Time and Time Again -- free short story

TIME AND TIME AGAIN

Gary Fry

If the clouds moved that day it was with the inexorable stealth of time curling around the face of a clock. I’d driven three hours straight. The cold air, rushing in through the roadster’s open top, lessened the weight of ruthless sunshine. Ellen seated beside me wore a dress as green as the fields of wheat we passed during the last leg of our journey. Whenever she spoke, I leaned her way and only replied if I needed to. On such a fine day it was as well to enjoy the companionable silence while we could, absorbing a world freshly minted by our recent marriage.

I’d booked the weekend stay in a rural cottage in lieu of a proper honeymoon abroad. Both employed by demanding companies, we’d struggled to find the same lengthy gap in our careers, but such pleasures, including children and the like, would come later. Just then we were so wrapped up in each other that remaining in our London flat wouldn’t have been unappealing. But Ellen, I’d learned during our three-year engagement, responded to changes of environments – in this case, eventless countryside trumping reliably regimented nine-to-five city life – and I, with leanings similarly inscribed in the spirals of my DNA, hoped that might free her up for even more newlywed preoccupations.

“First thing I need when we get there,” said Ellen as we arrived at our village destination, “is a big drink.”

“Soft or hard?”

She glanced at me with a snigger, though I hadn’t meant anything other than what I’d said – not consciously, at any rate. “Whisky,” she added, licking her lips. “On the rocks.”

Now I smirked – she’d chosen her comment deliberately, a hint at what would surely follow the drink – but with that slender stretch of green fabric in my peripheral vision, my heart also raced with all the seriousness of desire.

I glanced again at the satnav and trusted its faux-human promptings. It took us along a high street flanked by pubs and various stores selling crafts, cakes, wine and flowers. Then we reached a country lane where all the housing, stone-built terraces perched over pavements, fell away. Plant life and trees replaced it, budding with early summer foliage. A grassy scent beguiled us, fetched by a breeze. A moment later we spotted the place, a standalone cottage webbed with ivy. It looked even nicer than it had appeared online.

“Ooh, that’s pretty,” said Ellen, and if I’d had any doubts about whether this relatively cheap weekend away would impress her, they were dispensed at a stroke.

“I’m glad you like it.” I pulled the car alongside the building and silenced its panting engine. “Isolated enough but within walking distance of provisions if we need them.”

“I’m sure we’ll survive. Unless you forgot to pack the food I had delivered.”

“All in the boot with our clothes.”

“Let’s get inside then and start enjoying our first holiday as a mister and missus.”

“I’m game,” I said, and got out to perform the courteous manly duties.

The interior also exceeded the photos I’d seen on the booking website. Across a single storey the property offered lounge, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. Charming artefacts occupied each shelf and corner, while original paintings, some rather good, hung on rendered walls. There was a hatch for a loft but that wouldn’t concern us.
Ellen and I had drinks and then steaks and then more drinks. As the night drew in at a window we kept uncurtained, we snuggled in front of an irascible open fire and discussed how great our lives would be, how successful we’d become in our careers, how many children we’d have, and other fantasies the alcohol and a youthful naivety bordering on cockiness facilitated.

By the time stars appeared in a sky so dark it looked eager to extinguish the world, we edged towards the bedroom, removing what few items of clothing each of us wore. We made love, the expressions of our joy stabbing at the silence all around, where wild animals crept, or only people with business elsewhere. When we finally drifted into endorphin-induced sleep, neither of us cared about anything other than ourselves, and our love, in this alien place.

*

When we awoke we were in our late-sixties. Ellen got up first, the weak knee she’d developed lately only eventually supporting her. She limped to the doorway and turned, dressed in a silk nightgown which concealed most of her running-to-plump frame. “Coffee?” she asked with a weary smile.

I sat up, pushing one hand through thinning hair. The bedsheets felt like fire against my feet, and I realised that my gout had flared again. “Better make it a decaf,” I called as Ellen exited. “Prostate’s grumbling this morning.”

We breakfasted in the kitchen, re-examining furniture we’d playfully bickered over the day before.

“I’m telling you, it’s the same stuff. I just know it.”

“And as I keep saying, it can’t be,” Ellen protested, with all the good humour that had characterised our long marriage. “That was over forty years ago.”

“They built things to last back in the day.”

Ellen looked at me; I looked back.

“I’m glad we returned, aren’t you?” she said, her hair as white as the egg she shelled. “Just to reactivate old memories. Our first holiday together as a married couple.”

