The Thief of Time (35 page)

‘But where will you go?' I asked her and she touched my arm gently in thanks.

‘Don't worry about me,' she said. ‘I will go downstairs to my parents' home. With any luck they will not have heard of my behaviour yet. I'll sleep there tonight and make my plans in the morning. Thank you, Matthieu. You have been a great help.'

She kissed me on the cheek before disappearing through the door. Alexandra Jennings, self-styled bearer of a Scarlet Letter, sole inhabitant of a world which she created for herself on a daily basis.

May Day arrived and with it the opening day of the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations'. I was in the Crystal Palace from five in the morning, seeing to the final preparations, making sure that all those in the receiving line would be in their places in time for the opening ceremony. Although it was quite warm out, there was a slight drizzle in the air which I hoped would clear up by mid-morning, when most of the carriages would be en route. Over half a million people were expected to gather in Hyde Park that morning, awaiting the arrival of the foreign dignitaries along with the young Queen Victoria and her family. The building had been finally finished, with the very last touches added only hours earlier. As far as the eye could see were arranged the displays and exhibits, containing everything from chinaware to steam engines, hydraulic pumps to national costumes, butterflies to butter churns. The colours and ornaments stretched out in a rainbow of display beneath the glass surroundings and there was a constant sound of the intake of breath as the visitors passed through, amazed by the wondrous sights which greeted them at every juncture. The Queen herself arrived at lunch time and formally declared the Exhibition open. The foreign delegates were presented to her before Sir Joseph Paxton himself gave her a tour of the British exhibits and she later wrote of the experience in her diaries with admiration for the craftsmanship that had gone into the preparations.

It was near midnight by the time I returned home to my rooms but I felt as if the time had passed by within about the space of an hour. I could hardly recall a day so filled with excitement and the luminescence of artistry as had been gathered before me then. The Exhibition was a success – eventually over six million people would pass through it – and all the hard work which had gone into it had paid off. Although I felt gratified by my work, I could see what a small hand I had actually played in the preparations and contented myself with the knowledge that I had managed to take even a tiny role in one of the great events of recent times.

I settled down with a book and a glass of wine; naturally I was exhausted but decided to wind down a little before going to bed. I was expected back at the Crystal Palace the following morning and so required sleep if I was to be of any use whatsoever. I thought I could hear a commotion coming from downstairs in the Jennings household but gave it barely a thought until footsteps came charging up in my direction and someone attempted to gain entry to my room, which I had locked after coming in.

I stepped quickly towards it and was about to shout out to ask who was on the other side when I heard the familiar voice of Richard, raised in anger for the first time, calling my name as he banged on the door with a clenched fist.

‘Richard,' I said, opening it at once, fearing that he was being attacked on the other side and before I could say another word he pushed through, driving me against the far wall and holding me there with his hand pinning me by the throat. The room spun in my surprise and it was a few moments before I realised exactly what was taking place. I kicked out but, in his anger, his strength had increased and it took the sensible actions of his wife to pull him away from me. I collapsed on to the floor, coughing and spluttering, and holding my wounded throat with one hand.

‘What in God's name -?' I began before he cut me off by kicking out at my prostrate form, cursing me for a dog and a traitor.

‘Richard, get off him,' roared Betty, grabbing her husband with equal force and pushing him back until he landed on my sofa. I took advantage of this moment to struggle to my feet and prepare a defensive position for another attack.

‘You'll pay for this, Zéla,' he roared and I looked from husband to wife in amazement, unsure what crime I could have possibly committed to receive such treatment from my sometime friend.

‘I don't understand,' I said, looking to Betty for an explanation, expecting her to be slightly more open to reason than her husband. ‘What's going on here? What am I supposed to have done?'

‘She's just a
child,
Mr Zéla,' said Betty, bursting into tears, and I feared that she might attack me next. ‘Couldn't you have left her alone? Just a
child.'

‘Who is just a child?' I asked, shaking my head, pleased to note that, although Richard had taken control of himself again and was looking furiously in my direction, he did not appear poised for another attack.

‘You'll marry her,' he said to me before looking at his wife and speaking as if I was not in the room. ‘Do you hear that, missus? He'll marry her. There's no other choice.'

