The Infinite Moment

Stitch in Time

On the sheltered side of the house the sun was hot. Just inside the open french windows Mrs Dolderson moved her chair a few inches, so that her head would remain in the shade while the warmth could comfort the rest of her. Then she leant her head back on the cushion, looking out.

The scene was, for her, timeless.

Across the smooth lawn the cedar stood as it had always stood. Its flat spread boughs must, she supposed, reach a little further now than they had when she was a child, but it was hard to tell; the tree had seemed huge then, it seemed huge now. Further on, the boundary hedge was just as trim and neat as it had always been. The gate into the spinney was still flanked by the two unidentifiable topiary birds, Cocky and Oily, wonderful that they should still be there, even though Oily’s tail feathers had become a bit twiggy with age.

The flowerbed on the left, in front of the shrubbery, was as full of colour as ever, well, perhaps a little brighter; one had a feeling that flowers had become a trifle more strident than they used to be, but delightful nevertheless. The spinney beyond the hedge, however, had changed a little; more young trees, some of the larger ones gone. Between the branches were glimpses of pink roof where there had been no neighbours in the old days. Except for that, one could almost, for a moment, forget a whole lifetime.

The afternoon drowsing while the birds rested, the bees humming, the leaves gently stirring, the bonk-bonk from the tennis court round the corner, with an occasional voice giving the score. It might have been any sunny afternoon out of fifty or sixty summers.

Mrs Dolderson smiled upon it, and loved it all; she had loved it when she was a girl, she loved it even more now.

In this house she had been born; she had grown up in it, married from it, come back to it after her father died, brought up her own two children in it, grown old in it… Some years after the second war she had come very near to losing it, but not quite; and here she still was It was Harold who had made it possible. A clever boy, and a wonderful son… When it had become quite clear that she could no longer afford to keep the house up, that it would have to be sold, it was Harold who had persuaded his firm to buy it. Their interest, he had told her, lay not in the house, but in the site as would any buyer’s. The house itself was almost without value now, but the position was convenient. As a condition of sale, four rooms on the south side had been converted into a flat which was to be hers for life. The rest of the house had become a hostel housing some twenty young people who worked in the laboratories and offices which now stood on the north side, on the site of the stables and part of the paddock. One day, she knew, the old house would come down, she had seen the plans, but for the present, for her time, both it and the garden to the south and west could remain unspoilt. Harold had assured her that they would not be required for fifteen or twenty years yet much longer than she would know the need of them Nor, Mrs Dolderson thought calmly, would she be really sorry to go. One became useless, and, now that she must have a wheelchair, a burden to others. There was the feeling, too, that she no longer belonged that she had become a stranger in another people’s world. It had all altered so much; first changing into a place that it was difficult to understand, then growing so much more complex that one gave up trying to understand. No wonder, she thought, that the old become possessive about things; cling to objects which link them with the world that they could understand…

Harold was a dear boy, and for his sake she did her best not to appear too stupid but, often, it was difficult Today, at lunch, for instance, he had been so excited about some experiment that was to take place this afternoon. He had had to talk about it, even though he must know that practically nothing of what he said was comprehensible to her. Something about dimensions again she had grasped that much, but she had only nodded, and not attempted to go further. Last time the subject had cropped up, she had observed that in her youth there had been only three, and she did not see how even all this progress in the world could have added more. This had set him off on a dissertation about the mathematician’s view of the world through which it was, apparently, possible to perceive the existence of a series of dimensions. Even the moment of existence in relation to time was it, seemed some kind of dimension. Philosophically, Harold had begun to explain but there, and at once, she had lost him. He led straight into confusion. She felt sure that when she was young philosophy, mathematics, and metaphysics had all been quite separate studies nowadays they seemed to have quite incomprehensibly run together. So this time she had listened quietly, making small, encouraging sounds now and then, until at the end he had smiled ruefully, and told her she was a dear to be so patient with him. Then he had come round the table and kissed her cheek gently as he put his hand over hers, and she had wished him the best of luck with the afternoon’s mysterious experiment. Then jenny had come in to clear the table, and wheel her closer to the window…

