Читать книгу A Tale of Time City - Diana Wynne Jones - Страница 6

“No I don’t understand!” said Vivian. She could see well enough that the clacking boots had jolted both boys back to a sense of whatever passed for real life in this place. She thought: they were having an adventure up till then. Now it’s not fun any more.

She was angry. “What’s this law you’ve broken? What about me?”

“Twenty Century’s part of an Unstable Era,” Jonathan said. “It’s against the law even to take a thing out of an Unstable Era, and taking a person out is much worse. Putting a person back in after they’ve seen Time City is the worst crime you can commit.”

“They’ll send us out into history for it,” Sam said in a shocked whisper, and shivered. Jonathan, Vivian noticed, shivered much harder. “What will they do to her?”

“Something even worse,” Jonathan said, and his teeth chattered slightly.

“Well, you might have thought!” Vivian said. “What am I going to do now?”

Jonathan got to his knees. “I thought I did think!” he groaned as he crawled out from under the desk. He turned to face Vivian. His face looked pinched and frightened in the murky blue light. “I was quite sure you were… Look, can you give me your word of honour on the god Mao or Kennedy or Koran, or whatever you worship, that you really are just a plain person from Twenty Century and nothing to do with Faber John?”

“I give you my Bible oath,” said Vivian. “But you ought to know when a person’s real and telling the truth without it.”

Jonathan, to her surprise, took this rather well. “I do know,” he said. “I began to see something had gone wrong by the look on your face when you saw my pigtail – but I still don’t understand it! Let’s get out of here and think what to do.”

Crouching in the space behind the desk, they repacked Vivian’s suitcase and tried to cram Jonathan’s grey flannel clothes into it too. Only the trousers went in. They had to stuff the jacket into the string bag and the cap and tie into Vivian’s gas mask case. Sam took that. Jonathan carried the suitcase and Vivian hung on to the string bag. She felt that if she let go of it for an instant she might stop being Vivian Smith and turn into someone else completely.

At the door of the office, Sam produced a rattling bunch of – not keys. They were little squares that might have been made of plastic. He fitted one into a slot beside the door. “Pinched them from my father,” he explained in a loud proud whisper. The door slid aside, and then slid shut behind them when they were through, just as if it had known. They stole along a number of high corridors, where lights flicked on and off in the distance and round corners as the two guards went on their rounds. Unnerving though this was, it gave Vivian enough light to see that the building was all made of marble, with the same ultra-modern look as the office – except that there were carvings and sculptures up where the walls met the ceiling which did not look modern at all. Vivian glimpsed angel-faces in the dimness, winged lions and people who seemed to be half horses. It was like a dream.

I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls! Vivian thought. Perhaps I’ve fallen asleep on the train and this is all a dream I’m having. Though this was a comforting thought, she doubted it. Nobody could have slept on that noisy train.

They tiptoed down a narrow marble stair which led to what was obviously a grand entrance hall. This was much better lit. Vivian could see big glass doors in the distance, and a curving row of silver booths like the one she had come through. There must have been a hundred of them – with another hundred of them curving round the opposite wall, although her view of those was partly blocked by a gigantic marble stairway. This was a true marvel. The stone steps were moving. The three of them had to hide under it while a lady guard walked slowly across the open space with her hand on some sort of gun at her belt, and Vivian could hear the moving steps softly rumbling above them. She wondered how on earth it worked.

The guard walked out of sight behind a large circular installation in the centre of the hall. Jonathan and Sam led Vivian on a dash the other way, into the back of the building, where there were more corridors and, at last, a small back door. Sam stopped and fitted another card into a slot, and that door opened to let them out.

They went suddenly from ultra-modern to very old. Outside, they were in a narrow lane of crooked little stone houses. There was a round blue light fixed to one of the houses in the distance, which showed that the lane was cobbled, with a gutter down the middle. The air was fresh and cool. It made Vivian feel rather heady and giddy.

Sam and Jonathan plunged down towards the dark end of the lane. The cobbles dug into the underside of Vivian’s feet as she trotted after them. There was a thick old archway there, black as night underneath, and after that they came into a blue-lit courtyard, where they went scuttling towards a building like a church.

