by John Boyne
“I can’t imagine it does that much harm,” I said. “Everyone smokes.”
“You don’t.”
“I do,” I replied. “I just didn’t feel like it right now.”
She nodded and narrowed her eyes as if she were sizing me up. We didn’t speak for a while and it gave me an opportunity to examine her more closely. She was older than Will and I, about twenty-five I imagined, but there was no wedding ring on her finger so I assumed that she was still unmarried. She didn’t look very much like him; he had been so dark and cheeky-looking, his features always ready to crinkle into a wink and a smile, but she was fairer than him, almost as fair as I was, and she had a clean, blemish-free complexion. She wore her hair in a tidy, efficient way, cut short below the chin line, without an ounce of vanity to the style. She was pretty—handsome, I should say—and wore only a light smear of lipstick that may in fact have been her natural colouring. I imagined that there was many a young man who might lose his head over her. Or have it bitten off.
“So,” she said after a moment. “Where did you stay last night, anyway?”
“Mrs. Cantwell’s boarding house,” I replied.
“Cantwell’s?” she asked, wrinkling up her face now as she considered it, and I almost gasped. There he was! In that expression. “I don’t know them, do I? Where are they?”
“Quite close to the railway station,” I said. “Near the bridge.”
“Oh yes,” she said. “There’s a run of them along there, isn’t there?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“One never really knows the boarding houses in one’s own town, does one?”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I suppose not.”
“When I go to London I stay at a very nice place on Russell Square. An Irishwoman called Jackson runs it. She drinks, of course. Mother’s ruin by the gallon. But she’s polite, her rooms are clean, she stays out of my business and that’s good enough for me. Can’t cook breakfast to save her life but that’s a small price to pay. Do you know Russell Square, Mr. Sadler?”
“Yes,” I said. “I work in Bloomsbury, actually. I used to live in south London. Now I live north of the river.”
“No plans to move to the centre, then?”
“Not at the moment, no. It’s frightfully expensive, you see, and I work at a publishing house.”
“No money in it?”
“No money in it for me,” I said, smiling.
She smiled, too, and looked down at the ashtray, and I thought she might be rather regretting putting her cigarette out, for she seemed anxious to have something to do with her hands. She looked over towards the counter, where there was no sign of the tea or, for that matter, any sign of our waitress. The older man who had been present when I arrived had vanished, too.
“I’m thirsty,” she said. “What’s keeping her, anyway?”
“I’m sure she’ll only be a moment,” I said.
In truth, I was starting to feel rather unsettled and wondered why on earth I had decided to come here in the first place. It was clear that neither of us felt relaxed in the other’s company. I was quiet and offering little to the conversation other than quick responses and shy remarks, while Miss Bancroft—Marian—seemed to be a bundle of nervous energy, shifting from topic to topic without thought or hesitation. I didn’t for a moment believe that this was who she really was; it was simply part of our meeting. She did not feel free to be herself.
“It’s usually very reliable in here,” she said, shaking her head. “I suppose I owe you an apology.”
“Not at all.”
“It’s a good job we didn’t order any food, isn’t it? My goodness, all we asked for were two cups of tea. But you must be starving, Mr. Sadler, are you? Have you eaten? Young men are always ravenous, I find.”
I stared at her, unsure whether she would remember that she had already made that very remark, but she appeared curiously oblivious to it.
“I had some breakfast,” I replied after a moment.
“At your Mrs. Cantwell’s?”
“No, not there. Somewhere else.”
“Oh, really?” she asked, leaning forward, terribly interested now. “Where did you go? Was it somewhere nice?”
“I don’t remember,” I said. “I think—”
“There are a number of good places to eat in Norwich,” she said. “I suppose you think we’re terribly provincial here and can’t provide good food. You London chaps always think that, don’t you?”
“Not at all, Miss Bancroft,” I replied. “In fact—”
“Of course, what you should have done was ask me in advance. If you had let me know that you were coming the night before, why, we might have invited you to dinner.”
