The Absolutist (15 page)

“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 were. 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.

“They sounded like terrible terrors, Left and Right,” she remarked.

“They could be,” I said, considering it. “They were rather terrorized themselves, to be honest. Sergeant Clayton was a difficult man. When we were training he was bad enough. But when we were over there …” I shook my head and exhaled loudly. “He’d been before, you see. A couple of times. He’s not a man I have any respect for—in fact, even thinking about him makes me feel ill—but he’d had it hard, too. He told us once
about his brother being killed in front of him, about his … well, about his brains being splattered over his own uniform.”

“Good God,” she said, putting her cup down.

“It was only later that I learned he’d already lost three other brothers in the fighting. He didn’t have it easy, Marian, that’s the truth. Although it doesn’t excuse what he did.”

“Why?” she asked, leaning forward. “What did he do?”

I opened my mouth, fully aware that I was not yet ready to answer this question. I didn’t even know if I ever would be. For, after all, to reveal Clayton’s crime would be to admit my own. And I tried to keep that as firmly bottled up inside myself as possible. I was here to return a packet of letters, I told myself. Nothing more.

“Did your brother … did Will mention me much in those letters?” I asked after a moment, my natural eagerness to know overpowering my dread of what he might have told her.

“He certainly did,” she said, hesitantly, I thought. “Particularly in the early letters. Actually, he spoke of you quite a lot.”

“Really?” I said in as calm a tone as I could muster. “I’m pleased to hear it.”

“I remember his first letter arrived only a couple of days after he got there,” she said, “and he told me that it seemed all right really, that there were two troops of twenty and he’d been put in with a bunch who didn’t seem the most intellectually stimulating lot.”

I laughed. “Well, that’s true,” I said. “I don’t think we had much education to share around, any of us.”

“Then, in his second letter, a few days later, he sounded a little more down, as if the excitement of arriving had worn off and he was facing up to what he was left with. I felt bad for him then, and when I wrote back I told him that he had to make friends, to put his best foot forward, the usual nonsense
that people who know nothing about anything, like me, say when they don’t want their own days to be ruined by worrying about others.”

“I imagine you’re being hard on yourself there,” I said gently.

“No, I’m not. I didn’t know what to say, you see. I was rather excited about him going off to war. Does that make me sound like a monster? But you have to understand, Tristan, I was younger then. Of course I was younger, that’s obvious. But I mean that I was less informed. I was one of those girls that I despise so much.”

“And what girls are those?” I asked.

“Oh, you’ve seen them, Tristan. You live in London, they’re everywhere there. And, I mean, for pity’s sake, you came back from the war in your fine uniform, you must have been on the receiving end of so many of their favours.”

I shrugged and poured more tea, putting extra sugar in mine this time and stirring it slowly, watching as the spoon created a whirlwind in the murky brown soup.

“Those girls,” she continued with an irritated sigh, “they think that war is an enormous lark. They see their brothers and their sweethearts getting dressed up in their finery. And then they come back and the uniforms are more dishevelled but, oh my, don’t the men look handsome and experienced. Well, I was just like that. I read Will’s letters and I thought,
Oh, but you’re there at least!
And what I wouldn’t give to be there! I didn’t realize just how difficult it was. I still don’t, I imagine.”

“And the letters told you all this?” I asked, hoping to steer her back towards this subject.

“No, I only fully understood after everything that happened. I only appreciated the cruelty of the place then. So, in a way, I was rather frustrated by my brother’s tone. But then, after a while, the letters grew more cheerful and I was pleased about that.”

“Oh yes?”

“Yes. He told me in his third letter about the chap who had the bunk next to his. A Londoner, he said, but not a bad bloke all the same.”

I smiled and nodded, looking down at my tea, hearing him say the words in my head.

Ah, Tristan …

“He told me how you and he would pal around together, how everyone needed someone to talk to when they were feeling down and how you were always there for him. I was glad of that. I’m glad of it now. And he said that it made things easier because you were the same age and you were both missing home.”

“He said I was missing home?” I asked, looking up in surprise.

She thought about it for a moment and corrected herself. “He said that you didn’t talk about your home very much,” she replied. “But he could tell that you missed it. He said there was something in your silence that was very sad.”

I swallowed and thought about it. I wondered why he had never challenged me on this.

“And then there was all that business with Mr. Wolf,” she said.

