During the break I see Camille chatting to someone, out in the corridor. Leaning against some pupil artwork inspired by Rio’s favelas, which looks very bright and Fauvist and late nineteenth century.
She is talking to Martin. The hopeless music teacher. Martin is wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. He has a beard and longer hair than the average male teacher. I have no idea what they are talking about, but he is making Camille laugh. I feel a strange unease. And then I walk past and Martin sees me first and smirks at me, as if I amuse him. ‘Hi, Tim. You look a bit lost. Did they give you a map?’
‘Tom,’ I say.
‘You what, mate?’
‘My name’s Tom. It isn’t Tim. It’s Tom.’
‘All right, mate. Easy mistake.’
Camille is smiling at me. ‘How was your lesson?’ she asks, her eyes on me like a detective. A smiling detective but still a detective.
‘Fine,’ I say.
‘Listen, Tom, every Thursday a few of us go to the Coach and Horses for a couple of drinks. We meet at seven. Me, Martin, Isham, Sarah . . . You should come along. Tell him, Martin.’
Martin shrugs. ‘It’s a free world. Yeah, knock yourself out.’
Of course, there is only one answer I should give. No. But I glance at Camille and find myself saying, ‘Yeah, okay. Coach and Horses, seven. Sounds good.’
I moved from place to place and from time to time like an arrow immune to gravity.
Things did improve for a little while.
My shoulder healed.
I went back to London. Hendrich set me up as a hotel pianist in London. Life was good. I drank cocktails and flirted with elegant women in beaded dresses and then went out into the night to dance to jazz with playboys and flapper girls. It was the perfect time for me, where friendships and relationships were expected to be intense and burn out in fast gin-soaked debauchery. The Roaring Twenties. That’s what they say now, isn’t it? And they did kind of roar, compared to the times before. Of course, previous London decades had been noisy – the bellowing 1630s, for instance, or the laughing 1750s – but this was different. For the first time ever, there was always a sound, somewhere in London, that wasn’t quite natural. The noise of car engines, of cinema scores, of radio broadcasts, the sound of humans overreaching themselves.
It was the age of noise, and so suddenly playing music had a new importance. It made you a master of the world. Amid the accidental cacophony of modern life to be able to play music, to make sense out of noise, could briefly make you a kind of god. A creator. An orderer. A comfort giver.
I enjoyed the role I was in, during this time. Daniel Honeywell, born in London, but who had been tinkling the ivories for upper-class tourists and émigrés on ocean liners since the Great War. Slowly, though, a melancholy set in. At the time I thought it was another episode of personal melancholy, the futility of loving a woman who had died so long ago. But I think it was also a product of being in tune with the times.
I wanted to do something. I was fed up of simply doing things to help myself. I wanted to do something for humanity. I was a human after all and my empathy was for other human beings, not just those with the curse – or the gift – of hyperlongevity. ‘Time guilt’, that’s what Agnes called it, when I chatted with her about it. She came to see me in London, towards the end of my eight years. She had been living in Montmartre. She had lots of stories. She was still fun.
‘I feel a sense of dread,’ I told her, her feet resting on my stomach, as we smoked cigarettes in bed in my Mayfair apartment. ‘I keep having nightmares.’
‘Have you been reading Mr Freud?’
‘No.’
‘Well, don’t. It will make you feel worse. Apparently we are not in control of ourselves. We are ruled by the unconscious parts of our psyche. The only truth we can hope to find about ourselves is in our dreams. He says that most people don’t want to be free. Because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’
‘I think that Freud has clearly never had to change his identity every eight years for ever.’
Then we went on what Agnes called an ‘adventure’ – a mission that Hendrich had given us via telegraph. It was one we were going to go on together. We drove in a car up to Yorkshire. In the bleak countryside at a grim gothic mental asylum called the High Royds Hospital, a woman had been locked up for telling people the truth of her condition. We kidnapped her from the grounds. Agnes held the chloroform handkerchief over the faces of three members of staff, and then had to do the same to poor Flora Brown, who was understandably frightened by the appearance of two strangers with their faces wrapped in scarves.
