Taking refuge in practicalities, he busied himself drawing up a servicing schedule.
I made up a shopping list of supplies and medical stuff, including industrial strength painkillers. Understandably, he would want to be in and out as quickly as possible, but, as I kept pointing out, that was the beauty of the plan. He could spend days at St Mary’s – weeks, even – and so long as he could jump back to Pompeii around an hour or so after he left me there, it didn’t matter.
‘The plan can’t fail,’ I said, ignoring such minor inconveniences as an unreliable pod, an erupting volcano, the omnipresent Time Police, a dying city, and a panicking population. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’
He slowly folded his lists and put them carefully away.
I shut the last locker door and there was no reason why we shouldn’t get on with it. No reason at all.
So we didn’t. We sat on the floor and looked at each other.
I should speak. I hadn’t said anything and he hadn’t said anything either, but there was a very real chance that one or both of us wouldn’t get through this. His pod could whirl him off to some place there was no coming back from. I could find myself buried under the contents of Vesuvius. He could be caught at St Mary’s. I could be caught at Pompeii. This might be the last opportunity we would ever have to speak together and if it was one thing I had learned over the last year, it was never to let an opportunity pass. It might never come again.
We turned down the lights and heating to conserve power, wrapped ourselves in blankets and we talked. We were a little hesitant at first, but there was safety in the semi-darkness. A feeling of intimacy and understanding. After a while, the words came more easily. We talked a little of our lives before St Mary’s, but not a great deal, because those weren’t happy times for either of us. We talked of St Mary’s – of shared experiences, each bittersweet word recalling old memories and half-forgotten jokes.
I said, ‘Do you remember the day Roberts and Markham tried to get a horse upstairs?’
‘Oh, yes, I’d forgotten that. They got old Turk up onto the gallery and they couldn’t get him down again. Apparently, horses can’t go downstairs.’
‘I can’t remember why they did it.’
‘They’d heard that Caligula slept with his horse and wanted to give it a try.’
‘And Dr Bairstow turned up and told them to call the vet and tell him to be sure to bring his humane killer.’
‘And no one knew whether it was for the horse or for them.’
I laughed. ‘And there was a huge argument over whether Caligula did actually sleep with his horse or his sister. Or whether that was Nero. Or Catherine the Great. And everyone was so busy shouting that they never noticed Turk wander off and they eventually caught up with him outside the kitchens, where Jenny Fields was giving him apples and Mrs Mack had made a halter out of tea towels.’
‘So,’ he said, ‘can horses can walk downstairs?’
‘No one saw him do it so we still don’t know. It’s very possible he took himself down in the heavy goods lift.’
We both smiled at the memory.
‘Do you remember when John Calvin called you the devil’s strumpet and tried to have you run out of town?’
‘No,’ I said, regretfully, ‘that didn’t happen to me, but Isaac Newton did once try to have me indicted for stealing his mirror. And it was my bloody mirror in the first place. Do you remember Professor Rapson assembling a Roman tortoise and they all fell into the lake?’
He laughed. ‘We didn’t have that, but I do remember his efforts to invent his own embalming fluid – he never said why and no one dared ask – and he had about twenty sheep’s heads hanging from the trees like wind chimes. The gardens looked like something from a Tim Burton movie. Every dog in the neighbourhood was going demented trying to climb the trees to get to them.’
‘Do you remember Alexandria?’
‘Yes. And Mary Stuart?’
‘Yes.’
Silence. I can’t remember which of us said it.
‘Do you remember Troy?’
I looked down at my hands. We should talk about Troy and Helios. We must talk about Troy and Helios. But what to say? I didn’t want to lie to him, but no matter how much I tried to avoid it, I wouldn’t be able to hide the fact that when the other Leon died, we were not together.
He said nothing, just sitting in the dark, waiting for me to speak.
In the end, I said, ‘At Troy – just as we were pulling out, Leon wanted to take a young boy with us. Helios. To take him to a place of safety. I refused. I made him take Helios back outside and leave him to face whatever would happen to him there.’