A Tale of Time City (12 page)

Sam was in trouble too. The Time Patrol lady had given him grey shorts with red braces and he got tangled in the braces. For his feet, he had heavy lace-up boots with steel segs in the soles, and these gave him even more trouble. So, while Jonathan, dressed in grey flannel and glasses, jittered impatiently about with the egg in his hand, Vivian did her best to sort Sam out. She got the braces straight. She knelt down and laced the boots, and tied each one in a double bow, knowing what Sam was like. But nothing would persuade Sam’s hair to stay hidden under his striped school cap. Vivian had to find a rubber band from her shrunken coat pocket and fasten his hair in a knob on top of his head, like Sempitern Walker’s.

“I feel hideous!” he complained.

“You look it,” said Jonathan. “Are you ready
now
?” He held the grey egg up. “The station at the moment I found V.S.,” he said.

Hot afternoon daylight streamed from the slab of slate and was interrupted by a big billow of yellow smokes, which blew into their faces smelling like fish. Sam coughed. “It’s different!” he said hoarsely, as the smoke cleared.

Maybe, Vivian thought, they had come a moment or so later. The train was chuffing slowly out of the station, sending fogs of the yellow smoke rolling along the platform. It was hard to tell just what the difference was, but it did seem that the figures of herself and Jonathan were a long way further up the platform towards the exit, as if Vivian had just climbed out of quite a different carriage. The crowd of evacuees was milling about beyond them and it seemed a much thinner crowd than Vivian remembered. Sam’s father, when she glimpsed him murkily through the smoke, was not having nearly so much sorting out to do.

“Get going while the smoke’s there to hide us!” Jonathan said, hurriedly stuffing the egg into his box.

Sam walked forward and Vivian followed. Smoke surrounded them. The nails in Sam’s boots chinked on the platform. Vivian looked round in time to see Jonathan coming out of nowhere behind them. Oh dear! she thought. Now he’s the only one with a gas mask. I hope we don’t meet an Air Raid Warden!

“Where do we go now?” Jonathan whispered.

Vivian had not given as much thought to details as Jonathan. She had to think quickly. If they went up to the exit, they would run into Sam’s father and Jonathan’s. She turned the other way. “There must be a way out this way,” she said.

They passed some milk churns. The smoke cleared as the train
left and they came out into hot yellow sunlight at the very end of the platform, where it sloped down to the grass beside the railway lines. There was a convenient little white gate in the wire fence labelled GWR PRIVATE. They went through it, private or not, and came into a road where sparse groups of children with gas masks and luggage were already walking away with the people who were giving them homes.

“You’ll want a nice cup of tea,” they heard one say. “And you can have the room my Will had before he was called up.”

“I brung me teddy,” one of the children announced. “Ain’t he loverly?”

Jonathan looked back to the station building. “Shall we go and look for your Cousin Marty?” he said. “She must be quite worried by now. Or would it be safer to wait here till she comes by?”

“I don’t know what she looks like,” Vivian confessed. “I’m not even sure that she’s a she. All I know is the address on the other side of my label: M. Bradley, 52 Gladstone Road. We’ll have to go to the house and wait for her to get back. Or him.”

“You might have said so
before
!” Jonathan said, exasperated. “I could have brought a street map.”

“It’s the country. It won’t be big,” Vivian said soothingly.

They set off after the crowd of evacuees and hosts, down the sort of street there always is near a station.

“Horrible houses,” Sam said, chinking sturdily along.

“Hideous,” Jonathan agreed.

“I’m not responsible,” Vivian said huffily. But she felt she was rather. The red brick rows made a dismal contrast to the buildings of Time City. And by the end of that street it became clear to her
that, though this town was small compared with London or Time City, it was still big enough to get lost in. They turned into another street and another. The crowd in front of them dwindled away down other streets, and none of the roads were called Gladstone Road. In the end, Jonathan stopped the last group of evacuees before they could dwindle away too, and politely asked the grown–ups with them where Gladstone Road was.

He was given rather confusing directions, and they set off again. Before long, they found themselves in the centre of what was obviously a thoroughly sleepy town. There was nothing much in sight except some ancient ruins over the road and a garage with one rusty petrol pump and TYPHOO TEA painted on the house that belonged to it. There was a man in overalls pottering about the pump. Vivian timidly crossed the road and asked him the way.

