The Absolutist

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.”

“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 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.”

“Yes, but when he replied,” said Marian, hesitating, looking almost embarrassed by her words, “he told me that he had some bad news for me.”

“Bad news,” I said, more of a statement than a question, and I had a sudden anxious idea of what this might be.

“He said… I’m so sorry, Mr. Sadler, I mean, Tristan, but it’s really not me who has this wrong because, as I said, I went back and checked, it was just that he must have been so confused, what with all the shelling and the bombing and those awful, awful trenches—”

“Perhaps you’d better just tell me,” I said quietly.

“He said you’d been killed,” she said, sitting up straight now and looking me directly in the eyes. “There, I’ve said it. He said that two days after you left Aldershot, only a few hours after you’d arrived at your entrenchment, you were picked off by a sniper. He said it had been quick and you hadn’t suffered.”

I stared at her again and began to feel dizzy in my head. Had I been standing, I think that I might have fallen over. “He said I was dead?” I asked, the words sounding obscene on my tongue.

“It must have been someone else,” she replied quickly. “He spoke of so many people in his letters. He must have just got it wrong. But what a frightful mistake. Anyway, as far as I was concerned, there were the two of you, thick as thieves on the training ground, and off you go to France together, and the next thing I know, that’s it, you’re gone. I don’t mind telling you, Tristan, that even though I had never met you it had quite an effect on me.”

“My death did?”

“Yes. If that doesn’t sound too preposterous. I suppose part of it might have been that I was projecting your death on to the very real possibility that Will might die, too, which in my own stupidity I had never really thought about very much before. I cried for days, Tristan. For a man I had never met. I said prayers for you, even though I rarely pray. My father, he said a mass in your memory. Can you believe it? He’s a vicar, you see, and—”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I knew that.”

“And he was terribly sorry, too. I don’t think he could think too much about you, if I’m honest, because he was so worried about Will. He loved him so much. As did my mother. But there we are. I thought you had been killed in the war. And then, about three years later, out of the blue, your letter arrived.”

I turned and looked out of the window. The street had grown quiet and I found myself staring at the cobblestones, noting the different shapes and sizes of the pieces. Over the previous twelve months I had felt such pain, such remorse over what had happened to Will and my part in it. And I had grieved so much, too, my feelings for him so intense that I feared I would never be able to see past them. And now to hear this, to hear that he had effectively killed me off after our last night together in Aldershot. I had believed that he could not have broken my heart any more than he had—but now there was this. There was this.

“Mr. Sadler? Tristan?”

I turned back to her and saw that Marian was looking towards my right hand with a concerned expression. I glanced down and saw that it was twitching uncontrollably, the fingers dancing nervously as if independent of my brain. I stared at it as though it were not part of my body at all, but something that a passing stranger had left on the table and was planning to return for later, a curio of some sort, and then I felt mortified by it and placed my left hand over it, quelling the trembling for now.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said, standing up quickly, my chair making a loud scraping noise against the floor as I pushed it back, a sound that set my teeth on edge.

“Tristan—” she began, but I shook my head.

“I’ll be back,” I said, rushing towards the door to the Gents, on the opposite side of the room to the one through which she had disappeared earlier. As I reached it, terrified that I might not make it through in time before the horror of what she had told me overwhelmed me, I saw the man who had entered the café earlier, the one who had appeared to be watching me, suddenly jump to his feet and march hurriedly towards it, blocking my way.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Please.”

“I want a word with you,” he said, in an officious tone, an aggressive one. “It won’t take long.”

“Not now,” I snapped, uncertain why he was bothering me. I had never seen the man before in my life. “Get out of my way.”

“I won’t get out of your way,” he insisted. “Now, look here, I don’t want to cause any trouble, but you and me, we need to talk.”

“Get out of my way!” I repeated, shouting it now, and I saw the couple and the waitress turn to look at me in surprise. I wondered whether Marian had heard me, but our table was around the corner and not in my sight line, so if she had I would not have known. I pushed the man roughly aside. He didn’t struggle with me, and a few moments later I locked myself in the lavatory and placed my head in my hands, devastated. I was not crying, but there was a word being repeated over and over, I thought in my head but actually aloud, and I had to make a concerted effort to stop myself saying Will, Will, Will as I rocked back and forth, as if this was the only word that had ever mattered, the only syllable that held any meaning for me.

When I returned from the Gents, I felt embarrassed by my behaviour but was unsure whether Marian had even noticed how upset I had become. I didn’t turn to look in the direction of the man who had insisted on speaking with me but I could sense his presence, smouldering like a dormant volcano in the corner of the room, and wondered who exactly he thought I was. His accent betrayed his Norfolk roots but as I had never been to this part of the country before there was no possibility that we had ever met. At the table, Marian and our waitress, Jane, were deep in conversation, obviously reconciled, and I looked from one to the other a little nervously as I sat down again.

