How to Stop Time(66)

‘And you think she is still alive?’

‘I don’t know. It’s hard enough being a man and living for four hundred years. And no one ever thinks we’re witches or worries why we don’t have children. But I have always sensed it. She was a clever girl. She could read. She could quote Montaigne when she was nine. My worry is her mind. She was always a very sensitive child. Quiet. She would pick up on things. Get upset easily. She’d brood on things. Be lost in her own world. Have nightmares.’

‘Poor girl,’ said Camille, but I can see she is a bit dazed from all the information.

The one thing I haven’t told her about is the Albatross Society. I sense that even to talk about it is to endanger her somehow. So when she asks me if I know of any others like me, apart from Marion, I don’t mention Agnes or Hendrich. But I do tell her about Omai, my old friend from Tahiti.

‘I haven’t seen him since he left London. He went on Cook’s third voyage. Cook wanted him as translator. I never saw him again. But he didn’t come back to England.’

‘Captain Cook?’

‘Yes.’

She grapples enough with this that I don’t throw her with my stories about Shakespeare and Fitzgerald. Not just yet.

We talk some more.

She asks to see the scar again. She traces it with her finger, as if to make all this more real. I look out at the river, where Dr Hutchinson had been found, once upon a time, and I realise I need to tell her something.

‘Listen,’ I tell her, ‘you can’t tell anyone about this. I probably shouldn’t have told you. It’s just that you were asking lots of questions. You thought you knew me. And that thinking, that curiosity, was possibly more dangerous than knowing. So now you know, you’ll have to keep quiet about it.’

‘Dangerous? This isn’t the age of witches. Surely you could go public about this. Get DNA tests. Proof. It might be able to help people. Help, you know, science. Fighting illnesses. You said your immune system is—’

‘There is a history of bad things happening to people who know. Doctors who were about to publish evidence, and so on. They have had a habit of disappearing.’

‘Disappearing? Who made them disappear?’

The truth comes with its own lies. ‘I don’t know. It’s a shadowy kind of world.’

We talk some more, and keep walking. We walk over the Millennium Bridge and head east through the City. We are, informally, walking home. Our conversation is carrying us there.

It is an hour’s walk, but the weather is mild and neither of us fancy the underground. We walk past St Paul’s Cathedral, and I tell her how it used to be busier than it is today, and how the churchyard used to be the centre of the London book trade. Then we walk down a street called Ironmonger Lane and she asks me about it and I say that I used to walk down this same Ironmonger Lane on my way to Southwark, and that it used to live up to its name, with the whole road noisy and hot from the moulding of metal.

She lives further east than me. When I suggest that I should probably take Abraham for a walk and that she is welcome to come too, she accepts the invite.

We sit together on the bench where I first saw her. An empty carrier bag floats far over our heads like a cartoon ghost.

‘What are the main differences, over time?’

‘Everything you see. Everything you see is different. Nothing stays the same.’ I point to the creature darting up a tree. ‘That would have been a red squirrel once, not a grey one. And there wouldn’t have been carrier bags floating about. The sound of traffic was more clip-clopping. People looked at pocket watches, not phones. And smells, that’s the other thing. It doesn’t smell as much. Everywhere stank. Raw sewage and all the waste from the factories was pumped into the Thames.’

‘Lovely.’

‘It used to be severe. There was the Great Stink. It was eighteen fifty-something, around then. A hot summer. The whole city reeked.’

‘It’s still pretty stinky, though.’

‘Not even comparable. You used to live in stink. People never used to wash. People used to think baths were bad for them.’

She sniffs her armpit. ‘So I’d have been just about okay, then?’

I lean in and smell her. ‘Far too clean. People would have been very suspicious. You are almost twentieth-century clean.’

She laughs. It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.

The sky begins to darken slightly.

‘So, you really had a crush on me?’

She laughs again. ‘You really sound immature, for a four-hundred-year-old.’

‘Ahem, four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old.’

‘Sorry, a four-hundred-and-thirty-nine-year-old.’

‘Asking that question made you sound five.’

‘I feel five. Normally I feel my age but right now I feel five.’

‘Yes, if that is what you want to hear . . .’

‘I want to hear the truth.’

She sighs. Fake dramatic. Does that thing where she looks to the sky. I watch her in profile, mesmerised. ‘Yes, I had a crush on you.’

I sigh too. Mine is also a bit fake dramatic. ‘The past tense has never sounded so sad.’

‘Okay. Okay. Have. Have. I have a crush on you.’

‘Me too. On you, I mean. I find you fascinating.’