His directions were much clearer, but it was a long distance. They walked and walked, right to the other end of the town. It was still very hot. Vivian’s mixture of clothes felt more and more uncomfortable. Sam’s bootlaces came undone in spite of the double bows and he stumbled over them. Jonathan had sweat dripping out from under his glasses. He became more and more snappish and kept staring round as if he expected someone to ambush him from behind a street light or a pillar box.

“You might have explained properly that you had no idea where you were going!” he said angrily, while Vivian was kneeling in the road tying Sam’s boots.

“And we could have brought something to drink. I’m boiling!” Sam complained.

“So am I. At least you’ve got bare knees,” Jonathan said.

“But these boots are like lead foot-muffs,” said Sam. “Can’t I take them off?”

“No. That’s not respectable for these days,” Vivian said. “There. That’s
double
-double bows, and if they come undone again I’ll—I’ll eat my socks!”

“Oh let’s get on with this wild-goose chase!” Jonathan said. “I don’t believe there’s a Gladstone Road or a Cousin Marty anywhere in the
century
!”

Vivian took a moment to haul up her socks. Without her garters, they fell down every other step. She was not sure she believed in Cousin Marty any longer either. Ever since those slight but definite differences at the station, she had felt very uneasy. History had changed here. It could mean that nothing she knew was true any more.

She was quite surprised when they came to Gladstone Road round the next corner. It could have been the road outside the station. There were the same red houses, yellow privet hedges and silver railings, but since it was on the other side of the town, they could see green country rearing up beyond the roofs. There was a hump of hill with trees on it and, almost behind that, another taller hill, covered in grass with some kind of tower at the top.

Number fifty-two was half-way along. They hovered uncertainly outside its spiked silver front gate. “Let me knock,” Vivian whispered. “If she’s back, I’ll ask for a drink of water and then get talking.” But she still hovered. This town was so much bigger than she had expected that it did not seem likely any longer that Cousin Marty would know anything about the other evacuees. Jonathan
was right to call it a wild–goose chase… And I still have to go away again and come back for some reason, she thought. It all seemed more impossible the longer she stood there.

“Bother you!” said Sam. He boldly opened the gate and climbed the path to the front door, where he seized the door-knocker and battered away with it.

Someone snatched the door open. A thin withered lady stood there with her arms folded, looking grimly at Sam. She had warts on her face. Her hair was done up in a brown turban and the rest of her in a brown dress. “What do you want?” she said. “I thought it was the other one come back or I wouldn’t have opened the door.”

“Water!” groaned Sam, like someone dying in the desert.

Jonathan pushed him aside. “Mrs. Bradley?” he asked smoothly.

“
Miss
Bradley,” the lady contradicted him. “Miss Martha Bradley is my name, my boy, and I don’t—”

“Quite so,” said Jonathan. “And you were supposed to be having Vivian Smith to stay with you—”

“Don’t talk to me about that!” Miss Bradley said angrily.

“I only wanted to enquire—” Jonathan began, still trying to be smooth.

But Miss Bradley interrupted him with a gush of angry talk. “I know there’s a war on,” she said, “and I know we all have to do our bit. So when my Cousin Joan writes to me from London after never a word for all these years, I
don’t
tell her the things I had a mind to tell her, though I know she only remembers me when she wants something. I said I’d have the child. Mind you, in the ordinary way
nothing would possess me to have a shoddy little Cockney in my house—”

“Shoddy little Cockney!” Vivian exclaimed, staring at the lady with indignation mixed with strong horror. Surely she could not be Cousin Marty! But Mum’s name was Joan, so it looked as if she must be.

“That’s what I said,” Miss Bradley agreed. “They all have headlice. And worse. I was prepared for that. But I nearly dropped when I found he was a boy. Then he cheeks me to my face—”

“Excuse me,” Jonathan interrupted. “Did you say a boy?”

“I did,” said Miss Bradley, refolding her arms more grimly still. “I don’t have boys in my house. You may have nice manners, but you don’t step over my doormat, my boy—you, or the other one. My cousin Joan played a dirty trick on me, with her nice letter, all Cousin Marty this, Cousin Marty that. She never mentioned that Vivian is a boy’s name too. I’m going to write and give her a piece of my mind about that!”