‘Marry
who7.'
I begged, sure that I had caused no offence to anyone that could merit such a terrible punishment. ‘Who on earth am I to marry?'

‘It's Alexandra, of course,' said Betty, looking at me irritably as if to suggest that I should get past the denials and move straight on to the retribution. ‘Who do you think we're talking about?'

‘
Alexandra?'
I roared, finally unsurprised. ‘Why on earth would I marry Alexandra?'

‘Because you have tarnished her, you cur,' cried Richard. ‘You stand there, look at the cut of him will ya, and deny it? Do you? Well?'

‘I most certainly do,' I said firmly. ‘I most
certainly
do. I haven't so much as touched your daughter.'

‘The lying -' He sprang from his seat but this time I was ready for him and punched him in the nose as he leaped towards me. Although I had not intended on hitting him hard – merely hoping that the blow would prevent him from attacking me again – I immediately heard the sickening crunch of a bone breaking and I gasped as he fell to the floor, blood pouring from the centre of his face as he cried out in pain.

‘What have you done?' gasped Betty, rushing to her husband's side and screaming as she pulled his hands away to see the torrent of blood coming from his broken nose. ‘Oh, call the police!' she cried out to no one in particular. ‘The police, someone! Murder! Murder!'

By three O'clock the following morning the story was settled. Alexandra and I were both summoned to Richard Jennings's kitchen where we stood sullenly on opposite sides, staring each other down. I had explained privately to Betty Jennings the conversations I had already had with her daughter and she had shown little surprise by them. The doctor had treated her husband's nose and he sat there sulking, his face purple with bruising, his eyes baggy and bloodshot.

‘Alexandra,' I said quietly, looking in her direction and pleading for honesty, ‘you must tell them the truth. For both our sakes, please.'

‘The truth is, he promised to marry me,' said Alexandra. ‘He said that if I ... if I let him have his way with me he'd take me away from here. Said he had all the money in the world.'

‘A couple of months ago she was marrying the Prince of Wales!' I cried in annoyance. ‘Then she was having relations with a character straight out of
The Scarlet Letter!
She's mad, Mrs Jennings, mad!'

‘You promised!' roared Alexandra.

‘I did no such thing!'

‘You have to marry me now!'

‘Child, shut up!' screamed Betty Jennings, most likely feeling that enough was enough. ‘That's an end to it, both of you. Alexandra, I want the truth now and there's neither of us leaving this kitchen until I get it. Mr Zéla, you go on back up to your rooms and I'll be up to you presently.' I moved to protest but there was no arguing with her.
‘Presently,
Mr Zéla!' I returned to my rooms.

I met Richard the following afternoon as I was supervising an area occupied by the Cornish Quiltmakers' Association. If anything, his face seemed even worse than it had the night before but he approached me sheepishly and immediately apologised for his behaviour.

‘She's always been like that, you see,' he explained. ‘I don't know why it is that I fall for it every time. But when a man thinks his daughter's been tampered with, well -'

‘Really,' I said, ‘there's no need to explain. But you realise that there is something wrong with the girl, don't you? She's told me some wonderful tales over these last few months. I believed some of them at first too. I promise you, she'll land herself in a heap of trouble one of these days if she's not very careful.'

‘I know, I know,' he said, looking sad and dejected. ‘But it's not as simple as all that. She's just blessed with an over-active imagination, that's all.'

‘Please,' I replied, ‘there's a difference between an imagination and a downright lie. Particularly when the person passing it off as the truth actually believes what they're saying.'

‘Right enough,' he acknowledged.

‘So what are you going to do about her?' I asked after an incredibly annoying period of silence had passed. ‘You realise I'll have to move out because of this. She needs help, Richard. Medical help.'

‘Well, sir,' said Richard, turning and taking my arm, pressing on the bone as if even now, despite his apology, it would have done him the world of good to knock me unconscious. ‘If you ask me it's better to be the harmless child that tells the stories than the gullible fool who believes them.' I gasped in surprise. He was excusing her behaviour, was that it?

