I no longer go to the supermarket at lunch. Instead I make my own sandwich in the morning. But I’m not even hungry, so I just sit there, eyes closed.
When I open them I see Isham, the geography teacher, busy working out which sachet of herbal tea to put in his mug.
I also see Camille.
She is on the other side of the room and is peeling open her carton of salad. She has apple juice too, and a book, which she is using as a kind of makeshift little tray.
Daphne, taking a clementine from the communal fruit bowl, gives me a smile that might be a smirk. ‘How are you, Tom? How are things going?’
‘Good,’ I say. ‘I feel good.’
She nods, knowing it is a lie. ‘It will get better. The first ten years here are always the hardest.’ She laughs, and heads out of the staff room to her office.
I feel bad about Camille. I had been rude to her the last time we had spoken. I notice now that she is taking something out of her pocket. A pill. She swallows it down with the help of some apple juice.
I should just stay in my seat.
That is what Hendrich would want me to do. I mean, it is now – from an Albatross Society point of view – perfect. Camille will probably never speak to me again.
Yet, here I am, crossing the room.
‘I just want to say sorry,’ I tell her.
‘What for?’ she says, which is good of her.
I sit down, so I can speak to her at a lower volume, and less suspiciously. Another teacher, a maths teacher called Stephanie, is frowning at us as she eats a plum.
‘I didn’t mean to be so weird. So rude.’
‘Well, some people can’t help it. Some people are just like that.’
‘Well, I didn’t mean to be.’
‘What we are and what we mean are different things. It’s fine. The world makes it very hard not to be a prick.’
She just says it casually, gently. I have never been so insulted so delicately.
I try to explain without explaining. ‘I’m just . . . I have a lot of stuff going on, and I have one of those faces. Generic. I get a lot of people thinking I’m a friend of a friend. Or some actor they’ve seen on TV.’
She nods, unconvinced. ‘That’s probably it, then. Let’s say it’s that.’
I then notice the book beneath Camille’s salad. It is a novel. I wonder if it is the novel she had been reading that day I saw her in the park. A Penguin Classic. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with a photograph of the author on the front cover.
She must have seen me staring. ‘Oh, have you read it? What do you think?’
I find it hard to talk. The memories jam my mind, like too many open windows on a computer, or too much water in a boat.
My headache rises.
‘I . . . I . . . don’t know . . .’ Each word feels like an oar in the water. ‘Boats against the current,’ I say aloud.
‘Boats against the current? Gatsby?’
I hold my breath and I am now in a staff room in London and a bar in Paris all at once, torn between centuries, between place and time, now and then, water and air.
Paris, 1928
I was on my own, walking the long walk home from the grand hotel where I had been doing my shift, playing the piano for the rich Americans and Europeans who were enjoying tea or cocktails. I felt alone. I needed to be around people, to mask the loneliness inside myself. So I headed into the thronging buzz of Harry’s Bar, as I did on occasion. Almost everyone in there was from somewhere else, which was always the kind of crowd I liked.
I fought my way to the bar and found a place next to a glamorous couple with matching centre partings.
The man looked at me, and maybe sensed my loneliness.
‘Try the Bloody Mary,’ he said.
‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the thing. A cocktail. Zee loves it, don’t you, sweetheart?’
The woman looked at me with sad, heavy eyes. She was either drunk or ready for sleep or both. They both looked pretty drunk, now that I thought about it. She nodded. ‘It is a great ally in the war.’
‘Which war is that?’ I wondered aloud.
‘The war against boredom. It is a very real war. It is a war in which the enemy is all around us.’
I ordered the Bloody Mary. I was surprised to see it involved tomato juice. The man eyeballed the woman sternly. It was hard to tell if it was fake stern or the real deal. ‘I have to say I feel mildly insulted when you talk like that, Zee.’
‘Oh, not you, Scott . . . you haven’t been too dull. This has been one of your better evenings.’
It was then he held out his hand. ‘Scott Fitzgerald. And this is Zelda.’
The great thing about being deep into your fourth century was that you rarely got star struck, but even so it was quite something to accidentally happen upon the author of the book that was beside your bed.
‘I’ve just finished reading your book, The Great Gatsby. And I read This Side of Paradise when it came out.’
He suddenly seemed sober. ‘What did you make of it? Of Gatsby? Everyone prefers Paradise. Everyone. My publishers struggle on with the poor thing, out of pity mainly.’
Zelda made a face as if she was about to be sick. ‘That dust jacket. Ernest is so seldom right about anything but he was right about that. It is a war against eyes.’
‘Not everything is a war, sweetheart.’
‘Of course it is, Scott.’
They looked like they were about to squabble, so I interjected: ‘Well, I thought it was exceptional. The book, I mean.’
Zelda nodded. She looked like a child, I realised. They both did. They looked like children dressing up in grown-up clothes. There was such a fragile innocence to them.
‘I try to tell him it is good,’ she said. ‘You can tell him and tell him and tell him but it is just raindrops against the roof.’
Scott seemed relieved I liked it, though. ‘Well, that makes you a better person than the guy at the Herald Tribune. Now, there’s your drink . . .’ He handed me the Bloody Mary.
‘They invented it here, you know,’ said Zelda.
I sipped the strange drink. ‘Did they really?’
And then Scott interrupted and said, ‘Tell us, what do you do?’
‘I play piano. At Ciro’s.’
‘As in the Paris Ciro’s?’ he asked. ‘Rue Daunou? How wonderful. You win already.’
Zelda took a long mouthful of some kind of gin cocktail. ‘What are you scared of?’
Scott smiled apologetically. ‘It’s her drunk question. Every time.’
‘Scared of?’
‘Everyone is scared of something. I’m scared of bedtime. And housekeeping. And all the things you have housemaids for. Scott is scared of reviews. And Hemingway. And loneliness.’
‘I am not scared of Hemingway.’
I tried to think. I wanted, for once, to give an honest answer. ‘I’m scared of time.’
Zelda smiled, leaning her head in a kind of glazed sympathy, or resignation. ‘You mean growing old?’
‘No, I mean—’
‘Scotty and I don’t plan to grow old, do we?’
‘The plan is,’ Scott added, with exaggerated seriousness, ‘to hop from one childhood to the next.’