“Oh, he told you about him, did he?” I asked.

“Not at first. But later. He said that he’d met a fascinating chap who had all sorts of controversial views. He told me about them. You know what they were better than I, I dare say, so I needn’t explain.”

“No.”

“But I could tell he was interested in Mr. Wolf’s beliefs. And then after he was murdered—”

“It was never proven that Wolf was murdered,” I said irritably.

“Do you believe he wasn’t?”

“All I know is that there was never any proof,” I said, aware even as I said it that it was a bootless answer.

“Well, I know that my brother was convinced of it. He said it was put about that an accident had taken place but he had no doubt in his mind that the poor boy was killed. He said he didn’t know who did it, whether it was Sergeant Clayton, Left or Right, some of the other recruits, or a combination of all the above. But he was quite certain about it. They came for him in the dead of night, he said. I believe that was when he began to change, Tristan. With Mr. Wolf’s death.”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, a lot of things took place over those few days. We were under enormous strain.”

“After that, the carefree boy I had known, the boy who was frightened of course about what lay ahead, vanished and in came this new chap, a chap who wanted to talk about right and wrong rather than Right and Left.” She smiled at her joke, then grew immediately serious once again. “He asked me to give him details of what the newspapers were saying about the war, the debates that were taking place in Parliament, whether there was anyone who was standing up for the rights of man, as he called them, over the sound of the rifles. I didn’t recognize him in those letters, Tristan. But I was intrigued by who he had become and tried to help. I told him as much as I knew and, by then, you were all in France and his tone changed even further. And then … well, you know what happened then.”

I nodded and sighed and we sat very quietly for what felt like a long time, considering our different memories of her brother, my friend.

“And did he … did he say anything more about me?” I asked eventually, feeling that the moment to discuss those letters had passed but by God I might never get the chance again and I had to know. I had to know how he felt.

“I’m sorry, Tristan,” she said, looking a little shamefaced. “I have a rather awful thing to tell you. Perhaps I shouldn’t, I don’t know.”

“Please do,” I said, urging her on.

“The truth is that you were such a big part of his letters all through that time at Aldershot. He told me all the things you did together; it made you sound like a pair of mischievous children, if I’m honest, with your jokes and japes. I was glad you had each other and I rather liked the sound of you. I thought he was quite besotted with you, to be honest, as preposterous as that sounds. I remember once reading a letter and thinking,
Dear Lord, must I hear nothing more than what Tristan Sadler did this day or said on that day?
He really thought you were the bee’s knees and the cat’s pyjamas.”

I stared at her and tried to smile but could feel my face turning into a rictus of pain instead and hoped she wouldn’t notice.

“And then he wrote to say that you had all shipped out,” she continued. “And the thing is, from that first letter after you left Aldershot, he never mentioned you again. And for a while I didn’t like to ask.”

“Well, why would you?” I asked. “After all, you didn’t even know me.”

“Yes, but …” And here she stopped for a moment and sighed before looking back up at me as if she had a terrible secret, the weight of which was almost too much for her to bear. “Tristan, this is going to sound rather odd but I feel I ought to tell you. You can make of it what you will. The thing is … I said that when I received your letter a few weeks ago it came as rather a shock to me. I thought I must have misunderstood and I went back to read Will’s letters afterwards but it seems to be quite clear there, so I can only imagine that he was either confused by what was going on or had simply written
your name when he meant to write another. The whole thing is very odd.”

“It wasn’t easy out there,” I said. “When men wrote letters in the trenches, why, we often had no time or hardly any paper or pencils to do it. And the question of whether or not those letters even got through was one that we didn’t like to think about too much. All that time and energy, perhaps for nothing.”

“Yes,” she said. “Only I think most of Will’s letters did get through. And certainly all the ones from those first months in France, because I received one almost every week and I really can’t imagine that he would have had time to write more than that. So he was writing and telling me what was happening, trying to spare me some of the worst moments to stop me worrying too much, and because you’d become something of a character in my head, because you’d been such a big part of his earlier letters, I finally summoned up the nerve to ask him in one of my replies exactly what had happened to you, whether you had been posted to the same place together and were still part of the same regiment.”

“But we were,” I said, confused by this. “You know we were. We trained together, we took the boat to France together, we fought in the same trenches. I don’t think we were ever apart really.”