The task feels overwhelming.
I have no idea how I’m going to manage it.
But, with a fresh shot of adrenalin, I realise where I should start.
Or rather, with whom I should start.
Tim Hobbs, of course.
Tim, who’s claimed to have forgotten so much of his crew’s last hours, including who took that photograph of them all, but who I now know from Imogen has misremembered plenty about his recollections in the past.
Tim, who’s a hundred years old, and living in a nursing home in York.
Tim, who here and now, under these burning studio lights – on this Hollywood set of a very real world that he himself walked and breathed – I resolve I need to visit.
Just as soon as I can.
Assuming, of course, that he’ll let me.
Chapter Ten
Iris
February 1943
Iris and Robbie spent much more than a minute together in the old cottage that afternoon.
They spent hours there, not leaving until the early winter dusk descended, leaving them no choice but to return to the house, and the base, and the war that they had, all too briefly, managed if not to forget, then to separate themselves from.
But those afternoon hours passed in the space of a minute, whilst that first minute they shared – with those words,Hello, Clarence, reverberating in the frozen air between them – stretched across seconds that turned into hours that swiftly became an eternity.
To Iris, still half in her dreams, it was as though she was living it in an echo chamber, looking across at Robbie with swimming eyes that saw him both here and now, in the cottage’s crooked hallway with its peeling floral wallpaper, and all the other countless places she’d imagined them meeting, too: layers upon layers of alternative paths that they might so easily have chanced onto.
And was time really a constant? Or did it flex and bend?
Iris thought it probably did.
Especially in this old cottage, where it had always travelled at such strange speed.
Now she was within its walls again, encircled with Robbie by this motionless moment, it was impossible for her not to remember the last time the clocks had shifted for them here: back in that January of 1933, when the pair of them had knelt by the kitchen fire, and shared their almost kiss.
Was Robbie remembering it too?
Even as the question sounded in Iris’s mind, she watched his eyes, glassy with cold, shine, as though in answer.
Yes, he seemed to say,yes.
I’ve never forgotten.
Her smile grew.
So did his, lifting, but not disguising, the fatigue shadowing his face. There were lines around his eyes that hadn’t been there before, and which shouldn’t by rights have belonged to him for years to come. It was almost as though age had travelled backwards to find him, knowing how slim the chances were of them now meeting in the future.
But Iris couldn’t think about that.
‘Robbie,’ she choked, focusing on what was real, what was now, which was that she’d found him. ‘Where did you go?’
‘Where did I go?’ he said, incredulous. ‘Where didyougo?’ His accent hadn’t lost its trace of Yorkshire.
