How to Stop Time(53)

I considered the attention Chaplin was getting, and couldn’t think of a greater nightmare. Then, as I continued to contemplate the question I stared at the pianist, in his white dinner jacket, closing his eyes and drifting away, note by note, bar by bar, unnoticed except by me.

‘That,’ I said, nodding in the pianist’s direction. ‘That is what I want to do.’





London, now



‘But why couldn’t the League of Nations stop Mussolini from entering Abyssinia?’

Aamina is in the front row. Serious, frowning, alert, holding a pencil, she is wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Proud Snowflake’.

I am giving a lesson on the causes of the Second World War, trying to go back from 1939 through the 1930s, talking about Italy taking over Abyssinia, now Ethiopia, in 1935, as well as Hitler’s rise in 1933, the Spanish Civil War and the Great Depression.

‘Well, they tried, but in a really half-hearted way. Economic sanctions, but nothing that was majorly enforced. But the thing is, at the time, a lot of people didn’t realise what they were dealing with. You see, when you look at events in history there is a two-way perspective. Forwards and back. But at the time everything is one way. No one knew where fascism was heading.’

The lesson is going okay and my headache isn’t too bad – I think having made peace with Camille helped – but maybe because of this I slip into a kind of autopilot. I am not really thinking about what I am saying.

‘The news about Abyssinia felt like a real turning point, though. It made people realise something was happening. Not just with Germany but Italy too. With the world order. I remember reading a newspaper on the day Mussolini declared victory and I . . .’

Fuck.

I stop.

Realise what I have said.

Aamina, sharp as her pencil, also notices. ‘You said that as if you were there,’ she says.

A couple of other pupils nod in agreement.

‘No. I wasn’t there, but I felt I was. That’s the thing with history. You inhabit it. It’s another present . . .’

Aamina makes an amused face.

I continue. I cover my tracks, I think. It is a pretty minor mistake to make and yet it is the kind of mistake I never used to make.

During the break I see Camille chatting to someone, out in the corridor. Leaning against some pupil artwork inspired by Rio’s favelas, which looks very bright and Fauvist and late nineteenth century.

She is talking to Martin. The hopeless music teacher. Martin is wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. He has a beard and longer hair than the average male teacher. I have no idea what they are talking about, but he is making Camille laugh. I feel a strange unease. And then I walk past and Martin sees me first and smirks at me, as if I amuse him. ‘Hi, Tim. You look a bit lost. Did they give you a map?’

‘Tom,’ I say.

‘You what, mate?’

‘My name’s Tom. It isn’t Tim. It’s Tom.’

‘All right, mate. Easy mistake.’

Camille is smiling at me. ‘How was your lesson?’ she asks, her eyes on me like a detective. A smiling detective but still a detective.

‘Fine,’ I say.

‘Listen, Tom, every Thursday a few of us go to the Coach and Horses for a couple of drinks. We meet at seven. Me, Martin, Isham, Sarah . . . You should come along. Tell him, Martin.’

Martin shrugs. ‘It’s a free world. Yeah, knock yourself out.’

Of course, there is only one answer I should give. No. But I glance at Camille and find myself saying, ‘Yeah, okay. Coach and Horses, seven. Sounds good.’





An interlude about the piano





I moved from place to place and from time to time like an arrow immune to gravity.

Things did improve for a little while.

My shoulder healed.

I went back to London. Hendrich set me up as a hotel pianist in London. Life was good. I drank cocktails and flirted with elegant women in beaded dresses and then went out into the night to dance to jazz with playboys and flapper girls. It was the perfect time for me, where friendships and relationships were expected to be intense and burn out in fast gin-soaked debauchery. The Roaring Twenties. That’s what they say now, isn’t it? And they did kind of roar, compared to the times before. Of course, previous London decades had been noisy – the bellowing 1630s, for instance, or the laughing 1750s – but this was different. For the first time ever, there was always a sound, somewhere in London, that wasn’t quite natural. The noise of car engines, of cinema scores, of radio broadcasts, the sound of humans overreaching themselves.

It was the age of noise, and so suddenly playing music had a new importance. It made you a master of the world. Amid the accidental cacophony of modern life to be able to play music, to make sense out of noise, could briefly make you a kind of god. A creator. An orderer. A comfort giver.

I enjoyed the role I was in, during this time. Daniel Honeywell, born in London, but who had been tinkling the ivories for upper-class tourists and émigrés on ocean liners since the Great War. Slowly, though, a melancholy set in. At the time I thought it was another episode of personal melancholy, the futility of loving a woman who had died so long ago. But I think it was also a product of being in tune with the times.

I wanted to do something. I was fed up of simply doing things to help myself. I wanted to do something for humanity. I was a human after all and my empathy was for other human beings, not just those with the curse – or the gift – of hyperlongevity. ‘Time guilt’, that’s what Agnes called it, when I chatted with her about it. She came to see me in London, towards the end of my eight years. She had been living in Montmartre. She had lots of stories. She was still fun.