The Absolutist (3 page)

I made my way down the street but before entering the Carpenter’s Arms public house, my eyes drifted towards the brass plaque that was nailed prominently above the door, where the words
PROPRIETOR: J. T. CLAYTON, LICENSED TO SELL BEERS AND SPIRITS
were etched in a black matted script. I stopped short for a moment and stared at it, holding my breath, a sensation of dread soaring through my veins. I longed
for a cigarette and patted my pockets, hoping to find the packet of Gold Flakes I had bought in Liverpool Street that morning, already knowing that they were lost, left behind on my train-carriage seat when I reached up to help the novelist with her suitcase before disembarking, and they probably lay there still, or had found their way into the pockets of another.

PROPRIETOR: J. T. CLAYTON
.

It had to be a coincidence. Sergeant Clayton had been a Newcastle man, as far as I knew. His accent had certainly betrayed him as one. But had I heard that his father had been something high up at a brewery? Or was I confusing him with someone else? No, it was ridiculous, I decided, shaking my head. There must be thousands of Claytons spread across England, after all. Tens of thousands. This couldn’t be the same one. Refusing to succumb to painful speculation, I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The bar was half filled with working men, who turned to glance at me for only a moment before looking away and returning to their conversations. Despite being a stranger, I felt at ease there, a contentment born out of a sense of isolated companionship. As the years have passed, I have spent far too many hours in pubs, hunched over unsteady, ale-stained tables, reading and writing, tearing at beer mats as I’ve raised my characters from poverty to glory while dragging others down from mansion to gutter. Alone, always alone. Not drinking too much, but drinking all the same. A cigarette in my right hand, a scorch mark or two on my left cuff. That caricature of me, writing my books in the corner snugs of London saloons, the one that irritates me so and has caused me, in later life, to rise up, bristling and whinnying in interviews like an aggravated horse, is not, in fact, a mistaken one. After all, the clamour of the crowded public house is infinitely more welcoming than the stillness of the empty home.

“Yes, sir?” said a hearty-looking man standing behind the bar in his shirtsleeves, wiping a cloth along the countertop to remove the beaded lines of spilled beer. “What can I get for you?”

I passed an eye across the row of taps that stood before him, some of the names unfamiliar to me, local brews perhaps, and chose one at random.

“Pint, sir?”

“Yes please,” I said, watching as he selected a glass from the rack behind him and then, in an instinctive gesture, held it by its base up to the light to examine it for fingerprints or dust marks before, satisfied, tilting it at a precise angle against the tap and beginning to pour. There were flakes of pastry in his heavy moustache and I stared at them, both repulsed and fascinated.

“Are you the proprietor?” I asked after a moment.

“That’s right, sir,” he said, smiling at me. “John Clayton. Have we met before?”

“No, no,” I said, shaking my head as I rooted a few coins out of my pocket. I could relax now.

“Very good, sir,” he said, placing the pint before me, apparently unconcerned by my question. I thanked him and made my way across to a half-empty corner of the pub, where I removed my coat and sat down with a deep sigh. Perhaps it had been for the best that my room had not been ready, I decided, staring at the dark brown ale settling in the glass before me, its frothy head winking as the tiny bubbles made their way north, anticipating as I did so the great satisfaction that first mouthful would offer me after my train journey.
I could sit here all night
, I thought.
I could become very drunk and cause a scene. The police might arrest me, lock me in a cell and send me back to London on the first train tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t have to go through with it. The whole thing would be taken out of my hands
.

