The Thief of Time (14 page)

I had only a slight recollection of my father, Jean, whose throat was cut by a murderer when I was four years old. I remembered him as being a tall man with a grey-tinted beard but, when I once mentioned this fact to my mother, she shook her head and said she could not remember him ever growing a beard and insisted that I was mixing him up with someone else, some stranger who might have passed through our house once and whose image had remained with me. This revelation disappointed me as it was the only memory that I had of my father — or
thought
that I had – and I was sorry to know that it was a false one. Still, I know that he was respected and well liked, for there were many people in my first fifteen years of life in Paris who told me that they had known him and liked him and were sorry for his loss.

My mother, Marie, met her second husband in the same theatre where her first had been employed for so many years. She was there to meet the dramatist for whom my father had worked and who had so generously granted her a pension after his death. Every month she would call around to his office at the theatre on the pretext of taking tea with him and they would chat amiably for an hour or so together. As she would leave, he would silently pop a small bag of money into her pocket, which would subsidise our existence for the next thirty days; I don't know how we could have possibly survived without it, as we were constantly short of money anyway. It was on one of these occasions, while leaving the theatre, that she had the misfortune to meet Philippe DuMarque for the first time. She had stepped outside on to the street and was about to begin her walk home when a small boy ran past her and grabbed at the bag she was carrying. She lost her balance and fell to the ground, letting out a scream as the thief disappeared down a side street with whatever possessions she had on her at the time, plus her monthly pension. The boy – whom I was virtually to become myself when I went to Dover some years later – was apprehended by Philippe as he made his getaway and it was rumoured afterwards that he actually broke the child's arm as punishment for his theft, a severe penalty to pay for so petty a crime. Philippe returned the bag to my mother, who was greatly upset by the incident, and then offered to walk her home. Exactly what happened from then on I am not so clear upon but it seemed that he became a regular visitor to our house from that day onwards and he would call around at all hours of the day and night.

At first he was polite and charming and would entertain me with a ball or some card-trick that he had perfected. He was a fine mimic and would satirise our neighbours perfectly in order to amuse me. Our relationship was almost friendly on those occasions but his moods could alter without warning. Whenever I discovered him sitting alone at our kitchen table in the morning, nursing his regular hangover, I knew better than to approach him. He was a handsome man in his early twenties whose face appeared to have been chiselled out of granite. His cheekbones were pronounced and he had the most perfect eyebrows I have ever seen on a man, two perfect arches of deep black over his ocean-blue eyes. He wore his hair shoulder length and would often tie it into a ponytail behind his head, a fashion at the time. His looks have travelled down through the centuries, his genes reproducing an image of himself in all of his line. Although there have of course been differences and alterations made through the influx of the female side, even the present Tommy has a look which is unmistakably Philippe's and he has the ability sometimes to look at me in a way which sends a chill through me, a shiver of unpleasant memory, of centuries-old distaste. Of all the DuMarques, Philippe – their progenitor – has been my least favourite one. The only one whose death actually pleased me.

I wasn't present at their wedding and didn't even know that it had taken place until I realised that my new stepfather had moved all his belongings into the house and was staying with us every night. My mother explained that I had to treat him with respect, as I would my natural father, and not anger him for he was under too much pressure to deal with the idle rantings of children. I don't know exactly what kind of actor he was – I never actually saw him perform in any serious production – but he couldn't have been too talented as all the parts that he played were small and he would even take the position of understudy from time to time. This frustrated him, of course, and he started to grow moody around the house, generating an atmosphere of tension which scared me. It delighted me whenever he would disappear from our lives, sometimes for days at a time.

Shortly after their marriage, Tomas was born and Philippe made only rare appearances for a time, mostly to eat or sleep, and this pleased me. My half-brother was a noisy baby and frustrated all of us with his screaming for food and then refusing to eat it when it was offered to him. My stepfather ignored the child most of the time, as he did me, and continued with his obsessional quest to become a success in the theatre, but it seemed as if he was destined to be always frustrated as the parts he coveted were given to other actors whom he despised. Then one day he announced his decision to become a writer.

‘A writer?' asked my mother, looking at him in some surprise for she could probably not remember him so much as reading a book, let alone wanting to write one. ‘What kind of a writer?'

‘I could write a play,' he said enthusiastically. ‘Think about it. How many plays have I performed in since I was a child? I know the way they are constructed, I know what works in the theatre and what doesn't. I know what makes good dialogue and what sounds false. Have you any idea how much money some of these dramatists are making? The theatres are full every night, Marie.'

My mother was unsure but relentlessly encouraging and thereafter he would sit at home every evening at our table with paper and a quill pen and scratch away noisily for hours on end, looking up at the ceiling from time to time for inspiration before charging through a few pages of writing. I watched him in awe, always waiting for that moment when an idea would hit and he would race to realise it on paper. Eventually, one night a month later, he was finished. He lavishly wrote ‘The End' across the bottom of one page, underlined it and signed his name with a flourish, before standing up with an enormous grin and taking my mother in his arms, twirling her around the room until she shouted that she would throw up if he didn't put her down immediately. He told us both to sit down and he would read it to us and so he did. For almost two hours we sat silently side by side as he paced in front of us, reading the play in a variety of voices, adding in the stage directions as he went, his face contorted with pride, anger, hilarity, depending on the scene. Acting out every word as if his very life depended on it.

