OK, so - more. I apologise for how lengthy and verbose this is, and the non-appearance of the Doctor thus far, but don't worry! The chapters are hopefully going to be successively shorter. I can't do anything about the pretentiousness, however (this title is taken from a line in Blake's "The Lamb") and I rather suspect that the slash might get a little worse. Please read, stick with it, and review, even if only to point out how unreadably lengthy and verbose it is and how you couldn't possibly read to the end. Cheers.


'Where is she? Where is she? This old woman is hiding her from me. She's bored by me, and she's waiting for me to go, thinking it all an infernal nuisance, these crowding memories and this returning ghost…'
- Collette, The Last of Chéri

On these magic shores children at play are forever beaching their coracles. We too have been there; we can still hear the sound of the surf, though we shall land no more.
- J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy


Now she thought about the watch. Just turning it over, over and over, opening, closing, turning, click, but the watch itself never ticked. It was just an old piece of tat, yet he insisted on keeping it, and when once she had said to him sharply, "If you are going to be going on with that while I am telling you about Mr Shaw's play, I simply shan't bother", Hutchinson had snapped at her that she didn't know what she was talking about.

But to pacify her, Tim no longer took it with him in his pocket, for it tempted him too much to play with it. Now it rested on the mantel in the parlour, and sometimes she saw him looking vaguely towards it while she was talking to him.

She did not like the watch because it was something between him and Hutchinson, a sort of a physical remnant of whatever affection it was that they bore each other. But she knew there was something else bound up with it, something about this Doctor who had masqueraded as one of the schoolmasters at Farringham, and she resented this even more. She felt she ought not to have to stand meekly by while he divided up his love between Hutchinson and this Doctor and the maid, what was her name? Martha, and Joan Redfern, and then accept whatever he had leftover. It just wasn't fair. He wasn't under her spell at all.


He and Hutchinson had once gone back to the school. They stood at the end of the long drive, the grass now overgrown, and looked down towards the great empty building. Tim wanted to go further. Hutchinson held back.

"I thank God that it's dead now," Tim said feverishly, for he saw it like a great monster made of stone, welcoming in little boys with gently smiling jaws.

"I don't know," Hutchinson mused. "It's another thing that – well, you know."

That no one else would be able to understand, that was lost to the old world, that had never made it into the new world. It had no place in the new world. The delicate mechanical rounds of its toy soldiers now seemed quite ridiculous. When Tim remembered it now, it seemed like some distant medieval abbey, its male inhabitants 'amorous but not erotic' (a neat phrase from a Carthusian headmaster), its rites solemn and mysterious.

"Besides," Hutchinson chided him with a smile, "you don't believe in God."

Tim grinned, but could not take his eyes from the school. "I believe in God," he said carefully. "I just don't believe he's here."


Tim realised that he had convinced himself of something very peculiar. He had metamorphosed Joan Redfern's cousin and her little girl into the Doctor and Martha. Something in her manner had convinced him of this, as well as the fact that he hoped desperately that it was true. He knew he had dreamed of them. It was only when he woke properly that he realised he had got this notion from Barrie's Peter Pan.

He was lying at the very edge of Baines' bed – he hadn't felt able to leave him, and though he felt frankly terrified with him and knew that if he could only swaddle himself in his own bedclothes, with the drawn curtains instead of the gaping dark, he might get a little sleep, he had stayed with him. He was an adult. It was his responsibility not to be afraid of the dark, and so he had lain there precariously at the edge of the bed (there couldn't be anything worse than touching the boy, to be sure) and had very little sleep. Even in this very uncomfortable position, he had managed to dream. He had wakened frequently. When he was not awake he was dreaming. When he was not dreaming he was looking at Baines' dim form, with its back turned to him, and once, when he was not sure whether he was dreaming or not, the bed had been empty. That had frightened him so much that he had simply closed his eyes and willed it not to be true. And lo, it wasn't. The sun had risen and was slanting in through the windows, and the birds emitted their shrill cacophony, and the boy from the world before the war was snoring peacefully. Tim felt something in his hand, and jumped.

