that, under other circumstances, she would never have conceded. He disguised the joy the thought gave him by glancing around the room, taking the opportunity to try to spot one of Gilliam Murray’s possible spies among the chattering customers. He saw no one who struck him as suspicious.
‘I can’t be too careful,’ he remarked, turning back to face her. ‘As I said, I mustn’t draw attention to myself, and that would be impossible if I wore my armour. It’s why I must also ask you not to call me “Captain”.’
‘Very well,’ said the girl, and then, unable to control her excitement at being privy to a secret no one else knew, added: ‘I can’t believe you’re really Captain Derek Shackleton!’
Startled, Tom begged her to be quiet.
‘Oh, forgive me,’ she apologised, flushing, ‘only I’m so excited. I still can’t believe I’m having tea with the saviour of—‘
Luckily she broke off when she saw the waitress coming over. They ordered tea for two and an assortment of cakes and buns. When she had left to fetch their order, they stared at each other for a few moments, grinning foolishly Tom watched her attempt to regain her composure, while he wondered how to steer the conversation on to a more personal footing that would assist him in his plan. He had chosen the tea room because there was an inexpensive but clean-looking boarding-house opposite that had seemed the perfect venue for their union. Now all he needed to do was employ his powers of seduction, if he had any, to get her there. He knew this would be no easy feat: evidently a young lady like Claire, who probably still had her virtue intact, would not agree to go to bed with a man she had only just met, even if she did think he was Capitan Shackleton.
‘How did you get here?’ asked Claire, oblivious to his machinations. ‘Did you stow away on the Cronotilus?’
Tom had to stifle his annoyance at her question: the last thing he wanted was to justify his earlier fabrication while he was attempting to spin a credible yarn that would enable him to have his way with her. However, he could scarcely tell her he had travelled back in time to return her parasol and expect her to accept it, as though it were the most natural thing in the world for people to run back and forth between centuries on unimportant errands. The sudden appearance of the waitress with their order gave him time to think up an answer that would satisfy Claire.
‘The Cronotilus?’ he asked, pretending he knew nothing of the time-tram’s existence: if he had used it to travel back to this century he would have had no choice but to stay there until the next expedition to the year 2000. That was almost a month away, which meant this meeting need not be their last.
‘It’s the steam tram in which we travelled to your century across that dreadful place called the fourth dimension,’ Claire explained. Then she paused. ‘But if you didn’t come on the Cronotilus then how
‘Of course there is,’ Tom assured her, assuming that if the girl was taken in by Murray’s hoax – if she believed time travel was possible – then the chances were that he could make up any method he liked and she would believe it. ‘Our scientists have invented a machine that travels through time instantly, without the need for tiresome journeys through the fourth dimension.’
‘And can this machine travel to any era?’ she demanded, mesmerised.
‘Any time at all,’ replied Tom, carelessly, as though he had had enough of travelling across the centuries.
He reached for a bun and munched it cheerfully, as if to show her that, despite all he had seen, he could still enjoy the simplest pleasures of life, such as English baking.
Claire asked: ‘Do you have it with you? Can you show it me?’
‘Show you what?’
‘The time machine you used to travel here.’
Tom almost choked on his bun. ‘No, no,’ he said hastily. ‘That’s out of the question.’
She responded in a manner that took Tom by surprise, pouting rather childishly and folding her arms stiffly.
‘I can’t show it to you because . . . it’s not something you can see,’ he improvised, trying to mollify her anger before it set in.
‘You mean it’s invisible?’ She looked at him suspiciously.
‘I mean it’s not a carriage with wings that flies through time,’ he explained.
‘What is it, then?’
Tom stifled a sigh of despair. What was it, indeed, and why could he not show it to her?’
‘It’s an object that doesn’t move physically through the time continuum. It’s fixed in the future and from there it . . . well, it makes holes we can travel through to other eras. Like a drill, only instead of making holes in rocks, it digs tunnels through the fabric of time. That’s why I can’t show it to you, although I’d like nothing better.’
For a few moments she was silent, clearly intrigued. Then she murmured, ‘A machine that makes holes in the fabric of time. And you went through one of those tunnels and came out today?’
‘That’s right,’ replied Tom.
‘And how will you get back to the future?’
‘Through the same hole.’
‘Are you telling me that, at this very moment, somewhere in London, there’s a tunnel leading to the year 2000?’
Tom took a sip of tea. He was beginning to tire of this conversation. ‘Opening it in the city would have been too obvious, as I’m sure you understand,’ he said cautiously. ‘The tunnel always opens outside London, at Harrow-on- the-Hill, a tiny knoll with an old oak surrounded by headstones. But the machine can’t keep it open for very long. It will close in a few hours’ time, and I have to go back through it before that happens.’
With these words, he gazed at her solemnly, hoping she would stop plying him with questions if she knew they had so little time together.