“I wouldn’t have liked to put you to any trouble,” I said.
“But it wouldn’t have been any trouble,” she said, sounding almost offended. “For heaven’s sake, it’s just one more person at the table. How much trouble could that be? Didn’t you want to come to dinner, Mr. Sadler? Was that it?”
“Well, I didn’t think about it,” I said, becoming incredibly flustered now. “By the time I reached Norwich, I was tired, that’s all. I just went straight to my boarding house and went to sleep.” I decided not to tell her about the wait for the room or the reasons for that wait; neither did I mention my visit to the public house.
“Of course you were,” she said. “Train journeys can be so tiresome. I like to bring a book to read. Do you read, Mr. Cantwell?”
I stared at her and could feel my mouth opening but no words coming out. It was as if I had been thrown into a situation that I had known would be utterly unbearable but had had no realization of just how bad it would be until now. The irony was that I knew this meeting would be difficult for me but I had never quite considered how terrible it might be for her. But sitting there before me now, Marian Bancroft was a complete bag of nerves and she seemed to be getting worse by the moment.
“Oh my stars, I’ve already asked you that, haven’t I?” she said, bursting into an extraordinary laugh. “You told me that you liked to read.”
“Yes,” I said. “And it’s Sadler, not Cantwell.”
“I know,” she said, frowning. “Why would you tell me that?”
“You called me Mr. Cantwell.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. Just a moment ago.”
She shook her head and dismissed the idea. “I don’t think I did, Mr. Sadler,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. What were you reading?”
“On the train?”
“Yes, of course,” she said, a note of frustration seeping into her tone as she looked around and stared at the waitress behind the counter, who was placing two scones on two plates for the couple who had moved to the isolated seats and showing no signs whatsoever of bringing our teas.
“White Fang,” I told her. “By Jack London. Have you read it?”
“No,” she replied. “Is he an American author?”
“Yes,” I said. “You know of him, then?”
“I’ve never heard of him,” she said. “I just thought he sounded like one, that’s all.”
“Even with a name like London?” I asked, smiling at her.
“Yes, even with that, Mr. Cantwell.”
“Sadler,” I replied.
“Stop it, can’t you?” she snapped, her face turning cold and angry as she slammed both her hands flat on the table between us. “Don’t go on correcting me. I won’t stand for it.”
I stared at her, unsure what I could say or do to improve this moment; for the life of me, I couldn’t understand where it had gone so wrong. Perhaps on the day that I had put pen to paper and written Dear Miss Bancroft, You don’t know me … but I was a friend of your brother. Or perhaps before that. In France. Or earlier still. That day in Aldershot when I leaned forward in the line and caught Will’s eye. Or he caught mine.
“I’m sorry,” I said, swallowing nervously. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
“Well, you did. You did offend me. And I don’t like it. Your name is Sadler. Tristan Sadler. You don’t have to keep telling me over and over.”
“I’m sorry,” I repeated.
“And don’t keep apologizing, it’s terribly annoying.”
“I’m—” I stopped myself in time.
“Yes, yes,” she said. She drummed her fingers on the table and looked at the half-smoked cigarette again and I knew there was a part of her that was weighing the etiquette of picking it up, rubbing away the charred end and relighting it. My eyes turned to it, too; there was more than half of it left there, and it seemed such a frightful waste. In the trenches, a half-smoked cigarette meant almost as much to us as a night alone in a foxhole with a few hours’ sleep promised. I had lost track of the times that I had used even the smallest amount of tobacco, an amount that any sane person would toss on to the street without a second thought, as a companion for as long as I could make it last.
“What do … what do you like to read, Miss Bancroft?” I said eventually, desperate to salvage the situation. “Novels, I suppose?”
“Why do you say that? Because I’m a woman?”
“Well, yes,” I said. “I mean, I know that many ladies enjoy novels. I enjoy them myself.”