It was Baines' hand.

The day was clear, though the frost was beginning to creep in. Tim had been delighted, upon rising and going to the kitchen, to see a hart in the garden. He wished that such moments could take the place of all the other memories – instead of the light fixture in the hospital, the memorial service, and so forth, he could have geese crossing the sky in a v-shape, the trees ablaze with blossom in April. Again he was troubled by the fact that his memories of the future did not involve Eleanor, and now that Baines had entered his life, did not involve the Doctor.

Baines needed to shave. Tim did almost suggest that he do it himself, but he knew it would be cruel to say such a thing, when he knew how unsettling a mirror could be. So he lathered Baines' face, and took the long razor in his hand, and did it for him. He was glad that Baines' eyes did not meet his, for he might have been distracted and embarrassed enough to cut him. Thinking of this, he felt a sudden desire to do just that. He could not say where it came from. He wanted to disfigure Baines, to harm him, to change him. His hand shook a little; then he continued.

They ate breakfast together in silence. Eventually, Tim cleared his throat and said, "I must go into town again and leave you by yourself."

The boy looked at him dully. His expression was such that Tim expected, or wanted, him to whine, "Please don't leave me, I shall be so frightened." But in fact he said, "What exactly do you do?"

Tim started. "I'm sorry?"

"What do you do? For money? What is your job?"

"Why, I write, of course. I have regular engagements with two different journals, and then others who allow me to write a piece whenever the mood takes me. So, for example, I do write for a military publication, awfully dry stuff, but it brings regular money - all the things that they taught us under the misapprehension that they still applied, Jena and Waterloo and Blenheim, Blenheim for God's sake. And then the piece that you read yesterday – the Yeats piece – might go to a literary journal if they want it."

Baines digested this information. And then he said, with some of his old impenetrable self-assurance, "I say, you really make enough money out of scribbling to get by?"

Tim didn't know how to reply. He was wrong-footed. "Well, I seem to," he muttered hesitantly.

"And what will you do when you marry, if you do marry?" It was like having this conversation with his father.

"As it happens I shall be marrying rather soon," Tim said, regaining himself, "and although I certainly don't need to justify myself to you, you might be interested to know that my fiancée has her own income. And that, when she turns thirty, she will be permitted to vote."

Baines looked aghast at this. He pushed his food around his plate, and Tim could not suppress a snigger at his expense. Then Baines said, "You didn't mention before, that you have a fiancée."

"Didn't I? I expect it didn't come up."

"It didn't come up," Baines persisted, "because you didn't mention it. I'm sure you didn't mention it because she is not only hideous but stupid and probably blind too, and so I quite forgive you. Well if you are going out you had better go. I expect I am probably entirely in your head, and when you come back I shan't be here at all." He was jealous. It was obviously another way in which his old companions had grown, and he had remained unchanged.

"Oh, now, you mustn't say that. You are here, and you will be here, for whatever reason. You've just to get on with things. Perhaps you are imagining me, and I am not really here at all?" He meant it light-heartedly, but he saw he had really frightened the boy. Perhaps it made him think that he might still be tied to that post, and that whatever little fragment of him remained trapped in the mind of the other creature had simply gone insane.

"I don't think so," Baines said, "I don't have a very good imagination. You write, I mean you wrote, all of my English work for me, don't you remember?"

Tim had forgotten about that. He remembered peppering the exercises with liberal spelling mistakes, trying hard to adopt the appearance of a mind that had flashes of rough brilliance, but lacked the eloquence to properly express these. Baines had thumped him to encourage him, but honestly he had acted of his own free will. It intrigued him to be able to invent a literary persona for Baines, to suggest things about him that probably were not at all present in reality – to create for Baines the kind of mind that he wished Baines had. It had made him wish he could do this for everyone, subtly rewriting them. He need only start small, and then work his way up to the headmaster, to whom he could ascribe a great and sensitive unwillingness to fight. Then he might move on to the politicians, and to the Kaiser, and he could stop the war before it started.


