Sure, I have no idea how long I will stay as one, once I go public about who I am. I might have the job for a week or a month or a decade. I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Everything in life is uncertain. That is how you know you are existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, this is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or we think we do. It’s a song we’ve heard.
And it’s good to think of the past.
Those who cannot remember the past, observed the philosopher George Santayana in 1905, are condemned to repeat it. And you only need to switch on the news to see the dreadful repetitions, the terrible unlearned lessons, the twenty-first century slowly becoming a crude cover version of the twentieth.
But, although you can gaze at the past, you can’t visit it. Not really. I can’t sit by a tree in a forest and have my mother sing to me. I can’t walk along Fairfield Road and see Rose and her sister again, selling fruit out of a basket. I can’t cross the old London Bridge and enter Elizabethan Southwark. I can’t go back and offer more words of comfort to Rose in that dark house on Chapel Street. I can’t ever see Marion as a little girl again. I can’t go back to a time when the world’s map wasn’t known. I can’t walk snowy streets lined with beautiful Victorian streetlamps and choose not to visit Dr Hutchinson. I can’t go back to 1891 and tell myself not to follow Agnes onto the Etruria.
The yellow bird sits on a windowsill for a while and then it flies away. That is nature. There are things I have experienced that I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was – is – a one-way street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don’t always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.
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.’
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.