How to Stop Time(22)

‘Love is pain. It’s easier not to.’

She nodded in agreement, and swallowed, as if my words had a taste, and she looked away into the distance. ‘Yes. Yes, it is. Love is pain.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘you were going to tell me, why did you kill Dr Hutchinson?’

She looked around at the other diners, who were sitting stiff and upright in that overdressed upper-class way. ‘Would you kindly not air accusations of murder in the dining room? You need to learn the art of discretion. Of speaking about a thing without actually speaking of it. Truth is a straight line you sometimes need to curve, you should know that by now. It is a true wonder you are alive.’

‘I know but—’

Agnes closed her eyes. ‘You need to grow up, do you understand? You are still a child. You may look like a man now, but you are still a wide-eyed boy and you need to become, quite urgently, a grown-up. We need to civilise you.’

Her attitude of indifference appalled me. ‘He was a good man.’

‘He was a man. That was all you really knew, wasn’t it? He was a man. A doctor, seeking glory out of misery, whose best work was behind him. A man who had happily cast you aside and dismissed you previously. He was sixty-eight years old. He was frail. He was a skeleton in tweed. At best he had only a few years to live. Now, if he had stayed alive to publicise his findings, to make his name as the man who discovered anageria, then it would have led to far more harm. And deaths of people who not only have years to live, but centuries. It is called the greater good, surely you understand that? Lives are lost in order to save more lives. That is what the society is fighting.’

‘The society, the society, the society . . . You keep talking about this society, but you haven’t told me anything. I don’t even know what it is called.’

‘The Albatross Society.’

‘Albatross?’

Our food arrived.

‘Is there anything else I could do for you?’ the smartly dressed, slick-haired waiter asked.

‘Yes.’ Agnes smiled. ‘You could disappear.’

The waiter looked taken aback, and smoothed his moustache for comfort. ‘Very well.’

I stared down at my exquisitely prepared fish and my stomach hungrily rumbled with the knowledge that I hadn’t eaten like this in over a century.

‘It is thought that albatrosses live a long time. And we live a long time. Hendrich Pietersen founded the society in eighteen sixty-seven as a means of uniting and protecting us – people like us – the “albatrosses” or “albas” – from outside threats.’

‘And who is this Hendrich Pietersen?’

‘A very old and very wise man. Born in Flanders but has been in America since it was America. He made money during the tulip mania and came to New York when it was still New Amsterdam. Traded furs. Built up his wealth. Amassed, ultimately, a fortune. He got into property. All kinds of things. He is America, that is who Hendrich is. He set up the society to save us. We are blessed, Tom.’

I laughed.

‘Blessed. Blessed. It is a curse.’

She sipped her red wine.

‘Hendrich will want to know that you appreciate the nature of the gift you have been given.’

‘I will find that hard to do.’

‘If you want to stay alive, you will do it.’

‘I don’t know if I actually care too much about staying alive, Agnes.’

‘Not Agnes,’ she whispered sharply. She looked around the room. ‘Gillian.’

She took something out of her bag. Some Quieting Syrup cough mixture. She poured it into her whisky. She offered to do the same to mine. I shook my head.

‘Do you understand how selfish you sound? Look at everyone else. Look around this dining room. Even better, think of all those émigrés in steerage. Most of them will be dead before they are sixty. Think of all those terrible illnesses we have known people to die from. Smallpox, cholera, typhoid, even plague – I know you are old enough to remember.’

‘I remember.’

‘That will not happen to us. People like us die in one of only two ways. We either die in our sleep aged around nine hundred and fifty, or we die in an act of violence that destroys our heart or brain or causes a profound loss of blood. That is it. We have immunity from so much human pain.’

I thought of Rose trembling with fever and delirious with pain as she was on that last day. I thought of the days and weeks and years and decades afterwards. ‘There have been times in my life when shooting myself in the head seemed profoundly preferable to the blessing of existence.’

Agnes gently swirled the cocktail of whisky and Quieting Syrup in her glass. ‘You have lived a long time. You must know by now that it is not just ourselves we endanger when our truth begins to surface.’

‘Indeed. Dr Hutchinson, for instance.’

‘I am not talking about Dr Hutchinson.’ She swiped back faster than a cat. ‘I am talking about other people. Your parents. What happened to them?’

I took my time, chewing on the fish, then swallowing, then dabbing the side of my mouth with a napkin. ‘My father was killed in France due to his religion.’

‘Ah. The Wars of Religion? He was a Protestant? A Huguenot?’

I nodded three times.

‘And your mother?’ Agnes’s eye stared at me. She sensed that she had me. And she did, I suppose. I told her the truth.