‘Hm,’ Ginger said.
Ruby’s urge to confide in her ebbed. Had she overshared? By the usual constraints of their relationship, yes. She knew nothing of Ginger’s family. Ginger didn’t speak of her interests or where she was from. The secrets she shared were her patients’ rather than her own. Telling Ruby where she’d been on holiday was the most intimate detail she’d ever revealed. Picking up Ginger’s left hand, Ruby looked for a white circle among the freckles on her ring finger. The evidence was inconclusive.
Ginger pulled Ruby’s hand to her mouth, and kissed the inside of Ruby’s wrist. Maybe Ginger was right to shy away from personal revelations. Hadn’t Ruby wanted her for a distraction?
So Ruby let Ginger distract her. Afterwards, she fell asleep swiftly – for the first time that week.
*
The next morning Ruby heard Ginger in the kitchenette, opening and closing cabinet doors. Normally she would have left before dawn. Perhaps trouble at home had kept her here.
Ruby got out of bed and crossed the little hall to the kitchen doorway. Ginger was wearing Ruby’s dressing gown. Her hair was bright as marigolds against the green fabric. She filled the kettle.
‘I’ll make you breakfast,’ she said. ‘If there is anything for breakfast. D’you know what’s in your cupboards? A torn bag of rice and a very sticky bottle of Worcestershire sauce.’
‘There are eggs in that ceramic chicken.’
‘Perfect.’ Ginger busied herself with frying pans and butter. ‘I don’t have any clinics today. I’m giving a presentation on neural plasticity, but that’s not till noon.’
So they were to talk of work again. ‘Who’s the presentation for?’
‘Some new rehab workers. They always love the London cab example. You know, where the drivers memorise so many routes it physically restructures their brains?’
Ruby nodded. Her own day would include two clients with depression, and a third with PTSD. According to the usual pattern of her conversations with Ginger, she should volunteer that information now. But her new impulse to make personal admissions was back. Her previous attempt to discuss Bee had failed, and Ruby was not quite brave enough to talk of her explicitly again. She found herself drawn to a halfway position: couching personal concerns in professional interest.
‘There’s something I’ve been thinking over lately. Do you know if time travel changes the brain?’ Ruby had plausible grounds for ignorance. She only knew the basics of brain anatomy; she specialised in talking therapies.
‘Time travel doesn’t do much in the short term.’ Ginger pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear. Heat shimmered over the pan. ‘But more experienced time travellers generally have a weird hippocampus.’
‘No one wants a weird hippocampus,’ Ruby said, wryly. ‘What causes that?’
‘One theory is that time travel places your recall abilities under unusual stress.’ Ginger cracked two eggs into the spitting fat. ‘Let’s use your memories for comparison. Think of something that happened a long time ago.’
‘OK. I remember my grandmother reading me The Box of Delights.’
‘The Box of What?’
‘The Box of Delights. It’s my favourite book. It has puppeteers, and schoolgirls who love pistols, and a magic box that takes you to the past—’
‘When exactly did she read you this?’ Ginger interrupted.
‘No earlier than 1990. I could read the words along with my grandmother, so I was old enough to be at school. We probably read it in the winter. I remember the wool of her smock on my cheek. That would make sense, because the story’s set at Christmas.’
‘Right. You don’t automatically recall when the event occurred. You can piece a likely date together from hints and trifling details. A time traveller goes through the same process with events that she’s witnessed in the future. Sometimes she gets the date wrong, and mistakenly places it in the past. She expects her friends and family to remember something that won’t happen for years. If she works in intelligence, that kind of mistake can be dire. Have you got a fish slice?’
‘Second drawer down on the left.’
Ginger found the slice, and slid an egg onto a plate.
‘I didn’t know you were so domesticated,’ Ruby said.
‘Don’t expect me to make a habit of playing housewife.’
Ruby’s mobile was ringing in the bedroom.
‘Back in a tick,’ she said.
By the time she reached it the call had gone to voicemail. The number had been withheld. She dialled to hear the recording.
‘This is a message for Dr Rebello.’ The caller spoke with a quaint, mid-Atlantic accent. Ruby thought of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. ‘My name is Grace Taylor, and I’m calling to arrange an interview.’
She gave details of a hotel she would be staying at the following week, and instructed Ruby to meet her in the hotel restaurant at half eleven on Tuesday. The message ended there. Grace didn’t provide any other contact details.
Granny Bee had said that Grace liked to keep people guessing: she was deliberately obscure. Having met Grace, Bee’s explanation was convincing. Ruby remembered how Grace placed a finger to her lips in the gallery shop, as if they were co-conspirators. That kind of game troubled her, because she felt as though she were being manipulated. But now Ruby’s conversation with Ginger made her wonder if another explanation lay behind Grace’s behaviour. How much were future and past jumbled in Grace’s mind? She’d travelled years into the future on multiple occasions. Maybe she was too dislocated from the events the rest of them lived through. Was she confused about what Ruby knew, and what she didn’t?
Suddenly, Grace seemed a pitiable figure. Ruby didn’t know, yet, whether to feel sorry for her or afraid of her. At least, in just a few days, she would get the chance to pin her down.
9
MAY 2018
Odette
Having crammed successfully, Odette survived her final exams. She neglected celebrating with friends in Cambridge and instead went home for a family meal in Hounslow. The guest list was limited to three, because Odette’s older sister, Ophélie, now lived in Mahé. Three was enough. The hawthorn was flowering in the garden. Her father Robert was playing the piano, and her mother Claire was making octopus curry.
‘Can you do my laundry too, Maman?’ Odette rested her head on the table in mock idleness. The waxed oak smelt like home. French exercise books were stacked in towers at the table’s edge, to form a skyline of Maman’s marking.
‘Laundry and cooking don’t mix.’ Maman swooped to kiss Odette’s head. ‘Not unless you want underwear in your coconut sauce.’
Odette slunk like a child to the utility room, her holdall in hand. She crammed the machine with T-shirts and spring dresses that she hadn’t had time to wash while she was revising. The softener bottle was cracked. Her hands slickened with soap. No matter; there was a sink. She ran the hot tap and the boiler audibly ignited.
The whoosh transported her back to the museum, where she could hear nothing but the basement boiler and breathe nothing but the stench of death. She believed the blood was on the floor again. She believed the body was slumped before her with its broken head and hand and heart. The world had been disturbed and made no sense.