The warmth of the slumbrous afternoon carried her into a halfdream, took her back fifty years to just such an afternoon when she had sat here in this very window, though certainly with no thought of a wheelchair in those days waiting for Arthur.. wanting with an ache in her heart for Arthur… and Arthur had never come Strange, it was, the way things fell out. If Arthur had come that day she would almost certainly have married him. And then Harold and Cynthia would never have existed. She would have had children, of course, but they would not have been Harold and Cynthia… What a curious, haphazard thing one’s existence was… Just by saying “no” to one man, and “yes” to another, a woman might bring into existence a potential archbishop, or a potential murderer… How foolish they all were nowadays trying to tidy everything up, make life secure, while behind, back in everyone’s past, stretched the chance studded line of women who had said “yes” or “no,” as the fancy took them…

Curious that she should remember Arthur now. It must be years since she had thought of him…

She had been quite sure that he would propose that afternoon. It was before she had even heard of Cohn Dolderson. And she would have agreed. Oh yes, she would have accepted him.

There had never been any explanation. She had never known why he had not come then or any more. He had never written to her. Ten days, perhaps a fortnight later there had been a somewhat impersonal note from his mother telling her that he had been ill, and the doctor had advised sending him abroad. But after that, nothing at all until the day she had seen his name in a newspaper, more than two years later.

She had been angry of course a girl owed that to her pride and hurt, too, for a time… Yet how could one know that it had not been for the best, in the end? Would his children have been as dear to her, or as kind, and as clever as Harold and Cynthia…?

Such an infinity of chances… all those genes and things they talked about nowadays The thump of tennis-balls had ceased, and the players had gone; back, presumably, to their recondite work. Bees continued to hum purposefully among the flowers; half a dozen butterflies were visiting there too, though in a dilettante, unairworthy-looking way. The further trees shimmered in the rising heat. The afternoon’s drowsiness became irresistible. Mrs. Dolderson did not oppose it. She leant her head back, half aware that somewhere another humming sound, higher in pitch than the bees’, had started, but it was not loud enough to be disturbing. She let her eyelids drop…

Suddenly, only a few yards away, but out of sight as she sat, there were feet on the path. The sound of them began quite abruptly, as if someone had just stepped from the grass on to the path only she would have seen anyone crossing the grass… Simultaneously there was the sound of a baritone voice, singing cheerfully, but not loudly to itself. It, too, began quite suddenly; in the middle of a word in fact:

“rybody’s doin” it, doin” it, do”

The voice cut off suddenly. The footsteps, too, came to a dead stop.

Mrs Dolderson’s eyes were open now very wide open. Her thin hands gripped the arms of her chair. She recollected the tune: more than that, she was even certain of the voice after all these years… A silly dream, she told herself… She had been remembering him only a few moments before she closed her eyes… How foolish And yet it was curiously undreamlike… Everything was so sharp and clear, so familiarly reasonable… The arms of the chair quite solid under her fingers…

Another idea leapt into her mind. She had died. That was why it was not like an ordinary dream. Sitting here in the sun, she must have quietly died. The doctor had said it might happen quite unexpectedly… And now it had! She had a swift moment of relief not that she had felt any great fear of death, but there had been that sense of ordeal ahead. Now it was over and with no ordeal. As simple as falling asleep. She felt suddenly happy about it; quite exhilarated… Though it was odd that she still seemed to be tied to her chair.

The gravel crunched under shifting feet. A bewildered voice said: “That’s rum! Dashed queer! What the devil’s happened?”

Mrs Dolderson sat motionless in her chair. There was no doubt whatever about the voice.

A pause. The feet shifted, as if uncertain. Then they came on, but slowly now, hesitantly. They brought a young man into her view. Oh, such a very young man, he looked. She felt a little catch at her heart…

He was dressed in a striped clubblazer, and white flannel trousers. There was a silk scarf round his neck, and, tilted back off his forehead, a straw hat with a coloured band. His hands were in his trousers” pockets, and he carried a tennis-racket under his left arm.

