The Absolutist

UNPOPULAR OPINIONS Norwich, 16 September 1919

MARIAN AND I had lunch in the window seat of the Murderers public house on Timber Hill. The incident with Leonard Legg had been put behind us, although the bruise on my cheek served as a reminder of what had taken place outside the café.

“Is it sore?” asked Marian, noticing me touch the bump gingerly with my finger to test for pain.

“Not really. It might be tender tomorrow.”

“I am sorry,” she said, trying not to smile at my discomfort.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Still, it’s not on and I shall tell him so next time I see him. He’s probably gone off somewhere to lick his wounds. We won’t see him again today if we’re lucky.”

I hoped that would be the case and busied myself with my food. In the time it had taken us to walk there we had avoided controversial topics and settled for bland small talk instead. Now, as I finished my lunch, I remembered that I knew very little of what Will’s sister actually did here in Norwich.

“You didn’t mind meeting me on a weekday?” I asked, looking up. “You were able to take time away from your job, I mean?”

“It wasn’t difficult,” she replied with a shrug. “I work mostly in a part-time capacity. And it’s all voluntary, anyway, so it doesn’t really matter if I show up or not. Well, no, that’s not right. I only mean that it doesn’t affect my standard of living since I’m not being paid.”

“Can I ask what you do?”

She pushed away the last of her pie with a grimace and reached for a glass of water. “I work mostly with ex-servicemen like yourself,” she told me. “Men who’ve been through the war and are having difficulty coming to terms with their experiences.”

“And that’s a part-time position?” I asked, a flicker of a smile on my lips, and she laughed and looked down.

“Well, I suppose not,” she admitted. “The truth is I could work with them twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and I still wouldn’t even scrape the surface of what needs doing. I’m really only a dogsbody, of course, for the doctors, who actually know what they’re doing. I suppose it’s what you’d call emotionally draining. But I do what I can. It would be better if I was a professional.”

“Perhaps you could train as a nurse?” I suggested.

“Perhaps I could train as a doctor,” she replied, correcting me. “It’s not such an outlandish idea, surely, Tristan?”

“No, of course not,” I said, blushing slightly. “I only meant—”

“I’m teasing you. There’s no need to feel so awkward. But if I could go back a few years I certainly would have trained for medicine. I’d have liked to become involved in a study of the mind.”

“But you’re still a young woman,” I said. “It’s not too late, surely? In London—”

“In London, of course,” she said, interrupting me and throwing her hands in the air. “Why is it that everyone from London always believes it to be the centre of the universe? We do have hospitals here in Norwich, too, you know. And we have injured boys. Quite a few of them, in fact.”

“Of course you do. I seem to keep putting my foot in it, don’t I?”

“It’s very difficult for women, Tristan,” she explained, leaning forwards. “Perhaps you don’t fully realize that. You’re a man, after all. You have it easy.”

“You believe that, do you?”

“That it’s difficult for women?”

“That I have it easy.”

She sighed and gave a noncommittal shrug. “Well, I don’t know you, of course. I can’t speak for your particular circumstances. But trust me, things are not as difficult for you as they are for us.”

“The last five years might make a lie of that statement.”

Now it was her turn to blush. “Yes, of course you’re right,” she said. “But leave the war aside for a moment and examine our situation. The way in which women are treated in this country is almost unbearable. And, by the way, don’t you think that half of us would have gladly fought alongside the men in the trenches had we been allowed? I know I would have been out there like a shot.”

“I sometimes think that it’s wiser to leave action and discussion to men.”

She stared at me; she could not have looked more surprised had I jumped on the tabletop and burst into a rendition of “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.”

“I beg your pardon?” she said coldly.

“No,” I said, laughing now. “Those aren’t my words. They’re from Howards End. Have you read Forster?”

“No,” she replied, shaking her head. “And I shan’t if that’s the type of rot he comes out with. He sounds like a most objectionable sort.”

“Only it’s a woman who utters the line, Marian. Mrs. Wilcox says it at a lunch thrown in her honour. Rather appals the company, if I remember correctly.”

