Chapter One London, 2014
Chapter One
‘You’re crazy!’ Ulysses exclaimed. ‘And you waited until now to tell me?’
It was dusk. A blood orange sun was dropping slowly behind the buildings, plunging the street below into purple shadow.
Pixie and Ulysses sat on the terrace outside their apartment in Little Venice, wrapped in coats and hats for it was now mid-October, and November was edging closer with its cold winds and shorter days.
They’d been back in London for three weeks.
They both missed New York, but for entirely different reasons.
Pixie pined for Cavill; Ulysses yearned for Henry.
While Pixie’s pining was futile, Ulysses’ yearning was productive – he seemed to be constantly texting and FaceTiming, and laughing out loud at jokes to which Pixie was not privy.
She found it annoying. Ulysses, who claimed not to be interested in love, was clearly smitten with Henry Stirling whom he’d wasted no time in seducing at the Aldershoff Hotel.
Pixie, who wanted only to be loved by Cavill Pengower, was still coming to terms with the fact that she could never have him.
Ever. It seemed so unfair that Ulysses should be rewarded for his carelessness, while Pixie should suffer for her honest heart.
Pixie shook her head and shrugged. ‘You’re so dramatic, Ulysses. I was in trance for a minute, no more. No one came near me.’
‘I’m not dramatic, I’m passionate,’ he exclaimed, his Brazilian accent giving the word ‘passionate’ a sensuality it didn’t have in English.
He grinned, his teeth white against his olive skin, the green of his eyes accentuated by the last rays of sunshine that caused them to shine like tourmaline.
His smile was winning, as were his indecently good looks, and Pixie couldn’t help but smile back.
‘It’s all right for you. You have Mr Stirling – Henry – on the phone whenever you want him. I can’t call Cavill, ever.’
‘Give it up, Pixie,’ said Ulysses seriously. ‘You’re wasting your life on a man who doesn’t even exist. You might as well love a movie star.’
She took a sip of wine. ‘I thought I could slide back to a specific time and place. I just wanted to see him one more time. It was worth trying …’
‘Not without me,’ he cut in crossly.
She glanced at him slyly. ‘I knew you’d try to persuade me not to.’
‘So you went behind my back?’
‘Yes.’
‘You little devil.’
She laughed, but her joy turned quickly to worry. ‘Okay, so it was foolish, but at that point I was desperate. I thought I’d never see him again. I thought I’d lost him forever. But what if I haven’t lost him at all? What if I’ve actually started something that I don’t know how to get out of?’
Ulysses frowned. Pixie often seemed to speak a language he didn’t understand. ‘What do you mean? Started what?’
‘I mean, what if in falling in love with Cavill I’ve somehow tied our destinies together? Maybe it wasn’t a coincidence that I met him on the Titanic, after all. What was he doing on the Titanic, for goodness’ sake? What if I drew him there? Me. What if I draw him to me on every slide?’
‘That’s impossible. If you slide back to, say, mid-nineteenth century, he won’t have been born.’
‘But that’s the thing, am I destined to always slide back to his time? Will the Law of Attraction assign me jobs that take me there. Is this going to go on and on and on … ?’
‘Isn’t that what you want? You said you wanted to see him one last time. Well, maybe your prayer has been answered.’
She shook her head and her brow creased into small furrows.
The truth was she wasn’t really sure what she wanted.
She wanted Cavill in her own time, as Pixie, but only magic could make that happen, and she didn’t believe in magic.
She sighed heavily. ‘I don’t want to meet him again as someone else.
I can’t do that to him. I possessed Hermione and he fell in love with her and married her.
She died. I possessed Constance and he fell in love with her, and she died.
Poor man – the women he loves, leave him.
I leave him. Is that fair on him, just to satisfy my own longing? ’
‘Are you suggesting that he’s going to fall in love with you every time you slide into his world?
That every woman you take over is going to become the object of his desire?
It’s only happened twice. Maybe the third time you’ll take over someone who isn’t his type!
’ He grinned triumphantly as if he’d solved the problem.
‘It’s not about how she looks, it’s about me,’ she insisted, frustrated suddenly that he wasn’t keeping up. ‘It’s about who she is on the inside. Don’t you get it? It’s a soul connection. It’s me that he loves! At least, I hope that it is.’