He liked to imagine that his father's moustache would tickle, but he had never had the opportunity to discover whether it would. His father did not touch him, did not touch him even to beat him, and barely looked at him. But he had imagined that it would tickle, and now, at eleven, he had the memory of its doing so despite the fact that it had never happened.

His father had not returned to see him before he went to Farringham, it had simply worked out that way by coincidence. He remembered his father from when he had been a baby, but he remembered him tall and godlike. It was quite a shock to him, at eleven, to realise that he had his slight build from his father, who was almost a delicately tiny little man, rather like (Tim's mind ran on dreamily) Napoleon must have been, and Tim was the exiled son of Napoleon, the Eaglet, and he was to be imprisoned by the brutish Metternichs…

In a voice that was like a slap, but without touching, his father barked, "Listen when I'm talking to you. Dear God."

The disappointment in his voice would have made Tim's chin wobble, but he was bright enough to realise that this might be a mistake on his part, and kept a straight face.

"Well, I can't blame your mother." Tim's mother was dead by now. "And by all accounts you have attended the right sort of schools, and done well enough."

Tim focused on the floor and said nothing, did not move a whisker.

"You see, the trouble is, Timothy, that it is not good enough to simply be adequate. You might think that you have been very clever in keeping your head above water, but I assure you, everyone knows. They can tell by looking at you. They can tell that you have no honest fervour in your heart. And since it is plain that you have had all the means at your disposal to become a good, honest boy, with a bit of pluck, a bit of fire in his belly, you must ask yourself, who made you this way? Hmm? Who made you the deceitful creature that you are?"

Tim looked up. He felt that he knew the right answer to this. "God made me this way," he said, in a rather pathetic squeaky voice that he didn't recognise as his own.

His father did not roar, but his eyes were full of fury. "What?" he said disgustedly. "What did you say?"

"God made me this way," Tim said, and too late realised that he was merely repeating catechism, and that this was not the answer to the question at all.

"God did not make you this way, Timothy – you have only yourself to blame."


"A little mercy," said Eleanor, "can be a dangerous thing."

She and Jane were sitting before the fireplace in the old house in which Jane and Hutchinson lived. It was Tudor, had been in the family for that long, though there had always been a manor house here and Jane could trace her family back to the Normans. Jane had a long Plantagenet face, long dark gold hair, and moved with the stylised gestures of her ancestors. Eleanor liked her very much. She seemed to exist in all times continuously.

"I think we dote on them too much. And I think that they resent us, because we couldn't go – which is, God knows, not our fault. If we had been men we would have gone, and if they knew, as you know, how I often I dream that I am a man… But I can't tell him that, and anyway, it would mean nothing to him. They think that they are the only ones who have seen bloodshed, or at least, they don't care to remember that we have too. You, while you were a V.A.D., and I – "

She didn't finish this sentence. Jane could tell that she thought she was hiding something well, because she underestimated her companion. Jane was not an intellectual, and not as refined intellectually as Eleanor, for all her good breeding. But Jane knew that Eleanor had been out of the country in 1916. When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side, what stalked through the Post Office?

It was time to change the subject. "I find myself quite interested in Spiritualism," Jane said.

"Oh, that? Each to their own. I expect I shall have to go, because Tim seems rather interested, but I don't know who would wish to talk to the dead."

"If I could talk to my brother," Jane said, "I think I would."

Eleanor was suddenly penitent. She hesitated and then embraced the other woman. "I'm so sorry," she said into her hair, as Jane hugged her equably back, "I wasn't thinking of that. I haven't been thinking. Sorry, I've been awfully wrapped up in myself."

