I haven’t been to this specific place since the day I jumped onto the stage from the musicians’ gallery. The day I landed on Will Kemp’s back and saw Manning again. It had been the day of another confession, of course, to Rose. And now I can feel the faint echo of that day, amid the polite middle-class theatre chatter and clinking of cutlery around me.
The famous image of Shakespeare stares up at me from the front of the menu. I used to think it looked nothing like him – the image being all forehead and bad hair and wispy beard and lobotomised expression – but now the eyes seem to be his eyes. Watching me, wryly, as I continue through life. As if it amuses him, watching the man he helped to escape that day carry on in an interminable endless living tragicomedy.
The waiter is here now and Camille is smiling up at him.
She is wearing a midnight blue shirt. She looks pale, a little tired, but also beautiful.
‘I would like the skate wing,’ she tells the waiter, pushing her glasses a little further up her nose.
‘Very good,’ says the waiter, who turns to me.
‘I’ll have the gnocchi in kale pesto.’
He takes the menus, and their portraits of my former boss, and I turn back to look at Camille and try to relax.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘About being a bit odd sometimes, at school.’
Camille shakes her head. ‘You really have to stop saying that. Incessant apologising is never an attractive trait.’
‘You’re right. The thing is, I really am quite bad, you know, with people.’
‘Ah, them. People. Yes, it’s hard.’
‘And I have a lot, sometimes, going on in my head.’
‘Join the club.’
‘There’s a club?’
‘No. There are too many people in clubs. But it’s fine. Be how you want to be.’
‘I haven’t been a very public person. I have had to be careful.’ I am sure, looking at her, that I have never known her. In this life of familiar patterns and people she has the wonderfully rare feature of not reminding me of anyone. But I have to ask. ‘We never met, did we? I mean, before I saw you that day in the park. I saw you once, from Daphne’s window, but we have never met before, have we?’
‘It depends what you mean by met. But, no, in the conventional sense, no.’
‘Okay.’
‘Yeah.’
There is a kind of stand-off. We both have more questions but we are carrying them in holsters waiting for the other one to fire away. A single sentence could render either of us insane.
We nibble on rye bread and harpoon olives with cocktail sticks.
‘How are you feeling?’ I ask. The tamest enquiry, but a sincere one.
She rips some bread apart and stares at it for a moment, as if a secret is there, contained like every element in the universe, inside the leavened dough.
‘Much better,’ she says. ‘I’ve had epilepsy for a long time. Used to be a lot worse.’
A long time.
‘So you’ve had lots of seizures before?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
The waiter tops up our wine. I take a sip. Then another.
Camille looks at me with forceful eyes. ‘Now you. You promised. I need to know your story.’
‘I want to tell you about myself,’ I tell her, still unsure of how much truth I will eventually reveal. ‘But there are some things that it is better for you – for anyone – not to know.’
‘Criminal things?’ I feel like she is teasing me.
‘No. I mean, well, there are a few of those as well. No. I am just saying if you knew about me there would be a very strong chance you would think I was insane.’
‘Philip K. Dick wrote that it is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane.’
‘The sci-fi writer?’
‘Yes. I’m a geek. I like science fiction.’
‘That’s good,’ I say.
‘You like it too?’
No. I am it, I think to myself.
‘Some. Frankenstein. Flowers for Algernon.’
‘I want you to tell me about yourself,’ she says. ‘Tell me, at least, what you were going to tell me. Let me know if I am mad.’
It is tempting, right then, to put an end to it by saying you are mad. But instead I say, ‘Before I tell you about me, you have to tell me about you.’ I sound firmer than I had intended.
Wide eyes. ‘Do I?’
I inhale deeply. This is the moment. ‘I need to know how you recognised me. I need to know why you mentioned Ciro’s. Ciro’s closed eighty years ago.’
‘I am not that old.’
‘Exactly. I didn’t think so.’
A song comes on in the background. She tilts her head. ‘Ah, I love this. Listen.’
I listen. A warm, sentimental melody I recognise. It’s ‘Coming Around Again’ by Carly Simon.
‘My mother used to love Carly Simon.’
‘And Michael Jackson?’
‘That was just me.’
She smiles, and there is a moment of awkwardness when she realises it is her turn to explain herself. And in that moment I imagine being with her. Like I had in the pub. I imagine kissing her. I have an urge to run away and to get Hendrich to book me a plane and to disappear somewhere else, somewhere I will never see her again. But it is too late.
She is ready.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘Je vais m’expliquer.’
And she does.
She tells me she started having seizures when she was seven. Her parents safe-proofed the house. Soft carpets. Table corners blunted by glued-on napkins. Finding the right medication had taken a while. And she slowly became agoraphobic. ‘I was scared of life, basically.’
When she was nineteen she’d become engaged to a handsome, funny web designer called Erik – ‘with a K’, his mother was Swedish. This was the Erik I’d seen online. Facebook Erik. He had died in 2011 while rock climbing.