“I was just apologizing to Jane,” explained Marian, smiling across at me. “I think I might have been rather rude to her earlier. Which she didn’t deserve. Jane was very kind to my parents. Afterwards, I mean,” she said, choosing her words carefully.

“I see,” I replied, rather wishing that Jane would go back behind her counter and leave us alone. “You knew Will, then?”

“I knew him since he was a boy,” she said. “He was a few years behind me in school but I had a right crush on him back then. He danced with me once at a parish social and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.” She looked away as she said this, perhaps regretting her choice of words. “Well, I’d best be getting on,” she said. “Can I get you anything else, Marian?”

“Some more tea, I think. What do you say, Tristan?”

“Fine,” I said.

“And afterwards, we can go for a stroll and get something to eat. You must be hungry.”

“I am now,” I admitted. “But more tea first is fine.”

Jane disappeared to fetch the tea and Marian followed her with her eyes for a moment as she busied herself behind the counter. “She wasn’t the only one, of course,” she said, leaning forward and lowering her voice in a conspiratorial fashion.

“The only one of what?” I asked.

“Who was half crazed for love of my brother,” she said, smiling. “You’d never believe the way the girls around here threw themselves at him. Even my own friends were sweet on him and they were years older than he was.”

“Oh, come on,” I said, smiling. “You’re only a few years older than me. You’re not ready to be put out to pasture yet.”

“No, of course not,” she said. “But it used to drive me crazy. I mean, don’t misunderstand me, Tristan, I loved my brother to distraction, but to me he was always just a rather messy, rather unkempt, rather mischievous little boy. When he was a child, the difficulty my mother had getting him to take a bath was quite extraordinary—he would scream the house down the moment the tin appeared—but then I suppose all little boys are like that. And some of the older ones, too, if the chaps I know are anything to go by. So when I saw the effect he had on women as he grew older, it took me quite by surprise, I don’t mind telling you.”

I nodded. I wasn’t entirely sure that this was a line I wanted to pursue but there was a part of me, a masochistic part, that could not help itself.

“And he reciprocated their affections?” I asked.

“Sometimes,” she said. “There was a string of them at one point. You couldn’t walk down to the shops without seeing him strolling along with some hare-brained thing in her Sunday-best dress who’d put a few flowers in her hair for effect, thinking she might be the one to catch him. I couldn’t keep track of them, there were that many.”

“He was a good-looking fellow,” I remarked.

“Yes, I suppose he was. It’s hard for me to recognize it, being his sister. Almost as hard as it is for you, I suppose.”

“Me?”

“Well, being a man.”

“Yes.”

“I used to rag him about it, of course,” she continued. “But he never seemed to pay any attention to me. Most boys, of course, would have flown into a fury and told me to keep my nose firmly out but he just laughed and shrugged it off. He said he enjoyed going for long walks, and if some girl wanted to join him for the company, then who was he to stand in their way? To be honest, he never seemed particularly interested in any of them. That’s why it was pointless to tease. He really didn’t care.”

“But there was a fiancée, wasn’t there?” I asked, frowning, wondering what to make of all of this.

“A fiancée?” she asked, looking up and smiling at Jane as she placed the fresh pot before us.

“Yes, he told me once that he had a sweetheart back home and they were engaged to be married.”

She stopped pouring then but held the pot in mid-air as she stared at me. “Are you quite sure?” she asked me.

“Perhaps I have it wrong,” I said nervously.

Marian looked out of the window and remained silent for a few moments, considering this. “Did he say who she was?” she asked, turning back to me.

“I’m not sure if I can recall,” I said, although the name was firmly emblazoned in my memory. “I think it was Ann something.”

“Ann?” she asked, shaking her head. “I can’t think of any Ann. Do you have it right?”

“I think so,” I replied. “No, wait. I have it now. Eleanor. He said her name was Eleanor.”

Marian’s eyes opened wide and she stared at me for a few seconds before bursting out laughing. “Eleanor?” she asked. “Not Eleanor Martin?”

“I’m not sure of the surname,” I said.

“But it must be her. She’s the only one. Well, yes, he and Eleanor did have a thing, I suppose, at one point. She was one of those girls who were always hanging off him. I imagine she would have liked nothing more than to marry my brother. In fact,” and here she tapped the table several times as if she had just recalled something of importance, “Eleanor Martin was the one who wrote him all those soppy letters.”

“When we were over there?” I asked, surprised by this.

“Well, possibly, but I don’t know anything about that. No, I mean she used to send these extraordinary letters to the house. Frightful, scented things with little flowers crushed inside that fell out over his lap whenever he opened them and caused a terrible mess on the carpets. I remember once he asked me what I thought they were supposed to signify and I told him nothing at all, other than the girl’s utter stupidity, because—and you can trust me on this, Tristan—because I’ve known her since she was a child, that girl has no more sense than a postage stamp. I remember that she would write long essays on the theme of nature—spring, rebirth, little bunny rabbits, all that rubbish—and she sent these along, convinced that they would somehow captivate my brother. I don’t know who she thought he was, Lord Byron or someone. What a fool!” She raised her cup to her lips and held it there for a while. “But you say that he claimed they were engaged?” she asked, frowning. “But it can’t be. If she had said it I could put it down to the fact that the girl’s a complete idiot, but him? It doesn’t make sense.”

