Café Anselm sits on the Strand in Bude, an old Parisian-style coffee house with not the smallest hint of multinational Starbucks about it, and nobody in town can quite explain how it got there. Cast-iron tables with mahogany tops line the pavement outside; the general fog of the chain-smoking regulars puts a permanent haze around the awning. Nobody's sitting out today. The weather turned cold an hour ago, and the first flecks of a coming downpour are ticking against the glass.

George and Merlo are at their usual table by the window, the chessboard between them the only thing in the room that hasn't moved in fifteen minutes. Henry, the waiter, French, and proud of it in a town where nobody else is — drops a large espresso at my table, swaps my full ashtray for an empty one without a word, and drifts back to polishing the chrome on his coffee machine like it's a family altar. I check my watch. Rosina's late again. I go back to watching the game because there's nothing else to do while waiting.

Merlo is looking pleased with himself. He watches George's hand hover over the queen and can't resist it.

 

"Do that, if you think, my old friend. Please. Do."

George studies him, then cracks a slow smile.

 

"You do this every time, Merlo. Try to psych me out. You know what that tells me?"

Merlo puts on his best wounded-schoolboy face. "It tells you I'm panicking. That I'm about to lose."

"It tells me you're about to lose."

Merlo laughs, delighted, like George has fallen for it rather than seen straight through it.

 

"And you, my friend, fall for my games every time. You think I'm on the run. Really you're walking into the trap."

They do this every day. Both men look older than the town itself — I couldn't tell you which century either of them started in. George comes in every morning without fail, and on the days Merlo is up at the hospital visiting his daughter, he holds court on his own about the good old days, how morality used to mean something. Henry told me once, quietly, over the coffee machine, that George was in Auschwitz. I've never worked out how a man carries that and still calls anything *the good old days*.

Watching the odd couple is just how I burn the time. Rosina's twenty-five minutes late now, and I'd forgive her the traffic if I didn't know exactly where she is, the front room two doors down that what's left of Bude's small Jewish community still uses for a shul, since the proper one shut its doors before either of us was born. Since we got engaged she's developed a devotion to it that borders on strategic. She knows being late winds me up. She's a woman who treats a good argument as foreplay, and she knows precisely which of my buttons produces the reaction she's after. I know this about myself. It doesn't stop it working.

Twenty minutes and two espressos later I go up to the counter for cigarettes. The sky's opened properly now, a real Atlantic downpour, the kind Bude specialises in. George, Merlo and Henry are all staring out at the rain hammering the glass, faces gone slack and unfocused, the three of them hypnotised by something none of us can see. Henry's cigarette machine is empty. I'm going to have to brave it.

"Shit." Someone's running past the window, hood down, hair plastered flat. "Rosina?"

She doesn't turn in. She goes straight past the door and on down the Strand. I'm outside before I've decided to be, all thought of the rain gone. "Rosina! Wait!" She doesn't look back. The gutters are already running like something molten, black and fast, and I go after her past the canal lock with the rain coming in sideways off the sea.

She cuts down towards Chapel Street, and I lose her for a second in the spray. My jacket's given up being waterproof somewhere around the second turn, three minutes and I'm soaked to the skin. If this were really Rosina, if we were running home together to get dry, I'd be enjoying this. I'd be thinking about the fire, about peeling off wet clothes in front of it. Instead, I'm just cold and irritated, chasing a woman I've now lost sight of entirely.

I catch a flicker of movement, her, or someone, ducking into a doorway further up. Lightning flashes somewhere out past Compass Point, and this time the thunder arrives so close behind it that the storm must be directly over the town. I reach the door out of breath. It's a pawnshop. The window's a museum of other people's losses, an unplayable guitar, a bicycle with a flat tyre, a diver's helmet gone green at the seams. The bell over the door barely makes a sound as I step inside, and the next crack of lightning and the next clap of thunder come together, no gap between them at all.

No lights on. The storm's taken what was left of the daylight with it.

 

"Hello? Anyone here?" A shuffle from the back, and then a thin seam of light under a door I hadn't noticed.

 

"Can I help you?"

My eyes adjust before my mouth catches up, and I realise the woman standing there isn't Rosina at all. She's in a white top gone transparent with the rain, and I look away before I've properly registered what I've seen, ashamed of myself before I've even done anything.