"It's quite alright," Jane replied, unruffled. "Doubtless, for you, there are so many ethical dilemmas surrounding the whole notion – ought one to talk to the dead? And no doubt you would be thinking of Orpheus and Eurydice, or perhaps the more obscure Egyptian version of the same myth, or something like that. But for me, well, I simply didn't talk to him enough while he was here, he was so young, and so stupid, if I could have him back even for a minute I would.

"And I feel quite secure in saying that even if it had dreadful consequences for everyone else, I would have him back for that one minute."


Jane loved her husband and he did not love her. She had accepted this readily, since it was such a small price to pay for having a husband at all in these desolate times. Besides which, he was a war hero! She worshipped him and decided to live off her worship of him. He did not respond to her love, and so she would be like the pelican that tears chunks from its breast in order to feed its young. In her youth she had read the story of Geraint, King Arthur's knight, who believed his wife to have been unfaithful and lashed her to the saddle of his horse, and made her follow him across the land. In the end it all came right; and this would all come right too, when he realised just how much she cared. She had a very old oaken cradle in the nursery upstairs, in which she had slept as a baby, and she knew that her own child would sleep in this cradle. Oh, soon, soon, it would happen soon enough. Of course she envied Eleanor, who was already so familiar with dainty little Tim Latimer, but she herself was not like that. She would wait. It would be her cross to bear. She would be like those medieval ladies, with white hands, who sat sewing tapestries and waiting for their lords to return from the Crusades.

Of course, her love had already returned from the Crusades. But he had not returned yet. His mind had not returned. His heart had not returned. She imagined it would come one day, in a little wooden chest, oh, perfumed and beautiful.

And then he would love her.


Tim hurried along into town. He had a rather glorious truant-from-school sort of feeling, that he soon realised came from possessing so many secrets. It was as though Baines' presence had crystallised all of the other secrets, made them more concrete – it was as though every little dark wending lane had met at a crossroads. He whistled to himself contentedly.
He had made a habit of sneaking away from school whenever he got the chance. For instance, during games, he was often not missed, since they went out to the fields in any case. And though he had a hot feeling of dread in his stomach because Hutchinson had said to him, with a sneer, "You were sick again last week, Latimer? I didn't see you on either team", he was determined at least to miss this lesson before he got caught.

Baines had said to him, "I say, what's that in your shorts?"

"Nothing," Tim had replied, nervously, adding, "Why, do you want to have a look?" in as surly a manner as he possibly could.

"That's disgusting. Why would I want to look at your little knob? Latimer's a poof," Baines said in one breath, the last clause shouted so that Hutchinson could hear it across the changing room.

"I know," came the reply.

"And his knob's all flat and rectangular."

"I know."

Now Tim hurriedly removed Plato's Symposium from his shorts, and sat down, with his back against the fence post, to read it. It was a bright day, the hawthorn trees along the fields edge heavy with blossom. He was only a few pages in when a shadow loomed across him, and he looked up to see Clark peering down at him. The farmer said, "You're one of the schoolboys."

Tim nodded, terrified.

"You meant to be in school now?"

"Yes, sir, Mr Clark."

The farmer chewed his moustache thoughtfully. "Which lesson?"

"Games, sir."

"Eh, rugger and cricket and all of that? That's no lesson. What are you meant to get from that?"

Tim's voice became bored as he reeled off the whole list. "Physical stamina, fresh air, camaraderie, a sense of fair play and honour, a desire to defend the school values and therefore the values of the empire…"

The farmer thought a moment longer. "Come with me," he said, "and I'll teach you something useful."

So Tim followed him back towards the farmhouse, and it transpired that one of the ewes was pregnant, and Mr Clark showed him how to help with the lambing. Tim was delighted at the tender little blind, helpless creatures, who butted at their mother almost violently. Afterwards, Mr Clark gave him sweet, milky tea in a chipped cup, and a slice of bread and butter, and Tim was so overjoyed and thankful that the farmer was quite bemused.

