Page 51 of Strangers in Time

LATER, OLIVER CHECKED HISwatch; it was time. He placed the closed sign in the front window, poured a cup of tea, and pulled on an old woolen cardigan against a clammy chill that had overwhelmed the shop. He took the fat key from his pocket, glided down the short flight of steps and over to the door. He set the cup and saucer down on a small table set against the wall, drew an uneasy breath, and unlocked the door. He swung it open, replaced the key in his pocket, and picked up the cup and saucer. He ventured through the opening and closed the door behind him.

He took a few moments to look around the space.

This had been Imogen’s study. They had lived in the apartment over the shop, where there was situated a small bedroom, a smaller kitchen, a miniscule sitting room that almost never had anyone actually sitting in it, a tiny guest bedroom, and one loo. It was all spare and common, the pipes forever rattling and the water never warm and the stove never that hot. It was cold when you wanted heat, and insufferably hot when you desperately sought coolness.

However, the study made up for all of that and was Imogen’s pride and joy. It had been her father’s before her. John Bradstreet had been a highly respected public official, serving in importantcapacities in several governments. He was the author of a shelf full of learned books and had received a number of illustrious prizes for his writings. Imogen had revered him, and she had bitterly missed him after he passed away.

After his public career was over, her father’s private one had begun with this bookshop. This room had been his particular province, and he had furnished it in a way that Imogen thought perfect, for she had changed nothing when she had inherited the business and along with it her father’s cherished sanctum.

First, there was the desk. Solid oak with bountiful carvings on the sides, and a large work surface with tooled hunter green leather overlaid on the wood; brass tacks surrounded the leather pad, like columns of steadfast ants. The highbacked chair had a faded brown leather backrest. Along three walls were shelves bulging with Imogen’s and her father’s personal collection of books, many of them autographed. Against the fourth wall was a stout fireplace with a brick surround and wooden mantel. Fires would regularly simmer there before the war. Now it was a luxury to burn anything in it.

The rest of the space was a comfortable clutter of old chairs with worn seats, rickety tables, and a life’s worth of collected objects, along with a rug that was as wonderfully aged and worn as everything else in the room. The floor underneath was darkened walnut planks that had absorbed the mingled scents of countless cheery fires and smells from her father’s Barling briar pipes.

In the middle of the desk, and situated directly on the leather, was a fine Crown typewriter with a blank piece of paper wound into its maw. Next to the typewriter was a tin dispatch box. In front of the typewriter was an open journal with elegant writing in pen flowing sumptuously across its pages. And next to the journal was the pen that had done the markings. It was an Onoto work of art with a golden-tipped nib that Oliver had bought Imogen for their first wedding anniversary. It had cost him a packet, but it represented a physical specimen of his love for her cast in delicately crafted metal and lustrous mother-of-pearl.

He took some paper slips from a vase on the mantel, placed them in the fireplace, then drew two lumps of coal from the scuttle and tossed them in there as well. He lit the match, ignited the slips, and let the damper draw, until a meager bit of soothing warmth and delicate glow invaded the space. He settled in the chair, looked over the writings in the journal for a few minutes, and carefully positioned his fingertips on the Crown’s keys.

This was always the hardest part. Well, all of it was difficult, but this… this was Oliver’s long-standing nemesis. His Waterloo, as it were.

The half-finished and as yet untitled manuscript was Imogen’s. She had written one hundred and sixty-five pages before her life had ended. They were in the tin dispatch box next to the typewriter. He had read every single page. The story was good—no, it was better than good; he actually thought the unfinished manuscript exceptional. In those mass of words was his late wife’s perspective on the war, or at least the war’s effect on the city of her birth woven into a novel and told through various points of view, rich to poor, Mayfair to Stepney, pacifists to military heroes, larger-than-life leaders to prosaic followers, Tory backbenchers to energetic anarchists. She had completed page one hundred and sixty-five, placed it in the tin box, wound the next blank paper into the Crown in preparation for the next day’s labor, then rose from this desk, walked out of her study, and never walked back in due entirely to the cruelty of war.

Page one hundred and sixty-six was still curled into the typewriter awaiting the imprint of the keys.

Nearly a year without her. Nearly a year since that page was placed into the typewriter by her capable fingers. Nearly a year since she left me behind forever. Alone. And utterly bereft.

