Marion had held her head high and arguably made things worse by telling the man that ‘a monster who meets a miracle would see a monster’. Which wasn’t quite Montaigne, but was certainly influenced by him. But shortly after the man had gone Marion cried her eyes out and she remained mute for the rest of the day.
Rose was almost sick with fear, her voice trembling, as she told me of the incident that evening, after Marion had woken from a nightmare and fallen back asleep.
‘Why can’t these maggots leave us alone? I’m so worried for her. For all of us.’
She had a tear in her eye, even as her face hardened. She had made a decision. It was a terrifying one.
‘We must go back to London.’
‘But we fled from there.’
‘It was a mistake. We will go. All of us . . . all of us . . . all of us.’ She kept saying those words, as if she was scared of the words that would come after, though they eventually came.
The tears streamed now. I held her and she held me back and I kissed the top of her head.
‘You and Marion will be for ever in danger so long as I am with you.’
‘There must be a way—’
‘There is no way.’
Rose smoothed her skirt and stared down at it. She closed her eyes and wiped them and inhaled courage. A cart rattled by on the road outside. She looked at me and didn’t say anything but the silence was its own message.
‘You aren’t safe with us, Tom.’
She didn’t say the other half of this. That they weren’t safe with me, but I knew she knew that too, and the knowledge was near enough to kill me. To be the danger I wanted to protect them from.
I said nothing. What could I say? I knew Rose could survive without me. I knew, in fact, it was more likely without me.
She was now able to look at me in the face. ‘It is not for myself. I am not scared for myself. I will not be truly alive without you. I will be a ghost that breathes.’
And that was it. That was the moment all hope disappeared.
Marion knew I was going away. It hurt her. I could see it in her eyes. But, as she tended to do with things that troubled her, she kept it inside.
‘You will be safe, my angel. People won’t ask questions any more. No one will mark your door. No one will spit at your mother. Nothing terrible will happen. I have to go away.’
‘Will you return?’ she asked, almost formally, as if I was already at a distance from her. ‘Will you come and live with us?’
The truth would have broken both our hearts, and so I didn’t offer it. I did what you sometimes have to do as a parent. I told a lie. ‘Yes, I will return.’
She frowned darkly, and then she disappeared into her room. A moment later she returned, clutching something in her fist.
‘Open your hand.’
I opened it and a penny dropped onto my palm.
‘My lucky coin,’ she explained. ‘You must keep it with you always, and, wherever you are, you must think of me.’
We decided to leave for London, unseen, at night. Coach travel from Canterbury to London was available to anyone with money, and we managed to find a coachman with good horses who could take us there for a little less than two shillings.
And later that night, Marion, the only child I have ever had, fell asleep on my shoulder in the coach. My arm was around her. Rose stared at me, her eyes glistening with tears in the dark, as I clutched the coin Marion had given me.
It was so hard, in the years after that. I thought of all the days we’d had together as a family, all jammed close like plums in a basket. I wish I could have taken those days and spread them out for ever. One afternoon with them a month for the rest of my life. I could cope if it was just one day a year, so long as there was a time with Rose and Marion in front of me. But the trouble with life was that it had to be lived consecutively.
I fell into a nocturnal existence.
My lute and fresh face were a big hit in inns, particularly the Mermaid Tavern where fresh faces were an exotic rarity. I began to lose myself in the pleasures of alcohol and whorehouses. The city was becoming more and more crowded, and yet it just made me feel lonelier and lonelier. All those people who stubbornly were not Rose and were not Marion. I knew they lived in Shoreditch, or at least that Shoreditch had been their plan, so I sometimes went there but could never see them.
Then, one day, in one of the plague years – 1623 – I saw someone I vaguely recognised walking by the river. A woman in her thirties, holding a sleeping baby boy in her arms. (Walking by the river was a popular pastime whenever the plague struck, as the river air was seen as plague-free, bizarrely, given all the corpses that ended up there.) It took me a moment to realise it was Grace, though of course it took her no time at all to recognise me.
She looked sad and lost; the fierce life force of the girl I had once known seemed now blunted.
She stared at me for a while. ‘You still look the same, and look at me, an old woman!’
‘You are not an old woman, Grace.’ And she wasn’t. Not in age. Not in skin. Yet, still, the sadness and weight in her voice made me feel like it was a lie. And then I heard a reason for this.
‘How is she?’ I asked, voicing a question I’d had inside my head, through every single moment I had been without her.
‘Rose has it,’ she told me.
‘Has what?’
Grace didn’t have to say. I knew from her face. I felt a horrible coldness sink into me, clearing everything away.
‘She wants me nowhere near her for fear I catch it too. She will only speak to me from behind her door.’
‘I need to see her.’
‘She will not let you.’
‘Has she spoken of me?’
‘She misses you. It was all she was saying. That she should have never sent you away. That everything bad that happened has happened because she sent you away. She has never stopped thinking of you. She has never stopped loving you, Tom . . .’
I felt the prick of tears behind my eyes. I stared at her sleeping son. ‘Where does she live now? Where is Marion? I would love to know about Marion.’
