The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  It had never been my intention to stay in London for ever and as I turned fifty I began to regret the fact that I had not travelled very widely during those years. Of course, at that stage I believed that my life was cruising slowly towards its close as it was not particularly common for a man to live past a half century in those days; at times I felt that I had missed my chance to know more of the world. I grew a little disconsolate, examining my life and seeing money where a happy family life might have been. Little did I know how many wives were to come, how much travelling, how many years would remain for me. I began to feel that I had wasted my life.

  I was living in a fine house in London which was far too large for my needs and I had recently agreed to allow my nephew Tom to stay with me. Tom was my first true nephew, the son of the half-brother I had brought to England with me in 1760, and like so many of his descendants he was a difficult lad who showed no great interest in creating a life for himself and instead drifted from job to job until time caught up with him. I believe he was waiting for me to die so that his inheritance might finally come through. Little did he know that this was not something that he should have been relying upon. I was sitting at home one evening with Tom, who was aged around twenty at the time, and feeling considerably depressed with the turn my life had taken when we decided on a whim to take a trip.

  ‘We could go to Ireland,’ suggested Tom. ‘It’s not too far and it might be a pleasant place to live for a while. I’ve always fancied a country existence.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘It’s poor and miserable and it rains all the time. No use for the constitution. It would depress me even more than I already am.’

  ‘Perhaps Australia?’

  ‘I think not.’

  ‘Africa then. There’s a whole continent there waiting to be explored.’

  ‘Too hot. And too underdeveloped. You know me, Tom, I like my home comforts. No, at heart I am a European. That’s where I feel at my happiest. On the continent. Although I haven’t seen much of it, I grant you.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never even been outside of England.’

  ‘You’re young, I’m old. You have plenty of time ahead of you.’

  Tom thought about it and said nothing for a while. Wherever we went, it would be on my money so he perhaps felt a twinge of conscience about proposing a trip. Or perhaps not.

  ‘We could try Europe,’ he said in a quiet voice after a while. ‘There’s got to be a lot to see there. We could try Scandinavia. I’ve always liked the sound of it.’

  We discussed it further for some time until it was agreed. We would spend six months travelling around Europe, visiting some of the sites of great architecture which existed there – also the art galleries and museums, since I have always had an artistic bent. Tom would be my companion and secretary, for there would still be many business affairs which I would have to deal with while I was away. Letters to be written, meetings to be arranged, minutes to be taken. He was quite efficient, for one of the Thomases, and I felt that I could trust him entirely with this task.

  One evening some months later, while relaxing outside our hotel in Locarno, Switzerland, after a long day climbing around the mountains with some ladies, each of whom showed more energy and commitment to the task than either of us did, Tom expressed a desire to see France. I shuddered slightly as it was the last place in the world I had intended visiting owing to the less than pleasant memories that I had of the place, but he was adamant.

  ‘I am partly French, after all,’ he told me. ‘I’d like to see where my father grew up.5

  ‘Your father grew up in Dover and then a small village called Cageley,’ I told him irritably. ‘We could have stayed in England if you wanted to see where your father grew up, Tom. He left Paris when he was an infant, remember.’

  ‘Nevertheless, it’s where he was born and where his earliest experiences were. And my grandparents, they were both French, were they not?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, grudgingly, ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And you’re French through and through. You haven’t been back there since you left as a boy. Surely you want to see it again. See how it’s changed.’

  ‘I never cared for it much in the first place, Tom,’ I told him. ‘I don’t see why I’d want to go back and feign a little romantic nostalgia.’ I shrugged the idea off and wondered how I could dissuade him, so sure was I that I did not want to return to that country. The urge to learn more about one’s heritage, however, is a powerful one and he claimed it was cruel of me to prevent him from seeing the streets where we had grown up, the city where my parents had lived and died, the place that we had left in order to begin our new lives.

  ‘What if I just told you about them?’ I asked. ‘There are plenty of tales I could tell you about our early days in Paris and what went on there, if that’s what you want to hear. I could tell you how your grandfather met my mother, if that would interest you. It happened one afternoon when she was leaving the theatre and a boy -’

  ‘I know this story, Uncle Matthieu,’ he said, interrupting me with a look of frustration upon his face. ‘You’ve told me all those stories already. Many times.’

  ‘Not all of them surely.’

  ‘Well, a lot of them anyway. I don’t need to hear them again. I want to see Paris. Is it too much to ask? Isn’t there any part of you that wonders how the place has changed in thirty years? You ran away from it once with nothing, don’t you want to go back now that you have made a success out of your life and see what it has become without you?’

  I nodded. He was right, of course. Despite myself, my mind had often turned to France in the intervening years. Although I had no great patriotic feelings towards the country, I was none the less a Frenchman; although I had nothing but bad memories of Paris, it remained the city of my birth. And while I had occasionally had nightmares about our lives there, about the day my father died, the afternoon my mother was murdered, and the morning my stepfather was executed, it carried a strange and wholly understandable fascination for me. Tom was right; I did want to see Paris again. And so an arrangement was made to visit the city and late in 1792 we began to move slowly across Europe, stopping at places of interest for a few weeks at a time, and by the spring of the following year we had arrived at our destination, the city of my birth.

