Josh offered him a fifty pence coin and said, “News, please.”
The vendor looked down at the coin as if a pigeon had blessed the palm of his hand. “What’s this, then? Bloody American, is it?”
“It’s a fifty pence piece. A British fifty pence piece.”
The news-vendor turned it this way and that, and then handed it back. “Sorry mate. Tuppence-ha’penny in real money or nothing.”
“This is real money. Look, it has the queen’s head on it.”
“’Oo, the queen of Sheba?”
“The queen of England, of course.”
The news-vendor turned away and served another customer, and then another, tossing their coins into the upturned lid of a biscuit tin. Nancy tugged Josh’s sleeve and gave a meaningful nod of her head toward the money. There were heaps of large brown pennies, as well as small silver coins the size of dimes, and some little gold-colored ones, too, with seven or eight sides. None of them bore a likeness of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
They walked away from the newsstand, past the half-timbered frontage of The Kings Head pub, and the Wig & Pen Club. The traffic noise was so loud that they could hardly hear each other speak. On the opposite side of the road stood the Law Courts, with their wide Gothic arch and their complicated spires. As far as Josh could see, they were the same as the Law Courts in “real” London. But as they walked past, a flood of people came hurrying out, almost as if they had been cued by a movie director, all shouting at each other. Men in trilby hats and long heavy coats; women in a whole variety of hats, with ostrich feathers and veils and trailing ribbons.
A pale-faced woman in an ice-blue suit stood in the center of the crowd, and dozens of photographers clustered around her, taking pictures. They had old-fashioned flashbulbs, which Josh could hear popping, even over the traffic. One man held a heavy cine-camera on his shoulder, while his companion carried a tape recorder the size of a suitcase, and brandished an enormous black microphone.
“We must have traveled back in time,” said Josh. “Look at this place … steam trains, autogiros, disposable flashbulbs, everybody wearing hats. This is more like the 1930s or thereabouts.”
A stray newspaper tumbled across the sidewalk in front of him. He tried to step on it, missed, but then he stepped on it again and caught it, and picked it up. At the top of the page a large headline announced PROTECTOR GREETS PRESIDENT. There was a photograph of a black-suited man with a deathly-white face shaking hands with a tall gray-suited man with bouffant hair. In the background there was a gleaming railroad car and a station sign saying Naseby.
But above the headline was the date March 17, 2001.
“Look at this, we’re still in today, leastways as far as the date is concerned. We’re still in the same place, too, pretty much. But everything’s so out of date. Like the past seventy years never happened.”
Nancy was reading the crumpled-up newspaper. “Listen to this: ‘Lord Pearey of Richmond Forest died at the weekend at the age of thirty-four. He contracted tuberculosis on a visit to Vienna late last year and failed to respond to a convalescence in the Scottish Highlands. His personal physician, Dr John Woollcot, described him as a brilliant young man, full of glittering promise, and called for renewed Government efforts to find a chemotherapeutic cure for tuberculosis as a matter of the gravest urgency.’”
“And look at the headline: KING’S EVIL TAKES PEER. That’s a pretty quaint way of describing TB, wouldn’t you say?”
Josh stopped on the corner of Arundel Street and looked around. He was trying to imagine what Julia was looking for, when she came here. It was noisy and it was smelly and it was old-fashioned but it must have appealed to her for some reason.
“You’re thinking of Julia,” said Nancy.
Josh nodded. “She always did have a quirky sense of humor. Do you know something, when she was a little kid, she used to pretend that she was a puppet and that she was made out of wood, and I had to tie string to her wrists and the bow on top of her head, to make her dance.”
He suddenly pictured Julia’s appearance at Ella’s séance, her feet wildly pedaling frantically in the air. Nancy caught the sudden look of distress on his face and squeezed his hand.
They crossed over the Strand and began to walk westward toward Trafalgar Square, past dark, sour-smelling wine bars and men’s outfitters with faded tropical suits and topis in the window. The sidewalks here weren’t quite as crowded as Fleet Street, but everybody seemed to be walking very fast, and Josh had several irritating collisions with people who refused to deviate from their chosen path.
He found the photographic grayness of the sky more and more oppressive. It was like walking through a 1950s newsreel. The air was so polluted that he had to keep clearing his throat with a sharp, repetitious cough, and he was beginning to develop a headache.
He was struck by how dirty everything was. The “real” London was a grimy city, but this London was even worse. Very few passers-by looked as if they bathed very often. He saw clerks with soiled white collars and pimples and girls with greasy hair pinned up with criss-cross patterns of grips. Whenever they were jostled in tight with a knot of people, Josh could smell sweat and stale tobacco and a cheap, distinctive perfume like lily-of-the-valley. And almost everybody seemed to be smoking. There was no gum on the sidewalks, but the gutters overflowed with cigarette butts.
A third of the way down the Strand they found a red telephone booth, and there were two fat well-thumbed directories hanging inside it. They squashed themselves side by side into the booth and Josh hefted up one of the directories and searched for Wheatstone Electrics. Nancy peered in the mirror and said, “I don’t look any different. But I feel different.”
“Maybe you’re suffering from door lag.”
“Maybe I’m frightened I’m never going to get back home again.”
“Here it is,” said Josh at last, and he was almost sorry that he had found it. “Wheatstone Electrics, Great West Road, Brentford. Julia must have been here.”
“Why don’t you see if Julia’s listed? She was here for ten months, wasn’t she? She might have installed a phone.”
Josh thumbed through residential numbers, under Winward, but there was nothing there. Then he looked up Marmion, of Kaiser Gardens, Lavender Hill, and he found her almost immediately. “She’s here, look. LA Vender Hill 3223. But we don’t have any money to call her.”
“We could try calling collect.”
Josh lifted the receiver and dialed 0 for the operator.
“Number please.”
“I want to place a collect call to LA Vender Hill 3223.”
“You mean a reverse charge call? Who shall I say is calling?” The operator had such a clipped accent she pronounced it “kulling”.
“Mr Josh Winward. No, no – tell them it’s Julia’s brother.”
“Hold the line, please.”
He waited while the phone rang, and rang. Eventually, he heard a quavery woman’s voice say, “’Ullo? ’Oo is it?”
“Is that LA Vender Hill 3223? I have Julia’s brother on the line. Will you accept the charges?”
“Will I what?”
“The caller is asking you to pay for the call.”
“’Oo did you say it was?”