“Perhaps I have it wrong,” I repeated. “We had so many conversations. It’s impossible to remember half of them.”

“I’m sure you must have it wrong, Tristan,” she said. “My brother was many things but he would never have given up his life to share it with a fool such as her. He had more depth than that. Despite his good looks and his ability to captivate any woman in sight, he never seemed to take advantage of any of them. I rather admired him for that. When his friends were chasing girls like crazy, he seemed to lose interest entirely. I wondered whether it was out of respect for our father, who would not have been happy, of course, to have a son who was the village cad. Being a vicar, I mean. I find that many handsome young men are cads, Tristan. Would you agree with me?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “I really couldn’t say, Marian.”

“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true,” she said, smiling gently, teasing me a little, I thought. “You’re almost Will’s equal, as far as I can see. That lovely blond hair of yours and those sad, puppy-dog eyes. I say this strictly from an aesthetic perspective, Tristan, so don’t get any ideas, since I’m old enough to be your grandmother, but you’re rather a dish, aren’t you? Good Lord, you’ve gone quite red.”

She was speaking with such good humour, such unexpected joy in her tone, that it was hard not to smile back. This was not a flirtation, I knew, not anything of the sort, but perhaps it was the beginning of a friendship. I realized that she liked me, and I knew that I liked her, too. Which was unexpected. That was not what I had come here for.

“You’re not old,” I insisted, mumbling into my cup. “What age are you, anyway? Twenty-five? Twenty-six?”

“Didn’t your mother ever tell you that it was rude to ask a lady’s age? And you’re just a boy. What are you, nineteen? Twenty?”

“Twenty-one,” I said, and she frowned, thinking about it. “But hold on, that would mean—”

“I lied about my age,” I told her, anticipating the question. “I was only seventeen when I was over there. I lied in order that they would accept me.”

“And I thought Eleanor was a fool,” she said, although not unkindly.

“Yes,” I muttered, looking down at my tea.

“Just a boy,” she repeated finally, shaking her head. “But tell me, Tristan,” she continued, leaning forward. “Tell me the truth. Are you a cad?”

“I don’t know what I am,” I said quietly. “If you want the truth, I’ve spent most of the last few years trying to work that out for myself.”

She sat back then and narrowed her eyes. “Have you ever been to the National Gallery?” she asked me.

“A few times,” I said, a little surprised by this abrupt change of topic.

“I go whenever I’m in London,” she said. “I’m interested in art, you see. Which proves that I’m not a philistine, after all. Oh, I’m no painter, don’t get me wrong. But I love paintings. And what I do is I visit the gallery and find a canvas that intrigues me and I just sit down in front of it and stare at it for an hour or so, sometimes for a whole afternoon. I let the painting come together before my eyes. I start to recognize the brushstrokes and the intention of the artist. Most people just take a quick glance and walk on, ticking off this, this and this along the way and thinking that they’ve actually seen the work, but how can you appreciate anything that way? I say this, Mr. Sadler, because you remind me of a painting. That last remark of yours, I don’t quite know what it means but I feel that you do.”

“It didn’t mean anything,” I said. “I was just talking, that’s all.”

“No, that’s a lie,” she said equably. “But I feel if I keep looking at you for some time, then I might begin to understand you. I’m trying to see your brushstrokes. Does that make sense?”

“No,” I said firmly.

“And that’s another lie. But anyway…” She shrugged and looked away. “It’s getting a little cold in here, isn’t it?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I believe I’m a little distracted,” she said. “I keep thinking about that business with Eleanor Martin. Such an odd thing for Will to have said. She still lives around here, you know.”

“Really?” I said, surprised.

“Oh yes. Well, she’s a Norwich girl born and bred. Actually, she got married last year to a chap who really should have known better, but he was from Ipswich and I suppose you take what you can find there. She’s always about the town. We might run into her later if we’re terribly unlucky.”

“I hope we don’t,” I said.

“Why do you say that?”

“No reason. I’m just… not that interested, that’s all.”

“But why wouldn’t you be?” she asked, intrigued. “My brother, your best friend, tells you that he is engaged to be married. I tell you that there was never any such engagement that I knew of. Why wouldn’t you be interested in seeing this Helen of Troy who had so captured his heart?”

“Miss Bancroft,” I said with a sigh, leaning back now and rubbing my eyes. She had referred to Will as my best friend and I wondered whether the corollary held true. I also questioned why her previous good humour was now tinged with a certain amount of barbarity. “What is it that you want me to say?”

“Oh, I’m Miss Bancroft again now, am I?” she asked.