So this
was
Cousin Marty! And it sounded as if there had been another mix-up worse than any of the wildest worries Vivian had had on the train. She nudged Jonathan to suggest they came away. There did not seem much point in finding out any more. But Jonathan stood where he was.

“Your story fascinates me strangely,” he said. “So you met a boy named Vivian Smith at the station just now?”

“What else could I do?” Cousin Marty demanded. “He went up to Mrs. Upton and then to Lady Sturge and asked them if they were there to meet someone called Smith. Then he came up to me and waved his label at me! I was standing right beside them. I couldn’t
very well deny my own flesh and blood in front of Lady Sturge, could I? So I took him in charge and brought him back here. And we were hardly through the front gate before he cheeked me and went off again. If you’re looking for him, my boy, he’s not here!”

“Do you know where he went?” Jonathan asked.

“Up the Tor, for some reason,” Cousin Marty said. “I said, ‘And where do you think you’re going?’ And he says, ‘I’m going up the Tor. And since you’ve made it so clear you don’t want me, I probably won’t come back.’ The cheek! Then he says, ‘I’ll find someone else more like a human being,’ he says, and off he goes. I wish I’d never bothered to get in some meat paste for his tea now!”

“Ah,” said Jonathan. “Then perhaps you’d be kind enough to direct us to this Tor?”

“So you
are
a friend of his!” Cousin Marty said. This clearly damned all three of them black in her eyes. “Everyone knows the Tor!” But, probably to make sure that they went, she stepped down from her stance in the doorway and pointed above the roofs of the houses. “That’s the Tor. The green hill behind with the tower on top.”

“
Thank
you, Miss Bradley,” Jonathan said unctuously. He was very excited. He turned round and bundled Vivian and Sam down the path to the gate so fast that Sam’s sliding boots struck sparks from the gravel. “Go on, go
on
!” he whispered.

“If you find him, tell him from me he’s not coming back here!” Cousin Marty shouted after them. “He can go to the Mayor and get himself allocated to someone else!” She waited to make sure they were out of the gate and the gate was shut. Then she went indoors and shut her front door with a slam.

Jonathan set off at a fast walk towards the green hills. Sam
chanked behind miserably. “She never gave me any water,” he said. “I don’t like it in history.”

“You won’t die,” said Jonathan, striding along. “If you ask me,” he said to Vivian, “you’re well out of that. I did you a favour the other night. She must be one of the most horrible women in history!”

Vivian agreed with him. “Shoddy little Cockney!” she muttered to herself. The thought of having to stay with Cousin Marty made her back crawl. She would just have to make the time-lock take her back to Lewisham instead. Mum would understand, when she heard what Cousin Marty was like. “Why are we going after this boy?” she asked.

“Don’t you see?” Jonathan said excitedly. “
That’s
how she gave everyone the slip! She knew they were looking for a girl, so she disguised herself as a boy and asked people if they’d come to meet someone called Smith. Ten to one, someone would say Yes, with a common name like that, and then she could go off with them under Sam’s father’s nose. It was pretty clever! And thanks to you, we’ve got a chance of catching her that Chronologue never dreamed of!”

“But what if this is just an ordinary boy who happens to be called Vivian?” Vivian objected.

“We have to check up on him. You can see that,” Jonathan said confidently. He clearly had not the least doubt that they were on the track of the Time Lady at last. His confidence seemed to blaze them a trail to the Tor. At the end of the next street, where there did not seem any way to go, he led the way without hesitation into a grassy footpath. This took them along under the nearer hill with
trees on, between hedges loaded with hawthorn berries and some ripe-looking blackberries.

Even Sam revived here. He ate all the ripe blackberries he could reach. “This part of history’s better,” he announced.

At the end of the path, they climbed a stile into a field. Now the Tor was directly in front of them. It was a strangely regular round hill, quite high and steep, and covered with grass. The tower on top was like the tower of a church without any church to go with it.

“It looks like Endless Hill,” said Sam.

“With the Gnomon on top,” said Jonathan. “It does. How peculiar! No steps up it though—just a path.”