What about us? (33 page)

I looked at her as I spoke.  I
couldn’t tell her the whole truth, but I was not lying to her and she knew
that.

She understood exactly what I
meant and could see beneath the words.  She understood me; it was a revelation. 
In that moment I admired this woman who had come into the world with almost
nothing and had fought for her right to survive, even though the odds had been stacked
against her.  Armed only with sheer bloody minded determination and helped by
an act of kindness, she had built a better life for the generations that
followed her.

Slowly she came to a decision. 
She moved her bony hand to bring me closer; she wasn’t going to risk anyone
else hearing what she was about to say.

“He ain’t dead.” she said,
quickly but quietly.

“Who isn’t dead?” I asked.

Relief flooded through me; she
was going to tell me something, something that would help, I felt sure of it.

“My lying bastard son Charlie,
that’s who.” she whispered.

Thoughts began to fly about in
my mind, then started dropping into place, bringing isolated pieces of the
jigsaw closer together.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Last I heard, over in Bishops
Road in one of them grand houses.  Goes by the name of Sidney Green these days. 
Don’t tell him about me being here, I don’t want him at me funeral.  I don’t
want him meddling where he ain’t got no right to meddle, not anymore.  Not now
and not when I’m gone.” she said firmly.

“I promise Sal, I promise.  And
thank you.”

I sat with her for a while
longer and only when she drifted off to sleep did I leave.  I was saddened by
her pitiful state; she had been so strong once.  It almost felt as though the
other me, the one who had known her all that time ago, was standing beside me
and that the feelings I was experiencing were his, although I knew that he’d
never witnessed this event.  Something else to think about later I thought.  I
tried to shrug the feelings off and made enquiries at the taxi rank as to where
Bishops Road might be.

Once there I knocked on a few
doors and eventually found someone who knew him and was able to tell me the
right house to go to.  A maid opened the door and informed me that Mr Green was
at work and would not return until after six pm, but that Mrs Green was in and
did I want to see her? I found that I did.

Mrs Green was both charming and
lovely.  Her English was faultless, but it was clear to me that it was not her
mother tongue.  It was also obvious that she was a little anxious about my
visit.  As I had given no reason for it, I wondered why that could be.

She took me into the drawing
room and asked the maid to bring tea.

“I’ve been expecting you.” she said
quietly.

She asked me to sit down and
then sat opposite me, but on the edge of her chair.  She twirled her wedding
band nervously and I noticed it was on her right hand, not her left.  That and
the faint accent she was trying to conceal led me to believe that she was
German.

“Will the children be able to stay
with their father?” she asked softly.  “They have already had so much upheaval
in their short lives.  I wish to avoid more, if it is possible to do so of
course.”

This was my cue; I was able to
smile and tell her the truth.

“That is not why I am here Mrs
Green.  I am not taking you to one of the internment camps.  I cannot promise
that it will not be necessary later, but it is not the purpose of my visit
today.”

As she looked at me I saw both
hope and confusion flare in her intelligent brown eyes.

“I wish to confirm and explore
some interesting facts about your husband and your life together.  Will you
assist me?”

I leaned forward as I spoke and
held her eyes in mine for a moment.

“Yes.” she agreed, sighing
softly, “If it will help matters.”

“It may indeed.” I assured her,
knowing full well that we were talking at cross purposes, but choosing not to
enlighten her to the fact.

I was able to leave the large
and comfortable home of the Green family before Sidney, or rather Charlie,
returned from work.  With me I took an interesting tale and was marvelling, not
for the first time, at the things men and women will do for love or what they
believe to be love.

I walked some way down the
street until I was sure there was no one about, then lifted my wrist and set the
coordinates for the year 2895, thankful that I was able to leave wartime London
before nightfall, when the bombs would start raining down again.   I needed
access to the database of the library of that period and once at another safe
house, I made myself comfortable and mulled over what I had learnt from the
delightful Elsa Green.

Charlie Grundy and his friend
Sidney Green had been wounded and were taken prisoner on the Western Front in
1916.  They were both treated at a German field hospital, where a sweet and
very young Elsa had been assisting the nurses.  While Charlie survived his
wounds, Sidney did not and somehow, in the chaos of transferring Charlie to a
POW camp, their identities got mixed up; something Charlie had always meant to
put right as soon as he could.  Elsa had been quite firm on that point.

Late in 1917, he and some
others managed to escape, but as they made their way back towards the Front,
meaning to rejoin their battalions, they were ambushed.  Charlie was wounded
again and taken to a German hospital, where as luck or fate would have it, Elsa
was working.  Their acquaintance was renewed and they fell in love.  He was
transferred once more to a POW camp, but it was not far from the hospital, so
they kept in touch and romance was able to blossom.  When the war ended and
prisoners were being returned to British orders, he managed to slip away.  In
my opinion, he clearly saw a benefit in leaving the administrative mistake as
it was.

Elsa’s family was wealthy and
Jewish, but this wasn’t a problem in 1918 or the immediate years that followed. 
When they married in 1922, Elsa and her family were not aware of the deception that
Charlie was weaving them into.  They didn’t know that his name was not his own,
neither did they know that he already had a wife.  But to be fair to the man,
he was unaware that his son Henry existed.  Divorce was a taboo subject in
those days and he didn’t want to risk losing Elsa and in my view, the life that
came with her.  For Elsa, I am sure it never crossed her mind.

