“Send her to the Stone Age,” said Sam. “You wouldn’t mind that, would you?” he asked Vivian.
“Mind? I’d go crazy!” said Vivian. “There are spiders in caves. Why can’t you send me home?”
“I told you why we can’t,” Jonathan said. “Besides, it’s an Unstable Era and it’s even more unsettled than usual at the moment. Suppose we put you back and that mucked up the whole of history. They’d find out at once! Think of something, Sam!”
There was a long silence. Sam sat on the floor with his face in his fists. Jonathan leant against the wall, chewing the end of his pigtail. Vivian licked the last of her butter-pie off its stick and, for a while, could think of very little else except that she wished she could have another one. But I will get home! she told herself, sleepily twiddling the stick in her fingers. I will, whatever he says!
“I know!” Sam said at last. “Pretend she’s our cousin!”
Jonathan leapt away from the wall. “That’s it!” he shouted. “That’s clever, Sam!”
“I am clever,” said Sam. “You work out the details.”
“And that’s easy,” said Jonathan. “Listen, V.S., you are Vivian Sarah Lee. Your father is Sam’s uncle and mine. Have you got that?” He danced round the room, pointing at Vivian until she nodded. “Good. You’ve been away from Time City since you were six, because your parents are Observers on station in Twenty Century. That’s all true. Got it? But they’ve sent you home because the era’s getting more unsettled and there’s a war on. This is brilliant!” he said to Sam. “It will explain why she doesn’t know anything. And my mother’s bound to have her to live here, because Lee House is shut up – and we can even go on calling her V.S.!”
Sam rose from the floor and breathed heavily into Vivian’s face. “She doesn’t look like a Lee,” he said critically. “Her eyes are wrong and her hair curls.”
“A lot of Lees don’t have the eyefold,” Jonathan said. “I don’t think Cousin Vivian does. Her cheekbones are the right shape.”
“Will you both stop staring and criticising!” Vivian said. “There’s nothing wrong with my face. The lady in the woolshop says I look almost like Shirley Temple.”
“Who’s he?” said Sam, and Jonathan said, “Who are you, V.S.?”
“What?” said Vivian.
“She’s almost asleep,” Sam said, leaning even closer to Vivian’s face.
He was right. The long and worrying day, followed by the peculiar events of the last hour, were suddenly too much for Vivian. Or maybe it was the butter-pie. There began to be gaps in what she noticed. She heard Jonathan saying airily, “Oh, we can hide her in one of the archaic rooms. She’ll be more at home there.” At this, Vivian noticed that Jonathan seemed to have bounced back from his scare in the ultra-modern office and become once more the lordly, confident boy who met her at the station. This made her feel uneasy, but before she could work out why, they were telling her to get up and come along.
She almost forgot the precious string bag. She turned round for it and yelped. She found she had been sitting on nothing in a yellow framework, just like the flowerpots from the church-organ. She tried to reach through it for the bag. But the nothing stopped her hand and she had to grope underneath it before she could take hold of the string handles.
Next thing she noticed, they were going along a corridor. Then Jonathan was sliding a door aside and saying to Sam, “Mind you take those keys back now. And don’t get caught doing it.”
“I know what I’m doing,” Sam retorted, and trotted off down the hallway with the trailing tie of his puffy shoe flapping on the carpets.
After that Vivian noticed she was in bed, a rather hard, scratchy bed, with blue street light coming in from somewhere. What a lot of Vivians! she thought sleepily. And then: I’ll have another butter-pie before I go home tomorrow.
And after that, Vivian noticed that it was daytime again and woke up. She turned over under a heavy, scratchy coverlet embroidered with lines of thin brown people and smelling of dust, and knew at once where she was. She was in Time City, in the middle of a horrendous mistake. Oddly enough, although this was quite frightening, Vivian found it rather exciting too. She had always wanted to have an adventure, the way people did in films. And here she was having one. She knew it was no dream. She sat up.
No wonder the bed felt hard. It was made of stone. It had four huge stone pillars like totem poles that held up an embroidered canopy overhead. Beyond in the room, strong sunlight slanted on to Egyptian-type carvings on the stone walls. Vivian knew it was quite late on in the morning. She got out of the bed on to rush mats, where she was surprised to find that she had put on her night clothes before she had gone to sleep. Her suitcase was open on the stone floor and her clothes were scattered all over the room.
I wonder where the toilet is, and I do hope it’s not invisible! she thought. A stone archway in the wall led to a tiled place. Vivian went through and found, to her relief, that the toilet and washbasin in there looked much like the ones she was used to, even though they were made of stone. But there were no taps, and she could not find out how the toilet flushed.
“But at least I could see them,” she said to herself, as she hunted for her scattered clothes.
She was just putting on her second sock – which had somehow got right under the stone bed – and had only her shoes to find, when the stone door grated open and Jonathan came in. He was carrying what looked like half a birdcage with dishes floating in the air beneath it.
“Oh good!” he said. “You were asleep when I looked in earlier. I brought you some breakfast, so you won’t have to face my parents on an empty stomach.” He was wearing bright green pyjamas today and looking very spruce and confident.
Vivian had a feeling that he was going to rush her into something else unless she was careful. “You’ll have to tell me a whole lot more,” she said. “Or I can’t face anyone.”
“Well, you can’t stay hiding here. Elio’s bound to find you,” Jonathan said, putting the birdcage down on a stone table. “What’s your name?”
“Vivian Smi—” Vivian began, and then remembered that she was Jonathan’s cousin. “Vivian Sarah Lee,” she said. “You thought I’d forget, didn’t you?”
“I wasn’t sure,” Jonathan said, setting out the dishes from under the birdcage. “Pull up that log over there and start eating. We have to catch my mother before she goes to work.”
There was no butter-pie, to Vivian’s regret, but there were syrupy pancakes that were almost as good, and fruit juice which Vivian thought was even nicer than tinned pineapple. Up to then, tinned pineapple had been her favourite food. After that were slices of strange crumby bread that you ate with slices of cheese. “Why is everyone called Vivian?” she asked as she ate.
“The eldest Lee is always called Vivian,” Jonathan said. “After the Time Lady. Her eldest daughter married the first Lee. We descend from Faber John himself. And we’re the oldest family in Time City.”
He was sitting on the stone bed looking lofty. Vivian could tell he was very proud of being a Lee. “How old is that?” she said.
“Thousands of years,” said Jonathan. “Nobody knows quite how many.”
“That’s ridiculous!” said Vivian. “How