The Absolutist (26 page)

“It’s hard to know exactly when it began,” I said, thinking about it. “The truth is that, contrary to what the newspapers and the politicians would have you believe, not every soldier out there wanted to fight at all. Each of us fell at a different point on a spectrum from pacifism to unremitting sadism. Bloodthirsty fellows, saturated in some overzealous sense of patriotism, who would still be over there even now, killing Germans, if they were given the chance. Introspective chaps who did their duty, anything that was asked of them, but didn’t care for it at all. We spoke before about Wolf—”

“The murdered boy?”

“Well, yes, perhaps,” I said, still, for whatever reason, unwilling to cede this point. “I mean, he certainly had an influence on Will’s way of thinking.”

“They were close friends, too, then?”

“No, not close,” I said. “But he intrigued Will, that’s for sure.”

“And you, Tristan, did he intrigue you, too?”

“Wolf?”

“Yes.”

“No, not in the slightest. I thought he was something of a poseur, if I’m honest. The very worst kind of feather man.”

“It surprises me to hear you say that.”

“Why?” I asked, looking at her with a frown.

“Well, from the way you talk, it sounds to me as if you would have agreed with everything this man Wolf said. Look, I know we’ve only just met but you don’t strike me as a great antagonist. You didn’t even go after Leonard when he hit you earlier. What kept you from being as interested in Wolf as my brother was?”

“Well, he was … I mean, if you’d known him …” I was struggling now. The truth was that I had no answer to her question. I rubbed my eyes and wondered whether I really believed what I had said about Wolf, that he was a poseur, or whether it was simply the fact that he and Will had got along so well that had made me despise him so much. Was I that unjust? Was it nothing more than jealousy on my part that made me condemn a decent and thoughtful man? “Look, we might have held similar opinions in our hearts,” I said finally, “but we just rubbed each other up the wrong way, that’s all. And of course he died, he was killed, whatever is the correct form of words. Which certainly affected your brother in a very deep way.”

“And that’s how it began?” she asked me.

“Yes. But you must remember that all that took place here in England. Things didn’t really come to a head until France. There was an incident, you see, one that precipitated Will’s decision to lay down his arms. Although, in retrospect, I don’t think it’s right to put it all down to that single event either. There were other things that happened, I’m sure of it. Some that I witnessed, many that I didn’t. It was a confluence of events over a long period of time and sustained months of unremitting strain. Does that make sense?”

“A little,” she replied. “Only I feel there must have been one particular thing. To make him so aggressively anti-war, I mean. You said there was an incident that precipitated things?”

“Yes, it took place just after we took one of the German trenches,” I said. “It’s not a pleasant story, Marian. I’m not sure you want to hear it.”

“Tell me, please,” she said, turning to look at me. “It might help to explain things.”

“There were four of us, you see,” I said, nervous about recounting it. “We captured a German boy who’d been left alive, the last of his regiment.” I told her the story of Milton and Attling, and how Will had found the boy in hiding and brought him to our attention. I left nothing out, from Will’s determination to bring him back to HQ as a prisoner of war to the boy pissing his pants and igniting Milton’s anger.

“You’ll have to excuse my language,” I said as I finished the story. “Only you wanted to hear it as it happened.”

She nodded and looked away, troubled by this. “Do you think he blamed himself?” she asked.

“For the boy’s death?”

“For the boy’s murder,” she said, correcting me.

“No, I don’t think it was as simple as that,” I replied. “He wasn’t responsible for it, after all. He didn’t shoot the boy. In
fact, he did everything he could to save his life. No, I think he just hated the idea of it, the sheer bloody cruelty of it, and would have liked to have blown Milton’s brains out immediately afterwards, if you want the truth. He told me as much.”

“But he found the boy,” she insisted. “He captured him. If he hadn’t done that, then it never would have happened.”

“Yes, but he didn’t expect that it would have the result that it did.”

“I think he must have blamed himself,” she said in a determined voice, irritating me a little, for she hadn’t been there and didn’t know what had taken place. She hadn’t seen the expression on Will’s face as the German boy’s brains splattered across Attling’s uniform. She had only my rough attempts to describe the horror of it to draw upon. “I think it must have been that,” she added.