During the intervening years we’d travelled to every country on what had once been fashionably known as our “bucket list.” The following week we’d fly to Taiwan to visit our daughter who worked in education. Then we’d return to Oxford and spend time with our son and his pleasingly large family.

“It feels like only yesterday,” I said, wishing my body could regress as effortlessly as my mind. “What did we eat that first night – can you remember?”

“Fish, probably. With wine. I seem to recall that we were both mad for that at the time.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I consumed more of my kipper. “Shame we can’t stay the same two nights. But I promised Jacob a consultation this afternoon.”

“And that has to be done on the golf course, does it?”

“Walking facilitates creative thought.”

“Why can’t men just retire?”

I glanced through the uncurtained window. A majestic stretch of green reached the horizon, meeting a sky even older than the land must be.

“The devil makes work for idle hands,” I replied, but neither of us had much religion sense. Few did in this hyper-secular age.

We washed, dressed and packed. When I returned from putting the case in our sensible saloon, I found Ellen standing in the hall passage. She was looking upwards.

“Now here’s something I had forgotten.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t you remember?” she asked, pointing above her head. “The loft hatch. On the second day of our honeymoon you got curious. You climbed on a chair to put your head inside, using your phone as a torch. When you came back down you looked … well, shifty, I guess the word is. But no matter how many times I asked, you just said the loft was empty.”

At that moment I felt time collapse, an image from the past striking me so vividly it felt like a race memory.

“It must have been empty,” I said, justifying the lie with feelings of protectiveness, as if such an attitude hadn’t motivated my whole adult life since, well, our marriage. “Yes, just boards, beams and cobwebs.”

“So why do you look shifty again?”

“A lifetime in advertising, my dear,” I joked, turning away in the hope that she’d abandon her enquiries. “It does things to your face.”

But there was no fooling Ellen. We’d been together too long not to have unfailing mental records of each other’s subtlest characteristics.

When I realised that she hadn’t followed me, I halted and, heartrate running with wicked haste, added, “Well, I’m not going up for another look, not with the state of my feet.”

“But there’s nothing to stop me from doing so.”

I whirled, the gout making my toes turn into flame. Ellen had already pulled a stool from the bedroom to one side and now stepped on top of it, using her hands to dislodge the hatch from its frame. Then she triggered the flashlight of the phone she’d recently had implanted under one palm and angled it through the gap into which her head had already ventured.

After half a minute, during which she carefully turned her body to observe each part of the loft, I noticed her grow suddenly motionless, much the way I had so many years earlier. Part of the one thing up there was indeed shocking, but its incongruous combination with another both softened the blow and heightened the disturbance, so that the only way of handling exposure to it seemed to be silence. My own had bordered on a multi-decade repression until now.

Seconds later, Ellen came back down, returned the stool, and then passed me, concertedly avoiding my gaze. Without speaking we went out to the car and got in. She started its electric motor. And drove.

We were still amid treacherous countryside when my wife, switching the vehicle to auto-control, finally spoke.

“You saw it, didn’t you, way back when? The same thing I just did?”

I turned to masculine logic; it had often served me well, even when situations (and there’d been many down the years) were beyond reason. “People tend not to access lofts, let alone clear them out. And that property has been a holiday cottage for nearly half a century, which means nobody lives there. So why would the … the thing ever be discovered?”

“But who’d create something like that?” Ellen added, struggling with her recollection in the same manner I had for days later, if not weeks or months after first setting eyes on the loft’s content. “It doesn’t make sense. That face … the bones … time running backwards …”

And now I did permit myself a brief glimpse of the mental image I’d somehow kept out of sight during all the ups and downs of a pleasing life which had, nonetheless, passed all too quickly.

It’s a human skeleton in one dark corner, either a small adult or an ageing child. It’s crouched in a cross-legged posture, arms laid flat upon its thighs. Instead of a skull there’s a clock, an antique-looking artefact perched squarely on top of the spinal column. But its elaborate second hand tick-tick-ticks the wrong way, widdershins, and there’s no reason to assume that the other, slower two won’t do the same if one waits long enough to observe.

“What does it mean?” asked Ellen, her voice still floundering between disquiet and confusion.

I leaned towards her, unable to explain; simply placed a hand on one of hers. We watched the landscape roll by as we headed back to the reassuringly manmade city. The wheat in the fields on either side of us had turned yellow, ready to be reaped.