When she is thirteen she notices, as a child might notice, that you can only stir the jam in your rice pudding one way: “If you stir backwards, the jam will not come together again.” Yes, says her tutor Septimus, the Newtonian, classical scientist, who at this point knows more than his pupil, time will only go one way, and “we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it for ever.” Thomasina
