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“The Temple,” she told the driver. Then the glass pane between him and the back seat went up, and the taxi drove off.
“Are you angry with me?” I asked.
“No. Of course not, darling. You can’t help it.”
“No. I can’t! It’s all stupid old Newton’s fault,” I said, trying to make a little joke of it. But Mum was in no mood for jokes.
“You can’t blame Newton either. If anyone’s to blame, it’s me. I’d hoped this cup would pass us by.”
I looked at her, wide-eyed. “What do you mean?”
“I thought … hoped … I didn’t want you to…” My mother never stammered. She looked tensed up, and sadder than I’d seen her since Dad died. “I didn’t want to admit it. I’ve been hoping all this time that Charlotte would be the one.”
“Well, everyone was bound to think so! No one would ever think of Sir Isaac Newton getting his sums wrong. Grandmother’s going to be furious.”
The taxi was threading its way through the dense traffic of Piccadilly.
“Never mind your grandmother,” said Mum. “When did it first happen?”
“Yesterday! I was on my way to Selfridges.”
“What time?”
“Just after three. I didn’t know what to do, so I went back home to our house and rang the bell. But before anyone could open the door, I traveled forward to our own time. Then it happened again last night. I hid in the built-in cupboard, but there was someone sleeping there. A servant. Rather an angry servant. He chased me all over the house, and everyone was looking for me because they thought I was a thief. Thank goodness, I traveled back before they could find me. And the third time was just now. At school. This time I must have gone further back in time, because people were wearing wigs.… Mum! If this is going to happen to me every few hours now, I’ll never be able to lead a normal life again! And all because silly old Newton…” But even I realized that I was milking the Newton joke too hard.
“You ought to have told me at once!” Mum caressed my head. “So much could have happened to you!”
“I wanted to tell you, but last night you said we have too much imagination in our family already.”
“I didn’t mean it that way.… You haven’t had the slightest preparation for this. I’m so sorry.”
“But it’s not your fault, Mum! How could anyone have known?”
“It’s my fault,” said Mum. After a short, uncomfortable pause, she added, “You were born on the same day as Charlotte.”
“No, I wasn’t! My birthday is the eighth of October—hers is the seventh.”
“You were both born on the seventh of October, Gwyneth.”
I couldn’t believe what she was saying. I could only stare at her.
“I lied about the date of your birth,” Mum went on. “It wasn’t difficult. You were born at home, and the midwife who made out the birth certificate understood what we wanted.”
“But why?”
“It was only to protect you, darling.”
I didn’t understand. “Protect me? What from? It’s happened now, anyway.”
“We … I wanted you to have a normal childhood. A carefree childhood.” Mum was looking intently at me. “And you might not have inherited the gene, after all.”
cept for the love-bite affair, as Lesley called it, and Gordon’s pepperminty performance, I was entirely unkissed. And possibly also immature, as Miles claimed. I knew that at sixteen and a half, it was getting late, but Lesley, who had stayed with Max for a whole year, thought kissing in general was overrated. Maybe she’d just had bad luck, she said, but the boys she’d kissed so far definitely did not have the knack for it.
Kissing, said Lesley, ought really to be taught as a school subject, preferably instead of religious studies, which nobody needed.
We often discussed what the ideal kiss would be like, and there were any number of films we’d watched over and over again just because of the good kissing scenes in them.
“Ah, Miss Gwyneth. Will you condescend to speak to me today, or are you going to ignore me again?” James saw me leaving the Year Six classroom and came closer.