  Tom was a bloodthirsty lad and it was a flaw that would eventually prove to be his undoing. Although not personally sadistic – he was never brave enough to be the person actually inflicting pain on others -he enjoyed watching others suffer, playing the role of voyeur in another person’s misery. In London, I knew that he attended the cockfights and would return home after them with a slightly crazed expression in his eyes. He enjoyed boxing bouts and competitions where men would end up bloodied and beaten. And so, in order to satisfy this perversion, Paris in 1793 was not a wholly unpleasant place for him to be.

  The Bastille, that massive, stinking, infected prison where the aristos had been placed by the new Republicans, had fallen in 1789 and from then on there was a near endless series of demonstrations in the capital which forced the king, Louis XVI, to quit Paris with his family later that year. Over the course of the early 1790s, as the National Assembly strove harder and harder to force the king to accept their constitution and push through greater reforms that would sting his absolutism, it became clear that the atmosphere of the Terror was about to begin. In 1792, a year before we arrived in the city, Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin convinced the National Assembly to introduce the device – created not by him but by his colleague Antoine Louis – to deal with offenders and shortly after that the great killing machine was set up in the Place de la Concorde where she held sway over her citizens for the following few years.

  It was into this atmosphere of distrust, betrayal and abject fear that Tom and I arrived in the spring of 1793. The king had already been beheaded and, as we drove into Paris, I felt a strange lack of feeling for the place which betrayed my anticipation of returning to my
native city. I had expected to be moved by my return, particularly by the manner in which I was coming back after my long exile; no longer a poor orphan who saw pickpocketing as the only way to make a life for himself, but a successful businessman who had risen above the station of his birth to become a wealthy man. I thought of my parents and to a lesser extent of Tomas, but hardly gave Dominique a thought, as our relationship had been one solely based in England and, although we shared a birthplace, we never met in France at all and had rarely spoken of it.

  We immediately settled into a boarding house as far to the outskirts of the city as possible and it was my intention to stay there for about a week before moving south to explore a portion of the country with which I was unfamiliar.

  ‘You can feel it, can’t you?’ asked Tom, coming into my room on that first day, his thick, dark hair practically bouncing away from his skull in his excitement. ‘The atmosphere in the city. There’s a real stink of blood in the air.’

  ‘Charming,’ I muttered. ‘It’s always one of the more pleasant aspects to a modern city. It’s just the phrase they should use in the guidebooks. Really makes the holiday memorable.’

  ‘Oh, come on Uncle Matthieu,’ he said, bounding around the room enthusiastically like a little puppy dog who has just been unleashed from a tiny garden into a large open park. ‘You should be thrilled to be here and at such an important time too. Don’t you have any feelings for Paris? Remember the way you were brought up here.’

  ‘We were poor, certainly, but -’

  ‘You were poor because no one was interested in feeding you. Everything went to the rich.’

  ‘The rich simply had everything in the first place. It was the way of the world.’

  He shrugged, disappointed by my refusal to be drawn into the debate. ‘Same difference,’ he said. The aristos taking everything, leaving everyone else with nothing. It’s not fair.’

  I raised an eyebrow. I had never seen Tom as the revolutionary sort before. Indeed, it was my belief that given the chance he would much prefer to live his life as a wealthy, idle, drunken aristocrat than a poor, stinking, sober peasant, even if his ideals may have tended more towards the latter. Still, I suppose in retrospect that his basic belief -why should they have when we have not – was true enough in theory, even if it did not exactly apply to him, who was living off my money quite comfortably and without complaint.

  It was shortly after we arrived that we first met Thérèse Nantes, whose parents owned the boarding house where we were staying. She was a dark haired girl of around eighteen and, to her obvious irritation, an only child, a position which required her to take an added weight of responsibility in her parents’ business. I suspected that in healthier times the Nantes family had employed a small coterie of maids and cooks, for at peak capacity the boarding house could have held up to thirty guests. Now, however, with visitors to the city at an obvious decline, there was only an old French couple who had lived there for years and a couple of passing tradesmen in residence along with Tom and me. Therese wandered around her home with a permanent scowl on her face and responded to her parents with little more than monosyllabic grunts. When serving food, one learned not to ask for anything which was not already on the plate lest the dinner itself should drop mysteriously into one’s lap.

  Her mood improved immeasurably, however, as her friendship with my nephew developed. At first it was difficult to notice any signs of her thaw, but gradually, as the weeks passed, she would greet us for our evening meal with a look that bore a suspicious resemblance to a half-smile. The morning my breakfast was served to me with the phrase ‘enjoy your meal’ was a revelation and, when she offered to top up our wine glasses one night as we sat in the parlour, it felt like nothing short of a breakthrough. I took this as an encouragement towards conversation.

  ‘And where are Monsieur Lafayette and his wife tonight?’ I asked, referring to the elderly couple who shared the boarding house with us. ‘They’ve surely not deserted their usual seats for the evening air.’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ asked Therese, putting her wine bottle down on the sideboard and fingering it for dust. ‘They’ve left us. Gone to the country, I believe.’

