A God Facing Both Ways: synopsis

In 1906, a stranger seeks out prostitute-cum-dancer Nola Larmour and claims to know her future. He pays generously but refuses sex. When her lover beats her so badly she cannot work, the stranger pawns a ring to provide for her. Then he disappears. In the heyday of HG Wells, Nola never suspects she's met a time traveller.

But then the traveller didn't expect to become one. In 2004 Quentin Marsh-Rowland is single, living with his mother in Chelsea. While his sisters find ways to fulfil themselves and middle class convention, his attempts fail. By his thirtieth birthday he is out of ideas. For a temporal rift to be discovered by chance in his derelict glasshouse seems a godsend, though how it might help he isn't sure.

But he fancies if he met Nola, 'that bloody Irish tart' who scandalised the Marsh-Rowlands in 1908 by marrying his great-grandfather, it might shed light on present dilemmas. Why his father left to live with a cleaner, for example, or why Quentin can't muster ambition beyond his job as an archivist. Why life with mother hovers between affection and emotional blackmail, or why his most satisfying relationship was with a library assistant from Putney, unimpressively named Lucy Frecker. He'd rather not visit the library, but time travel needs research. Quentin lurks in corners, behind bookcases, but Lucy distracts. He comes to study and ends up recalling how they met, how they ended. A man named Dr. Grundig comes too; he seems to get an inordinate amount of Lucy's attention. As Quentin edges toward a confrontation Lucy pre-empts him. Her ultimatum: until he leaves his mother and reconciles with his father, they have nothing to discuss.

He would argue, except the time slip seems to agree. Suddenly it insists on taking him back to 1984, the year he found an unfamiliar lipstick in his father's car. Forced to reconsider his own history, Quentin sees how he filled the gap, tried to be 'man of the house' after the split. Inadvertently he protected his mother from facing up to her part in it. He could confide this to any number of people; the person he wants to tell most is Nola. He takes a chance, and leaves a letter addressed to her in the glasshouse.

Then things get hectic with meeting his father's second family and moving into his own flat. It's in the same block as Lucy's, but ulterior motives aside Quentin has to rein in his hopes, and accept that their future is unknown. Unlike Nola, no time traveller has come back to tell him whom he will marry.

Except his great-grandmother cannot know if the prediction he made for her was true. Her situation is much like Quentin's: she must choose between a secure but burdensome ménage-a-trois with magician Marcel Triomphe and his sister, or bank on the infatuation of Captain Charles Marsh-Rowland, who might love and leave her. She takes a leap of faith.

Fifty years on she has no regrets, in spite the fact that several relatives by marriage shun her. As she writes in her reply to Quentin's letter, pain is a constant one must accept, but certain relationships make it bearable. When finished, she seals it along with the ring he pawned for her. Quentin will retrieve her message from the glasshouse assuming it was the one he left.

Read the first three chapters

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3