The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  ‘Well, don’t expect to see me around the lot over the next few days,’ I said in parting. ‘Because if you’re not going to support them I certainly am.’

  Dorothy and Lee were already testifying when I arrived in the House for the committee hearings. We had dined together the night before and tried to avoid discussing the upcoming grilling but it was difficult to keep away from the subject entirely. Nobody mentioned Rusty – I suspected that they had already had something of a run-in with him before leaving California for Washington – but his spirit hovered in the air like the ghost of trouble yet to come. Stina attempted to lighten the conversation with tales of hardship covering school prize-givings for her local television station but the mood was bleak among us and we drank heavily in an attempt to cover over the cracks in the conversation.

  As a result I overslept the following morning – most unlike me – and didn’t arrive in the committee room until after eleven O’clock, about an hour and a half after the proceedings had begun. Fortunately, my friends had not been called until a few minutes earlier so I hadn’t missed much but nevertheless I cursed myself, for they had their backs to me at the front of the room and I wanted them to see that I was there and on their side.

  ‘It’s just a comedy show,’ Lee was saying as I settled into my seat beside a large fat woman eating a bag of mints noisily. ‘That’s all it is. There’s no subtext at all.’

  ‘So what you’re telling this committee is that you put no aspects of your own personality or beliefs into the characters of ... The Buddy Rickles Show.’ The man speaking was a thin, pale senator from Nebraska who had to consult a piece of paper to be sure that he was referring to the right show. About a dozen men sat in a line behind an enormous oak desk, with secretaries passing back and forth between them, placing notes or copies of relevant information before them. I saw Senator McCarthy sitting in the centre of his team, a fat, bulbous man, perspiring heavily under the lights and cameras which were directed towards him. He seemed hardly aware of either Dorothy or Lee and was engrossed in the day’s edition of the Washington Post, shaking his head from time to time to signify his disagreement with what the paper said.

  ‘Subconsciously perhaps,’ said Lee carefully. ‘I mean when you write anything you -’

  ‘So you admit that you do infuse your own personal beliefs into this television programme watched by millions around the country every week? You admit that?’

  ‘Hardly beliefs,’ countered Dorothy. ‘We’re talking about a TV show where the biggest dilemma faced by the characters is whether to upgrade the family motor car or use the money to hire a maid two mornings a week. It’s just a TV comedy script, that’s all. It’s not exactly The Communist Manifesto.’

  I winced when she said the words, and I dare say she did herself, for that was about the worst example she could have made to prove her point. The senator from Nebraska glared at her, wondering whether he should wait a few moments for her to try to pull back from that comment or whether this was a perfect opportunity to attack. In the end, he attacked.

  ‘You’ve read The Communist Manifesto then, Mrs Jackson?’ he asked, and there was a flurry of camera shots as she struggled for an answer.

  ‘I’ve read the St James’ Bible too,’ she said carefully. ‘And the constitution of the United States. Have you read that, sir?’

  ‘I have,’ he replied.

  ‘I read many things,’ she continued. ‘I’m a writer. I love books.’

  ‘But would you say you love The Communist Manifesto in particular?’

  ‘Of course not, I just meant -’

  ‘Mrs Jackson,’ boomed Senator McCarthy suddenly and all eyes turned towards him. He was known for his incredible lack of patience with his witnesses and the televised proceedings were already beginning to damage what little credibility he had left by that stage. ‘Please don’t bother wasting the time of this committee by giving us a needless trawl through your no doubt effusive bookshelves. Is it true that you socialised with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, that you plotted with them ways to overthrow the legitimate government of these United States and that had it not been for a lack of evidence you and your husband may well have ended up in a similar unfortunate state as those two traitors?’

  ‘Lack of evidence is hardly a cause for acquittal in these times, Senator,’ said Dorothy sharply.

