The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘In a house, maybe. I’ve spoken to people about it. There’s always openings for servants in houses. I could do that for a while. Make a little money. Save it up. Maybe start my own business somewhere.’

  I laughed. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said. ‘How could you do that? You’re a girl.’ The very idea was outrageous.

  ‘I could do it,’ she insisted. ‘I’m not sitting in this stinking hole for ever, Matthieu. I don’t want to grow old and die here. And I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life on my knees washing someone else’s floors either. I’m willing to give up a few years of my life in order to make something for myself. For us, if you like.’

  I thought about it but wasn’t sure. I liked Dover. I got a perverse thrill from my life of petty crime. I had even found ways to amuse myself without Dominique’s knowledge. I had fallen in with a gang of street boys who led similar lives to my own, indulging in various crimes in order to feed ourselves. Ranging in age from six to eighteen or nineteen, some lived on street corners, finding a place to call their own and collapsing in it every night beneath whatever they could find to keep them warm. Their young bodies had built up an immunity against the cold and disease and they remain among the healthiest people I have ever known in 256 years. Some banded together and shared rooms, sometimes eight or nine to an area no bigger than a prison cell. Some were kept in finer rooms by older men who took a portion of their earnings, molesting them when they felt like it, a knife to the throat, an arm around the ribcage, a grasping mouth around the smooth-skinned neck.

  Together we planned more elaborate crimes, often involving no financial reward for ourselves but simply as exciting ways to pass our afternoons, for we were young and given to reckless endeavour. Stealing hansoms, rolling barrels of beer away from cellars, tormenting harmless old ladies; these were all part of a normal day for me and my kind. As my earnings began to grow, I realised that I could keep a portion for myself without telling Dominique and this money went into my developing sexual freedom. I tried not to return to any particular prostitute more than once but it was difficult for me to make sure of that for, whenever I was in some hovel, naked and pressed deep into the body of a girl whose stench of sweat and grime was too easily located beneath the nauseous spray of cheap perfume, it was only Dominique’s face that I could see, her almond shaped eyes, her small brown nose, her slim body with the slight scar above her left shoulder where I longed to run my tongue once again. For me, all these girls were Dominique, and for them I was simply a few shillings’ worth of boredom. It was a fine life. I was young.

  There were girls from the street as well, girls who did not guard their virtue with the same determination as Dominique was now guarding hers. These girls, often the sisters or cousins of my fellow criminals – more often than not, criminals themselves – would capture my mind for a week, sometimes two, but our union would lead to disinterest on my part afterwards and they would quickly move on to the next lad. In the end I either paid for it or went without, for at least with the passing over of money I could pretend that my partner was the one I wanted the most.

  It was always bound to happen that I would be caught. The night that sealed our fate in Dover was a dark October evening in 1760. I was standing on a quiet street corner opposite the Law Courts watching for a likely victim to emerge. I saw him – a tall, elderly gentleman, with a black hat and a fine, oak stick – pause briefly as he stood on the street, patting his overcoat to check for his wallet, locating it and moving on with a reassuring smile. I pulled my cap down over my face, looked around me for any spotters, and followed him slowly through the streets.

  My footsteps fell in automatic timing with his, my arms hanging loosely by my sides as his own did so that he would not hear me approaching behind him. I reached my hand into his pocket and my fingers clasped around a thick leather wallet within, which I eased out without losing a step. As my hand emerged, I rotated and began to walk off in the opposite direction at a steady pace, my footsteps still in perfect time, ready to return home for the evening, when I heard a voice cry out behind me.

  I spun around to see the old man standing in the street, staring in bewilderment at a middle-aged man who was running in my direction, his arms waving in the air as he bore down upon me. I stared too in surprise, unsure what he was after, when I remembered the wallet and realised that he must have spotted me and decided to fulfil some ridiculous sense of civic responsibility. I turned on my heel and ran, cursing my luck but not for a moment believing that I could fail to outrun this giant of a man, whose paunch alone would surely slow him down. I sped on, my long legs leaping across the cobblestones as I tried to make out the direction in which I could make my escape. I wanted to get towards the market square, where I knew there were five separate lanes leading in different directions, each of which gave off on to laneways of their own. There were always crowds there and I would be lost within their number with no difficulty, being, as I was, dressed like every other street boy. But it was dark that night and in my confusion I lost my sense of direction and after a few moments I knew that I had gone wrong and began to worry. The man was gaining on me, shouting for me to stop – which was an unlikely outcome – but as I glanced over my shoulder briefly I could see the determination in his face and worse, the stick in his hand, and felt for the first time a real sense of fear. I saw two laneways ahead off what I thought might be Castle Street, one running left and one running right, chose the latter and was dismayed to find the street growing narrower and narrower ahead of me until a sinking feeling inside confirmed that a wall stood before me, a dead end, too tall to climb, too solid to break through. I turned and stood as the man turned into the street, himself stopping and gasping for breath as he realised that I was cornered.

