-conscious catalog of where the men were looking. I’ve seen people deal with this in diPerent ways. By “this,” I mean power. I mean magnetism. I try to absorb it. Within twenty minutes Margaret and I were planning a girls- take-Soho night out, which necessitated me explaining the history of Soho, the concept of clubbing, the genre of R & B, the club night R & She, and dancing. I hadn’t been clubbing since I was an assistant in Languages. No matter.
“I know a little of the pavane and the jig… but if there will be only women…” “You really don’t need to worry about that. You just sort of… throw yourself
around. And wiggle.”
“I would like to be ‘thrown,’” she said wistfully. “Here. I’ll teach you the Electric Slide.”
“I say, that looks fun,” said Arthur. “What’s it called? The Electrical Slide…?”
He was swaying, and his oddly seductive rhotacism had intensi1ed. Graham pinched the joint out of his 1ngers.
“Don’t encourage them, Sixteen. I’m going to open another bottle of wine.” “I’ve had enough of the polka. I want to learn the Electrical Slide.”
“What manner of dance is a polka?” asked Margaret, breathlessly, mid-slide. “Ask Forty-seven to teach you. I think they had it in his time.”
“I will not be press-ganged into dancing, thank you,” Graham said, and slid with the bottle of wine oP to the left.
“Hey! You can dance!”
“Such matters are between myself and God,” he said gravely. “Oh, stop frowning, Sixty-1ve. Arthur, will you please lead her in a polka, if you can still stand.”
Arthur got up, and we exchanged a sort of maddened, camp, bowing exchange of Margaret between us, but as soon as she was gathered into Arthur’s arms, I started to laugh helplessly. Margaret barely came to his shoulder.
“Oh… oh God… you look like a handsome giraPe… and his tiny rabbit wife… ahaha haa… God…”
“You take her, Forty-seven.” “Excuse me!”
“Here.”
“I don’t dance. I took up the Aute especially, in order that no one would ask me.”
“In this age, musicians are imprinted inside music boxes, and there is no need for the band to keep time,” said Margaret. “You will instruct me in the polka, or I will step on your toes.”
“I think ‘feminism’ has gone to your head. Ow!” “May I have this dance?” Arthur asked me.
Graham had never, even pulling out my chair in restaurants, even handing me plates in the kitchen, deliberately touched me. It was strange to see him handle Margaret. My heart was careening in a way that felt inextricable from a good time. I pulled up to Arthur.
“I’ll teach you some swing dance,” I said. “I had a terrible ex-boyfriend who was very into Lindy Hop, and he used to drag me out to lessons with him, so I have to pass the talent on like a curse.”
“I understood at least half of those words. I’ve known men like that. Who lead one in a merry dance.”
I looked at Arthur thoughtfully. I had accidentally caught his eye a number of times that evening. On reAection, every time it had happened, it was because our glances had both been resting on Graham.
At the other end of the kitchen, I heard Graham saying, “Your other left.” “Go to! Why do you not instruct more levelly?”
“Why do you keep trying to lead? No, Sixty-1ve, your other other left.” “You are a terrible teacher.”
“I don’t dance. Ow!”
Arthur, by contrast, danced beautifully. He dipped me, and I bent like a reed.
He spun me, and I was, with such satisfaction, spun. “Why, Captain. You’ve got fresh and funky before.” “My dear lady, we invented the ‘fresh’ and the ‘funky.’”
There must have been something in our movement, or the music, that triggered a memory of the trenches—or something else, an agony in Arthur that was unrelated to the brief bloody corridor of the war. We’d 1nished the joint long enough ago that it can’t have been the vertigo-nausea of a bad reaction. Whatever it was, it came over him like a caul. Without any warning, he blanched, and I felt a slick cold sweat transfer from his palm to my waist.
“Arthur?” I said, at the same time Graham said, “Sixteen?”
Arthur passed a shaking hand across his forehead. His breath was coming in short bursts.
