Yours, Jack .

And there was an old, heavy, rusting key, which was almost as long as my middle finger, making the envelope bulge. It had a neat little paper label tied to it with a fraying scrap of string, that said Front Door. It wasn't the same handwriting as the letter; it was more familiar, and the ink was blacker, as if it had been written more recently. It took me a second to realise it was Granddad's writing but untidier than it was now, more like mine. Granddad's writing from a long time ago.

The other side of the label said, TYME'S END.

I looked at it, and my hands stopped shaking, and everything was solid again.

I knew of course I knew that Granddad's name was the same as mine. The other letters, the ones to Cambridge and Peltenshall, were for him. And this one was just as old; it was falling apart along the creases, as if it had been read and reread. I didn't even know where Falconhurst was, or who Jack was. I'd never heard of Tyme's End.

But . . . I squeezed the key in my fist, until the edges dug into my palm.

I knew that the letter wasn't for me. I knew that the invitation had been for Granddad, years and years ago. Jack, whoever he was, was probably dead. But none of that made any difference.

I was going to go to Tyme's End. I didn't care about the party, or what Adeel or Rosina would think. I wanted to run away, and Tyme's End was there, waiting for me.

It was mad. I knew it was a stupid, crazy idea. But the rational part of me wasn't strong enough to override the calm, quiet certainty that I was doing the right thing, something I needed to do. The key was meant for me. Granddad had hidden it but I'd found it. It was just as much mine as Dad's letters were. I put it in my pocket. Then I paused and decided to take the papers, too.

I packed my stuff. I took my sleeping bag and two changes of underpants and another T-shirt and my mobile phone and wallet and my toothbrush and a bar of soap and a towel. I took the emergency cash from the spaghetti jar. And then, because I had space in my rucksack, I took a carrier bag of food.

And I left Granddad's study door open, with the empty shoebox still sitting in front of the fireplace, so that when he got back he'd know why I'd gone.

It was like a dream. I got the train from Charing Cross, and although there wasn't a Tunbridge Wells West any more the Tunbridge Wells train still went to Falconhurst. I sat on the wall outside Falconhurst station with the letter in my hand, squinting along the road into the sunlight. I could feel the sweat on the back of my neck starting to trickle down my spine, but it was cooler here than in London pleasant, not like the train, where everyone had been beetroot-red and pissed off, flapping newspapers and sighing.

And the little hand-drawn map on the other side of the letter was easy to follow too easy, easier than it should have been. A couple of years ago I'd navigated in Italy while Granddad drove, working from a map a few years old, and we'd ended up on a brand-new motorway that apparently didn't exist. But this was different. Falconhurst hadn't changed. The landmarks were in the same places. There was the one-armed stone cross at the crossroads. There was the signpost to Tunbridge Wells. And the church was there, on my left, set back behind a shady churchyard, only the tower rising above treetops. The High Street was quiet, as if everyone was drowsing indoors, away from the heat. A couple of times I stopped and stood still. It wasn't like London; it was another country.

And when I'd walked down the High Street for a quarter of a mile, the gates were there, exactly where the letter said they'd be.

I stood in front of them and heard myself laugh, because they were padlocked, and there was a sign saying TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED. What had I expected? Someone to welcome me in?

I rubbed the key in my pocket with my fingers, feeling the rust crumble against my skin. Someone else owned this house now. The locks would have been changed. Trespassers would be prosecuted.

My dear Oliver . . .

I don't know why I didn't turn round and go back to the station. Maybe it was because I'd come this far; or because of the letter in my pocket, or because it was so quiet, so green, so hot . . . But somehow I couldn't bear the thought of giving up now, of leaving without even seeing what Tyme's End looked like.

I followed the wall, keeping an eye open for a gap or a tree growing close enough to help me climb over. It curved away from the road, until there was only the occasional swish of a car or the dull drone of a motorbike coming from a long way away. And I saw there was somewhere to climb over the wall, where the railings had been knocked out like teeth. I felt a great electric surge of triumph. I pulled myself up and over, dropped into a bed of bracken, and stumbled through a thin band of trees on to a ragged-edged lawn.