“You called me Mr. Sadler a moment ago. I thought perhaps we were returning to formalities.”

“Well, we’re not,” she replied abruptly. “And let’s not argue, all right? I couldn’t stand it. You seem like such a pleasant young man, Tristan. You mustn’t mind if I appear out of sorts. I’ll attack you one minute and call you a dish the next. It’s a strange day, that’s all. I am glad you made the journey, though.”

“Thank you,” I said. I noticed her glancing at my hand, my left one, though, not the twitching right, and I caught her eye.

“I just wondered, that’s all,” she said. “So many men your age seem to have got married since coming back from the war. You haven’t been tempted?”

“Not even a little bit,” I said.

“You didn’t have a sweetheart waiting for you, then, back home?”

I shook my head.

“Well, so much the better for you,” she said quickly. “In my experience, sweethearts are a lot more trouble than they’re worth. If you ask me, love is a fool’s game.”

“But it’s all that matters,” I said suddenly, surprised to hear myself say such a thing. “Where would we be without love?”

“You’re a romantic, then?”

“I’m not sure that I even understand what that means,” I told her. “A romantic? I know that I have emotions. I know that I feel things deeply—too deeply, in fact. Does that make me a romantic? I don’t know. Perhaps.”

“But you men all feel things so deeply now,” she insisted. “Friends of mine, boys who fought over there. You have an intensity now, a potent sadness, even a sense of fear. It’s not at all like before. Why is that, do you think?”

“Isn’t it obvious?” I asked.

“Yes. To an extent. But I’d like to hear you explain it to me.”

I glanced down at the table and thought about it. I wanted to be honest with her, or as honest as I dared to be. I wanted my words to have meaning.

“Before I went over there,” I said, not looking at her now but staring at the used cutlery laid out before me, “I thought I knew something about myself. I felt things then, of course. I knew someone, I… forgive me, Marian, but I fell in love, I suppose. In a childish way. And I got very hurt by it. No one’s fault but my own, of course. I hadn’t thought things through. I thought I had. I thought I knew what I was doing and that the other party had similar feelings for me. I was wrong, of course, quite wrong. I allowed things to get completely out of hand. Then when I went over there and fell in with the regiment, fell in with your brother, too, of course, well, I realized how silly I had been back then. Because suddenly everything, life itself, became an intensely heightened experience. It was as if I was living on a different plane from the one before. At Aldershot, they weren’t teaching us how to fight, they were training us how to extend our lives for as long as possible. As if we were already dead, but if we learned to shoot straight and to use a bayonet with care and precision then we might at least have a few more days or weeks in us. The barracks were filled with ghosts, Marian. Does that make sense? It was as if we died before we left England. And when I wasn’t killed, when I was one of the lucky ones… well, there were twenty of us in my barracks, you see. Twenty boys. And only two came back. One who went mad, and myself. But that doesn’t mean we survived it. I don’t think I did survive it. I may not be buried in a French field but I linger there. My spirit does, anyway. I think I’m just breathing, that’s all. And there’s a difference between breathing and being alive. And so, to your question, am I a romantic? Do I think in terms of weddings and falling in love any more? No, I don’t. It seems so pointless to me, so completely and utterly trivial. I don’t know what that says about me. Whether it means that there is something wrong in my head. But the thing is, there’s always been something wrong in my head, you see. From ever since I can remember. And I never knew what to do about it. I never understood it. And now, after everything that has happened, after what I did—”

“Tristan, stop,” she said, reaching forward suddenly and taking my hand, which was shaking noticeably, embarrassing me once again. I realized that I was crying a little, too, not heavily, just a few tears working their way down my cheeks, and I felt ashamed about that as well, and wiped them away with the back of my left hand. “I shouldn’t have asked you about this,” she said. “I was being flippant, that’s all. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. Good Lord, you came all this way to meet me, to give me this great gift of your stories about my brother, and this is how I repay you. Can you forgive me?”

I smiled and shrugged my shoulders. “There’s nothing to forgive,” I said. “It’s just… Well, you don’t want to get any of us started on these things. You say you have some friends, some former servicemen, who came back?”

“Yes.”

“Well, do they like to talk about it?”

She considered this for a moment and looked uncertain. “It’s a difficult question to answer,” she said. “I feel at times that they do, because they talk about it almost incessantly. But it always leaves them distraught. Just as it did with you a moment ago. But at the same time, I feel that they cannot stop themselves reliving every moment over and over. How long will it take, do you think?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “A long time.”

“But it is over,” she insisted. “It’s over! And you’re a young man, Tristan. You’re only twenty-one years old, after all. My God, you were just a child when you were over there. Seventeen! You can’t let it drag you down. Look at Will.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, he’s dead, isn’t he?” she said, a look of genuine empathy on her face. “He doesn’t even get to be distraught. He doesn’t get to live with his bad memories.”