“I told you I don’t read modern novels, Tristan,” she said. “Leave the action and discussion to men, indeed! I never heard such a thing. This Mrs. Wilton—”

“Wilcox.”

“Wilton, Wilcox, whatever she calls herself. She betrays her sex with such a statement.”

“Then you wouldn’t like what she says next.”

“Go on, then. Scandalize me.”

“I won’t be able to remember it exactly right. But it’s something to the effect that there are strong arguments against the suffrage. She remarks that she is only too thankful not to have the vote herself.”

“Extraordinary,” said Marian, shaking her head. “I’m appalled, Tristan. I’m frankly appalled.”

“Well, she dies shortly after this speech so her views go to the grave with her.”

“What does she die of?”

“Unpopular opinions, I suppose.”

“Like my brother.”

I remained silent, refusing to acknowledge the remark, and she held my gaze for a long time before turning away and allowing her face to relax.

“I was involved in the suffrage movement myself, you know,” she said after a while.

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” I replied, smiling at her. “What did you do?”

“Oh, nothing very substantial. Went on marches, posted leaflets through letter boxes, that sort of thing. I never tied myself to the railings of the Houses of Parliament or stood outside Asquith’s house, crying for equality. My father would never have allowed it, for one thing. Although he believed in the movement, he believed in it very strongly. But he has a great conviction that one must retain one’s dignity, too.”

“Well, you got your way in the end,” I said. “The vote has been granted.”

“The vote has not been granted, Tristan,” she replied tartly. “I don’t have a vote. And I won’t have until I’m thirty. And even then only if I’m a householder. Or am married to one. Or possess a university degree. But you do already and you’re younger than I am. Now, does that strike you as fair?”

“Of course it doesn’t,” I said. “In fact, I wanted to publish a treatise on that very thing, written by a man, if you can believe it, pointing out the inequality of the suffrage. It was remarkably salient and would have a caused a stir, I’m sure of it.”

“And did you publish it?”

“No,” I admitted. “Mr. Pynton would have nothing to do with it. He’s not modern, you see.”

“Well, there we are, then. You have your rights, ours are still to be won. Astonishing how everyone is willing to go abroad to fight for the rights of foreigners while having such little concern for those of their own countrymen at home. But look, I’d better shut up about all this. If I get started on the inequalities that we simply accept without question in this country then we could be here all afternoon.”

“I’m in no hurry,” I said, and she appeared to appreciate the sentiment, for she smiled at me and reached across to pat my hand, leaving hers atop mine for longer than necessary.

“Is something wrong?” she asked me a moment later.

“No,” I said, taking my hand away. “Why do you ask?”

“You looked suddenly upset, that’s all.”

I shook my head and turned to look out of the window. The truth was that the touch of her hand on mine put me so much in mind of Will that it was a little overwhelming. I could see a lot of him in her face, of course. Particularly in her expressions, the way she turned her head at times and smiled, the dimples that suddenly rose in her cheeks, but I had never realized that touch could be a common thread in families, too. Or was I fooling myself? Was it simply something that I was ascribing to her out of my sheer desire to feel close to Will again and atone for my actions?

“It must be very rewarding,” I said finally, facing her again.

“What must be?”

“Helping the soldiers. The ones who are suffering.”

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” she replied, considering it. “Look, this is an awful thing to say, but I feel such resentment towards so many of them. Does that make sense? When they talk of what they’ve been through or when they speak of loyalty in the ranks and their sense of comradeship, it makes me want to scream so loudly that sometimes I have to leave the room.”

“But there was loyalty,” I said, protesting. “Why would you think otherwise? And there was, at times, an almost overwhelming sense of comradeship. It could be quite suffocating.”

“And where was comradeship when they did what they did to my brother?” she snapped, her eyes filling with the same rage that provoked her, I imagined, to march out of those nursing wards or consulting rooms, controlling her fury. “Where was comradeship when they lined him up against a wall and turned their rifles on him?”

