‘You can insist all you like,’ she replied, ‘but I pay my own way with strange men. We’ll ask him to split it and I shall sign for mine. You can do the tip if it makes you feel any more manly. My purse is in my luggage and I never carry coins in my pockets. It stretches the fabric and ruins the line.’
The waiter returned with the menus.
‘For what it’s worth,’ Stanton said, ‘I think you’re going to win on women’s rights. I really do.’
‘It doesn’t look that way at the moment,’ Bernadette replied morosely. ‘Half my friends are in prison on hunger strike and that swine Asquith doesn’t seem to care at all. I think they’re planning to wait us out until we’re all either exhausted or dead.’
‘Well, all I can say is I honestly think you’re going to get the vote, and a lot more quickly than you think.’
‘Really? You do?’
‘Yes, I do, and I’ll tell you another thing. There’ll be a female MP within a decade and a female Prime Minister this century.’
She laughed, but he could see she was pleased he’d said it.
‘And how would you know that, may I ask?’
He was about to make her gasp with his confident predictions of women taking their place alongside men in the industrial process, something which, in the previous version of the century, was set to occur within a mere two years, by which time women would be earning sexual equality and the vote with every rivet they hammered in and every aeroplane they produced.
But that would take a war. A massive war. The very war he was bent on preventing.
‘Oh well,’ he replied rather weakly. ‘I just think it has to happen, that’s all.’
‘Well, we must make our dreams big, mustn’t we?’ she said. ‘And I must powder my nose.’
While she was in the lavatory, Stanton reflected on the slightly unsettling thought that if his mission was a success, history would inevitably see much slower progress towards the emancipation of women. The Suffragettes had been taking direct action since 1905 and got absolutely nowhere. It was the Great War and the Great War alone that had been the game changer. Stanton doubted that Professor McCluskey had thought that one through.
The cocktails arrived and they ordered their food. The quality and taste of food, or at least expensive food, in 1914 was something that Stanton was still getting used to. It was so different and so much better than anything he’d ever experienced in his own century. Tougher sometimes but better, the tastes more alive. It was as if food had been in monochrome and had suddenly appeared for the first time in colour.
‘Shall we have some wine?’ Stanton asked.
‘Of course,’ Bernadette replied. ‘Dutch courage.’
And she looked him in the eye again as she said it.
‘So we’ve had enough about me for a moment,’ she said, taking a substantial swig at her Manhattan. ‘What about you?’
Good question. What about him?
And the strange thing was, it took him by surprise. It shouldn’t have, of course. She was bound to ask, but having gone four weeks without having had a proper conversation with a soul, he just wasn’t ready for it. And before that, since Cassie’s death, he’d scarcely spoken to anyone but McCluskey, and they’d rarely spoken on personal matters. He’d got so used to emotional isolation, explaining himself to no one, that he didn’t know where to begin. He struggled to remember the back story Chronos had supplied him with.
‘Well, I’m in from the colonies,’ he began. ‘Australia.’
‘How interesting. Sydney or Melbourne?’
‘Neither. The Western bit. Perth. They ignore it even over there.’
Chronos had decided on Perth for its isolation. Less chance of people knowing it or knowing anyone from it. And it explained his loner status. Perth, after all, was the loneliest city on earth.
‘And I was in the army when I was younger,’ he added. They’d also agreed he’d have some military background, going on the theory that a lie is always better if it contains elements of truth.
‘Where have you served?’ Bernadette asked.
‘Pakistan, I mean, Northern India and a bit in Afghanistan.’
‘Fascinating. The far-flung patches of red, eh?’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘And your family?’
‘Miners. Gold, actually, which is why I’m in a position to swan about the place in first-class carriages.’
‘Sounds like quite an exciting life,’ Bernadette commented. ‘And why are you “swanning about”? What’s an Australian miner doing on a train in Bosnia?’
What should he say? His back story had been planned for casual conversation. He’d presumed he’d never get into the more intimate kind, which was silly. He was only thirty-six, he was going to live a long time yet and he was bound to share confidences with someone sooner or later. And now it seemed that it had happened sooner. He was having a chat with an attractive woman over lunch. The sort of circumstance where commonly, if one liked the person enough, you generally got to know each other a little.
But what could he say? He couldn’t tell her who he was or where he’d come from. But he didn’t want to lie either. He liked her, he was enjoying his time with her, he wanted to share. He wanted to tell her something real about himself.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘and please don’t let this cast a downer … I mean, make us gloomy. But I suppose I should tell you that the most significant thing about me is that I was married with two children.’
‘Oh, goodness,’ Bernadette said. ‘How do you mean “was”?’
‘Well, I’m afraid I lost them. All three, a year ago in a motor accident.’
It felt good to tell her. It was the most significant thing about him. Not that he was a time traveller from another century, but that he had loved Cassie, Tessa and Bill and he had lost them.
‘Oh my,’ Bernadette said. ‘I’m so very sorry.’
‘Look … Bernie,’ Stanton went on, ‘I’ve been grieving for a year now. Consumed by a ferocious and ravenous grief that eats away at me day and night but never seems to finish me off. But they’re gone and I’m here. And talking to you I was pretending for a minute that I wasn’t the loneliest man in the world. Pretending that I could just chat for a while without, well, without all the emotional baggage, so to speak …’
Her eyes were wet with tears.
‘Emotional baggage?’ she whispered. ‘Gosh, you really do have a way with words, don’t you?’
‘Anyway, what I’m saying is, would you mind if we carried on talking about you for a bit, because I was really loving that.’
‘Well,’ Bernadette said, dabbing at her eyes with her handkerchief, ‘you’ve come to the right girl because I love talking about me.’
And she did. Through three courses and a bottle of wine. She told him about her childhood and her feminism and her trip to Greece. She skirted over her time in Budapest, when it was quite clear to Stanton she’d had her heart broken, so he changed the subject and turned the conversation to the previous day’s events in Sarajevo.
‘Thank goodness those Serbs didn’t pull it off,’ Bernadette said. ‘God knows what sort of mess Europe would be in this morning if they had. It’s obvious the Austrians are spoiling for an excuse to cut Serbia down to size and the Germans are egging them on.’
‘You know your geopolitics,’ Stanton said.
‘Geopolitics?’
‘Uhm … international affairs.’
‘Well, it doesn’t take a Bismarck to see how the cards are stacked at the moment. Russia would have come in for the Serbs, which would have brought in the French and that would have been that. We should consider ourselves very lucky the man that got away missed and killed his own comrade. If he’d been a better shot we might have been facing the real prospect of a European war this morning.’