The Map of Time

fragile and threatened cohesion. Without protest, Wells resigned himself to taking on the mantle of clan defender, knowing that none of its other members was up to the task. His father, having finally freed himself from the burden of the china shop, had moved to a cottage in Nyewood, a tiny village south of Rogate, where he had a view of Harting Down and the elms at Uppark. Life had gradually washed up the rest of the family in the tiny house.

The first to arrive was Frank. He had left the bakery a few years earlier to become a travelling watch salesman, an occupation in which he had not been very successful – a fact borne out by the two enormous trunks of unsold watches he brought with him. They gave off a loud, incessant whirring sound and rattled like a colony of mechanical spiders. Then came Fred, his trusting brother, who had been unceremoniously dismissed from the company where he worked as soon as the boss’s son was old enough to occupy the seat he had unknowingly kept warm for him. Finding themselves together again, and with a roof over their heads, Bertie’s brothers devoted themselves to licking each other’s wounds and, infected by their father’s relaxed attitude to life, soon accepted this latest downturn with good cheer.

The last to arrive was their mother, dismissed from her beloved paradise at Uppark because the onset of deafness had rendered her useless and irritable. The only one who did not return to the fold was Frances, perhaps because she felt there would not be enough room for her infant coffin. Even so, there were too many of them, and Wells had to make a superhuman effort to keep up his endless hours of teaching to protect that nest, buzzing with the sound of Frank’s watches, that pesthouse of happy walking-wounded reeking of snuff and stale beer, to the point at which he ended up vomiting blood and collapsing on the steps of Charing Cross station.

The diagnosis was clear: tuberculosis. And although he made a swift recovery, this attack was a warning to Wells to stop burning the midnight oil or the next onslaught would be more serious. He accepted this in a practical spirit. He knew that, when the wind was favourable, he had plenty of ways to make a living, so had no difficulty in drawing up a new life plan. He abandoned teaching and resolved to live solely from his writings. This would allow him to work at home, with no timetables and pressures than those he chose to impose on himself. He would finally be able to live the peaceful life his fragile health required.

Thus he set about swamping the local newspapers with articles, penning the odd essay for the Fortnightly Review and, after much persistence, managed to persuade the Pall Mall Gazette to offer him a column. Overjoyed by his success, and seeking the fresh air indispensable to his sick lungs, the whole family moved to a country house in Sutton, near the North Downs, one of the few areas that had as yet escaped becoming a suburb of London. For a while, Wells believed his quiet seclusion was to be his life, but once again he was mistaken: this was an imaginary truce. Apparently chance considered him a most amusing toy, for it decided to change the course of his life again, although this time the twist involved the pleasant, popular veneer of fated love.

In the classroom Wells had established friendly relations with a pupil of his, Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he nicknamed Jane, and during the walk they happened to share to Charing Cross station to catch their respective trains, he could not help mesmerising the girl with his eloquent banter. He indulged in it with no other purpose than to allow himself to swell with pride at being able to impress such a beautiful, adorable girl with his words. However, those innocent conversations bore unexpected fruit. His wife, Isabel, alerted him to it on their return from a weekend in Putney, where they had been invited by Jane and her mother. She it was who assured him that, whether or not he had intended it, the girl had fallen head over heels in love with him. Wells could only raise an eyebrow when his wife demanded he stop seeing his former pupil if he wished their marriage to survive.

It was not difficult to choose between the woman who refused his caresses and the cheerful, apparently uninhibited Jane. Wells packed up his books, his furniture and the wicker basket, and moved into a miserable hovel in Mornington Place in a rundown area of north London between Euston and Camden Town. He wished he could have abandoned the marital home spurred on by a violent passion, but he had to leave that to Jane. His real reasons for leaving were the playful curiosity he felt when he glimpsed her little body beneath her dress and, above all, the chance to escape monotony and discover a new life, given that he could predict how the old one would turn out.

However, his first impression was that love had caused him to make a serious mistake: not only had he moved to the worst possible place for his tormented lungs – a neighbourhood in which the air was polluted by soot borne on the wind and mixed with smoke from the locomotives passing through on their way north – but Jane’s mother, convinced her poor daughter had fallen into the clutches of a degenerate because Wells was still married to Isabel, had moved in with the couple. She seemed determined to undermine their patience with her endless, vociferous reproaches.

These unforeseen events, with the additional worrying certainty that it would be impossible for him to run no less than three homes on the proceeds of his articles, compelled Wells to take the basket and shut himself into a cupboard, the only place safe from Mrs Robbins’s intrusive presence. Hidden among the coats and hats, he stroked the wicker for hours on end, like Aladdin trying to bring back the power of his magic lamp.

This may have seemed an absurd, desperate, or even pathetic strategy, but the day after he performed this rubbing of the basket, Lewis Hind, the literary editor of the Gazette’s weekly supplement sent for him. He needed someone capable of writing stories with a scientific slant, short stories reflecting on and even predicting where the relentless onslaught of inventions bent on changing the face of that century would lead. Hind was convinced Wells was the ideal man for the job. What he was proposing, in fact, was that he resurrect his childhood dream, and have another stab at becoming a writer.

Wells accepted, and in a few days drafted a story entitled ‘The Stolen Bacillus’, which delighted Hind and earned Wells five guineas. The story also drew the attention of William Ernest Henley, editor of the National Observer, who promptly invited him to contribute to the pages of his journal, convinced the young man would produce far more ambitious stories if he had room to experiment. Wells was delighted and terrified in equal measure at being given the chance to write for such a prestigious magazine, which at that time was publishing a serialised version of The Nigger of the Narcissus by his idol Joseph Conrad. This was no longer writing news items, articles or short stories. He was being offered the space for his imagination to run wild, the freedom to be a real writer of fiction.

Wells awaited his meeting with Henley in a state of nervous tension bordering on collapse. Since the editor of the National Observer had asked to see him, Wells had been rummaging through his large mental stockpile of ideas in search of a story original and striking enough to impress the veteran publisher. None seemed to live up to his offer. The rendezvous was drawing near, and Wells still did not have a good story to show Henley. It was then that he turned to the basket and saw that, although it looked empty, it was actually brimming with novels, a cornucopia that needed only a gentle nudge to pour forth its torrent of ideas. This extravagant image was, of course, Wells’s way of expressing in poetic language what really happened when he saw the basket: inevitably he remembered his conversation with Merrick and, to his amazement, each time he recalled it he discovered, like a nugget of gold hidden on the bed of a stream, another idea that could be made into a novel. Whether deliberately or by accident, it was as though Merrick had supplied him with enough plots to last several years while he and Wells had pretended they were having tea. He recalled Merrick’s disappointment at Dr Nebogipfel being so uninterested in venturing into the unknown world of tomorrow, and this omission appeared worth rectifying now that he had the experience of writing all those articles.

Without a second thought, he got rid of the unsavoury Nebogipfel, replacing him with a respectable, anonymous scientist in whom any inventor could see himself portrayed, and who even embodied the archetypal scientist of the dawning new century. Endeavouring to create something more than just a naive fantasy from his idea of time