“No, it’s always left unlocked,” Jonathan whispered to Sam, as he bounded up the steps to the church-place, with his pigtail flying. “And I left both doors to the Annuate unfastened just in case.” Sure enough, the mighty door clicked and swung smoothly to let them in.

Quite a small church! Vivian thought in surprise. But it didn’t smell like a church!

It smelt warmer and more dusty than a church. It was harder to see than any place she had been in so far, because the blue street lighting came in through high-up coloured windows. Bars of misty blue-green light showed up leather-covered seats not quite like pews, and a splotch of dark violet light rested on a throne-thing at one end with some kind of glittering canopy above it. A slant of orange-blue on a wall gave Vivian a glimpse of one of the most beautiful paintings she had ever seen.

“That’s Faber John’s Seat,” Jonathan whispered, pointing to the throne as he led the way down an aisle. “This is the Chronologue, where the Time Council meets.”

“We unlocked a door and listened to them,” Sam said.

“That’s how we heard about the crisis and the plans to intercept you – I mean the real V.S.,” Jonathan explained.

They moved to the right and Vivian found herself facing a shining thing misted with more violet light, that seemed to crown the end of a row of seats. It was like a winged sun and it seemed to be studded with jewels.

“The Sempiternal Ensign,” Jonathan whispered. “Solid gold. That’s the Kohinoor diamond in the left wing and the Star of Africa’s in the right.” He gave the thing a fond pat as they passed it.

This was too much for Vivian. I must be dreaming! she decided. I know both those diamonds are somewhere else.

“Given to Time City by the Icelandic Emperor in Seventy-two Century,” Jonathan added as he undid a small heavy door. But Vivian felt too dreamlike to attend. She went dreamily down a long dark passage, through a door that creaked horribly and out into a place like a stately home, where they hurried up what seemed endless dark wooden stairs. This dream keeps getting things wrong! Vivian thought, as her legs began to ache. There ought to be a lift or a moving stair at least! She did not start thinking properly until she found herself sitting in another peculiar chair in a large room where all the furniture seemed to be empty frames, like a playground full of climbing-frames. Jonathan put a light on and leant against the door. “Phew!” he said. “Safe so far. Now we have to think hard.”

“I can’t think,” said Sam. “I’m hungry. She is too. She told me.”

“My automat’s on the blink again,” Jonathan said. “What do you want if I can get it to work?”

“Forty-two Century butter-pie,” Sam said, as if it was obvious.

Jonathan went to a thing on the wall facing Vivian which she supposed must be a musical instrument. It had keys like a piano and pipes like a church-organ and it was decorated all over with gilt twiddles and garlands, which were a little worn and peeling, as if the instrument had seen better days. Jonathan pounded at the white keys. When nothing happened, he banged at the organ-pipes. The thing began to chuff and grunt and to shake a little, at which Jonathan kicked it fiercely lower down. Finally, he took up what seemed to be an ordinary school ruler and pried at a long flap under the pipes.

“Well, it’s done the butter-pies,” he said, peering inside. “But the Twenty Century function seems to have broken. There’s no pizza and no bubble-gum. Do you mind food from other centuries?” he asked Vivian rather anxiously.

Vivian had never heard of pizza, though she thought it sounded Italian and not like the English food she was used to at all. She was past being surprised at anything by this time. “I could eat a dinosaur!” she said frankly.

“You almost have to,” Jonathan said, carrying an armful of little white flowerpots over to the empty frame beside Vivian’s chair. He dumped them into the air above it, and they stayed there, standing on nothing. “Butter-pie,” Jonathan said, handing a pot with a stick poking out of it to Sam. “Otherwise it’s done you algae soup, malty soy, two carob cornpones and fish noodles.”

Sam pulled the stick out of his pot with a yellow nubbly ice cream on the end of it. “Yummee!” he cried and bit into it like an ogre.

“Er – which is which?” Vivian asked, looking at the strange marks on the other pots. “I can’t read these words.”

“Sorry,” Jonathan said. “Those are Universal Symbols from Thirty-nine Century.” He sorted out the pots for her and took a butter-pie for himself. The pots, Vivian found, were sort of stuck to the air. She had to give a little pull to get them loose. She discovered that you peeled back the lid, and if you needed a spoon or a fork, the lid shrivelled itself into a spoon or fork shape. Algae soup was not at all pleasant, like salty pond water. But malty soy was nice if you dipped the cornpone in it. The fish noodles were—

“I’d rather eat Dad’s fishing bait,” Vivian said, putting that pot quickly down.

