‘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.
