Chapter 18

"Wait!" Tilly put her hand up to her hair. She didn't want Johnny to be shocked. "My hair has turned white," she whispered.

"It's all right." The doctor gave her a gentle smile. "It's been white for some time. He won't be worried. Now, listen. I don't want you to be worried either. He has experienced some paralysis of the right side of his face, so his mouth is drawn down. And his speech is a little slurred. Maybe you should look at him through the window for a moment, just to get used to it before you go in."

Tilly peered through the glass. Surely the thin little old man in the bed wasn't her Johnny? She looked back at Dr Jarman for reassurance and he nodded. Just as Tilly was gathering together the courage to go in, the man in the bed spotted her and his face broke into a wide smile. Or rather, half of his face. The right side remained dragged down in a sneer.

She opened the door.

"Tilly! Darling, you've come back to me!"

The words were slurred, but she understood them perfectly and broke into a run towards the bed.

Dr Jarman turned back to Gilly, who was still waiting patiently with the tray.

"When they've settled down, take them the tea. If they take more than ten minutes, make a fresh pot."

And he headed back to his office, whistling cheerfully.

****

Dr Jarman came back to visit the Thompsons in the late morning. Tilly was sitting on Johnny's bed. They had their heads together and they were giggling like schoolchildren. He knocked on the door and waved at them through the glass as they both looked up.

"Hello, you two. You seem very happy."

They both smiled, and Johnny reached out his left hand to seize that of the doctor,

"I can't thank you enough, Doctor," he said, shaking the hand vigorously up and down. "It's like a miracle. I thought I'd lost her forever. I tried to explain what you did, but I'm not sure I understand it properly myself. Something to do with computers?"

Tilly looked a little abashed.

"I'm so sorry I was so rude to you earlier, Doctor," she said. "I really couldn't believe that what you were telling me was true. And I was so worried about Johnny."

"That's all right, Mrs Thompson -"

"Tilly," she corrected automatically.

"Tilly. I understand completely. And I know you two have a lot to catch up on. But I really would like some of your time to run some tests. Could you spare me an hour after lunch?"

"Of course." Tilly nodded her head. "It's the least I can do."

Dr Jarman grinned. He really did look impossibly young to be a fully-qualified doctor.

"We are very excited about this project," he said. "You're our third success and it looks like some of the others are showing signs of waking up as well." He was practically rubbing his hands with glee.

"I'm ready to hear about it, now. If you're prepared to tell me," Tilly said.

She could tell she had really pleased the young doctor. Face shining with enthusiasm, he launched into his tale.

"It all started when my computer crashed. I'm not very good with computers and I was devastated. There was several weeks' work on it and I was sitting looking at the blank screen when my Ph.D. student, Kim, came in. Now he is a computer whizz. And he got to work on it straight away. 'What you have to do,' he said, 'is take it back into the past. Can you remember what time it was when it crashed?' And I said, 'It must have been about half an hour ago.'

'Right,' said Kim. 'We'll take it back two hours to be on the safe side. It just means you'll lose whatever you put on after that.'

I was childishly grateful. It was like magic. I had no idea what he was doing. He just rattled away on the keyboard and various screens came up full of gibberish as far as I could see, and then, eventually, he pressed one last key and my own screen came up again, with all my documents intact. I could have kissed him."

Tilly and Johnny looked at each other and began to giggle.

"But I didn't, of course," the doctor added hurriedly. "And then he said, 'The first thing I'm going to do is show you how to do a back-up and you must do this religiously at the end of every day.' And he set the machine to back up the documents onto a disk and said, 'We can just leave it to get on with it now. Let's go and have a drink.'

And we went to the pub down the road. And it was when we were on the second pint that he said the truly amazing thing. He said, 'It's a pity we can't do that with our Alzheimer's patients.' And it was as if a light went on in my head.

I thought, 'Could we? Could we take them back in time to before the Alzheimer's? Could we persuade their minds to believe they were in the past?' And right there and then, in the pub, we devised the experiment.

"Of course, we couldn't exactly reproduce anyone's individual past, but we could do a sort of generic reproduction.

The one thing all our patients had in common was that they had lived through the war years. And it was also a period for which there is an almost infinite supply of radio recordings, newspapers and films."

He stopped. "Our idea was to reproduce, as far as we possibly could, the environment of the 1940s. We would dedicate an entire wing of the nursing home to the project, and within that wing, all the furniture, the clothes, the food, was to be as close as we could get to those in the 1940s. The patients would be subjected to a regime of film, radio broadcasts and newspapers, arranged chronologically. No member of staff could enter that wing unless they were wearing convincing period clothes."

He looked down at his double-breasted suit and grinned. Tilly resisted the urge to tell him how unconvincing the girl Gilly was.

"And we hoped that it would wake them up. That they would start thinking as they did when they were young."

He paused and looked down at his hands. "There was a terrible risk, of course. Even if the experiment succeeded, they might have lost all their memories after the war. But we discussed it with their families," he looked at Johnny and smiled, "and every one of them said that it was a risk worth taking, since they had no memory at all at the moment."

He paused.

"Do either of you know much about Alzheimer's?"

Tilly and Johnny both shook their heads.