“Yes,” I said, that familiar stabbing pain resurfacing inside my body. I exhaled loudly and rubbed the heels of my hands against my eyes for a moment, and when I took them away I blinked several times and focused on her face carefully. “Can we get out of here?” I asked. “I feel I need some fresh air.”

“Of course,” she said, tapping the table in immediate recognition that we had stayed too long. “You don’t have to go back to London yet, though, do you? I’m enjoying our talk.”

“No, not yet,” I said. “Not for a few hours, anyway.”

“Good. It’s such a beautiful day, I thought we might go for a walk. I could show you some of the places where Will and I grew up. You really have to see some of Norwich—it’s a beautiful city. Then we can have a late lunch somewhere. And there’s just one thing I’d like you to do for me, but I’ll tell you that in a while, if you don’t mind. If I ask you now, I think you’ll refuse me. And I don’t want you to refuse me.”

I said nothing for second or two but then nodded. “All right,” I agreed, getting up and taking my overcoat from the stand as she put her own coat on. “Let me just pay for the teas,” I said. “I’ll meet you outside in a moment.”

I watched her as she made her way towards the door and out on to the street, buttoning her coat as she stood glancing around for anyone she might recognize. She didn’t resemble Will physically, of course. They were very different types. But there was something in the way that she carried herself, a certain confidence mixed with a sense that although her beauty would be noticed by others, she rather wished it wouldn’t be. I found myself smiling as I looked at her and then turned back to pay for the teas.

“I’m sorry about before,” I said to our waitress as she took my money and counted out change from the till. “I hope we weren’t becoming a bit of a trial for you.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” she said. “You were a friend of Will’s, then?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, we served together.”

“It was a disgrace,” she hissed, leaning forward, fire in her eyes. “What happened to him, I mean. It was an absolute disgrace. Made me ashamed to be English. You won’t get many around here that will agree with me on that, but I knew him and I knew the kind of man he was.” I swallowed and nodded, taking the coins from her and putting them silently in my pocket. “There’s not many people I respect as much as I do Marian Bancroft,” she continued. “She’s one in a million, she is. Despite everything that happened, she offers such help to the ex-servicemen around her. You’d think, all things considered, that she would hate them. But she doesn’t. I never know quite what to make of her, actually. She’s a mystery.”

I frowned, realizing that I hadn’t even asked Marian what she did in Norwich, how she spent her days, how she filled her time. It was typical of boys like me; we were so wrapped up in ourselves that we didn’t think the world held a place for anyone else. I heard a quick ringing sound, the chiming of the bell over the door as someone left, thanked Jane and said goodbye.

Before leaving the café, I patted my pockets, checking for my wallet and the packet of letters, which was still in my overcoat, and satisfied that all was in place I opened the door and went outside. Marian was right: it was a beautiful day. Bright and warm with no breeze but no overbearing sunshine either. It was a perfect day to go for a stroll and I had a sudden vision of Will walking along these cobbled streets next to some unfortunate lovesick girl who would be doing all she could to keep up with him, sneaking sly glances at his handsome face, dreaming that perhaps at the next turning, where no one could see them, he would do the most unexpected but natural thing in the world and turn to her, take her in his arms and pull her to him.

I shook my head, dismissed the idea, and looked around for Marian. She was standing no more than ten or twelve feet away from me, but not alone. The man from the café had followed her out and was standing before her, gesticulating wildly. I didn’t know what to make of it and simply stared at them before registering that there was something aggressive about his behaviour. I walked quickly towards them.

“Hello,” I said. “Everything all right here?”

“And you,” said the man, raising his voice and jabbing a finger in my face as he glared at me with thunder in his eyes, “you can just take a step back, friend, because none of this concerns you and I swear I won’t be responsible for my actions if you come any closer. Do you understand me?”

“Leonard,” said Marian, stepping forward and placing herself between him and me. “This has nothing to do with him. You’ll leave it alone if you know what’s good for you.”

“You don’t tell me what to do, Marian,” he said, which at least made me understand that these two knew each other and he wasn’t just some stranger assaulting her in the street. “You won’t answer my letters, you won’t speak to me when I call at the house, and then you take up with someone else and flaunt it in front of my eyes. Who do you think you are, anyway?” he asked, this last question addressed to me, and I looked at him in astonishment, not knowing what I could possibly say in response. He was in a pure rage, his cheeks scarlet with anger, and I could see that it was all he could do to stop himself from pushing Marian out of the way and knocking me to the ground; instinctively, I took a pace back. “That’s right, you’d better back away,” he added, so pleased by this move that he began to advance further towards me, probably thinking that he could intimidate me. The truth was that I wasn’t in the least frightened of him; I simply had no desire to involve myself in some sort of street brawl.

“Leonard, I said stop it!” shouted Marian, pulling at his coat and dragging him back. A few people passing on the street stared at us with a mixture of interest and contempt but kept walking, shaking their heads as if they expected nothing better of our type. “It’s not what you think. You’ve got everything wrong, as usual.”

