THE NEXT MORNING when Charlotte awoke to an airplane’s booming overhead and saw Susannah asleep next to her, she at once thought Emily merely a dream. What had happened yesterday seemed something that could only have happened in a dream, for she had carried out that day so calmly and ordinarily, even writing a Sunday letter home to Emily’s Aunt Dolly, whom she did not know, and by the evening she had found herself accepting it as any other day, not one out of her own time at all. Now she assumed that she must have fallen asleep on Saturday night to dream most vividly about Sunday, and that awake at last, she was about to spend the real Sunday in her own time.
But the rising bell went not long afterwards, the one-note electric bell—and at seven o’clock, weekday time. The others grumbled their way out of bed into weekday shirts and tunics, not Sunday coats and skirts.
“Gosh, Monday mornings. How I hate Monday mornings!” Vanessa sighed. But if it was Monday, it meant Charlotte had missed out a whole day in her own time. It meant Emily was no dream but real.
Yesterday she thought she must have been quite numbed by the strangeness to have behaved as she did, so normally, though in another time, and in wartime, too. Today, contrariwise, she was overcome by it, stopping, thinking, trembling every now and then.
She did not know when exactly she had realized what had happened to her. Not knowing had slid so gradually into half guessing, half knowing, knowing for certain. She thought herself stupid now for not realizing immediately, as children did in books, but of course they usually went back so much farther into the past that it was easier to tell because people dressed, unmistakably, in wigs or crinolines.
Then, at bedtime yesterday, she had found beneath Clare’s Bible on the chair a thin red exercise book. “Diary,” it had said on the cover, and “Clare Mary Moby”; and beneath that again in letters three times larger, PRIVATE. Charlotte had hesitated briefly, holding it in her hands. But she had been comforted in some odd way because Clare shared her middle name and even her initials, and at last she had opened it determinedly, though she was careful still to look only at the date of the last entry. The day before in her own time, the present had been Saturday, September 14. But Clare had written Saturday, September 14, 1918, the same day, only more than forty years before.
It seemed quite unbelievable today. After breakfast, her bed half made, Charlotte picked up her nightdress and stood there, far away, letting it dangle from her hands. She was looking out of the window at the new brick building that stood where the cedar tree used to stand, thinking that the room must have been called Cedar after it. The tree had been beautiful as a sailing ship, its trunk stouter than a mast, its branches spread like sails, and she felt sad, indignant even, that they should have cut it down. Yet it seemed silly to feel sad for something lost so long ago, that she ought never to have seen.
“Penny for them.”
Charlotte came back out of her mind to find Vanessa staring at her, curiously.
“You might have been on Mars the way you looked. Penny for your thoughts.”
“Oh. Oh, I see. Nothing very much really.”
“But you must think about something. All yesterday and this morning, too, it’s been hard to get a word out of you. You must think about something all that time.”
“Oh, Charlotte’s just dreamy, aren’t you, Charlotte?” Susannah apologized for her.
“Why should she want to talk to us anyway?” asked Elizabeth lazily, looking up from her book. “Lucky Charlotte. Perhaps she can dream herself right out of here.”
Elizabeth was not a thin girl like Janet and Vanessa, not plump exactly either, but big. Her hair, though short, was rough even when brushed and wild when not, as now. She had a big untidy-looking mouth, big untidy-looking hands with the nails chewed down, even untidy-looking skin that was pale and peeled in places. As soon as they had returned from breakfast, she had flung herself down to read on her unmade bed. A trail of clothes lay on the floor around her, and her transistor radio blurted out “Housewives’ Choice.”
Vanessa looked distastefully at Elizabeth.
“Well, we all know you’re always too busy reading to hear anything we say, but we can’t dream away your mess unfortunately.”
“It’s five minutes to the bell, Elizabeth,” said Janet coldly but more patiently. “Don’t you think you’d better get a move on?”
“Gosh, is it really? I’ll be late!” cried Elizabeth, hurling her nightdress to the floor and rushing out of the room, leaving Janet and Vanessa to make faces at each other and murmur what a slut she was. How could they bear to share a room with her for a whole term.
“She’s supposed to be brainy; that’s her trouble. She thinks she can get away with anything because of it.” Vanessa turned off the radio. But Elizabeth switched it on again, quite casually, when she returned.
From all the confusion Charlotte’s mind grasped one thing—that no one had missed her yesterday. But it was not until later that the obvious explanation struck home to her, that while she herself had taken Clare’s place yesterday, Clare must have taken hers here.
