The Map of Time

by Félix J Palma

  He walked slowly through the house, with almost ghostlike footsteps, and, unable to find her in the sitting room or in the kitchen, he went on upstairs to the bedroom. There was Jane standing by the window, waiting for him. The moonlight framed her naked, tempting body. With a mixture of astonishment and lust, Wells examined its elements, its proportions, the supple wisdom with which her womanly parts, always glimpsed separately or divined through fabric, formed a greater landscape, creating a liberated, otherworldly being that looked as though it might fly away at any moment. He admired her soft, malleable breasts, her painfully narrow waist, the placid haven of her hips, the dark woolliness of her pubis, her feet like small, appealing animals.

  Jane was beaming at him, delighted to feel herself the object of her husband’s astonished gaze. Then the writer knew what he must do. As though obeying an invisible prompter, he tore off his clothes, also exposing his nakedness to the light of the moon that instantly outlined his skinny, sickly-looking frame. Husband and wife embraced in the middle of their bedroom, experiencing the touch of each other’s skin in a way they never had before. And the sensations that followed also seemed magnified, for Claire’s words etched in their memories redoubled the dizzying effect of each caress, each kiss. Real or imagined, they abandoned themselves hungrily, passionately, anxious to explore each other, to venture outside the boundaries of their familiar garden of delights.

  Later on, while Jane slept, Wells slipped out of their bed, tip-toed into the kitchen, took up his pen, and began to rapidly fill the paper, prey to an uncontrollable sensation of euphoria.

  My love, How I long for the day when at last I shall be able to experience all the things you have described to me. What can I say except that I love you and I shall make love to you exactly as you describe? I shall kiss you tenderly, caress you softly and reverently, enter you as gently as I can, and, knowing as I do everything you are feeling, my pleasure will be even more intense, Claire.

  Tom read Wells’s passionate letter with suspicion. Even though he knew the author was pretending to be him, he could not help thinking those words might just as well come from both of them.

  Wells was evidently enjoying all this. “What did his wife think of it?” Tom wondered. He folded the letter, replaced it in the envelope, and hid it under the stone next to the mysterious Peachey’s tomb. On the way back, he went on mulling over the author’s words, unable to help feeling as if he had been left out of a game he himself had invented, relegated to the mere role of messenger.

  I love you already, Claire, I love you already. Seeing you will simply be the next phase. And knowing we will win this bloody war gives me renewed joy. Solomon and I locked in a sword fight? Until a few days ago, I would have wondered whether you were quite sane, my love; I could never have imagined we would settle our differences with such a prehistoric weapon. But this morning, picking through the ruins of the History Museum, one of my men came across a sword. He deemed the noble relic worthy of a captain, and, as though obeying your command, solemnly presented me with it. Now I know I must practice with it in preparation for a future duel, a duel from which I shall emerge victorious, for knowing that your beautiful eyes are watching me will give me strength.

  All my love from the future, D.

  Claire felt her knees go weak, and, lying down on her bed, she luxuriated in the wave of sensations the brave Captain Shackleton’s words had unleashed in her heart. While he had been dueling with Solomon he had known she was watching him, then … The thought made her slightly dizzy again, and she took a moment to recover. Suddenly, it dawned on her she would receive only one more letter from her beloved. How would she survive without them? She tried to put it out of her mind. She still had to write two more letters. As she had promised, she would only tell him about their encounter in the year 2000 in her last letter, but what about the one she had to write now? She realized, somewhat uneasily, that for the first time she was free to write what she liked. What could she say to her beloved that she had not already said, especially considering that everything she wrote must be carefully examined in case it conveyed information that might jeopardize the fabric of time, apparently as fragile as glass? After some thought, she decided to tell him how she spent her time now, as a woman in love without a lover. She sat at her desk and took up her pen: My darling, You cannot know how much your letters mean to me. Knowing I shall only receive one more makes me feel dreadfully sad. However, I promise I will be strong, I will never falter, never stop thinking of you, feeling you near me every second of each long day. It goes without saying that I will never allow another man to tarnish our love, even though I will never see you again. I prefer to live from my memories of you, despite the best efforts of my mother to marry me off to the wealthiest bachelors in the neighborhood—naturally I have told her nothing of you (my love would seem like a waste of time to her, for she would see you as no more than a pointless illusion). She invites them to our house and I receive them courteously, of course, and then amuse myself by inventing the most outrageous reasons for rejecting them, that leave my mother speechless.

  My reputation is growing worse by the day: I am doomed to become a spinster and a disgrace to my family. But why should I care a fig for what others think? I am your beloved.

  The brave Captain Derek Shackleton’s beloved, although I have to hide my feelings for you.

  Apart from these tedious meetings, I devote the rest of my time to you, my love, for I know how to sense your presence swirling around me like a fragrance even though you are many years away from me. I feel you near me always, watching me with your gentle eyes, although at times it saddens me not to be able to touch you, that you are no more than an ethereal memory, that you cannot share anything with me. You cannot slip your arm though mine in Green Park, or hold my hand as we watch the sun go down over the Serpentine, or smell the narcissi I grow in my garden, whose scent, my neighbors say, fills the whole of St James’s street.