“Got it wrong, have I?” he asked, turning to her as I studied him a little more closely. He was taller than me, with brown hair and a ruddy complexion. He looked like someone who knew how to handle himself. The only thing detracting from his strong physical presence was a pair of owl-type spectacles perched on his face, which made him look more academic. And yet the argument against this was the commotion that he was causing here on the street. “Got it wrong? When I see the two of you sitting there for almost an hour, chatting away to each other like a pair of cooing mynah birds? And I saw you take his hand, Marian, so please don’t tell me there’s nothing going on when I know what my own eyes are telling me.”

“And what if there is something going on?” she shouted in reply, the colour coming into her cheeks, too. “What if there is? What business is it of yours, anyway?”

“Don’t give me that,” he began, but she stepped closer to him, her face almost in his as she roared at him.

“I’ll say whatever I like, Leonard Legg! You have no hold over me. Not any more. You mean nothing to me now.”

“You belong to me,” he insisted.

“I don’t belong to anyone!” she cried. “Least of all you. Do you think I’d ever look at you again? Do you? After what you did?”

“After what I did?” he said, laughing in her face. “That’s rich, that is. Why, even the fact that I’m willing to put the past in the past and still marry you should show you the kind of man I am. Getting mixed up with a family like yours won’t do me any favours, will it, and still I’m willing to do it. For you.”

“Well, don’t bother,” she said, lowering her voice; in an instant she had regained her dignity. “Because if you think I would ever marry you, if you think that I would debase myself so much—”

“You debase yourself? Why, if my parents even knew that I was talking to you, let alone forgiving you—”

“You have nothing to forgive me for,” she cried, throwing her arms in the air in frustration. “It is I who should forgive you. But I don’t,” she insisted, stepping close to him again. “I don’t. And I never, ever will.”

He glared at her, breathing heavily through his nose like a bull getting ready to charge, and for a second I thought that he was going to assault her, so I moved forward, and as I did so, he turned to look at me and the fury that filled him was transferred from Marian’s direction to my own. Without warning I found myself on the ground in a daze, one hand pressed to my nose from which—to my surprise—there was no blood pouring, but my cheek felt raw and tender and I realized that he had missed my nose entirely and punched me right of centre, knocking me off my feet and sending me sprawling to the ground.

“Tristan!” cried Marian, rushing over and leaning down to examine me. “Are you all right?”

“I think so,” I said, sitting up and looking at my assailant. Every fibre of my being wanted to stand up and hit him back, to punch him all the way to Lowestoft, if need be, but I didn’t do it. Like Wolf, I would not fight.

“Come on, then,” he said, goading me into action and assuming a stance such as a professional boxer might take, pathetic clown that he was. “Get on your feet, then, and show me what you’ve got.”

“Get out of here, Leonard,” said Marian, turning on him. “Go, before I call the police.”

He laughed but seemed a little disturbed by this suggestion and perhaps irritated by the fact that I was refusing to stand up and fight him. He shook his head and spat on the ground, the phlegm landing only a foot or two from my left shoe. “Coward,” he said, looking down at me contemptuously. “No wonder she likes you. It’s what the Bancrofts go in for, after all, isn’t it?”

“Just leave, please,” said Marian quietly. “For God’s sake, Leonard, can’t you just leave me alone? I don’t want you.”

“This isn’t over,” he said, turning away. “Don’t think this is over, because it isn’t.”

He took one more look at the two of us, huddled together on the pavement, and shook his head in contempt before making his way down one of the side streets and disappearing out of sight. I turned to Marian in confusion only to find her close to tears now as she held her face in her hands.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “Tristan, I’m so, so sorry.”

Later, when I was back on my feet, we began to walk side by side along the streets of Norwich town centre. A slight bruise was forming on my cheek but no serious damage had been done. Mr. Pynton would no doubt look at me with disapproval the following day, remove his pince-nez and give a deep sigh, putting it all down to the high spirits of youth.

“You must think terribly of me,” she said, after a lengthy silence.

“Why would I?” I asked. “It wasn’t you who hit me.”

“No, but it was my fault. At least partly, anyway.”

“You know that man, obviously.”

“Oh yes,” she said in a regretful voice. “Yes, I know him, all right.”

“He seems to think that he has some sort of hold over you.”

“He did. Once,” she replied. “We were an item once, you see.”

“Are you serious?” I asked, rather surprised, for although I had pieced this together from the row earlier, I found it hard to imagine either Marian being involved with such a creature or a scenario in which a chap who had secured her hand would ever let it go.

“Well, don’t sound so shocked,” she said with a hint of amusement in her tone. “I have had my share of suitors in my time.”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“We were engaged to be married. That was the plan, anyway.”

“And something went wrong?”

“Well, obviously, Tristan,” she said, turning to me in frustration. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t take it out on you,” she added a moment later. “It’s just… well, I’m terribly embarrassed by how he attacked you like that and I feel ashamed of myself on account of it.”

