Where the Club was now was a few streets north of St James’s Park, south of Piccadilly, tucked in between bespoke tailors and mansions for the declining rich, a single brass plaque on its door declaring, TIME FLIES. NO TRADESMEN PLEASE.
“It’s a joke,” she explained when I asked. “That’s the 1780s bunch. Everyone’s always leaving each other little notes for posterity. I buried a time capsule in 1925 once with a vital message for the Club five hundred years from now.”
“What’s in the capsule?” I asked.
“A recipe for proper lemon sherbet.” She saw my face and spread her arms expansively. “No one said it was easy being on the end of linear temporal events!”
I drank brandy and looked around the room again. Like so many giant properties in the wealthy parts of London, it was a throwback to a time when colours were rich, tastes were prim and mantelpieces had to be made of marble. Portraits of men and women dressed smartly in the garments of their time–“Apparently they’ll be worth something one day. Damned if I know why and I’ve snogged Picasso!”–lined the walls like memorials to the departed in a crematorium. The furniture was plush and rather dusty, the giraffe-built windows were criss-crossed with tape, “To appease the locals, darling. Nothing’s going to get hit round here but the wardens kick up such a fuss.”
The halls were silent. Crystal chandeliers tinkled gently when planes went overhead, the lights burned low in a few rooms behind the blackout blinds, and no one was to be seen.
“Countryside,” explained Virginia brightly. “Most of them pack out by July ’39. It’s not so much the bombing, you see, as the ghastly sense of oppression. Our members have been through it so many times before that really they can’t be buggered, so they ship off to somewhere nicer, brighter, with good ventilation and none of this tedious war business to bother them. A lot go to Canada, especially from the rather more oppressive clubs–Warsaw, Berlin, Hanover, St Petersburg, all that crowd. One or two stick around for the excitement but I can’t be bothered.”
Then why was she here?
“Keeping the ship afloat, dear boy! It’s my turn, you see, to keep an eye out for our freshest members. That’s you, by the way–you are our first new member in six hundred years. But there’s also several members being born about now–their mothers take such a sentimental view of their boys departing to conflict that, what can I say, discretions are brought into question. One has to stick around to make sure their childhoods aren’t too rough. A lot of the time money solves things, but sometimes–” she took a careful sip from the glass “–one has to arrange things. Evacuation and that sort of business. Parents can be such a bore.”
“Is that what you do?” I asked. “You… cater for the childhood period?”
“It’s one of our primary roles,” she replied airily. “Childhood is the most taxing time of our lives, unless of course you’re genetically predisposed towards a ghastly death or some sort of inherited disease. We have all the knowledge and experience of a dozen lives, and yet if we tell some boring linear adult that they really should invest in rubber as it’s going to be the most marvellous thing, we just get a pat on the head and a cry of ‘There there, Harry, go back to your choo choo set’ or whatnot. A lot of our members are also born rather poor, so it helps to know that there is a society of mutually understanding individuals who can see that you get a decent pair of socks to wear and ensure that you don’t have to waste several tedious years of your life, every life, learning your ABC. It’s not just the money,” she concluded with a flare of satisfaction, “it’s the companionship.”
I had a hundred questions, a thousand, all reeling round inside my head, but I couldn’t pin any of them down so fell back weakly on, “Are there any rules I should know about?”
“Don’t bugger about with temporal events!” she replied firmly. “You did cause us a bit of embarrassment in your last life, Harry–not your fault of course, not at all; we’ve all been in difficult situations–but Phearson had enough information to change the course of the future, and we really can’t have that. It’s not that we aren’t concerned, it’s that these things can never be fully predicted.”
“Anything else?”
“Don’t harm another kalachakra. We really couldn’t care what you do to everyone else as long as it’s not particularly obscene and doesn’t bring attention to us, but we remember, and it’s just not on. Be good!”
“You mentioned contributions…”
“Yes, if you do get a chance to make a massive, obscene amount of money, please do put some aside for our childhood benevolent fund. The future generations are so appreciative.”
Was that it?
No, not quite.
“Not so much a rule, Harry darling,” she explained, “as good advice. Don’t tell anyone where or when you’re from. Not in so much detail.”