‘Your daughter should be a novelist, sir,' I said angrily, pulling away from him. ‘She could probably find a way to fashion a brand new story on every single page.'

He shrugged and said nothing as I walked away.

A few years later, while holidaying in Cornwall, I caught sight of Alexandra Jennings once again. It was in a newspaper report in
The Times.
The brief article, dated 30 April 1857, stated the following:

Perhaps I was becoming an old cynic, but as I read it I found her alibi less than convincing. She had never been violent, in my experience, but I couldn't help but wonder what stories she had been spinning in the intervening time and what tales she would fashion from this disaster. I read a little further, but the article concerned itself with the events of the inquest, until the very last paragraph, which contained the following.

She may have been a fictionalist – she may have been a downright liar -but she managed to do something that neither God nor man had been able to do for one hundred and fourteen years before that or one hundred and twelve years since: she killed me off.

On 12 October, at four O'clock in the morning, I took a taxi to the City Hospital where my nephew Tommy lay in a coma, following a drugs overdose. He had been brought in by an anonymous friend towards midnight the night before, and Andrea – Tommy's pregnant girlfriend – had been contacted an hour later by the hospital, following a phone call made to his apartment, the number of which was in his wallet. Shortly after that, she phoned me, waking me up with a sense of
dead vu,
for it had been a similar late night phone call which had alerted me to James Hocknell's death a few months earlier.

I arrived, tired and bleary eyed, at the front reception desk, asked for directions to my nephew's room and was sent upstairs and towards intensive care, where I found him hooked up to a heart monitor with an intravenous tube inserted into a vein on his needle-marked arms. He looked perfectly peaceful, he even had a slight smile hovering about his lips, but I could see that his breathing was laboured and a little less than regular due to the uncertain movements of his chest. His heart rate and blood pressure were being constantly monitored and the sight of him lying there, a picture typically seen on a television medical show, was depressing but somehow inevitable.

While walking towards his room, I had noticed a small group of nurses hovering outside the window, staring in at him excitedly and I even heard one wonder how ‘Tina' would take the news if he died. ‘Perhaps she'd go straight back to Carl,' said another. ‘Them two were made for each other.'

‘He'd never forgive her. After what she did with his brother? Forget it,' said a third, but they all walked away when they saw me approach. I sighed. Such was the life my unfortunate nephew had set out for himself and such was the one he was damned to continue living.

A short history of the DuMarques: they have been an unfortunate line. Every one of them has had his life cut short, either by his own stupidity or by the machinations of the times. My own brother Tomas had a son, Tom, who died in the French Revolution; his son Tommy was shot during a card game for stealing aces; his unlucky son Thomas died when a jealous husband tried to run me through with a sword in Rome and ran him through instead; his son Tom caught malaria in Thailand; his son Thorn was killed in the Boer War; his son Tom was crushed by a speeding motor car in the Hollywood Hills; his son Thomas died at the end of the Second World War; his son Tomas was killed in a gangland riot; his son Tommy is a soap opera actor, lying in a coma following a drugs overdose.

I stood by the window myself for some time and watched him. Although I had been warning Tommy for so long about the chances of his ending up in this very condition, it shocked me to see him finally laid so low. Gone was the handsome, self-assured, bright young man who was recognised wherever he went, the celebrity, the star, the fashion plate; replaced by a mere body in a bed, breathing with the help of a machine, unable to turn away now from the prying eyes. I should have done more, I thought. This time, I should have done more.

I met Andrea for the first time in the waiting room a few minutes later. She was sitting there alone, drinking a cup of hospital coffee, in the typically sterile atmosphere which hardly encourages relaxation. The stench of disinfectant surrounded us and there was only one window, which didn't open and was in need of cleaning. Although I had never met Tommy's girlfriend before, I guessed it was her by her obvious pregnancy and the fact that she was shaking and staring at the ground.

‘Andrea?' I asked, leaning in towards her and touching her gently on the shoulder. ‘Are you Andrea?'

‘Yes ...' she said, looking at me as if I might be a doctor come to bring her the bad news.

‘I'm Matthieu Zéla,' I explained quickly. ‘We spoke earlier on the phone.'

