Buying Time Page 10

  “Why, that’s… thank you. I’ll take great care of it and get it back to you when I’ve read it.”

  He nodded. “There’s no hurry. Take your time. I don’t think I could…” He gestured. “But I’d love to read the biography when you’ve completed a draft you’re happy with.”

  “You’ll be my first reader,” she promised.

  He escorted her back through the house and along the hallway. “Now, I really must get ready for that blessed meeting. Script conference over dinner in Leeds,” he explained. “Last minute changes to the opener in season seven of the appropriately named Oh, My God!” He laughed. “But what next for you?” he asked as she pulled on her parka.

  “I’m booked into a hotel in Manchester,” Ella said, “then I’m taking a train down to London tomorrow. I’ve arranged to interview the actress, Samantha Charlesworth. One of Ed’s old flames.”

  “Ah, the delectable Sam.” Lincoln smiled, as if in reminiscence. “Remember me to her, will you? And next time we meet, Ella, I must tell you all about Ed’s women, and a little theory I have about them.”

  Ella thanked him once again and hurried out to her car.

  She laid Ed Richie’s journal on the passenger seat and started the engine, wondering what Lincoln’s ‘little theory’ might be.

  As she drove from the house, she turned to wave at him. He was a portly figure filling the doorway, the puppy seated obediently at his feet.

  He lifted a hand in farewell, then retreated inside and closed the door.

  From Ed Richie’s journal, 20th May, 2020

  SO THE PEOPLE of Scotland have voted for independence. I’m not sure how I feel about this. One part of me is against the breaking up of functioning political units (no matter how dysfunctional those units might be!) for fear of fomenting unrest and even warfare fifty, a hundred years or whatever down the line… Then there’s the other part of me that rejoices in the referendum result. I think the socialists up there will make a decent fist of it and rejoin Europe. Compared with what we have down here, with the rise of the UK Front and the encroaching totalitarianism… Scotland’s prospects seem rosy.

  Reading Enemies and Lovers, the second volume of Olivia Manning’s London Trilogy. Wonderful stuff.

  From Ed Richie’s journal, 17th November, 2023

  LAST WEEK I received a letter – a real, snail-mail letter, and hand-written – from the daughter of an old lover. She wrote that her mother and I had had an affair in the late nineties, lasting some three months. The woman, Sherri Morton, told her daughter that she cherished her memories of our time together, and still felt a great fondness towards me. The reason the daughter was writing was that Sherri had recently passed away, aged 60, after battling with cancer for three years, and she thought I’d like to know.

  I wrote to the daughter expressing my commiserations, and telling her that I, too, harboured wonderful memories of our affair…

  The terrible thing is that it was a lie. Worse: I have no memories whatsoever of anyone called Sherri Morton, still less of our affair.

  It’s sobering to think that twenty-five years ago I had an intimate relationship with someone who left no impression on me. I can’t have lived with Sherri Morton – surely I would have recalled that? But apparently I had an affair lasting three months. I made love to Sherri, perhaps even said that I loved her – and perhaps at the time I truly did! – and yet nothing of our time together, now that Sherri is gone, remains.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  September, 2013

  WHEN HE CAME to his senses, Richie was sitting at his desk in his study, staring at the computer screen. He looked up, through the window, at the fields across the lane; bright sunlight glinted off rain-wet trees and sheep munched contentedly. The last thing he recalled, he’d been in his bedroom, a little hungover, having just spoken to Diggers on his mobile. Now he had a clear head, and it appeared to be the middle of the day. He looked down: he was wearing the brown cords he’d long ago thrown away, and a faded blue rugby shirt – his casual writing gear.

  He reached for the mouse and dragged the cursor to the clock – 12.35 – and clicked. A calendar appeared.

  It was Tuesdaythe 10th of September, and the year was 2013.

  So he’d jumped again, over two and a half years this time.

  His heartbeat seemed to slow in his chest, as if it were pumping treacle instead of blood. He felt light-headed, a little hysterical. His first urge was to laugh out loud at the absurdity of the situation; his second to rage tearfully. He did neither, just sat very still and stared at the screen.

  He clicked the calendar away and read the words on the screen. The outline of a one-off radio play about an illegal immigrant he was working up for the BBC. They commissioned the play later that year, and he’d spent the following November and December writing the first, second and third drafts. Work that he recalled doing, sweating over… The play was produced and broadcast the following year, to universal indifference.

  September 2013…

  He’d met Samantha Charlesworth in April 2013, and about now would still be in the honeymoon period of total infatuation. He recalled those first few months as joyous, carefree – he thought he’d met the woman with whom he’d spend the rest of his life, and Sam had given him all the signs of reciprocating these feelings. Even later, three years into their affair, he’d worked to convince himself that theirs was a long-term relationship… despite what old Diggers might have thought.

  He left his study and moved through the house.

  The 10th of September… He had a bad memory at the best of times, and had no hope of recollecting what he might have done on this particular day. As an actress, Sam’s working routine was arbitrary at best: she might be away for a few days, back for one or two, then off again… Or she might be away for weeks at a time, or at home for just as long. He had no idea where she might be today.

