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“No, thank you, no coffee,” I said.
He looked at me undecidedly. I stared silently back.
“Are you … are you in the Girl Guides?”
“What?”
“I mean … because of the uniform.”
“No.” I couldn’t help it, I just had to keep staring at Mr. George. It was unmistakably him! He was still very much the same when he was fifty-five years older, except for having no hair left, wearing glasses, and being as broad as he was tall.
Young Mr. George, on the contrary, had plenty of hair, neatly parted and kept in place with some kind of hair cream, and he was positively slender. Obviously he didn’t like being stared at, because he went red, sat down at the desk again, and leafed through some papers. I wondered what he would say if I took his signet ring out of my pocket and showed it to him.
We sat in silence like that for at least fifteen minutes before the office door opened and my grandfather came in. When he saw me, his eyes almost popped out of his head for a split second, before he had control over himself again and said, “Well, look who’s here—my dear little cousin!”
I jumped up. Since our last meeting, Lucas Montrose had definitely grown older. He was wearing an elegant suit and a bow tie, and he had a mustache that didn’t really suit him. The mustache tickled when he kissed me on both cheeks.
“How good to see you, Hazel! How long are you going to be in town? Have your dear parents come with you?”
“N-no,” I stammered. Was I going to have to pretend I was horrible Hazel? “They’re at home, with the cats.…”
“By the way, this is my new assistant, Thomas George. Thomas, this is Hazel Montrose from Gloucestershire. I told you she was probably going to visit me sometime.”
“I thought her name was Purpleplum,” said Mr. George.
“Yes,” I said. “So it is. Part of my name. Hazel Violet Montrose Purpleplum, but who can possibly remember all that rigmarole?”
Lucas looked at me, frowning. Then, turning to Mr. George, he said, “I’m going for a little walk with Hazel. All right? If anyone wants me, say I’m in a meeting with a client.”
“Yes, Mr. Montrose, sir,” said Mr. George, trying to keep an indifferent expression on his face.
“See you later,” I told him.
Lucas took my arm and led me out of the room. We both kept strained grins on our faces, and it wasn’t until we had closed the heavy front door of the building behind us and were out in the sunny road that we spoke again.
“I don’t want to be horrible Hazel,” I said reproachfully, looking around. The Temple didn’t seem to have changed much in fifty-five years, if you ignored the cars. “Do I look like someone who picks up cats by their tails and swings them in the air?”
“Purpleplum!” said Lucas, just as reproachfully. “I suppose you couldn’t think of anything even more striking?” Then he took me by the shoulders and examined my face. “Let’s take a look at you, granddaughter! Why, you look just the same as you did eight years ago.”
“Yes, but for me that was only the day before yesterday.”
“Amazing,” said Lucas. “And all these years I thought I might just have been dreaming the whole thing.”
“I elapsed to 1953 yesterday,” I said, “but I wasn’t on my own.”
“How long do we have today?”
“I arrived at three o’clock your time, so I’ll be traveling back at six thirty.”
“Then at least we have a little time to talk. Come along. There’s a café where we can get a cup of tea around the corner.” Lucas took my arm, and we walked toward the Strand. “You won’t believe it, but I’m a father now!” he said as we walked on. “The baby was born three months ago. I must say it’s a nice feeling. And I think Arista was a good choice. Claudine Seymour has rather lost her figure, and they say she drinks. Even in the morning.” We went down a small alley and then out of the arched gateway into the street. I stood there staring. Traffic was roaring up and down the Strand as usual, but all the cars were vintage models. Even the noisy red double-decker buses looked like museum pieces, and most of the people on the sidewalk wore hats—men, women, even children! There was a film poster on the wall of the building over the road, advertising High Society, starring wonderfully beautiful Grace Kelly and incredibly ugly Frank Sinatra. I looked left and right with my mouth open and could hardly take a step. It all looked like something out of a nostalgia picture postcard in the retro style, only much more colorful.
Lucas took me to a pretty corner café and ordered tea and scones. “You were hungry last time,” he remembered. “They make good sandwiches here, too.”
“No, thanks,” I said. “Grandpa, about Mr. George! In the year 2011, he acts as if he’d never seen me before!”
Lucas shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t worry about the boy. It’s going to be another fifty-five years before he meets you again. He’ll probably have simply forgotten you by then.”
“Yes, maybe,” I said, looking around, irritated, at all the smokers here. Right beside us a fat man was sitting at a kidney-shaped table with an ashtray the size of a skull on it, smoking a cigar. Hadn’t they heard of lung cancer yet in 1956? “Have you found out anything about the Green Rider since we last met?”
