‘Not even comparable. You used to live in stink. People never used to wash. People used to think baths were bad for them.’
She sniffs her armpit. ‘So I’d have been just about okay, then?’
I lean in and smell her. ‘Far too clean. People would have been very suspicious. You are almost twentieth-century clean.’
She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.
The sky begins to darken slightly.
‘So, you really had a crush on me?’
She laughs again. ‘You really sound immature, for a four-hundred-year-old.’
‘Ahem, four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old.’
‘Sorry, a four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old.’
‘Asking that question made you sound five.’
‘I feel five. Normally I feel my age but right now I feel five.’
‘Yes, if that is what you want to hear . . .’
‘I want to hear the truth.’
She sighs. Fake dramatic. Does that thing where she looks to the sky. I watch her in profile, mesmerised. ‘Yes, I had a crush on you.’
I sigh too. Mine is also a bit fake dramatic. ‘The past tense has never sounded so sad.’
‘Okay. Okay. Have. Have. I have a crush on you.’
‘Me too. On you, I mean. I find you fascinating.’
I am being totally sincere, but she laughs. ‘Fascinating? I’m sorry.’
Her laugher fades. I want to kiss her. I don’t know how to make that happen. I have been single for four centuries and have absolutely no idea of the etiquette. But I feel light, happy. Actually, I would be fine with this. This ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ moment. With a kiss forever a possibility. With her looking at me and me looking at her.
I realise I would like to solve the mystery of her just as much as she wants to solve the mystery of me and she nestles a little into me and I put my arm around her. Right there. On the park bench. Maybe that is what it takes to love someone. Finding a happy mystery you would like to unravel for ever.
We sit in silence for a while, like a couple, watching Abraham gallop around with a Springer spaniel. And I am enjoying the happy weight of her head on my shoulder, for two minutes or so. Then two things happen in quick succession. I feel a sudden pang of guilt, thinking of Rose. Of her head resting on my chest as we lay on her narrow bed in Hackney. Of course, Camille wouldn’t know this is what I am thinking, except that my body might have tensed a little.
And then my phone rings. ‘I’ll ignore it.’
Which I do. But then it rings again and this time she says, ‘You’d better see who it is,’ and I look at my phone and I see a single letter on the screen. H. I realise I have to get it. I have to do exactly what I would do if I wasn’t with Camille. So I answer it. And the moment, that brief moment of happiness, floats away like a bag on the wind.
I stand up from the bench, with the phone to my ear.
‘Is this a bad time?’, Hendrich asks.
‘No. No, Hendrich. It’s fine.’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m walking the dog.’
‘Are you on your own?’
‘Yes. I’m on my own. Except for Abraham.’ I say this, I hope, quietly enough for Camille not to hear, and loud enough for Hendrich not to become suspicious. I think I fail on both counts.
A pause.
‘Good, well, listen . . . we have found someone.’
‘Marion?’
‘Alas, no. We have found your friend.’
I am confused by the word ‘friend’. I look at Camille, now frowning at me, still on the bench.
‘Who?’
‘Your man.’
I sincerely have no idea what he is talking about. ‘What man?’
‘Your Polynesian. Omai. He’s alive. And he’s being a fool.’
‘Omai?’
Even without Camille nearby, this news wouldn’t make me happy. Not because I am not interested in my old friend, but because I sense there can be nothing good from Hendrich finding him. It is very unlikely he wants to be found. The happiness of just one minute ago seems totally out of reach.
‘Where is he?’ I ask. ‘What’s the story?’
‘There is a surfer in Australia who looks just like a three-hundred-year-old portrait by Joshua Reynolds. He calls himself Sol Davis. He’s becoming a little bit too known in the surfing community. This good-looking thirtysomething going on three hundred and fifty. And people are talking about how he doesn’t age. People are talking about that. It’s in the online comments, for fuck’s sake. Someone saying, “Oh, that’s the immortal guy who lives near me who’s looked the same since the nineties.” He’s dangerous. People are getting suspicious. And apparently that’s not all. Agnes’ source in Berlin says they know about him. The institute. He could be in real trouble.’