“Don’t,” I begged, placing a hand across my eyes, hoping that to close them would banish the images from my mind. “Please, Marian.” The sudden rush of words produced terrible memories that sliced through my body.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, surprised perhaps by how violently I had reacted against this. “But you can’t blame me for feeling that there are double standards in those supposed bands of brothers. Anyway, there’s no point in pursuing this. You stood by him to the very end, I know. I can see how upset you become whenever I mention his death. Of course, you were close. Tell me, did you hit it off immediately, the two of you?”

“Yes,” I said, smiling now at the memory. “Yes, we had the same sense of humour, I think. And we had the bunks next to each other, so naturally we formed an alliance.”

“Poor you,” she replied, smiling, too.

“Why so?”

“Because my brother was many things,” she said, “but clean was not one of them. I remember before he went over there going into his room in the mornings to wake him and nearly fainting from the stench. What is it with you boys and your terrible smells?”

I laughed. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “There were twenty of us in the barracks so I can’t imagine it was particularly sanitary. Although Left and Right, as you put it, as he put it, saw to it that we kept our beds and reports in good order. But yes, we became friends quickly.”

“And how was he?” she asked. “In those early days, I mean. Did he seem glad to be there?”

“I’m not sure he thought about things in those terms,” I told her, considering her question carefully. “It was more that this was simply the next part of life that had to be got through. Some of the older men, I think they found it more difficult than we did. For us, as stupid as it sounds in retrospect, it seemed like a great adventure, at least at the start.”

“Yes, I’ve heard others use those exact words,” said Marian. “Some of the men I’ve worked with, the younger ones, I mean, they’ve spoken of it as if they never really understood what lay in front of them until they got over there.”

“But that’s it, you see,” I agreed. “We were training but it didn’t feel any different from practising football or rugby at school. Perhaps we believed that if we learned everything on offer to us, then sooner or later we would be sent out on to the pitch for a jolly good skirmish and when it was all over we’d shake hands and retire to the changing rooms for slices of orange and a hot shower.”

“You know better now, of course,” she muttered.

“Yes.”

One of the bar staff came over and took our plates away and Marian tapped the table for a moment before looking up at me. “Shall we get out of here, Tristan?” she asked. “It’s terribly warm, don’t you think? I feel as if I might pass out.”

“Yes, of course,” I said, and this time she settled our account, and when we stepped out into the street I followed as she led the way, assuming that she had an idea in her mind of where we were going next.

“How soon was it before his tendencies began to show themselves?” she asked me as we walked along.

I turned to her in surprise, uncertain what she might be getting at. “I beg your pardon?” I said.

“My brother,” she replied. “I don’t remember him being much of a pacifist before he went away. He used to get into the most frightful scrapes at school, if I remember correctly. But then, once he decided not to fight any more, I had the most terrifying letters from him, full of anger and disappointment at what was going on over there. He became so disillusioned with things.”

“It’s hard to know exactly when it began,” I said, thinking about it. “The truth is that, contrary to what the newspapers and the politicians would have you believe, not every soldier out there wanted to fight at all. Each of us fell at a different point on a spectrum from pacifism to unremitting sadism. Bloodthirsty fellows, saturated in some overzealous sense of patriotism, who would still be over there even now, killing Germans, if they were given the chance. Introspective chaps who did their duty, anything that was asked of them, but didn’t care for it at all. We spoke before about Wolf—”

“The murdered boy?”

“Well, yes, perhaps,” I said, still, for whatever reason, unwilling to cede this point. “I mean, he certainly had an influence on Will’s way of thinking.”

“They were close friends, too, then?”

“No, not close,” I said. “But he intrigued Will, that’s for sure.”

“And you, Tristan, did he intrigue you, too?”

“Wolf?”

“Yes.”

“No, not in the slightest. I thought he was something of a poseur, if I’m honest. The very worst kind of feather man.”

“It surprises me to hear you say that.”

“Why?” I asked, looking at her with a frown.