  There was still a chance. I was sixteen. I was strong and fit. He was forty if he was a day. He was lucky to still be alive. If I could simply steer around him quickly before he could grab me, I could continue running as long as I had to. He was almost out of breath while I could have run on for another ten minutes yet without breaking into a sweat, let alone having to slow down. The trick was to get past him.

  We stood staring at each other and he cursed at me, calling me a thieving swine, a money grabbing knave to whom he would teach a thing or two when he caught me. I waited until he was as close to the left hand side of the street as I thought he would go, before running right with a shout, determined to outflank him, but he lunged in that direction at the same moment and we collided, me falling to the ground with the weight of him, he falling on top of me with a gasp. I tried to stand up but his reactions were quicker than mine and with one hand he pinned my neck to the ground as his other felt through my pockets for the old man’s wallet. Taking it, he put it inside his own and, as I struggled beneath him, he let his stick crash down on my face, blinding me for a moment, the sound of my breaking nose crashing across my head, the taste of blood and mucus in my throat, a sharp white light exploding before my eyes. He rose and my hands went to my face to ease the pain and he let loose with that stick on the rest of me, until I was rolled in a messy ball in the corner of the street, my mouth a mixture of blood and phlegm, my body a separate entity to my mind, my ribs kicked and beaten, my jaw swollen and bruised. I could feel a trickle of blood at my scalp and I know not how long I lay there, curled up within myself, before I realised that he had gone and that I could gather myself together and get up.

  It was hours before I found my way home, blinded as I was by the blood in my eyes, and, as I pushed open the door, Dominique screamed as she saw me. Tomas burst into tears and hid under the bedclothes. Dominique pulled out a bucket of tepid water and stripped me of my clothes as she tended to my wounds, my body in such pain that I had not even the energy to be excited by her attending to me. I slept for three days and when I woke, clean but battered, aching with pain, she told me that my pick-pocketing days were over for good.

  ‘Say goodbye to Dover, Matthieu,’ sh
e said as I opened my one good eye. ‘We’re leaving the minute you can get out of that bed.’

  I was too weak to argue with her and by the time I had recovered my health — several weeks later – our plans had already been determined.

  Chapter 5

  Constance & The Movie Star

  The most short-lived of my marriages occurred in 1921, and despite its brevity, it is one that I look back upon with a great deal of fondness -Constance was certainly my second-favourite wife of this century. I had moved back to America just after the war, seeking a complete release from all my associations with the hospital, the Foreign Office and the awful Beatrice, widow of my then recently deceased nephew Thomas. I boarded an ocean liner and set sail for the States, enjoying the pleasant and revitalising few weeks of sunshine and romance which the transatlantic crossing afforded me. I landed in New York and found that to my dismay the city was still obsessed by European affairs and hungry for more information about such matters as Versailles and the Kaiser. Strangers would hear my accent in a local saloon and immediately attempt to engage me in conversation. Had I ever met the King, they would ask? Is it true what they say about him? What news of France? What were the trenches actually like? Really, one of the greatest achievements of this modern age of global television networks is that complete strangers no longer need to ask for the most mundane of information. For that alone, we should be grateful to modern technology.

  Irritated by this constant intrusion into my life, and feeling a little lost in the city without friends or employment, I decided to spend one afternoon at a local theatre, watching the newsreels and some of the new kinescopes. The theatre I chose was really no more than a small room with a high ceiling, capable of fitting about twenty-five people in some discomfort, and it was half full as I took my seat in the centre of a row towards the back, as far away from the local hoipolloi as possible. The seats were hard and wooden and the place smelled of a startling mix of perspiration and alcohol, but it was dark and it was private so I stayed where I was, knowing that I would grow immune to the unpleasant scents of the populace soon enough. The newsreels began and they were the same old nonsense I had seen a thousand times in real life – war, appeasement, universal suffrage — but the moving pictures amused me. I saw Easy Street and The Cure, both of which featured Charlie Chaplin, and the crowd groaned when each began -evidently they had seen them before, many times, and were looking for new entertainment already – but almost immediately, they started to laugh along at the fairly slapstick affairs that they were watching. As the projectionist changed the reels in the middle of each feature, I found myself growing restless, anxious to see more, intrigued by the flickering black and white images before me, my mind finally released from the events of recent years, if only for an afternoon. I stayed and watched the same show several times over and by the time I left the theatre – by which time it was dark outside and my throat was dry and in need of liquid refreshment – I had made up my mind.

  I would go to Hollywood and work in pictures.

  It was a three-day train journey across the country but it afforded me an opportunity to plan my assault on what I had already perceived would be a fast-growing art form. There would be money to be made in it – already the newspapers were starting to carry features on the enormous riches and playboy lifestyles of Keaton, Sennett, Fairbanks and others. Their tanned visages, so different from their pale, often impoverished alter egos that we saw fooling around on screen, shone out from the front pages of the dailies as they pranced about in tennis gear on the lawns of some lavish estate, or in black tie at the latest birthday party for Mary Pickford, Mabel Normand or Edna Purviance. It would not be hard to find a route into this society, I assumed, as I was wealthy and handsome and a recently demobbed Frenchman to boot. With such credentials, how could I fail? Already I had phoned ahead to a real estate agency and rented a house in Beverly Hills for six months and knew that simply by attending a few select parties I could meet all the right people and perhaps spend a year or two enjoying myself. The war was behind me; I needed entertainment. And where better to go in order to find it than the emerging wonderland that was Hollywood, California?