“I’ll get you a butter-pie,” Jonathan said.

“And another one for me,” Sam put in.

The church-organ received another banging, two more kicks and a punch in the delivery-flap and Vivian and Sam received a pot with a stick each. Jonathan threw the empty pots into a frame beside the organ, where they vanished.

“Now we must talk,” he said, while Vivian dubiously lifted the nubbly lump out of its pot. “We’ve all broken the law and we daren’t be caught. It would have been all right if V.S. was really V.S. but she isn’t, so we’ve got to think how to hide her.”

Vivian was getting very tired of being called V.S. She would have objected if she had not at that moment bitten into the butter-pie. Wonderful tastes filled her mouth, everything buttery and creamy she had ever tasted, with just a hint of toffee, and twenty other even better tastes she had never met before, all of it icy cold. It was so marvellous that she simply said quietly, “You owe me an explanation. What were you trying to do?”

“Save Time City of course,” Sam said juicily out of the middle of his butter-pie. “We listened to the Chronologue. That’s how we knew where you’d be.”

“There’s a passage between the Chronologue and here,” Jonathan explained. “But it’s been chained up ever since my father was elected Sempitern and I got curious about it. So Sam shorted it out for me and – anyway, we found it led to the Chronologue and, if we opened the door a crack, we could hear what they were all talking about. They were debating the crisis—”

“Only I couldn’t understand a word,” Sam said, as if this was rather clever of him. “It wasn’t like the stories.”

“It wasn’t!” Jonathan said feelingly. “It was all about polarities and chronons and critical cycles, but I understood the part about Time City being nearly worn out. It’s used one bit of space and time too often, you see, and they were trying to find a way to move it to another bit. The City’s held in place by things called polarities, which are put out into history like anchors, but no one except Faber John ever understood how it was done. I heard Dr Leonov admit that. So that was where V.S. comes in.”

“Who is she?” said Vivian.

“The Time Lady,” said Sam. “She’s on the rampage.”

“Yes, but we had to work that out,” said Jonathan, “by putting the talk in the Chronologue together with what the stories say. Chronologue was being very scientific, talking about someone coming up through the First Unstable Era in a wave of temporons and chronons, causing wars and changes everywhere. But I guessed it had to be the Time Lady. The story says that Faber John and his wife quarrelled about the way to rule Time City, and she tricked him into going down under the city and falling asleep there. They say he’s still there, and as long as he sleeps, the City is safe. But if it’s in danger he’ll wake up and come to our rescue. We’re going by the stories. We know you—the Time Lady hates Faber John and the City, because he saw how she’d tricked him at the last minute and threw her out into history. We think she’s trying to get back and destroy the City now it’s nearly worn out.”

“That’s the bit I didn’t understand,” Sam said. He was cross-legged on the floor, licking the stick of his butter-pie.

“It is a bit puzzling,” Jonathan said. Vivian could see he was very pleased with himself for working it out. “Chronologue seemed to be sure that the Time Lady would be quite reasonable when they found her and explained about the crisis. I think the quarrel she had with Faber John must have been political in some way.”

He looked questioningly at Vivian. Vivian caught the flicker of his flickering eyes and began to wonder if Jonathan did believe she was just a normal person from the Twentieth Century after all. But at that moment she bit through into the middle of the butter-pie. And it was hot. Runny, syrupy hot.

“It’s goluptuous when you get to the warm part, isn’t it?” Sam said, watching her with keen attention. “You want to let it trickle into the cold.”

Vivian did so and found Sam’s advice was excellent. The two parts mixed were even better than the cold part alone. It sent her rather dreamy again. When Sam grinned at her, a wide cheeky grin with two big teeth in the middle of it, she found herself thinking that Sam was not so bad after all. But she did her best to keep to the subject.

“I still don’t understand what made you think the Time Lady was me,” she said.

Jonathan started to say something. Then he changed his mind and said something else. “Because of the name, you see. Faber John’s wife was called Vivian. Everyone knows that. And Faber really means Smith. So when I heard Chronologue say that you—she was on that evacuee train, I worked out that she must be posing as a girl called Vivian Smith.”