  He enteredthe bedroom and found her cases on top of the wardrobe. So she was at home, or rather not at work. He moved from room to room, anticipating coming upon the woman he thought he’d loved, and wondering at his reaction if he were to find her. But Sam was nowhere in the house, thankfully, and he experienced a sudden release of tension.

  In the kitchen he poured himself a bottle of Landlord, then saw that the answerphone was flashing.

  Her high, bright voice filled the room. “Eddy, darling. Don’t cook. I’ll pick up a Thai take-away on my way back, and a bottle of white. Should be in around four. Loves. Bye-ee.”

  He played the message again, her words conjuring an image of the woman; slim and slight, in her late thirties now but looking ten years younger. She often wore her hair in plaits wound around her head. She sported navy blue velvet waist-coats, faded blue jeans, and Converse trainers. He recalled the heft of her in his arms, her perfumed slightness, her insatiable sex drive.

  He found himself fearing her return. He was totally unprepared, psychologically, for the encounter: she had walked out on him around nine months ago, subjectively, and to the best of his ability he had dealt with the rejection, and moved on. Now, to be shunted back to near the start of the relationship, when Sam had been at her most passionate, and he had mirrored that passion with an almost incredulous sense of gratitude, he was like an actor pitched into an unfamiliar role, in a play he barely remembered.

  He took a long drink to steady his nerves, then swore out loud as if to do so might provide some form of catharsis.

  He carried the beer back through to the study and sat down at his desk, staring through thewindow without seeing a thing.

  There was a lot more to think about, he realised, than the mere fact that in a few hours he would be reunited with Sam.

  That was a massive enough consideration – how he might conduct himself, without letting slip to her that all was not as it should be – but the more weighty concern was what might be happening to him.

  It had been difficult enough to accept when he had assumed the first jump had been a one-off. He might,
had he continued to live in 2016, have come to some acceptance of what had happened, maybe even shrugging it off as a mental aberration, and got on with his life.

  Now that was not an option.

  He had jumped back twice, once to a point nine months before what he still thought of as the ‘present,’ and the second time to now, to September 2013, three years and four months before January 2017.

  His first thought was, where might this end? A one-off he might have been able to live with, but the second jump made the phenomenon random, unpredictable, and therefore terrifying.

  He would be able to take nothing for granted, from now on. His day to day reality was fundamentally destabilised; how could he plan ahead, look forward to tomorrow, when faced with the uncertainty of there ever being a normal ‘tomorrow’? Potentially, from now on, his tomorrows would be always in his past.

  Was he doomed to relive snatches of his earlier life, as if to atone…?

  He recalled what Digby had said, yesterday… or would say, two and a half years from now.

  No… No, he could not accept that he was being punished, or was punishing himself.

  But he was faced with the very real fact that in three subjective days he had been pitched back in time more than three years …

  His hand shaking, he snatched up his beer and moved outside. His study was claustrophobic, limiting: he needed to be outside, in the open.

  He carried his beer into the back garden and walked up the sloping lawn to the picnic table, from which he had a bird’s-eye view over the slate roof of the house to Harrowby Bridge and the widening valley beyond.

  The village had been here for centuries, essentially unchanged, and the valley dated from the last ice age, gouged out by the relentless forces of glaciation. An eye-blink in the entire span of geological history, perhaps, but a long time in human terms. The view provided Richie with a sense of solidity, a familiar, reassuring landmark against which to assess his own small, egocentric problem.

  Where might it end, he asked himself?

  Did his time-shifts to date indicate a set rate of progression? Nine months, then thirty months… and then what…? Or were they purely random, so that all he could be sure of was that he would, again and again, find himself inhabiting the body of ever younger versions of himself, in past times he had already lived through?

  Until?

  In their student days, when Digby Lincoln had harboured dreams of writing groundbreaking science fiction novels, he and Richie had exchanged drink-fuelled speculations long into the early hours. Digby had possessed a thorough working knowledge of the sciences, an active imagination, and an envious ability to extrapolate current trends. He had spun fantastic futures, creating post-human scenarios long before that sub-genre became popular, and stunning Richie with his bizarre storylines.

  He wondered what Digby would make of what was happening to him; if he could accept the phenomenon as fact, and not some psychological defect, as he had yesterday, or rather more than two years in the future?

  So he was travelling, little by little, back in time. He would move gradually through his forties, thirties, twenties, into his teens and earlier… Would he eventually come to his senses in the incontinent body of his new-born self, with fifty-six years of memories intact,but with no way of communicating with the outside world?

  And then? What then?

  Richie marvelled, drinking his beer and staring out across the sun-dappled landscape.

  Digby might push the speculation further, envisage his temporal regression to… where? …into a past life? What if reincarnation were a fact, he could hear Digby saying – you’d inhabit past lives, but backwards, spinning back through history, surfing down the centuries, the millennia, until… until you ran out of humans to inhabit and you found yourself in the consciousnesses of animals, apes, and then lemurs, then shrews… right back to the time some form of legged-fish crawled from the primeval ocean…?

  He stopped himself, his head spinning.