 

"Sorry, I think I've got the wrong place."

The room comes into focus slowly: not really a pawnshop after all, or not only one, the walls behind the counter are floor-to-ceiling with old books, spines gone soft with damp. And the woman has Rosina's face, near enough to stop my breath, except ten years further into it. "You're soaked through," she says. "Come in and wait out the storm. I'll make you something. Do you take coffee?"

*

It's a week later and I still haven't seen Rosina. I can't face it, not after the pawnshop. Something in me, nostalgia, maybe, or just the old animal comfort of arriving somewhere warm with someone familiar, took the wheel that afternoon, and I let it. Catalina had all of Rosina's warmth and none of her teeth. Calm where Rosina is combative, kind where Rosina keeps her kindness in reserve for later. For a while I genuinely forgot who I was with. It was only after, looking down at her, that I noticed the lines at the corners of her eyes, the first grey she hadn't bothered to hide, and the guilt came in like the tide at Crooklets, all at once, no warning, up around my knees before I'd even seen it coming. She smiled at me the way she had all afternoon and reached for me again. I got up too fast, dressed badly, and left mumbling something that wasn't quite an apology. What I felt walking home wasn't really guilt. It was grief, not for what I'd done, but that I'd ever walked through that door at all.

I've let Rosina's calls go to voicemail all week. Today I stop hiding. Café Anselm, our table, and for once the weather's on my side — clear and bright, washing everything down to something simple. Merlo's up at the hospital, so George is at the bar alone with his roll-ups, and Henry's between customers, deep in his usual complaint to George about what's happened to decency in this country.

"Nick." I haven't heard her come in because, for once, she's on time, and it throws me off more than any lateness ever could. I smile up at her, trying to keep the guilt off my face, but I can't manage it.

 

"What's going on, Nick? Why haven't you answered me all week?"

For one horrible second I'm convinced she can read my mind, that Catalina's face at the moment she came is written across the inside of my skull for anyone to see. Soft, unguarded, nothing like Rosina's tight-shut eyes and that high bark of a laugh.

 

"Coffee, Rosy?"

She sits with a short, irritated sigh.

 

"You're a shit sometimes, Nick. What's going on?"

We talk all afternoon at that table and I never get around to telling her. Her annoyance burns off after an hour and she doesn't ask again, which is somehow worse. She drifts, eventually, onto the wedding, venues, numbers, her aunt's opinion on flowers, and I realise I've stopped listening some time back and started thinking about Catalina instead. It's nearly dark. Rosina's looking at me, waiting.

 

"Well?" she says.

"Sorry... what?"

That's the moment I understand there isn't going to be a wedding. That whatever this was supposed to be, it isn't going to be that.

 

"I'm sorry, Rosy. I have to go."

 

I'm up and walking before she can find the breath to object, heading back towards Chapel Street without letting myself think too hard about why.

*

Catalina isn't there this time. An old man stands behind the counter instead, older than George, older than Merlo, older-looking than either of them has any right to be. Long white hair framing a face that's more skull than face, skin stretched tight and thin as paper over it. He watches me come in without a word, and when I open my mouth to ask about Catalina, he cuts me off before I've made a sound, just turns and beckons, shuffling towards the back room.

The back room is where the memories live: Catalina on the rug in front of the fire, pulling me down into her. The old man points to a table in the corner and I sit, unsure what any of this is building to. He goes to an oak cabinet, takes something from a drawer, and sits across from me, sliding a heavy leather-bound photograph album onto the table between us.

 

He nods at it.

Opens it.

The first photograph is black and white, gone the colour of weak tea with age. The room in the picture is this room — unchanged, down to the cabinet itself — with the old man standing beside Catalina. Beside the photo, a caption in a script I don't recognise, something like Hebrew but not quite, and beneath it a date I assume is a misprint: 1906. I turn the page. Same two people, same back room, 1908. I go faster now, and the photographs get newer as I go, and somewhere a few pages in Catalina starts to look older than she should for how little time has passed, 1926, and I understand, with the particular cold clarity that comes right before real fear, that this isn't Catalina at all. The woman in the photographs ages, vanishes, and returns as a child, who grows again into a woman with a face I now know too well.