Anyway, we carried her out of there and escaped quite easily, and, for whatever reason – the hospital’s embarrassment? the total lack of care for their patients? the failure of the local authorities to check records? – the incident was never reported in the press. If it had been, we’d have been safe, Hendrich would have seen to that, but it wasn’t, and I have always found that terribly sad.
Anyway, Flora was young. She was only eighty years old. She looked seventeen or eighteen. She was a bewildered stuttering damaged thing when we found her, but the society saved her; it really did, the way it saved many others. She had honestly thought she was mad, and to discover her own sanity made her weep with relief. She left for Australia with Agnes and started a new life. Then she moved to America and started another one. But the point was: the society was doing good. It had saved people. Flora Brown. Reginald Fisher. And many, many more. And maybe myself, too. I realised Hendrich was right. There was a meaning and purpose to all this. I might not always have believed in him, but – most of the time – I believed in the work.
I didn’t want to go back to London. I told Hendrich by telegraph that I had arranged it with my employers Ciro’s to work in their sister restaurant, in a hotel in Paris. So, I went to live in Montmartre, in the apartment where Agnes had been living. I was her ‘brother’. There was a brief moment we overlapped. I mention this because we had a very interesting conversation. She told me that, as you get older, somewhere around the mid-millennium mark, albas develop a deep insight.
‘What kind of insight?’
‘It’s incredible. Like a third eye. The feeling for time becomes so profound that inside a single moment you can see everything. You can see the past and the future. It is as though everything stops and, for just that moment, you know how everything is going to be.’
‘And is that good? It sounds horrifying.’
‘It’s not good or horrifying. It just is. It’s just an incredibly powerful feeling, neither good or bad, where everything becomes clear.’
The conversation stayed with me, long after she left. I craved such clarity at a time when I could hardly understand my present, let alone my future.
I eventually moved to Montparnasse and wrote a lot of poetry. I once wrote a poem in the cemetery there, leaning against Baudelaire’s headstone, and I played the piano every night and made the most superficial acquaintances with poets and painters and artists that often only lasted a night.
I anchored myself in music. As well as Ciro’s, I sometimes worked at a jazz club called Les Années Folles. I had been playing the piano near-continuously for three decades now and it had become natural to me. Piano could carry a lot. Sadness, happiness, idiotic joy, regret, grief. Sometimes all at the same time.
I gained a routine. I would start my day with a Gauloise then I would head to Le Dôme Café on the Boulevard du Montparnasse and have a pastry (it was usually around midday by the time I was out of the apartment). I sometimes had a coffee. More often I had cognac. Alcohol became more than just alcohol. It felt like freedom. Drinking wine and cognac was almost a moral duty. And I drank and drank and drank, until I almost convinced myself I was happy.
But there was a sense of something tipping out of balance. The times seemed out of joint. There was too much decadence. Too much intensity. Too much change. Too much happiness juxtaposed with too much m
isery. Too much wealth next to too much poverty. The world was becoming faster and louder, and the social systems were becoming as chaotic and fragmented as jazz scores. So there was a craving, in some places, for simplicity, for order, for scapegoats and for bully-boy leaders, for nations to become like religions or cults. It happened every now and then.
It seemed, in the 1930s, that the whole course of humanity was at stake. As it very often does today. Too many people wanted to find an easy answer to complicated questions. It was a dangerous time to be human. To feel or to think or to care. So, after Paris I stopped playing the piano. And I didn’t play it again. The piano had been taking it out of me. I often wondered if I’d ever play it again. And I don’t know if I ever would have, if I hadn’t been sitting next to Camille when the opportunity arose.
London, now
‘I like the old stuff,’ Martin is saying, nodding at his own wisdom, before taking a sip of his lager. ‘Hendrix mainly, but also Dylan, The Doors, the Stones. You know, stuff before we were born. Before everything was commercialised.’
