How to Stop Time(63)

But it was too late. I had been so lost in the music he had been taking photos of me without my realising.

‘Merde,’ I whispered to myself, switching to Gershwin to try to better my mood.





London, now



We are in a smart gastropub in the new Globe Theatre.

I feel nervous. The reason isn’t the location. It is Camille herself. The mystery is terrifying. How does she know about Ciro’s? How could she? I am scared of all the answers I have thought of, and the unknown ones I haven’t. I am scared for her. I am scared for me. I am twitching and looking around like an ominous bird on a windowsill. But there is also another reason I am scared. I am scared because up until now I have been surviving.

I mean, I haven’t actively wanted to kill myself for a long time. The last time, precisely, was in a bunker near Tarragona in the Spanish Civil War when I placed a pistol in my mouth and prepared to blow my head off. Only by forcing myself to stare and stare at Marion’s lucky penny had I managed to keep my brains on the inside of my skull. But that was 1937. That was a long time of not actively trying to die.

I have recently thought I wanted out from Hendrich but maybe, actually, this was a mistake. Yes, I am ‘owned’ by Hendrich but there is a comfort in that. Free will might be overrated.

‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’

I had ached from the death of Rose for centuries, and that pain had faded into the neutral monotony of existing, and moving on before I had time to gather any emotional moss. I’d been able to enjoy music and food and poetry and red wine and the aesthetic pleasures of the world and that, I now realised, was perfectly fine.

Yes, there had been a void inside me, but voids were underrated. Voids were empty of love but also pain. Emptiness was not without its advantages. You could move around in emptiness.

I try to tell myself I am just meeting her for what she is going to tell me, and that I don’t have to tell her anything in return. But it is strange being here. Especially as it is here.

I haven’t been to this specific place since the day I jumped onto the stage from the musicians’ gallery. The day I landed on Will Kemp’s back and saw Manning again. It had been the day of another confession, of course, to Rose. And now I can feel the faint echo of that day, amid the polite middle-class theatre chatter and clinking of cutlery around me.

The famous image of Shakespeare stares up at me from the front of the menu. I used to think it looked nothing like him – the image being all forehead and bad hair and wispy beard and lobotomised expression – but now the eyes seem to be his eyes. Watching me, wryly, as I continue through life. As if it amuses him, watching the man he helped to escape that day carry on in an interminable endless living tragicomedy.

The waiter is here now and Camille is smiling up at him.

She is wearing a midnight blue shirt. She looks pale, a little tired, but also beautiful.

‘I would like the skate wing,’ she tells the waiter, pushing her glasses a little further up her nose.

‘Very good,’ says the waiter, who turns to me.

‘I’ll have the gnocchi in kale pesto.’

He takes the menus, and their portraits of my former boss, and I turn back to look at Camille and try to relax.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘About being a bit odd sometimes, at school.’

Camille shakes her head. ‘You really have to stop saying that. Incessant apologising is never an attractive trait.’

‘You’re right. The thing is, I really am quite bad, you know, with people.’

‘Ah, them. People. Yes, it’s hard.’

‘And I have a lot, sometimes, going on in my head.’

‘Join the club.’

‘There’s a club?’

‘No. There are too many people in clubs. But it’s fine. Be how you want to be.’

‘I haven’t been a very public person. I have had to be careful.’ I am sure, looking at her, that I have never known her. In this life of familiar patterns and people she has the wonderfully rare feature of not reminding me of anyone. But I have to ask. ‘We never met, did we? I mean, before I saw you that day in the park. I saw you once, from Daphne’s window, but we have never met before, have we?’

‘It depends what you mean by met. But, no, in the conventional sense, no.’

‘Okay.’

‘Yeah.’

There is a kind of stand-off. We both have more questions but we are carrying them in holsters waiting for the other one to fire away. A single sentence could render either of us insane.

We nibble on rye bread and harpoon olives with cocktail sticks.

‘How are you feeling?’ I ask. The tamest enquiry, but a sincere one.

She rips some bread apart and stares at it for a moment, as if a secret is there, contained like every element in the universe, inside the leavened dough.

‘Much better,’ she says. ‘I’ve had epilepsy for a long time. Used to be a lot worse.’

A long time.

‘So you’ve had lots of seizures before?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

The waiter tops up our wine. I take a sip. Then another.

Camille looks at me with forceful eyes. ‘Now you. You promised. I need to know your story.’