“Well, from the way you talk, it sounds to me as if you would have agreed with everything this man Wolf said. Look, I know we’ve only just met but you don’t strike me as a great antagonist. You didn’t even go after Leonard when he hit you earlier. What kept you from being as interested in Wolf as my brother was?”

“Well, he was… I mean, if you’d known him…” I was struggling now. The truth was that I had no answer to her question. I rubbed my eyes and wondered whether I really believed what I had said about Wolf, that he was a poseur, or whether it was simply the fact that he and Will had got along so well that had made me despise him so much. Was I that unjust? Was it nothing more than jealousy on my part that made me condemn a decent and thoughtful man? “Look, we might have held similar opinions in our hearts,” I said finally, “but we just rubbed each other up the wrong way, that’s all. And of course he died, he was killed, whatever is the correct form of words. Which certainly affected your brother in a very deep way.”

“And that’s how it began?” she asked me.

“Yes. But you must remember that all that took place here in England. Things didn’t really come to a head until France. There was an incident, you see, one that precipitated Will’s decision to lay down his arms. Although, in retrospect, I don’t think it’s right to put it all down to that single event either. There were other things that happened, I’m sure of it. Some that I witnessed, many that I didn’t. It was a confluence of events over a long period of time and sustained months of unremitting strain. Does that make sense?”

“A little,” she replied. “Only I feel there must have been one particular thing. To make him so aggressively anti-war, I mean. You said there was an incident that precipitated things?”

“Yes, it took place just after we took one of the German trenches,” I said. “It’s not a pleasant story, Marian. I’m not sure you want to hear it.”

“Tell me, please,” she said, turning to look at me. “It might help to explain things.”

“There were four of us, you see,” I said, nervous about recounting it. “We captured a German boy who’d been left alive, the last of his regiment.” I told her the story of Milton and Attling, and how Will had found the boy in hiding and brought him to our attention. I left nothing out, from Will’s determination to bring him back to HQ as a prisoner of war to the boy pissing his pants and igniting Milton’s anger.

“You’ll have to excuse my language,” I said as I finished the story. “Only you wanted to hear it as it happened.”

She nodded and looked away, troubled by this. “Do you think he blamed himself?” she asked.

“For the boy’s death?”

“For the boy’s murder,” she said, correcting me.

“No, I don’t think it was as simple as that,” I replied. “He wasn’t responsible for it, after all. He didn’t shoot the boy. In fact, he did everything he could to save his life. No, I think he just hated the idea of it, the sheer bloody cruelty of it, and would have liked to have blown Milton’s brains out immediately afterwards, if you want the truth. He told me as much.”

“But he found the boy,” she insisted. “He captured him. If he hadn’t done that, then it never would have happened.”

“Yes, but he didn’t expect that it would have the result that it did.”

“I think he must have blamed himself,” she said in a determined voice, irritating me a little, for she hadn’t been there and didn’t know what had taken place. She hadn’t seen the expression on Will’s face as the German boy’s brains splattered across Attling’s uniform. She had only my rough attempts to describe the horror of it to draw upon. “I think it must have been that,” she added.

“But it wasn’t, Marian,” I insisted. “You can’t put it down to one thing. It’s too simplistic.”

“Well, what about you, Tristan?” she asked, turning to me, her tone growing aggressive now. “Weren’t you upset by what you’d witnessed?”

“Of course I was,” I said. “I wanted to pick up a rock and hammer Milton’s brains in. What right-thinking man wouldn’t? That boy was terrified out of his wits. He lived his last minutes in a state of pure fear. You’d have to be a sadist to take any pleasure in that. But then we were all terrified, Marian. Every one of us. It was a war, for pity’s sake.”

“But you didn’t feel moved to join Will?” she asked. “You didn’t feel as strongly about it as he did. You kept a hold of your rifle. You continued to fight.”

