The Absolutist

  “They sounded like terrible terrors, Left and Right,” she remarked.

  “They could be,” I said, considering it. “They were rather terrorized themselves, to be honest. Sergeant Clayton was a difficult man. When we were training he was bad enough. But when we were over there …” I shook my head and exhaled loudly. “He’d been before, you see. A couple of times. He’s not a man I have any respect for—in fact, even thinking about him makes me feel ill—but he’d had it hard, too. He told us once about his brother being killed in front of him, about his … well, about his brains being splattered over his own uniform.”

  “Good God,” she said, putting her cup down.

  “It was only later that I learned he’d already lost three other brothers in the fighting. He didn’t have it easy, Marian, that’s the truth. Although it doesn’t excuse what he did.”

  “Why?” she asked, leaning forward. “What did he do?”

  I opened my mouth, fully aware that I was not yet ready to answer this question. I didn’t even know if I ever would be. For, after all, to reveal Clayton’s crime would be to admit my own. And I tried to keep that as firmly bottled up inside myself as possible. I was here to return a packet of letters, I told myself. Nothing more.

  “Did your brother … did Will mention me much in those letters?” I asked after a moment, my natural eagerness to know overpowering my dread of what he might have told her.

  “He certainly did,” she said, hesitantly, I thought. “Particularly in the early letters. Actually, he spoke of you quite a lot.”

  “Really?” I said in as calm a tone as I could muster. “I’m pleased to hear it.”

  “I remember his first letter arrived only a couple of days after he got there,” she said, “and he told me that it seemed all right really, that there were two troops of twenty and he’d been put in with a bunch who didn’t seem the most intellectually stimulating lot.”

  I laughed. “Well, that’s true,” I said. “I don’t think we had much education to share around, any of us.”

  “Then, in his second letter, a few days later, he sounded a little more down, as if the excitement of arriving had worn off and he was facing up to what he was left with. I felt bad for him then, and when I wrote back I told him that he had to make friends, to put his best foot forward, the usual nonsense that people who know nothing about anything, like me, say when they don’t want their own days to be ruined by worrying about others.”

  “I imagine you’re being hard on yourself there,” I said gently.

  “No, I’m not. I didn’t know what to say, you see. I was rather excited about him going off to war. Does that make me sound like a monster? But you have to understand, Tristan, I was younger then. Of course I was younger, that’s obvious. But I mean that I was less informed. I was one of those girls that I despise so much.”

  “And what girls are those?” I asked.

  “Oh, you’ve seen them, Tristan. You live in London, they’re everywhere there. And, I mean, for pity’s sake, you came back from the war in your fine uniform, you must have been on the receiving end of so many of their favours.”

  I shrugged and poured more tea, putting extra sugar in mine this time and stirring it slowly, watching as the spoon created a whirlwind in the murky brown soup.

  “Those girls,” she continued with an irritated sigh, “they think that war is an enormous lark. They see their brothers and their sweethearts getting dressed up in their finery. And then they come back and the uniforms are more dishevelled but, oh my, don’t the men look handsome and experienced. Well, I was just like that. I read Will’s letters and I thought, Oh, but you’re there at least! And what I wouldn’t give to be there! I didn’t realize just how difficult it was. I still don’t, I imagine.”

  “And the letters told you all this?” I asked, hoping to steer her back towards this subject.

  “No, I only fully understood after everything that happened. I only appreciated the cruelty of the place then. So, in a way, I was rather frustrated by my brother’s tone. But then, after a while, the letters grew more cheerful and I was pleased about that.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “Yes. He told me in his third letter about the chap who had the bunk next to his. A Londoner, he said, but not a bad bloke all the same.”

  I smiled and nodded, looking down at my tea, hearing him say the words in my head.

  Ah, Tristan …

  “He told me how you and he would pal around together, how everyone needed someone to talk to when they were feeling down and how you were always there for him. I was glad of that. I’m glad of it now. And he said that it made things easier because you were the same age and you were both missing home.”

  “He said I was missing home?” I asked, looking up in surprise.

  She thought about it for a moment and corrected herself. “He said that you didn’t talk about your home very much,” she replied. “But he could tell that you missed it. He said there was something in your silence that was very sad.”

  I swallowed and thought about it. I wondered why he had never challenged me on this.

  “And then there was all that business with Mr. Wolf,” she said.

  “Oh, he told you about him, did he?” I asked.