‘It’s far-fetched if you ask me.’
‘The point is, it’s not fair on him to put him in that position time and again, nor me for that matter. I can’t return to the past as another woman and hope that he’ll eventually see through her eyes into my soul. I have to put an end to it.’
Ulysses raised his glass. ‘Now you’re talking sense, Pixie.’
‘So, how do I do that?’
‘Well, if you are somehow drawing him into your slides, perhaps you shouldn’t timeslide at all.’
She cocked her head. ‘That’s ridiculous. It’s my job. I have to timeslide.’
‘Get another job. There are a thousand things you could do.’
‘Like what? Sit in an office in front of a laptop? You know I can’t do that.
This is the only thing I know how to do.
And I’m good at it. Besides, I feel a responsibility towards those earthbound spirits I help.
It gives me pleasure seeing them letting go of their misery and heading off into the light. They need me.’
‘Then take on jobs that don’t require timesliding. At least for the moment. Give yourself a rest. Perhaps, if you get over Cavill, you’ll stop drawing him into your slides. Maybe you’re right, the person responsible for his participation in your slides is you and your dogged pining.’
She thought about that for a moment. Then she said, ‘You know, I feel there’s more to it.
That there’s a reason we keep meeting. Like it’s destiny.
There’s something important I need to learn from him, and he from me.
Like life – only played out in a different time.
On another level. It’s still life, isn’t it? Maybe we learn from our dreams too.’
He chuckled and drained his glass. ‘You’re reading way too much into it, if you ask me.
You slid back to 1895 and fell in love. That’s not so crazy.
Why wouldn’t you fall in love? It’s just a shame he’s dead now.
But there’s nothing significant about it.
It’s just unlucky. You’d be better off falling in love with someone in your own time. ’
His phone buzzed with a call. He lifted it off the little table between them and grinned happily.
‘Sorry, Pix. New York calls.’ He put it to his ear.
‘Hey you,’ he said, getting off his chair and wandering inside.
Pixie felt herself bristle with resentment.
Why couldn’t she find a man who called her and said, ‘Hey you’?
The sun dipped behind a building, and she was plunged into shadow and cold.
She went inside, closing the glass door behind her.
She could hear Ulysses’ laughter from his bedroom.
His happiness made her heart heavy. She wasn’t sure whether that was because she was jealous he was in love, or because she felt excluded.
Ulysses always had a man on the go, but Henry Stirling felt different.
Ulysses’ laughter sounded different too.
It resonated with an intimacy she hadn’t heard before.
She went into her bedroom and perched on the edge of the bed.
Still in her coat and bobble hat she felt cold, and lonely.
She felt terribly lonely. She rubbed her hands together to warm them and glanced warily at the drawer of her bedside table.
Her stomach tightened with anxiety just thinking about what lay inside it.
But like the tongue that craves the aching tooth, she reached out to open it.
Inside was a pile of letters. On her return from America, she had stopped throwing away her mother’s attempts at communication.
Instead, she now kept them in a drawer, unopened.
She hadn’t read a single one. She knew what they contained, and she didn’t want to hear it.
The postmark was Manchester. Fortunately, that was quite a long way away.
She didn’t think her mother would suddenly turn up on her doorstep.
If Pixie ignored the letters, her mother might stop writing them and disappear.
At that thought she felt her throat tighten with anguish.
She’d like to have a mother, only not her mother.
Not a mother capable of plunging a knife into her husband’s chest, a mother who was so selfish as to deny Pixie a father.
No, she wished she had a mother like other people’s mothers.
A mother who was soft and gentle and loving.
Her eyes stung with tears. She closed the drawer, hiding the letters in darkness.
She did not want her mother.
The following morning Ulysses received a call from the College of Psychic Studies in South Kensington. ‘There’s an earthbound spirit in a house in Battersea that needs to be removed. A simple job for Pixie,’ said the receptionist brightly. ‘Do you think you can head up there today?’
Ulysses was a journalist by trade and worked at home, in the flat in Little Venice that he and Pixie had shared since leaving university six years before.
Accompanying Pixie on her visits was something he was able to juggle between assignments.
As it happened, he’d just submitted an article for The Sunday Times about public demonstrations in his home country, Brazil, and was free.
He took down the address then texted Pixie, who had gone out to buy groceries.