‘I was there. Not climbing, obviously. Rock climbing and seizures don’t go that well. But I was there. I was with some of our friends. There was a lot of blood. I didn’t see anything for months when I closed my eyes except blood. And now he was dead I thought, well . . . fuck it.’
She takes a few breaths. To talk about memories is to live them a little.
‘I was always worrying I could die at any minute. And I wanted to be like him, healthy, but then – bam – he turned out to be mortal too. And it was too much. I had to get out of there. I had to get out, so I went travelling. I knew I couldn’t live as a prisoner to my condition any more. Do you understand?’
Of course I did. ‘So what happened after that? How did things turn around?’
‘I travelled around South America for six months. Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Columbia. Chile. I loved Chile. It was amazing. But then, eventually, my money ran out, and so I went back to France and I couldn’t go back to Grenoble – just the memories, you know – so I went to Paris. I went around all the nice restaurants and hotels and I got a job at the Plaza Athénée. One of the snooty grand hotels. There was something calming about that work. You would be speaking to people all the time, all day, checking in, checking out, but there was never anything deep and meaningful to it, you know? There were never any questions about life stuff, so it suited me perfectly.’
This is it. I sense it. Anxiety tightens my chest as she continues.
‘And anyway, they had these photos, this exhibition in the lobby, of Golden Age Paris, all from the twenties. And lots were of jazz clubs, and of the boulevards, and Montmartre, and they had one of what’s her name . . . the jazz singer, the dancer, with the cheetah . . .’
‘Josephine Baker?’
As I say the name I remember watching her through a mist of cigarette smoke dancing the Charleston at the Century Club in Paris.
She nods quickly, makes a rolling motion with her hands, as if she is nearing her conclusion. I try to steel myself.
‘Yes. Josephine Baker. Anyway, the one I was facing, the one I loo
ked at, day in, day out, was the largest one: of the pianist at a restaurant. The restaurant was called Ciro’s. It had the name Ciro’s in the photograph. And the photo was black and white but very good quality for the time, and the man looked so lost in the music he was playing, as he looked forward over the piano, ignoring all the people in the restaurant who were looking at him, and I became fascinated by this moment, this frozen moment . . . Because it seemed like there was something timeless about it. Something beyond time. And also, the man was handsome. He had nice hands. And a seriously brooding face. And he had this pristine white shirt on, but with his sleeves rolled up, devil may care, and there was this scar on his arm. This curved scar. And I thought it was okay to have a crush on this man because he was dead. Only he wasn’t dead, was he? Because he was you.’
I hesitate. Suddenly I have no idea what to do. I remember her staring at the scar on my arm in the pub and now I know why. It all makes sense.
It is ridiculous, given that I have brought her here to tell her the truth, but I am now scared of doing so. My instinct is to lie. I am, after all, quite a good liar. Smooth and natural. I should just laugh and look disappointed, and say it is a bit of a shame, because I thought for a minute that she had really recognised me, and that now I know she is joking. Photographs could lie. Especially photographs from the 1920s.
But I don’t do that. I suppose part of it is because I really don’t want her to be embarrassed. Another part of me, I think, wants her to know the truth. Needs her to.
‘So,’ she says, into my silence.
She then makes a kind of gesture that is hard to capture. She sticks her chin out a little and does a slight nod and closes her eyes and pulls her hair back behind an ear. It is a gesture of mild defiance. I don’t know what she is defying. Life? Reality? Epilepsy? It is over in two seconds but I think this is the moment in which I have to admit to myself that I am in love for the first time in four centuries.
It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.
‘So,’ I say, tentatively, testing how much she believes versus what she thinks she believes. ‘You not only like science fiction, you think I could be science fiction. You think I could be a time traveller or something.’
She shrugs. ‘Or something. I don’t know. I don’t know. I mean, any truth that people aren’t ready to believe sounds like science fiction. The earth going around the sun. Electromagnetism. Evolution. X-rays. Aeroplanes. DNA. Stem cells. Climate change. Water on Mars. It is all science fiction until we see it happen.’
I have that urge to get out of here, out of the restaurant. It is almost as strong as the urge to want to talk to her for all eternity. But not quite.
I clench my eyes closed, as if pressing forge-hot iron against my skin.
‘You can tell me. You can tell me the truth.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I know it was you in that picture.’
‘It was staged. The picture was staged. It wasn’t from the twenties.’
‘You’re lying. Don’t lie to me.’
I stand up. ‘I’ve got to go.’
‘No, you don’t. Please. Please. I like you. You can’t run away from everything.’
‘You’re wrong. You can. You can run and run and run. You can run your entire life. You can run and change and keep running.’
People stop chewing to look at me. I am making a scene. Again, here in Southwark. I sit back down in my chair.
‘I have the photo,’ she says. ‘I have it on my phone. A photo of a photo. But it’s good quality. I know that sounds weird. But if you don’t tell me, I will have this question in my head for ever and I will try and find other ways to answer it.’
‘That would be very unwise.’
‘Sounds exactly like me. I believe that every truth should be known. Do you see? Because I’ve lived with epilepsy and it’s a mystery. They know so fucking little about it. There is a truth and it isn’t known. We should know all the truths. Especially these days. And you promised. You promised if I came here you would tell me. If you don’t tell me I’ll keep asking questions.’