I hesitated and thought about it. “I suppose you’re right,” I admitted. “The truth is I simply didn’t feel the same way about that incident as your brother did. I don’t know what that says about me, whether it means that I’m a callous person, or an inhuman one, or a man incapable of compassion. Yes, I felt it was unjust and unwarranted, but also I believed it was just another one of those things that happened every day over there. The fact is that I was constantly witnessing men dying in the most horrific ways. I was on edge every day and night for fear that I was going to be picked off by a sniper. It’s an awful thing to say but I allowed myself to become immune to the random acts of violence. My God, if I hadn’t become immune to it I would never have been able to—” I pulled myself up short and stopped in the street, astonished by the sentence that I had been about to utter.

“You’d never have been able to what, Tristan?” she asked.

“To… to carry on, I suppose,” I said, trying to salvage the situation, and she looked at me, narrowing her eyes, as if suspecting that that was not what I had been planning to say. But for whatever reason she decided not to press me on it. “Where are we, anyway?” I asked, looking around, for we were no longer in the town centre but making our way back towards Tombland and the cathedral, where I had begun my day. “Should we turn back now, do you think?”

“I mentioned earlier that there was something I wanted you to do for me,” she said quietly. “Do you remember that?”

“Yes,” I said, for she had said it as we left the café but I hadn’t thought much of it at the time. “That’s why I’m here, after all. If there’s something I can do to make things any easier for you—”

“It’s not my well-being I’m concerned with,” she said. “It’s my parents’.”

“Your parents’?” I asked, and then, looking around, I realized what she was getting at. “You don’t live near here, do you?” I asked nervously.

“The vicarage is just down there,” she said, nodding towards the curve at the end of the road, where a small lane led to a cul-de-sac. “It’s the house where I grew up. Where Will grew up. And where my parents still live.”

I stopped, feeling as if I had walked directly into a stone wall. “My daughter has arranged something,” her father had said when I had inadvertently met him at Nurse Cavell’s grave. “I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head. “No, I can’t do that.”

“But you don’t know what I want you to do yet.”

“You want me to visit your mother and father. To talk to them about the things that happened. I’m sorry, Marian, but no. It’s out of the question.”

She stared at me, her forehead wrinkling into a series of confused lines. “But why ever not?” she asked. “If you can talk to me about it, then why not them?”

“That’s completely different,” I said, not entirely sure why it would be. “You were Will’s sister. Your mother gave birth to him. Your father… No, I’m sorry, Marian. I simply don’t have the strength for it. Please, you’ll have to take me away from here. Let me go home. Please.”

Her expression softened now. She could see how difficult this was for me and she reached out and placed a hand on both my arms, just above the elbows. “Tristan,” she said quietly. “You don’t know what it means to me to be with someone who speaks as highly of my brother as you do. People around here”—she nodded her head up and down the street—“they don’t talk of him at all, I told you that. They’re ashamed of him. It would help my parents enormously if they were to meet you. If they could just hear how much you cared for Will.”

“Please don’t ask me to do this,” I said, beseeching her, panic rising inside me as I realized that there was almost no way out of this other than to run away. “I wouldn’t know what to say to them.”

“Then don’t say anything,” she said. “You don’t even have to talk about Will if you don’t want to. But let them meet you and give you tea and know that there is a boy sitting in their front room who was friends with their son. They died over there, too, Tristan. Can you understand that? They were shot up against that wall just as my brother was. Think of your own family, your own father and mother. If, God forbid, something had happened to you over there, don’t you think they would have wanted their minds to be set at ease? They must love you as much as my parents loved Will. Please, just for a little while. Half an hour, no longer. Say you’ll come.”

I looked down the street and knew that I had no choice. Do it, I thought. Be strong. Get it over with. Then go home. And never tell her the truth about the end.

But even as I thought this, my head was dizzy with what she had said about my mother and father. What if I had died over there, I wondered? Would they have cared? After the way things had ended between us, I rather thought not. Everything that had taken place between Peter and me, the fool I had made of myself, the mistake that cost me my home. What was it my father had said to me when I was leaving, after all?

“It would be best for all of us if the Germans shoot you dead on sight.”

