I force a smile. ‘Fake news, I’m afraid.’
‘I just thought that maybe you’re the person to cheer her up.’
‘I think I may be the last person for that job.’
There is an awkward silence. Well, it is awkward for me. I don’t think Daphne does awkward. I notice a bottle of rum lying in her trolley, next to a bag of pasta.
‘Having a party?’ I ask, trying to initiate a new topic.
She sighs. ‘I wish. No, no, the bottle of Bacardi is for my mum.’
‘She isn’t going to share it?’
‘Ha! No. Bless her. She’s quite a hog with her rum. She’s in an old folk’s home in Surbiton – her choice, she likes the company – and she always gets me to sneak in a bottle of the good stuff. She’s a bit naughty, my mum. I always feel like a bootlegger or something, like in America during Prohibition, you know . . .’
I remember playing ragtime tunes on the piano in Arizona, a bottle of moonshine on the dusty floor beside me.
‘She’s had a bit of kidney trouble and has had a stroke so she should be off the booze completely, but she always says she’s here for a good time not a long time, though she has been here for a long time, because she’s eighty-seven and she’s a right tough old bird. Ha!’
‘She sounds great.’ I try my hardest to engage in the conversation, but my painful, overactive hippocampus is now making me think of Camille at school. How pale she’d been looking. How she had deliberately placed herself at the opposite end of the staff room to me.
But then Daphne says something that snaps me out of my despair.
‘Yeah, she’s a good chick, my mum. Mind you, she’s with a right motley crew in the home. There’s one woman there who reckons she’s so old she was born in the reign of William the Conqueror! She should be in a psychiatric ward, really.’
I stop in my tracks. My first thought is Marion. This is irrational. If Marion was alive she wouldn’t look like an old person. She’d look younger than me. And she was born in the reign of King James, not William the Conqueror.
‘Poor Mary Peters. Mad as a box of frogs. Gets scared of the TV. But a lovely old dear.’
Mary Peters.
I shake my head at Daphne, even as I remember the gossip that surrounded the disappearance of the Mary Peters we knew in Hackney. The one who Rose knew at the market. Who used to get Hell-turded by Old Mrs Adams and had arrived ‘from nowhere’.
‘Oh. Oh really? Poor woman.’
When Daphne has gone I leave my trolley in the aisle and walk with brisk determination out of the supermarket. I get out my phone and start looking up train times to Surbiton.
The care home is set back from the road. There are trees crowding out the whole front of the place. I stand outside on the pavement and wonder what I should do. There is a postman on the other side of the road, but other than that – no one. I inhale. Life has a strange rhythm. It takes a while to fully be aware of this. Decades. Centuries, even. It’s not a simple rhythm. But the rhythm is there. The tempo shifts and fluctuates; there are structures within structures, patterns within patterns. It’s baffling. Like when you first hear John Coltrane on the saxophone. But if you stick with it, the elements of familiarity become clear. The current rhythm is speeding up. I am approaching a crescendo. Everything is happening all at once. That is one of the patterns: when nothing is happening, nothing continues to happen, but after a while the lull becomes too much and the drums need to kick in. Something has to happen. Often that need comes from yourself. You make a phone call. You say, ‘I can’t do this life any more, I need to change.’ And one thing happens that you are in control of. And then another happens which you have no say over. Newton’s third law of motion. Actions create reactions. When things start to happen, other things start to happen. But sometimes it seems there is no explanation as to why the things are happening – why all the buses are coming along at once – why life’s moments of luck and pain arrive in clusters. All we can do is observe the pattern, the rhythm, and then live it.
I take a deep breath, inhale the air.
Ash Grange Residential Care Home. The logo is a falling leaf. A generic leaf. The sign is pastel-yellow and blue. It is one of the most depressing things I have ever seen. The building itself is nearly as bad. Probably only twenty years old. Light orange brick and tinted windows and a muted quality. The whole place feels like a polite euphemism for death.
