‘And now, if you’ll excuse me,’ said Murray, standing up and handing him back the document, ‘I’m extremely busy’
‘Of course, Mr Murray’
Taken aback by the way in which Murray had abruptly ended the interview, Garrett rose from his armchair, thanked him once more for his co-operation, and left his office. A smile played across the inspector’s lips as he walked along the interminable corridor lined with clocks. By the time he reached the stairs he was in an excellent mood and began chanting to himself: ‘Peritoneum, spleen, left kidney, suprarenal gland, urinary tract, prostate gland . . .’
Chapter XXXVI
Not even the touch on the skin of the delicious breeze heralding the arrival of summer, nor caressing a woman’s body, nor sipping Scotch whisky in the bathtub until the water goes cold ... In short, no other pleasure Wells could think of gave him a greater sense of well-being than adding the final full stop to a novel. This culminating act always filled him with a sense of giddy satisfaction born of the certainly that nothing he could achieve in life would fulfil him more than writing a novel, no matter how tedious, difficult and thankless he found the task. Wells was one of those writers who detest writing but love ‘having written’.
He pulled the last folio from the carriage of his Hammond typewriter, laid it on top of the pile and placed his hand on it with a triumphant smile, like a hunter resting his boot on a lion’s head. For Wells the act of writing was much like a struggle, a bloodthirsty battle with an idea that refuses to be seized. An idea that nonetheless originated with him. Perhaps that was the most frustrating thing of all: the eternal yawning gap between the fruit of his efforts and his initial goal, which admittedly was always more instinctive than deliberate. He had learned from experience that what he succeeded in putting down on paper was only ever a pale reflection of what he had imagined, so he had come to accept that this would only be half as good as the original, half as acceptable as the flawless, unachievable novel that had acted as a guide, and which he imagined pulsating mockingly behind each book like some ghostly presence.
Even so, here was the result of all those months of toil, he told himself, and it felt wonderful to see transformed into something palpable what had been no more than a vague premise until he had typed that last full stop. He would deliver it to Henley the next day and could stop thinking about it.
And yet such doubts never arose in isolation. Once more Wells wondered, as he sat beside his pile of typed folios, whether he had written the book he had been meant to write. Was this novel destined to figure in his bibliography or had it been engendered by accident? Was he responsible for writing one novel and not another, or was this also controlled by the fate that governed men’s lives? He was plagued by doubts, although one caused him particular distress: was there a novel lurking somewhere in his head that would allow him to express the whole of what was really inside him? The idea he might discover this too late tormented him: that as he lay on his deathbed, before his last gasp, the plot of an extraordinary novel he no longer had time to write would rise from the depths of his mind, like a piece of wreckage floating to the sea’s surface. A novel that had always been there, calling out to him in vain amid the clamour, a novel that would die with him, for no one but he could write it, because it was like a suit made to measure just for him. He could think of nothing more terrifying, no worse fate.
He shook his head, driving out these distressing thoughts, and glanced up at the clock. It was past midnight. That meant he could write 21 November 1896 next to his signature on the end page of the novel. Once he had done so, he blew lovingly on the ink, rose from his chair and picked up the oil lamp. His back was stiff and he felt terribly tired, yet he did not go into the bedroom, where he could hear Jane’s steady breathing. He had no time for sleep: he had a long night ahead of him, he told himself, a smile playing across his face.
He padded down the corridor in his slippers, lighting his way with the lamp, and began to climb the stairs to the attic, trying to avoid making the steps creak. Shiny and magnificent, shimmering in the celestial moonlight filtering in through the open window, the machine waited for him. He had grown attached to his secret ritual, although he did not know why he derived such enjoyment from sitting on the thing while his wife was asleep below him. Perhaps because it made him feel special, even though he knew it was only a sophisticated toy. Whoever made it had reproduced every last detail: the machine might not be able to travel in time but, thanks to a clever mechanism, any date could be set on the control panel, with the fictitious destinations of impossible passages through the fabric of time.
Until now, Wells had only set the date to distant times in the future – including the year 802,701, the world of the Eloi and the Morlocks – a time so remote that life as he knew it could only appear completely alien, painfully incomprehensible – or in the past he would like to have known, such as the time of the druids. But that night, with a roguish grin, he adjusted the numbers on the control panel to 20 May in the year 2000, the date on which the impostor Gilliam Murray had chosen to stage the greatest ever battle of the human race, the pantomime by which all England had been fooled, thanks in part to his own novel. He found it ironic that he, the author of a novel about time travel, was the only person who thought it was impossible. He had made all England dream, but was immune to his own creation.
What would the world really look like in a hundred years’ time? He would have liked to travel to the year 2000, not just for the pleasure of seeing it, but to take photographs with one of the new-fangled cameras so that he could come back and show the unsuspecting crowds queuing outside Murray’s offices what the true face of the future looked like. It was a pipe dream, of course, but there was nothing to stop him pretending he could do it, he told himself, settling back in his seat and ceremoniously pulling the lever down, experiencing the inevitable frisson of excitement he felt whenever he performed the gesture.
However, to his astonishment, this time when the lever had come to halt, a sudden darkness fell on the attic. The flecks of moonlight shining through the window seemed to withdraw. Before he was able to understand what the devil was going on, he was overcome by a dreadful feeling of vertigo and a sudden giddiness. He felt himself floating, drifting through a mysterious void that might have been the cosmos itself. And as he began to lose consciousness, he thought that either he was having a heart attack, or he really was travelling to the year 2000.
He came to painfully slowly. His mouth was dry and his body strangely sluggish. Once he could focus properly, he realised he was lying down, not in his attic but on a piece of wasteland covered with stones and rubble. Disoriented, he struggled upright, discovering to his annoyance that each time he moved he felt a terrible shooting pain in his head. He decided to stay sitting on the ground. From there he glanced around with awe at the devastated landscape. Was this the London of the future? Had he really travelled to the year 2000? There was no sign of the time machine, as if the Morlocks had spirited it away inside the sphinx.
After his careful inspection, he decided the time had come for him to stand upright, which he did with great difficulty, like Darwin’s primate crossing the distance separating him from man. He was relieved to find he had no broken bones, although he still felt unpleasantly queasy. Was this one of the effects of having crossed a century in his time carriage? The sky was covered with a dense fog that left everywhere in a pale twilight, a grey blanket dotted with red from the dozens of fires burning on the horizon. The crows circling above his head were an almost obligatory feature of the desolate landscape, he reflected. One flew down, alighting very close to where he was sitting, and made a macabre tapping sound as it pecked stubbornly at the rubble.
On closer examination, Wells saw with horror that the bird was trying to bore through a human skull. This discovery caused him to recoil a few paces, a rash response in that hostile environment. The next thing he knew, the ground gave way beneath him, and he realised too late that he had woken up at the top of a small incline, down