And there was the house, pale in the sunlight, windows glinting.

It was quiet, even quieter than the road; as if the world had swung slowly to a stop, and the moment went on and on. I felt like I'd stepped into the past. All I could do was stand there and stare, forgetting to think, forgetting to breathe. The place, the sunlight, the way the shadows fell . . . I'd been here before, seen it before not just the house, but the summer afternoon, the exact position of the sun, even the heat. At least I hadn't, of course. But deja vu swirled round me like water, filling my ears, silencing everything.

Tyme's End looked back at me, waiting.

And I knew then, somehow, that there was no one there.

The house hadn't been forgotten exactly. It wasn't derelict. It hadn't gone to rack and ruin but it wasn't lived-in any more. The grass must have been mown and the roof hadn't fallen in and the windowpanes were intact, but all the same I could tell it'd been left to itself. I felt a kind of strange tension in my gut that I thought, then, was excitement. I'd be able to have a look after all.

And I was happy. Even now, I can remember how that felt. It was like I'd come home.

And when the door key actually opened the front door, it seemed like . . . it didn't surprise me, somehow. It was like being in a dream, where you know everything's going to happen the way you want it, smoothly, easily, without any fuss. The lock was stiff and the door was swollen, and it took all my strength to push it open; but it seemed inevitable that sooner or later I'd stumble through the gap and stand in the porch, my arms trembling from the effort. I walked into the hall, watching the dust billow up into a narrow blade of sunlight. There was a massive fireplace with white-shrouded chairs hunched in front of it, and more doors. My heart was beating hard. I heard the front door scrape shut behind me, and I jumped and swung round, but there was no one there.

I took a few steps into the room, hearing the small sounds of the floor under my feet so clearly it was as if they were amplified. There was a smell of cigarette smoke. For a second it made my skin prickle, until I realised it was only my clothes, because of being in the same house as Granddad. I was too hot, and breathing too fast. I tried to take a deep breath but it only made me feel dizzy.

I went to the door beside the fireplace and opened it. It opened easily, almost before I'd touched it, as if there were someone on the other side pushing it open just as I put my hand on the handle.

It was the drawing room. There was another fireplace, more white-cloaked furniture, a wall of bookshelves that had been curtained with more dust sheets. The sun streamed in, throwing a lattice of shadow over the floor. And My heart leapt. Suddenly I couldn't breathe.

Someone had been in here just a moment ago.

I didn't know how I knew. There was nothing moving no dust swirling or cobweb drifting to the floor, no footprints, not even the tiny noise of the floorboards settling but I knew. Someone had been there. I'd only just missed him. If I'd been a second quicker . . .

But there was only one door: the one I'd come in through.

And no one lived here. There was no one here.

I stood still, frozen to the spot. I could smell fresh air, dry grass and flowers, and still that bitter trace of tobacco smoke. It should have smelt musty, a room that had been closed up for years, but it didn't. The silence settled like dust.

There was the sound of someone tapping on the window.

I jumped violently and stumbled backwards. My back smacked into something hard, and something dropped palely over my eyes, wrapping itself round me. I panicked, fighting to get free, until I was panting and sweating. Oh, God, there was someone trying to get in, someone I stood still, shaking, with a dust sheet still draped over me like a toga. I clung on to the bookshelf behind me and stared at the window.

The casement was slightly open. There were tendrils of ivy moving in the breeze, beating gently against the glass. That was what had made the noise.

I started to laugh. My voice hit a high note and stuck there. I pulled the dust sheet off my shoulder and bundled it up, still shaking with laughter. The tension went out of my body and I sagged over one of the hooded chairs, limp with relief and embarrassment. Honestly, Olly. An empty house with an open window could reduce me to hysterics. I coughed and shook my head, dragging the air into my lungs. Of course there was no one here.

When I stood up again it was as if the room was bigger than before, as if the walls had all taken a step backwards. The breeze from the open window played on the back of my neck and in my hair. I could smell flowers.

