Chapter 10: Final Mission

July 1968, age 13

The summer was enjoyable, unremarkable and frustrating. Enjoyable because Caity and I got to spend lots of time with friends: firstly Harry and Ester, then each being allowed to take a friend with us to our new villa in Italy. I took Peter, and I would never again want to go abroad on holiday without taking a friend along. I love my family, but it was so much better having another boy my age there. The summer was unremarkable with nothing really out of the ordinary happening (which I considered to be a good thing), and frustrating because I didn’t have anyone to practice French kissing with!

When school began again in September, there was an undefinable excitement to our year group, like we knew this was going to be a big year for us. It was our last year in ‘lower school’, as we would soon make our option choices to pick which subjects we’d study at O-Level. It was also the year when most of us began to seriously regret being at an all-boys school, as puberty had struck and we were increasingly enamoured with the opposite sex. In my case, that meant Ellie King, but frustratingly I only got to see her at occasional birthday parties and gatherings. Cold showers ahead!

So it was a year of change, with exciting times ahead. For me, that excitement included Air Cadets one evening a week, which I took to with relish. It would be quite some time before I actually got in the air, but I was enthusiastic in the games and challenges we did, and diligent in studying the handbook.

In October, I (almost) got to meet the (future) most powerful man in the world. His name was William Jefferson Clinton.

Grandpa had asked one afternoon if I’d like to have a day off school to go with him to Oxford. I mistakenly assumed that he had a business meeting, but no, he wanted to take me to a rugby match. Now rugby was a sport that I really didn’t like. Football was bad enough, but rugby was just glorified violence. There were plenty of boys who did like the rough and tumble — I wasn’t one of them. Call me stupid, but I just didn’t like getting beaten up. Part of it might have been that it was the one time of the week that I didn’t have a bodyguard to protect me, and one of the less pleasant boys in my year had taken advantage of that fact repeatedly. Anyway, suffering a 90-minute drive to see a match didn’t appeal to me, even if it meant a day off school.

Then Grandpa told me that one of the players was the future President of the United States, as Bill Clinton was currently studying at Oxford University. I did some research on him and found out what an important and controversial figure he would become. I had to admit that seeing him in 1968, aged 22, would be interesting. The Vietnam war had been going on for a while, which I was pretty much oblivious to other than occasional TV news reports. Studying in England was a convenient excuse for Clinton to avoid being drafted into the military, and the books said he would soon organise a protest rally in Oxford. It would be an interesting point in his life to get an impression of him.

When the day came, it was a complete anti-climax. He was just a big, ordinary looking guy who enjoyed throwing his weight around.

On the business front, things seemed to be ticking along nicely. The various research teams I’d proposed had been set up, working in temporary accommodation. Grandpa had bought the land in Cambridge and hired the young architect Norman Foster to design our new research campus. Foster had designed the flying saucer for Apple in future history, so we were interested to see what he would come up with now with a similar brief. Grandpa had also bought a massive former chalk quarry east of London, near the Dartford tunnel, that would become our new theme park (if we ever got planning permission). And in California, Intel had been founded with a loan of a couple of million from Grandpa to get them started, thanks to the link with Arthur Rock. So all was going well.

The most significant event of 1968 came in the middle of November. We were having lunch at home one Saturday when the phone rang. Mrs O’Keef answered and called Grandpa, telling him it was Harry. Phone calls from Harry were rare, so red flags were immediately waving.

I followed Grandpa as he went to the telephone in his study, then tried to piece his conversation together from the bits I heard. I quickly worked out that it was about Harry’s mum. Harry and I had only ever talked briefly about his mum and why he’d ended up in care. I knew he had never known his dad and that his maternal grandparents were in a nursing home. More importantly, I knew that his mum was in prison, though I didn’t know why. In any case, it seemed she had been given parole and was now out.

At first, I thought that to be good news, as she might be Harry’s ticket out of the orphanage. But then what if she didn’t let him visit us anymore? The tone of the conversation didn’t sound good either, with Grandpa mentioning a solicitor. Eventually, he handed the phone to me, and Harry and I spoke briefly. He didn’t sound all that excited about his mum but assured me he was okay.