“But it wasn’t, Marian,” I insisted. “You can’t put it down to one thing. It’s too simplistic.”

“Well, what about you, Tristan?” she asked, turning to me, her tone growing aggressive now. “Weren’t you upset by what you’d witnessed?”

“Of course I was,” I said. “I wanted to pick up a rock and hammer Milton’s brains in. What right-thinking man wouldn’t? That boy was terrified out of his wits. He lived his last minutes in a state of pure fear. You’d have to be a sadist to take any pleasure in that. But then we were all terrified, Marian. Every one of us. It was a war, for pity’s sake.”

“But you didn’t feel moved to join Will?” she asked. “You didn’t feel as strongly about it as he did. You kept a hold of your rifle. You continued to fight.”

I hesitated and thought about it. “I suppose you’re right,” I admitted. “The truth is I simply didn’t feel the same way about that incident as your brother did. I don’t know what that says about me, whether it means that I’m a callous person, or an
inhuman one, or a man incapable of compassion. Yes, I felt it was unjust and unwarranted, but also I believed it was just another one of those things that happened every day over there. The fact is that I was constantly witnessing men dying in the most horrific ways. I was on edge every day and night for fear that I was going to be picked off by a sniper. It’s an awful thing to say but I allowed myself to become immune to the random acts of violence. My God, if I hadn’t become immune to it I would never have been able to—” I pulled myself up short and stopped in the street, astonished by the sentence that I had been about to utter.

“You’d never have been able to what, Tristan?” she asked.

“To … to carry on, I suppose,” I said, trying to salvage the situation, and she looked at me, narrowing her eyes, as if suspecting that that was not what I had been planning to say. But for whatever reason she decided not to press me on it. “Where are we, anyway?” I asked, looking around, for we were no longer in the town centre but making our way back towards Tombland and the cathedral, where I had begun my day. “Should we turn back now, do you think?”

“I mentioned earlier that there was something I wanted you to do for me,” she said quietly. “Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” I said, for she had said it as we left the café but I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. “That’s why I’m here, after all. If there’s something I can do to make things any easier for you—”

“It’s not my well-being I’m concerned with,” she said. “It’s my parents’.”

“Your parents’?” I asked, and then, looking around, I realized what she was getting at. “You don’t live near here, do you?” I asked nervously.

“The vicarage is just down there,” she said, nodding towards the curve at the end of the road, where a small lane led to a cul-de-sac.
“It’s the house where I grew up. Where Will grew up. And where my parents still live.”

I stopped, feeling as if I had walked directly into a stone wall. “My daughter has arranged something,” her father had said when I had inadvertently met him at Nurse Cavell’s grave. “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I can’t do that.”

“But you don’t know what I want you to do yet.”

“You want me to visit your mother and father. To talk to them about the things that happened. I’m sorry, Marian, but no. It’s out of the question.”

She stared at me, her forehead wrinkling into a series of confused lines. “But why ever not?” she asked. “If you can talk to me about it, then why not them?”

“That’s completely different,” I said, not entirely sure why it would be. “You were Will’s sister. Your mother gave birth to him. Your father … No, I’m sorry, Marian. I simply don’t have the strength for it. Please, you’ll have to take me away from here. Let me go home. Please.”

Her expression softened now. She could see how difficult this was for me and she reached out and placed a hand on both my arms, just above the elbows. “Tristan,” she said quietly. “You don’t know what it means to me to be with someone who speaks as highly of my brother as you do. People around here”—she nodded her head up and down the street—“they don’t talk of him at all, I told you that. They’re ashamed of him. It would help my parents enormously if they were to meet you. If they could just hear how much you cared for Will.”

“Please don’t ask me to do this,” I said, beseeching her, panic rising inside me as I realized that there was almost no way out of this other than to run away. “I wouldn’t know what to say to them.”

