Charles shook his head. ‘It’s no joke, cousin. Murray’s Time Travel is a real company. The main offices are in Greek Street in Soho. And, as the advertisement says, they offer the chance to travel through time.’
‘But, is that possible?’ stammered Andrew, taken aback.
‘It certainly is,’ replied Charles, completely straight-faced. ‘What’s more, I’ve done it myself.’ They stared at one another for a moment.
‘I don’t believe you,’ said Andrew at last, trying to detect a hint in his cousin’s solemn face that would give the game away, but Charles shrugged.
‘I’m telling the truth,’ he assured him. ‘Last week, Madeleine and I travelled to the year 2000.’
Andrew burst out laughing, but his cousin’s earnest expression silenced his guffaws. ‘You’re not joking, are you?’
‘No, not at all,’ Charles replied. ‘Although I can’t say I was all that impressed. The year 2000 is a dirty, cold year where man is at war with machines. But not seeing it is like missing a new opera that’s all the rage.’
Andrew listened, still stunned.
‘It’s a unique experience,’ his cousin added. ‘If you think about it, it’s exciting because of all it implies. Madeleine has even recommended it to her friends. She fell in love with the human soldiers’ boots. She tried to buy me a pair in Paris, but couldn’t find any. I suspect it’s too soon yet.’
Andrew reread the leaflet to make sure he was not imagining things. ‘I still can’t believe …’ he stammered.
‘I know, cousin, I know. But, you see, while you’ve been roaming Hyde Park like a lost soul the world has moved on. Time goes by even when you’re not watching it. And, believe me, strange as it may seem to you, time travel has been the talk of all the salons, the favoured topic of discussion, since the novel that gave rise to it came out last spring.’
‘A novel?’ asked Andrew, increasingly bewildered.
‘Yes. The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. It was one of the books I lent you. Didn’t you read it?’
Since Andrew had shut himself away in the house, refusing to go along with Charles on those outings to taverns and brothels, his cousin had started bringing him books. They were usually new works by unknown authors, inspired by the century’s craze for science to write about machines capable of performing the most elaborate miracles. The stories were known as ‘scientific romances’ – the English publishers’ translation of Jules Verne’s ‘extraordinary voyages’, an expression that had taken hold with amazing rapidity and was used to describe any fantasy novel that tried to explain itself by using science. According to Charles, these novels captured the spirit that had inspired the works of Bergerac and Samosata, and had taken over from the old tales of haunted castles.
Andrew remembered some of the madcap inventions in those tales, such as the anti-nightmare helmet hooked up to a tiny steam engine that sucked out bad dreams and turned them into pleasant ones. But the one he remembered best was the machine that made things grow, invented by a Jewish scientist who used it on insects: the image of London attacked by a swarm of flies the size of airships, crushing towers and flattening buildings as they landed on them, was ridiculously terrifying. There had been a time when Andrew would have devoured such books but, much as he regretted it, the worlds of fiction were not exempt from his steadfast indifference to life: he did not want any type of balm but to stare straight into the gaping abyss, thus making it impossible for Charles to reach him via the secret passage of literature. Andrew assumed that this fellow Wells’s book must be buried at the bottom of his chest, under a mound of similar novels he had scarcely glanced at.
When Charles saw the empty look on his cousin’s face he gestured to him to sit back down in his chair and drew up the other. Leaning forward slightly, like a priest about to take confession from one of his parishioners, he began summarising the plot of the novel that, according to him, had revolutionised England. Andrew listened sceptically. As he could guess from the title, the main character was a scientist who had invented a time machine that allowed him to journey through the centuries. All he had to do was pull on a little lever and he was propelled at great speed into the future, gazing in awe as snails ran like hares, trees sprouted from the ground like geysers, the stars circled in the sky, which changed from day to night in a second … This wild and wonderful journey took him to the year 802,701, where he discovered that society had split into two different races: the beautiful and useless Eloi and the monstrous Morlocks, creatures that lived underground, feeding off their neighbours up above, whom they bred like cattle.
Andrew bridled at this description, making his cousin smile, but Charles quickly added that the plot was unimportant, no more than an excuse to create a flimsy caricature of the society of their time. What had shaken the English imagination was that Wells had envisaged time as a fourth dimension, transforming it into a sort of magic tunnel you could travel through.
‘We are all aware that objects possess three dimensions – length, breadth and thickness,’ explained Charles. ‘But in order for this object to exist,’ he went on, picking up his hat and twirling it in his hands like a conjuror, ‘in order for it to form part of this reality we find ourselves in, it needs duration in time as well as in space. That is what enables us to see it, and prevents it disappearing before our very eyes. We live, then, in a four-dimensional world. If we accept that time is another dimension, what is to stop us moving through it? In fact, that’s what we are doing. Just like our hats, you and I are moving forwards in time, albeit in a tediously linear fashion, without leaving out a single second, towards our inexorable end. What Wells is asking in his novel is why we can’t speed up this journey, or even turn around and travel backwards to that place we refer to as the past – which, ultimately, is no more than a loose thread in the skein of our lives. If time is a spatial dimension, what prevents us moving around in it as freely as we do in the other three?’
Pleased with his explanation, Charles replaced his hat on the bed. Then he studied Andrew, allowing him a moment to assimilate what he had just said.
‘I must confess when I read the novel I thought it was rather an ingenious way of making what was basically a fantasy believable,’ he went on, a moment later, when his cousin said nothing, ‘but I never imagined it would be scientifically achievable. The book was a raging success, Andrew, people spoke of nothing else in the clubs, the salons, the universities, during factory breaks. Nobody talked any more about the crisis in the United States and how it might affect England, or Waterhouse’s paintings or Oscar Wilde’s plays. The only thing people were interested in was whether time travel was possible or not. Even the women’s suffrage movement was fascinated by the subject and interrupted their regular meetings to discuss it. Speculating about what tomorrow’s world would be like or discussing which past events ought to be changed became England’s favourite pastime, the quickest way to liven up conversation during afternoon tea.
‘Naturally such discussions were futile, because nobody could reach any enlightened conclusions, except in scientific circles, where an even more heated debate took place, whose progress was reported almost daily in the national newspapers. But nobody could deny it was Wells’s novel that had sparked off people’s yearning to journey into the future, to go beyond the bounds imposed on them by their fragile, destructible bodies. Everybody wanted to glimpse the future, and the year 2000 became the most logical objective, the year everyone wanted to see. A century was easily enough time for everything to be invented that could be invented, and for the world to have been transformed into a marvellously unrecognisable, magical, possibly even a better place.
‘Ultimately, this all seemed to be no more than a harmless amusement, a naïve desire – that is, until last October, when Murray’s Time Travel opened for business. This was announced with great fanfare in the newspapers and on publicity posters. Gilliam Murray could make our dreams come true. He could take us to the year 2000. Despite the cost of the tickets, huge queues formed around his building. I saw people who had always maintained that time travel was impossible waiting like excited children for the doors to open. Nobody