I sighed deeply, dismissing the notion, and took my book from my pocket, glancing for a moment at the jacket with the feeling of safety that a set of bound-together pages has always afforded me. On that mid-September Monday of 1919, I was reading
White Fang
by Jack London. My eyes focused on the dust-jacket image: a silhouetted cub testing the air beyond some trees, the shadows of their branches suggesting a road cut deep into the heart of the mountains ahead, the full moon guiding his way forward. I turned to where my page holder rested, but before reading, I glanced again at the title page and the words inscribed there:
To my old pal Richard
, it said in black ink, the characters elegant and well formed.
No less of a mangy ol’ dog than White Fang himself, Jack
. I had found the book a couple of days earlier on a stall outside one of the bookshops on Charing Cross Road and it was only when I had taken it home and opened it that I noticed the inscription. The bookseller had charged me only a ha’penny for the second-hand volume so I presumed that he had overlooked the words written inside, but I considered it a great bonus, although I had no way of knowing whether the Jack who signed himself “Jack” was the Jack who had written the novel or a different Jack entirely, but I liked to believe that it was him. I traced my right index finger—the one whose inconsistent trembling always caused me such trouble—along the letters for a moment, imagining the great author’s pen leaving its trail of ink along the page, but instead of being offered a curative through literature, which in my youthful fancy I hoped it would, my finger trembled even more than usual and, repulsed by the sight, I pulled it away.

“What are you reading, then?” asked a voice from a few tables away, and I turned to see a middle-aged man looking in my direction. I was surprised to have been addressed and turned the novel around to face him so that he could read the title,
rather than simply answering his question. “Never heard of that one,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Any good, is it?”

“Very good,” I said. “Terrific, in fact.”

“Terrific?” he repeated, smiling a little, the word sounding unfamiliar on his tongue. “Well, I’ll have to look out for it if it’s terrific. I’ve always been a reader, me. Mind if I join you? Or are you waiting for someone?”

I hesitated. I had thought that I wanted to be alone, but when the offer of company was made I found that I didn’t mind so very much.

“Please,” I said, indicating the seat next to mine, and he slid across and placed his half-finished pint on the table between us. He was drinking a darker beer than mine and there was an odour of stale sweat about him that suggested a long, hard-working day. Curiously, it wasn’t unpleasant.

“The name’s Miller,” he said. “William Miller.”

“Tristan Sadler,” I replied, shaking his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“And you,” he said. He was about forty-five, I thought. My father’s age. Although he did not remind me of my father in the slightest for he was of slender build, with a gentle, thoughtful air, and my father was the opposite. “You’re from London, aren’t you?” he asked, sizing me up.

“That’s right,” I said, smiling. “Is it that obvious?”

“I’m good with voices,” he replied, winking at me. “I can place most people within about twenty miles of where they grew up. The wife, she says it’s my party trick but I don’t think of it that way. It’s more than just a parlour game to my way of thinking.”

“And where did I grow up, Mr. Miller?” I asked, eager to be entertained. “Can you tell?”

He narrowed his eyes and stared at me, remaining silent for almost a minute, save for the sound of his heavy, nasal breathing,
before he opened his mouth again, speaking cautiously. “I should think Chiswick,” he said. “Kew Bridge. Somewhere around there. Am I right?”

I laughed, surprised and delighted. “Chiswick High Street,” I said. “My father has a butcher’s shop. We grew up there.”

“We?”

“My younger sister and I.”

“But you live here? In Norwich?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I live in London now. Highgate.”

“That’s quite a distance from your family,” he said.

“Yes,” I replied. “I know.”

From behind the bar, the sound of a glass crashing to the floor and smashing into a million fragments gave me a jolt. I looked up and my hands clenched instinctively against the side of the table, only relaxing again when I saw the shrugged shoulders of the proprietor as he bent down with pan and brush to clear up his mess, and heard the delighted, teasing jeers of the men sitting close to him.

“It was just a glass,” said my companion, noticing how startled I had become.

“Yes,” I said, trying to laugh it off and failing. “It gave me a shock, that’s all.”

“There till the end, were you?” he asked, and I turned to look at him, the smile fading from my face as he sighed. “Sorry, lad. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“It’s all right,” I said quietly.

“I had two boys out there, you see. Good boys, the pair of them. One with more than his share of mischief about him, the other one a bit like you and me. A reader. A few years older than you, I’d say. What are you, nineteen?”

“Twenty-one,” I said, the novelty of my new age striking me for the first time.

“Well, our Billy would have been twenty-three now and our Sam would have been about to turn twenty-two.” He smiled when he said their names, then swallowed and looked away. The use of the conditional tense had become a widespread disease when discussing the ages of children and little more needed to be said on the matter. We sat in silence for a few moments and then he turned back to me with a nervous smile. “You have the look of our Sam, actually,” he said.