“Oh… For—give—mm—”
“It’s too warm in here,” said Graham. He’d drawn Arthur from my grasp and was steering him toward the kitchen door. “Let’s sit outside and have a cigarette. I need to rest my feet. Maggie Aattened them.”
Arthur wheezed in a way that passed as a laugh. He was high-shouldered and skittish in Graham’s careful grip, and then he was suddenly slumped against him, his face turned against Graham’s ear.
“Tobacco deprivation is very dangerous,” said Graham. “I’m—sor—”
“Be careful of the step.”
I felt Margaret squirrel her hand into mine. Graham shot me a look—in fact, a look—and the weight of its exchange pulled my heart upward. I asked Margaret if she had been introduced to the phenomenon of modern makeup and took her up to my room.
As soon as she stepped in, I started making a tally of the evidence of unbeauty. There was a chair whose seat was 1lled with clothes too dirty for the wardrobe but too clean for the washing basket. My bedside table sprouted two water glasses and a mug. Dust crouched on the skirting boards and in the seams of my chest of drawers. When a woman is as impossibly attractive as Margaret, the mediocrity shed by a woman like me bustles around her like a horde of
pigeons. Or so I thought, at that time. Truthfully, I’d been foxed by how beautiful she was. I felt a complicated anguish when I saw her little besocked toes treadling the carpet.
Margaret appeared unaware of any of these concerns. She didn’t even glance at herself in the mirror. She gave me an interested grin as I pulled out my lipsticks.
“Oh! What manner of material makes this color?” “I have no idea.”
“I do not think I have seen such color. ’Tis very dramatic.”
“Yeah. I’m actually not sure why I own blue lipstick. Here, try this pink. It doesn’t suit me, it makes me look a bit green.”
“It matches with my pustules,” she said sadly. (She had a bijou constellation of acne across her forehead and cheeks. She made acne look chic.)
“Oh. Well, there’s foundation for that. Look…”
I’d stopped wearing it—I was, at the time, thinking of the way my face might be received by a Victorian who didn’t approve of cosmetics—but I demonstrated the coverage of my sole foundation. Margaret was amazed by the smoothness of its application and the faithfulness of its shade. She drew an arrow with it on her cheek. On her fair skin, it looked like clay. We started giggling.
By and by, the drink and the weed overtook us. We took the conversation to a horizontal position, struggling as we both were with articulation and uprightness. We lay face-to-face on the bed, woozy and languid. I had an obscure sense that I had won something, though whether from Margaret, oP Graham, or within myself I wasn’t sure.
“You’re pretty,” I said. “You are pretty.”
“Feel a bit tired.”
“Mmm. Are you Graham’s mistress?” “Mmf. No. God. No. Just his bridge.” “Oh,” she said, and fell asleep.
I began to doze. I didn’t know how much time passed, but I came to when I heard his voice.
“… check on Maggie and my guard cat.” The door to my bedroom creaked.
“Your bridge is very kind. Strange, though, for a bridge.” “She’s a strange woman. Ah.”
“Oh. Leave them, Gray. Poor things.”
“The degeneracy of this era. They have not even taken down their hair.”
The door grumbled shut and I fell back into a doze. Margaret was snoring lightly, like a puppy being squeezed. The door reopened, and I surfaced to vague consciousness. I felt a wave of cool air, and then a gentle warmth. He had spread a blanket over the pair of us.
The next morning, Margaret and I woke up with no voices. We crept downstairs together for tea and toast. When we got to the kitchen, we found that the men had done the washing up.
Autumn set in like a decorative inlay. The trees wilted and dropped leaves. Leaden clouds enameled the sky, and the wind picked up all over the city.
Graham and Arthur had decided to go to Scotland for the stag season— partly so that they could experience a domestic Aight. They Aew to Aberdeen, watched by the Ministry. They were shadowed by 1eld agents, but once the pair got to the tiny Highlands town where they were staying, the Ministry had to call oP the shadows. The town was the sort of quiet, close-knit place where the locals were wary of suspicious characters with no obvious purpose.