She saw him first in profile, and not quite at his best, for his expression was bewildered, and his mouth slightly open as he stared towards the spinney at one of the pink roofs beyond.

“Arthur,” Mrs Dolderson said gently.

He was startled. The racket slipped, and clattered on the path. He attempted to pick it up, take off his hat, and recovered his composure all at the same time; not very successfully. When he straightened his face was pink, and its expression still confused.

He looked at the old lady in the chair, her knees hidden by a rug, her thin, delicate hands gripping the arms. His gaze went beyond her, into the room. His confusion increased, with a touch of alarm added. His eyes went back to the old lady. She was regarding him intently. He could not recall ever having seen her before, did not know who she could be yet in her eyes there seemed to be something faintly, faintly not unfamiliar.

She dropped her gaze to her right hand. She studied it for a moment as though it puzzled her a little, then she raised her eyes again to his.

“You don’t know me, Arthur?” she asked quietly.

There was a note of sadness in her voice that he took for disappointment, tinged with reproof. He did his best to pull himself together.

“I’m afraid not,” he confessed. “You see I... er... you... er” he stuck, and then went on desperately: “You must be Thelma’s Miss Kilder’s aunt?”

She looked at him steadily for some moments. He did not understand her expression, but then she told him: “No. I am not Thelma’s aunt.”

Again his gaze went into the room behind her. This time he shook his head in bewilderment.

“It’s all different, no, sort of half-different,” he said, in distress. “I say, I can’t have come to the wrong?” He broke off, and turned to look at the garden again. “No, it certainly isn’t that,” he answered himself decisively. “But what... what has happened?”

His amazement was no longer simple; he was looking badly shaken. His bewildered eyes came back to her again.

“Please, I don’t understand how did you know me?” he asked.

His increasing distress troubled her, and made her careful.

“I recognised you, Arthur. We have met before, you know.”

“Have we? I can’t remember… I’m terribly sorry…”

“You’re looking unwell, Arthur. Draw up that chair, and rest a little.”

“Thank you, Mrs... er... Mrs?”

“Dolderson,” she told him.

“Thank you, Mrs. Dolderson,” he said, frowning a little, trying to place the name.

She watched him pull the chair closer. Every movement, every line familiar, even to the lock of fair hair that always fell forward when he stooped. He sat down and remained silent for some moments, staring under a frown, across the garden.

Mrs Dolderson sat still, too. She was scarcely less bewildered than he, though she did not reveal it. Clearly the thought that she was dead had been quite silly. She was just as usual, still in her chair, still aware of the ache in her back, still able to grip the arms of the chair and feel them. Yet it was not a dream everything was too textured, too solid, too real in a way that dream things never were Too sensible, too that was, it would have been had the young man been any other than Arthur Was it just a simple hallucination? A trick of her mind imposing Arthur’s face on an entirely different young man?

She glanced at him. No, that would not do he had answered to Arthur’s name. Indubitably he was Arthur and wearing Arthur’s blazer, too… They did not cut them that way nowadays, and it was years and years since she had seen a young man wearing a straw hat A kind of ghost…? But no, he was quite solid; the chair had creaked as he sat down, his shoes had crunched on the gravel… Besides, whoever heard of a ghost in the form of a thoroughly bewildered young man, and one, moreover, who had recently nicked himself in shaving…?

He cut her thoughts short by turning his head.

“I thought Thelma would be here,” he told her. “She said she’d be here. Please tell me, where is she?”

Like a frightened little boy, she thought. She wanted to comfort him, not to frighten him more. But she could think of nothing to say beyond: “Thelma isn’t far away.”

“I must find her. She’ll be able to tell me what’s happened.” He made to get up.

She laid a hand on his arm, and pressed down gently.

“Wait a minute,” sh told him. “What is it that seems to have happened? What is it that worries you so much?”

“This,” he said, waving a hand to include everything about them. “It’s all different and yet the same, and yet not… I feel as if as if I’d gone a little mad.”