  ‘The country?’ I asked, surprised, for we had struck up an awkward friendship, the four of us, and I was taken aback that they would leave without saying goodbye. ‘Well, how long are they going for? I thought they would be here ‘til they were in their shrouds.’

  ‘They’re gone for good, Monsieur Zéla,’ she replied.

  ‘Matthieu, please.’

  ‘They packed their bags early this morning and took a coach towards the south. I’m surprised you didn’t hear them. Madame made a fuss about who should be carrying her bags. I told her there are certain things I’m paid for and certain things I’m not but she -’

  ‘I never heard a thing,’ I said, cutting her off before she could continue with her grievance and my abruptness merited a look of anger from the girl. Tom coughed in order to break the moment and turned around in his chair to look at her.

  ‘At least you should have some more time to yourself with two less mouths to feed,’ he said and she continued to stare at me for a moment before averting her gaze to my nephew and smiling at him.

  ‘It’s no trouble,’ she said, as if he had suggested that it was. ‘I enjoy it here.’ My burst of laughter, quickly muffled, earned another look from Therese, whose eyes narrowed into thin slits as she considered a response. I decided to forge a reconciliation.

  ‘Why don’t you sit down?’ I said, standing up and pulling out the spare armchair that formed a triangle between my nephew’s seat and my own. ‘Enjoy a glass of wine. Your day’s work must be over by now.’

  Therese looked at me in surprise before turning to Tom, who nodded his approval and encouraged her to join us. She shrugged and with great dignity walked to the armchair and sat. Tom reached for another glass and poured her a healthy measure which she accepted with a smile. The gesture made, I wondered where our conversation could go from here and sat back, racking my brain for suitable topics. Fortunately the silence lasted only a moment as the wine immediately loosened Therese’s lips.

  ‘I never liked Madame anyway,’ she began, referring to our recently departed housemate. ‘She had some ways of which I could never approve. Sometimes her room in the mornings ...’ She shook her head as if she didn’t want to cause us any horror by informing us of the devastation the Lafayette family could inflict upon their small room.

  ‘She was always quite polite to me,’ I muttered.

  ‘She invited me into her room once,’ said Tom suddenly, his voice overly loud as if we were in danger of not hearing him. ‘She said that she was having some difficulty with her curtain rail. When I stretched to replace one of the hooks, she took a step towards me and ...’ He suddenly blushed a crimson red and I guessed that he had not thought this story out in advance. ‘She behaved inappropriately,’ he muttered, his voice low now. ‘I ... I’m ...’ He looked around at us in confusion and, for the first time ever, I heard Therese laugh.

  ‘She thought you a handsome young man,’ she replied, and I thought I saw her give my nephew a wink. T could tell from the way she would look in your direction when you entered a room.’ Tom frowned, as if he regretted the turn this conversation had taken.

  ‘My God,’ he said, clearly appalled. ‘She must be forty if she’s a day.’

  ‘A veritable Methuselah,’ I muttered, but neither of my companions acknowledged the comment.

  ‘She treated me with contempt’, said Therese, ‘because she was jealous of my youth, no doubt. And my beauty. She has several entries in my occurrences book.’

  ‘Your what?’ I asked, unsure whether I had heard her correctly. ‘What is an occurrences book?’

  Now it was Therese’s turn to look a little unsettled, having perhaps said more than she intended. ‘It’s a silly thing,’ she said apologetically, refusing to look me in the eye. ‘A thing I keep for my own amusement.
Like a diary.’

  ‘But a diary of what?’ asked Tom, like me intrigued by the phrase.

  ‘Of people who offend me,’ she said with a slight laugh, but I could tell that she took it very seriously indeed. ‘I keep a log of anyone who treats me badly or offends me in any way. I have done so for years.’

  I stared at her. I could think of only one question. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘So that I don’t forget,’ she replied with perfect equanimity. ‘What goes around comes around, Monsieur Zéla. Matthieu,’ she added before I could protest. ‘It may sound ridiculous to you, but to me -’

  ‘It’s not ridiculous,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s just ... unusual, that’s all. I suppose it’s one way to remember ...’ I couldn’t see where my thoughts were headed and brushed them off quickly with the phrase ‘... things that have happened.’

  ‘I hope I don’t feature too heavily in your occurrences book, Therese,’ said Tom, his face breaking into a broad smile, and she shook her head, smiling back at him as if the very idea was impossible.

  ‘Of course you don’t,’ she said, reaching out and touching his hand for a moment, stressing the word ‘you’ to deliberately exclude me. She shot me a reproachful glance to reinforce her point and I shifted uncomfortably, wondering what I could possibly have done to offend the girl. I stayed silent for a time, refilling the three wine glasses, as the two young people flirted with each other, both ignoring me completely, and I was about to make my excuses and leave when something that Therese had said came to my mind and I wanted to ask her about it.

  ‘What goes around comes around,’ I said loudly, in order to interrupt the pair, and they looked at me, perhaps surprised that I was still there. ‘Do you believe that, Therese?’