All the expats had phones, paid for (and tapped) by the Ministry. Graham had switched his own phone on a total of three times in the seven months he had been in the twenty-1rst century. I was therefore unsurprised when, about half an hour after their plane landed, I got a call from Arthur’s phone.
“Hi, Arthur!”
“It’s me. Sixteen is clinging to a wall.” “Oh! Hello. How was your 1rst Aight?”
“It was both extraordinary and terribly mundane. Though I’m afraid Arthur and I nearly broke each other’s hands during takeoP.”
“Ha! Did your ears pop?”
“Yes! Very strange. But the aeroplane took us above the clouds! They were beneath us like a mattress. They looked almost solid.”
“Fun fact, the average cloud weighs about 1ve hundred and 1fty-one tons.” “That is a fun fact.”
“You didn’t have any trouble at the airport?”
“The machine that reads bodies stopped working when I passed through it.” “Reads…? Oh, the body scanner. It didn’t go oP?”
“Some airport officer had to manhandle me to ensure I was not carrying weapons. In full view of everyone! My honor has been impugned.”
“Oh dear. Now you’re spoiled.” “No one will ever take me as a wife.” “I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“Somehow I will bear it stoically. Now, I must go, because if I don’t smoke a cigarette soon, I am going to bite through a wall.”
After the call, I turned on my laptop to check the Teams channel—me, Quentin, Control, the Wellness team, and the administrative staP assigned to Expat Eighteen-forty-seven. The 1eld agents had already 1led an alert about the body scanner failing to “read” Graham. Recommend returning expats to base, one of the agents had written. I thought about the boyish grin on Graham’s face when he came home after passing the exam, his high-spirited singing in the bath. I typed fast.
Overcorrecting out of cautiousness will be as damaging to his adjustment as forcing him home. His “readability” has not, hitherto, been a cause of concern.
Then, in the private conversation with Quentin: he’s gone thru the scanners at the staff entrance with no problem, right? most of the time.
Quentin’s status was invisible. It had been for a while.
In the main channel, a member of Graham’s Wellness team was agreeing with me.
His “read” rate average is 86% and has been since records started. By far the highest of all the expats. We don’t want to risk alienating him and impacting that average.
Records started two weeks ago, the agent typed.
Several people started typing, but stopped when Adela—whose status was also invisible—dropped:
ACCORDING TO YOUR REPORT 1916 FOLLOWED 1847 AND WAS TEMPORARILY
UNREADABLE, SUBSEQUENTLY READABLE. SUGGESTS DELIBerate attempts to test
readability. Do not interfere. Expats will be monitored on their return.
The conversation ended there. Adela could do barking over a meeting even over Teams.
“Thank you,” I said out loud. I slammed the laptop shut.
After that, I drifted through the house like a purposeless balloon. In truth I was purposeless: my job for the bridge year was to watch him, and he was not there to be watched.
I went into his room. He was a neat man, used to the limited space of a cabin at sea, and there wasn’t much to see. I sat on the very edge of the bed. It was a double, and I knew from past conversations that he slept like a dropped twig at one far end of it, accustomed as he was to ships’ berths. I didn’t rummage through his drawers for his journal, or sketches, or push my face into his clothes. I acted as if watched by an invisible audience who were checking for signs of mania.
A few days after he and Arthur had left England, Simellia paid me an unannounced visit. She came in the wake of a new project-wide working group on “readability” and the Brigadier’s concepts of “hereness” and “thereness.”
This was a development of such signi1cance that the Secretary had been forced to chair a working group, announcing (glassy of voice and face) that while bridge work wasn’t changing, the Wellness team would be “running some tests”
on the expats, monitoring “vitals and responses” under “standard and stressor conditions.”
“Sounds a bit MK-Ultra,” I’d ventured. “Unprecedented in the history of the world, et cetera,” he’d told the air to the left of my head.
“Oh, Simellia, hi.”
“Hello. Hope I’m not disturbing you. I wanted to see how you were doing since Quentin’s reassignment.”
