How to Stop Time(62)

I had been conditioned, even before I had knowledge of the Albatross Society, not to get involved in the heat of the moment. To float through life with a cool detachment. But that doesn’t seem to work any more. Maybe that youngest version of my adult self was returning. The one which had jumped off a theatre gallery to protect Rose and her sister.

Before I know it I am there, right over her, as Daphne comes running. Camille’s whole body is jerking now.

‘Pull the table back!’ I tell Daphne.

She does so. Then she asks another member of staff to call an ambulance.

I hold Camille steady.

There is a crowd. Only this is a twenty-first century crowd, so everyone’s macabre fascination is tempered with at least the semblance of concern.

She stops convulsing, and comes around, her confusion delaying her embarrassment. For a minute or so, she says nothing, just concentrates on my face.

Daphne brings some water. ‘Let’s all give her some room,’ she says to the parents and staff. ‘Come on, guys and gals, let’s all step back a little . . .’

‘It’s okay,’ I tell Camille. ‘You just had a seizure.’

Just. That sounds terrible.

‘Where . . . where . . . I . . . ?’

She looks around a little. She gets up, on her elbows, then sits up fully. She is weak. Something has been taken from her. Along with Daphne I help settle her back in her seat.

‘Where am I?’

‘The sports hall.’ Daphne’s smile is reassuring. ‘You’re at work. At the school. It’s all right, lovely, it’s just a . . . You’ve had some kind of a seizure . . .’

‘School,’ she says sleepily, to herself.

‘An ambulance is coming.’ This is one of the parents, putting their iPhone away.

‘I’m okay,’ she says. She doesn’t seem in the slightest bit self-conscious. Just tired and confused.

She stares up at me, frowning, not understanding who I am, or maybe understanding too much.

‘You’re okay,’ I tell her.

Her eyes are fixed on me. ‘I do know you.’

I smile at her, then, with more awkwardness, at Daphne. And I gently tell her, ‘Of course you do. We work together.’ I then, perhaps foolishly, underline my point for the crowd. ‘The new history teacher.’

She is leaning back. She sips the water. She shakes her head.

‘Ciro’s.’

The name hits my heart like a hammer. Hendrich’s words, that day years ago in a hurricane-ravaged Central Park, come back to me. The past is never gone. It just hides.

‘I—’

‘You played piano. When I saw you the other day, at the pub . . . I . . .’

Two thoughts: I am dreaming. It is possible. I have dreamed of Camille before.

Or: maybe she is old too. Old, old, old. As in, ancient. An alba. Maybe somehow the photos I have seen on Facebook of her younger self have been photoshopped. Maybe this is what I had felt for her. Maybe this was the connection. Maybe I just have a sense of our exotic sameness. Or maybe she knows some other way.

The one thing I am sure of is that I have to stop her talking. If she carries on she not only risks exposing me, but herself. I feel for her. There is no point denying that any more. The lie I had told myself for so long – that I could exist without caring for anyone new – was just that. A lie. I have no idea why Camille was the one to make me realise this, but I can no longer deny I care for her. And, in caring for her, I feel an overwhelming need to protect her. After all, Hendrich has had people permanently silenced for less than a mutter in a school hall. If she knows about albas, and is talking about it in public, she is automatically risking more than my identity. She’s risking her life.

‘Just relax. We’ll . . . nous allons parler plus tard . . . I’ll explain everything. But quiet, now. I can’t tell you here. Please understand.’

She looks sleepy with the effort of sitting up. She stares at me, the confusion clearing. ‘Okay. I understand.’

I lift the cup of water and help her take a sip. She smiles at Daphne and the other concerned faces. ‘I’m sorry . . . I have a seizure every few months. It’s my epilepsy. They make me tired for a while. I’ll be fine. The tablets were meant to stop the seizures. So I probably need some new ones . . .’

She stares at me. Her eyelids seem heavy. She looks vulnerable and invincible all at once.

‘You okay?’ I ask her.

She gives a small nod, but looks almost as scared as I am.





Paris, 1929



It was around seven in the evening. Beside the vast empty dance floor, men in dinner jackets and women in low-necked tassel-fringed shift dresses and bobbed hair were drinking apéritifs and listening to the music I was playing.

Jazz was what Ciro’s was known for. But, by 1929, the sophisticated clientele didn’t just want jazz-jazz-jazz, because jazz was everywhere. So I sometimes mixed it up a little. Sometimes, if people were on the dance floor, I’d drop in an Argentine tango or some gypsy flavours, but early evening you could get away with playing anything soft and thoughtful, so I was playing some Fauré, from his melancholic period, and feeling every note.

‘Prétendez que je ne suis pas ici,’ the photographer had told me as I was playing.

‘Non,’ I whispered, remembering Hendrich’s no-photographs rule. ‘Pas de photos! Pas de—’