Grace looked a little sheepish, clearly not knowing if she should say. She only answered my first question.
‘Rose doesn’t want—’
‘I won’t catch it. I can’t. I would have caught it by now. I never catch anything.’
Grace thought, gently rocking her baby in the cool afternoon air. ‘All right, I will tell you . . .’
London, now
It is parents’ evening. I am sitting behind a table, having just taken my third ibuprofen of the hour, lost in a flashback. Thinking of that last conversation with Rose. That last time I saw her. No. Not thinking of it, actually living it, again, as I sit here in a hall with parents, all with smartphones in their pockets or hands. I am hearing her whisper, from when she lay in a bed less than five hundred metres from this hall.
There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy . . .
She had been talking of a hallucination, but the more those words echoed, the more it seemed like a statement on life.
‘It’s all right, Rose,’ I whisper to myself, like a madman, right there in the twenty-first century. ‘It’s all right . . .’
And then the other echo.
The one that reverberated day and night.
She was like you. You must try to find her. You must try to look after her . . .
‘I’m sorry, Rose. I’m sorry . . .’
Another voice breaks through. A voice from right now. A voice from across the table.
‘Are you all right, Mr Hazard?’
It is Anton Campbell’s mother, Claire. She is staring at me, confused.
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. I was just . . . I’m sorry, I was just thinking of something . . . Anyway, you were about to tell me something. Please, go ahead.’
‘I want to thank you,’ she says.
‘Thank me?’
‘I have never seen Ant
on more engaged with his schoolwork than he is with history. He’s even been getting books out from the library. All kinds of things. It’s so good to see. He says you really make it come alive.’
It is tempting, of course, to tell her that her son’s friend had threatened to stab me, but I don’t. I actually feel a bit proud.
I can’t really remember feeling pride. I hadn’t felt like this since I helped Marion to read Montaigne and play ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ on the pipe. Hendrich always said I should be proud of the work I do for the society, but I had only felt good on occasion, such as when I’d gone up to Yorkshire to help rescue Flora. Generally, though, the work for the society had been a bit tense, and at worst soul-destroying. This, though, is different. This feels good in a solid, sustainable kind of way.
‘I’d been so worried about him . . . You know, he was drifting a little. A boy. Fourteen. He was very lost in himself. Hanging out with the wrong crowd. Getting in a little late . . .’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Wouldn’t talk to me much . . . But now he’s really getting back on track. So thank you. Thank you.’
‘Well, he’s a very bright young man. His essays on the Second World War and the British Empire’s role in the slave trade were really good. He’s on track for As.’
‘He wants to go to university. And do history. Which, you know, these days . . . it’s going to be expensive. But I want him to go. Which is why I am working every hour God sends. And God sends some crazy hours. But he’s determined. He wants to go.’
I feel a swell of pride. This. This right here is why I wanted to become a teacher. To know that it is possible to change the world for the better, in however small a way.
‘That is a brilliant . . .’ I look over at one of the tables across the sports hall. Camille is between parents. I notice her take off her glasses and rub her eyes. She doesn’t look very well. She is staring down at the papers on her little table, trying to focus.
I bring my mind back to Mrs Campbell. Or try to. My mind is haunting me with images: Rose’s dead face, Marion with her book, a house being devoured by flames.
When the city had burned, in 1666, I took part in the firefighting efforts and contemplated walking suicidally into one of the burning shops that, before the blaze, lined either side of London Bridge.
‘Yes,’ I say, trying to reassure Mrs Campbell that I am listening. ‘Yes, I bet.’
Then, suddenly, and with no warning, Camille falls off her chair. Her ribs hit the side of the table on her way down to the floor. Then her legs start to spasm violently. She is having some kind of fit, right there on the floor of the sports hall in the middle of parents’ evening.
I had been conditioned, even before I had knowledge of the Albatross Society, not to get involved in the heat of the moment. To float through life with a cool detachment. But that doesn’t seem to work any more. Maybe that youngest version of my adult self was returning. The one which had jumped off a theatre gallery to protect Rose and her sister.
Before I know it I am there, right over her, as Daphne comes running. Camille’s whole body is jerking now.
‘Pull the table back!’ I tell Daphne.
She does so. Then she asks another member of staff to call an ambulance.
I hold Camille steady.
There is a crowd. Only this is a twenty-first century crowd, so everyone’s macabre fascination is tempered with at least the semblance of concern.
She stops convulsing, and comes around, her confusion delaying her embarrassment. For a minute or so, she says nothing, just concentrates on my face.
Daphne brings some water. ‘Let’s all give her some room,’ she says to the parents and staff. ‘Come on, guys and gals, let’s all step back a little . . .’
‘It’s okay,’ I tell Camille. ‘You just had a seizure.’
Just. That sounds terrible.
‘Where . . . where . . . I . . .?’
She looks around a little. She gets up, on her elbows, then sits up fully. She is weak. Something has been taken from her. Along with Daphne I help settle her back in her seat.
‘Where am I?’