“Yes—of course—come in—”
I put the kettle on and made a performance of biscuits. The air around us Aexed with expectation. I said, “Can’t believe we’re dealing with the long, dark time-travel of the soul, or whatever Defence think ‘thereness’ is. Quite a change from Kooks and Killers, eh?”
“We tend not to use that nickname in the department.”
I winced. She added, not unkindly, “You know how it is. I’m sure you’re tired of people making jokes about Google Translate.”
“I suppose so. Builder’s okay?”
“Yes, thanks. Am I right in thinking that your grandfather was a governor of the rain forests in Cambodia or something like that?”
I made an audible syllable of surprise, which was drowned out by the kettle. I was always on high alert, minimum, when people asked about my heritage with any taxonomic speci1city. I never knew what they were hoping to do with it. My sister described these interactions as “microaggressions,” as if she didn’t talk about her Cambodian heritage at every possible opportunity. I probably had her latest essay, published in an online magazine the previous week, about the psychic horror of passing as white, to blame for Simellia’s question. My sister and I shared the same bizarre Eurasian double-barreled surname, so we were easy to link. I sometimes wondered if my sister had decided to develop daddy issues about our long-dead Cambodian grandfather because our father was a nice, quiet white guy who liked afternoon naps, making long lists, and curating complete sets of things (stamps, DVDs, limited-edition fountain pens)—he was not someone you could have an interesting and publishable psychological complex about.
“Er, my grandfather was governor of Siem Reap until he was dismissed in ’1fty-1ve,” I said. “I guess there are a lot of rain forests in the province. Ha, but if you know that, I expect you know what happened to him.”
“Disappeared.” “Mm.”
I felt her gaze through my hair.
“I know that was a bizarre thing to bring up,” she said. “It was pretty spicy.”
“It’s just that… given your family history, I suppose I’m a bit surprised by your choice of career. Your time in Languages… it’s all a bit, dare I say it, postcolonial. Are you hoping that the time-door will—?”
“Adela said that you can’t change the past, you can only change the future.” “That’s wordplay. Changing the past is changing the future. Your girl just
means that the past exists the way she says it exists. Have you managed to get your commander to stop calling me a Negress, by the way?”
She was smiling as she spoke, but as Simellia often smiled, even when she was angry, I dropped into a crouch, spiritually.
“I’m so sorry.” “What for?”
I thought it might be callow to say, “For the existence of racism.” I ummed and erred and eventually said, “If it’s any consolation, he has asked me, straight of face as you like, about being ‘half-caste.’”
“Is that a consolation? No sugar, thanks.”
I put the tea bags on the sideboard. A pad of hardwater scum disported across the top of my mug.
“I appreciate,” I said slowly, “that this project is more fraught for you than anyone else—”
“Stop hand-wringing,” said Simellia, still smiling, though increasingly looking as if the smile was being operated by winches inside her skull. “God, Ministry bias training has a lot to answer for,” she said. “I don’t want to drop a piano on your head, but believe it or not, I already know I’m Black. You don’t have to roll over and show me your belly about it.”
I put the tea down in front of her.
“I’m sorry if I said something that upset you,” I said. “You haven’t upset me. You’re just boring me.” “Okay.”
“‘Okay.’ I bet you had a Tumblr.”
That made me laugh, albeit nervously. Simellia’s smile loosened a bit. “Called it,” she said. “I bet you put up a Black Lives Matter reading list.”
I sat down. I had, in fact, shared someone else’s reading list, but she could have me lick the Aoor clean of germs before I’d admit it right then.
“Simellia,” I said, “has something happened?”
Simellia rolled her shoulders. She seemed discom1ted in her own immaculate costume.
“Yes,” she said 1nally. “Do you remember when you told the Secretary that you were 1nding the whole proposed ‘readability’ monitoring a bit MK-Ultra? It got me thinking about what we’re doing with the expats. I’m a clinical professional. I’m supposed to be governed by a code of ethics.”
