‘You are not an old woman, Grace.’ And she wasn’t. Not in age. Not in skin. Yet, still, the sadness and weight in her voice made me feel like it was a lie. And then I heard a reason for this.
‘How is she?’ I asked, voicing a question I’d had inside my head, through every single moment I had been without her.
‘Rose has it,’ she told me.
‘Has what?’
Grace didn’t have to say. I knew from her face. I felt a horrible coldness sink into me, clearing everything away.
‘She wants me nowhere near her for fear I catch it too. She will only speak to me from behind her door.’
‘I need to see her.’
‘She will not let you.’
‘Has she spoken of me?’
‘She misses you. It was all she was saying. That she should have never sent you away. That everything bad that happened has happened because she sent you away. She has never stopped thinking of you. She has never stopped loving you, Tom . . .’
I felt the prick of tears behind my eyes. I stared at her sleeping son. ‘Where does she live now? Where is Marion? I would love to know about Marion.’
Grace looked a little sheepish, clearly not knowing if she should say. She only answered my first question.
‘Rose doesn’t want—’
‘I won’t catch it. I can’t. I would have caught it by now. I never catch anything.’
Grace thought, gently rocking her baby in the cool afternoon air. ‘All right, I will tell you . . .’
London, now
It is parents’ evening. I am sitting behind a table, having just taken my third ibuprofen of the hour, lost in a flashback. Thinking of that last conversation with Rose. That last time I saw her. No. Not thinking of it, actually living it, again, as I sit here in a hall with parents, all with smartphones in their pockets or hands. I am hearing her whisper, from when she lay in a bed less than five hundred metres from this hall.
There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy . . .
She had been talking of a hallucination, but the more those words echoed, the more it seemed like a statement on life.
‘It’s all right, Rose,’ I whisper to myself, like a madman, right there in the twenty-first century. ‘It’s all right . . .’
And then the other echo.
The one that reverberated day and night.
She was like you. You must try to find her. You must try to look after her . . .
‘I’m sorry, Rose. I’m sorry . . .’
Another voice breaks through. A voice from right now. A voice from across the table.
‘Are you all right, Mr Hazard?’
It is Anton Campbell’s mother, Claire. She is staring at me, confused.
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. I was just . . . I’m sorry, I was just thinking of something . . . Anyway, you were about to tell me something. Please, go ahead.’
‘I want to thank you,’ she says.
‘Thank me?’
‘I have never seen Anton more engaged with his schoolwork than he is with history. He’s even been getting books out from the library. All kinds of things. It’s so good to see. He says you really make it come alive.’
It is tempting, of course, to tell her that her son’s friend had threatened to stab me, but I don’t. I actually feel a bit proud.
I can’t really remember feeling pride. I hadn’t felt like this since I helped Marion to read Montaigne and play ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ on the pipe. Hendrich always said I should be proud of the work I do for the society, but I had only felt good on occasion, such as when I’d gone up to Yorkshire to help rescue Flora. Generally, though, the work for the society had been a bit tense, and at worst soul-destroying. This, though, is different. This feels good in a solid, sustainable kind of way.
‘I’d been so worried about him . . . You know, he was drifting a little. A boy. Fourteen. He was very lost in himself. Hanging out with the wrong crowd. Getting in a little late . . .’
‘Oh, really?’
‘Wouldn’t talk to me much . . . But now he’s really getting back on track. So thank you. Thank you.’
‘Well, he’s a very bright young man. His essays on the Second World War and the British Empire’s role in the slave trade were really good. He’s on track for As.’
‘He wants to go to university. And do history. Which, you know, these days . . . it’s going to be expensive. But I want him to go. Which is why I am working every hour God sends. And God sends some crazy hours. But he’s determined. He wants to go.’
I feel a swell of pride. This. This right here is why I wanted to become a teacher. To know that it is possible to change the world for the better, in however small a way.
‘That is a brilliant . . .’ I look over at one of the tables across the sports hall. Camille is between parents. I notice her take off her glasses and rub her eyes. She doesn’t look very well. She is staring down at the papers on her little table, trying to focus.
I bring my mind back to Mrs Campbell. Or try to. My mind is haunting me with images: Rose’s dead face, Marion with her book, a house being devoured by flames.
When the city had burned, in 1666, I took part in the firefighting efforts and contemplated walking suicidally into one of the burning shops that, before the blaze, lined either side of London Bridge.
‘Yes,’ I say, trying to reassure Mrs Campbell that I am listening. ‘Yes, I bet.’
Then, suddenly, and with no warning, Camille falls off her chair. Her ribs hit the side of the table on her way down to the floor. Then her legs start to spasm violently. She is having some kind of fit, right there on the floor of the sports hall in the middle of parents’ evening.
I had been conditioned, even before I had knowledge of the Albatross Society, not to get involved in the heat of the moment. To float through life with a cool detachment. But that doesn’t seem to work any more. Maybe that youngest version of my adult self was returning. The one which had jumped off a theatre gallery to protect Rose and her sister.
Before I know it I am there, right over her, as Daphne comes running. Camille’s whole body is jerking now.
‘Pull the table back!’ I tell Daphne.
She does so. Then she asks another member of staff to call an ambulance.
I hold Camille steady.
There is a crowd. Only this is a twenty-first century crowd, so everyone’s macabre fascination is tempered with at least the semblance of concern.
She stops convulsing, and comes around, her confusion delaying her embarrassment. For a minute or so, she says nothing, just concentrates on my face.
Daphne brings some water. ‘Let’s all give her some room,’ she says to the parents and staff. ‘Come on, guys and gals, let’s all step back a little . . .’
‘It’s okay,’ I tell Camille. ‘You just had a seizure.’
Just. That sounds terrible.
‘Where . . . where . . . I . . . ?’
She looks around a little. She gets up, on her elbows, then sits up fully. She is weak. Something has been taken from her. Along with Daphne I help settle her back in her seat.
‘Where am I?’
‘The sports hall.’ Daphne’s smile is reassuring. ‘You’re at work. At the school. It’s all right, lovely, it’s just a . . . You’ve had some kind of a seizure . . .’
‘School,’ she says sleepily, to herself.