I shrugged my rucksack off and leant it against the nearest chair. The huddled, bulky shapes underneath the sheets seemed to inhale slowly, like sleeping animals. I felt floppy and hot, holiday-ish, half tired, half excited. I didn't know what I was doing here, but it felt . . . right.

There were more windows in the opposite wall, and I went over absently and opened them, pushing against the friction of rust and damp-swollen wood. More outside smells flooded in, and the warm air billowed round me. The loose corners of the dust sheets fluttered and moved, as if the furniture underneath was waking up. I turned my back to the windows and looked at my shadow falling across the dusty, bright floorboards. I felt as if I was waiting for someone; as if the owner of the house had just popped out for a second to get something. Without really thinking about it, I wandered back to the bookcase and stared at the spines of the books. There was a thin veneer of dust, but the sheet had kept the worst of it off and the titles stared back at me. There were gold-lettered leather books Dickens, two volumes of Middlemarch, a lot of Shakespeare but there were mouldy-looking canvas hardbacks too, that looked as if they'd been read over and over. The Odyssey, Le Morte d'Arthur, Treasure Island . . . I slid Le Morte d'Arthur out and held it gently in my hands. Then I let it fall open on the first page and brought it up to my face, smelling the old-book tobacco-and-dust fragrance. Le Morte d'Arthur was one of Granddad's favourites, and for a second, in spite of myself, I could hear his voice reading it aloud to me years ago, when I couldn't sleep. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, clearing my mind. It hurt to think about Granddad. If I didn't concentrate hard I'd be back in his study, kneeling over his shoebox of papers, reading the letters from my dad over and over again.

I thought, Stop it. You're here, now. You're miles away from all that. I took a deep breath, tasting the pollen in the air. This wasn't London, this was another country. It was as if none of that had happened yet.

I glanced down at the flyleaf of the book in my hand before I put it back. There was a line of dark brown handwriting, thin and clear.

H. J. Martin, August 1923.

The book missed the shelf and fell on the floor.

The noise was so loud that I stood frozen. What if someone heard? What if the owner was coming down the stairs at this very moment, to see who was in his house? What if ? Even though I knew the house was empty, I felt my whole body prickling.

But there was nothing. Nothing happened. No one came; the dust rippled round my feet and came to rest again. The book lay face down, its covers spread like wings.

I picked it up. It felt heavier in my hands than it had done, warmer, like something alive.

H. J. Martin, August 1923.

I put it back on the shelf and slid the next one out. Treasure Island. This one was older, but sturdier too, covered in thick ash-coloured fabric that might have been another colour once. I flipped it open to the fly leaf. Hugo JoHn MArtin. His Book. The Year of Anno Domini, 1899.

My stomach felt funny, and my knees. I reached out and leant on a dust sheet-covered chair. It seemed to rock gently, pressing itself into my palm and then pulling away. I thought, I'm dehydrated. I need to sit down.

But my body wouldn't obey me. I watched my hand pale skinned, smudged with dust reach for another book. The Odyssey. But this time the handwriting was different.

It was To Jack, from Oliver, Cambridge, 1936.

I stared down at it. Oh, God. The familiar-unfamiliar shapes, the words that were taller, untidier, younger than they should have been but were still, unmistakably, Granddad's. To Jack . . .

I didn't understand. The house shifted around me, creaking almost silently.

Jack. Hugo John Martin. H. J. Martin.

This was his house. Had been his house. But I shut the book and held it to my chest, bending my head to breathe in the old-book smell. It was only a coincidence. H. J. Martin wasn't relevant. He didn't matter. I was here because of Dad and Granddad, and H. J. Martin was just someone from long ago, from the book that Dad had bought me. He was just someone Granddad had met, and disliked, and made me promise not to read about . . .

I lifted my head. I wasn't sure how I felt, except sick. But there was something . . . A coincidence. Yes. Maybe. But of all the places I could have run away to, I ended up here.

And the door was damp and swollen, and it had taken all my strength to get open. But it had closed behind me of its own accord.