She looked at him steadily, and then shook her head.

“I don’t think you have. Tell me, what is it that’s wrong?”

“I was coming here to play tennis, well, to see Thelma really,” he amended. “Everything was all right then just as usual. I rode up the drive and leant my bike against the big fir tree where the path begins. I started to come along the path, and then, just when I reached the corner of the house, everything went funny…”

“Went funny?” Mrs Dolderson enquired. “What went funny?”

“Well, nearly everything. The sun seemed to jerk in the sky. The trees suddenly looked bigger, and not quite the same. The flowers in the bed over there went quite a different colour. This creeper which was all over the wall was suddenly only halfway up and it looks like a different kind of creeper. And there are houses over there. I never saw them before it’s just an open field beyond the spinney. Even the gravel on the path looks more yellow than I thought. And this room… It is the same room. I know that desk, and the fireplace and those two pictures. But the paper is quite different. I’ve never seen that before but it isn’t new, either… Please tell me where Thelma is… I want her to explain it… I must have gone a bit mad…”

She put her hand on his, firmly.

“No,” she said decisively. “Whatever it is, I’m quite sure it’s not that.”

“Then what?” He broke off abruptly, and listened, his head a little on one side. The sound grew. “What is it?” he asked, anxiously.

Mrs Dolderson tightened her hand over his.

“It’s all right,” she said, as if to a child. “It’s all right, Arthur.”

She could feel him grow tenser as the sound increased. It passed right overhead at less than a thousand feet, jets shrieking, leaving the buffeted air behind it rumbling back and forth, shuddering gradually back to peace.

Arthur saw it. Watched it disappear. His face when he turned it back to her was white and frightened. In a queer voice he asked: “What... what was that?

Quietly, as if to force calm upon him, she said: “Just an aeroplane, Arthur. Such horrid, noisy things they are.”

He gazed where it had vanished, and shook his head.

“But I’ve seen an aeroplane, and heard it. It isn’t like that. It makes a noise like a motorbike, only louder. This was terrible! I don’t understand, I don’t understand what’s happened…” His voice was pathetic.

Mrs Dolderson made as if to reply, and then checked at a thought, a sudden sharp recollection of Harold talking about dimensions, of shifting them into different planes, speaking of time as though it were simply another dimension… With a kind of shock of intuition she understood, no, understood was too firm a word she perceived. But, perceiving, she found herself at a loss. She looked again at the young man. He was still tense, trembling slightly. He was wondering whether he was going out of his mind. She must stop that. There was no kind way but how to be least unkind?

“Arthur,” she said, abruptly.

He turned a dazed look at her.

Deliberately she made her voice brisk.

“You’ll find a bottle of brandy in that cupboard. Please fetch it and two glasses,” she ordered.

With a kind of sleepwalking movement he obeyed. She filled a third of a tumbler with brandy for him, and poured a little for herself.

“Drink that,” she told him. He hesitated. “Go on,” she commanded. “You’ve had a shock. It will do you good. I want to talk to you, and I can’t talk to you while you’re knocked half-silly.”

He drank, coughed a little, and sat down again.

“Finish it,” she told him firmly. He finished it. Presently she enquired: “Feeling better now?”

Hi nodded, but said nothing. She made up her mind, and drew breath carefully. Dropping the brisk tone altogether, she added: “Arthur. Tell me, what day is it today?”

“Dy?” he said, in surprise. “Why, it’s Friday. It’s the er... twenty-seventh of June.”

“But the year, Arthur. What year?”

He turned his face fully towards her.

“I’m not really mad, you know. I know who I am, and where I am, I think… It’s things that have gone wrong, not me. I can tell you”

“What I want you to tell me, Arthur, is the year.” The peremptory note was back in her voice again.

He kept his eyes steadily on hers as he spoke.

“Nineteen-thirteen, of course,” he said.

