The Absolutist (37 page)

“Anything else?” she asked. “Tell me. I have a right to know.”

“I’ve written about our day together. How I tried to explain things to you. How I failed.”

“You’ve written about me?”

“Yes.”

“So why haven’t you published it, then? Everyone praises you so much. Why not give them this book, too?”

I thought about it, pretending that I was trying to decipher the reason, only I knew it well enough. “I suppose the shame would be too much for me,” I said. “For anyone to know what I had done. I couldn’t live with the way that people would look at me. It won’t matter after I’m gone. They can read it then.”

“You’re a coward, Tristan, aren’t you?” she asked me. “Right to the end. A terrible coward.”

I looked up at her; there wasn’t a lot she could say to hurt me. But she had found something. Something true.

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I suppose I am.”

She sighed and looked away, her expression suggesting that she might scream if she wasn’t careful. “I don’t know why I came here,” she said. “But it’s late now. I have to go. Goodbye, Tristan,” she said, standing up. “We shan’t meet again.”

“No.”

And with that she was gone.

She was right, of course. I have been a coward. I should have delivered this manuscript years ago. Perhaps I was waiting for the story to find a conclusion of sorts, sure that it would come sooner or later. And it has finally come tonight.

I returned to my room shortly after she left. Holding my right hand out before me I noticed that my spasmodic index finger was perfectly still now; the finger that had pulled the trigger that sent the bullet into my lover’s heart, satisfied at last. I removed the manuscript from my briefcase; I take it with me whenever I travel, you see. I like it to be close at hand. And I
write now of our conversation, that short, final encounter between Marian and me, and I hope that it has given her some satisfaction, even though I am sure that wherever she is right now she is unable to sleep, and if she does then she will be haunted by nightmares from the past.

And then I reach into my case for something else, something I also keep close to hand, for the moment when it feels right to use it.

Soon they will find me here, in this bedroom, in an unfamiliar hotel, and the police will be called, and the ambulance service, and I will be carried away to some cold morgue in the heart of London city. And tomorrow, the newspapers will run my obituary and say that I was the last of that generation to go and what a shame, another link with the past gone, but look what he left us, my Lord, look at the legacy he has left behind to honour his memory. And soon afterwards this manuscript will appear, my final book, published between hard covers, edited by Leavitt. There will be outrage and disgust and people will turn on me at the last, they will hate me, my reputation will forever be destroyed, my punishment earned, self-inflicted like this gunshot wound, and the world will finally know that I was the greatest feather man of them all.