I can't remember the title of Philippe's play, but it concerned a rich nobleman in Paris in the mid-i6oos. His wife had gone mad and killed herself and he had married another, but found her unfaithful with a rich landlord in the city. He tortured her until she went mad and killed herself, at which time he realised that he had loved her all along, at which point he went mad and killed
himself.
And that was it. That was the end. There wasn't anything more to it than that, just a lot of people going mad all the time. And killing themselves. The final scene presented a stageful of corpses and a character who had previously not appeared at all entering stage left to speak a resolution in sonnet form. It was not a good play but we applauded at the end of it in order to make ourselves agreeable and my mother talked of all the things we would buy when we were rich, even though we both knew that the chances of our making our fortune from Philippe's masterpiece were beyond slim.

The following day, he took the play to the theatre and showed it to the owner who read it carefully before telling the actor that he should stick to the understudying and leave the words to someone else. Furious, Philippe stormed out – after knocking the man over and breaking his nose – and tried several more theatres over the following week before accepting that no one was willing to produce his play or, after his behaviour after each rejection, even employ him any more. Within a week, he had lost not only his ambition to become a writer but also the chance of ever working in the theatre again. He was probably the only playwright who was so bad that he wasn't even allowed to act any more.

Following this disappointment, he took to staying at home and drinking. My mother was taking in laundry at the time and still accepting her pension money, but most of this was swallowed up by her husband who became violent as that year progressed, towards both her and me, a violence which eventually led to the wicked afternoon when he beat my mother so badly that she never rose again. When it became clear that she was dead, he sat at the kitchen table and prepared a little bread and cheese, apparently oblivious to her corpse on the ground beside him. I ran to fetch help, my tears and growing hysteria making it difficult for anyone to understand me, but eventually I returned with a gendarme who raised the alarm to others and Philippe was arrested. I had expected him to be gone by the time I returned home but he was seated in exactly the same position in which I had left him, staring at the table in apparent boredom. He was tried for his crime, showed little or no remorse for his actions, was executed, and that was when Tomas and I left the city for England.

There are many stories from those days which I had never told Dominique, stories which were just as unpleasant as that one, and I had failed to speak of them because I did not want to remind myself of my early life if I did not have to. I didn't want her to think that I was being secretive, merely private, an important distinction I felt. As we walked along the road that day, however, I told her that story and she listened quietly, offering no comment or story of her own in response. Eventually, I had no choice but to ask her outright whether anything similar had ever happened to her, but she ignored my question and pointed instead to an inn which was appearing over the horizon, perhaps half an hour's walk away, where she suggested we go to rest and find some cheap food. We walked the remainder of the way in silence as my mind drifted from memories of my parents to wondering what secrets Dominique stored inside her head.

We had eaten little over the previous day so we decided to treat ourselves to a decent meal which might last us throughout the next twenty-four hours and raise our spirits as well. It was a pleasant enough inn on a quiet corner of the road, raucous with the noise of music and laughter, eating and drinking, and we were fortunate to find the end of one small table near the fire at which to rest and eat our food. I sat opposite Dominique, with Tomas by my side, and to his left and opposite were a middle-aged man and his wife, reasonably well dressed, eating food which was piled dangerously high on their plates like towers. They were noisy eaters and stopped only briefly as we sat down to look at us with suspicious glances before returning to their meals. We ate in silence for a while, glad to be putting something into our stomachs at last. I was proud of Tomas who, for all his unhappiness with the long walk, had not complained too much about the lack of food so far.

‘Perhaps we should not go as far as London,' said Dominique eventually, breaking the long silence between us. ‘There are other places after all. We could find a small village or -'

‘It depends what we're looking for, doesn't it?' I said. ‘Our best chance of work is within a large house, servants or some such position.'

‘Not with Tomas,' she pointed out. ‘No one will take us on with a six-year-old child.' Tomas looked across at her suspiciously as if he was concerned that she might be trying to get rid of him, which she never would have done. T just think we might have more luck getting jobs in a busy village or town.'

‘You don't want to go to London,' said the man beside Tomas, effortlessly entering into the conversation as if he had been part of it all along. ‘London's an ‘eartless place. Absolutely ‘eartless.' We looked at him blankly and continued to talk among ourselves.

‘We can continue along the road', I said after a decent interval but in a quieter voice now, ignoring him completely, ‘and, if we come across a place that seems pleasant, we can stop for as long as we choose. We don't have to make any decisions right away.'

The man gave out a loud belch, followed by an extraordinary fart, and the sigh he followed it up with gave testament to the pleasure they had both afforded him. ‘Mr Amberton,' said his wife, tapping him on the hand casually, more as an instinctive gesture than an offended one, ‘you mind your manners now.'

‘It's natural, lad,' he said, looking across at me. ‘You don't mind hearing a little from the natural bodily functions, do you?' I stared at him and wasn't quite sure whether the question was rhetorical or not. He was a man of about forty-five, rather obese, with a shaved head and a two-day stubble that flickered around his ugly features like dirt. His teeth were yellow and he displayed them prominently. As he looked at me, he wiped his nose with the back of his hand, and then inspected it carefully before smiling at me and offering the same hand in my direction. ‘Joseph Amberton,' he said cheerfully and when he smiled I was afforded a view of those miserable teeth within that filthy mouth. ‘At your service,' he added. ‘So tell me, lad, you never answered my question; you don't mind hearing a little from the natural bodily functions, do you?'

‘Not at all, sir,' I said, afraid of what might happen if I answered in a way which displeased him for the idea of being jumped upon by a man possessed of quite so much blubber terrified me. He was like a demon hybrid of man and whale. You could have skinned him for oil or raised a signal from his movements. ‘It's perfectly all right.'

‘And you, missy,' he said, looking at Dominique. ‘You don't want to go to London, mark me now. It's only rotten things go on down there. I should know.'