Mrs Dolderson’s gaze went back to the lawn and the flowers. She nodded gently. That was the year and it had been a Friday; odd that she should remember that. It might well have been the twenty-seventh of June… But certainly a Friday in the summer of nineteen-thirteen was the day he had not come… All so long, long ago…

His voice recalled her. It was unsteady with anxiety.

“Why... why do you ask me that about the year, I mean?”

His brow was so creased, his eyes, so anxious. He was very young. Her heart ached for him. She put her thin fragile hand on his strong one again.

“I think I know,” he said shakily. “It’s... I don’t see how, but you wouldn’t have asked that unless… That’s the queer thing that’s happened, isn’t it? Somehow it isn’t nineteen-thirteen any longer that’s what you mean? The way the trees grew… that aeroplane…” He stopped, staring at her with wide eyes. “You must tell me… Please, please… What’s happened to me? Where am I now?

Where is this… “My poor boy…” she murmured.

“Oh, please..

The Times, with the crossword partly done, was pushed down into the chair beside her. She pulled it out half-reluctantly. Then she folded it over and held it towards him. His hand shook as he took it.

“London, Monday, the first of July,” he read. And then, in an incredulous whisper: “Nineteen-sixty-three!”

He lowered the page, looked at her imploringly.

She nodded twice, slowly.

They sat staring at one another without a word. Gradually, his expression changed. His brows came together, as though with pain. He looked round jerkily, his eyes darting here and there as if for an escape. Then they came back to her. He screwed them shut for a moment. Then opened them again, full of hurt and fear.

“Oh, no... no…! No… You’re not… You can’t be… You... you told me… You’re Mrs Dolderson, aren’t you…? You said you were… You can’t... you can’t be Thelma…?”

Mrs Dolderson said nothing. They gazed at one another. His face creased up like a small child’s.

“Oh, God! Oh-oh-oh… I” he cried, and hid his face in his hands.

Mrs Dolderson’s eyes closed for a moment. When they opened she had control of herself again. Sadly she looked on the shaking shoulders. Her thin, blueveined left hand reached out towards the bowed head, and stroked the fair hair, gently.

Her right hand found the bellpush on the table beside her. She pressed it, and kept her finger upon it…

At the sound of movement her eyes opened. The venetian blind shaded the room but let in light enough for her to see Harold standing beside her bed.

“I didn’t mean to wake you, Mother,” he said.

“You didn’t wake me, Harold. I was dreaming, but I was not asleep. Sit down, my dear. I want to talk to you.”

“You mustn’t tire yourself, Mother. You’ve had a bit of a relapse, you know.”

“I dare say, but I find it more tiring to wonder than to know. I shan’t keep you long.”

“Very well, Mother.” He pulled a chair close to the bedside and sat down, taking her hand in his. She looked at his face in the dimness.

“It was you who did it, wasn’t it, Harold? It was that experiment of yours that brought poor Arthur here?”

“It was an accident, Mother.”

“Tell me.”

“We were trying it out. Just a preliminary test. We knew it was theoretically possible. We had shown that if we could, oh, dear, it’s so difficult to explain in words if we could, well, twist a dimension, kind of fold it back on itself, then two points that are normally apart must coincide… I’m afraid that’s not very clear…”

“Never mind, dear. Go on.”

“Well, when we had our field distortion generator fixed up we set it to bring together two points that are normally fifty years apart. Think of folding over a long strip of paper that has two marks on it, so that the marks are brought together.”

“Yes?”

“It was quite arbitrary. We might have chosen ten years, or a hundred, but we just picked on fifty. And we got astonishingly close, too, Mother, quite remarkably close. Only a four day calendar error in fifty years. It’s staggered us. The thing we’ve got to do now is to find out that source of error, but if you’d asked any of us to bet”

“Yes, dear, I’m sure it was quite wonderful. But what happened?”

Oh, sorry. Well, as I said, it was an accident. We only had the thing switched on for three or four seconds and he must have walked slap into the field of coincidence right then. An outside a millions-to-one chance. I wish it had not happened, but we couldn’t possibly know…”

She turned her head on the pillow.

“No. You couldn’t know,” she agreed. “And then?”