  Wells was waiting in the kitchen, as before. Tom silently handed him the letter, and left before the writer could ask him to. What was there to say? Although in the end he knew it was untrue, he could not help feeling as though Claire were writing to the author instead of to him. He felt like the intruder in this love story, the fly in the soup. When he was alone, Wells opened the letter and began to devour the girl’s neat handwriting: In spite of all this, Derek, I shall love you until my dying day, and no one will be able to deny that I have been happy.

  And yet, I have to confess it is not always easy. According to you, I will never see you again, and the thought is so unbearable that, despite my resolve, I try to make myself feel better by imagining you might be mistaken. That does not mean I doubt your words, my love, of course not. But the Derek who uttered them in the tearoom was only guided by what I am saying now, and it is possible the Derek who hurried back to his own time after making love to me in the boardinghouse, the Derek who is not yet you, will be unable to bear not seeing me again and will find a way of coming back to me. What that Derek will do, neither you nor I can know, for he is outside the circle. This is my only hope, my love—a naïve one perhaps, but necessary all the same. I dearly hope I see you once more, that the scent of my narcissi will lead you to me.

  Wells folded the letter, put it back in its envelope, and laid it on the table, where he stared at it for a long time. Then he stood up, walked round the kitchen in circles, sat down, stood up again, and walked round in circles some more, before finally leaving for Woking station to hire a cab. “I’m going to London to settle some business,” he told Jane, who was working in the garden. During the journey, he tried to calm his wildly beating heart.

  At that hour of the afternoon, St James’s Street seemed lulled by a peaceful silence. Wells ordered the cabdriver to stop at the entrance to the street and asked him to wait for him there. He straightened his hat and adjusted his bow tie, then greedily sniffed the air, like a bloodhound. He concluded from his inhalations that the faint, slightly heady odor remin
iscent of jasmine, which he detected through the smell of horse dung, must be narcissi. The flower added a symbolic touch to the scene which pleased Wells, for he had read that, contrary to popular belief, the name narcissus derived not from the beautiful Greek god but from the plant’s narcotic properties. The narcissus bulb contained hallucinogenic opiates, and this oddity struck Wells as terribly appropriate: were not all three of them (the girl, Tom, and himself) caught up in a hallucination? He studied the long, shady street and set off down the pavement with the leisurely air of one out for a stroll, although as he approached the apparent source of the aroma, he began to notice his mouth becoming dry. Why had he come there, what did he hope to gain? He was not sure exactly.

  All he knew was that he needed to see the girl, to give the recipient of his passionate letters a face, or, failing that, to glimpse the house where she penned her beautiful letters. Perhaps that would be enough.

  Before he knew it, Wells found himself standing in front of an undeniably well-tended garden with a tiny fountain on one side, and enclosed by a railing at the foot of which lay a carpet of pale yellow flowers with large petals. Since the street boasted no other garden that could rival its beauty, Wells deduced that the narcissi before him, and the elegant town house beyond, must be those of Claire Haggerty, the unknown woman he was pretending to love with a fervor he did not show the woman he truly loved.

  Not wishing to give too much thought to this paradox, which was nonetheless in keeping with his contradictory nature, Wells approached the railings, almost thrusting his nose through the bars in an attempt to glimpse something behind the leaded windowpanes that made sense of his urgent presence there.

  It was then he noticed the girl looking at him slightly perplexed from a corner of the garden itself. Realizing he had been caught red-handed, Wells tried to act naturally, although his response was anything but natural, especially since he realized straightaway that the girl staring at him could be none other than Claire Haggerty. He tried to gather himself even as he gave her a docile, absurdly affable grin. “Magnificent narcissi, miss,” he declared in a reedy voice. “One can smell their aroma from the end of the street.” She smiled and came a little closer, enough for the author to see her beautiful face and delicate frame. Here she was at last, before his eyes, albeit fully clothed. And she was indeed a vision of loveliness, despite her slightly upturned nose that marred her serene beauty reminiscent of a Greek sculpture, or perhaps because of it. This girl was the recipient of his letters, his make-believe lover. “Thank you, sir, you’re very kind,” she said, returning the compliment. Wells opened his mouth as if to speak but hurriedly closed it again. Everything he wanted to tell her went against the rules of the game he had consented to play. He could not say that although he might appear an insignificant little man, he was the author of those words without which she claimed she could not live. Nor could he tell her he knew in precise detail her experience of sexual pleasure. Still less could he reveal that it was all a sham, urge her not to sacrifice herself to a love that only existed in her imagination, for there was no such thing as time travel, no Captain Shackleton waging war on the automatons in the year 2000. Telling her it was all an elaborate lie which she would pay for with her life would be tantamount to handing her a gun to shoot herself through the heart.

  Then he noticed she had begun giving him quizzical looks, as if his face seemed familiar. Afraid she might recognize him, Wells hurriedly doffed his hat, bowed politely, and continued on his way, trying not to quicken his pace. Intrigued, Claire watched for a few moments as he vanished into the distance, then finally shrugged and went back inside the house.