I don’t like Martin. The great thing about being in your four hundreds is that you can get the measure of someone pretty quickly. And every era is clogged with Martins, and they are all dickheads. I can remember a Martin called Richard who used to stand right near the stage at the Minerva Inn in Plymouth in the 1760s, shaking his head at every tune I played, whispering to the poor prostitute on his knee about my terrible taste in music, or shouting out the name of a Broadside ballad better than the one I was playing.
Anyway, so here we all are, seated around a table in the Coach and Horses. The table is small, a dark wood, the colour and feel of the back of a lute, and barely contains the assortment of drinks and crisps and peanuts which we huddle around. The atmosphere of the pub is quiet and civilised, although maybe that is because I now have the riotous stinking brawl-pit of the Minerva Inn in my mind.
‘Oh, me too,’ says Isham. ‘But then all geography teachers like old rock.’
Everyone eye-rolls Isham’s attempt at a joke, even Isham.
‘But also a bit of eighties hip-hop,’ Martin has to add. ‘De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest, PE, NWA, KRS-One . . .’
‘Anything modern?’ Camille asks him.
He takes a quick micro-glance at her chest, then up to her eyes. ‘Not really. No one you’d have heard of.’
‘That is possibly true. After all, I am from France. We don’t have music there. Literally none.’ Her gentle sarcasm is lost, or maybe he didn’t hear her, but I like it.
‘Okay,’ Martin says. ‘What are you into?’
‘My tastes are quite eclectic, I suppose. Beyoncé. Leonard Cohen. Johnny Cash. Bowie. Bit of Jacques Brel. But Thriller is my favourite album of all time. And “Billie Jean” is the best pop song ever written.’
‘“Billie Jean”?’ I say. ‘It’s a great song.’
Martin turns to me. ‘What about you, then? You into music?’
‘A little.’
His eyes widen, waiting for me to clarify.
‘Do you play anything, music wise?’ Camille asks me, frowning, as if there is more to the question than it seems.
I shrug. It would be easy to lie, but it falls out of me. ‘Bit of guitar, little bit of piano . . .’
‘Piano?’ Camille’s eyes widen.
Sarah, the sports teacher, in a capacious Welsh rugby shirt, points over to the corner of the room. ‘They’ve got a piano in here, you know. They let people play.’
I stare at the piano. I had been trying so hard to act like an ordinary mayfly that I hadn’t even noticed it when I’d walked in.
‘Oh yes, you can give it a tinkle,’ says the barman, a lanky twenty-something with a weak wispy beard, who is clearing our glasses away.
I begin to panic, the way anyone might panic when being offered a drug they had fought to give up. ‘No, I’m fine.’
Martin, sensing my awkwardness in front of Camille, pushes it a little further. ‘No, go on, Tom. I had a go last Thursday. Have a go.’
Camille looks at me sympathetically. ‘It isn’t compulsory. It’s not an initiation ritual. He doesn’t have to if he doesn’t want to.’
‘Well,’ I find myself saying, ‘it’s been a while.’
I don’t want her to pity me, so maybe it is for that reason that I stand up and walk over to the scratched and well-worn upright piano, passing the only other customers in the place – three grey-haired friends staring in the timeless mute sorrow of old men at their half-drunk pints of bitter.
I sit down on the stool and the room falls quiet with expectation. Well, quiet, except for a little snorted giggle from Martin.
I stare down at the keys. I haven’t played the piano since Paris. Not properly. That was the best part of a century ago. There was something about the piano, compared to the guitar. It demanded more of you. It cost too much emotion.
I have no idea what to play.
I push up my sleeves.
I close my eyes.
Nothing.
I play the first thing that comes to mind.
‘Greensleeves’.
I am in a pub in East London and playing ‘Greensleeves’ on a piano. Martin’s laughter flaps into my head but I keep going. ‘Greensleeves’ blurs into ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, which makes me pine for Marion, and so I move on to a bit of Liszt’s Liebestraum No. 3. And by the time that I reach Gershwin’s ‘The Man I Love’ Martin isn’t laughing and I am on my own inside the music. I feel exactly how I used to feel, playing in Paris at Ciro’s. I remember, in short, what the piano can do.