And when Tim got back to the school it was so late that he did not even bother to hide the book from the others, and Hutchinson beat him rather too soundly with a piece of knotted rope, while Baines read aloud from the book and sniggered at anything he considered to be lewd.

"Asistoph – Aristiph –"

"Aristophanes," Hutchinson corrected him boredly.

"That's exactly what I meant. Latimer, are you in love with Socrates?"

Tim's bottom was sore. He had heard that another boy had hidden a piece of tin inside his pants to protect his tender flesh, but that the clanging had given him away, and he had been beaten all the more soundly. He rubbed his bottom ruefully, and just at that moment he had looked over his shoulder and seen Hutchinson watching him really quite intently. Baines was lolling stupidly, holding the book over his head and squinting up at it.

"Yes," Tim muttered tersely, holding Hutchinson's gaze.

"Ahahaha. You're in love with Socrates. You're a poof," Baines cackled.

"Yes. I am."

Hutchinson did not waver. In Tim's mind the two memories began to get rather confused, the sting of the rope and the boneheaded bullying, and the growing sense that Hutchinson's hatred of him sprang from something quite unmentionable, and the butting of the wet, pink lambs against their mother, and the way the small creatures with their tender hooves felt in his hands, and the children of the sun and the moon and the earth, and the great abbey that was Farringham School.


"There's a thing," Eleanor said, "on his mantel."

"Oh yes? What manner of thing?"

"A sort of – a fob watch. He's really quite silly about it. The two of them, they have this notion that it's very special. But it's just a broken watch."

Jane shrugged gracefully. Eleanor had a sort of intense look in her eyes, and said suddenly, "Let's go and get it."

Jane laughed. "And why should we do that, if it's just an old broken watch?"

"Oh goodness, Jane, you can't say that you aren't curious," Eleanor cried, "that you aren't even the least bit curious about any of his secrets."


When Eleanor had first met Tim, he had been idly turning the watch over and over in his hand – opening, closing it, opening it again, turning it over – as though looking for something. It was a very compulsive movement and almost hypnotic. She thought it sort of charming.

It had been at a dinner party in Cambridge, held by a playwright of whom neither Tim nor Eleanor was particularly fond. She thought there was something familiar about him, but it was he who looked up at her and said shyly, "I say, it is you, isn't it? You live in that little house and all the old biddies gossip about you in town."

"They do?" she said, feigning ignorance.

"Oh yes," he said, with a sly sort of a smile. "Truth be told, I've been avoiding you for fear that if I met you I'd fall under your spell."

"And now meeting me must be a great relief."

"Certainly. I think if I were to fall under anyone's spell, I should want it to be yours, and it is rather a relief to fall under someone's. It does absolve me of the fact that I've almost certainly shocked you deeply by going on like this without introducing myself. You say, 'But you've shocked me deeply by going on like this without introducing yourself.'"

She smiled and repeated what he had said, but in a deadpan tone, for he must not think that she was impressed. But she was impressed. And when he took her hand and smiled at her and said, "I'm sorry, terribly rude of me. My name is Timothy Latimer and I am thoroughly under your spell, or I shouldn't have been quite so remiss", she blushed, and she very nearly simpered.

Tim was the only person who could make her very-nearly-simper. That was how she could tell that there was something that was not quite right about him, something that had never quite been right, as though he had been made slightly differently to everyone else. Macduff was from his mother's womb untimely ripped; and no earthly gentleman could get the better of Eleanor, so it followed that Tim must be quite extraordinary in some way.


Tim usually went into town at around half-past ten, Eleanor knew, because he needed the air. He was something of an ascetic – up at six, writing until half-past ten, the brief walk into town, lunch, and then resumed writing until six in the evening. At this point, he and Hutchinson would often go to the pub, or he might visit Eleanor. If he planned to return home (and he did not always plan to), he would go straight to bed with some ridiculous book on the use of the oblique order of attack in ancient Greece and Frederician Prussia, and when his eyes grew weary he would add it to the mounting pile of books that lay beside him.

