stopped our frantic dash and asked Alice to grip my hands as tightly as she could. She looked at me, puzzled, but did as I said, and as reality dissolved and my body became weightless for a third time, I gritted my teeth and tried to take her with me. I had no idea where I was going, but I was not prepared to leave her behind as I had left Jane, my life, and everything that was dear to me.
The sensations that subsequently overtook me were the same as before: I felt myself float upwards for a split second, leaving my body then returning to it, slipping back between my bones, except that this time I could feel the warm sensation of someone else’s hands in mine. I opened my eyes, blinking sluggishly, struggling not to vomit. I beamed with joy when I saw Alice’s hands still clasping mine. Small, delicate hands I would cover with grateful kisses after we made love, hands joined to slender forearms covered with a delightful golden down. The only part of her I had managed to bring with me.
I buried Alice’s hands in the garden where I appeared in the Norwich of 1982, which did not look as if it had ever been shelled, except for the monument to the dead in the middle of one of its squares. There I discovered Alice’s name, among many others, although I always wondered whether it was the war that killed her, or Otto Lidenbrock, the man who loved her. In any event, it was something I was condemned to live with, for I had leaped into the future to escape the bombs. Another forty-four years: that seemed to be as far as I could jump.
The world in which I now found myself was apparently wiser, intent on forging its own identity and displaying its playful, innovative spirit in every aspect of life. Yes, this was an arrogant world that celebrated its achievements with a child’s jubilant pride, and yet it was a peaceful world where war was a painful memory, a shameful recognition that human nature had a terrible side that had to be concealed, if only under a facade of politeness. The world had been forced to rebuild itself, and it had been then, while clearing the rubble and gathering up the dead, while putting up new buildings and sticking bridges back together, patching up the holes that war had wreaked on his soul and his lineage, that man had become brutally aware of what had happened, had suddenly realised that everything which had seemed rational at first had become irrational, like a ball in which the music stops.
I could not help rejoicing: the zeal with which those around me condemned their grandfathers’ actions convinced me there would be no more wars like the one I had lived through. And I will tell you I was also right about that. Man can learn, Bertie, even if as with circus animals, it has to be beaten into him.
In any event, I had to start again from scratch, to build another wretched life from the very beginning. I left Norwich, where I had no ties, and went back to London where, after being astounded by the advances of science, I tried to find a job that might be suitable for a man from the Victorian age going by the name of Harry Grant. Was I doomed, then, to wander through time, floating from one period to another like a leaf blown in the wind, alone for ever? No, things would be different this time. I was alone, yes, but I knew I would not be lonely for very long. I had a future appointment to keep, one that did not require me to travel in time again. This future was close enough for me to wait until it came to me.
But apparently, before that, the mysterious hand of fate had made another appointment for me, with something very special from my past. And it happened at a cinema. Yes, Bertie, you heard right. It is hard to exaggerate the extent to which cinema will develop from the moment the Lumiere brothers first projected images of workers leaving their factory at Lyon Monplaisir. No one in your time had any inkling of the enormous potential of their invention. However, once the novelty wears off, people will soon tire of images of men playing cards, scampering children and trains pulling into stations -everyday things they can see from their windows and with sound -and they will want something more than dull social documentaries accompanied by the absent tinkle of a piano. That is why the projector now tells a story on the empty screen.
To give you an idea, imagine one of them filming a play that does not have to take place on a stage raised in front of rows of seats, but can use anywhere in the world as its setting. And if in addition I tell you that the director can narrate the story using not just a handful of painted backdrops but a whole arsenal of techniques, such as making people vanish in front of our eyes by means of manipulating images, you will understand why the cinema has become the most popular form of entertainment in the future, far more so than music hall. Yes, nowadays an even more sophisticated version of the Lumiere brothers’ machine makes the world dream, bringing magic into people’s lives, and an entire industry commanding enormous sums of money has grown up around it.
I am not telling you this for pure pleasure, but because sometimes these cinema stories are taken from books. And this is the surprise, Bertie: in 1960, a director named George Pal will turn your novel The Time Machine into a film. Yes, he will put images to your words. They had already done this with Verne, of course, but that in no way diminished my joy. How can I describe what I felt when I saw the story you had written take place on screen? There was your inventor, whom they had named after you, played by an actor with a determined, dreamy expression, and there, too, was sweet Weena, played by a beautiful French actress whose face radiated a hypnotic calm, and the Morlocks, more terrifying than you could ever have imagined, and the colossal sphinx, and dependable, no-nonsense Filby, and even Mrs Watchett, with her spotless white apron and cap. And as one scene succeeded another, I trembled with emotion in my seat at the thought that none of this would have been possible if you had not imagined it, that somehow this feast of images had previously been projected inside your head.
I confess that, at some point, I looked away from the screen and studied the faces of the people sitting near me. I imagine you would have done the same, Bertie. I know more than once you wished you had that freedom: I still remember how downcast you felt when a reader told you how much they had enjoyed your novel, without you being able to see how they had responded to this or that passage, or whether they had laughed or wept in the proper places, because to do so you would have had to steal into their libraries like a common thief. You may rest assured: the audience responded exactly as you had hoped.
But we must not take the credit away from Mr Pal, who captured the spirit of your novel brilliantly – although I will not try to hide the fact that he changed a few things in order to adapt it to the times: the film was made sixty-five years after the book was written, and part of what for you was the future had already become the past. Remember, for example, that despite your concern over the ways man might use science, it never even occurred to you that he might become embroiled in a war that would engulf the entire planet. Well, he did, not once but twice, as I have already told you. Pal made your inventor witness not only the First and Second World Wars, he even predicted a third in 1966, although fortunately in that case his pessimism proved unfounded.
As I told you, the feelings I experienced in that cinema, hypnotised by the swirling images that owed so much to you, is beyond words. This was something you had written, yes, and yet everything that appeared on the screen was unfamiliar to me – everything, that is, except the time machine, your time machine, Bertie. You cannot imagine how surprised I was to see it there. For a moment I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. But, no, it was your machine, gleaming and beautiful, with its graceful curves, like a musical instrument, betraying the hand of a skilled craftsman, exuding an elegance that the machines in which I had been cast adrift had lost. But how had it ended up there, and where could it be now, more than twenty years after the actor called Rod Taylor, who played you, first climbed out of it?
After several weeks spent scouring the newspapers at the library, I managed to trace its eventful journey. I discovered that Jane had not wanted to part with it and had taken it with her to London, to the house of