“I don’t see why,” I said. “It seems to me that you broke it off just in time. You could have been married to the brute. Who knows what kind of life he might have led you?”

“Only I wasn’t the one who broke it off,” she explained. “It was Leonard. Oh, don’t look so surprised, please. The truth is I would have had no choice but to throw him over in the long run but he got in first, which is to my eternal regret. You must realize why, surely?”

“It was over Will, wasn’t it?” I said, everything becoming clear now.

“Yes.”

“He threw you over because of what people might say?”

She shrugged her shoulders, as if she were embarrassed by it, even after so much time had passed.

“And you think I’m a cad,” I said, smiling at her, which caused her to laugh. She looked across towards the market, where a group of about forty stalls were positioned together in a tight rectangle, each one covered with a brightly coloured tarpaulin; they were selling fruit and vegetables, fish and meat. There were a lot of people gathered around them, mostly women, shopping bags at the ready, passing what little money they had to the stallholders and engaging in long, complaining conversations with each other as they did so.

“He wasn’t that bad really,” she said. “I did love him once. Before all this, all that, I should say—”

“The war, you mean?”

“Yes, the war. Before that he was a different person. It’s hard to explain. We’ve known each other since we were fifteen or sixteen. We were always sweet on each other. Well, I was sweet on him, anyway—he was in love with a friend of mine, or as much in love as you can be at that age.”

“Everything’s a mess at that age.”

“Yes, I think you’re right. But anyway, he threw this other girl over in favour of me, which led to terrible arguments between our families. And that girl, who was a good friend of mine, never spoke to me again. It was a terrible scandal. I’m quite ashamed when I look back on it, but we were young so there’s no point losing any sleep over it. The fact remains that I was crazy about him.”

“But you seem so mismatched,” I said.

“Yes, but you don’t know him. We are different, now. Well, everyone is, I suppose. But we were happy for a time. So he asked me to marry him and I said yes. Now I can scarcely think of anything worse.”

I thought about it but remained silent. I knew little about the relations between men and women, the intimacies that bound them together, the secrets that might drive them apart. Sylvia Carter was the sole experience I had had with girls and it was hard to imagine that one kiss, six years before, could be the end of the thing for me, but it was, of course.

“Was he over there?” I asked, considering it, for he was about the same age as Marian, I thought, only a few years older than me. “Leonard, I mean.”

“No, he couldn’t go,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s terribly short-sighted, you see. He had an accident when he was sixteen. Fell off his bike, the clot, and hit his head against a stone. He was found unconscious in the road and by the time they got him to the doctor he didn’t know who or where he was. The upshot was that he’d damaged some of the ligaments in his eyes. The right eye is almost entirely blind while the left gives him terrible gyp, too. He hates it, of course, although you’d never know there was anything wrong just by looking at him.”

“No wonder he missed my nose when he punched me, then,” I said, trying to suppress a smile, and Marian turned to me, complicit for a moment in my laughter. “I saw him earlier,” I added. “In the café, I mean. He was watching us. He tried to engage me when I went to the bathroom.”

“If I’d known he was there I would have left,” she said. “He follows me around now, trying to make things right between us. It’s tiresome.”

“And because of his eyes, he couldn’t enlist?”

“That’s right,” she said. “And, to be fair to him, he was terribly cut up about it. I think he felt that it made him less of a man in some way. Of his brothers—he had four of them—two enlisted before 1916 and the other two, the younger ones, came in on the Derby Scheme. Only one came back alive and he’s very ill. Had some sort of a breakdown, I believe. Stays at home most of the time. I hear his parents have a rotten time of it, which gives me no pleasure. Anyway, I know that Leonard feels awful about the fact that he couldn’t fight. He’s quite brave, you see, and terribly patriotic. It was awful for him when it was all going on and he was the only young man here in town.”

“Awful for him?” I asked, irritated by this. “I would say it was wonderful for him.”

“Yes, I can see why you would say that,” she agreed. “But try to see it from his point of view. He wanted to be over there with the rest of you, not stuck here with a bunch of women. He doesn’t fit in at all with the men who came back. I’ve seen him sitting in the corner of the public houses, not mixing with the fellows he used to go to school with. How can he, after all? He can’t share their experiences, he doesn’t know what they’ve been through. Some of them try to involve him, I think, but he gets aggressive about it and I think they’ve given up. Why should they humour him, I suppose, is their attitude. They have nothing to reproach themselves for.”

I shrugged my shoulders. I could see what she was getting at and was willing to admit that he probably felt bad about things but, still, I couldn’t bring myself to sympathize with a man who had been lucky enough to escape the trenches simply because he felt emasculated by this same good fortune.

“Well, if he didn’t get to fight then he’s certainly making up for it now,” I said. “What does he mean, anyway, hitting me like that?”

“I suppose he thought there was something between us,” she explained. “And he can be terribly jealous.”