‘Oh, yes,' she said, looking both relieved and disappointed at once. ‘Of course. We meet at last,' she added with an attempt at a smile. ‘Of all the places. Would you like some coffee? I could ...'

Her voice trailed off as I shook my head and sat down opposite her. She was wearing clothes that looked like they had been lying beside her bed before she'd crawled out of it. Dirty jeans, a T-shirt, running shoes without socks. Her dark blonde hair was curly but needed a wash and as she wore no make-up, her face had a natural beauty which appealed.

‘I don't know what happened to him,' she said, shaking her head miserably. ‘I wasn't even with him when it happened. Some friend of his brought him here and then disappeared. One of those hangers-on that are always lurking, hanging out of his coat, getting into clubs for free, trying to get a part or pick up girls.' She paused and looked suitably angry. ‘I
can't
believe he OD'd,' she said. ‘He's always so careful. He's supposed to
know
what he's doing.'

‘It's difficult to remain careful when you're high on drugs all the time,' I replied irritably. I find myself increasingly irritated by the young; the older I grow, the more distance that exists between myself and the current generation, the more maddening I find them. I had thought that the previous one – the generation born around the 1940s -was bad enough but everyone that I had ever encountered connected to my nephew, all of those born in the 1970s, seemed oblivious to the dangers the world presented them. It was as if they
all
believed they could live to be my age.

‘It was never
all
the time,' she retorted, and I noticed that she was already using the past tense in reference to him. ‘He liked a little something socially, that was all. No more than everyone else does.'

‘I
don't,' I said and I didn't have the first clue why I was behaving so puritanically; now I was irritating myself as well.

‘Well, then, you're a fucking saint, aren't you?' she shot back immediately.
‘You're
not in an incredibly stressful job, working eighteen hour days, being stared at wherever you go and always having to put on this ... this
display
for millions of people who don't even know you.'

‘I realise that. I'm -'

‘You don't know what it's -'

‘Andrea, I realise that,' I repeated firmly, silencing her with my tone. ‘I'm sorry. I know that my nephew leads a bizarre existence. I know it can't be easy for him. My God, I've heard him talk about it often enough. For now, though, I feel we should be thinking about his recovery and how we can prevent this from happening again, assuming he survives. Has a doctor spoken to you yet?'

She nodded. ‘Just before you got here,' she said, quieter now. ‘He said that the next twenty-four hours will be crucial, but I think they just train them to say that at medical school no matter what the situation is. It seems to me the next twenty-four hours are
always
crucial, whatever's going on. Either he'll wake up, in which case he'll be all right after a few days, or he could be brain damaged, or he'll stay like that. Lying there. In that bed. For God knows how long.' I nodded. In other words, the doctor had said nothing that a fool couldn't have diagnosed.

‘You're shaking,' I said after a reasonable pause, leaning across to take her hand. ‘And you're freezing cold. Shouldn't you get a jacket or something? The baby ...' I muttered, not quite sure what I was trying to say but feeling that there was a good chance she shouldn't be sitting around catching pneumonia when she was six months pregnant.

‘I'm all right,' she said, shaking her head. ‘I just want him to wake up. I love him, Mr Zéla,' she offered, almost apologetically.

‘Matthieu, please.'

‘I love him and I need him. That's all there is to it.'

I stared at her and wondered. My problem with Andrea was this: firstly, I didn't know the girl so I didn't know what her qualities were, what her position at work was, who her family were, what kind of money she earned, where she lived in London and how many people she shared with. I didn't know the first thing about her so it was perfectly reasonable of me to be suspicious.

On the other hand, I could have misjudged her. She could love him. Simple as that. She could know the sickening, aching pain that goes with love. She could know how it feels to be aware of someone's presence in a building, even when you're not together; she could know how it feels to be hurt and damaged and crucified by someone and still be unable to shake them from your head, no matter how hard you try, no matter how many years you are apart; she could know that, even years later, all it would take would be one phone call and you would go to them, drop everything, desert everyone, put the world on hold. She could feel those things for Tommy and I could be denying her that right.

‘The baby,' she said after a while. ‘He has to live for the baby's sake. That's what will make him hold on, isn't it? Well? Isn't it?'