I nearly panicked then. I nearly dropped the book, grabbed my rucksack and made a dash for the front door; and if it hadn't opened I'd have smashed a window, broken the door down anything, just to get out. I'd have sprinted to the station and caught the next train back to London, and maybe I'd have got there in time to go to the party and get plastered on Granddad's absinthe. That's what I nearly did.

There was a cool gust of perfume from the open window, and somewhere, distantly, the faint bitter fragrance of a cigarette.

And it was as if Tyme's End said to me, Don't go.

I turned my head, as if I expected to see someone behind me. But I wasn't scared. I felt . . . curious, detached and safe, like I wasn't really there. None of this was to do with me. I was an observer, that's all.

I opened the book and looked again at Granddad's writing. To Jack, from Oliver . . . And that clear, emotionless part of me noted coldly that Granddad must have lied about this as well. He'd said he hardly knew H. J. Martin, and that he'd disliked him. But he'd given him this book. And what about the letter in my rucksack, that he'd kept for years? And Why did Granddad have the key to Tyme's End? Why hadn't he given it back to whoever owned it these days? Granddad was conscientious about things like that, always orderly, methodical.

And somehow I knew then that it wasn't a coincidence that I was here. Not exactly. I knew that out of everywhere in the world, this house was the one place that Granddad had tried to keep me away from. And that filled me with a kind of burning gladness, like acid. It served him right for all those lies, those betrayals, those days when he must have watched me praying that Dad would answer my letters, when all the time he knew about that little cache of envelopes.

Stay, Tyme's End whispered. You're welcome.

I slotted the Odyssey on to the bookshelf. My hand was steady, and for a moment I looked at it and thought it was someone else's.

Then I bent down and swept the sheets away from the furniture, pulling armful after armful of pale cotton off chairs and little tables and a gramophone, loitering in the shadows, that I didn't notice until the ivy tapped on the window again, drawing my attention to that corner of the room. And then I was coughing on the dust and there was a pile of sheets at my feet like laundry, and the room was awake.

Something was strange, though. I stared round at the room, trying to put my finger on it. It looked lived-in, as if someone had just walked out and never come back, like a photo. And there was something odd about that.

I took a step backwards into a table and heard it rock, and a clink as the stopper rattled in a decanter. I looked round, and then I knew what was bothering me.

There was a dark stain round the middle of the decanter, as if there'd still been something in it when the dustsheets were thrown over it. And there were other things on the tables a photo in a frame, a box of cigarettes, the paper sleeve for a gramophone record. There was even a folded newspaper on the sofa, yellowed and densely printed. No one had even bothered to pack any of it away before they covered everything up. That was odd. Wasn't it?

As if someone had done it as quickly as possible. As if they hadn't cared about any of it, as if all they'd wanted was to leave. Or as if they'd been told to do it, but whoever had told them to do it didn't care, didn't want to think about it, never wanted to come here again.

I leant over and picked up the newspaper. It ripped as I pulled it, and the last page stayed stuck to the leather of the sofa. I didn't unfold the rest in case it fell apart in my hands. A phrase in the dense print caught my eye: Italy's disregard of her obligations under the Covenant of the League of Nations . . . The date was 15 June, 1936.

I thought, No one's been here since 1936. But it wasn't true. It couldn't be true. It felt as if someone had only just left. And, anyway, it wouldn't happen. Why would someone cover everything up and leave it for sixty years? A house like this would be worth well, millions, surely? No one would just leave it to rot.

But they had. I looked down again at the newspaper. AGGRESSION AND ECONOMICS. THE WARPATH IN CHINA . . .

1936. Slowly, gently, I laid the paper back on the sofa, lining it up so that it covered the page that was still clinging to the leather. I stood back and looked round the room, taking it in. I couldn't shake the feeling that someone was about to walk in and pick up the conversation where he left off, sixty years ago. H. J. Martin. Jack.