“And yet you’re a man.”
“Indeed.”
“No, I don’t care for novels,” she said, shaking her head. “I’ve never really understood them, if I’m honest.”
“In what way?” I asked, confused by how the concept of the novel could be a difficult one to understand. There were some writers, of course, who told their stories in the most convoluted way possible—many of whom seemed to send their unsolicited manuscripts to the Whisby Press, for instance—but there were others, such as Jack London, who offered their readers such a respite from the miserable horror of existence that their books were like gifts from the gods.
“Well, none of the stories ever happened, did they?” asked Miss Bancroft. “I can never quite see the point of someone reading about people who never existed, doing things they never did, in settings they never visited. So Jane Eyre marries her Mr. Rochester at the end. Well, Jane Eyre never existed, nor did Mr. Rochester or the wild woman he kept in the cellar.”
“It was an attic,” I said pedantically.
“Regardless. It’s a lot of nonsense, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s more of an escape than anything else.”
“I don’t need an escape, Mr. Sadler,” she said, stressing my name now to ensure that she got it right. “And if I did I should book myself a passage to somewhere warm and exotic where I might become involved in espionage or a romantic misunderstanding, like the heroines of those precious novels of yours. No, I prefer to read about things that are actually true, things that really happened. I read non-fiction mostly. History books. Politics. Biographies. Things like that.”
“Politics?” I asked, surprised. “You’re interested in politics?”
“Of course I am,” she said. “You think I shouldn’t be? On account of my sex?”
“I don’t know, Miss Bancroft,” I said, exhausted by her belligerence. “I’m just … I’m just talking, that’s all. Be interested in politics if you want to be. It doesn’t matter to me.” I felt that I couldn’t possibly continue with this. Keeping up with her was more than I felt capable of doing. We had been together less than fifteen minutes but I felt that this must be what it would be like to be married to someone, a constant back and forth of bickering, watching out for any stray comment in a conversation that might be corrected, anything to keep gaining the upper hand, the advantage, bringing one closer to taking the game, the set and the whole blasted match without ever ceding a point.
“Of course it matters, Mr. Sadler,” she said after a moment, quieter now, as if she realized that she might have gone too far. “It matters because you and I wouldn’t be here together if it wasn’t for politics, would we?”
I looked at her and hesitated for a moment. “No,” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “No, I suppose we wouldn’t.”
“Well, then,” she said, pulling open her bag and reaching again for her cigarette case, which, when she retrieved it, slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor with a tremendous crash, scattering cigarettes around our feet in much the same way as I had dropped the napkins just before her arrival. “Oh, bloody hell!” she cried, startling me. “Look at what I’ve done now.”
In a moment, Jane, our waitress, was beside us, reaching down to help gather them, but it was the wrong move on her part for Miss Bancroft had had quite enough for one day and stared at her so furiously that I thought she might attack her.
“Never mind them, Jane!” she shouted. “I can pick them up. Can we have our tea? Please? Is it too much to ask for two cups of tea?”
The arrival of the tea offered some respite from the intensity of our conversation and allowed us to focus on something trivial for a few minutes, rather than being forced to talk. Marian was clearly in a state of great tension and anxiety. In my selfishness, I had considered little but my own preoccupations before we met, but Will, after all, was her brother. And he was dead.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sadler,” she said after a long silence, putting her cup down and smiling across at me with a contrite expression; again, I was stuck by how pretty she was. “I can be an awful old hag sometimes, can’t I?”
“There’s nothing to apologize for, Miss Bancroft,” I said. “Of course we’re both … Well, this is not the most comfortable situation.”
“No,” she agreed. “I wonder if it might be easier if we dispensed with some of the formalities? Can I ask you to call me Marian?”
“Of course,” I said, nodding. “And I’m Tristan.”
“A knight of the round table?”
“Not exactly.” I smiled.