The wind picks up. Camille rubs her shoulders, to mime to me she is cold. I nod and mouth the words, ‘I’m coming.’ But at the same time I know I must look like I am not hurrying Hendrich.
‘This is—’
‘You have a holiday coming up? A half-term?’
This is sounding ominous. ‘Yes.’
‘I can get you on a flight to Sydney. Straight through. Just a two-hour stop in Dubai. Some airport shopping. Then, Australia. Week in the sun.’
Week in the sun. He’d said the same before Sri Lanka.
‘I thought you said that was it,’ I say. ‘I thought you said I could have this life for the full eight years. No interruptions.’
‘You are sounding like a man with an anchor. You’ve no anchor.’
‘No. Not an anchor. A dog, though. I have a dog. Abraham. He’s an old dog. He won’t last the eight years. But I can’t just leave him.’
‘You can just leave him. They have dog sitters nowadays.’
‘He’s a very sensitive dog. He gets nightmares and separation anxiety.’
‘You sound like you’ve been drinking.’
I knew I couldn’t endanger Camille.
‘I had some wine earlier. Enjoying life’s pleasures. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? Isn’t that what you told me?’
‘On your own?’
‘On my own.’
Camille is standing up now. She is holding the lead. What is she doing? But it is too late. She is already doing it.
‘Come on, boy!’
No.
‘Abraham!’
The dog runs over to her.
Hendrich’s tone becomes steel. ‘Is that your anchor?’
‘What?’
‘The woman who called for Abraham. That’s your dog’s name, right?’
Hendrich has a thousand symptoms of old age. I curse that one of them isn’t hearing loss.
Camille clips on Abraham’s lead, then looks at me again. She is ready to go.
‘Woman?’
Now Camille is listening to me.
‘Who is it?’
‘No one,’ I say. ‘She is no one at all.’
The mouth I had just been dreaming of kissing is now agape with disbelief.
‘She?’ she whispers, but it is one of those whispers that is more a voiceless scream.
I don’t mean it, I mime.
‘It’s just someone I see in the park. Our dogs know each other.’
Camille is furious.
Hendrich sighs. I have no idea if he believes me or not, but he returns to his main subject. ‘If it isn’t you, there will still be someone seeing your old friend. A stranger. I have been recruiting quite heavily recently. This is what gives me faith I will find Marion. The point is: I have lots I could send, but they might not be able to persuade him, and then . . .’ His voice trails off. ‘So it is up to you. It is completely up to you.’
The myth of choice. Classic Hendrich. Either I go and talk to Omai, or Omai dies. That is essentially what he is saying. If it isn’t someone from Berlin who gets to him, it will be someone else. And, even more horribly, I know he is
right. Hendrich may be a manipulator, but he very often has the truth on his side.
Camille has handed me the lead and now she is walking out of the park.
‘I’ll phone you later. I need to think about it.’
‘You have an hour.’
‘An hour. Fine.’
Once off the phone, I call to Camille. ‘Camille, wait. Where are you going?’
‘Home.’
‘Camille?’
‘Who was on the phone?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘Just as you couldn’t tell her who I was.’
‘It wasn’t a her.’
‘I can’t do this, Tom.’
‘Camille, please.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Camille?’
‘I pour my heart out to you and get close to you and imagine there is something between us for you to deny we know each other. Jesus fucking Christ. I could have ended up sleeping with you! That’s probably what you do. Manipulate people. I’m probably just like another dog for you to train.’
‘Abraham isn’t trained. Camille, please, wait—’
‘Fils de pute!’
She walks out of the park. I could follow her. Every atom of me wants to follow her. I could talk to her and explain about Hendrich. I could quite possibly make everything all right. But I stay standing there, on the grass, under a purple sky, with the day dying around me. I calculate that pissing her off is better than endangering her. It is a total conundrum. The only way to protect her is to have as little to do with her as possible.