The old man does not change. Not once, not anywhere in the book. I flick through it almost frantic now, 1976, a ten-year-old and the same unmoving old man; back further, 1954, a woman in her middle years, and him, exactly as he is sitting across from me now; forward again, 2002, a woman of about thirty-five in a white top I recognise, and him, consistent as the tide.

I look up with no idea what I'm meant to do with any of this. He just watches me. Somewhere at the front of the shop, the bell over the door goes. Someone's come in out of the weather. He gets up without a word and leaves me with the album open in my lap, and one thought arrives late and lands harder than all the others:

 

Who took the photographs?

Someone's standing in the doorway. It takes me a second.

 

"Nick? What's going on, why did you just walk off like that, and what are you doing here?"

 

Rosina's face has worry on it where I expected fury.

 

"I don't know what to say, Rosy. I really don't."

The other door opens and Catalina comes in. She takes in the room, me, the album, Rosina, in one unhurried look, and something in her settles before she sits across from me at the table. I watch Rosina's face change as she understands, watch it go from confusion to something closer to a wound, and then she turns and walks out, and I know without needing telling that it's for good.

Catalina looks at me, not unkindly, not warmly either.

 

"Why did you come back, Nick?"

"I wanted to see you. I needed to."

She looks down at the table for a moment.

 

"I'm sorry," she says, so quietly I nearly miss it.

 

The old man passes behind her and goes up a narrow staircase I hadn't noticed, leaving the two of us with the storm still going outside and about forty questions I don't know how to order.

*

He brings coffee down a while later, sets two cups by us, and leaves without a sound. She watches him go with the same warm look I fell for a week ago, and something passes between them I'm not part of and never will be. The door clicks shut, and everything I've been holding back comes out at once.

She answers all of it. Doesn't flinch from any of it.

"The photographs are only part of it," she tells me. "Records of my father go back two thousand years."

 

She lets that sit before I can argue with it.

 

"He's Lazarus. The one from the story. Christ raised him, and something in that didn't fully take, he stopped dying, but he never stopped ageing either. He's been an old man for the better part of two millennia. His teeth went centuries ago. He lost his voice sometime in the third century."

 

I don't say anything. There isn't anything to say to that. She reads the next question off my face before I've built it.

 

"You're wondering why we all look like me. I don't fully understand it myself. Every child born into this family since he came back has been a girl. One child. Always a girl. Always this face."

"You call him your father."

"It's a figure of speech. He fathered the first of us, no more than that, it's just one more thing about us that never changes, that the face doesn't either."

"And the fathers? The men?"

She goes quiet, and something in her expression turns guilty before she gets up and crosses to the sideboard. She sets a small brown glass bottle in front of me. I turn it to read the label. Rohypnol.

"Oh." The floor tilts a little. "You drugged me. Last week."

"You were wondering who took the photographs."

"Why did you drug me at all?"

"You weren't supposed to come back, Nick. You were supposed to stay with Rosina."

Neither of us says much after that. I leave with the specific, hollowed-out feeling of a man who's just understood, too late, that he was never really choosing anything. The one thing she couldn't tell me was why Rosina wore her face too — she thought it might be some throwback, distant blood from one of Lazarus's other children, the ones who went on after the resurrection to live and marry and die like everyone else.

*

I never saw Catalina again. I imagine that's exactly how she wanted it. The shop moved on not long after, these things always do, and somewhere, some thirty years from now, another Catalina will find another man to carry on for her, to keep her father in photographs and company a while longer.

I still come to Café Anselm most days, five years on now. George is still at his window table, still philosophising about a past I've stopped believing was ever that good. I've never told anyone the real version of what happened with Rosina — I say we grew apart, that we called it before it went too far, and people nod and let it go. I've never told anyone about Catalina, or the old man in the back room, or the album, or the small brown bottle. Who would believe any of it.

It bothers me, some evenings, more than others, that somewhere out there is a daughter of mine who will grow up calling something two thousand years old father, and never once know my name. But then I think about Lazarus, brought back once against every rule that governs the rest of us, condemned to keep aging without the mercy of an endand I wonder if this is simply what a gift like that costs, several generations downstream, paid by men like me who never got a vote in the matter. The rain's coming back in off the sea. Henry's already reaching for the cloth to polish the chrome, and George moves a pawn he definitely shouldn't, and somewhere out past Compass Point the storm is building again, the way it always does.