‘Well, I love music. I love playing music. But I’d find it a hard thing to teach. I’ve always found it hard to talk about music.’
‘Unlike history?’
‘Unlike history.’
‘And you seem up to speed with the current curriculum.’
‘Yes,’ I lie, easily. ‘Absolutely.’
‘And you’re still on the young side of things.’
I shrug, and make the kind of face I think you are meant to make.
‘I’m fifty-six so forty-one is young, trust me.’
Fifty-six is young.
Eighty-eight is young.
One hundred and thirty is young.
‘Well, I am quite an old forty-one.’
She smiles at me. She clicks the top of her pen. Then clicks it again. Each one is a moment. The first click, the pause between the click, and the second click. The longer you live, the harder it becomes. To grab them. Each little moment as it arrives. To be living in something other than the past or the future. To be actually here.
Forever, Emily Dickinson said, is composed of nows. But how do you inhabit the now you are in? How do you stop the ghosts of all the other nows from getting in? How, in short, do you live?
I am drifting away.
It has been happening a lot recently. I had heard about this. Other albas had spoken about it. You reached the mid-point of your life, and the thoughts got too much. The memories swell. The headaches grow. The headache today isn’t so bad, but it is there.
I try to concentrate. I try to hold on to that other now, a short few seconds ago, where I was enjoying the interview. Enjoying the feeling of relative ordinariness. Or the illusion of it.
There is no ordinary.
Not for me.
I try to concentrate. I look at Daphne as she shakes her head and laughs, but softly now, at something she doesn’t disclose. Something sad, I feel, from the sudden glazing of her eyes. ‘Well, Tom, I am quite impressed by you and this application, I must say.’
Tom.
Tom Hazard.
My name – my original name – was Estienne Thomas Ambroise Christophe Hazard. That was the starting point. Since then I have had many, many names, and been many, many things. But, on my first arrival into England, I quickly lost the trimmings and became just Tom Hazard.
Now, using that name again, it feels like a return. It echoes in my head. Tom. Tom. Tom. Tom.
‘You tick all the boxes. But even if you didn’t you’d be getting the job.’
‘Oh, really. Why?’
She raises her eyebrows. ‘There’s no other applicant!’
We both laugh a little at that.
But the laugh dies faster than a mayfly.
Because then she says, ‘I live on Chapel Street. I wonder if you know anything about that?’
And, of course, I do know about that, and the question wakes me like a cold wind. My headache pulses harder. I picture an apple bursting in an oven. I shouldn’t have come back here. I should never have asked Hendrich for this to happen. I think of Rose, the last time I saw her, and those wide desperate eyes.
‘Chapel Street. I don’t know. No. No, I’m afraid I don’t know.’
‘Don’t worry.’ She sips her coffee.
I look at the poster of Shakespeare. He seems to be staring at me, like an old friend. There is a quote below his image.
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
‘I have a feeling about you, Tom. You have to trust your feelings, don’t you?’
‘I suppose so,’ I say, though feelings were the one thing I had never trusted.
She smiles.
I smile.
I stand up, and head to the door. ‘See you in September.’
‘Ha! September. September. It will fly by. Time, you see. That’s another thing about getting older. Time speeds up.’
‘I wish,’ I whisper.
But she doesn’t hear, because then she says, ‘And children.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Children are another thing that seem to make life go faster. I have three. Oldest is twenty-two. Graduated last year. Yesterday she was playing with her Lego; today she’s collecting the keys to her new flat. Twenty-two years in a blink of an eye. Do you have any?’
I grip the door handle. This is a moment, too. And inside it, a thousand others come painfully alive.
‘No,’ I say, because it is easier than the truth, ‘I don’t.’
She seems, for a brief moment, a little awkward. I think she is about to comment on this but instead she says, ‘See you soon, Mr Hazard.’
I step out into the corridor that smells of the same disinfectant, where two teenagers lean against the wall, staring down at their phones as devoutly as old priests with prayer books. I turn back to see Daphne looking towards her computer.
‘Yes. See you soon.’
As I walk out of Daphne Bello’s office, and out of the school, I am in the twenty-first century but also the seventeenth.
As I walk the mile or so to Chapel Street – a stretch of betting shops and pavements and bus-stops and concrete lampposts and half-hearted graffiti – I am almost in a trance. The streets feel too wide. And when I get to Chapel Street I discover what I of course know: the houses that had once been there no longer are, replaced by ones built in the late 1800s, tall and red-bricked and as austere as the time of their design.
At the corner, where I had known a small deserted church, and a watchman, there is now a KFC. The red plastic throbs like a wound. I walk along with my eyes closed, trying to sense how far along the street the house had originally been and I come to a stop after twenty or so steps. I open my eyes to see a semi-detached house that bears no physical relation to the house I had arrived at all those centuries ago. The unmarked door is now a modern blue. The window reveals a living room complete with a TV. Someone is playing a video game on it. An alien explodes on the screen.
My headache pounds and I feel weak and I have to step back, almost as if the past is something that could thin the air, or affect the laws of gravity. I lean back against a car, lightly, but enough to set off the alarm.
And the noise is loud, like a wail of pain, howling all the way from 1623, and I walk briskly away from the house, then the street, wishing I could just as easily walk away from the past.
London, 1623
I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.
And my point, for a while, was Rose.
But after she was gone so many of the good memories were clouded by the last. An end that was also a terrible beginning. That final day I had with her. Because it is this day, the one where I headed to Chapel Street to see her, that has defined so many over the centuries.
So . . .
I was standing outside her door.
I had knocked and waited and knocked again.
The watchman, who I had passed at the corner of the street, was now approaching.
‘It is a marked house, lad.’
‘Yes. I know that.’
‘You must not go in there . . . It is unsafe.’
I held out my hand. ‘Stand back. I am cursed with it too. Do not get any closer.’
This was a lie, of course, but an effective one. The watchman stepped back away from me, with considerable haste.
‘Rose,’ I said, through the door. ‘It’s me. It’s me. Tom. I just saw Grace. By the river. She told me you were here . . .’