  Crouched behind a wall on the opposite pavement, Tom Blunt watched her go back in. Then he emerged from his hiding place and shook his head. Seeing Wells appear had surprised him, although not excessively. The author would likewise not have been surprised to find him there. Apparently, neither of them had been able to resist the temptation to look for the girl’s house, the location of which she had subtly revealed in the hope that if Shackleton came back he could find her.

  Tom returned to his lair in Buckeridge Street unsure what to think of Wells. Had the author fallen in love with her? He did not think so. Maybe he had gone there out of simple curiosity. If he were in Wells’s shoes, would he not also have wanted put a face to the girl whom he addressed using words he would probably never utter to his own wife? Tom fell back on the bed feeling completely exhausted, but his anxiety and permanent state of tension prevented him from sleeping more than a couple of hours, and before dawn, he set off once more on the long journey to the writer’s house. These walks were keeping him more fit than the training sessions they were put through by Murray, whose hired assassin had not shown up again to punish his flagrant breaking of the rules. Even so, Tom had no intention of lowering his guard.

  Wells was waiting for him on the doorstep. He did not look rested either. His face was crumpled, and his eyes had dark shadows under them, although they were twinkling mysteriously.

  Doubtless he had been awake all night writing the letter he now had in his hand. When he saw Tom, he greeted him with a slow nod and held out the missive, avoiding looking him in the eye.

  Tom took it from him, and, similarly unwilling to break the silence charged with tacit understanding, turned to go back the way he had come. Then he heard Wells say: “Will you bring her last letter even though it needs no reply?” Tom turned and looked at the author with a profound sense of pity, although he did not know whether he felt sorry for Wells or himself, or possibly for Claire. At length he nodded glumly and left the house. Only when he was at a comfortable distance did he open the envelope and begin to read.

  My love, There are no narcissi in my world, nor the least trace of any flower, and yet I swear that when I read your letter I can almost smell their fragrance. Yes, I can envisage myself standing beside you in the garden you speak of, which I imagine carefully tended by your lily-white hands and perhaps lulled by a babbling fountain. In some way, my love, thanks to you, I can smell them from here, from time’s distant shore.

  Tom hung his head, imagining how moved the girl would be by these words, and he felt pity for her again, and in the final analysis, an overwhelming sense of self-disgust. The girl did not deserve to be deceived like this. The letters might save her life, but in the end they were only repairing the harm he had so selfishly caused, merely to quench the fire between his legs. He felt unable simply to congratulate himself for preventing her suicide and forget the whole thing, while Claire was ruining her life because of a lie, burying herself alive due to an illusion. The long walk to Harrow helped him gather his thoughts, and he concluded that the only reparation he could make that would ease his conscience would be actually to love her, to make into a reality the love for which she was willing to sacrifice herself, to bring Shackleton back from the year 2000, to make him risk life and limb for her, exactly as Claire was hoping. That was the only thing that would completely atone for his wrongdoing. But it was also the one thing he was powerless to do.

  He was reflecting about this when, to his astonishment, he caught sight of the girl under the oak tree. Despite the distance, he recognized her at once. He stopped in his tracks, stunned. Incredible as it seemed, Claire was there, at the foot of the tree, shielding herself from the sun with the parasol he had traveled through time to bring her. He also glimpsed the coach at the bottom of the hill, and coachman nodding off on his perch. He quickly hid behind some bushes before one or other of them sensed his presence. He wondered what was Claire doing there, but the answer was obvious. Yes, she was waiting for him or rather she was waiting for Shackleton to step through a hole in the air from the year 2000. Unable to resign herself to living without him, the girl had decided to act, to defy fate, and what simpler way of doing so than by going to the place where the captain emerged to collect her letters. Desperation had compelled Claire to make a move that infringed the rules of the game. And, watching her from behind the bushes, Tom
kicked himself for not having foreseen this possibility, especially as the girl had given him ample proof of her courage and intelligence He remained in hiding almost the entire morning, watching gloomily as she circled the oak tree, until finally she grew tired, climbed into her carriage, and went back to London. Then Tom finally emerged from his hiding place, left the letter under the stone, and made his own way back to the city. As he walked, he remembered the tormented words Wells had used to end his final letter: A terrible sorrow overwhelms me when I realize this is the last letter I am going to write you, my love.

  You yourself told me it was, and I believe you are right about that, too. I would love nothing more than for us to go on writing to one another until we meet next May.

  However, if there is one thing I have learned from all this, it is that the future is predestined, and you have already experienced it. And so I can only suppose something will happen to stop me from sending you more letters; possibly use of the machine will be banned and my hitherto unsuccessful mission called off. I feel torn, as I am sure you can imagine: On the one hand, I am happy to know that for me this is not a last farewell, for I shall see you again very soon. On the other, my heart breaks when I think that you will never hear from me again. But this does not mean my love for you will die. It will live, Claire, I promise you, for one thing I am sure of is my love for you. I shall carry on loving you from my flowerless world. D.