The Map of Time. Felix J. Palma

but I can travel at the speed of light, so that – voilà! - in the blink of an eye, or faster still, we find ourselves in Woking, floating above the roof of a modest three-storey house with a garden overrun by brambles and silver birch, whose frail façade trembles slightly as the trains to Lynton roar past.

      Chapter XI

      I immediately discover I have picked an inopportune moment to intrude upon Herbert George Wells’s life. In order to inconvenience him as little as possible, I could quickly pass over the description of his physical appearance by saying no more than that the celebrated author was a pale, skinny young man who had seen better days. However, of all the characters swimming like fish in this story, Wells is the one who appears most frequently, no doubt to his regret, which compels me to be a little more precise in my depiction of him.

      Besides being painfully thin, with a deathly pallor, Wells sported a fashionable moustache, straight with downward-pointed ends that seemed too big and bushy for his childish face. It hung like a dark cloud over an exquisite, rather feminine mouth, which, with his blue eyes, would have lent him an almost angelic air were it not for the roguish smile playing on his lips. In brief, Wells looked like a porcelain doll with twinkling eyes, behind which roamed a lively, penetrating intellect. For lovers of detail, or those lacking in imagination, I shall go on to say that he weighed little more than eight stone, wore a size eight and a half shoe and his hair neatly parted on the left. That day he smelt slightly of stale sweat – his body odour was usually pleasant – as some hours earlier he had been for a ride with his new wife through the surrounding Surrey roads astride their tandem bicycle, the latest invention that had won the couple over because it needed no food or shelter and never strayed from where you left it. There is little more I can add, short of dissecting the man or going into intimate details such as the modest proportions and slight south-easterly curvature of his manhood.

      At that very moment, he was seated at the kitchen table, where he usually did his writing, a magazine in his hands. His stiff body, bolt upright in his chair, betrayed his inner turmoil. For while it might have seemed as though Wells were simply letting himself be enveloped by the rippling shadows cast by the afternoon sun shining on the tree in the garden; he was in fact trying to contain his simmering rage. He took a deep breath, then another and another, in a desperate effort to summon a soothing calm. Evidently this did not work, for he ended up hurling the magazine against the kitchen door. It fluttered through the air like a wounded pigeon and landed a yard or two from his feet.

      Wells gazed at it with slight regret, then sighed and stood up to retrieve it, scolding himself for this outburst of rage unworthy of a civilised person. He put the magazine back on the table and sat in front of it again, with the resigned expression of one who knows that accepting reversals of fortune with good grace is a sign of courage and intelligence.

      The magazine in question was an edition of the Speaker, which had published a devastating review of his most recent novel, The Island of Doctor Moreau, another popular work of science fiction. Beneath the surface lurked one of his pet themes: the visionary destroyed by his own dreams. The protagonist is a man called Prendick, who is shipwrecked and has the misfortune to be washed up on an uncharted island that turns out to be the domain of a mad scientist exiled from England because of his brutal experiments on animals. On that remote island, the eponymous doctor has become like a primitive god to a tribe made up of the freakish creations of his unhinged imagination, the monstrous spawn of his efforts to turn wild animals into men.

      The work was Wells’s attempt to go one step further than Darwin by having his deranged doctor attempt to modify life by speeding up the naturally slow process of evolution. It was also a tribute to Jonathan Swift, his favourite author: the scene in which Prendick returns to England to tell the world about the phantasmagorical Eden he has escaped from is almost identical to the chapter in which Gulliver describes the land of the Houyhnhnm. And although Wells had not been satisfied with his book, which had evolved almost in fits and starts from the rather haphazard juxtaposition of more or less powerful images, and had been prepared for a possible slating by the critics, it stung all the same.

      The first blow had taken him by surprise, as it had come from his wife, who considered the killing of the doctor by a deformed puma he had tried to transform into a woman a jibe at the women’s movement. How could Jane possibly have thought that? The next jab came from the Saturday Review, a journal he had hitherto found favourable in its judgements. To his further annoyance, the objectionable article was written by Peter Chalmers Mitchell, a young, talented zoologist who had been Wells’s fellow pupil at the Normal School of Science, and who, betraying their once friendly relations, now declared bluntly that Wells’s intention was simply to shock. The critic in the Speaker went still further, accusing the author of being morally corrupt for insinuating that anyone succeeding through experimentation in giving animals a human appearance would logically go on to engage in sexual relations with them. ‘Mr Wells uses his undoubted talent to shameless effect,’ declared the reviewer. Wells asked himself whether his or the critic’s mind was polluted by immoral thoughts.

      Wells was only too aware that unfavourable reviews, while tiresome and bad for morale, were like storms in a teacup that would scarcely affect the book’s fortunes. The one before him now, glibly referring to his novel as a depraved fantasy, might even boost sales, smoothing the way for his subsequent books. However, the wounds inflicted on an author’s self-esteem could have fatal consequences in the long-term: a writer’s most powerful weapon, his true strength, was his intuition and, regardless of whether he had any talent, if the critics combined to discredit it, he would be reduced to a fearful creature who took a mistakenly guarded approach to his work that would eventually stifle his latent genius. Before cruelly vilifying them, mud slingers at newspapers and journals should bear in mind that all artistic endeavours were a mixture of effort and imagination, the embodiment of a solitary endeavour, of a sometimes long-nurtured dream, when they were not a desperate bid to give life meaning.

      But they would not get the better of Wells. Certainly not. They would not confound him, for he had the basket.

      He contemplated the wicker basket sitting on one of the kitchen shelves, and his spirits lifted, rebellious and defiant. The basket’s effect on him was instantaneous. As a result, he was never parted from it, lugging it around from pillar to post, despite the suspicions this aroused in his nearest and dearest. Wells had never believed in lucky charms or magical objects, but the curious way in which it had come into his life, and the string of positive events that had occurred since then, compelled him to make an exception in the case of the basket. He noticed that Jane had filled it with vegetables. Far from irritating him, this amused him. In allocating it that dull domestic function, his wife had at once disguised its magical nature and rendered it doubly useful: not only did the basket bring good fortune and boost his self-confidence, not only did it embody the spirit of personal triumph by evoking the extraordinary person who had made it, it was also just a basket.

      Calmer now, Wells closed the magazine. He would not allow anyone to put down his achievements, of which he had reason to feel proud. He was thirty years old and, after a long, painful period of battling against the elements, his life had taken shape. The sword had been tempered and, of all the forms it might have taken, had acquired the appearance it would have for life. All that was needed now was to keep it honed, to learn how to wield it and, if necessary, allow it to taste blood occasionally. Of all the things he could have been, it seemed clear he would be a writer – he was one already. His three published novels testified to this. A writer. It had a pleasant ring to it. And it was an occupation that he was not averse to: since childhood it had been his second choice, after that of becoming a teacher – he had always wanted to stand on a podium and stir people’s consciences, but he could do that from a shop window, and perhaps in a simpler and more far-reaching way.