‘Oh,’ I say, feeling like fatherhood is something I have lost the knack of. ‘That’s . . . uh . . .’
She is staying with me for a little while. Right now she is sitting on the chair, away from Abraham, vaping, and humming an old tune. Very old. ‘Flow My Tears’ by John Dowland. A tune I used to play on the lute when she was a little girl, before she ever played the pipe. She doesn’t say anything about it, and nor do I. There is a vibration to her voice. A softness. There is still a soft nut beneath the shell.
‘Do you miss Ma?’ she asks me.
‘I miss her every day. Even after all these years. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?’
She smiles sadly, then sucks on her e-cigarette. ‘Has there been anyone else?’
‘No . . . mainly.’
‘Mainly?’
‘Well, there hasn’t been. For centuries. But there is someone at school. Camille. I like her. But I feel like I might have messed it up.’
‘Love is a motherfucker.’
I sigh. ‘Of course it is.’
‘You should just shoot for it. Tell her you messed up. Tell her why you messed up. Be honest. Honesty works. Well, honesty gets you locked up in a psych ward. But sometimes it works.’
‘Honesty is a motherfucker,’ I say, and she laughs.
She goes quiet for a little while. Remembers something. ‘“I speak the truth not so much as I would, but as much as I dare, and I dare a little more as I grow older.”’
‘Is that . . .?’
‘Montaigne himself.’
‘Wow. You still like him?’
‘Some of it’s a bit dodgy nowadays, but yeah. He was a wise man.’
‘What about you? Has there been anyone?’
‘There was. Yes. There have been a few. But I’m fine on my own. I’m happier on my own. It always got too complicated. You know, the age thing. I have generally found men to be quite a disappointment. Montaigne said that the point of life is to give yourself to yourself. I am working on that. Reading, painting, playing the piano. Shooting nine-hundred-year-old men.’
‘You play the piano?’
‘I find it offers more than the tin pipe.’
‘Me too.’ I am enjoying this. This is our first real proper conversation since Australia. ‘When did you get your lip pierced?’
‘About thirty years ago. Before it was a thing everyone had.’
‘Does it ever hurt?’
‘No. Are you judging me?’
‘I’m your father. That’s what I’m here for.’
‘I also have tattoos.’
‘I can see.’
‘I have one on my shoulder. Want to see it?’ She pulls down her jumper and shows me a tree. Beneath it are the words: ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. ‘I got it to remember you. You taught me the song, remember.’
I smile. ‘I remember.’
She is a bit jetlagged, still. So am I. I want her to stay but she says London gives her panic attacks and she doesn’t want to go back to hospital. She says there’s a house on Fetlar, one of the Shetland Islands where she had lived in the 1920s, which is still there and abandoned. She says she wants to go back. She says she has some cash. And that by next weekend – after my week back at school – she will go. It saddens me, but I understand, and promise to visit as soon as I can.
‘Time doesn’t move there,’ she says. ‘On the islands. It used to make me feel normal. Being surrounded by all that unchanging nature. The city is harder work. Things happen in cities.’
Her hands have a slight tremble to them. I wonder at the horrors she has been through. The stuff she has blocked out. I wonder about the future, about what will happen to her, and to me, now that the secret of the albas is likely to be revealed. Now that we, or Omai, might be the ones to reveal it.
But the thing is: you cannot know the future. You look at the news and it looks terrifying. But you can never be sure. That is the whole thing with the future. You don’t know. At some point you have to accept that you don’t know. You have to stop flicking ahead and just concentrate on the page you are on.
Abraham slides off the sofa and slopes off into the kitchen. Marion comes and sits next to me. I want to put my arm around her, like a father would a daughter. I don’t think she wants me to, but then she places her head on my shoulder and says nothing. I remember that same head resting on that same shoulder, when she was ten years old, that night in the coach. That had felt, then, like the end of everything. This, now, feels like a beginning.
Time can surprise you sometimes.
I cycle to school.
I see Anton walking into the main building on his own. He has his headphones in and he is reading a book. I can’t see what the book is called but it is a book. Whenever I see someone reading a book, especially if it is someone I don’t expect, I feel civilisation has become a little safer. He looks up. Sees me. Raises his hand.
I like this job. I can’t right now think of a better purpose in life than to be a teacher. To teach feels like you are a guardian of time itself, protecting the future happiness of the world via the minds that are yet to shape it. It isn’t playing the lute for Shakespeare, or the piano at Ciro’s, but it’s something as good. And goodness has its own kind of harmony.
