John Boyne - The Absolutist

“Can I get you some tea?” asked the waitress, coming over with pad and pen.

“Yes,” I said. “Or rather, no. Do you mind if I wait until my companion comes back? She won’t be long.”

The girl nodded, not in the least put out, and I turned my attention once again to the street outside, where a group of schoolchildren was walking past now, about twenty of them in a crocodile, each small boy holding the hand of the boy next to him so they wouldn’t get lost. Despite how nervous I was feeling, I couldn’t help but smile. It recalled my own schooldays and how, when I was eight or nine years old and our teacher would make us do the same thing, Peter and I always locked hands, squeezing tightly, determined not to be the first to cry out and demand release. Could it really be only twelve years ago, I wondered? It felt like a hundred.

“I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting,” said Marian, returning to the table now and sitting down opposite me. As she did so, the couple glanced across and whispered something to each other. I thought that perhaps they were there on a liaison and didn’t want their conversation to be overheard, for they stood up almost immediately and moved to a table by the furthest wall, throwing unpleasant looks at us as they went, as if it were we who had disturbed them. Marian watched them go, her tongue bulging slightly in her cheek, before turning back to me with a curious expression on her face, a mixture of pain, resignation and fury.

“It’s perfectly all right,” I replied. “I only got here about ten minutes before you.”

“Did you say you arrived last night?”

“Yes,” I said. “On the late-afternoon train.”

“But you should have said. We could have met then if it was more convenient for you. You wouldn’t have had to stay the night.”

I shook my head. “Today is fine, Miss Bancroft. I just didn’t want to leave it to chance in the morning, that’s all. The trains from London can still be quite unreliable and I didn’t want to miss our appointment if they were cancelled for whatever reason.”

“It is dreadful, isn’t it?” she said. “I had to be in London a couple of months ago for a wedding. I decided to take the ten-past-ten train, which should have got me to Liverpool Street by about midday, and do you know, I didn’t arrive until just after two o’clock. When I got to the church, my friends had already exchanged their vows and were walking down the aisle towards me. I was so embarrassed I felt like running right back to the station and catching the first train home again. Do you think things will ever get back to normal?”

“Some day, yes,” I said.

“When? I grow fearfully impatient, Mr. Sadler.”

“Not this century, anyway,” I replied. “Perhaps the next.”

“Well, that’s no good. We’ll all be dead by then, won’t we? Is it too much to ask for decent transportation during one’s lifetime?”

She smiled and looked away for a moment, out towards the street where a second delegation of schoolchildren—girls this time—was marching past in similar military two-by-two formation.

“Was it awful?” she said eventually, and I looked up, surprised that she should ask such a loaded question so soon. “The train journey,” she added quickly, noticing my disquiet. “Did you get a seat?”

Of course it was natural that we should make small talk at first; it was hardly as if we could just get straight into the reason for my visit. But it was a curious sensation to know that we were making small talk, and for her to know it, too, and for us each to be entirely aware that the other was engaged in a similar level of deceit.

“I didn’t mind it,” I replied, half amused by my misunderstanding. “I met someone I vaguely knew on board. We were sharing a carriage.”

“Well, that’s something, I suppose. Do you read, Mr. Sadler?”

“Do I read?”

“Yes. Do you read?”

I hesitated, wondering for a moment whether she meant could I read. “Well, yes,” I said cautiously. “Yes, of course I read.”

“I can’t bear to be on a train without a book,” she announced. “It’s a form of self-defence in a way.”

“How so?”

“Well, I’m not very good at talking to strangers, that’s the truth of it. Oh, don’t look so worried, I shall do my best with you. But it seems to me that every time I’m in a railway carriage there’s some lonely old bachelor sitting next to me who wants to compliment me on my dress or my hair or my good taste in hats, and I find that type of thing rather frustrating and not a little patronizing. You’re not going to pay me any compliments, are you, Mr. Sadler?”

“I hadn’t planned on it,” I said, smiling again. “I don’t know much about ladies’ dresses or their hair or their hats.”

She stared at me and I could see that she liked the remark, for her lips parted and she offered what might have been a distant relation of a smile; it was obvious that she was still deciding what to make of me.

“And if it’s not a bachelor, then it’s some terrible old woman who interrogates me about my life and whether or not I’m married and do I have a position and what does my father do and are we anything to do with the Bancrofts of Shropshire and it goes on and on and on, Mr. Sadler, and the whole thing’s a frightful bore.”

“I can imagine it would be,” I said. “No one ever talks to a chap much. Young ladies certainly don’t. Young men don’t. Old men… well, sometimes they do. They ask questions.”

“Quite,” she said, her tone letting me know immediately that she didn’t want to pursue this line just yet. She reached for her bag and removed a cigarette case, plucked one out and offered a second to me. I was going to accept but changed my mind at the last minute and shook my head. “You don’t smoke?” she asked, appalled.

“I do,” I said. “But I won’t just now, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” she said, putting the case back in her bag and lighting up in a quick, fluid movement of thumb, wrist and flint. “Why should I mind? Oh, hello, Jane, good morning.”

“Good morning, Marian,” said the waitress who had approached me earlier.

“I’m back again, like a bad penny.”

“We hold on to our bad pennies here. We’ll grow rich off them some day. Ready to order, are you?”

“Are we lunching yet, Mr. Sadler?” she asked me, blowing smoke in my face and causing me to turn my head to avoid it; she immediately waved it away with her right hand and turned her head to the side when she took her next drag. “Or shall we just have tea for now? I think tea,” she said, not waiting for an answer. “Tea for two, Jane.”

“Anything to eat?”

“Not just yet. You’re not in a hurry, Mr. Sadler, are you? Or are you ravenous already? It seems to me that young men are always ravenous these days. All the ones I know, anyway.”

“No, I’m fine,” I replied, unsettled by her brusqueness; was it a front, I wondered, or her natural manner?

“Then just tea for now. We may have something else a little later on. How’s Albert, by the way? Is he feeling any better?”

“A little better,” said the waitress, smiling now. “The doctor says the cast can come off in a week or so. He can’t wait, the poor dear. Nor can I, for that matter. He gets the most frightful itches and brings the house down with his complaining about it. I gave him a knitting needle to slide down there, to help scratch it away, you know, but I’m always terrified that he’ll push it too hard and cut himself. So I took it away, but then he complains even more.”

“Dreadful business,” said Marian, shaking her head. “Still, you have only a week to go.”

“Yes. And your father, he’s all right, is he?”