I know I have already done too much damage. Hendrich has heard her voice. He could have detected a French accent.
Shit. This is what happens when you drink wine. And when you try to get close to someone. You get trapped. But it is the same trap I’ve been in since 1891. As always, it is Hendrich’s trap. I feel literally immobilised. I will never have a life. And now I have upset the first new person I have really cared about in what feels like eternity. Shit. Shit. Shit.
‘Shit.’ I tell it to Abraham too.
Abraham looks up, panting his confusion.
For centuries I have thought all my despair is grief. But people get over grief. They get over even the most serious grief in a matter of years. If not get over then at least live beside. And the way they do this is by investing in other people, through friendship, through family, through teaching, through love. I have been approaching this realisation for some time now.
But it is all a farce. I am not going to be able to make a difference to anyone else. I should stop being a teacher now. I should stop all attempts at conversation. I should have nothing to do with anyone. I should live in total isolation. I should go back to Iceland, doing nothing except the tasks Hendrich asks of me.
It doesn’t seem possible for me to exist and not cause pain – my own, or other people’s.
Abraham whimpers a little beside me, as if feeling my pain. ‘It’s all right, boy. Let’s go home.’
I put some biscuits out for Abraham and drink some vodka and sing Carly Simon’s ‘Coming Around Again’, repeating the title of the song until I think I’m going insane.
Seeing there is ten minutes before I must call Hendrich I click on YouTube and type in ‘Sol Davis’. I find footage of waves and a man in a wetsuit on a board, carving his way across the water.
It cuts to this same man coming out of the water and walking over the sand, addressing the camera, with a smile but also a frown, and he shakes his head.
‘Hey, man, don’t do anything with that,’ he says. He has an Australian accent and his head is shaven and he looks, in normal terms, nearly twenty years older but there is no doubt about it: it is Omai. I freeze the frame. His eyes stare straight at me, his forehead beaded with saltwater.
I pick up the phone, cradle it in my hand, go into ‘Recents’ and press my thumb on ‘H’.
Hendrich answers.
‘All right, Hendrich. I’ll do it.’
PART FIVE
The Return
Plymouth, England, 1768
The story of how I met Omai began on a rainy Tuesday in March on the cobbles of Plymouth harbour. I was hungover. I was always hungover in Plymouth. Well, either hungover or drunk. It was a wet place. Rain, sea, ale. It felt like everyone was slowly drowning.
When I found Captain Samuel Wallis, I recognised him from the portrait I had seen hanging in the Guildhall. He was wearing his fine royal blue coat and walking along the jetty, deep in conversation with another man.
I had arrived in Plymouth only a month before. At this time my hope seemed to ebb ever further out to sea. I had stopped believing in ever finding my daughter and instead I found myself trying to solve the riddle that plagued me: what is the point of living when you have no one to live for? I still had no answer to that. I think, looking back, I was suffering from a kind of depression.
I ran over to him, to Wallis, and stood in front of his path, walking backwards as he walked forwards.
‘I heard you were a man short,’ I said. ‘For the voyage. On the Dolphin.’
The men carried on walking. Captain Wallis looked at me. He was, like so many of the men made large by history, rather mediocre in the flesh, the fine tailoring highlighting rather than hiding his physical shortcomings. Short, pudgy, purple-cheeked. A man made more for grand dinners than seafaring. And yet he was only two years away from having an island named after him. In the meantime, his small green eyes viewed me with disdain.
‘Who are you?’ he asked, in a deep snorting kind of voice.
‘John Frears.’ It was the first time I had ever said that name.
Captain Wallis’ companion lightly touched his arm. A quiet gesture but one which did its purpose. This man seemed very different to Mr Wallis. Sharp-eyed but with a kind mouth, his lips curling at their edges with interest. He was wearing a coal-black coat despite the weather. This was Tobias Furneaux, a man I would get to know quite well over the years. Both men now stopped still amid the busy harbour, near crates of speckled grey freshly killed fish, shining in the June sunlight. ‘And why should we have you on our vessel?’