I shrugged. I doubted it. I know a little about the Thomases and their lack of resilience.

The lift opened on the ground floor of the hospital and I stepped outside, surprised by the number of people waiting near the main reception desk. I gave them a cursory glance – old men, sitting and rocking back and forth catatonically through some internal rhythm, young women in cheap clothes with greasy hair and tired faces yawning and drinking from murky plastic cups of tea, children buzzing around the floor noisily, alternating between tears and screams – and made for the doorway. They opened automatically as I approached them and the second I stepped outside I took a long, deep breath of fresh air and felt it recharge my body from within. The day was breaking, it was bright now but it would still be an hour or so before full service was restored, and the wind bit through me as I wrapped my coat closer around my body.

I was about to hail a taxi when, like a moment of revelation, I spun around and stared back at the hospital. I thought about it and shook my head – it couldn't be. After a moment, I walked back quickly through the doors and looked at the mass of seats once again, scanning the faces carefully this time, aiming directly for where I had seen him, but now he had been replaced by an old woman breathing from an inhaler. I looked around, my mouth open, and I had the sudden impression that I was in a film. The scene before me was opening up like a wide angle shot and I was carefully moving around the reception area before my eyes focused on the drinks machine where he stood, a finger hovering over the choices as he made his decision. I walked towards him, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him around. A fifty pence coin fell to the floor and he almost tripped over himself with surprise. I was right; I stared at him and shook my head.

‘What the hell are you doing here?' I demanded. ‘How the hell did you find out?'

The irony of watching a report of my nephew's overdose and currently comatose condition on my own broadcasting station's breakfast news show was not lost on me. I didn't sleep much when I got home; instead I collapsed into a comfortable armchair which could easily fit two average sized people and closed my eyes for a while, dozing fitfully before I realised that the night's sleep was lost to me. Afterwards, I took a long, hot shower, applying exotic shower gels with intriguing fragrances to my body and shampoos with heavy scents of coconut to my hair before emerging in a thick bathrobe a half hour later into the kitchen. It was refreshing and gave me a new energy for the day that I would have otherwise lacked. I prepared a light breakfast – a tall glass of cold orange juice, a toasted muffin with sliced kiwi – and ate it in front of the television as the coffee brewed.

A reporter named Roach Henderson was standing outside the hospital and he looked as if he would rather be almost anywhere else in the world than standing there in the freezing cold, worrying that his hairpiece might blow away in the middle of his broadcast. I knew Roach only slightly; his real name was Ernest but for some reason he had decided in his early twenties to call himself ‘Roach'. I think he had been heavily influenced by the anchormen of the American news shows and believed that an exotic first name would lend him both credibility and a desk job in a warm studio. He had achieved neither in the twenty odd years since. It was interesting that he had chosen a bug's name for his own.

‘Roach,' asked the
real
anchorman, Colin Molton, his brow furrowed in trademarked worry, a biro tapping against his lips as he himself stared at the television screen containing the reporter's image. ‘What can you tell us of Tommy DuMarque's condition? Roach,' he added once again to indicate that it was his turn to speak now.

‘Well, as most of you know,' began Roach, ignoring the question and launching into his prepared speech anyway, ‘Tommy DuMarque is one of the nation's most
recognisable
actors.' Stress on the ‘recognisable'. ‘He began his career eight
years
ago, playing Sam Cutler on leading soap opera -' Photographs and a brief scene from a few years ago were quickly played. ‘Having also launched himself into the worlds of pop
music
as well as
modelling,
it's fair to say that Tommy DuMarque's condition is one which will be monitored by the general public
as well
as entertainment insiders. Colin.' It was like saying ‘over' at the end of every sentence on a walkie-talkie.

‘So what
is
his condition then? Roach,' Colin repeated his question.

‘Doctors say that he is
critical
but
stable.
We're still not quite sure what exactly
happened
to Tommy DuMarque but reports are coming in to us that he collapsed at a fashionable night-club in London just after one O'clock this morning' – wrong, I thought – ‘and was rushed here shortly after that. Although he was apparently
conscious
when he arrived here, he slipped into a coma soon afterwards and has remained in that condition since then. Colin.