How to Stop Time(88)

I no longer have my headache. I haven’t had it since Australia. And yet, I am still worried.

I can see Camille staring at me through the staff-room window. She is smiling and then she notices me and suddenly she looks cross, or scared; it’s hard to tell. I stand there and wait. I will speak to her. I will explain things. I will tell her who I was on the phone to. I will tell her about Hendrich. I will tell her about Marion. Maybe someday soon we can try another park bench. I don’t know. I can’t know.

But from now on, I am going to exist in the open. I am not going to let secrets hurt people any more.

Yes.

It is about time.

It is about time I lived.

So I inhale the east London air, which feels purer than usual, and I walk, among the teenagers, into the rather uninspiring 1960s school building with a strange and long-forgotten feeling.

I feel at the beginning of something.

I feel ready to care and be hurt and take a risk on living.

And within two minutes I see her. Camille.

‘Hello,’ she says. Business-like, polite.

I can see now from her eyes she wants me to say something. And I was going to. In the moment after this one, I am going to try to do what has always been so hard.

I am going to try to explain myself. And a peculiar feeling happens when I am right in front of her. It is a sense of total understanding, as though inside this one moment I can see every other one. Not just the moments before but those lying ahead. The whole universe in a grain of sand. This is what Agnes had been talking about in Paris almost a century ago. And Mary Peters. I had finally had this experience of total understanding of time. What is and what was and what will be. It is just a single second, but inside it I feel as though, just staring into Camille’s eyes, I can see for ever.





La Forêt de Pons, France, the future



Two years from that moment in the school corridor.

France.

The forest near Pons that still remains. The one I once knew.

Abraham is old now. He had a kidney stone removed last month, but still isn’t exactly in great shape. Today, though, he seems happy sniffing a thousand new scents.

‘I’m still scared,’ I say, as we walk Abraham among the beech trees.

‘Of?’ Camille asks.

‘Time.’

‘Why are you the one scared of time? You’re going to live for ever.’

‘Exactly. And one day you won’t be with me.’

She stops. ‘It’s strange.’

‘What’s strange?’

‘How much time you spend worrying about the future.’

‘Why? It always happens. That’s the thing with the future.’

‘Yes, it always happens. But it’s not always terrible. Look. Look right now. At us. Here. This is the future.’

She grabs my wrist and places my hand on her stomach. ‘There. Can you feel her?’

I feel it – the strange movement – as you kick. You. Marion’s little sister. ‘I feel her.’

‘Exactly.’

‘And one day she might look older than me.’

She stops, right then. Points through the trees. There is a deer. It turns and looks at us, holding our gaze for a moment, before darting away. Abraham tugs on the lead half-heartedly.

‘I don’t know what will happen,’ Camille says, staring at the space where the creature had been. ‘I don’t know if I will make it through the afternoon without having a seizure. Who knows anything?’

‘Yes. Who knows?’

I keep staring between the trees at the air that had been inhabited by the deer and realise it is true. The deer isn’t there, but I know it had been there and so the space is different than it would otherwise have been. The memory made it different.

‘“You are no longer insulated; but I suppose you must touch life in order to spring from it.”’

‘What’s that? A quote?’ I ask.

‘Fitzgerald.’

We carry on walking. ‘I met him, you know.’

‘Yes, I know.’

‘I knew Shakespeare too. And met Dr Johnson. And once saw Josephine Baker dance.’

‘Name dropper.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Speaking of names,’ she says slowly, as if considering her words as carefully as her steps on this uneven path. ‘I’ve been thinking. I don’t know what you would say. Now we know it’s going to be a girl I think we should call her Sophie. After my grandmother. Sophie Rose.’

‘Rose?’

She holds my hand. Then, just so she is clear: ‘I have always loved the name. The flower, but also the sense of having risen . . . Like you now, now you’re free to be who you are. And yes, I know it’s weird for someone to name their baby after, you know . . . But it’s quite hard to be jealous of someone from four centuries ago. And, besides, I like her. She helped you become you. I think it would be nice. To have that thread through things.’

‘Well, we’ll see.’

We kiss. Just standing there, in the forest. I love her so much. I could not love her more. And the terror of not allowing myself to love her has beaten that fear of losing her. Omai is right. You have to choose to live.

‘Everything is going to be all right. Or, if not, everything is going to be, so let’s not worry.’