  He had never believed in an afterlife, and he had no reason to believe that there had been a life before this one. He thought all religions ludicrous, wish-fulfilling fantasies. As far as he was concerned, this life was all there ever would be. You lived, then died, and then your consciousness expired. It was a harsh thought, especially when it hit you in the cold, empty early hours, but he’d come across no evidence to suggest any other, happier resolution.

  So when, at last, he inhabited his new-born self, he envisaged no existence beyond that. He would expire, his consciousness extinguished, forever.

  It was a sobering thought because it meant that if his previous two jumps were any indication, he had a very limited time left on planet Earth.

  If he lived through a day or two at every jump and there were, say, another twenty jumps remaining… then he could measure his life-expectancy in weeks, not decades.

  A very sobering thought.

  On reflection, he preferred the mental breakdown theory. Perhaps he was in a coma in hospital, and this was a very realistic dream?

  His mobile went off, startling him with its long forgotten ringtone. He quelled the Thunderbirds theme tune and said, “Hello?”

  “Ed,” Digby said. “Still on for tomorrow night?”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten, Ed? Dinner at ours, followed by the match? I know you hate Man U., but even you appreciate good football, or should…”

  He smiled. Now he remembered: he’d gone over to Digby’s and watched United play in the European Cup – a game Manchester won, he recalled dimly. Sam was seeing a friend in Leeds, granting him furlough.

  “I’ll be there. What time again?”

  “Six. Caroline’s cooking an Indian,” Digby said. “And how’s the delectable Sam?”

  “She’s well. Gone shopping.”

  Digby hesitated. “I thought you told me she was reading for a part in a play?”

  Jesus! “Ah… No. That was called off. Re-scheduled. She decided to go shopping instead.”

  “Attagirl! Got to keep herself looking beautiful. See you tomorrow, Ed.”

  Tomorrow evening, at Digby’s, he’d tell his friend for the second time what was happening to him – and this time he would have proof: United would beat Bayern one-nil, scoring in the second half. He’d tell his friend the score and perhaps Diggers might believe his bizarre story.

  If, of course, he didn’t time-jump again before tomorrow evening…

  He drank his beer and reflected that there would be time for a couple more before Sam arrived home. He decided that the best way to prepare himself for the potentially traumatic encounter would be to be well-oiled. If he played the part of his old self, in love and in lust, Sam would suspect nothing.

  As he sat and drank and stared down the valley, thoughts of his ‘old’ self made him wonder about his future self: that is, the Ed Richie who had woken up two-years-plus down the line, the day after he, the Ed Richie of now, had jumped back in time. Like a mental usurper, he had briefly inhabited the body and mind of that future Ed, supplanting his thoughts for the duration of his brief tenancy – but the day after? Did Ed wake up with a blank in his memory of that day?

  He considered the events of this day, more than three years in his past. He would have written all morning and into the afternoon – but he was sure he’d not had a beer or three on that occasion. He tried to think back that far, but had only the faintest recollection of Sam’s returning with a Thai take-away, insisting they make love before dinner, and again afterwards.

  His own consciousness was overwriting the old Ed’s, he thought. He could alter what he did on this day if he chose to: place a hefty bet on Manchester winning tomorrow night. bequeathing himself a few extra thousand pounds. Then when next he jumped, leaving this iteration of himself, his future self would be a little richer, but with, presumably, no knowledge or memory of how it had happened.

  He could alter history – or rather alter his future – by creating eve
nts in the here and now that never occurred originally… But what, then, of the ‘past’ events that he, the Ed Richie of the future, recalled as established fact? What happened to that reality?

  His head was spinning again. He’d put it to Digby tomorrow and see what his friend came up with.

  He went back to the kitchen and returned to the garden with another beer, and only when he sat down and opened the bottle did it hit him. Normally he took the stone steps from the patio to the rear lawn, but this time he’d jumped up onto the low retaining wall without the slightest spasm of pain from his usually arthritic knees. He held out a hand and examined it closely. The crepe paper texture of his metacarpus was not as pronounced as it would be three-plus years down the line; in general his body didn’t ache as much, and he felt no twinges from his knees and ankles. He’d begun a course of methotrexate for his arthritis this coming December, and though it had slowed the progress of the disease, he’d still been plagued, over the following two years, by periodic bouts of pain.

  It was little compensation for the malaise now afflicting him, but at least he wasn’t in pain.

  He polished off the beer and the world began to take on a rosy glow.

  He wondered when he’d time-jump again, away from the here and now, wondered how long he might have in this present. The coming encounter with Sam would be a bitter-sweet experience, on one level a recapitulation of the love and desire he had felt for her, maybe, combined with a sense of betrayal at her ultimate rejection. He told himself to treat it as a short fling that would soon be over, to enjoy the moment, and not to invest emotionally in the affair… but he knew that that would be impossible.

  He heard the grumble of an engine and looked up to see Sam’s sky-blue E-type Jaguar race up the valley road and turn into the drive. She gunned the engine and accelerated the last ten metres, coming to a sudden halt in a spurt of gravel. That was something he’d forgotten about her, how her driving had mirrored her recklessness, her impulsiveness.