“Then don’t say anything,” she said. “You don’t even have to talk about Will if you don’t want to. But let them meet you and
give you tea and know that there is a boy sitting in their front room who was friends with their son. They died over there, too, Tristan. Can you understand that? They were shot up against that wall just as my brother was. Think of your own family, your own father and mother. If, God forbid, something had happened to you over there, don’t you think they would have wanted their minds to be set at ease? They must love you as much as my parents loved Will. Please, just for a little while. Half an hour, no longer. Say you’ll come.”

I looked down the street and knew that I had no choice.
Do it
, I thought.
Be strong. Get it over with. Then go home. And never tell her the truth about the end
.

But even as I thought this, my head was dizzy with what she had said about my mother and father. What if I
had
died over there, I wondered? Would they have cared? After the way things had ended between us, I rather thought not. Everything that had taken place between Peter and me, the fool I had made of myself, the mistake that cost me my home. What was it my father had said to me when I was leaving, after all?

“It would be best for all of us if the Germans shoot you dead on sight.”

Peter and I were friends from the cradle. It was always just the two of us until the day when the Carters arrived, spilling their furniture and carpets on to the street as they took possession of the house next door to my father’s shop and two doors along from Peter’s home.

“Hello, boys,” said Mr. Carter, an overweight car mechanic with hair growing in tufts from his ears and up over the collar of his too-small shirts. He was holding half a sandwich in his hand and stuffed it in his mouth as he watched us kicking a football to each other. “Pass it!” he shouted, ignoring his wife’s sighs of exasperation. “Pass it over here, lads. Pass it over here!”

Peter, stopping for a moment, stared at him before using the toe of his boot to kick the ball neatly up in the air, where it landed with enviable precision in his arms.

“For pity’s sake, Jack,” said Mrs. Carter.

He shrugged and made his way over to his wife, who was as corpulent as he was, and it was at that moment that Sylvia appeared. That this pair could have produced such a creature was a surprise.

“Got to be adopted,” muttered Peter in my ear. “There’s no way she’s theirs.”

Before I could say anything, my own mother appeared from the upstairs flat in her Sunday best—she must have known that the new neighbours were arriving that day and been watching out for them—and began a conversation that was a mixture of welcome and curiosity. The battle for who was lucky to be living next door to whom was already beginning while Sylvia simply stared at Peter and me, as if we were a new class of beast altogether, entirely distinct from the boys she had known in her previous neighbourhood.

“I won’t go short on meat, anyway,” said Mrs. Carter, nodding in the direction of our front window, where a couple of rabbits were hanging from steel hooks through their necks. “Do you always keep them out like that?”

“Out like what?” asked my mother.

“Open to the world. Where anyone can see them.”

My mother frowned, unsure where else a butcher’s shop could display its wares, but said nothing.

“If I’m honest,” continued Mrs. Carter, “I’m more of a fish person, anyway.”

Bored by their talk, I tried to get Peter to return to our game, but he pulled away from me and shook his head, dropping the football again before bouncing it a dozen or more times on his knee as Sylvia watched him silently. Then, ignoring him, she
turned her attention to me and her lips turned upwards slightly, the hint of a smile, before she looked away and disappeared inside her front door to explore her new home.

And that, as far as I was concerned, was the end of that.

But it wasn’t long before she became a near-constant presence in our lives. Peter was smitten by her and it became obvious that to try to exclude her from our company was to ensure that I would be excluded from his, the idea of which was very painful to me.

But then the strangest thing happened. Perhaps it was because of Peter’s evident devotion or my apparent indifference, but Sylvia began to direct all her attention towards me.

“Shouldn’t we call for Peter?” I would ask when she knocked on my door, full of ideas for an afternoon’s entertainment.

She’d shake her head quickly. “Not today, Tristan,” she’d say. “He can be such a bore.”

It made me furious when she insulted him like that. I would have argued his case, but I suppose I was flattered by her attentions. She had a somewhat exotic air, after all—she had not grown up in Chiswick, for one thing, and had an aunt who lived in Paris—and it was obvious that she was beautiful. Every boy wanted to be her friend; Peter was desperate to secure her favours. And yet she was choosing to bestow them on me. How could I not have been flattered?