So she and Jane went down to the house at a quarter to eleven, and found the door locked. Eleanor smiled and removed the key from its place beneath the flowerpot; she and Jane were almost clamouring now. It was not clear to them what they would do, but they knew they would do something. Perhaps they would look through Tim's letters, or Eleanor would show Jane the picture that Hutchinson had lent to his friend: a daguerreotype of a naked youth wearing ram's horns, in some cod-mythological pornographic scene. Except that Eleanor was not sure that Jane would find this as funny as she herself did (particularly when she considered that the two men might be attempting to give their own activities a Wildean frisson of danger), and rather thought she might cry at the sight of it. And part of Eleanor quite wanted to show it to her regardless of this.

But first they went straight to the mantel. "He hides it under this idiotic corn dolly, you see? And when I talk to him sometimes, I can see him looking longingly towards it. He won't credit me with having eyes."

She turned the watch over the way he did, examining the markings. She opened it, closed it. She handed it to Jane, who examined it similarly and said, "But why is it so important? It's broken."

And then the stairs creaked violently. "The wind," Eleanor said, and as if to disprove her, they did so again, but this time with the defiant thud of a footfall overlapping the creak.

"There's a cat that gets in sometimes."

"Must be a bloody great cat," whispered Jane, her eyes wide. "Perhaps Tim isn't out."

"But the door was locked."

"Let's just leave, please."

The noise had ceased. But it had not been replaced by silence. Instead there was the sound of something keeping very quiet indeed. "Hello?" Eleanor called. "Tim?" she added hopefully. "Puss cat?" she said, and tried to laugh, but Jane looked at her so solemnly that she stopped.

Then the unmistakeable sound of human feet pounding up the stairs, and Eleanor's heart was in her mouth. She ran to the door that led into the corridor.

"Eleanor!" Jane hissed frantically. "What if it's a burglar?" But she followed Eleanor anyway; she had no choice.

The upstairs landing was dark, but light streamed from the spare bedroom, the door of which was wide. Outside the window, clouds ran like pursuing dogs across the blue sky. The crows could be heard clearly, and their crying seemed to have grown more frenzied. The bed was unmade.

Eleanor crept into the room, Jane clinging to her arm. "Hello?" she said tentatively. "I warn you, you won't find anything worth stealing." The words sounded hollow.

She looked about. There was still the same uneasy feeling in the air, but the room appeared undisturbed. The air felt stale. The dust was unshaken. She bent down to look under the bed, but there was no one and nothing there – except –

"Christ," Eleanor said, pulling it out.

"What's that?" Jane asked, quavering.

"It's the uniform they used to wear, isn't it? Dear me." She had separated out the frock coat, the trousers, the dress shirt, the waistcoat, the tie. She sniffed it. "Oh, how horrible!"

"What? What's wrong?"

"Well, it isn't Tim's," Eleanor clarified, "it's far too big. And it smells – smell it."

She handed the frock coat to Jane, who sniffed tentatively, and shuddered. "It smells like a corpse," she said.

"Eleanor," Jane sobbed, "you mustn't say that."

Eleanor shushed her, and then sat on the floor gazing thoughtfully at the clothes. It was like opening an old locket to find a single curl of golden hair that crumbles when touched. Even the crows had fallen silent now. Eleanor got to her feet and took Jane's hand gently, and they descended the stairs.

"Let's leave."

"In a moment." Eleanor went through to the kitchen, where Tim's writing implements and papers were strewn across the table. She took his pen, and a scrap of paper on which he had begun to write "Although the Oisin myth is undoubtedly a myth – just as Orpheus, Urishima Taro et al are myths – after all there is no magic hawthorn tree with a door in its trunk", and wrote in bold letters:

You have a ghost. Good luck, Eleanor