I go inside.
‘Hello,’ I say to the woman in the office after she has slid the Perspex window open for me to speak. ‘I’m here to see Mary Peters.’
She looks at me and smiles in that brisk efficient way. A modern professional smile. The kind of smile that never existed before, say, the telephone.
‘Oh yes, you called a short while ago, didn’t you?’
‘Yes. That was me. Tom Hazard. I knew her when she was younger, in Hackney.’
She stares at her computer screen and clicks the mouse. ‘Oh yes. She wants to see you. Through there.’
‘Oh good,’ I say, and as I walk over the carpet tiles I almost feel like I am walking backwards through time.
Mary Peters looks at me with eyes made pink and weak by time. Her grey hair is as frail as dandelion seeds and the veins under her skin like routes on a secret map, but she is recognisably the woman I met in Hackney, four centuries ago.
‘I remember you,’ she says. ‘The day you came into the market. The fight you had with that slimy bastard.’
‘Mr Willow,’ I say, remembering him disappear in a cloud of spice.
‘Yes.’
There is a rattle to her breath. A kind of scraping sound on every in-breath. She winces a little, and her crooked fingers faintly caress her brow.
‘I get headaches. It’s what happens.’
‘I’m starting to get them too.’
‘They come and go. Mine have come back recently.’
I marvel at her. How she can still care enough to speak. She must have been an old woman for two hundred years now.
‘I don’t have long,’ she says, as if reading my thoughts. ‘That is why I came here. There is no risk for me.’
‘No risk?’
‘I only have about two years left.’
‘You don’t know that. You could have another fifty.’
She shakes her head. ‘I hope not.’
‘How are you feeling?’
She smiles as if I have told a joke.
‘Near the end. See, I’ve had a variety of ailments. When the doctor told me I only had a matter of weeks I realised I . . . I only have two more years. Three at the most. So I knew it was safe, you know, to come here. Safer . . .’
It doesn’t make sense. If she is still bothered about safety, then why did she talk openly to people here about her age?
There are other people in the room. Mainly sitting in chairs, lost in crosswords or memories.
‘You were Rose’s love. She spoke of nothing else but you. I had a flower stand next to where she and her little sister used to sell fruit. Tom this. Tom that. Tom everything. She came alive after she met you. She was a different girl.’
‘I loved her so much,’ I tell her. ‘She was so strong. She was the greatest person I ever knew.’
She smiles in faint sympathy. ‘I was a sad old thing in them days. Suffered my own heartache.’
She stares around the room. Someone switches on the TV. The opening credits of a show called A New Life in the Sun start to play. Then images of a couple inside their Spanish restaurant, the Blue Marlin, looking stressed as they rinse mussels in a pot.
When Mary’s face returns to mine she is pensive, almost trembling with thought. And then she tells me: ‘I met your daughter.’
It is so out of context that I don’t really understand what she has said.
‘What did you say?’
‘Your child, Marion.’
‘Marion?’
‘Quite recent. We were in hospital together.’
My mind is racing to und
erstand. This is so often the way with life. You spend so much time waiting for something – a person, a feeling, a piece of information – that you can’t quite absorb it when it is in front of you. The hole is so used to being a hole it doesn’t know how to close itself.
‘What?’
‘The psychiatric hospital in Southall. I was a day patient, just a mad old bird crying in a chair. She was there all the time. I came to know her. I had left before she had been born, hadn’t I?’
‘So how did you know it was my daughter?’
She looks at me as if it is a silly question. ‘She told me. She told everyone. That was one of the reasons she was there in the first place. No one believed her of course. She was mad. That’s what they thought . . . She used to talk in French sometimes, and she sang a lot.’
‘What did she sing?’
‘Old songs. Old, old songs. She used to cry when she sang.’
‘Is she still there?’
She shakes her head. ‘She left. It was strange, how it happened—’
‘Strange? How do you mean?’
