“Mycroft,” I said in a respectful whisper, “I don’t want to keep you from your wife, but time is short. I know why you came back.”

“You mean it wasn’t Farquitt or the chairs?”

“No. It was about the recipe for unscrambled eggs.”

“We need to know,” added Polly, “where you left it.”

“Is that all?” laughed Mycroft. “Why, goodness—I put in my jacket pocket!”

He was beginning to fade, and his voice sounded hollow and empty. His post-life time was almost up.

“And after that?”

He faded some more. I was worried that if I blinked, he’d go completely.

“Which jacket, my darling?” asked Polly.

“The one you gave me for Christmas,” came an ethereal whisper, “the blue one…with the large checks.”

“Crofty?”

But he had vanished. Friday and I rushed to support Polly, who had gone a bit wobbly at the knees.

“Damn!” said Friday. “When does he next come back?”

“He doesn’t,” I said. “That was it.”

“Then we’re no closer to knowing where it is,” said Friday. “I’ve been through all his clothes—there isn’t one with blue checks in his closet.”

“There’s a reason for that,” said Polly, her eyes glistening with tears. “He left it on the Hesperus. I scolded him at the time, but now I see why he did it.”

“Mum? Does this make any sense to you?”

“Yes,” I said with a smile. “It’s somewhere the ChronoGuard can’t get to it. Back in 1985, before he used the Prose Portal to send Polly into ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ he tested it on himself. The jacket is right where he left it—in the teeth of an Atlantic gale inside Henry Longfellow’s poem ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’”

“Inside the BookWorld?”

“Right,” I replied, “and nothing—repeat, nothing—would compel me to return there. In two days the ChronoGuard will be gone, and the slow repair of the Now can begin. You did good, Sweetpea.”

“Thanks, Mum,” he said, “but please—don’t call me Sweetpea.”

Spending the Surplus

The Commonsense Party’s first major policy reversal of perceived current wisdom was with the scrapping of performance targets, league standings and the attempt to make subtle human problems into figures on a graph that could be solved quickly and easily through “initiatives.” Arguing that important bodies such as the Health Service should have the emphasis on care and not on administration, the Commonsense Party forced through legislation that essentially argued, “If it takes us ten years to get into the shit, it will take us twenty years to get out—and that journey starts now.”