headache pounds and I feel weak and I have to step back, almost as if the past is something that could thin the air, or affect the laws of gravity. I lean back against a car, lightly, but enough to set off the alarm.
And the noise is loud, like a wail of pain, howling all the way from 1623, and I walk briskly away from the house, then the street, wishing I could just as easily walk away from the past.
London, 1623
I have been in love only once in my life. I suppose that makes me a romantic, in a sense. The idea that you have one true love, that no one else will compare after they have gone. It’s a sweet idea, but the reality is terror itself. To be faced with all those lonely years after. To exist when the point of you has gone.
And my point, for a while, was Rose.
But after she was gone so many of the good memories were clouded by the last. An end that was also a terrible beginning. That final day I had with her. Because it is this day, the one where I headed to Chapel Street to see her, that has defined so many over the centuries.
So . . .
I was standing outside her door.
I had knocked and waited and knocked again.
The watchman, who I had passed at the corner of the street, was now approaching.
‘It is a marked house, lad.’
‘Yes. I know that.’
‘You must not go in there . . . It is unsafe.’
I held out my hand. ‘Stand back. I am cursed with it too. Do not get any closer.’
This was a lie, of course, but an effective one. The watchman stepped back away from me, with considerable haste.
‘Rose,’ I said, through the door. ‘It’s me. It’s me. Tom. I just saw Grace. By the river. She told me you were here . . .’
It took a while, but I heard her voice, from inside. ‘Tom?’
It had been years since I had heard that voice.
‘Oh, Rose, open the door. I need to see you.’
‘I can’t, Tom. I am sick.’
‘I know. But I won’t catch it. I have been around many plague sufferers these last months and I have had not so much as a cold. Come on, Rose, open the door.’
She did so.
And she was there, a woman. We were the same age, near enough, but now she looked like she was nearing fifty, while I still seemed a teenager.
Her skin was grey. Sores patterned her face like territories on a map. She could hardly stand up. I felt guilty that I had made her leave her bed but she seemed pleased to see me. She talked, semi-coherently, as I helped her back into bed.
‘You look so young, still . . . You are still a young man . . . a boy, almost.’
‘I have a little line, in my forehead. Look.’
I held her hand. She couldn’t see the line.
‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I am sorry I told you to leave.’
‘It was the right thing. Just my existence was a danger to you.’
I should also say, in case it needs saying: I don’t know for sure that the words I write were the words that were actually spoken. They probably weren’t. But this is how I remember these things, and all we can ever be is faithful to our memories of reality, rather than the reality itself, which is something closely related but never precisely the same thing.
Though I am absolutely sure, word for word, she then said: ‘There is a darkness that fringes everything. It is a most horrid ecstasy.’ And I felt the horror of her horror. That, I suppose, is a price we pay for love: the absorbing of another’s pain as if our own.
She drifted in and out of delirium.
The illness was taking further hold, almost by the minute. She was now the opposite of me. While for me life stretched out towards an almost infinitely distant point in the future, for Rose the end was now galloping closer.
It was dark in the house. All the windows had been boarded up. But as she lay on the bed in her damp night clothes, I could see her face shining like pale marble, the red and grey patches colonising her skin. Her neck was swollen with egg-sized lumps. It was terrible, a kind of violation, to see her transformed like this.
‘It’s all right, Rose. It’s all right.’
Her eyes were wide with fear, almost as if something was inside her skull, slowly pushing from behind.
‘Soft, soft, soft . . . All will be well . . .’
It was such a ridiculous thing to say. All was not going to be well.
She moaned a little. Her body writhed in pain.
‘You must go.’ Her voice was dry.
I leaned over and kissed her brow.
‘Careful,’ she said.
‘It is safe.’ In truth, I didn’t know for certain if that was true. I thought it was, but couldn’t know it, having only lived forty-two years on earth (and looking little more than the sixteen Rose first thought I was). But I didn’t care. Life had lost its value in the years away from her.
Even though I hadn’t seen Rose since 1603 the love was still there, exactly as strong, and now it was hurting. It was hurting more than any physical pain could try to.
‘We were happy, weren’t we, Tom?’ The faintest echo of a smile was on her face now. I remembered walking past Oat Barn carrying heavy pails of water, on some long-lost Tuesday morning, content in our chatter. I remembered the joy of her smile and her body, when it had writhed from pleasure not pain, and of trying to be quiet so her sister wouldn’t wake. I remembered long walks back from Bankside, dodging the stray dogs and slithering in mud, comforted by nothing but the thought that she would be at the end of the journey home, and be the point of it.
All those times, all those talks, all that everything, reduced to the simplest most elemental truth.
‘We were . . . I love you, Rose. I love you so much.’
I wanted to hold her up and feed her a rabbit pie and some cherries and make her well again. I could see she was in so much pain that she just wanted to die now but I didn’t know what that would mean. I didn’t know how the world would stay together.
There was also something else I wanted. An answer that I hoped dearly she would have.
‘Sweetheart, where is Marion?’ I asked.
She stared at me a long time. I readied myself for some terrible news. ‘She