Sure, I have no idea how long I will stay as one, once I go public about who I am. I might have the job for a week or a month or a decade. I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or we think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.
And it’s good to think of the past.
Those who cannot remember the past, observed the philosopher George Santayana in 1905, are condemned to repeat it. And you only need to switch on the news to see the dreadful repetitions, the terrible unlearned lessons, the twenty-first century slowly becoming a crude cover version of the twentieth.
But, although you can gaze at the past, you can’t visit it. Not really. I can’t sit by a tree in a forest and have my mother sing to me. I can’t walk along Fairfield Road and see Rose and her sister again, selling fruit out of a basket. I can’t cross the old London Bridge and enter Elizabethan Southwark. I can’t go back and offer more words of comfort to Rose in that dark house on Chapel Street. I can’t ever see Marion as a little girl again. I can’t go back to a time when the world’s map wasn’t known. I can’t walk snowy streets lined with beautiful Victorian streetlamps and choose not to visit Dr Hutchinson. I can’t go back to 1891 and tell myself not to follow Agnes onto the Etruria.
The yellow bird sits on a windowsill for a while and then it flies away. That is nature. There are things I have experienced that I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.
I no longer have my headache. I haven’t had it since Australia. And yet, I am still worried.
I can see Camille staring at me through the staff-room window. She is smiling and then she notices me and suddenly she looks cross, or scared; it’s hard to tell. I stand there and wait. I will speak to her. I will explain things. I will tell her who I was on the phone to. I will tell her about Hendrich. I will tell her about Marion. Maybe someday soon we can try another park bench. I don’t know. I can’t know.
But from now on, I am going to exist in the open. I am not going to let secrets hurt people any more.
Yes.
It is about time.
It is about time I lived.
So I inhale the east London air, which feels purer than usual, and I walk, among the teenagers, into the rather uninspiring 1960s school building with a strange and long-forgotten feeling.
I feel at the beginning of something.
&n
bsp; I feel ready to care and be hurt and take a risk on living.
And within two minutes I see her. Camille.
‘Hello,’ she says. Business-like, polite.
I can see now from her eyes she wants me to say something. And I was going to. In the moment after this one, I am going to try to do what has always been so hard.
I am going to try to explain myself. And a peculiar feeling happens when I am right in front of her. It is a sense of total understanding, as though inside this one moment I can see every other one. Not just the moments before but those lying ahead. The whole universe in a grain of sand. This is what Agnes had been talking about in Paris almost a century ago. And Mary Peters. I had finally had this experience of total understanding of time. What is and what was and what will be. It is just a single second, but inside it I feel as though, just staring into Camille’s eyes, I can see for ever.
La Forêt de Pons, France, the future
Two years from that moment in the school corridor.
France.
The forest near Pons that still remains. The one I once knew.
Abraham is old now. He had a kidney stone removed last month, but still isn’t exactly in great shape. Today, though, he seems happy sniffing a thousand new scents.
‘I’m still scared,’ I say, as we walk Abraham among the beech trees.
‘Of?’ Camille asks.
‘Time.’
‘Why are you the one scared of time? You’re going to live for ever.’
‘Exactly. And one day you won’t be with me.’
She stops. ‘It’s strange.’
‘What’s strange?’
‘How much time you spend worrying about the future.’
‘Why? It always happens. That’s the thing with the future.’
‘Yes, it always happens. But it’s not always terrible. Look. Look right now. At us. Here. This is the future.’
She grabs my wrist and places my hand on her stomach. ‘There. Can you feel her?’
I feel it – the strange movement – as you kick. You. Marion’s little sister. ‘I feel her.’
‘Exactly.’
‘And one day she might look older than me.’
She stops, right then. Points through the trees. There is a deer. It turns and looks at us, holding our gaze for a moment, before darting away. Abraham tugs on the lead half-heartedly.
‘I don’t know what will happen,’ Camille says, staring at the space where the creature had been. ‘I don’t know if I will make it through the afternoon without having a seizure. Who knows anything?’
‘Yes. Who knows?’
I keep staring between the trees at the air that had been inhabited by the deer and realise it is true. The deer isn’t there, but I know it had been there and so the space is different than it would otherwise have been. The memory made it different.