And out of a deep, forgotten part of my mind, something surfaced from the biography Dad had bought me. It was strange how clearly I could see it, the one page I'd managed to get through, that I hadn't looked at since. On June 21st 1936, at half past five in the morning, a motorcycle and its rider hurtled along the long, straight road that still runs from Falconhurst in East Sussex north-east towards Tunbridge Wells . . . The house must have been closed up immediately after his death and never lived in again. Whoever owned it never came here; and Granddad kept the key . . .

I walked back to the door and slipped through it quietly. I wasn't scared, but all the same I trod carefully as I walked past the cowled chairs in the entrance hall. There was another door on my right and I opened it. There were more dust sheets in here, but I could see the shape of a chair and bookshelves and a lumpy desk. I tugged gently on the sheet, and the desk was exactly as someone must have left it: a notebook, a half-addressed envelope, one of those brass-and-green-lampshade lamps. A fountain pen rolled on to the floor, and an open bottle of ink tilted and toppled as the sheet caught it. I swore and reached out for it, but it was empty. There was a photo in a silver frame: two men, grinning, in a stone archway. The older one had a face that I thought I'd seen somewhere before: he had to be Martin. He had his arm around the other man, who Was me.

No. I laughed aloud, although it sounded strange, as if I was out of practice. Of course not me.

It was Granddad. Granddad sixty years ago, a few years older than I was now. He was leaning towards Martin, and beaming his familiar wide, unfakeable smile at the camera. He was wearing a tweed jacket and tie, but his top button was undone and the tie-knot was sloppy and crooked. It gave me a pang to see him like that, not just because he'd hidden Dad's letters and I was furious with him, but for some other reason. He looked so happy.

I picked the frame up and tilted it this way and that, watching the reflected sunlight blank them out. The way they were smiling; that easy, paternal arm draped over Granddad's shoulders . . .

He really had lied to me. Not an exaggeration or a little white lie, but proper, deliberate lies. Granddad, who wouldn't even say it was all right, the injection wouldn't hurt a bit. About Dad, yes, but about this too and why, why would he lie about this? It was so pointless. As if I'd care about H. J. Martin. Somehow it made me even angrier than the other lies.

But I was here now. He'd lost. Whatever he was trying to do, he'd failed.

I dragged the last corner of the dust sheet off the desk, then put the picture back. I narrowed my eyes at it, imagining that it was me. I could almost remember being there, in an archway in Cambridge on a summer's day, Martin's arm over my shoulder, making jokes at the person behind the camera. Martin would have liked me, I knew that.

I took all the dust sheets off so the room looked lived-in again, ready for the owner to come back.

Then I made my way through the rest of the house, taking all the sheets off the furniture, until it was as if I'd gone back in time, right back to the moment sixty years ago when Martin closed the door behind him and started up his motorbike. There were musty, moth-eaten clothes in the bedrooms, beds still made up and stinking of mildew, enamel baths centimetres deep in crumbly, gritty dust; but even so, Tyme's End was awake. I felt reckless. I whistled as I worked through the rooms one by one, half dancing in the sunlight that streamed in. None of the windows were broken, the water from the taps ran clear after an initial spurt of red, and some of the lights worked. Nothing was quite as bad as you'd expect, after sixty years of neglect. It was as if someone had been here, quietly fighting the worst of the decay, keeping everything going, just in case.

But all the same, every room in the house was fiercely, hungrily happy to be uncovered again. Tyme's End had been starving to death, only just clinging to life as it stifled under dust sheets. And now I was here. And I thought of Granddad, oblivious across the Atlantic, and that made me feel even better.

At last I came down the back staircase and into the drawing room. I'd left my rucksack there beside the pile of dust sheets, and I sat down, dug out an apple and started to eat it.

Then I stretched out, put my hands behind my head and shut my eyes. I could feel the sunlight on my face, and smell the breeze and the scent of smoke that must have been clinging to the furniture. I remembered the first time I'd walked into the room, as if it was a long time ago. I'd been scared. But I couldn't remember what that felt like. I didn't believe in it, somehow. There was nothing to be frightened of here. I was welcome; I belonged.

I heard myself say drowsily, 'Thanks for inviting me.'

But if there was an answer, I was asleep before I heard it.

V.