How to Stop Time(89)

I see now how right she is. Sometimes I can see futures beyond this one. I can see her try and fail to remember my own face, even as I am there in front of her. I can see her holding my hand as Rose had done, pale and ill at the end of life. I can feel the fringes of a pain that will one day overwhelm me, after she has gone. She knows I know this. But she doesn’t want me to tell her any more. She is right. Everything is going to be. And every moment lasts for ever. It lives on. Somewhere. Somehow. So, as we keep walking back down the path from where we came we are in a way staying there, kissing, just as I am also congratulating Anton on his exam results and drinking whisky with Marion in her Shetland home and shuddering from the sound of artillery fire and talking to Captain Furneaux in the rain and clutching a lucky coin and walking past the stables with Rose and listening to my mother sing as sycamore seeds spin and fall in this same forest.

There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.

Yes.

It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be?

The future is you.





Acknowledgements




Thank you for reading this book. That is the first acknowledgement to make. A book only becomes real by being read, so thank you for giving my daydream a reality. I wanted to write a book that you enjoyed reading and I enjoyed writing, and I guarantee I achieved at least the latter. I have never had as much fun writing a book. It was time travel and a therapy session in one, minus the psychiatrist’s fees and the DeLorean.

I first had the idea of writing it as I was writing another novel, The Humans. That had been a book that was really about placing our small but wonderful human lives within the vast context of the universe. So whereas the perspective of that was space, I wanted the perspective of this one to be time. The way time can comfort us and terrify us, and the way it makes us appreciate the scale and precious texture of our lives.

Anyway, wanting to write something is not the same as writing it. And I am very lucky to have an editor like Francis Bickmore who always understands the essence of what I am trying to do, and helps me get there. Indeed, I am grateful to Jamie Byng and all at Canongate, for giving me the freedom to write the books I want to write and for publishing them so well. Particular mentions to Jenny Todd, Jenny Fry, Pete Adlington, Claire Maxwell, Jo Dingley, Neal Price, Andrea Joyce, Caroline Clarke, Jessica Neale, Alice Shortland, Alan Trotter, Rona Williamson and Megan Reid.

I am very lucky to have the most magnificent agent Clare Conville, who has somehow helped me turn my eclectic scribblings into something resembling a career.

Also, I would like to thank Katherine Boyle, Kirk McElhearn and Joanne Harris for help with making my French a bit more natural, and Greg Jenner for his emails packed with historical knowledge, firing my mind off in different directions through time. Of course, I must also thank Benedict Cumberbatch and all at StudioCanal and SunnyMarch for seeing the film potential.

Most of all, I must acknowledge my wife and best friend Andrea Semple, who is the first reader I write for, and the first one to tell me what is and isn’t working, and who is a daily inspiration. The one I always want to stop time for.

Thank you.