“And we said V.S. when we talked about her so that nobody would guess our plan,” Sam put in. “We started planning two days ago after they met the train and couldn’t find her.”

“Two days ago!” Vivian exclaimed. “But I was there today, and so were you!”

“Yes, but you can get to any time you want through a time-lock,” Jonathan said, waving that puzzle away in his most lordly manner. “My father went there and Sam’s father, and so did the Head Librarian and the High Scientist, but they all came back saying she’d slipped through them somehow. That was when I thought we had a chance of getting you—her ourselves. Only you’re the wrong Vivian Smith for some reason – and I still can’t understand it! Sam, we’ve got to think what to do with her.”

“Send her to the Stone Age,” said Sam. “You wouldn’t mind that, would you?” he asked Vivian.

“Mind? I’d go crazy!” said Vivian. “There are spiders in caves. Why can’t you send me home?”

“I told you why we can’t,” Jonathan said. “Besides, it’s an Unstable Era and it’s even more unsettled than usual at the moment. Suppose we put you back and that mucked up the whole of history. They’d find out at once! Think of something, Sam!”

There was a long silence. Sam sat on the floor with his face in his fists. Jonathan leant against the wall, chewing the end of his pigtail. Vivian licked the last of her butter-pie off its stick and, for a while, could think of very little else except that she wished she could have another one. But I will get home! she told herself, sleepily twiddling the stick in her fingers. I will, whatever he says!

“I know!” Sam said at last. “Pretend she’s our cousin!”

Jonathan leapt away from the wall. “That’s it!” he shouted. “That’s clever, Sam!”

“I am clever,” said Sam. “You work out the details.”

“And that’s easy,” said Jonathan. “Listen, V.S., you are Vivian Sarah Lee. Your father is Sam’s uncle and mine. Have you got that?” He danced round the room, pointing at Vivian until she nodded. “Good. You’ve been away from Time City since you were six, because your parents are Observers on station in Twenty Century. That’s all true. Got it? But they’ve sent you home because the era’s getting more unsettled and there’s a war on. This is brilliant!” he said to Sam. “It will explain why she doesn’t know anything. And my mother’s bound to have her to live here, because Lee House is shut up – and we can even go on calling her V.S.!”

Sam rose from the floor and breathed heavily into Vivian’s face. “She doesn’t look like a Lee,” he said critically. “Her eyes are wrong and her hair curls.”

“A lot of Lees don’t have the eyefold,” Jonathan said. “I don’t think Cousin Vivian does. Her cheekbones are the right shape.”

“Will you both stop staring and criticising!” Vivian said. “There’s nothing wrong with my face. The lady in the woolshop says I look almost like Shirley Temple.”

“Who’s he?” said Sam, and Jonathan said, “Who are you, V.S.?”

“What?” said Vivian.

“She’s almost asleep,” Sam said, leaning even closer to Vivian’s face.

He was right. The long and worrying day, followed by the peculiar events of the last hour, were suddenly too much for Vivian. Or maybe it was the butter-pie. There began to be gaps in what she noticed. She heard Jonathan saying airily, “Oh, we can hide her in one of the archaic rooms. She’ll be more at home there.” At this, Vivian noticed that Jonathan seemed to have bounced back from his scare in the ultra-modern office and become once more the lordly, confident boy who met her at the station. This made her feel uneasy, but before she could work out why, they were telling her to get up and come along.

She almost forgot the precious string bag. She turned round for it and yelped. She found she had been sitting on nothing in a yellow framework, just like the flowerpots from the church-organ. She tried to reach through it for the bag. But the nothing stopped her hand and she had to grope underneath it before she could take hold of the string handles.

Next thing she noticed, they were going along a corridor. Then Jonathan was sliding a door aside and saying to Sam, “Mind you take those keys back now. And don’t get caught doing it.”

“I know what I’m doing,” Sam retorted, and trotted off down the hallway with the trailing tie of his puffy shoe flapping on the carpets.

After that Vivian noticed she was in bed, a rather hard, scratchy bed, with blue street light coming in from somewhere. What a lot of Vivians! she thought sleepily. And then: I’ll have another butter-pie before I go home tomorrow.