‘One night she just went. People who were there said there was a lot of noise and commotion . . . Then, when I came in the next day she was gone.’
‘Where? Where?’
Mary sighs. She takes a moment. Looks sad and confused as she thinks about it. ‘No one knew. No one said. They just told us she’d been discharged. But we never knew for sure. That sounds strange, but we didn’t always know what was going on. That was the nature of the place.’
I can’t let go. For so long I have been waiting for hope, and then hope has come along for ten seconds only to be dashed again. ‘Where would she have gone? Did she ever give you any clues as to where she might end up? She must have.’
‘I don’t know. Honestly, I just don’t know.’
‘Did she talk about places?’
‘She’d travelled. She talked about places she’d been. She’d been to Canada.’
‘Canada? Where? Toronto? I was in Toronto.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. She’d also spent a lot of time in Scotland, I think. Her voice was very Scottish. I think she’d travelled around, though. Through Europe.’
‘Do you think she’s in London?’
‘I honestly don’t know.’
I sit back. Try to think. I am simultaneously relieved that Marion is still alive – or had been until recently – and worried for whatever torments she has known.
I wonder if the society has caught up with her. I wonder if someone has tried to silence her. I wonder if Hendrich knows about this and hasn’t told me. I wonder if someone has taken her. The institute in Berlin. Or someone else.
‘Listen, Mary,’ I say, before I leave, ‘I think it’s important that you don’t talk about the past any more. It may have been dangerous for Marion, and it is dangerous for you. You can think about it. But it’s dangerous to talk about your age.’
She winces at some invisible pain as she shifts, with careful effort, in her seat. A minute goes by. She is mulling my words, and dismissing them.
‘I loved someone once. A woman. I loved her madly. Do you understand? We were together, in secret, for nearly twenty years. And we were told we couldn’t talk about that love . . . because it was dangerous. It was dangerous to love.’
I nod. I understand.
‘There comes a time when the only way to start living is to tell the truth. To be who you really are, even if it is dangerous.’
I hold Mary’s hand. ‘You have helped me more than you know.’
One of the nurses comes over and asks if I want a cup of tea and I say I am fine.
And then I ask Mary, in a low voice, ‘Have you ever heard of the Albatross Society?’
‘No. Can’t say I have.’
‘Well, just be careful. Please, don’t talk about, you know . . .’
I look at the clock on the wall. It is a quarter to three. In three hours’ time I need to be on a plane to Dubai, en route to Sydney.
‘Be careful,’ I tell Mary.
She shakes her head. Closes her eyes. Her sigh sounds closer to a cat’s hiss. ‘I am too old to be scared any more. I am too old to lie.’ She leans forward in her chair, and clasps her walking stick until her knuckles whiten. ‘And so are you.’
I step outside and phone Hendrich.
‘Tom? How are things?’
‘Did you know she was alive?’
‘Who?’
‘Marion. Marion. Have you found her? Did you know?’
‘Tom, calm down. No, Tom. Have you got a lead?’
‘She is alive. She was at a hospital in Southall. And then she disappeared.’
‘Disappeared? As in, taken?’
‘I don’t know. She might’ve run away.’
‘From a hospital?’
‘It was a mental hospital.’
A postman trundles along the pavement. ‘I don’t know where she is,’ I whisper into the phone. ‘But I can’t go to Australia. I need to find her.’
‘If she has been taken . . .’
‘I don’t know that.’
‘If she has been taken you will not find her alone. Listen, listen. I will get Agnes to put her ear to the ground in Berlin. After Australia this will be our chief operation. We will find her. If she’s been taken she’ll probably be in Berlin, or Beijing, or Silicon Valley. You won’t find her alone. I mean, you’ve been in London and you haven’t found her.’
‘I haven’t been looking. I mean, I’ve been side-tracked.’
