Pauline Ashwell: Time's Revenge

“No, no, quite impossible. I could never do that.”

He sounded as though the suggestion was not only impossible but in the worst of taste, and I was slightly annoyed until he added “Dr. McCollum, with whom I had my appointment, was already approaching; in another moment he would have called to me. Then, inevitably, I must have seen myself—and I know that that did not happen.”

“But didn’t he speak to you—I mean your former self?”

“No… I think Dr. Bastable, with whom I had that meeting, was standing between us. I remember, I think, that a man brushed past us when we were standing by the gate and seemed to be looking for somebody. A moment later Dr. Bastable remembered something that he wanted to show me, and we went back to his office, so that Dr. McCollum and I did not meet on that occasion.”

“How are you going to explain why you didn’t meet on this occasion?” I enquired. “If he was coming out to look for you I suppose you must have been announced from the reception desk, so he’ll think you got lost somewhere on the way up.”

“Yes… dear me. I should have returned, with a tale of taking a wrong turning somewhere. It’s too late for that now.” He pondered. “I think… on the stairway I passed a lady who was suddenly taken ill, seriously, so that I conveyed her to hospital in a taxi.”

“Wouldn’t the people on the reception desk have noticed that?”

“Perhaps not. There happened to be a school party coming in… they were kept quite busy. And if Dr. McCollum does not believe me he will just think that I was dodging a business rival, or perhaps the police.” “He will?” I said, startled.

“Oh, yes. He thinks, you see, that I deal sometimes in antiques stolen from archaeological sites. Not with him; the jewels I am showing him have a very good provenance, from a collection made in the eighteenth century, but there are times when I can’t arrange that.” He gave a slightly hunted look at the wall clock. “I think perhaps I should telephone him now and arrange another appointment.”

Having watched a good many archaeological programmes on television, I knew that people who stole from sites were dreadfully wicked, and for a moment I missed the significance of his last remark. I grabbed his coat sleeve just as he was going away.

“Look, there’s a lot more I want to know. Can’t we meet again?” He probably would not want to come to the British Museum again for a bit and there are not many tea shops in London now. I fumbled in my bag and found an envelope with my address, I don’t carry visiting cards, and scribbled my phone number beside it. “Look, any time you’re in Wimbledon, why don’t you just drop in?”

He looked pleased as well as surprised, but I never really expected anything to come of it. However he turned up that very evening—at the front door that time—carrying a bottle of whisky from which he accepted one drink. (Harold and I don’t care for spirits, and know little about them; but on a later occasion, when we had to entertain his managing director, the remains of the bottle caused quite a stir, and I had to invent a mythical deceased uncle from whom I’d inherited it.) He came, I think, partly for the kind of reason that makes people visiting foreign countries feel one-up when they manage to rub shoulders with a “local”; but mostly because he was lonely. Later we became friends, but right then he wanted somebody to talk to, and having deliberately involved myself in his affairs I was fair game.

Anyway, he wanted me to understand that he did not steal from archaeological sites or anywhere else; the items he sold had been bought from the artists who made them, at the going rate. The problem was that these transactions were not accompanied by the usual records, since they had taken place about 2,500 years ago.

“But then scientific tests would show that they were quite new,” I said, airing the expertise I got from various TV programmes.

“Oh, we don’t put them on the market straight away, of course. We bury them in the right kind of soil and dig them up a couple of thousand years later.”

I blinked. “Is that safe? Suppose someone else found the spot?”

“They were buried in—I forget just when—some time in the Pliocene, I think. In any case, well before the appearance of Homo sapiens. ”

I blinked again.

“So,” continued the Time Traveler gloomily, “everything I handle has an authentic patina, authentic attribution—I insist on having the pieces signed—and passes all scientific tests; and half the time I still have to pose as a grave-robber in order to sell it.”

“How about the other half?” I enquired, fascinated.

“For the other half I manage to blame the grave-robbing on somebody else. Usually some anonymous person in the eighteenth century, before the laws against exporting national relics came into force. There were quite a number of collectors then, and some of their collections got dispersed, without any record of where the items ended up. So with certain types of objects one can… er… lay a trail suggesting that they were bought from the original finder by Lord So-and-so or Prince Whatsisname, and later passed through various hands, until they ended up in mine. Especially, of course, if they correspond to some item included in the catalogue of that collection, which has since disappeared. For example—am I boring you?”

I assured him, with the utmost sincerity, that he wasn’t.

“Well then, for example, take the last thing I commissioned—only a couple of days ago in my lifetime. The catalogue of the seventh Duke of Pontecalmo’s collection lists a life-size bronze statue of Persephone, attributed to Theodoros. You’ve heard of him?”

“The Samian sculptor?” I said.

“That’s the one.” He was not particularly impressed by my knowledge: I decided not to mention that it derived from a novel by Mary Renault. “So I went to Samos in—” he paused, evidently calculating. “By the present calendar it would have been 528 B.C.—”

“You went there yourself?” I exclaimed. I don’t know quite how I had thought the transaction was to be arranged: probably I had been too absorbed in what he was actually saying, to extrapolate from it. I wonder how he would look in a tunic and sandals; of course a lot would depend on his legs. Or did men in their fifties stick to ankle-length robes?

“Of course. That’s where most of the fun lies… I speak Greek of that period, of course, with a moderate Persian accent; and Persian with a Corinthian accent. One can’t simply pose as a Greek, you see; it would have to be a citizen of one particular polis, Athens or Thebes or Sparta or whatever. Then you’d almost certainly run into fellow citizens and be asked about your relations and which of the twelve tribes you belonged to, and if you told him that he’d want to go into the matter further; it’s much safer to be a foreigner. There are plenty of them around in the big cities. For Theodoros’s benefit I was the agent of a Persian nobleman—a minor one he wouldn’t expect to have heard of, but with an eclectic taste in bronzes.”

“But aren’t Persians pretty unpopular in Greece?” I enquired.

“Not at that time-point. Marathon won’t happen for nearly forty years. They’re a bit wary of Cambyses, but they admired his father, Cyrus. No, I ought to have been safe enough.”

“ Ought to have been?” I said.

“Oh—well, as it turned out I didn’t come to any harm, but I mistimed my visit a little. I stayed on Samos to see the work start on ‘Persephone.’ Alter I’d been there a week I went down to Theodoros’s yard, in the afternoon, because he was going to finish the core of the statue from the model and I was curious to see her. The core of a big bronze is made of clay, you know, and modeled just like the statue except for the fine detail. He’d been building up the bulk of it for a couple of days, allowing each layer to dry, partly, before he attached the next. A layer of fresh clay had just been applied all over, ready for the finer modeling, when a tremendous row broke out nearby. The yard was in the lower part of the town, quite close to the docks. What had happened—do you know anything of samian history?”