After I’d hung up, Grandpa was silent. I waited for a few seconds and then said: “This is it, isn’t it? The last part of your mission.”

He nodded, gravely.

“Will you tell me what’s going on? Please?”

He nodded again and said: “Sit yourself down. You need to understand, Finn, that there are some people in the world who lack willpower. You know what I mean by that? Like, giving up on things too quickly or giving in to pressure from other people. Harry’s mum, Ms Redpath, she’s like that. When she left school, she discovered to her great disappointment that the world wasn’t just going to give her what she wanted in life. She certainly wasn’t prepared to achieve those things herself through the old fashioned idea of hard work, so instead she took short cuts to cheat her way through life. When you’re a pretty young woman, that sometimes means getting things through men, sort of in exchange for what the men want. D’you get what I mean?”

“Sex?”, I asked.

“Yes. Not like being a prostitute, but sometimes men and women in a relationship can each take advantage of the other. From what I gathered back in the day, Harry’s mum had a nice thing going with a well-off man that gave her the comfortable life she wanted. Then she got pregnant with Harry. The guy chucked her out, and after Harry was born the council had to give her a flat to live in, and welfare money to live on. Over the years she never did get a proper job, but she had plenty of boyfriends. The last one was a nasty piece of work who got her involved with drugs and was awful to Harry. When Harry was eight, Ms Redpath was driving a car one night while she was drugged up to the eyeballs. She crashed, and someone got killed. That’s how she ended up in prison.”

I nodded in solemn understanding. Death by car crash was very personal for me. My perception of Harry’s mum was not generous.

“Harry’s worried that living back with his mum will mean another stream of boyfriends, drugs and alcohol. He’s right to be worried. Fate’s plan is that his mum will get back together with her last boyfriend. That’s what happened in my lifetime when I was still living in the orphanage. Harry was taken out to live with his mum, but we still went to the same school together. Then one day he just didn’t turn up. I found out a few days later that he was dead. His mum’s boyfriend had smacked him so hard that he fell, hit his head and died from bleeding in his brain.”

Needless to say, that shocked the hell out of me.

“Don’t worry. There’s no way I’ll let that happen this time. I’ve had years to prepare for this.”

I felt conflicted. On one hand, I obviously didn’t want to lose Harry. On the other, I still had residual anger that Grandpa had picked doing this over saving my parents.

“Why couldn’t you save all of them?”, I asked. “Harry and Mum and Dad?”

There was silence for what felt like an age.

“If I had saved our parents, you would never have met Harry”, Grandpa told me. “I might still have been able to save him. Might. But it’s more complicated than that. I told you before that I came back in time to make your life better than it was destined to be. You know now that I also came back to do the same for Harry. The two of you are linked by fate and each defined in part by the other. I had my reasons for choosing to do things the way I have, and I stand by them. If you want to hate me for the choice I made, then that’s okay, just don’t make the mistake of directing your anger towards the wrong person.

I had nightmares that night. Nightmares of Harry lying unconscious on the ground with blood oozing from his head. Nightmares of my parents in the mangled wreck of their car.

The next day Grandpa left for Sheffield, leaving Caity and me behind because of school. He didn’t reappear for a few days, but when he did he had a lady with him. One look at her and I knew she could only be Harry’s mum, as they were really alike. When Grandpa introduced us, I was civil, but couldn’t bring myself to be friendly.

“The plan is that Ms Redpath will move into one of the lodges, and will work as a secretary at Marvel”, Grandpa told me. The lodges were the six houses on the driveway of our private little estate. Dan lived in one of them, Mrs O’Keef in another, one was our security nerve centre, and the rest were guest quarters or used for overnights by the security guys. For a second I wasn’t best pleased that she’d be living so close, then I realised that Harry could end up living just down the drive! Brilliant!!

“We’re going to wait until the new year before she petitions for custody, that way she’ll be able to show that she has an established home and employment. The solicitor thinks we stand a good chance of getting Harry out of the system.”

I knew we would. After all, she’d managed it in Grandpa’s lifetime, and this time around she also had a job and house thanks to us. And vitally, she was well away from that boyfriend back in Yorkshire, which would protect Harry and keep him close enough for us to unofficially adopt him. Awesome!