‘Yes, Tom. Yes. You finally see it. You’ve been side-tracked. That is exactly it. Now, we will sort this. But you have a flight to catch.’
‘I can’t. I can’t.’
‘If you want to find Marion, you need to focus again, Tom. You need to go and bring your friend in. Who knows? He himself might have information for us. You know how it is. Albas are the people to ask about albas. You need to get back on track, Tom. The truth is: you don’t know where Marion is. But we know where your friend is. And so does Berlin. Marion has survived for over four hundred years. She’ll still be alive for another week. Just do this in Australia and I swear – I swear – we will work together and we will find her. You have a lead, yes?’
I can’t tell him about Mary Peters. I don’t want to endanger a woman who clearly would never agree to be a part of the society. ‘I, just, I need to find her.’
‘We will, Tom,’ he says, and I hate him almost as much as I believe him. I have doubted him many times, but the truth is, I feel it too. I feel every word as he says it. ‘I can sense it. I have experienced so much past that I can sense the future. I know. I know. We are nearly there, Tom. You will see her again. But, first, if you want to save your friend, you really need to get to the airport. Omai needs you.’
And the conversation ends and, as always, I do what Hendrich wants me to do. Because he is the best hope I have.
Tahiti, 1767
I was meant to set fire to the village.
‘Light it!’ roared Wallis. ‘If you ever want a trip home you will light the savage’s hut, Frears! Then light the others!’
I held the flaming torch in my hand, my arm weak from the weight, my whole body weak from just standing up. It would have been easy to let it down, but I couldn’t light the hut. I just stood there, in the black sand, as the islander stared at me. The young man said nothing. He did nothing. He just stood in front of the hut and stared at me. His eyes were wide, and he looked at me with a mixture of horror and defiance. He had long wispy hair, down to his chest, and was wearing more jewellery than most of the other islanders. Bracelets made with bone. Necklaces too. I would have said he was about twenty years old. But I also knew, better than most, that when it came to matters of age, appearances could be deceptive.
Centuries later, watching this same man step out of the ocean in a YouTube video, I would see those eyes stare out with a similar expression. Somewhere between defiance and bewilderment.
I was no saint
. I saw no shame in the discovering of new lands or the forging of empire. I was thoroughly a man of a different age, even to the one I was then inhabiting. And yet, I could not set fire to the man’s home. Whether it was the eyes, whether I could recognise in him a fellow outsider, or whether I knew the damage that was caused to the soul by the accumulation of sin in a long life, I still do not know.
But even as Wallis barked at me I walked away. I carried the torch to the smooth wet sand and let the sea take it. I walked back to the man whose hut was still standing and pulled out the pistol – given to me before treading onto the shore, by a scurvy-weakened officer – from my belt and placed it on the sand. I don’t think the man understood the pistol, or what it was for, but he understood the knife, and I put that on the ground too.
I had a small mirror in my pocket and I showed it to him and he stared at it, at his own face, with fascination.
Wallis was now right at me.
‘What the devil are you doing, Frears?’
I tried to stare at Wallis with the quiet dignity the islander had stared at me.
Luckily, Furneaux was also there. ‘If we destroy their homes, we will never be welcome here. We need to tempt them, not scare them any more than we have. Sometimes the beast only needs to roar.’
And Wallis just mumbled and looked at me and said, ‘Don’t make me regret having brought you,’ and the huts were burned to the ground anyway. And so it was that the island that would one day be known as Tahiti was first witnessed by Europeans. A mere two years later it would be used by Captain James Cook on his first voyage as the site on which he and his astronomer would observe the transit of Venus as it crossed the sun. It was indeed this reason – the convenient positioning of the island from which to observe something – that would advance not only scientific knowledge but the calculation of longitude.
While the village was ablaze the only two naturalists to survive the voyage, along with the artist Joe Webber, set about exploring the rainforest. We weren’t there to take over, we were there, in our own minds, to discover.