“Do I?” I asked, strangely pleased by the comparison. I entered the woods of my imagination again and made my way through gorse and nettle-tangled undergrowth to picture Sam, a boy who loved books and thought that one day he might like to write some of his own. I saw him on the evening he announced to his parents that he was signing up, before they came to get him, that he was going out to join Billy over there. I pictured the brothers finding solidarity on the training ground, bravery on the battlefield, heroism in death. This was Sam, I decided. This was William Miller’s Sam. I knew him well.

“He were a good boy, our Sam,” whispered my companion after a moment, then slapped the flat of his hand three times on the table before us as if to say, No more of that. “You’ll have another drink, lad?” he asked, nodding at my half-finished beer, and I shook my head.

“Not yet,” I said. “But thank you. You don’t have a tab on you, by any chance?”

“Of course,” he replied, fishing a tin box out of his pocket that looked as if it had been with him since childhood, opening it and handing me a perfectly rolled cigarette from a collection of about a dozen. His fingers were dirty, the lines on his thumb heavily defined and darkened by what I decided was manual labour. “You wouldn’t see better in a baccie’s, would you?” he asked, smiling, indicating the cylindrical precision of the smoke.

“No,” I said, admiring it. “You’re a dab hand.”

“Not me,” he said. “It’s the wife who rolls them for me. First thing every morning, when I’m still about my breakfast, she’s sat there in the corner of the kitchen with a roll of papers and a packet of gristle. Takes her only a few minutes. Fills the box for me, sends me on my way. How’s that for luck? There’s not many a woman would do that.”

I laughed, satisfied by the cosy domesticity of it. “You’re a lucky man,” I said.

“And don’t I know it!” he cried, feigning indignation. “And what about you, Tristan Sadler?” he asked, using my full name, perhaps because I was too old to be addressed with the familiarity of “Tristan” but too young to be called “Mr.” “Married gentleman, are you?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.

“Got a sweetheart back in London, I suppose?”

“No one special,” I replied, unwilling to admit that there was no one who was not special either.

“Sowing your wild oats, I expect,” he said with a smile, but without that leering vulgarity with which some older men can make such remarks. “I don’t blame you, any of you, of course, after all you’ve been through. There’ll be time enough for weddings and young ’uns when you’re a bit older. But, my Lord, the young girls were thrilled when you all came home, weren’t they?”

I laughed. “Yes, I expect so,” I said. “I don’t know really.” I was beginning to grow tired now, the combination of the journey and the drink on an empty stomach causing me to feel a little drowsy and light-headed. One more, I knew, would be the ruination of me.

“You have family in Norwich, do you?” asked Mr. Miller a moment later.

“No,” I said.

“First time here?”

“Yes.”

“A holiday, is it? A break from the big city?”

I thought about it before answering. I decided to lie. “Yes,” I said. “A few days’ break, that’s all.”

“Well, you couldn’t have picked a nicer place, I can tell you that,” he said. “Norwich born and bred, me. Lived here man and boy. Wouldn’t want to live anywhere else and I can’t understand anyone who would.”

“And yet you know your accents,” I pointed out. “You must have travelled a bit.”

“When I was a pup, that’s all,” he said. “But I listen to people, that’s the key to it. Most people never listen at all. And sometimes,” he added, leaning forward, “I can even guess what they’re thinking.”

I stared at him and could feel my expression begin to freeze a little. Our eyes met and there was a moment of tension there, of daring, when neither of us blinked or looked away. “Is that so?” I said finally. “So you know what I’m thinking, Mr. Miller, do you?”

“Not what you’re thinking, lad, no,” he said, holding my gaze. “But what you’re feeling? Yes, I believe I can tell that much. That don’t take a mind reader, though. Why, I only had to take one look at you when you walked through the door to figure that out.”

He didn’t seem prepared to expand on this so I had no choice but to ask him, despite the fact that my every instinct told me to leave well alone. “And what is it, then, Mr. Miller?” I asked, trying to keep my expression neutral. “What am I feeling?”