“What about the rest of us?”
She hadn’t touched her tea. “What about the rest of you?” she said. “Hello, Officer.”
“Stop it,” she said, far more sharply than she’d ever spoken to me. “Take things seriously for a moment.”
I bristled—not visibly, not readably, but inside me I felt the spikes slide out. I should have ended the conversation there. Spikes under the skin, that angry internal prickle—I hated to have the lower hand, and I’ve never been good at managing it graciously.
“I’m not going to insult you by feeding you aphorisms about omelets and broken eggs,” I said. “But you signed up for this job. You thought, as much as I did, that what we were doing was world-changing. That’s what you wanted, remember? Do you think the world changes by being asked politely? Or do you think there has to be risk?”
She took a deep breath. All the emotions I normally watched her puree into professionalism were churning on her face.
“I came here,” she said, “because you—because—I thought you would understand. Don’t you? Being the experiment. Being the pioneer they break the
concepts on. The fivst. Are there any other Cambodians on the core team? Any other Southeast Asians, even? I can tell you exactly how many Black people there are, and I’d only need one hand to count them oP.”
I leaned back in my chair. She wasn’t telling me oP, and yet I felt scolded. She reminded me of my sister sometimes.
“Simellia,” I said, “I’m not a victim. I don’t give people an excuse to make me a victim. I’d advise you not to give them the opportunity either.”
Simellia stared. The emotion in her face spiraled away, water down a plughole. She stood up. “Thanks for the tea,” she said coldly.
I let her leave without saying goodbye and sat in the pool of silence that followed the crash of the front door slamming shut. This was one of my 1rst lessons in how you make the future: moment by moment, you seal the doors of possibility behind you.
5
“Your feet are swelling,” Goodsir notes.
Gore is back in the sick bay aboard the Erebus. Stanley is yanking at his cuffs, yelling for hot water. Gore’s frostnip isn’t the worst cold injury the crew has seen—not even the worst Gore himself has suffered—but Stanley’s agitation is heightened by the report Gore just delivered.
“You’re certain you shot him dead?” asks Lieutenant Le Vesconte, the second lieutenant. A veteran of the Opium War, Le Vesconte is calm and soldierlike, and like many men of his kind, has a tenderness about bloodshed.
In the same even tone, Goodsir adds, “Mr. Gore never misses.”
Gore appreciates the assistant surgeon’s steady irony. Goodsir is his friend, as much as a commander and a lesser surgeon can be friends. No, that’s unfair—they are friends. Goodsir is a career scientist; if there were figs on board, he wouldn’t care about the gold epaulettes on Gore’s shoulders.
“I thought he was a seal,” says Gore. “Poor fellow. I ran over as soon as I heard him cry out.”
“He was definitely dead?” Le Vesconte asks again, his voice sounding raw.
“Yes. Send a couple of men to retrieve the body,” Gore replies. “Take tobacco. Steel knives if we can spare any. Leave something to show we mean no further harm. Don’t disturb the corpse.”
“I’d be cautious about arming those people, Graham,” Le Vesconte murmurs, “given the circumstances.”
“Tobacco, then. Mr. Goodsir?”
“Sir?”
“Can I walk on these?”
Goodsir inspects Gore’s feet. He takes one swollen arch and rubs it briskly.
“I know it doesn’t matter what I say,” Goodsir remarks. “You’re going to walk on them anyway.”
“Well done.”
Gore starts to force his feet back into his boots. His gloves rest beside him on the table, crusted with a brownish stain. The Esquimaux had bled through his furs. By the time Gore reached him, his eyes had already clouded over.
“I shot him through the heart, Harry,” Gore says absently.
Goodsir doesn’t reply, but he squeezes Gore’s arm. Why? Gore checks his inner state, like winding a chronometer. Is that a feeling stirring in his chest? Does he need comforting?
Above deck, the watch begins stamping and shouting. A flurry of boots on the ladderway. Someone has spotted a group of Esquimaux approaching the ships.