“Nothing, really. We didn’t know until jenny answered your bell to find you in a faint, and this chap, Arthur, all gone to pieces, and sent for me.

“One of the girls helped to get you to bed. Doctor Sole arrived, and took a look at you. Then he pumped some kind of tranquilliser into this Arthur. The poor fellow needed it, too one hell of a thing to happen when all you were expecting was a game of tennis with your best girl.

“When he’d quietened down a bit he told us who he was, and where he’d come from. Well, there was a thing for you! Accidental living proof at the first shot.

“But all he wanted, poor devil, was to get back just as soon as he could. He was very distressed quite a painful business. Doctor Sole wanted to put him right under to stop him cracking altogether. It looked that way, too and it didn’t look as if he’d be any better when he came round again, either.

“We didn’t know if we could send him back. Transference “forward,” to put it crudely, can be regarded as an infinite acceleration of a natural progression, but the idea of transference “back” is full of the most disconcerting implications once you start thinking about it. There was quite a bit of argument, but Doctor Sole clinched it. If there was a fair chance, he said, the chap had a right to try, and we had an obligation to try to undo what we’d done to him. Apart from that, if we did not try we should certainly have to explain to someone how we come to have a raving loony on our hands, and fifty years off course, so to speak.

“We tried to make it clear to this Arthur that we couldn’t be sure that it would work in reverse and that, anyway, there was this four day calendar error, so at best it wouldn’t be exact. I don’t think he really grasped that. The poor fellow was in a wretched state; all he wanted was just a chance any kind of chance to get out of here. He was simply one track.

“So we decided to take the risk after all, if it turned out not to be possible he’d well, he’d know nothing about it or nothing would happen at all…

“The generator was still on the same setting. We put one fellow on to that, took this Arthur back to the path by your room, and got him lined up there.

“Now walk forward,” we told him. “Just as you were walking when it happened.” And we gave the switch on signal. What with the doctor’s dope and one thing and another he was pretty groggy, but he did his best to pull himself together. He went forward at a kind of stagger. Literal-minded fellow; he was half-crying, but in a queer sort of voice he was trying to sing: “Everybody’s doin” it, do 7))

“And then he disappeared just vanished completely.” He paused, and added regretfully: “All the evidence we have now is not very convincing one tennis-racket, practically new, but vintage, and one straw hat, ditto.”

Mrs Dolderson lay without speaking. He said: “We did our best, Mother. We could only try.”

“Of course you did, dear. And you succeeded. It wasn’t your fault that you couldn’t undo what you’d done… No, I was just wondering what would have happened if it had been a few minutes earlier or later, and you had switched your machine on. But I don’t suppose that could have happened… You wouldn’t have been here at all if it had…”

He regarded her a little uneasily.

“What do you mean, Mother?”

“Never mind, dear. It was, as you said, an accident. At least, I suppose it was though so many important things seem to be accidents that one does sometimes wonder if they aren’t really written somewhere..

Harold looked at her, trying to make something of that, then decided to ask: “But what makes you think that we did succeed in getting him back, Mother?”

“Oh, I know you did, dear. For one thing I can very clearly remember the day I read in the paper that Lieutenant Arthur Waring Batley had been awarded a D. S. O. sometime in November nineteen-fifteen. I think it was.

“And, for another, I have just had a letter from your sister.”

“From Cynthia? How on earth does she come into it?”

“She wants to come and see us. She is thinking of getting married again, and she’d like to bring the young man, well, not such a very young man, I suppose down here to show him.”

“That’s all right, but I don’t see”

“She thinks you might find him interesting. Re’s a physicist.”

“But”

Mrs Dolderson took no notice of the interruption. She went on: “Cynthia tells me his name is Batleyand he’s the son of a Colonel Arthur Waring Batley, D.S.0., of Nairobi, Kenya.”

“You mean, he’s the son of?”

“So it would seem, dear. Strange, isn’t it?” She reflected a moment, and added: “I must say that if these things are written, they do sometimes seem to be written in a very queerly distorted way, don’t you think.