In the library that morning she saw a book called Twentieth Century Library, and when the bell had rung and the rest of the class was collecting their books, she lifted it down, hastily, guiltily. She opened it at the back, leafing through till she came to the chapters on World War II. Earlier yesterday she had thought that might be the war then being fought; but now she saw it had started in 1939. At once she slammed the book firmly shut. She did not want to check further the dates of the other, World War I. She did not want to read of it at all. It seemed like cheating somehow, like looking at the end of a book before you were halfway through. It even seemed unlucky. Of course she might never go back into 1918. Yet in an odd, aching sort of way, she hoped she might. She did not want to do anything that might prevent it, even something so simple as checking on a date.
The very next morning when she awoke beside Emily again, Charlotte, pleased, gave her a special smile of greeting before being reminded by her look of surprise that as far as Emily was concerned, she had been there all the time.
•
Emily was silent today. From time to time she looked most oddly at Charlotte, who wondered uncomfortably if she was beginning to guess that something strange was happening.
“I say,” Bunty said when they went to their classroom after prayers, “I say, I wanted to ask you. If you’re thirteen, aren’t you a bit old to be in a class with me and Emily?”
“It’s just because we’ve been to so many schools, she’s never had a chance to catch up,” cried Emily fiercely. “Clare’s very clever, really she is, so snubs to you and utterly squash.”
“I never said she was stupid, did I, stupid? Anyway, can’t she ever answer for herself?”
“And can’t you ever stop asking questions? Someone of thirteen can’t be bothered with all your silly questions, that’s all.”
“Was there ever such a cheeky little new bug as you?” asked Bunty amiably.
Their classroom was a big room with two pillars at one end above the dais, where the teacher sat surveying both their class and another one. In Charlotte’s time this was used as a dining hall, while her class met in a little cell-like place at the end of the new glass-covered way that ran along beside a stable yard. The classroom might once even have been the saddle room, with its three high windows and stone walls, with the three stone steps that led to a door kept permanently locked. It was very dark, very small, compared to this large, light, dusty room. The clicking of the rings on the green baize curtains covering the pigeonholes sounded the same in both the classrooms, though.
Charlotte went upstairs at recess to fetch a handkerchief, up the steep back stairs that emerged by the window over-looking the yard. The window was open, and there was no one in sight. Hastily, guiltily, she thrust out her head and found that with some awkward craning she could see where the classroom should have been. No covered way ran to it now. Its door was painted blue like the other doors in the yard, but the paint was so flaked and old that she could see the wood in places underneath; also there was a large padlock on it.
Beneath Charlotte, a door opened, and a maid came out of the kitchen. Charlotte could see the parting in her hair and smell the steaming reek of food. She brought her head in again hastily to find Nurse Gregory standing there behind her, Nurse Gregory’s eyes screwing themselves into her.
“And what do you find so interesting then, Clare?” she inquired with interest.
“I—I’ve just come up to fetch a handkerchief from my room.”
“Handkerchiefs, I suppose, growing outside like Virginia Creeper?”
Charlotte said no and then yes, meek and confusedly, since an answer seemed expected, but either way convicted her, yes, of stupidity, no, probably of crime, that is, of breaking a school rule.
“The rule is no girl may come up to her bedroom during the day. You should have remembered your handkerchief this morning.”
“But I thought,” said Charlotte, “honestly, I thought the rules said. . .” And then she remembered she had heard the rules read in her own time, not here, and that there weren’t necessarily the same rules now. But she could not, of course, use this for an excuse. “I didn’t know the rules,” she ended lamely, pulling down the rather short tunic they wore on weekdays in 1918 that was not unlike the modern one except for the strip of velvet across its top.
“That is no excuse. You should have known. I read them to you myself only yesterday. It is not, of course, a rule you’ll long be in a position to break, since you will be in lodgings soon and come only as a day girl here.”
“Lodgings?” asked Charlotte, amazed, but Nurse Gregory noticed no amazement, her voice clattering on as if it were set by clockwork and had to go running down.
“I cannot spare my sickroom long, you know. I have two girls ill already in the other one, and if there are more, I shall soon need your room. I hope you and Emily quite realize the kindness Miss Bite did you in allowing you its use till lodgings could be found. Were it not for wartime, such sudden upsets and arrangements could never be allowed.”
“Everything’s upside down with the war,” ventured Charlotte, remembering what Bunty had said.
“I am not upside down, and my order mark system works perfectly. You will take one please and go straight downstairs again.”
All the rest of that morning Charlotte had to do what she usually told her sister not to do; wipe her nose on the back of her hand. She was wondering, too, what would happen once the Mobys went into lodgings and did not sleep at school. Would she and Clare continue to change about? And suppose she should get stuck here, could not get back to her proper time, to be Charlotte instead of Clare, to have Emma for her sister instead of Emily? The thought of that frightened her, and she tried hard not to think about it.