The Absolutist

by John Boyne

  “What does he want to go starting fights in here for?” the landlord asks me. “Save all that for over there, I say.”

  I don’t respond, simply turn around and leave. The notion runs through my head that Will may have run off in anger at what has happened to Wolf and means to desert. Bloody fool, I think, for he’ll be court-martialled if—when—he’s caught. But there are three separate paths leading from where I stand and he could have taken any of them; I have no choice but to make my way back to the barracks and hope that he’s been smart enough to return there while I’ve been gone.

  As it happens, I don’t need to go that far, for halfway between pub and camp, I discover him by chance in one of the clearings in the woods, a small, secluded area that overlooks a stream. He’s sitting in the moonlight on a grassy bank, staring into the water and tossing a pebble casually from hand to hand.

  “Will,” I say, running towards him, relieved that he hasn’t put himself in danger’s way. “There you are at last. I’ve been looking for you everywhere.”

  “Have you?” he asks, looking up, and in the moonlight I can see that he has been crying; his cheeks are streaked with dirt where he’s tried to dry the tears away and the skin below his eyes is fleshy and red. “Sorry about that,” he says, turning away from me. “I just needed to be alone for a while, that’s all. I didn’t mean to worry you.”

  “It’s all right,” I say, sitting down beside him. “I thought you might have done something stupid, that’s all.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, you know,” I say with a shrug. “Run off.”

  He shakes his head. “I wouldn’t do that, Tristan,” he says. “Not yet, anyway.”

  “What do you mean, ‘not yet’?”

  “I don’t know.” He lets a deep sigh escape his lips and rubs his eyes once again before turning back to me with a sad smile on his face. “So here we are,” he says. “The end of the road. Was it worth it, do you think?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough, I imagine,” I reply, staring into the still water. “When we get to France, I mean.”

  “France, yes,” he says thoughtfully. “It’s all in front of us now. I believe Sergeant Clayton would be disappointed if we weren’t all killed in the line of duty.”

  “Don’t say that,” I reply with a shudder.

  “Why not? It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

  “Sergeant Clayton may be many things,” I say, “but he’s not that much of a monster. I’m sure he doesn’t want to see any of us dead.”

  “Don’t be so naive,” he snaps. “He wanted Wolf dead, that’s for sure. And he got his way in the end.”

  “Wolf killed himself,” I say. “Perhaps not on purpose but through his own foolishness. Only an idiot would go marching up through that forest in the middle of the night.”

  “Oh, Tristan,” he says, shaking his head again and smiling at me, the low, quiet way he whispers my name reminding me of the time he had me pinned to the floor after our mock-wrestle in the barracks. His hand reaches out now and he pats me on the knee, once, twice, then lingers a third time before slowly moving it away. “You really are unbelievably innocent at times, aren’t you? It’s one of the reasons I like you so much.”

  “Don’t patronize me,” I say, annoyed by his tone. “You don’t know as much as you think.”

  “Well, what else am I supposed to think?” he asks. “After all, you believe that Wolf was the author of his own misfortune, don’t you? Only an innocent would think that. Or a bloody fool. Wolf didn’t fall, Tristan. He didn’t kill himself. He was murdered. Killed in cold blood.”

  “What?” I ask, almost laughing at the absurdity of his remark. “How can you even think such a thing? For God’s sake, Will, he’d deserted the camp. He’d run—”

  “He hadn’t run anywhere,” he says angrily. “He told me, only a few hours earlier, before going to sleep, that he’d been granted his status as a conscientious objector. The tribunal had finally come back with a resolution to his case. He wasn’t even being sent out there as a stretcher-bearer on account of it. Turns out he was quite adept at mathematics and had agreed to help in the War Department and live under house arrest for the rest of the war. He was going home, Tristan. The very next morning. And then, just like that, he disappears. That’s a pretty extraordinary coincidence, don’t you think?”