  ‘Mrs Jackson!’ he roared in response and even I jumped in my seat then. ‘Did you socialise with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg? Were they present in your home on social occasions when you discussed ways that you could -’

  ‘We didn’t socialise,’ she shouted over the din. ‘They were there, perhaps, but we weren’t close. I hardly knew them. Although having said that, there remains no firm evidence that -’

  ‘Are you currently a member of the communist party?’ he shot back, and this was usually the point where he would go in for the kill.

  ‘No, I’m not,’ she answered defiantly.

  ‘Have you ever been a member of the communist party?’ he asked in the same tone of voice and this time she could not help but hesitate.

  ‘I was never a member,’ she said carefully.

  ‘But you admit to attending their meetings? Reading their literature? Disseminating their filthy ideas to corrupt the minds of America’s young at a point in our -’

  ‘That’s not how it was,’ she said, beginning to come apart now, for she had backed herself into a corner and everyone present knew it. She may well have never been a member of the party but she had of course learned about their organisation and read about their ideals.

  ‘You were a member of the communist party,’ shouted Senator McCarthy as if she had just admitted it. He slammed his hand down on the desk and for the next few moments it was impossible to decipher all that was said between the two as they roared ever louder to get their points across.

  ‘I have never said that I -’

  ‘You were a cold-blooded -’

  ‘And furthermore I question the —’

  ‘You were in league with -’

  ‘I don’t believe I am under any -’

  ‘You stand for everything that is -’

  The meeting ended in chaos. Officers of the senate took the Jacksons from their seats and led them away from the committee room through a door at the back. The senator from Nebraska called the next witness and the stormy business of government continued.

  Things moved quickly after that day. Lee and Dorothy were blacklisted and prevented from working in the entertainment industry. We brought in a couple of new writers but the show had run out of steam anyway, and once the investigation into Buddy Rickles himself began we had no choice but to close down production for good.

  Within a few months, Lee and Dorothy were living apart. He began a romance with the daughter of a stationery tycoon and eventually spent the rest of his working life in that business, after his divorce and remarriage. Dorothy never really recovered from the witch-hunt years. She was so accustomed to being at the very centre of things, hosting parties and making sure that she said the cleverest things at them, that her exile from society hit hard. Stina and I saw a lot of her, of course, but we were the only ones. Everyone else who was still working in the industry had grown afraid of associating with those who had already been blacklisted and those who had received the same treatment had mostly moved away from America, towards London or Europe, where they found a more moderate system of government in place.

  By the time the blacklists were lifted, she was no longer the woman that she had once been and drifted into alcoholism; I lost track of her after I left America but always imagined her ending up in a nursing home somewhere, her face fully made-up, still drinking, still writing, still cursing McCarthy and Rusty Wilson, who was retired by NBC shortly after the end of The Buddy Rickles Show and given a comfortable golden handshake as he tottered off to old age and obscurity.

  Stina and I stayed in California for some years, although I eventually got out of television production.
We made our home there but travelled often and we remained happy until the beginning of the Vietnam War, when the memories of her dead brothers came back to haunt my wife and she became an ardent politicist once again. She travelled across the country campaigning against the war and was eventually killed in a riot at Berkeley, when she recklessly jumped out in front of an army vehicle in an attempt to halt it. Her death hurt me for we had enjoyed some happy times over twenty years or so and I packed up and left California once again with a heavy heart.

  This time I decided to return to England and to a life of leisure. In the 1970s and 1980s I lived on the south coast, near Dover, and spent many happy days walking the streets there, reliving my youth, recognising hardly anything after a distance of two hundred-odd years. But it still felt strangely like home and those decades were rich with adventure and happiness and I was greatly amused to note the sudden rise to fame of my nephew Tommy towards the end of my time there. But eventually I knew that I had to leave for I grew restless, as is my habit every few decades, and returned to London in 1992, unsure of my plans for the future. I made the decision to rent a small basement flat in Piccadilly, for I did not want to be too heavily tied to the city should an opportunity arise elsewhere, and it was completely by chance that I found myself heading back towards the world of television with the creation of our satellite broadcasting station.