And after that, Vivian noticed that it was daytime again and woke up. She turned over under a heavy, scratchy coverlet embroidered with lines of thin brown people and smelling of dust, and knew at once where she was. She was in Time City, in the middle of a horrendous mistake. Oddly enough, although this was quite frightening, Vivian found it rather exciting too. She had always wanted to have an adventure, the way people did in films. And here she was having one. She knew it was no dream. She sat up.

No wonder the bed felt hard. It was made of stone. It had four huge stone pillars like totem poles that held up an embroidered canopy overhead. Beyond in the room, strong sunlight slanted on to Egyptian-type carvings on the stone walls. Vivian knew it was quite late on in the morning. She got out of the bed on to rush mats, where she was surprised to find that she had put on her night clothes before she had gone to sleep. Her suitcase was open on the stone floor and her clothes were scattered all over the room.

I wonder where the toilet is, and I do hope it’s not invisible! she thought. A stone archway in the wall led to a tiled place. Vivian went through and found, to her relief, that the toilet and washbasin in there looked much like the ones she was used to, even though they were made of stone. But there were no taps, and she could not find out how the toilet flushed.

“But at least I could see them,” she said to herself, as she hunted for her scattered clothes.

She was just putting on her second sock – which had somehow got right under the stone bed – and had only her shoes to find, when the stone door grated open and Jonathan came in. He was carrying what looked like half a birdcage with dishes floating in the air beneath it.

“Oh good!” he said. “You were asleep when I looked in earlier. I brought you some breakfast, so you won’t have to face my parents on an empty stomach.” He was wearing bright green pyjamas today and looking very spruce and confident.

Vivian had a feeling that he was going to rush her into something else unless she was careful. “You’ll have to tell me a whole lot more,” she said. “Or I can’t face anyone.”

“Well, you can’t stay hiding here. Elio’s bound to find you,” Jonathan said, putting the birdcage down on a stone table. “What’s your name?”

“Vivian Smi—” Vivian began, and then remembered that she was Jonathan’s cousin. “Vivian Sarah Lee,” she said. “You thought I’d forget, didn’t you?”

“I wasn’t sure,” Jonathan said, setting out the dishes from under the birdcage. “Pull up that log over there and start eating. We have to catch my mother before she goes to work.”

There was no butter-pie, to Vivian’s regret, but there were syrupy pancakes that were almost as good, and fruit juice which Vivian thought was even nicer than tinned pineapple. Up to then, tinned pineapple had been her favourite food. After that were slices of strange crumby bread that you ate with slices of cheese. “Why is everyone called Vivian?” she asked as she ate.

“The eldest Lee is always called Vivian,” Jonathan said. “After the Time Lady. Her eldest daughter married the first Lee. We descend from Faber John himself. And we’re the oldest family in Time City.”

He was sitting on the stone bed looking lofty. Vivian could tell he was very proud of being a Lee. “How old is that?” she said.

“Thousands of years,” said Jonathan. “Nobody knows quite how many.”

“That’s ridiculous!” said Vivian. “How can anyone think that Faber John and the Time Lady are still around after all that time?”

“I told you last night,” Jonathan said, “that I’m going by the stories. I think the Scientists have got it wrong – and even they can’t account for the person coming uptime from Four Century to Twenty Century, bringing all the disturbance to history.” He leant forward earnestly. “I know that’s the Time Lady, and I’m sure the stories are right and she’s trying to destroy the City because she hates Faber John. The stories are almost the only history of Time City that we’ve got. The records are terribly hazy. You should hear my tutor swearing about how little we know!” He stood up impatiently. “Are you finished? Shall we go?”

Vivian was still eating cheese and crumby bread. “No,” she said. “And listen here – I’m not going to be rushed and bullied all the time. You caught me on the hop yesterday, but that doesn’t mean I’m feeble.”

“I never thought you were feeble!” Jonathan protested. He hung about, standing on one foot and then on the other, until Vivian had put the last slice of cheese into her mouth. Then he rushed to the door. “Ready now?”

Vivian sighed. “No. I have to put my shoes on. And what about my luggage?”

Jonathan had forgotten about that. “You’d better bring it with you to show that you’ve travelled,” he said. “That gas mask is a wonderfully realistic touch.”

“It’s not realistic,” said Vivian. “It’s real.”

She found her shoes and packed her suitcase yet again, while Jonathan took his grey flannel disguise and hid it in a stone chest. “They’ll be safe there until Sam can sneak them back to Patrol Costumes,” he said. “Oh, and take that label off the string thing. It’ll look pretty funny if I introduce you as V.S. Lee and you’re waving a label saying V. Smith.”