‘I have skills, good sirs, that might be wanting elsewhere.’
‘Like what?’ asked Mr Furneaux.
I dug deep into my bag and took out my black wooden three-holed galoubet and put it to my lips. I began to play a few notes of a folk tune, ‘The Bay of Biscay’.
‘You play the pipe well,’ said Mr Furneaux, suppressing a smile.
‘I can also play the mandolin.’ I didn’t mention the lute, obviously. It would have been like, these days, saying you could use a fax machine in a job interview. It simply wasn’t something people did any more.
Mr Furneaux was impressed, and said something along those lines.
‘Hmm,’ said Mr Wallis, humming a more doubtful tune and turning to his companion. ‘We are not arranging a concert, Mr Furneaux.’
Mr Furneaux inhaled the damp air sharply. ‘If I may be so bold, Mr Wallis, I would like to proffer that musical ability is an invaluable skill on long voyages such as ours.’
‘I have other skills too, sir,’ I said, addressing Mr Wallis.
He gave me a quizzical look.
‘I can hook a sail and oil the masts and repair the rigging. I can read both words and maps. I can load a gun with powder, and fire it with reasonable aim. I can speak in the French tongue, sir. And the Dutch, though with less proficiency. I am sound on a night watch. I could go on, sir.’
Mr Furneaux was suppressing a laugh by now. Captain Wallis looked no happier than he had a minute before. In fact, he looked like he seriously didn’t like me now. He began walking away, his velvet coat flapping in the breeze like the sail of a retreating ship.
‘We sail early. Six of the clock, tomorrow morning. We’ll see you harbourside.’
‘Aye, sir, six of the clock. I’ll be there. Thank you. Thank you very much.’
London, now
I am teaching more social his
tory to the class of year nines when Camille walks past the window, like a tormenting dream.
‘In Elizabethan England, no one carried bank notes in their pocket. It was all coins until the establishment of the Bank of England . . .’
I raise my hand instinctively, but Camille doesn’t respond, even though she sees me. Anton watches as my hand falls.
It stays that way the whole week. I am invisible to Camille. Her eyes never meet mine in the staff room. She never says hello when we pass each other outside. I have hurt her. I know that. So I make no attempt to make it worse by talking to her. My plan is simply to see the week out, go to Australia, and then ask to go somewhere far away from here.
Once, though, crossing diagonal paths across the school hall, seeing her looking sad, I can’t help but say, ‘Camille, I’m sorry . . . I’m sorry.’ And she gives a nod so small it might not have been there at all, and carries on walking.
That evening, as Abraham tries to shake off a Maltese terrier a quarter of his size, I stare over at the empty bench and remember putting my arm around Camille. The bench exudes a sadness, almost as if it remembers too.
The following Saturday is the start of the half-term break. I am due to fly to Australia and drop Abraham off at the dog sitter’s the following day but right now I am in the supermarket. I am chucking a travel-size tube of toothpaste in my basket when I notice Daphne, bright-bloused and wide-eyed, behind her trolley.
I don’t want her to know I am going away, so I hide the toothpaste and a bottle of sun tan lotion under a copy of New Scientist.
‘Hey, Mr Hazard!’ she says, laughing.
‘Mrs Bello, hi!’
Unfortunately, we get talking. She says she has just seen Camille on her way to Columbia Road flower market.
Daphne’s eyes dance a little mischievously. ‘If I wasn’t your boss – which I am – if I was just your next-door neighbour – which I am not – I would say that, well, Madame Guerin has, for some crazy reason, a bit of a thing for a certain new history teacher.’
I feel the unnatural brightness of the supermarket.
‘But obviously I wouldn’t say that, because I am a headteacher and headteachers shouldn’t say that sort of thing. It would be totally unprofessional to encourage inter-staff romances. It’s just . . . she’s been very quiet this last week. Have you noticed?’