  But I was also interested in the idea of working within the industry, at a production level of course, as I am no actor. My first thought was that I should involve myself with the financing of motion pictures, or possibly their distribution, which was still in the process of evolving and creating a network efficiency. While stuck in my railway carriage during those three hot days, I read an interview with Chaplin who at the time was working at First National, and while he came across as a man obsessed with his work, an artist who wanted nothing more than to produce feature after feature after feature without breaking for so much as a weekend in the sun, I felt that there was some hidden meaning in his carefully phrased comments about his relationship with FN. It was a decent place to work, he seemed to be suggesting, but there was no overall control for the artist. He wanted to own the place, he said, or at least run his own studio. In the meantime I believed I could be of some use to him and wrote him a letter suggesting a meeting, implying that I wanted to invest in the motion-picture industry and saw him as its most reliable asset. If my money was to go anywhere, I pointed out, I wanted to take his advice on where I should put it. Perhaps, I suggested, I should even invest it in Chaplin himself.

  To my great delight, he telephoned me one evening while I was sitting at home alone, bored with my own company, weary of solitaire, and invited me to lunch the next day at his house, an offer which I gladly accepted. And it was there that I met Constance Delaney.

  At the time, Chaplin was living in a rented house only a few streets away from my own. He had just come through a messy divorce with Mildred Harris and the papers had only recently let the scandal die away. He was not the man I expected, so used was I to seeing his tramp incarnation on the screen and in photographs, and when I was led out to the pool area and saw a short, handsome man sitting alone reading Sinclair Lewis, I wondered at first whether he was simply an acquaintance or a family friend of the film star. I had heard that Chaplin’s brother Sydney also worked in Hollywood and wondered whether it might not be him. Of course, once he rose and came towards me, his face broad with a white-toothed smile, I knew immediately who he was but somehow failed to engage that strange sensation one develops upon meeting a person one has only previously seen on a cinema screen, enlarged beyond all reality, a sequence of lines and dots bouncing across canvas. As we talked, I examined his face for elements of the familiar screen persona but the constant smile, the bare upper lip, the hand ruffling through the curly, unhatted hair, was a far cry from the alter ego I knew so well and I was left amazed at his ability to transform himself so utterly. He was aged thirty-one then and looked twenty-three. I was 177 and looked like a respectable, wealthy man in my late forties. While there were many aspects to his character that distinguished him from other men, there was one that brought him directly into line with the countrymen of the nation in which he chose to live. He wanted only to speak of the war.

  ‘How much fighting did you see?’ he asked me, sitting back in his chair in a pose of relaxation while his eyes flickered with fascination at all times, bouncing from my face, to the trees behind, to the house beyond, to the sky above. ‘Was it as bad as the papers reported?’

  ‘I saw some,’ I offered reluctantly. ‘It wasn’t pleasant. I managed to avoid the trenches, except for one brief miserable period. I sat a lot of it out in an encampment in Bordeaux.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I cracked codes,’ I said, shrugging gently, ‘intelligence work mostly.’

  He laughed. ‘That’s where you made your money?’ he asked me, looking towards the pool and shaking his head as if he had the mark of me now, in a line, in the briefest of sentences. ‘Lot of money to be made in war, I expect.’

  ‘I inherited my money,’ I said, lying but resenting his implication. ‘Believe me, I had no wish to profit from the exp
erience of the last few years. It has been ... unpleasant,’ I muttered, understating the experience somewhat.

  ‘Wanted to go myself, you know,’ he said quickly, and I noticed how his London accent was being carefully suffused with a nasal American twang. Only the odd word slipped out to betray his origins. Later, I learned that he had taken weekly voice lessons from a speech therapist to improve his American accent, a strange concept for a silent movie star. ‘The boys at the top suggested I would be better off here though.’

  ‘I’m sure you were,’ I said, not meaning to sound sarcastic as I gestured towards the lavish surroundings with my hand and sipped my margarita, mixed with a little too much lime I thought, but cold and refreshing on the throat nevertheless. ‘It’s magnificent.’

  ‘I mean working,’ he said tetchily. ‘Making movies, you know. Sent them all over the world. Free of charge to servicemen when it costs a fortune for any distributor to buy them off the studio. I think the army wanted to have something to show the troops on off days to help improve morale. You might say I earned my medals as chief morale officer for the British Army,’ he added with a smile.

  It was odd, I thought. In four years I had never seen any movies at all except when I was on leave in a city and paid for them myself. Nor could I remember an awful lot of ‘off days’ for the servicemen. I tried to change the subject but it was too valuable for him as source material.