This was true, but Vivian felt a twinge of alarm as the label went into the stone chest too. It was as if she really had lost her name. How am I going to prove to Cousin Marty that I’m me? she wondered, putting on her school hat and her coat. “Now I am ready,” she said.

The house was huge, with a sort of lived-in richness to it. The rugs along the passages had an ugly, valuable look, but they had worn places on them. The banisters of the many stairs they went down had been polished so much that the carvings on them had almost worn away. The stairs had dips in the middle from countless years of feet. People were hard at work putting another layer of polish on them. Jonathan took Vivian on a dodging, zig-zag way down, using four different staircases, so that they never met any of these people face to face, and they came at last to the ground floor. Jonathan let out a sigh of relief. “Now we can let people see us,” he said.

Vivian looked from the coloured marble patterns on the floor to the wide oak stairway, and then to a row of pointed windows – or maybe doors – on the other side. She could see a sloping town square out there with a fountain in the middle. “What is this house?” she said.

“The Annuate Palace,” said Jonathan. “This way.”

He took Vivian along the patterned marble floor to where the space stopped being a front hall and turned into a kind of room full of carved empty frames that were probably chairs. Just beyond an archway, a lady was speaking into what was probably a telephone – though it looked rather as if she was gazing into a mirror and speaking into a magnifying glass. “I’ll be along in five minutes,” she said, glancing at Jonathan and Vivian, “and we’ll sort it out then. Something seems to have come up here. ’Bye.” She put the magnifying glass into a slot by the mirror and turned round, staring at Vivian.

Vivian suddenly felt truly uncomfortable. This lady had the same deeply anxious look that Mum had worn ever since War was declared. And though she looked nothing like Mum, since she had the same folded eyes as Jonathan with the same flicker in front of them, Vivian knew she was a real person with real worries, just like Mum. She might wear yellow and black pyjamas and do her hair in a strange way, but it was not right to lie to her. And here was Jonathan smoothly telling her lies.

“You’ll never guess, Mother!” he said. “This is Cousin Vivian – Vivian Lee! She’s just got here from Twenty Century.”

His mother put up a hand and clutched her jetty black hair. “Oh Great Time! Are the Lees back already then? I meant to air Lee House first!”

“No, she’s on her own. Viv and Inga sent her back because World War Two has just started,” Jonathan explained.

And here am I standing here letting him lie! Vivian thought uncomfortably. But she had to join in the lying after that, because Jonathan’s mother turned to her with a worried smile. “Of course! That war comes up about a third of the way through Twenty Century, doesn’t it? Has it turned out worse than they expected?”

“Much worse,” said Vivian. “London’s been bombed quite a bit already. They think there’s going to be gas-attacks and an invasion soon.” Though all this was quite true, it somehow amounted to a lie. Jonathan’s mother turned pale. “They’re sending all the children away from London,” Vivian said, hoping that would make her feel better.

“You poor child! And my poor brother!” Jonathan’s mother said. “Why does everything have to happen at once? Of course you must stay here with us until your parents are recalled. And we’ll find you some proper clothes. I suppose you’ve nothing but those awful things you’ve got on.”

Vivian looked down at her coat and her best skirt rather indignantly, but she did not need to say anything. Jonathan’s mother turned back to the telephone-thing and pressed a knob in the wall beside it. “Elio,” she said. “I need you at once. Can you come to the hall?” She said over her shoulder to Jonathan, “Will you take care of Vivian today, my love – and show her around and so on? She’s bound to feel very strange after five years in history. I’ve got a crisis on in Agelong. Someone’s sent out the New Australian Grammar to Malaya nearly a century before it was invented and I’m going to be all day sorting it out.”

“I always have to do your dirty work!” Jonathan said, pretending to be annoyed. “You’re never here at all!”

“I know, my love,” his mother said, looking more worried than ever. “I’ll try to get the day off tomorrow, I—”

But here a door slammed open across the room and a tall anguished-looking man came storming out in a swirl of grey robes. He was followed by a pale respectful-looking man in sober fawn-coloured pyjamas. Jonathan’s mother instantly turned more worried yet.