Peter and I were friends from the cradle. It was always just the two of us until the day when the Carters arrived, spilling their furniture and carpets on to the street as they took possession of the house next door to my father’s shop and two doors along from Peter’s home.

“Hello, boys,” said Mr. Carter, an overweight car mechanic with hair growing in tufts from his ears and up over the collar of his too-small shirts. He was holding half a sandwich in his hand and stuffed it in his mouth as he watched us kicking a football to each other. “Pass it!” he shouted, ignoring his wife’s sighs of exasperation. “Pass it over here, lads. Pass it over here!”

Peter, stopping for a moment, stared at him before using the toe of his boot to kick the ball neatly up in the air, where it landed with enviable precision in his arms.

“For pity’s sake, Jack,” said Mrs. Carter.

He shrugged and made his way over to his wife, who was as corpulent as he was, and it was at that moment that Sylvia appeared. That this pair could have produced such a creature was a surprise.

“Got to be adopted,” muttered Peter in my ear. “There’s no way she’s theirs.”

Before I could say anything, my own mother appeared from the upstairs flat in her Sunday best—she must have known that the new neighbours were arriving that day and been watching out for them—and began a conversation that was a mixture of welcome and curiosity. The battle for who was lucky to be living next door to whom was already beginning while Sylvia simply stared at Peter and me, as if we were a new class of beast altogether, entirely distinct from the boys she had known in her previous neighbourhood.

“I won’t go short on meat, anyway,” said Mrs. Carter, nodding in the direction of our front window, where a couple of rabbits were hanging from steel hooks through their necks. “Do you always keep them out like that?”

“Out like what?” asked my mother.

“Open to the world. Where anyone can see them.”

My mother frowned, unsure where else a butcher’s shop could display its wares, but said nothing.

“If I’m honest,” continued Mrs. Carter, “I’m more of a fish person, anyway.”

Bored by their talk, I tried to get Peter to return to our game, but he pulled away from me and shook his head, dropping the football again before bouncing it a dozen or more times on his knee as Sylvia watched him silently. Then, ignoring him, she turned her attention to me and her lips turned upwards slightly, the hint of a smile, before she looked away and disappeared inside her front door to explore her new home.

And that, as far as I was concerned, was the end of that.

But it wasn’t long before she became a near-constant presence in our lives. Peter was smitten by her and it became obvious that to try to exclude her from our company was to ensure that I would be excluded from his, the idea of which was very painful to me.

But then the strangest thing happened. Perhaps it was because of Peter’s evident devotion or my apparent indifference, but Sylvia began to direct all her attention towards me.

“Shouldn’t we call for Peter?” I would ask when she knocked on my door, full of ideas for an afternoon’s entertainment.

She’d shake her head quickly. “Not today, Tristan,” she’d say. “He can be such a bore.”

It made me furious when she insulted him like that. I would have argued his case, but I suppose I was flattered by her attentions. She had a somewhat exotic air, after all—she had not grown up in Chiswick, for one thing, and had an aunt who lived in Paris—and it was obvious that she was beautiful. Every boy wanted to be her friend; Peter was desperate to secure her favours. And yet she was choosing to bestow them on me. How could I not have been flattered?

Peter noticed this, of course, and was driven half mad with jealousy, which left me in a quandary over how to solve the problem. The fact was that the longer I encouraged her, the less possibility there was of her throwing me over for my friend.

As my sixteenth birthday approached I grew more tormented. My feelings towards Peter had clarified themselves in my head by now—I recognized them for what they were—and they were only amplified by my inability to verbalize or act upon them. I would lie in bed at night, curled into a tight ball, half encouraging the most lurid fantasies to energize the dark hours, half desperate to dismiss them out of pure fear of what they implied. As the summer approached and Peter and I took to the islands past Kew Bridge, I would encourage play-acting on the river banks in an attempt to force a physical bond between us but was always forced to pull away at the moments of the most intense thrill for fear of discovery.

And so I allowed Sylvia to kiss me under the chestnut tree and I tried to make myself believe that this was what I wanted.