  “Who else knew about this?” I ask.

  “Clayton, of course. Wells and Moody, those dark horsemen. And one or two of the other men, I suppose. It was starting to get around late last night. I heard some rumblings about it.”

  “I never heard a thing.”

  “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t the case.”

  “So what are you suggesting?” I ask. “That they took him out and murdered him on account of it?”

  “Of course, Tristan. Do you mean to tell me that you think they’re not capable of it? What have we been trained for, after all, if not for killing other soldiers? The colour of the uniform doesn’t matter much. They all look the same in the dark, anyway.”

  I open my mouth to reply but am unable to find any words. It makes perfect sense. And then I remember waking in the middle of the night and the noises that I heard, the rustling of the bed sheets, the kicking of the blankets, the shushing and the dragging along the floor.

  “Jesus,” I say.

  “Now you have it,” he says in an exhausted tone, nodding his head. “But what can we do about it, anyway? Nothing. We’ve done what we came here to do. We’ve made ourselves fit and strong. We’ve trained our minds to believe that the man in front of us who doesn’t speak our language is a piece of meat that needs stripping from the bone. We’re perfect warriors now. Ready to kill. Sergeant Clayton’s work is done. We’re just getting a head start on the action, that’s all.”

  He speaks with such anger, such a tangled mixture of dread and fear and hostility, that I want nothing more than to reach out and comfort him, and so I do. A moment later, his head is buried in his hands and I realize that he is weeping. I stare, unsure what to do, and he looks up, guarding one side of his face with the flat of his hand so I cannot see how upset he is.

  “Don’t,” he says, between gulps. “Go back to the barracks, Tristan. Please.”

  “Will,” I say, reaching forward. “It’s all right. I don’t mind.

  We all feel it. We’re all lost.”

  “But, damn it,” he says, turning his face to mine, swallowing as he takes me in. “Jesus Christ, Tristan, what’s going to happen to us out there? I’m scared shitless, honest I am.”

  He reaches over, takes my face in his hands and pulls me to him. In my idle moments, imagining such a scene, I have always assumed that it would be the other way round, that I would reach for him and he would pull away, denouncing me as a degenerate and a false friend. But now I am neither shocked nor surprised by his initiative, nor do I feel any of the great urgency that I thought I would, should this moment ever come to pass. Instead, it feels perfectly natural, everything he does to me, everything that he allows to happen between us. And for the first time since that dreadful afternoon when my father beat me to within an inch of my life, I feel that I have come home.

  BREATHING AND

  BEING ALIVE

  Norwich, 16 September 1919

  MISS BANCROFT,” I said, returning the pile of fallen napkins to the table and standing up, a little flushed now and more than a little nervous. I extended a hand and she stared at it before removing her glove and shaking it in a brisk, businesslike fashion. Her skin was soft against my own rough hands.

  “You found it all right, then?” she asked, and I nodded quickly.

  “Yes,” I said. “I arrived last night, actually. Shall we sit down?”

  She took her coat off, hanging it on a stand near the door before leaning over the table for a moment and speaking quietly. “Can you excuse me for a moment, Mr. Sadler?” she asked. “I just want to freshen up.”

  I watched her as she walked towards a
side door and I guessed that this café must be a particular favourite of hers as she had no difficulty locating the Ladies. I suspected that she had planned this manoeuvre: step inside, say hello, size me up, disappear for a few minutes to gather her thoughts, then come back ready to talk. As I waited, a young couple entered, chatting happily, and sat down, leaving a gap of only one empty table between me and them; I noticed a large burn-mark running along the side of his face and averted my gaze before he caught me staring. In the far corner I was dimly aware of the man who had come in earlier staring in my direction. He had moved out from behind the pillar and appeared to be watching me intently, but as I caught his eye he looked away immediately and I didn’t think anything further of it.

  “Can I get you some tea?” asked the waitress, coming over with pad and pen.

