The Time Machine

The invitations went out on Monday. No explanation, just dinner, Thursday, seven o’clock. They came because they always came, because he was their friend, because five years of watching the light burn in Victor’s laboratory at two in the morning had made them careful about the invitations he did issue.

When Victor issued an invitation it meant something was happening.

Eleanor Whitmore was the first through the door. She had dressed for a proper dinner, the dark green silk, the pearl earrings that had been her mother’s, and she came into the entrance hall and handed her coat to the junior member of the catering staff and walked toward the dining room and stopped.

Victor was already at the table.

She had been to perhaps forty dinners in this house over the years. She had a clear memory of every one of them because they were that kind of dinner, the kind you remembered. In forty dinners she had never once arrived to find Victor already seated.

He was always in the laboratory. He always appeared late with something on his hands that wouldn’t quite wash off, trailing apologies he didn’t mean, dropping into a chair with the distracted energy of a man whose mind was still among the instruments. It was one of the things she had come to expect from Victor the way she expected weather.

Tonight he sat at the head of the table in his good coat, clean-shaven, still. His hands were folded on the table in front of him. He looked at the far wall.

She stood in the doorway for a moment. She had known Victor for eleven years, since the summer he and Catherine had taken the house next to James’s mother. She knew his face well enough to read it without appearing to read it. Something was different.

Not tired, she knew what tired looked like on Victor. This was something else. He looked like a man who had been somewhere and come back with a great deal to tell.

She said his name. He turned and saw her and stood, and she crossed the room and took his hand briefly and looked at his face, and yes: somewhere. He had been somewhere.

Her husband James arrived perhaps five minutes later, talking as he came through the door about something in the morning paper. James was a natural philosopher in the old sense, curious about everything, expert in some of it, willing to be wrong in a way that made him better company than most experts. He had been fifty-eight years old for several months and was not yet accustomed to it. He had expected fifty-eight to feel like something and it had turned out to feel like fifty-seven, which he found both reassuring and mildly disappointing. He kissed Eleanor on the cheek and looked at Victor and said, “He looks different.”

“Yes. I noticed,” Eleanor said.

Arthur Finch arrived exactly on time, because Arthur always arrived exactly on time. He had decided in his twenties that punctuality was a form of respect and had practised it for twenty years until it became a form of character. He was a barrister with a reputation for precision that other barristers spoke of with the particular mixture of admiration and slight irritation reserved for people who are better at the thing you both do. He had lost two colleagues in the war and had not spoken about it directly since their names went on the plaque in the entrance hall of his chambers. He examined the wine label with the look he wore when approaching a problem.

Edmund Hartley arrived quietly, which he always did now. He had attended Catherine through her illness. He had been there when she died. He had done everything that could be done, which was not sufficient, and he had stayed anyway because staying was what a physician did. He had not spoken to Victor directly about it in five years. They had spoken around it, around the dates, the season, the general fact of it, but not directly. Edmund shook Victor’s hand and held it for a moment longer than necessary and said nothing.

Clara Osgood came in last among the expected guests, unwinding a scarf and apologizing for the cold. She was thirty-one and had an independent income from her father’s estate and had used the independence to pursue science with a seriousness that the Philosophical Society had recently begun to notice, which was not yet sufficient but was a beginning.

She was the youngest of them and the most impatient with the social forms that the others had been performing for decades. She had grown up watching her mother perform those forms and had decided at some point in her teens that she would perform them when they were useful and skip them when they were not. She had a gift for asking the question nobody had thought to ask. Victor was one of the few people she knew who never found this irritating.

Thomas Beaumont came in a few minutes after Clara, hanging his coat himself without waiting for the staff. He was a journalist, not the kind that filled column inches, the kind that understood something. He had been covering Parliament for seven years and had grown, in those seven years, a thorough and slightly jaundiced understanding of how men with power justified what they did with it.

He watched things. He watched them with the quality of attention that meant he would understand them fully at some point in the next few days when he was alone at his desk. He carried a notebook in his coat pocket but he did not take it out at social occasions unless something required it.