The Map of Time

she lived in was dreary and uninspiring; it bored her to tears. And the fact that she could find no one around her who seemed to share her disenchantment made her feel out of place and out of sorts. This profound inner unease, which inevitably isolated her socially, often made her irritable and sharp-tongued, and from time to time, regardless of whether the moon was full or not, she would lose control and turn into a mischievous creature who delighted in wreaking havoc at family gatherings.

Claire knew perfectly well that these fits of frustration, besides being self-indulgent and futile, did her no good at all, especially at such a crucial time in her life. Her main concern ought to have been finding a husband to support and provide her with half a dozen offspring to show the world she was of good breeding stock. Her friend Lucy used to warn her she was gaining a reputation among her suitors for being unsociable, and some had abandoned their courtship after realising that her offhand manner made her an impregnable fortress. Nevertheless, Claire could not help reacting as she did. Or could she?

Sometimes she wondered whether she did everything in her power to overcome her gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, or whether, on the contrary, she derived a morbid pleasure from giving in to it. Why could she not accept the world as it was? Lucy stoically endured the torments of the corset as though they were some sort of atonement aimed at purifying her soul. She did not mind being barred from study at Oxford and put up with being visited by her suitors in scrupulous succession, in the knowledge that sooner or later she must marry one of them. But Claire was not like Lucy: she loathed those corsets, apparently designed by the devil himself; she longed to be able to use her brain as any man could; and she was not the slightest bit interested in marrying any of the young men hovering around her.

It was the idea of marriage she found most distressing – despite the great progress that had been made since her mother’s day. Then when a woman married she was immediately stripped of all her possessions, even the money she earned from paid employment. The law, like an ill-fated wind, blew everything straight into her husband’s grasping hands. At least if Claire were to marry now she would keep her possessions, and might even win custody of her children in the event of a divorce. Even so, she continued to consider marriage a form of legal prostitution, as Mary Wollstonecraft had stated in her book A Vindication of the Rights of Women - a work that to Claire was as sacred as the Bible. She admired the author’s determined struggle to restore women’s dignity her insistence that women should stop being considered the handmaidens of men, whom science deemed more intelligent because their skulls – and therefore their brains -were bigger: she had more than enough evidence to suggest that such enhanced proportions were only good for filling a larger hat.

On the other hand, Claire knew that if she refused to place herself under a man’s tutelage, she would have no choice but to make her own living, to try to find employment in one of the few openings available to someone of her position: as a stenographer or nurse. Both occupations appealed to her even less than being buried alive with one of the elegant dandies who took it in turns to worship her.

But what could she do if marriage seemed such an unacceptable alternative? She felt she only could go through with it if she were truly to fall in love with a man – which she considered virtually impossible: her indifference towards men was not confined to her dull crowd of admirers, but extended to every man on the planet, young or old, rich or poor, handsome or ugly. The niceties were unimportant: she was firmly convinced she could never fall in love with any man from her own time, whoever he might be, for the simple reason that his idea of love would pale beside the romantic passion to which she longed to surrender herself.

Claire yearned to be overwhelmed by an uncontrollable, violent fervour that would scorch her very soul; she longed for a furious happiness to compel her to take fateful decisions that would allow her to gauge the strength of her feelings. Yet she longed without hope, for she knew that this type of love had gone out with frilly blouses. What else could she do? Resign herself to living without the one thing she imagined gave meaning to life? No, of course not.

And yet, a few days earlier, something had happened that, to her amazement, had roused her sleeping curiosity, encouraging her to believe that, despite first appearances, life was not devoid of surprises. Lucy had summoned her to her house with her usual urgency and, somewhat reluctantly, Claire had obeyed, fearing her friend had organised yet another of the tedious seances to which she was so partial. Lucy had joined in the latest craze to come out of America with the same zeal she applied to following the latest Paris fashions. Claire was not so much bothered by having to make believe she was conversing with spirits as she was by Eric Sanders, a skinny, arrogant young man, who had set himself up as the official neighbourhood medium. Sanders maintained he had special powers that allowed him to communicate with the dead. Claire knew this was simply a ruse to gather together half a dozen unmarried, impressionable girls, plunge them into an intimidating gloom, terrify them with a preposterously cavernous voice, and take advantage of their proximity to stroke their hands and even their shoulders with impunity. The crafty Sanders had read enough of The Spirits Book by Allan Kardec to be able to interrogate the dead with apparent ease and confidence, although he was evidently far too interested in the living to pay much attention to their responses.

After the last seance when Claire had slapped him after she felt a spirit’s all too real hand caressing her ankles, Sanders had banned her from any further gatherings, insisting that her sceptical nature was too upsetting to the dead and hampered his communication with them. At first, her exclusion from Sanders’s supernatural gatherings had come as a relief, but she ended up feeling disheartened: she was twenty-one and had fallen out not only with this world but with the world beyond.

However, Lucy had not arranged any seances that evening. She had a far more thrilling proposal, she explained to her friend, smiling excitedly and leading her by the hand to her room. There, she told her to sit down on a small armchair and be patient. Then she began rifling through her desk drawer. Open on a lectern on the desk lay a copy of Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle. The page showed an illustration of a kiwi bird, an extraordinary-looking creature that her friend was copying on to a piece of paper – tracing its simple, rounded form required no artistic ability. Claire could not help wondering whether, besides looking at the pictures, her friend had troubled to read the book that had become a favourite among the middle classes.

Once she had found what she was looking for, Lucy shut the drawer and turned to her friend with an ecstatic smile. What could Lucy possibly find more exciting than communicating with dead people? Claire wondered. She discovered the answer on reading the leaflet her friend thrust into her hand: communicating with people who had not yet been born. The flyer advertised a company called Murray’s Time Travel, which offered journeys through time, to the year 2000, to witness the battle between automatons and humans that would decide the fate of humanity. Stunned, Claire re-read the leaflet then studied the crude illustrations that apparently depicted the aforementioned battle. Amid ruined buildings, automatons and humans battled for the future of the world with strange weapons. The figure leading the human army caught her eye – the artist had drawn him in a more heroic pose than the others. According to the caption below, he was the brave Captain Derek Shackleton.

Without giving Claire time to collect herself, Lucy explained she had visited the premises of Murray’s Time Travel that very morning. They had informed her that seats were still available for the second expedition, arranged after the success of the first, and she had not hesitated to sign them up for it. Claire looked a little put out, but Lucy did not apologise for having failed to ask her friend’s permission. She went on to explain how they would go about travelling to the future without their respective parents finding out: she knew that if they did they would doubtless forbid them to go or, worse, insist on going with them. Lucy wanted to enjoy the year 2000 without the bore of being chaperoned. She had it all worked out: money would be no object, as she had persuaded her wealthy grandmother, Margaret, to give her the amount they needed to cover the cost of both tickets – naturally without telling her what it was for. She had even enlisted her friend Florence Burnett’s help. For ‘a small fee’, the greedy Florence was willing to send them a false invitation to spend the following Thursday at her country house at Kirkby.