  “Not at first. But later. He said that he’d met a fascinating chap who had all sorts of controversial views. He told me about them. You know what they were better than I, I dare say, so I needn’t explain.”

  “No.”

  “But I could tell he was interested in Mr. Wolf’s beliefs. And then after he was murdered—”

  “It was never proven that Wolf was murdered,” I said irritably.

  “Do you believe he wasn’t?”

  “All I know is that there was never any proof,” I said, aware even as I said it that it was a bootless answer.

  “Well, I know that my brother was convinced of it. He said it was put about that an accident had taken place but he had no doubt in his mind that the poor boy was killed. He said he didn’t know who did it, whether it was Sergeant Clayton, Left or Right, some of the other recruits, or a combination of all the above. But he was quite certain about it. They came for him in the dead of night, he said. I believe that was when he began to change, Tristan. With Mr. Wolf’s death.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, a lot of things took place over those few days. We were under enormous strain.”

  “After that, the carefree boy I had known, the boy who was frightened of course about what lay ahead, vanished and in came this new chap, a chap who wanted to talk about right and wrong rather than Right and Left.” She smiled at her joke, then grew immediately serious once again. “He asked me to give him details of what the newspapers were saying about the war, the debates that were taking place in Parliament, whether there was anyone who was standing up for the rights of man, as he called them, over the sound of the rifles. I didn’t recognize him in those letters, Tristan. But I was intrigued by who he had become and tried to help. I told him as much as I knew and, by then, you were all in France and his tone changed even further. And then … well, you know what happened then.”

  I nodded and sighed and we sat very quietly for what felt like a long time, considering our different memories of her brother, my friend.

  “And did he … did he say anything more about me?” I asked eventually, feeling that the moment to discuss those letters had passed but by God I might never get the chance again and I had to know. I had to know how he felt.

  “I’m sorry, Tristan,” she said, looking a little shamefaced. “I have a rather awful thing to tell you. Perhaps I shouldn’t, I don’t know.”

  “Please do,” I said, urging her on.

  “The truth is that you were such a big part of his letters all through that time at Aldershot. He told me all the things you did together; it made you sound like a pair of mischievous children, if I’m honest, with your jokes and japes. I was glad you had each other and I rather liked the sound of you. I thought he was quite besotted
with you, to be honest, as preposterous as that sounds. I remember once reading a letter and thinking, Dear Lord, must I hear nothing more than what Tristan Sadler did this day or said on that day? He really thought you were the bee’s knees and the cat’s pyjamas.”

  I stared at her and tried to smile but could feel my face turning into a rictus of pain instead and hoped she wouldn’t notice.

  “And then he wrote to say that you had all shipped out,” she continued. “And the thing is, from that first letter after you left Aldershot, he never mentioned you again. And for a while I didn’t like to ask.”

  “Well, why would you?” I asked. “After all, you didn’t even know me.”

  “Yes, but …” And here she stopped for a moment and sighed before looking back up at me as if she had a terrible secret, the weight of which was almost too much for her to bear. “Tristan, this is going to sound rather odd but I feel I ought to tell you. You can make of it what you will. The thing is … I said that when I received your letter a few weeks ago it came as rather a shock to me. I thought I must have misunderstood and I went back to read Will’s letters afterwards but it seems to be quite clear there, so I can only imagine that he was either confused by what was going on or had simply written your name when he meant to write another. The whole thing is very odd.”

  “It wasn’t easy out there,” I said. “When men wrote letters in the trenches, why, we often had no time or hardly any paper or pencils to do it. And the question of whether or not those letters even got through was one that we didn’t like to think about too much. All that time and energy, perhaps for nothing.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Only I think most of Will’s letters did get through. And certainly all the ones from those first months in France, because I received one almost every week and I really can’t imagine that he would have had time to write more than that. So he was writing and telling me what was happening, trying to spare me some of the worst moments to stop me worrying too much, and because you’d become something of a character in my head, because you’d been such a big part of his earlier letters, I finally summoned up the nerve to ask him in one of my replies exactly what had happened to you, whether you had been posted to the same place together and were still part of the same regiment.”

  “But we were,” I said, confused by this. “You know we were. We trained together, we took the boat to France together, we fought in the same trenches. I don’t think we were ever apart really.”

  “Yes, but when he replied,” said Marian, hesitating, looking almost embarrassed by her words, “he told me that he had some bad news for me.”

  “Bad news,” I said, more of a statement than a question, and I had a sudden anxious idea of what this might be.

  “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 acc
ent 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.