  “Yes,” I said. “Or rather, no. Do you mind if I wait until my companion comes back? She won’t be long.”

  The girl nodded, not in the least put out, and I turned my attention once again to the street outside, where a group of schoolchildren was walking past now, about twenty of them in a crocodile, each small boy holding the hand of the boy next to him so they wouldn’t get lost. Despite how nervous I was feeling, I couldn’t help but smile. It recalled my own schooldays and how, when I was eight or nine years old and our teacher would make us do the same thing, Peter and I always locked hands, squeezing tightly, determined not to be the first to cry out and demand release. Could it really be only twelve years ago, I wondered? It felt like a hundred.

  “I’m so sorry to have kept you waiting,” said Marian, returning to the table now and sitting down opposite me. As she did so, the couple glanced across and whispered something to each other. I thought that perhaps they were there on a liaison and didn’t want their conversation to be overheard, for they stood up almost immediately and moved to a table by the furthest wall, throwing unpleasant looks at us as they went, as if it were we who had disturbed them. Marian watched them go, her tongue bulging slightly in her cheek, before turning back to me with a curious expression on her face, a mixture of pain, resignation and fury.

  “It’s perfectly all right,” I replied. “I only got here about ten minutes before you.”

  “Did you say you arrived last night?”

  “Yes,” I said. “On the late-afternoon train.”

  “But you should have said. We could have met then if it was more convenient for you. You wouldn’t have had to stay the night.”

  I shook my head. “Today is fine, Miss Bancroft. I just didn’t want to leave it to chance in the morning, that’s all. The trains from London can still be quite unreliable and I didn’t want to miss our appointment if they were cancelled for whatever reason.”

  “It is dreadful, isn’t it?” she said. “I had to be in London a couple of months ago for a wedding. I decided to take the ten-past-ten train, which should have got me to Liverpool Street by about midday, and do you know, I didn’t arrive until just after two o’clock. When I got to the church, my friends had already exchanged their vows and were walking down the aisle towards me. I was so embarrassed I felt like running right back to the station and catching the first train home again. Do you think things will ever get back to normal?”

  “Some day, yes,” I said.

  “When? I grow fearfully impatient, Mr. Sadler.”

  “Not this century, anyway,” I replied. “Perhaps the next.”

  “Well, that’s no good. We’ll all be dead by then, won’t we? Is it too much to ask for decent transportation during one’s lifetime?”

  She smiled and looked away for a moment, out towards the street where a second delegation of schoolchildren—girls this time—was marching past in similar military two-by-two formation.

  “Was it awful?” she said eventually, and I looked up, surprised that she should ask such a loaded question so soon. “The train journey,” she added quickly, noticing my disquiet. “Did you get a seat?”

  Of course it was natural that we should make small talk at first; it was hardly as if we could just get straight into the reason for my visit. But it was a curious sensation to know that we were making small talk, and for her to know it, too, and for us each to be entirely aware that the other was engaged in a similar level of deceit.

  “I didn’t mind it,” I replied, half amused by my misunderstanding. “I met someone I vaguely knew on board. We were sharing a carriage.”

  “Well, that’s something, I suppose. Do you read, Mr. Sadler?”

  “Do I read?”

  “Yes. Do you read?”

  I hesitated, wondering for a moment whether she meant could I read. “Well, yes,” I said cautiously. “Yes, of course I read.”

  “I can’t bear to be on a train without a book,” she announced. “It’s a form of self-defence in a way.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I’m not very good at talking to strangers, that’s the truth of it. Oh, don’t look so worried, I shall do my best with you. But it seems to me that every time I’m in a railway carriage there’s some lonely old bachelor sitting next to me who wants to compliment me on my dress or my hair or my good taste in hats, and I find that type of thing rather frustrating and not a little patronizing. You’re not going to pay me any compliments, are you, Mr. Sadler?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it,” I said, smiling again. “I don’t know much about ladies’ dresses or their hair or their hats.”

