So we walk along, myself and Abraham, with all the exhaust fumes in our faces.
‘There used to be a well here,’ I tell him, as we pass a betting shop. ‘And here, right here, that’s where all the men used to play skittles after church on a Sunday.’
A teenage boy passes us, in turned-up trousers and an oversized ‘The Hundreds’ T-shirt, looking like an oblivious distant echo of a seventeenth-century London boy of his age in rhinegrave breeches and overskirt. The boy looks up from his phone and glances at me with quizzical and disapproving eyes. To him I am just another loose-screwed London loner, talking to myself. Maybe he is going to be one of the pupils I will be teaching on Monday.
We cross over the road. We pass a lamppost with an advert tied to it. THE CANDLELIGHT CLUB. Relive the Roaring Twenties at London’s top speakeasy-themed cocktail bar. My headache intensifies, and I close my eyes and a memory rises like a cough – playing ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ at Ciro’s piano bar in Paris, with a stranger’s hand resting softly on my shoulder.
I am in the park now. I hadn’t played the piano for years, I realise. I am fine with that, most of the time. I have long convinced myself that the piano is like a drug, seductive and strong, and it can mess you up, it can awaken dead emotions, it can drown you in your lost selves. It is a nervous breakdown waiting to happen. I wonder if I will ever play again. I unclip the lead from Abraham’s collar and he stays by my side and looks up at me, confused, as if perplexed by the concept of freedom.
I relate.
As I stare around the park I see a man with a Bichon Frise discreetly scoop up shit with a plastic bag. A squirrel darts in jerky zigzags up the trunk of a beech tree. The sun climbs out from behind a cloud. Abraham trots away.
It is then that I notice her.
A woman sitting on a bench, reading, a short distance away. I recognise her, which itself is rare. I hardly pay much attention to what people look like any more. Faces blur into other faces. But I know instantly this is the woman I saw out of the window of Daphne’s office. The French teacher. As then, she seems wholly herself. It takes a lot to be unique in a species of so many. She has style. I don’t mean in what she is wearing (corduroy blazer, jeans, glasses), though that is perfectly fine. I mean in the easeful way in which she places the book down beside her on the bench and stares around at the park. In the way she puffs out her cheeks a little and blows and closes her eyes and tilts her head up to invite the sun. I look away. I am a man in a park looking at a woman. I could be anyone. It isn’t 1832 any more.
But then, as I look away from her, she calls over.
‘Your dog is lovely.’ She has a French accent. The new French. Yes. It is definitely the same woman I had seen. She holds out the back of her hand for Abraham to smell. Abraham licks his gratitude, and even wags his tail.
‘You’re honoured.’
And then she looks up at me in a rather unsettling way. A little too long. I am not arrogant enough to believe I am so attractive it is difficult for her to turn away. In reality, I haven’t had those sort of looks from anyone for at least a hundred years. In the 1700s, when I looked in my twenties and wore my grief like a scar, I was often the subject of long, lingering gazes, but not these days. No. She is looking at me for another reason. And that troubles me. Maybe she had seen me too, at the school. Yeah. That was probably it.
‘Abraham! Abraham! Here, boy! Here!’
The dog pants his way to me and I clip on his lead and I walk away, even as I feel her eyes on the back of my neck.
At home, I start looking at lesson plans for the year sevens, and the first topic to appear on the dim-lit screen is ‘Witch Trials in Tudor England’, which I already know is integral to the syllabus.
I realise there is a reason I am doing this. Why I want to become a history teacher. I need to tame the past. That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can’t be tamed.
My brain suddenly hurts.
I rise and walk kitchenward and find myself making a Bloody Mary. Basic. No stick of celery. I play some music, simply because music sometimes helps. I resist Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, and Billie Holiday, and my sea shanty Spotify playlist, and go for ‘The Boys of Summer’ by Don Henley, which was written yesterday (actually, 1984). I have liked this song ever since I first heard it – in Germany in the eighties. I don’t know why. It always makes me think of my childhood, even though it was made centuries after it. It reminds me of the poignant French chansons Maman used to sing, the ones she chose after we had moved to England. The sad, nostalgic ones. And I think, as the headache continues, how the pain in John Gifford’s head all that time ago must have been a whole infinity worse. And I close my eyes and feel those early memories come rolling back, with the power to thin the air.
Suffolk, England, 1599
This is what I remember. My mother sat beside my bed, singing in French and playing her cherrywood lute, her fingers running fast across the strings as if escaping something.
Normally, music was her escape. I never saw my mother more calm than when she was gently singing an air de cour, but this evening something was troubling her.
She was a beautiful singer, and always closed her eyes when she sang, as if songs were dreams or memories, but today her eyes were open. She was staring at me with that vertical crease in her forehead. It was the crease that always appeared whenever she thought about Father, or the trouble in France. She stopped playing. She set down the lute. A gift from the Duke of Rochefort, when I was still a baby.
‘You do not change.’
‘Maman, please. Not again.’
‘There is not a hair on your face. You are eighteen now. But you still look much as you did five years ago.’
‘Maman, I cannot help the way I look.’
‘It is as though time has stopped for you, Estienne.’
She still called me Estienne at home, even if I was always Thomas in public.
I tried to hide my own worry and reassure her. ‘Time hasn’t stopped. The sun still sets and rises. Summer still follows spring. I have been working as hard as anyone my age.’
Mother stroked my hair. She could see only the child I still seemed to be.
‘I don’t want more bad things to happen.’
One of my earliest memories came to me: of her howling with grief and burying her face in a tapestry hanging in the hall of our vast home in France, on the day we found out my father had been killed by cannon-fire on a battlefield near Reims.
‘I will be fine.’
‘Yes. I know the money from thatching is good, but maybe you should stop working for Mr Carter. Everyone can see you, up on the Giffords’ roof, thatching. And they talk. Everyone is talking now. It’s a village.’
The irony was that, during my first thirteen years of life, I aged quickly. Not unnaturally quickly but certainly quicker than average. This was why Mr Carter had recruited me. I had been young, so he could pay me cheap, but I had been tall and broad and strong-armed for a thirteen-year-old. The trouble was, that after such fast development to suddenly slow to what seemed like no change at all must have made it more noticeable.
‘We should have gone to Canterbury,’ I said. ‘Or London.’