“What’s this? What’s going on?” asked the storming man. “You can’t take Elio away now! I need him.” He glared at the pale man, who looked at the floor respectfully. He glared at Jonathan, who looked back as if he was used to it. Then he came right up to Vivian and glared at her. “What in Time’s name is this?” he said. His pepper-coloured hair was scraped into a knob on top of his head, and his eyes stared out of deep hollow sockets, looking agonised. He was so alarming that Vivian backed away.

“It’s little Vivian Lee, Ranjit,” Jonathan’s mother said in a guilty, soothing way. “Your niece. The Lees have had to send her home because Twenty Century seems to be getting quite dangerous, and she’ll have to stay with us. Their house is shut up, remember? I wanted Elio to see about a room and some clothes for her.”

“But she’s too big!” the anguished man said, still glaring at Vivian. “This girl is not the right size!”

Vivian stood limply, looking at the floor like the pale man. It was almost a relief that he had realised she was not the right Vivian. Now she would not need to lie any more. But she was very scared about what they would do to her now they knew.

“She was six when she went away, Father,” Jonathan said. He did not seem in the least alarmed. “That was nearly six years ago. Think how much I’ve changed since then.”

“So you have,” said this alarming man, turning his glare on Jonathan as if he did not think the change was for the better. “I see,” he said. “She grew.” And to Vivian’s great surprise, he turned to her again with his anguished face relaxed into a charming smile. The hint of anguish still there in his hollow eyes only seemed to make the smile more charming. He held out a long, knobby hand for Vivian to shake. “I believe that to be Twenty Century custom,” he said. “How do you do, my dear?”

“Very well, thank you,” Vivian managed to say. Relief seemed to have taken her voice away at first. No wonder Jonathan thought I’d better have breakfast before I met his father! she thought. I might have fainted without.

Jonathan’s father turned round, saying, “I need Elio back in five minutes exactly,” and went away in the same storming way that he had come, with his robes streaming, and banged the door behind him. Jonathan’s mother took pale Elio aside and began telling him what she needed. She seemed quite flustered, but Elio nodded calmly. He had a little square thing in his hand and punched buttons on it respectfully as Jonathan’s mother talked. It must have been a way of taking notes.

“What do I call them?” Vivian whispered urgently to Jonathan while his mother talked.

“Call who what?” said Jonathan.

“Your parents. Auntie what? Uncle which?” Vivian whispered.

“Oh, I see!” Jonathan whispered. “Her name’s Jenny Lee Walker. You’d better say Jenny. He’s called Ranjit Walker. Most people call him Sempitern, but you’re supposed to be a Lee, so you could call him Ranjit.”

Ranjit, Vivian tried out to herself. Uncle Ranjit. It was no good. She just could not imagine herself calling that alarming man anything. Jenny was better. She could manage that. But she did wonder if Jonathan was very brave, or just mad, to think of deceiving either of them.

Jonathan’s mother – Jenny, Vivian told herself – turned back to them, smiling. “That’s all seen to then!” she said. “Leave your coat and hat and your luggage here, Vivian dear, for Elio to see to, and run off and enjoy Time City with Jonathan – Or—” She looked worried again. “Do you need anything to eat?”

“No thanks,” Vivian said, and once more found herself lying by telling the truth. “I had – I had sandwiches to take on the train.”

Then they were free to go back along the coloured marble floor. Vivian went feeling rather shaky, but Jonathan walked with a bouncing, lordly stride, smiling broadly. “There! We got away with it!” he said. “I knew we would. This way.”

He swung towards the line of pointed windows. They clearly were doors. One in the middle flapped aside to let them out, as if it knew they were coming – or Vivian thought it was opening for them, until she saw that two people, a man and a woman, were coming in from the square outside. Vivian stopped politely to let them come in first. But, to her astonishment, Jonathan took no notice of them at all. He went on walking through the opening as if the two people did not exist. And to Vivian’s utter horror, he walked straight through both of them, the man first and then the woman, as if they were made of smoke.

“How – who – how did you do that?” she gasped, as the man and woman walked past her through the hall, looking quite whole and undamaged. “Who – who are they?”

“Those? You don’t want to take any notice of those,” Jonathan said. “They’re only time-ghosts.”

Vivian’s still-shaky legs nearly folded under her. “Ghosts!” she squawked.