In Bed With Lord Byron

put on the exact clothes I’d been wearing that day – my jeans and a white cashmere
rollneck. This had meant removing the rollneck from the washing basket, which was a tad smelly, but never mind.
    Throughout the night, worries had been flickering through my mind, and now they resurfaced. Could it really be that easy? What if I went back and unravelled everything? What if I found that I
had lost the wisdom of hindsight, that I was just as naïve and foolish? I jumped out of the machine, ran to my bookcase and pulled down T. S. Eliot, flipping frantically to the
Four
Quartets.
    Time present and time past
    Are both perhaps present in time future,
    And time future contained in time past.
    ‘There, you see,’ I told a bemused Lyra. ‘There will be a thread of wisdom still with me. Anthony and I will go to the restaurant and I’ll sit there and think of dumping
him, but some big, deep instinct in my tummy will tell me I mustn’t. And so I won’t.’
    Right. I settled myself back in the machine and put my finger on the green button. Here goes . . .
    My doorbell suddenly shrilled and I jumped violently.
    Ignore it, I told myself. It won’t be important. Come on, just press—
    The bell rang again, more urgently. And then I remembered: I had promised Sally I’d babysit Adam. For the entire day. I swallowed. I looked at the date; I looked at the door. I found
myself getting up.
    ‘LUCY!’ Sally was extremely red-faced. I looked down to see that my white doorbell was now brown; clearly Adam had had Marmite for breakfast. ‘What the hell are you playing
at?’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I just – are you OK?’
    ‘I am, actually,’ she said, much to my surprise.
    ‘So you’re getting back together with Richard?’ I cried.
    ‘God, no, I just feel better having had a whole week to myself without him!’ She laughed with an odd mixture of bitterness and freedom. Then she looked down and saw her son’s
face and gave him a tight hug, ruffling his hair. ‘You’ll be all right with Auntie Lucy for the day, won’t you, darling? Mummy won’t be long.’ She passed me a bag
filled with videos and toys and then started reeling off a list of instructions, even though I’d babysat a thousand times before.
    After she’d gone, I offered to put on
Postman Pat,
which was normally his favourite.
    ‘Boring, boring, boring.’ He seemed a bit despondent. I chewed my lip.
    ‘How about a drink?’ I asked, waiting for his usual demand for Coke.
    Instead, he replied with a sarcasm that shocked me: ‘Can I have nice healthy good-for-my-teeth orange juice?’
    I laughed faintly; he looked sullen.
    ‘Hey,’ he said, suddenly brightening, ‘what’s that in the corner? That looks cool.’
    Oh God. Now he would think the time machine was some sort of elaborate playpen.
    ‘That is . . . a death machine,’ I improvised. ‘If you so much as touch it, you get an electric shock. And if you get into it, it will eat you, I’m afraid, so I think
you’d better stick to
Postman Pat
.’ I worried I had gone too far, but Adam just widened his eyes and said, ‘Wow.’
    I nudged him firmly away from the machine and in front of
Postman Pat.
As I went into the kitchen to get him some juice, I looked back at him gazing at the TV with a slack, innocent face
and felt a wave of affection. It was funny – normally I loathed babysitting, and had only agreed to it in the past because I felt I ought to. After all, I was his aunt. But I’d always
found him utterly exhausting. Just one hour of his hyperactive cheekiness and I felt ready to collapse into bed for a week from exhaustion. At the end of the day I’d always passed him back
eagerly, secretly thinking: How on earth do parents survive?
    But today I felt different. My experiences with Tiryns’ baby and my love for Anthony had changed something inside me. I could see beyond Adam’s playfulness. I could see the seed of
adult potential in him, the man he might become. I could see how much his parents’ troubles were hurting him and how he was trying to make sense of it all on his own. Maybe, I thought, I
ought to have a word with Sally. Only she’d probably feel I was patronising her. Maybe there was nothing I could do but give him a little bit of love . . .
    And what about the time machine?
    That would have to wait until later.
    I suddenly became aware of a thrumming noise. I put down the cup with a thump, orange juice spilling over the surface. I heard Adam