John Boyne - The Absolutist

“He said… I’m so sorry, Mr. Sadler, I mean, Tristan, but it’s really not me who has this wrong because, as I said, I went back and checked, it was just that he must have been so confused, what with all the shelling and the bombing and those awful, awful trenches—”

“Perhaps you’d better just tell me,” I said quietly.

“He said you’d been killed,” she said, sitting up straight now and looking me directly in the eyes. “There, I’ve said it. He said that two days after you left Aldershot, only a few hours after you’d arrived at your entrenchment, you were picked off by a sniper. He said it had been quick and you hadn’t suffered.”

I stared at her again and began to feel dizzy in my head. Had I been standing, I think that I might have fallen over. “He said I was dead?” I asked, the words sounding obscene on my tongue.

“It must have been someone else,” she replied quickly. “He spoke of so many people in his letters. He must have just got it wrong. But what a frightful mistake. Anyway, as far as I was concerned, there were the two of you, thick as thieves on the training ground, and off you go to France together, and the next thing I know, that’s it, you’re gone. I don’t mind telling you, Tristan, that even though I had never met you it had quite an effect on me.”

“My death did?”

“Yes. If that doesn’t sound too preposterous. I suppose part of it might have been that I was projecting your death on to the very real possibility that Will might die, too, which in my own stupidity I had never really thought about very much before. I cried for days, Tristan. For a man I had never met. I said prayers for you, even though I rarely pray. My father, he said a mass in your memory. Can you believe it? He’s a vicar, you see, and—”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I knew that.”

“And he was terribly sorry, too. I don’t think he could think too much about you, if I’m honest, because he was so worried about Will. He loved him so much. As did my mother. But there we are. I thought you had been killed in the war. And then, about three years later, out of the blue, your letter arrived.”

I turned and looked out of the window. The street had grown quiet and I found myself staring at the cobblestones, noting the different shapes and sizes of the pieces. Over the previous twelve months I had felt such pain, such remorse over what had happened to Will and my part in it. And I had grieved so much, too, my feelings for him so intense that I feared I would never be able to see past them. And now to hear this, to hear that he had effectively killed me off after our last night together in Aldershot. I had believed that he could not have broken my heart any more than he had—but now there was this. There was this.

“Mr. Sadler? Tristan?”

I turned back to her and saw that Marian was looking towards my right hand with a concerned expression. I glanced down and saw that it was twitching uncontrollably, the fingers dancing nervously as if independent of my brain. I stared at it as though it were not part of my body at all, but something that a passing stranger had left on the table and was planning to return for later, a curio of some sort, and then I felt mortified by it and placed my left hand over it, quelling the trembling for now.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said, standing up quickly, my chair making a loud scraping noise against the floor as I pushed it back, a sound that set my teeth on edge.

“Tristan—” she began, but I shook my head.

“I’ll be back,” I said, rushing towards the door to the Gents, on the opposite side of the room to the one through which she had disappeared earlier. As I reached it, terrified that I might not make it through in time before the horror of what she had told me overwhelmed me, I saw the man who had entered the café earlier, the one who had appeared to be watching me, suddenly jump to his feet and march hurriedly towards it, blocking my way.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Please.”

“I want a word with you,” he said, in an officious tone, an aggressive one. “It won’t take long.”

“Not now,” I snapped, uncertain why he was bothering me. I had never seen the man before in my life. “Get out of my way.”

“I won’t get out of your way,” he insisted. “Now, look here, I don’t want to cause any trouble, but you and me, we need to talk.”

“Get out of my way!” I repeated, shouting it now, and I saw the couple and the waitress turn to look at me in surprise. I wondered whether Marian had heard me, but our table was around the corner and not in my sight line, so if she had I would not have known. I pushed the man roughly aside. He didn’t struggle with me, and a few moments later I locked myself in the lavatory and placed my head in my hands, devastated. I was not crying, but there was a word being repeated over and over, I thought in my head but actually aloud, and I had to make a concerted effort to stop myself saying Will, Will, Will as I rocked back and forth, as if this was the only word that had ever mattered, the only syllable that held any meaning for me.

When I returned from the Gents, I felt embarrassed by my behaviour but was unsure whether Marian had even noticed how upset I had become. I didn’t turn to look in the direction of the man who had insisted on speaking with me but I could sense his presence, smouldering like a dormant volcano in the corner of the room, and wondered who exactly he thought I was. His accent betrayed his Norfolk roots but as I had never been to this part of the country before there was no possibility that we had ever met. At the table, Marian and our waitress, Jane, were deep in conversation, obviously reconciled, and I looked from one to the other a little nervously as I sat down again.

“I was just apologizing to Jane,” explained Marian, smiling across at me. “I think I might have been rather rude to her earlier. Which she didn’t deserve. Jane was very kind to my parents. Afterwards, I mean,” she said, choosing her words carefully.

“I see,” I replied, rather wishing that Jane would go back behind her counter and leave us alone. “You knew Will, then?”

“I knew him since he was a boy,” she said. “He was a few years behind me in school but I had a right crush on him back then. He danced with me once at a parish social and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” She looked away as she said this, perhaps regretting her choice of words. “Well, I’d best be getting on,” she said. “Can I get you anything else, Marian?”

“Some more tea, I think. What do you say, Tristan?”

“Fine,” I said.

“And afterwards, we can go for a stroll and get something to eat. You must be hungry.”

“I am now,” I admitted. “But more tea first is fine.”

Jane disappeared to fetch the tea and Marian followed her with her eyes for a moment as she busied herself behind the counter. “She wasn’t the only one, of course,” she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice in a conspiratorial fashion.

“The only one of what?” I asked.

“Who was half crazed for love of my brother,” she said, smiling. “You’d never believe the way the girls around here threw themselves at him. Even my own friends were sweet on him and they were years older than he was.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, smiling. “You’re only a few years older than me. You’re not ready to be put out to pasture yet.”

“No, of course not,” she said. “But it used to drive me crazy. I mean, don’t misunderstand me, Tristan, I loved my brother to distraction, but to me he was always just a rather messy, rather unkempt, rather mischievous little boy. When he was a child, the difficulty my mother had getting him to take a bath was quite extraordinary—he would scream the house down the moment the tin appeared—but then I suppose all little boys are like that. And some of the older ones, too, if the chaps I know are anything to go by. So when I saw the effect he had on women as he grew older, it took me quite by surprise, I don’t mind telling you.”