  She stared at me and I could see that she liked the remark, for her lips parted and she offered what might have been a distant relation of a smile; it was obvious that she was still deciding what to make of me.

  “And if it’s not a bachelor, then it’s some terrible old woman who interrogates me about my life and whether or not I’m married and do I have a position and what does my father do and are we anything to do with the Bancrofts of Shropshire and it goes on and on and on, Mr. Sadler, and the whole thing’s a frightful bore.”

  “I can imagine it would be,” I said. “No one ever talks to a chap much. Young ladies certainly don’t. Young men don’t. Old men … well, sometimes they do. They ask questions.”

  “Quite,” she said, her tone letting me know immediately that she didn’t want to pursue this line just yet. She reached for her bag and removed a cigarette case, plucked one out and offered a second to me. I was going to accept but changed my mind at the last minute and shook my head. “You don’t smoke?” she asked, appalled.

  “I do,” I said. “But I won’t just now, if you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind,” she said, putting the case back in her bag and lighting up in a quick, fluid movement of thumb, wrist and flint. “Why should I mind? Oh, hello, Jane, good morning.”

  “Good morning, Marian,” said the waitress who had approached me earlier.

  “I’m back again, like a bad penny.”

  “We hold on to our bad pennies here. We’ll grow rich off them some day. Ready to order, are you?”

  “Are we lunching yet, Mr. Sadler?” she asked me, blowing smoke in my face and causing me to turn my head to avoid it; she immediately waved it away with her right hand and turned her head to the side when she took her next drag. “Or shall we just have tea for now? I think tea,” she said, not waiting for an answer. “Tea for two, Jane.”

  “Anything to eat?”

  “Not just yet. You’re not in a hurry, Mr. Sadler, are you? Or are you ravenous already? It seems to me that young men are always ravenous these days. All the ones I know, anyway.”

  “No, I’m fine,” I replied, unsettled by her brusqueness; was it a front, I wondered, or her natural manner?

  “Then just tea for now. We may have something else a little later on. How’s Albert, by the way? Is he feeling any better?”

  “A little better,” said the waitress, smiling now. “The doctor says the cast can come off in a week or so. He can’t wait, the poor dear. Nor can I, for that matter. He gets the most frightful itches and brings the house down with his complaining about
it. I gave him a knitting needle to slide down there, to help scratch it away, you know, but I’m always terrified that he’ll push it too hard and cut himself. So I took it away, but then he complains even more.”

  “Dreadful business,” said Marian, shaking her head. “Still, you have only a week to go.”

  “Yes. And your father, he’s all right, is he?”

  Marian nodded and took another drag of her cigarette, smiling as she did so and then looking away, making it clear that Jane was dismissed and that was an end to that particular conversation.

  “I’ll bring the tea,” said the waitress, understanding perfectly and walking away.

  “Terribly sad story,” said Marian, leaning towards me once the waitress was out of earshot. “It’s her husband, you see. They’ve only been married a few months. He was repairing some tiles on their roof about six weeks ago and he fell off. Broke his leg. And he’d only just got over a broken arm about a month before that. Brittle bones, I expect. It wasn’t as if he fell a great distance.”

  “Her husband?” I asked, surprised. “It sounded to me as if you were talking about a child.”

  “Well, he is rather a child,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t care for him much myself, he’s always up to some mischief or other, but Jane is sweet. She used to play with me and—” She stopped herself and her face fell, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she had been about to say. She took a final drag from her tab, then pressed it out, only half smoked, in the ashtray. “That’s enough of that,” she said. “Do you know, I’m rather thinking of giving these things up.”

  “Really?” I asked. “Any particular reason?”

  “Well, the truth is I don’t enjoy them as much as I used to,” she said. “Also, I can’t imagine it can be all that good for you, can you? Taking all that smoke into your lungs every day. It doesn’t sound very sensible when you think about it.”