However, I had seen the life
Charlie would have had.  It would have been better than Sal’s had been, but
nothing compared to what Elsa could offer him.  He made a choice; one that I’m
sure he never regretted.  But times changed around them though, and eventually
Charlie could see what was coming.  By November 1938 they had three children; a
girl born in 1925 and two boys, born in 1928 and 1933.

The terror of Kristallnacht
forced him to make a decision.  He was English, even with his borrowed name.  And
they had money, so he brought his family home to safety.

The problem of course, was that
their safety depended on Elsa being married to Charlie.  Bigamy was a crime and
there could be trouble ahead, so Charlie was forced to confide in her.  He
could never be sure that he wouldn’t run into anyone from his previous life and
at her insistence they turned to his mother for help.

While Sal could never condone
what he’d done, or what he’d put them all through for the years they’d believed
him to be dead, she couldn’t turn her back on her only son and the three
grandchildren she’d never known she had.  Family, it appeared, was always
family, no matter what had been done and family had to stick together, so she
didn’t turn him over to the authorities and she never told a soul about his
return from the grave.  That is, apart from me.  While she hadn’t wanted to
meet Elsa and the children, she helped them settle and did what she could to
let them start a new life; untroubled by the old one.

As I was leaving, I advised Elsa
to do the same as her mother-in law had done; she had to keep the secret and
tell no one else, no matter who they were and to forget that her husband had
ever been Charlie Grundy.  She was the only one who could encourage him to do
the same; sever all links with his past.  I knew that by saying all this I was
doing much more than gathering facts, but it was the only way I could keep my
promise to Sal.  I felt I owed her something, although I couldn’t explain what
it was or why.

I brought my mind to the time
period I had come to.  The last decades of the twenty-ninth century were
desolate, despite the lack of bombs, but the library was the best in history
and one that travellers used frequently for reference.  My clearance level gave
me access to its files directly from the safe house, so I did not have to
venture out into the dismal sprawling city that lay outside; a city that having
consumed the countryside around it, was about to implode in the most
unforgiving way possible.

The temporal reality that I was
in was linked to the time before Grace died and I hoped that the records I
needed would therefore exist in a way that they wouldn’t after the event of her
death in 2000.  If nothing else, this journey of mine was opening my mind to
new possibilities; ones which I found very interesting indeed and I looked
forward to re-examining them later, when my current investigation was concluded
and I had more time.

After a brief search I found
the information I required and downloaded it straight into my implants, so that
I could settle down in comfort and examine what it could tell me.  The two
strands of Charlie’s descendants, the Greens and the Grundys, had continued
separately for generations, changing names and professions as they went.  I was
pleased to discover that Vicki had done well for herself and that her children had
too.  Both Sal and Henry would have been proud.  One of her great grandchildren
became a very important environmentalist and generations later another
descendant, along with others, pioneered what was to become the HG Unit, of which
I had been so proud to be a member.

The Greens took a different
path and for a long time there was nothing of any note.  Then at the end of the
twenty-second century they became part of a long succession of freedom fighters
and political activists, but not always on the same side, which made me smile. 
In the year 2830 the two strands of Sal’s descendants, the Greens and the
Grundys, came together and produced a female child called Rachel.  My other
self had been familiar with this name but I was not.  She didn’t exist in my
timeline, because neither Sal nor Charlie had survived the winter of 1888 and I
surmised that the other two people who had ceased to exist on the 5
^th
of May 2000 were descendents of Charlie and Elsa.

Rachel intrigued me,
because Javier had met her granddaughter Virginia.  My other self had clear
knowledge of this famous meeting and although he had not been present, he knew
what happened as a result of it.  Yet in my memories, Javier had been
dead for over a decade at that point in time, so the
meeting never happened.  At some point, time had shifted and I was beginning to
think I knew exactly when that was.

It was the knowledge of this
meeting that my other self had had that had fired me up in the first place.  All
events after it were different to what had happened in my reality.  He had
enjoyed his old age in a time of peace, while mine was in a time of constant
conflict; sometimes deadly and always futile.  Together, Javier and Sal’s
descendant Virginia had brought about this peace; something they could only do
if they were alive at the same point in time.  In my world, Virginia could not
exist and Javier had already died.

I now had all the pieces, but
in my mind the picture was still difficult to see.  I tried shuffling them
about, letting them fall randomly.  I tried holding the conflicting sets of
memories separately, placing all the facts in date order.  I tried comparative
lines, but of course they spun off into different realities.  The only point
where they could meet was Grace.

We had no proof of parallel
universes, they were only a theory, nothing more than a fanciful idea that
those who wished to, endlessly explored.  Yet at that very moment I was living
proof of two very separate but linked realities.  But which would have been the
correct one, if no meddling had ever taken place? That was the fundamental
question.  However, this then led me to another equally important question.  If
mine was the wrong reality, should we meddle further in an attempt to correct
the situation?

I realised that I should not
answer this alone.  I had neither the experience, nor the required authority.  My
thoughts turned to home, back at the base.  But who could I share this with?
When I left, an attack had been in progress.  I didn’t know what damage would
have been inflicted, or if the communications systems would still be intact. 
In order to be certain of being heard in full, I would need to actually be with
those that I needed to speak to.

I shook my head.  The protocols
would prevent me being able to arrive on any ship or base where our leaders or
members of the Board were.  For their safety and the safety of our people, the
shields would prevent me locking onto their coordinates.  I could of course
choose an earlier point in time to arrive at and request a full Board hearing,
but I shied away from the idea; I was not at all sure that their minds would
appreciate the complexities of this dilemma.  The more I thought about it, the
less certain I became.