‘Sorry.’ I wriggled round to face him and waited expectantly. He said nothing, just stared at me, and I began to feel a little alarmed. Several times I thought he seemed about to speak but nothing happened.
Eventually I said, ‘Look, I’m well and truly focused now, but I’m not sure how long I can keep this up. If you don’t get a move on then I’m going to be wandering off again. What’s the problem?’
He took my hand and held it gently and I knew this was going to be bad.
‘Do you trust me?’
‘Yes,’ I said, because I did, but with a little twist of unease.
‘Well, you shouldn’t. Nothing is what it seems, least of all me.’
Shit. He was married. No, he was a woman. No, he was gay. I thought I felt something tear inside me.
‘Well, what are you then?’
He took a deep breath and exhaled, not looking at me. ‘I’m from the future.’
‘You’re … from the future?’
I don’t know why I should be so surprised. I know I’m an historian and we tend to think in the past, but, after all, our now was someone else’s past. Really, the only surprise should be that it hadn’t happened before.
He nodded fractionally. Now I could see it – the typical historian’s instinct to give away as little as possible. I could relate to that. Don’t contaminate the timeline.
‘Why are you here? Are you on assignment?’ Bloody long one if so; I’d known him four years and he’d been at St Mary’s two years before that. ‘Are you a fugitive? Are you on the run?’
‘No, no, nothing so exciting.’ He got up and began to wander around the room. I recognised that behaviour. I hate being bombarded with questions, so I left him. After a while he stopped by the window and turned to face me.
I said, ‘Why not start at the beginning, go on to the end and then stop.’
He smiled his small smile. ‘Yes, Lucy.’
‘Shouldn’t that be Alice?’
‘No, you’re my Lucy; the girl in the song – the one with kaleidoscope eyes.’
I was breathless again.
‘Leon Farrell is not my real name. I was born in France. My mother was English and a teacher. I never knew my father. We didn’t have a lot. My mother took extra jobs. So did I. Anything to get by. I got a full army scholarship to – well, a place in France. I graduated with honours and served three years at various land bases around Europe. I got transferred to a carrier, served there for two years, met a pilot named Monique, and married her.’
I sat very, very still.
‘Things were great for a couple of years. She got pregnant. We had a boy. Alexander. Alex. Then another, Stevie. Then she left me, citing career, demands of the military, not enough excitement. I tried to be both parents and carry on working but it was hard. My mother joined us to take care of the boys. Life got better for all of us and it was a pleasure to make things easier for her after all she’d done for me. Those were good years.’ The way he said it made me think there hadn’t been many of those. ‘I came home whenever I could and then I got posted to a research establishment just outside – well, somewhere in England. We all moved. We were happy. Alex started school.’
He stopped, drew back the curtains and stared out into the dark.
‘There was – will be – an outbreak of flu. There’s one nearly every year, I know, but this one was a killer. And cruel. It took the old and the young. Anyone from twenty to fifty only seemed to get it mildly. Other people, the ones outside that age group, just dropped and died. It was that quick.
‘My mother got it first. I’m glad, actually, that she went first. So she never knew … All public establishments closed. The country was at a standstill. I sat with my mother at the hospital until she died, quite quietly and without a fuss. Typical of her. Next day, the boys got it. There was nothing anyone could do. Alex went first. Like his grandmother, he went quietly. Just closed his eyes and drifted away. Stevie … suffered. He didn’t know me. I held him and tried to keep him cool. He cried for his grandmamma. He cried for me. It was … very bad. He died in the small hours. It was the end of my world. I started the week with a happy, healthy family and at the end of it I was the only one left.’
He took a very long, deep breath. ‘They were working on a cure by that time; a vaccine. They took samples of the boys’ blood. And mine, because sometimes … When the doctors asked to see me I thought there was a chance they could … and then they told me they couldn’t … because the boys weren’t mine. They didn’t even have the same father. There was no chance for them. I buried all three on the same day. Their mother didn’t come.’
What can you say? What can you do? He cleared his throat, closed the curtains, and continued with bitter amusement.