‘The sports hall.’ Daphne’s smile is reassuring. ‘You’re at work. At the school. It’s all right, lovely, it’s just a . . . You’ve had some kind of a seizure . . .’
‘School,’ she says sleepily, to herself.
‘An ambulance is coming.’ This is one of the parents, putting their iPhone away.
‘I’m okay,’ she says. She doesn’t seem in the slightest bit self-conscious. Just tired and confused.
She stares up at me, frowning, not understanding who I am, or maybe understanding too much.
‘You’re okay,’ I tell her.
Her eyes are fixed on me. ‘I do know you.’
I smile at her, then, with more awkwardness, at Daphne. And I gently tell her, ‘Of course you do. We work together.’ I then, perhaps foolishly, underline my point for the crowd. ‘The new history teacher.’
She is leaning back. She sips the water. She shakes her head.
‘Ciro’s.’
The name hits my heart like a hammer. Hendrich’s words, that day years ago in a hurricane-ravaged Central Park, come back to me. The past is never gone. It just hides.
‘I—’
‘You played piano. When I saw you the other day, at the pub . . . I . . .’
Two thoughts: I am dreaming. It is possible. I have dreamed of Camille before.
Or: maybe she is old too. Old, old, old. As in, ancient. An alba. Maybe somehow the photos I have seen on Facebook of her younger self have been photoshopped. Maybe this is what I had felt for her. Maybe this was the connection. Maybe I just have a sense of our exotic sameness. Or maybe she knows some other way.
The one thing I am sure of is that I have to stop her talking. If she carries on she not only risks exposing me, but herself. I feel for her. There is no point denying that any more. The lie I had told myself for so long – that I could exist without caring for anyone new – was just that. A lie. I have no idea why Camille was the one to make me realise this, but I can no longer deny I care for her. And, in caring for her, I feel an overwhelming need to protect her. After all, Hendrich has had people permanently silenced for less than a mutter in a school hall. If she knows about albas, and is talking about it in public, she is automatically risking more than my identity. She’s risking her life.
‘Just relax. We’ll . . . nous allons parler plus tard . . . I’ll explain everything. But quiet, now. I can’t tell you here. Please understand.’
She looks sleepy with the effort of sitting up. She stares at me, the confusion clearing. ‘Okay. I understand.’
I lift the cup of water and help her take a sip. She smiles at Daphne and the other concerned faces. ‘I’m sorry . . . I have a seizure every few months. It’s my epilepsy. They make me tired for a while. I’ll be fine. The tablets were meant to stop the seizures. So I probably need some new ones . . .’
She stares at me. Her eyelids seem heavy. She looks vulnerable and invincible all at once.
‘You okay?’ I ask her.
She gives a small nod, but looks almost as scared as I am.
Paris, 1929
It was around seven in the evening. Beside the vast empty dance floor, men in dinner jackets and women in low-necked tassel-fringed shift dresses and bobbed hair were drinking apéritifs and listening to the music I was playing.
Jazz was what Ciro’s was known for. But, by 1929, the sophisticated clientele didn’t just want jazz-jazz-jazz, because jazz was everywhere. So I sometimes mixed it up a little. Sometimes, if people were on the dance floor, I’d drop in an Argentine tango or some gypsy flavours, but early evening you could get away with playing anything soft and thoughtful, so I was playing some Fauré, from his melancholic period, and feeling every note.
‘Prétendez que je ne suis pas ici,’ the photographer had told me as I was playing.
‘Non,’ I whispered, remembering Hendrich’s no-
photographs rule. ‘Pas de photos! Pas de—’
But it was too late. I had been so lost in the music he had been taking photos of me without my realising.
‘Merde,’ I whispered to myself, switching to Gershwin to try to better my mood.
London, now
We are in a smart gastropub in the new Globe Theatre.
I feel nervous. The reason isn’t the location. It is Camille herself. The mystery is terrifying. How does she know about Ciro’s? How could she? I am scared of all the answers I have thought of, and the unknown ones I haven’t. I am scared for her. I am scared for me. I am twitching and looking around like an ominous bird on a windowsill. But there is also another reason I am scared. I am scared because up until now I have been surviving.
I mean, I haven’t actively wanted to kill myself for a long time. The last time, precisely, was in a bunker near Tarragona in the Spanish Civil War when I placed a pistol in my mouth and prepared to blow my head off. Only by forcing myself to stare and stare at Marion’s lucky penny had I managed to keep my brains on the inside of my skull. But that was 1937. That was a long time of not actively trying to die.
I have recently thought I wanted out from Hendrich but maybe, actually, this was a mistake. Yes, I am ‘owned’ by Hendrich but there is a comfort in that. Free will might be overrated.
‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’
I had ached from the death of Rose for centuries, and that pain had faded into the neutral monotony of existing, and moving on before I had time to gather any emotional moss. I’d been able to enjoy music and food and poetry and red wine and the aesthetic pleasures of the world and that, I now realised, was perfectly fine.
Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.
I try to tell myself I am just meeting her for what she is going to tell me, and that I don’t have to tell her anything in return. But it is strange being here. Especially as it is here.