  And that is where I have lived for these last seven years.

  Chapter 24

  Leaving Dominique

  I waited until Tomas was out of the house, playing with friends, before speaking to Mr and Mrs Amberton. I hadn’t been looking forward to this, and felt more than a little tense as I entered the room. We sat around their kitchen table, the three of us, their small wood-laden fire hissing and spitting with almost as much frequency as Mr Amberton himself, and I told them about what had taken place with Jack Holby. At first I was economical with the truth, not wishing to do anything which would cast the injured Nat Pepys in anything less than a despicable light; not wishing to say a word which would portray Jack in anything less than a heroic one. Mr Amberton said nothing, paying more attention to his whiskey than he did to me, while his wife drew in her breath in shock every so often, a hand rushing to her mouth as I reached the point in my story where blood was drawn, and by the end she was shaking her head in horror, as if we had assaulted God himself.

  ‘What’s happen to him?’ she asked. ‘This is terrible. To inflict such an injury on Nat Pepys. Sir Alfred’s son!’ The fact that he was the son of a prominent man, as opposed to actually being a prominent man himself, was irrelevant to Mrs Amberton; the crime at hand was that someone from the lower orders had assaulted someone from the upper. ‘I never trusted that Jack Holby anyway,’ she added, sniffing loudly as she crossed her arms before her chest.

  ‘It wasn’t his fault,’ I insisted, keeping my voice controlled but feeling concerned that I had not presented the case for the defence anything like as well as I should have. ‘He was provoked, Mrs Amberton. Nat Pepys is a bully and a lech, that’s all. He -’

  ‘But I don’t understand,’ asked Mrs Amberton. ‘Why would Jack be defending Dominique? Does he know her that well?’

  ‘Well, we all work together,’ I said doubtfully. ‘But the thing was that he wasn’t so much defending her as he was me.’ She stared at me, baffled, and I was forced to explain. ‘The truth is’, I said, feeling a little nervous inside as I prepared to tell two good people that I had been lying to them for a year, ‘Dominique isn’t actually my sister. In fact, we’re not related at all.’

  ‘There, I said so, didn’t I?’ said Mr Amberton triumphantly, slamming his hand down on the kitchen table with a grin as his wife shushed him and urged me to continue.

  ‘We said that originally because we didn’t think there was much chance of us finding work together if we said we were anything but brother and sister. Meeting you was pure chance and by then we had already developed the deceit. By the time it seemed needless, we had lied to everyone and we felt there was no point in changing our stories.’

  ‘And Tomas?’ asked Mrs Amberton, her voice controlled but an obvious anger bubbling up inside her. ‘What about him? I suppose you’ll tell me now that he was just some child you picked up off the streets somewhere in Paris. I mean you all have the same accent, so how are two poor fools like us to know the difference?’ I could tell by the tone in which she spoke that she was hurt; it was one of injured pride.

  ‘No,’ I said, bowing my head in shame, unwilling to meet her eye. ‘He really is my brother. Well, half-brother anyway. We have different fathers but the same mother.’

  ‘Ha!’ she snorted with distaste. ‘And where is she then, might I ask, this mother of yours? Living in the village somewhere? Working at the house?’ There were tears in her eyes, more for Tomas’s sake, I suspected, than my own. It occurred to me how in all the time that we had been there we had told the Ambertons little about our past other than the barefaced lie that we were three siblings travelling together. In fairness to us, they had never asked for much more, accepting our fiction as worthy of their trust, and nothing had stepped in the way to dissuade them. But, finally, the truth had to be told. Staring into the fire, I told them of my early years in Paris; of my mother, Marie, and the senseless killing of my father, Jean; of the dramatist who had provided us with a little money to survive upon; of the child who stole my mother’s bag one day as she left the theatre, resulting in a meeting with her second husband Philippe, Tomas’s natural father; of his attempts at creativity, both on stage and off; finally I told them of the fatal afternoon when he had killed my mother and how I had run from the house to seek help. After telling of his execution and the subsequent meeting between Dominique Sauvet, Tomas and me on board the boat from Calais, I related how we had lived by our wits in Dover for a year before heading towards London, in order to seek our fortune. En route, we had met them, the Ambertons, and they knew the rest. I neglected to tell them of the dreadful night on which we had encountered Furlong and left him to rot in a thicket as we made our getaway; it seemed senseless to add pointless trauma to the story. I told them all of that, and it took some time but they heard me out silently and maintained a respectful pause when I finally finished.

