Zelda nodded. She looked like a child, I realised. They both did. They looked like children dressing up in grown-up clothes. There was such a fragile innocence to them.

‘I try to tell him it is good,’ she said. ‘You can tell him and tell him and tell him but it is just raindrops against the roof.’

Scott seemed relieved I liked it, though. ‘Well, that makes you a better person than the guy at the Herald Tribune. Now, there’s your drink . . .’ He handed me the Bloody Mary.

‘They invented it here, you know,’ said Zelda.

I sipped the strange drink. ‘Did they really?’

And then Scott interrupted and said, ‘Tell us, what do you do?’

‘I play piano. At Ciro’s.’

‘As in the Paris Ciro’s?’ he asked. ‘Rue Daunou? How wonderful. You win already.’

Zelda took a long mouthful of some kind of gin cocktail. ‘What are you scared of?’

Scott smiled apologetically. ‘It’s her drunk question. Every time.’

‘Scared of?’

‘Everyone is scared of something. I’m scared of bedtime. And housekeeping. And all the things you have housemaids for. Scott is scared of reviews. And Hemingway. And loneliness.’

‘I am not scared of Hemingway.’

I tried to think. I wanted, for once, to give an honest answer. ‘I’m scared of time.’

Zelda smiled, leaning her head in a kind of glazed sympathy, or resignation. ‘You mean growing old?’

‘No, I mean—’

‘Scotty and I don’t plan to grow old, do we?’

‘The plan is,’ Scott added, with exaggerated seriousness, ‘to hop from one childhood to the next.’

I sighed, hoping this would make me appear thoughtful and serious and in possession of a great Golden Age intelligence. ‘The trouble is, if you live long enough, you end up running out of childhoods eventually.’

Zelda offered me a cigarette, which I accepted (I was smoking now – everyone was smoking now), and then placed one in Scott’s mouth, and another in her own. A kind of wild despair flared suddenly in her eyes as she struck the match. ‘Grow up or crack up,’ she said, after the first inhale. ‘The divine choices we have . . .’

‘If only we could find a way to stop time,’ said her husband. ‘That’s what we need to work on. You know, for when a moment of happiness floats along. We could swing our net and catch it like a butterfly, and have that moment for ever.’

Zelda was now looking across the crowded bar. ‘The trouble is they stick pins in butterflies. And then they are dead . . .’ She seemed to be looking for someone. ‘Sherwood’s gone. But, oh, look! It’s Gertrude and Alice.’

And within moments they had disappeared through the packed room with their cocktails and, though they made it perfectly clear I could join them, I stayed there with nothing but vodka and tomato juice for company, staying in the safe shadows of history.

London, now

It is strange how close the past is, even when you imagine it to be so far away. Strange how it can just jump out of a sentence and hit you. Strange how every object or word can house a ghost.

The past is not one separate place. It is many, many places, and they are always ready to rise into the present. One minute it is the 1590s, the next it is the 1920s. And it is all related. It is all the accumulation of time. It builds up and builds up and can catch you violently off guard at any moment. The past resides inside the present, repeating, hiccupping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faces and the covers of books. Sometimes just the sight of a tree or a sunset can smack you with the power of every tree or sunset you have ever seen and there is no way to protect yourself. There is no possible way of living in a world without books or trees or sunsets. There just isn’t.

‘Are you okay?’ Camille asks me, her hand resting on the cover of her book, so only the word ‘tender’ is visible.

‘Yes. I’m still getting these headaches, though.’

‘Have you been to the doctor?’

‘No. But I will.’ Going to the doctor, of course, is the last thing I am going to do.

I look at her. She has the kind of face that makes you want to speak, to tell things to. It is a dangerous face.

‘Maybe you need some more sleep,’ she says.

I wonder what she means, and she can see me wondering, because then she says: ‘I saw on Facebook that you liked my post at three in the morning. That’s an interesting time for you to be awake on a school night.’

‘Oh.’

There is a sliver of mischief in her smile. ‘Is it a habit of yours? Spying on women’s Facebook pages in the middle of the night?’

I feel ashamed.

‘It . . . wh . . . came up on my feed.’

‘I’m only joking with you, Tom. You need to lighten up a little bit.’

If only she could understand the weight of things. The gravity of time. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘for the heaviness.’

‘It’s all right. Life is like that sometimes.’

Maybe she does understand. ‘I’m just a bit awkward around people.’