‘“You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”’
‘What’s that? A quote?’ I ask.
‘Fitzgerald.’
We carry on walking. ‘I met him, you know.’
‘Yes, I know.’
‘I knew Shakespeare too. And met Dr Johnson. And once saw Josephine Baker dance.’
‘Name dropper.’
‘It’s true.’
‘Speaking of names,’ she says slowly, as if considering her words as carefully as her steps on this uneven path. ‘I’ve been thinking. I don’t know what you would say. Now we know it’s going to be a girl I think we should call her Sophie. After my grandmother. Sophie Rose.’
‘Rose?’
She holds my hand. Then, just so she is clear: ‘I have always loved the name. The flower, but also the sense of having risen . . . Like you now, now you’re free to be who you are. And yes, I know it’s weird for someone to name their baby after, you know . . . But it’s quite hard to be jealous of someone from four centuries ago. And, besides, I like her. She helped you become you. I think it would be nice. To have that thread through things.’
‘Well, we’ll see.’
We kiss. Just standing there, in the forest. I love her so much. I could not love her more. And the terror of not allowing myself to love her has beaten that fear of losing her. Omai is right. You have to choose to live.
‘Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.’
I see now how right she is. Sometimes I can see futures beyond this one. I can see her try and fail to remember my own face, even as I am there in front of her. I can see her holding my hand as Rose had done, pale and ill at the end of life. I can feel the fringes of a pain that will one day overwhelm me, after she has gone. She knows I know this. But she doesn’t want me to tell her any more. She is right. Everything is going to be. And every moment lasts for ever. It lives on. Somewhere. Somehow. So, as we keep walking back down the path from where we came we are in a way staying there, kissing, just as I am also congratulating Anton on his exam results and drinking whisky with Marion in her Shetland home and shuddering from the sound of artillery fire and talking to Captain Furneaux in the rain and clutching a lucky coin and walking past the stables with Rose and listening to my mother sing as sycamore seeds spin and fall in this same forest.
There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.
Yes.
It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be?
The future is you.
Acknowledgements
Thank you for reading this book. That is the first acknowledgement to make. A book only becomes real by being read, so thank you for giving my daydream a reality. I wanted to write a book that you enjoyed reading and I enjoyed writing, and I guarantee I achieved at least the latter. I have never had as much fun writing a book. It was time travel and a therapy session in one, minus the psychiatrist’s fees and the DeLorean.
I first had the idea of writing it as I was writing another novel, The Humans. That had been a book that was really about placing our small but wonderful human lives within the vast context of the universe. So whereas the perspective of that was space, I wanted the perspective of this one to be time. The way time can comfort us and terrify us, and the way it makes us appreciate the scale and precious texture of our lives.
Anyway, wanting to write something is not the same as writing it. And I am very lucky to have an editor like Francis Bickmore who always understands the essence of what I am trying to do, and helps me get there. Indeed, I am grateful to Jamie Byng and all at Canongate, for giving me the freedom to write the books I want to write and for publishing them so well. Particular mentions to Jenny Todd, Jenny Fry, Pete Adlington, Claire Maxwell, Jo Dingley, Neal Price, Andrea Joyce, Caroline Clarke, Jessica Neale, Alice Shortland, Alan Trotter, Rona Williamson and Megan Reid.
I am very lucky to have the most magnificent agent Clare Conville, who has somehow helped me turn my eclectic scribblings into something resembling a career.
Also, I would like to thank Katherine Boyle, Kirk McElhearn and Joanne Harris for help with making my French a bit more natural, and Greg Jenner for his emails packed with historical knowledge, firing my mind off in different directions through time. Of course, I must also thank Benedict Cumberbatch and all at StudioCanal and SunnyMarch for seeing the film potential.
Most of all, I must acknowledge my wife and best friend Andrea Semple, who is the first reader I write for, and the first one to tell me what is and isn’t working, and who is a daily inspiration. The one I always want to stop time for.
Thank you.
Also by Matt Haig
The Last Family in England
The Dead Fathers Club
; The Possession of Mr Cave
The Radleys
The Humans
Humans: An A–Z
Reasons to Stay Alive
For Children
The Runaway Troll
Shadow Forest
To Be A Cat
Echo Boy
A Boy Called Christmas
The Girl Who Saved Christmas
Father Christmas and Me
Matt Haig, How to Stop Time
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