Oliver came here every day at this same exact time. He came here hoping for inspiration, intending to finish his dead wife’s novel and see it in print under her name. And every day he sat in this chair, took in long whiffs of the long-ago remnants of coal fires and pipe smoke, drank his tea until it turned cold, and not a single word cameto his mind to transfer to the paper. He did all the right things, he assumed. He placed his fingers on the keys, composed his thoughts, and waited for the organized epiphanies to come. They never ventured within a mile of him.

His dilemma was clear enough. When he tried to compose the words, Imogen’s face crept into his mind and would not leave. With that visage confronting him, Oliver could not encounter revelation or experience inspiration or whatever it was that occurred when what was in one’s thoughts was transmitted to words, and placed dramatically on paper.

In his anxiousness he took the Alberti’s Disk from his pocket and manipulated it, swiftly creating one encrypted cipher after another. He had always been far more comfortable with numbers and puzzles than he was with written tales crafted from scratch.

When he had been a child, his father, a university professor of mathematics, had challenged him with figuring out encryption techniques after Oliver had shown some promise in the field. His father had said, “This is the Vigenère Square, Ignatius. To give you a bit of a hint, it is based on the Caesar Shift, which I tested you with previously.”

Oliver knew the Caesar Shift had flummoxed the brightest of minds for over three-quarters of a millennium, and it had taken eight more centuries to find a better method of encryption. Oliver had been tasked by his father to unlock its secrets and had done so within a very few minutes.

“No pressure now, but the Vigenère Square remained unbreakable for three centuries, Ignatius,” his smiling father had told him before giving him the encrypted message.

He had quickly figured out that the Vigenère encryption was based onsequencesof various Caesar Shifts. The cipher presented by his father had been a question about a birthday gift for his mother. Oliver had presented his own coded answer to his father that afternoon.

“You have a gift, Ignatius,” he had said after decoding his youngest son’s response. “Do not waste it.”

But did I waste it? No, I lived the life I wanted, with the person I wanted to live it with. Just not for nearly as long as I hoped I would.

Next he did what he always did. He opened the tin box and read the first chapter Imogen had written and then the last one. The principal character in the first chapter was a young girl full of brilliance, grit, but also heartbreaking loss. The last chapter held the fate of a boy wondering whether he would live much longer while the bombs fell all around.

Then, as though following an instruction manual for beleaguered scriveners, he closed his eyes, and his thoughts wandered back to the conversations he had had with Imogen about her book, what she was thinking, her possibilities in plot, and “character arcs,” as she termed it. This invariably led to a conversation with his beloved wife that Oliver would never forget.

THELASTINKLING OFDREAMS

THEY HAD EATEN THEIRdinner, the remains of a meat pie, tins of dried fruit, and a small potato each, all fortified by cups of strong tea. Then Imogen had pulled out a bottle of port from a cubby that Oliver didn’t even know they had. She had poured out small portions into two glasses, and they had sat in this very room swirling the amber liquor and leisurely talking about things that did not seem of any particular significance: the weather, the assortment of books that had just come in, the disreputable state of the kitchen. Next, the loud cat in the alley. Then the odd bit of gossip each had heard about this or that person. Lastly, how Desdemona Macklin was not very nice, although he recalled that the word his wife had actually used was “cow.”

And then Imogen had wanted to talk about dreams. Oliver had adjusted his specs as she ventured into that subject. He was a mathematician by training, so dreams that had nothing to do with numbers—and what dreams really did?—were not part of his experience or interest.

He had taught at a private boys’ school in London right up until the start of the war, when it had closed. Because of his abilities with numbers Oliver had been recruited to work for the war effort invarious official capacities, before being offered a full-time position at Bletchley Park, where the English were attempting to break the German encryption system. But that would have realistically meant being away for years from Imogen, and thus he had, with some reluctance, declined the offer.

He had instead, over Imogen’s protests, become an air warden. He had gone to duty at his warden’s post waiting for the sirens to erupt. Yellow alert meant the bombers were twenty-two minutes away and the red alert—known colloquially as the “Wailing Winnies” or “Moaning Minnies”—cut that time nearly in half. When the yellow alert came the wardens would put down their darts and cards and rush to help folks to shelters. However, as part of their duties and long before any sirens sounded off, wardens would also patrol their official sectors to check and see that windows and doors were covered and up to snuff, that logbooks were up to date, and that the latrines in the shelters were cleaned and water canteens in place, even ensuring that lending libraries located there were well stocked. As the husband of a bookseller, Oliver enjoyed performing that particular task.

Oliver had very nearly died in the course of his warden duties, and he still felt he wasn’t doing enough. However, others obviously thought he was performing up to snuff, and had even honored him for his service to King and Country.

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