Upon reaching the nearest Underground station, he swiped his Oyster at the turnstile and received the dreaded “Seek Assistance” sign once again. Rather than repeat his former escapade, he dutifully purchased a ticket from one of the machines, pushed through the turnstile, and headed down the steps to the platform. When the train came whooshing up, he climbed on, took a seat, and uneventfully rode the rest of the way to Clapton, where he proceeded straightaway to Wilhelmina’s flat, firmly resolved to forget the whole strange interlude, put it behind him; to never, ever breathe a word about it to another living soul. This resolve carried him all the way to his girlfriend’s tower-block apartment building and her front door.
He knocked.
There was a click and the door swung open. “You’re late!”
“What? No kiss? No cheery greeting?”
Wilhelmina frowned, but gave him a quick, dry peck on the cheek. “You’re still late.”
“Yeah, sorry about that. I had this-” He stopped abruptly and retrenched. “I mean, my Oyster card was out, so I had to walk.”
“And that took you eight hours?”
“Huh?” he wondered. “No, really.”
She moved away from the doorway, and he stepped in, kicking off his damp shoes. Her flat was ample by London standards, clean as a dental hygienist’s treatment room and nearly as cold. Wilhelmina was nothing if not tidy-perhaps owing to the fact that she had once been a dental hygienist, briefly, before chucking it in-too many people, too many mouths-to become a baker.
She still filled people’s mouths, albeit in a different and, for her, much more satisfying way.
As Kit watched her slouch back to her big blue sofa, which was her habitual nest, he was once more impressed with the idea that he simply had to get a better girlfriend at first opportunity. Dressed in black slacks and a black turtleneck with the horrible, ratty, hand-knitted purple scarf she wore everywhere, with her feet stuffed into flat-heeled, sheepskin boots, she was a dead ringer for the undertaker’s anemic daughter. Why, he wondered, did she have to look so austere? Whatever happened to sugar and spice? When enumerating the qualities he desired in a mate, vim and vigour, a zest for life, and a keenness of mind and intellect came quite near the top of the list. Wilhelmina’s idea of excitement was an extra scoop of sultanas in the cinnamon buns. Her intellect might have been keen enough-if anyone could ever catch her awake long enough to stimulate her into meaningful conversation.
Her job at Giovanni’s Rustic Italian Bakery-“Artisan Breads Our Specialty”-meant that she had to rise every weekday morning in the wee hours to be at work by four o’clock to fire up the ovens and mix the first of the day’s dough. She finished work just after one in the afternoon, was completely exhausted by six in the evening, and usually sound asleep by eight-all of which meant one hardly ever saw her when she wasn’t yawning, stifling a yawn, or having just yawned. If sleep were an Olympic event, Wilhelmina Klug could have slept for Team GB.
Her eyelids drooped, and her shoulders too. Like many tall girls, she had developed the round-shouldered, hunched-over posture that would in time grow into a widow’s hump; in Wilhelmina’s case, since marriage seemed so very remote, it would be a spinster’s hump.
Everything about her was retiring. Even her chin receded.
Her hair was mousy, both in colour and texture: very fine, shiny, and slightly bristly; and she wore it aggressively short. The better to keep it out of the pastry, she claimed, but the style was far from flattering. She had large, dark eyes that might in themselves have been pretty if not for the matching large dark circles beneath them.
Wilhelmina was no catch. As one of Kit’s colleagues put it after spending a rare evening with the unfortunate couple: “For warmth and affection, mate, you’d be better off with a pair of ferrets and a hot-water bottle.”
Kit could not disagree.
But until something better came along, she was, for him, it. And, despite her many obvious flaws, and his continually renewed determination to do better in the dating game, he inexplicably turned up time and again outside her door. It was as if his feet had a mind of their own and weren’t over-fussy about whose table they parked themselves under.
“Well?” she said.
“Sorry? Am I missing something here?”
“You’re late, dope. You promised to go help me pick out curtains for the bathroom this morning.”
“So, here I am. Let’s go.”
“Is this your lame idea of a joke?”
“Sunday morning-John Lewis, yeah? So, let’s go and pick out some curtains.”
“You’re winding me up, right? You know well and good they close on Sunday at five.”
“Wait!” He stepped close. “What did you say?”
She puffed out her cheeks with exasperation. “I’m too tired for this.”
“No, really, what time is it?”
“Four-bloody-thirty!” She gave him the full frontal glare of a woman on the edge and collapsed on the couch. “Idiot man.”
“It’s never half-four.” Pulling his phone from his front pocket, he checked the display. He saw the number four followed by two threes, experienced a twinge of disbelief, and quickly shoved the phone back into his pocket.
“Are you trying to pick a fight? You waste the whole day and this is the best excuse you can think up? ‘Duh, I forgot what time it is.. ..’ Pathetic.” She rolled her big brown eyes. “You can’t do better than that?”
“No, really, Mina,” said Kit, suddenly desperate to explain. “Listen, something’s happened-”
“Something’s happened, all right. I missed my chance to go shopping on the one day of the week I have off, and all because of you. Where were you anyway-at the pub? I tried to call you, but your phone is off.”
“We’ll go next week,” he offered.
“No thanks. I’ll do it myself-as usual.”
“No, Mina, listen-I’m trying to tell you the truth.” Even as he spoke he could feel his former resolve evaporating in the heat of her righteous indignation. He slid onto the couch beside her. “Something’s happened. I didn’t believe it myself-I’m still not sure I believe it yet-but I can explain. Really.”
“This should be good,” she snipped. Crossing her arms across her sunken chest, she thrust out her chin, daring him. “Go on, then.”
“Okay,” he said, his vow to say nothing about his hallucination effectively dwarfed by the need to make her believe, “but you can’t tell anybody what I’m about to tell you.”
“Yeah, right. As if I would.”
“Well, I was on my way here, but my Oyster was tapped out-” She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off. “No, just shut up and listen. The ticket machine wouldn’t cooperate, and I couldn’t get change, right? So, I decided to walk. Well, I’m walking along and decided to cut through this alley. All of a sudden there’s this terrific storm-wind, hail, lightning, the whole works. And this is where it gets weird, but you gotta trust me on this-I’m telling the truth, I swear-and I met my great-grandfather.”
“Your what?” Her voice climbed to another register.
“Great-grandfather. I met him-”
“I didn’t know you had a great-grandfather.”
“Neither did I. Turns out his name is Cosimo, too, and he took me to this old-fashioned pub at a place on the coast called Sefton-on-Sea and he-”
“How’d you get there?” Wilhelmina demanded.
“We walked,” he hedged.
“All the way from London?”
“Well, yeah. Sort of.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Define sort of.”
He had hoped to avoid that part of the experience, fearing, and rightly so, that he would not be believed. “Thing is,” he confessed, “I’m not exactly sure what happened.”
Her eyes narrowed farther.
“Whatever it was, it happened when we were in the alley-it has to do with ley lines and stuff. See, we started walking, and when we got to the end of the alley we were someplace else.”
“Someplace else?” Mina’s eyes became slits of suspicion. “Boy, you just don’t give up, do you?”
“Cornwall, I think,” said Kit. “Or, Devon.” He saw her face harden in disbelief. “Possibly Pembrokeshire.