But then other memories rise up, and my head pounds as my mind goes into a kind of cramp of emotion.
When I eventually stop I turn to look at the group. Mouths are open. Camille leads a little round of applause. Even the three old men and bar staff join in.
Martin mumbles the word ‘Greensleeves’. Isham tells me: ‘That was epic!’ Sarah tells Martin: ‘You might be out of a job!’ Martin tells Sarah to fuck off.
I sit on my stool next to Camille.
‘When you played I really had that feeling again. Like I’d seen you playing before. It was like déjà vu or something.’
I just shrug. ‘Well, they say déjà vu is a real thing.’
‘A symptom of schizophrenia,’ says Martin.
‘But truly,’ Camille says, her hand touching the back of mine, then retreating before anyone sees. ‘That was amazing – si merveilleux.’
And I feel a brief but intense surge of desire. I haven’t truly lusted after another human being for centuries, but when I look at Camille, when I hear her kind, strong voice, when I see the delicate creases around her eyes, when I feel the skin of her hand against the skin of mine, when I look at her mouth, my mind switches to what it would be like to be with her, to lose my way with her, to whisper longings into her ear, to devour and be devoured. To wake up in the same bed and talk and laugh and be in comfortable silence with her. To give her breakfast. Toast. Blackcurrant jam. Pink grapefruit juice. Maybe some watermelon. Sliced. On a plate. She would smile, and I see it in my mind, the smile, and I would dare to feel happy with another human being.
This is what playing the piano does.
This is the danger of it.
It makes you human.
‘Tom?’ she says, breaking my reverie. ‘Would you like another drink?’
‘No thanks,’ I say, embarrassed, as though I am a book left open with every secret written on the page for all to see. ‘I think I’ve probably had enough.’
Isham gets his phone out. ‘Anyone want to see the scan?’ he asks. ‘It’s 3D.’
‘Ooh,’ says Camille, ‘me!’
Isham and his wife are expecting a baby. We lean in around the moving ultrasound image. I can remember when the concept of ultrasound was first spoke of in the 1950s. It still, even now, feels like the future. Though it is a strange kind of future that makes you see a potential human as the delicate primitive clay-like being it is. L
ike watching a half-made sculpture seeking definition.
I notice, for a second, that Camille is staring at the scar on my arm. I pull down my sleeves, self-conscious.
‘We don’t know the sex yet. Zoë wants it to be a surprise.’
He has a tear glistening in his eye.
‘I’d say it’s a boy,’ says Martin, and he points to the screen.
‘That is not a penis,’ Isham says.
Martin shrugs. ‘It’s a penis.’
I stare down at the screen, and I remember what it felt like when Rose told me she was pregnant. I wonder what Rose would have made of sonograms. And whether she’d have wanted to find out the gender. And I sit back in my chair and don’t say much after that. A guilt takes over me. The guilt of desiring someone who isn’t Rose.
So ridiculous.
And I drift away again, forgetting my headache, forgetting this is the Coach and Horses, and imagining it is the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, and that I could step outside into the night and walk back through the dark narrow streets to reach Rose and Marion and a version of me I had abandoned for centuries.
London, 1607–1616
In 1607 I was twenty-six years old.
I obviously didn’t look twenty-six but I was looking a fraction older than I had done back when I’d worked on Bankside. When I had first become aware of my difference I thought that was it, I thought my physical being was frozen in time, but then, slowly, very slowly, things happened. For instance, hair. My crotch, chest, underarms and face were growing more hairs than they had done before. My voice, which had broken when I was twelve, became deeper still. My shoulders broadened a little. My arms found it easier to carry washing water back from the well. I gained greater control over my erections. And my face, according to Rose, became more like the face of a man. I was becoming so much more like a man that Rose suggested we get married, and we did so, in a small parentless wedding, with Grace as our witness.
Grace was now married too. She had become happily betrothed to her precise opposite – a shy, God-fearing, flush-cheeked shoemaker’s apprentice called Walter – at the age of seventeen and she now lived with him in a tiny cottage in Stepney.