How to Stop Time(56)

I sit on my stool next to Camille.

‘When you played I really had that feeling again. Like I’d seen you playing before. It was like déjà vu or something.’

I just shrug. ‘Well, they say déjà vu is a real thing.’

‘A symptom of schizophrenia,’ says Martin.

‘But truly,’ Camille says, her hand touching the back of mine, then retreating before anyone sees. ‘That was amazing – si merveilleux.’

And I feel a brief but intense surge of desire. I haven’t truly lusted after another human being for centuries, but when I look at Camille, when I hear her kind, strong voice, when I see the delicate creases around her eyes, when I feel the skin of her hand against the skin of mine, when I look at her mouth, my mind switches to what it would be like to be with her, to lose my way with her, to whisper longings into her ear, to devour and be devoured. To wake up in the same bed and talk and laugh and be in comfortable silence with her. To give her breakfast. Toast. Blackcurrant jam. Pink grapefruit juice. Maybe some watermelon. Sliced. On a plate. She would smile, and I see it in my mind, the smile, and I would dare to feel happy with another human being.

This is what playing the piano does.

This is the danger of it.

It makes you human.

‘Tom?’ she says, breaking my reverie. ‘Would you like another drink?’

‘No thanks,’ I say, embarrassed, as though I am a book left open with every secret written on the page for all to see. ‘I think I’ve probably had enough.’

Isham gets his phone out. ‘Anyone want to see the scan?’ he asks. ‘It’s 3D.’

‘Ooh,’ says Camille, ‘me!’

Isham and his wife are expecting a baby. We lean in around the moving ultrasound image. I can remember when the concept of ultrasound was first spoke of in the 1950s. It still, even now, feels like the future. Though it is a strange kind of future that makes you see a potential human as the delicate primitive clay-like being it is. Like watching a half-made sculpture seeking definition.

I notice, for a second, that Camille is staring at the scar on my arm. I pull down my sleeves, self-conscious.

‘We don’t know the sex yet. Zo? wants it to be a surprise.’

He has a tear glistening in his eye.

‘I’d say it’s a boy,’ says Martin, and he points to the screen.

‘That is not a penis,’ Isham says.

Martin shrugs. ‘It’s a penis.’

I stare down at the screen, and I remember what it felt like when Rose told me she was pregnant. I wonder what Rose would have made of sonograms. And whether she’d have wanted to find out the gender. And I sit back in my chair and don’t say much after that. A guilt takes over me. The guilt of desiring someone who isn’t Rose.

So ridiculous.

And I drift away again, forgetting my headache, forgetting this is the Coach and Horses, and imagining it is the Boar’s Head in Eastcheap, and that I could step outside into the night and walk back through the dark narrow streets to reach Rose and Marion and a version of me I had abandoned for centuries.





London, 1607–1616



In 1607 I was twenty-six years old.

I obviously didn’t look twenty-six but I was looking a fraction older than I had done back when I’d worked on Bankside. When I had first become aware of my difference I thought that was it, I thought my physical being was frozen in time, but then, slowly, very slowly, things happened. For instance, hair. My crotch, chest, underarms and face were growing more hairs than they had done before. My voice, which had broken when I was twelve, became deeper still. My shoulders broadened a little. My arms found it easier to carry washing water back from the well. I gained greater control over my erections. And my face, according to Rose, became more like the face of a man. I was becoming so much more like a man that Rose suggested we get married, and we did so, in a small parentless wedding, with Grace as our witness.

Grace was now married too. She had become happily betrothed to her precise opposite – a shy, God-fearing, flush-cheeked shoemaker’s apprentice called Walter – at the age of seventeen and she now lived with him in a tiny cottage in Stepney.

After we married, Rose and I moved too. The reason for this was quite simple. The longer we stayed in one place, the more dangerous it became. Rose’s idea was to head further out, to one of the villages, but I knew of the potentially perilous consequences of this, so I suggested we do the opposite. I suggested we go and live inside the walls, go where we could disappear into the safety of crowds, and so we moved to Eastcheap, and life was good for a while.

Yes, there was rot and rats and misery all around us, but we had each other. The problem was, of course, that, although I was ageing, I wasn’t ageing at the same speed as Rose. She was now twenty-seven years old, and looked it. While I was, gradually, starting to look young enough to be her son.

I said to people I was eighteen, which I could just about get away with, at least at the Boar’s Head Inn, where I had started to play most nights of the week, but by the time Rose came to me and told me she wasn’t bleeding, and that she thought she was pregnant, I had already felt like I was endangering her. Anyway, it was true. And I had no idea if the news was wonderful or devastating. She was pregnant. We had hardly enough money to feed ourselves, and now there was going to be a third mouth to feed.