The kitchen was empty when he returned.
The breakfast things were still on the table, two cups drained to their dregs, a plate scattered with toast crumbs, a half-empty marmalade jar with the spoon resting across the lid. The back door stood open a crack, letting in a thin ribbon of cool April air and the distant sound of next door's cat. Wherever his parents had got to, they hadn't been gone long.
Jon's eyes fell on the folded newspaper lying beside his father's empty cup. He reached over and picked it up.
The Daily Telegraph. Monday, 25th April, 1955. He stared at the date for a moment. Confirmation, as if he needed any more of it, that he was in 1955. At least he could now be sure that he'd surmised the correct date.
The front page was dominated by a headline about cabinet appointments. The new Prime Minister — he read the name twice — Clarissa Eden, had announced her senior appointments to government. He scanned the names. The Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Foreign Secretary. The Home Secretary. The Chief Whip. He read them again, more slowly this time. Every single one of them was a woman's name.
He thought about that for a moment. In his world, he'd done a history project on The Marshall Plan and European post-WW2 recovery. He did vaguely remember that in 1955, Churchill had handed over to someone called Eden, but he was pretty sure that his reality's Eden had been a man. He supposed, in this world, that would be Clarissa Eden. And her cabinet was full of women.
His eyes drifted to the lower half of the page. A photograph, formal and posed: a row of seven women standing in bright sunshine outside what looked like a civic building, all of them with short dark hair and smartly dressed in the angular, tailored style of the decade. The caption read: Prime Ministers of Indonesia, Burma, India, Ceylon and Pakistan photographed at the conclusion of the Bandung Conference. He studied their faces for a moment. Of course. The heads of government of half of Asia, gathered in one frame.
All women too. It looked like the reversal of gender roles in this world went beyond his household.
He was still turning that over in his mind when his mother came back in through the back door, wiping her hands on a cloth.
"Jon, what are you doing?" She plucked the newspaper from his hands in a single brisk motion and folded it onto the sideboard. "Why are you wasting the time reading the paper, I've already taken out the men's supplement anyway. You can read it later. Right now you've got a train to catch." She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece over the range. "The eight-fifteen from Lewisham Station. Don't miss it."
"I know, Mum."
"And when you come out at Charing Cross, you turn right onto the Strand." She held up a hand, as though she expected an interruption. "Then left onto Exeter Street. The office will be on your left. It's not far." She gave him a look that communicated, without quite saying so, that she felt this level of instruction was probably still insufficient. "Try not to get lost."
"Thank you, Mum," Jon said.
His father appeared in the doorway behind her, dressed for the day in a neatly pressed skirt and blouse, hair combed smooth. He stopped when he saw Jon and his face broke into a warm, open smile.
"Well," he said, looking him over. "Now that's more like it." He came across the kitchen and put both hands briefly on Jon's shoulders, regarding him with undisguised pride. "Quite the improvement on the head you were carrying half an hour ago." He leaned in and pressed a kiss to Jon's cheek. "Good luck, love. You'll be wonderful."
Then, with a gentle but decisive hand at his back, he steered Jon out of the kitchen and down the narrow hallway towards the front door.
Jon stopped.
The hallway was only small, but the row of shoes along its skirting board somehow made it feel narrower. There were perhaps a dozen pairs: sturdy brogues and oxfords in brown and black, a pair of heavy work boots caked in dried mud, and then, at the far end, a cluster of lighter, lower styles that looked, even to Jon's uninformed eye, rather more like what he'd seen in the wardrobe upstairs. He eyed them uncertainly.
In his own world, he and his father had always been the same shoe size, which had been the source of occasional helpful borrowing and occasional rows. He had no idea what size this father's shoes were, or which ones were his own, and he'd rather not find out by putting on the wrong pair.
He took a breath.
Same as before. He let his thoughts settle, the way they had at the dressing table. He stopped looking at the shoes as a problem to be solved and simply stood in front of them and waited.
His feet moved.
They stepped, with quiet certainty, to a pair of neat black pumps with a modest heel — perhaps an inch, perhaps a little less. His feet slipped into them as though into something completely familiar, the fit immediate and sure. He stood up straight. The heel felt odd for a fraction of a second, then didn't.
I can walk in these, he thought, with considerable relief. I think I can actually walk in these.
Before he'd fully registered what his hands were doing, they had already reached for the hook beside the door. A coat: powder blue, soft wool, the kind of structured, fitted cut that pulled in at the waist and then fell in a long, smooth skirt well below his knees. He didn't know what you called a cut like that, only that his arms knew how to put it on, the buttons running from just below the collar to the hip fastening themselves almost without effort. The coat settled on his shoulders with a quiet, solid weight.
Then his hands went to the shelf above the hooks.
A small hat, the same powder blue as the coat, with a low brim and a simple felt bow at one side. He watched in the little mirror beside the door as his fingers placed it, tilted it, slightly, deliberately, onto the styled hair and pushed a pin through it with a deftness that felt like someone else's memory entirely. But it held. He could tell by the faint, satisfied settling-feeling in his fingertips that it was right.
Then the handbag. Leather, structured, dark coloured. His hand closed on the handle without looking and he recognised, in the same peripheral instinctive way, that it was the correct thing to pick up: it matched the shoes. He did not know how he knew. He simply did.
He straightened up and looked at his reflection.
Whoever Jon was in this world, he was dressed and ready and looked like someone who had done this without thinking about it for years. The coat, the hat, the bag. All of it where it was supposed to be.
His father appeared at the kitchen doorway and made a small, wordless sound of approval. Then he crossed the hall quickly and wrapped his arms around Jon in a firm hug, squeezing once, tightly, before letting go.
"Off you go then," he said softly. "And don't let them intimidate you."
Jon turned to the front door, closed his fingers around the handle, and opened it.
The street outside was grey and cool and lined with identical brick terraces stretching away in both directions, the chimneys beginning their morning work against a pale April sky. A woman with short cropped hair and a dark overcoat wearing a bowler hat walked briskly past on the pavement without looking up.
Jon stepped out and was momentarily not sure what direction to go.
"The station is that way."
He turned and saw his father, waving him off from the front door, pointing down the street to the right.
"Thanks dad!" he said, setting off.
Behind him he just about heard his father say affectionately "That boy could get lost in a paper bag. Head in the clouds!" as the front door swung shut.