  Eventually: ‘Well, I still don’t see why you had to lie to us,’ said Mrs Amberton, maintaining her position as ranger of the moral high ground while allowing her tone to slip back from insulted outrage to disappointed understanding. ‘But I suppose it’s all come good in the end.’

  ‘Good?’ I said, staring at her in amazement. ‘How has it come good? What good? Because of this, Jack Holby is left sitting in a prison cell, his entire future ruined. He had plans, Mrs Amberton. He was leaving Cageley.’

  ‘He’ll be going nowhere for a few years now,’ said Mr Amberton, pulling a piece of gristle from between his two front teeth, the only teeth he possessed on the upper gum. ‘He’ll get five years for what he did to Nat Pepys. He won’t have a job to come out to either when he gets released. He should count himself lucky that he didn’t kill him or he’d be on the scaffold himself.’

  ‘This is what I mean,’ I said, incredibly frustrated by their lack of compassion for my friend, feeling as if I wanted to break up every item in the room to get them to understand how this made me feel. ‘All these lies ... if we hadn’t lied, then none of this would have happened. Dominique and I could have sorted out our relationship and people would have known about it. Nat Pepys wouldn’t have mattered. As it stands, Jack is only in jail because he didn’t want to see me end up there. He’s my friend}’ I insisted, still shocked within myself at what he had sacrificed to preserve that friendship; in my two and a half centuries of life, I have never known a more selfless act. Although I never observed its like again, it made me value friendship. It made me believe that being true to one’s friends and refusing to betray them was as important a trait as any other. The history that one can create with a friend, a lifetime of history and shared experienc
e, is a wonderful thing and shabbily sacrificed. And yet a true friend is a rare thing; sometimes those whom we perceive as friends are simply people with whom we spend a lot of time.

  ‘I thought there was something funny about you and Dominique,’ said Mr Amberton eventually. ‘I saw the way you looked at her. Didn’t seem like the kind of looks you give your sister,’ he muttered, but I hardly heard him for Mrs Amberton said something instead which made me sit up and open my eyes wide.

  ‘Well, I never liked her anyway,’ she said, catching my eye after a moment and seeing how shocked I looked. ‘There’s no point looking at me like that, Matthieu,’ she continued. ‘I speak as I find, I do. I always thought there was something a little shifty about the girl. Here we are, bring her here to this new life, put a roof over her brothers’ heads – oh, I know you’re not her brother but you know what I mean – and how does she repay us? Barely comes to visit us any more. Only speaks to me on the street out of politeness. I can see she’s always itching to get away.’

  ‘Mrs Amberton, please,’ I protested.

  ‘No, I’ll have my say,’ she said more loudly, drowning me out as she simultaneously raised a hand to silence me. ‘If you ask me, she’s sat around and let this whole thing develop around her. From what you tell me, she’s been quite keen to encourage that Mr Pepys and his advances.’

  ‘she has no interest in him whatso -’

  ‘He might have no interest in her, certainly, for he’ll be marrying into a better family than hers, but she’s got ideas, oh yes. I can see them in her. Now she’s got the whole village fighting over her -’

  ‘It’s hardly the whole village,’ I said.

  ‘And she’s probably loving every moment of it. Nat Pepys is half crippled, Jack Holby’s ruined and in jail and you ... well, I don’t even know what you’re planning on doing.’