‘And if I tell you the truth and say you must not say a thing – even a hint of a thing – to anyone? What then?’
‘Then I will say nothing.’
I look at her face. You can tell only so much from a face. But I trust her. I have been trained, especially for the past century or so, not to trust anyone except Hendrich, and yet I trust her. Maybe it is the wine. Or maybe I am developing aptitude.
For a terrible, bewildering moment I know her completely. I know her as if I had spent whole lifetimes with her.
‘Yes, it was me. It was me.’
She stares at me for a while, as if at something slowly emerging from a mist. As if she hadn’t really been so sure before, as if she had wanted to be told it was all an elaborate illusion. I enjoy this look. I enjoy her knowing.
I will worry, later, about what I have just said. The truth that has passed between us. But right now, it is nothing but a release.
Our food arrives.
I watch the waiter disappear into the noise of the restaurant.
And then I look at her and I tell her everything.
Two hours later, we are walking by the Thames.
‘I am scared to believe this. I knew it was you. I knew it. But there is knowing something and knowing something. I feel like I may be mad.’
‘You’re not mad.’
There is a young man, near where the Cardinal’s Hat used to be, hopping about on a BMX to the delight of a crowd.
I look at Camille and see her intense seriousness juxtaposed with the happy tourists around us and I feel guilty, as if I haven’t just told her a secret, but infected her with my own emotional weight.
I had told her about Marion. And now I was taking the polythene bag holding her penny out into the light.
‘I remember the day she was given it. I remember times with her more than I remember things that happened a year ago.’
‘And you think she is still alive?’
‘I don’t know. It’s hard enough being a man and living for four hundred years. And no one ever thinks we’re witches or worries why we don’t have children. But I have always sensed it. She was a clever girl. She could read. She could quote Montaigne when she was nine. My worry is her mind. She was always a very sensitive child. Quiet. She would pick up on things. Get upset easily. She’d brood on things. Be lost in her own world. Have nightmares.’
‘Poor girl,’ said Camille, but I can see she is a bit dazed from all the information.
The one thing I haven’t told her about is the Albatross Society. I sense that even to talk about it is to endanger her somehow. So when she asks me if I know of any others like me, apart from Marion, I don’t mention Agnes or Hendrich. But I do tell her about Omai, my old friend from Tahiti.
‘I haven’t seen him since he left London. He went on Cook’s third voyage. Cook wanted him as translator. I never saw him again. But he didn’t come back to England.’
‘Captain Cook?’
‘Yes.’
She grapples enough with this that I don’t throw her with my stories about Shakespeare and Fitzgerald. Not just yet.
We talk some more.
She asks to see the scar again. She traces it with her finger, as if to make all this more real. I look out at the river, where Dr Hutchinson had been found, once upon a time, and I realise I need to tell her something.
‘Listen,’ I tell her, ‘you can’t tell anyone about this. I probably shouldn’t have told you. It’s just that you were asking lots of questions. You thought you knew me. And that thinking, that curiosity, was possibly more dangerous than knowing. So now you know, you’ll have to keep quiet about it.’
‘Dangerous? This isn’t the
age of witches. Surely you could go public about this. Get DNA tests. Proof. It might be able to help people. Help, you know, science. Fighting illnesses. You said your immune system is—’
‘There is a history of bad things happening to people who know. Doctors who were about to publish evidence, and so on. They have had a habit of disappearing.’
‘Disappearing? Who made them disappear?’
The truth comes with its own lies. ‘I don’t know. It’s a shadowy kind of world.’
We talk some more, and keep walking. We walk over the Millennium Bridge and head east through the City. We are, informally, walking home. Our conversation is carrying us there.
It is an hour’s walk, but the weather is mild and neither of us fancy the underground. We walk past St Paul’s Cathedral, and I tell her how it used to be busier than it is today, and how the churchyard used to be the centre of the London book trade. Then we walk down a street called Ironmonger Lane and she asks me about it and I say that I used to walk down this same Ironmonger Lane on my way to Southwark, and that it used to live up to its name, with the whole road noisy and hot from the moulding of metal.
She lives further east than me. When I suggest that I should probably take Abraham for a walk and that she is welcome to come too, she accepts the invite.
We sit together on the bench where I first saw her. An empty carrier bag floats far over our heads like a cartoon ghost.
‘What are the main differences, over time?’
‘Everything you see. Everything you see is different. Nothing stays the same.’ I point to the creature darting up a tree. ‘That would have been a red squirrel once, not a grey one. And there wouldn’t have been carrier bags floating about. The sound of traffic was more clip-clopping. People looked at pocket watches, not phones. And smells, that’s the other thing. It doesn’t smell as much. Everywhere stank. Raw sewage and all the waste from the factories was pumped into the Thames.’
‘Lovely.’
‘It used to be severe. There was the Great Stink. It was eighteen fifty-something, around then. A hot summer. The whole city reeked.’
‘It’s still pretty stinky, though.’