Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound (British Library Science Fiction Classics Book 12) by Mike Ashley

Author:Mike Ashley [Ashley, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Priestley, H G Wells, Doctor Who, Time Machine, paradox, time travel, Sci-fi
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2019-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Sitting in the smoker, Boyce held up a newspaper so that nobody should talk to him, ask him to play gin rummy, bother him. The quarrel had made him feel sick; one of the worst quarrels they had had; he wanted to forget it, and to think about Molly. God! he said to himself. When you think what life could be like—and what it actually is … If Molly and I could go away together…

He had never thought anything like that before. He had never seen her, never heard of her until six months ago when Ted had come to tell him about his marriage. And, because Ted was not an enemy then, but his friend, he had moved heaven and earth to get Ted a house on the same street. I want you and Molly to meet, Ted had said.

At Grand Central, Boyce took a taxi downtown to the office. If Lilian knew it, he thought, she’d never stop talking about my ‘extravagance’. All right! What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her. And she’s never going to know about my last two raises. Damned if I’m going to spend all the best years of my life in that office, just for Lilian’s benefit.

He was thirty-eight now, the same age as Lilian, but anyone would think she was older, she with her sulky mouth, her quick, graceless bustling. He was tall, limber, fair-haired and grey-eyed, with a look of boyish good-humour. Even now, shaken by that quarrel, he was good-humoured and friendly to the others in the office.

He was popular here; he got along well with everyone; he had been like that in the army. Lilian likes to quarrel, he thought. Every one of these wretched women she gets in to do a day’s work now and then does something that makes her angry. The last one washed the bath mat in something that faded it, so that it doesn’t match the shower curtain, and that’s a tragedy. That’s her life.

What else have I got left?

Let her find something else. Let her be something else. He turned to his work, routine work which he could handle without effort; it was dull enough, but it soothed him.

“Someone on the telephone for you, Mr. Boyce,” said the secretary he shared with three other men.

He picked up the telephone without interest, and for a moment he did not believe what he heard.

“Not—you?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s Molly. I just wondered if you could get off a little early, and we could have a cup of tea?”

“Yes,” he said. “Where?” He had to be careful; there were a dozen people who could hear every word.

“I’ll meet you in the lobby of your building, shall I? At four?”

“Yes,” he said, again.

He could not believe this; he could not understand it. They had never tried to meet alone; never mentioned it, and, in all his wretched longing for her, Boyce had never seriously made any sort of plan for meeting her. They had never even

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