“But he was the one who threw you over!” I said, instantly regretting the unchivalrous nature of my remark, and she turned to look at me, scowling.

“Yes, I’m well aware of that, thank you, but clearly he regrets it now.”

“And you don’t?”

She hesitated only briefly before shaking her head. “I regret that a situation came about that led him to feel he had to break it off with me,” she said. “But I don’t regret that he did it. Does that make any sense?”

“A little,” I said.

“But now he wants me back, which is a bore. He wrote to me and said as much. He follows me around town, and shows up at the house whenever he’s had too much to drink, which is a couple of times a week at least. I’ve told him there’s no chance at all and he might as well resign himself to it but he’s as stubborn as a mule. Really, I don’t know what I’m going to do about him. It’s not as if I can speak to his parents—they won’t have anything to do with me. And it’s not as if I can ask my father to talk to him. He won’t even acknowledge that Leonard exists any more.” She took a deep breath before expressing in words what we were both thinking. “What I need, of course, is my brother.”

“Perhaps I should have said something,” I said.

“What would you have said? You don’t know him, you don’t know the circumstances.”

“No, but if you’re upset about it—”

“I don’t mean to be rude, Tristan,” she said, looking at me with an expression that suggested she was not to be patronized, “but you barely know me. And I don’t need your protection, as grateful as I am that you are willing to offer it.”

“Of course not. I just meant that as your brother’s friend—”

“But don’t you see?” she asked. “That’s what makes it worse. It was his parents, you see. They put the most awful pressure on him. They run a greengrocer’s, here in town, and rely on the goodwill of the community to keep their business going. Well, of course everyone knew that Leonard and I were to be married, so after Will died most of the town stopped shopping at Legg’s. They were looking for someone to attack, you see. And it wasn’t as if they could take it out on my father. He was their vicar, after all. There were certain conventions that had to be upheld. So the Leggs were the next best thing.”

“Marian,” I said, looking away, wishing there was a bench nearby where we could sit quietly. I felt a strong urge to remain silent for a long time.

“No, Tristan,” she insisted. “Let me finish. You might as well know it. We tried to carry on for a while but it was obvious that it was no good. The Leggs were shunning me, the town was shunning the Leggs, it was horrible, all of it, and so Leonard decided that he’d had enough and threw me over for his family’s sake. Of course his father put it about within a few hours and, by the next day, everyone was shopping there again. Business could go on as normal, hurrah. Never mind that I was going through the worst time of my life, grieving for the brother I’d lost; never mind that the person I relied on most to see me through those days decided that he couldn’t stand the sight of me. But now that things have begun to blow over and no one wants to talk about it any more, he’s decided that he wants me back. Everyone around here wants to act as though nothing ever happened and there never was a boy called Will Bancroft who grew up around them and played on their streets and went out and fought their blasted war for them—” She was raising her voice now and I could see a few people passing by looking at her with expressions that suggested they were thinking, Ah yes, the Bancroft girl, we shouldn’t expect much more from her than shouting in the streets. “Now that that’s all behind us, Tristan, my poor Leonard has decided that he made a terrible mistake and damn his father and damn his mother and damn their blessed cash register but he wants me back. Well, he shan’t have me, Tristan, he shan’t have me. Not today, not tomorrow. Never.”

“All right,” I said, trying to calm her. “I’m sorry. I can see it now.”

“People behave as though we are disgraced. Can you understand that?” she said, quieter now. Tears sprung into her eyes as she spoke to me. “Look at that couple in the café. Their brazen rudeness. Their insensitivity. Oh, Tristan, don’t look at me like that. Don’t pretend you didn’t notice.”

I frowned, remembering only the couple who had sat a few tables away from us before moving to a more secluded area to continue their assignation.

“They moved because of me,” she cried. “When I came back from the Ladies and they saw who was sitting near them, they upped sticks and got as far away from me as possible. This is what I have to put up with every day. It’s not as bad as it once was, that’s true, it used to be horrendous, but in a way it’s even worse now that people are talking to me again. It says that they’ve entirely forgotten Will. Which I never shall. They treat my parents, they treat me, like they want to say that they forgive us, as if they think we have something to be forgiven for. But it’s we who should be forgiving them for how they treated us and how they treated Will. And yet I don’t say anything. I’m full of fine ideas, Tristan; you’d learn that about me if you were fool enough to stick around here any longer. But that’s all they are. Fine ideas. In my heart, I’m just as much a coward as they all think my brother was. I want to defend him, but can’t.”

“Your brother was not a coward,” I insisted. “You must believe that, Marian.”

“Of course I believe it,” she snapped. “I don’t think it for a moment. How could I? I who knew him best. He was the bravest one of all. But try telling that to the people here and see how far it gets you. They’re ashamed of him, you see. The only boy from the entire county during the whole war ever to be lined up in front of a firing squad and executed for cowardice. They’re ashamed of him. They don’t understand who he is. Who he was. They never have. But you do, Tristan, don’t you? You know who he was.”