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.
There is only the present. Just as every object on earth contains similar and interchanging atoms, so every fragment of time contains aspects of every other.
Yes.
It is clear. In those moments that burst alive the present lasts for ever, and I know there are many more presents to live. I understand. I understand you can be free. I understand that the way you stop time is by stopping being ruled by it. I am no longer drowning in my past, or fearful of my future. How can I be?
The future is you.
Acknowledgements
Thank you for reading this book. That is the first acknowledgement to make. A book only becomes real by being read, so thank you for giving my daydream a reality. I wanted to write a book that you enjoyed reading and I enjoyed writing, and I guarantee I achieved at least the latter. I have never had as much fun writing a book. It was time travel and a therapy session in one, minus the psychiatrist’s fees and the DeLorean.
I first had the idea of writing it as I was writing another novel, The Humans. That had been a book that was really about placing our small but wonderful human lives within the vast context of the universe. So whereas the perspective of that was space, I wanted the perspective of this one to be time. The way time can comfort us and terrify us, and the way it makes us appreciate the scale and precious texture of our lives.
Anyway, wanting to write something is not the same as writing it. And I am very lucky to have an editor like Francis Bickmore who always understands the essence of what I am trying to do, and helps me get there. Indeed, I am grateful to Jamie Byng and all at Canongate, for giving me the freedom to write the books I want to write and for publishing them so well. Particular mentions to Jenny Todd, Jenny Fry, Pete Adlington, Claire Maxwell, Jo Dingley, Neal Price, Andrea Joyce, Caroline Clarke, Jessica Neale, Alice Shortland, Alan Trotter, Rona Williamson and Megan Reid.