“Never mind. Still, I’m glad that’s out of the way. I don’t think I could bear to be called Miss Bancroft for much longer.
It makes me sound like a maiden aunt.” She hesitated, bit her lip, then spoke again in a less flippant tone. “I suppose I should ask you why you wrote to me.”
I cleared my throat; so here we were at last. “It’s like I said in the letter,” I told her. “I have something of Will’s—”
“My letters?”
“Yes. And I thought you might want them back.”
“It was kind of you to think of me.”
“I know he would have wanted me to return them to you,” I said. “It seemed only right.”
“I don’t mean this to sound critical, but you have held on to them for rather a long time.”
“I assure you, I’ve never so much as opened an envelope.”
“Of course not. I don’t doubt that for a moment. I just wonder why you took so long to get in touch, that’s all.”
“I haven’t been well,” I told her.
“Yes, of course.”
“And I didn’t feel I was up to meeting you.”
“It’s perfectly understandable.”
She looked out of the window for a moment and then turned back to me. “Your letter came as more of a surprise to me than you might imagine,” she said. “But I had heard your name before.”
“Oh yes?” I asked cautiously.
“Yes. Will wrote often, you know. Particularly when he was training at Aldershot. We had a letter from him every two or three days.”
“I remember,” I said. “I mean, I remember that he used to sit on his bed with a notepad, scribbling away in it. The men used to rag him about it, said he was writing poetry or something, the way so many did, but he told me he was writing to you.”
“Poetry is even more frightful than novels,” she remarked with a shudder. “You mustn’t think me a terrible philistine, you know. Although I can see how you might with the things I’m saying.”
“Not at all. Anyway, Will didn’t care what anyone said. He wrote, as you say, all the time. They seemed like awfully long letters.”
“They wer
e. Some of them,” she said. “I think he had aspirations towards literature, you know. He employed some very arch phrases, trying to heighten the experience a little, I thought.”
“Was he any good?”
“Not really,” she said, then laughed. “Oh, I don’t mean to belittle him. Please don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Sadler.”
“Tristan,” I said.
“Yes, Tristan. No, I only mean that he was obviously trying to tell me things in those letters, to explain how he was feeling, the sense of dread and anticipation that came with training at Aldershot. He seemed to spend an awful lot of time looking forward to the war. Sorry, I don’t mean ‘looking forward’ as in ‘being excited’ about it—”
“Looking ahead?” I suggested.
“Yes, just that. And it was interesting, because he said so much but also so little. Does that make sense at all?”
“I think so,” I replied.
“He told us all about his routines, of course. And about some of the men who were training with him. And the man in charge—Clayton, was it?”
I felt my body grow a little rigid at the name; I wondered how much she knew of Sergeant Clayton’s responsibility in the whole business or the orders he had given at the end. And the men who had obeyed him. “Yes,” I said. “He was there from start to finish.”
“And who were the other two? Left and Right, Will called them.”
“Left and Right?” I asked, frowning, unsure what she meant by this.
“He said they were Sergeant Clayton’s assistants or something. One always stood on his left side, the other on his right.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding now. “He must have meant Wells and Moody. That’s odd. I never heard him refer to them as Left and Right before. It’s rather funny.”
“Well, he did, all the time,” she said. “I’d show you the letters, Tristan, but do you mind if I don’t? They are rather private.”
“Of course,” I said, not realizing how much I wanted to read them until she told me that I couldn’t. The truth was that I had never really given much consideration to the content of his letters home. At Aldershot, I had never written to anyone. But once, during the course of the French campaign, I wrote a long letter to my mother, asking her forgiveness for the pain I had caused. I attached a note to my father in the envelope, telling him that I was well and keeping healthy, lying that things over there were not quite as bad as I had expected them to be. I told myself that he would be pleased to hear from me, but I never received a reply. For all I knew he had been the first to pick the letter off the mat some morning and had thrown it away, unopened and unread, before I could cast further shame on his household.