“Did you like it?” she asked as she pulled away, half drunk on what she considered to be her own desirability.

“Very much,” I lied.

“Do you want to do it again?”

“Perhaps later. Anyone might see us out here.”

“And so what if they do? What does that matter?”

“Perhaps later,” I repeated.

I could tell that this was not the answer she expected and my continued indifference, my utter refusal to be seduced by her, finally brought her campaign to a crashing end. She simply shook her head, as if dismissing me from her mind once and for all.

“I’ll be getting home, then,” she said, taking off across the fields without me, leaving me there alone to ponder my disgrace. I knew immediately that I had lost her favour and didn’t care in the slightest. Move away, I thought. Go back where you came from. Take up with your aunt in Paris if you want. Just leave us all in peace.

And then, a day or two later, Peter came to see me in a state of great excitement.

“There’s something I have to ask you, Tristan,” he said, biting his lip and trying to keep his enthusiasm at bay. “You’ll give me a straight answer, won’t you?”

“Of course,” I said.

“You and Sylvia,” he said. “There’s nothing between you, is there?”

I sighed and shook my head. “Of course not,” I told him. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

“Well, I had to ask,” he said, breaking into a smile, unable to keep his news to himself any longer. “Look, the thing is that she and I, well, we’re an item now, Tristan. It’s all decided.”

I remember I was standing up at the time and to my left was a small table where, before going to bed at night, my mother would leave a bowl of water and a jug for me to wash with in the morning. My hand instinctively went out and rested atop that table for fear that my legs might give way beneath me.

“Is that so?” I asked, staring at him. “Well, lucky you.”

I told myself that it was all something and nothing, that sooner or later he would make some idiotic comment that would annoy her and she would throw him over—but no, it was impossible, I realized, for who in their right mind would ever secure Peter’s affections and then discard them? No, she would betray him with another and then he would put her aside and return to me and agree that girls were a bad lot and it would be for the best if we stuck to each other from now on.

Of course that didn’t happen. Something more real, an actual romance, unfolded before my eyes and it was painful to observe. And so I made my great mistake, the one that within a few short hours would see me expelled from school, home and family and from the only life I had ever known.

It was a school day, a Thursday, and I found myself alone with Peter in our classroom, a rare occurrence now, for Sylvia was almost always by his side, or, rather, he was almost always by hers. He was telling me about the previous evening, how he and Sylvia had gone for a walk along the river together and there had been no one around to catch them so she had allowed him to place his hand on the soft cotton fabric of her blouse. To “feel her up,” as he put it.

“She wouldn’t let me go any further, of course,” he said. “She’s not that type of girl, not my Sylvia.” My Sylvia! The words revolted me. “But she said we might go back again this weekend if it’s sunny and if she can find an excuse to get away from her dragon of a mother.”

He was prattling on, twenty to the dozen, unable to stop himself in the intensity of his feelings. It was obvious how much she meant to him, and without pausing to think about the consequences of my actions, overwhelmed by the power of his own longings, I reached forward, took his face in my hands and kissed him.

The embrace lasted a second or two, no more than that. He pulled away in shock, gasping, tripping over his own feet as I stood still before him. He stared at me in confusion, then repulsion, wiped his hand against his mouth and looked at it as if I might have left a stain upon his skin. Of course I knew immediately that I had made a terrible miscalculation.

“Peter,” I said, shaking my head, ready to throw myself on his mercy, but it was too late: he was already running from the room, his boots pounding along the corridor outside as he sought to put as much distance between the two of us as he could.

It’s an astonishing thing: we had been friends all our lives but I never laid eyes on him again after that. Not once.

I didn’t return to class that afternoon. I went home, complaining to my mother of a sick stomach, and thought about packing a bag and running away before anyone could discover what I had done. I lay on my bed, the tears coming quickly, then found myself in the bathroom, vomiting hard, feeling the tension of perspiration and humiliation combining to condemn me. I was probably still there when our headmaster appeared in the shop downstairs, not to purchase a leg of lamb or a few pork chops for his tea, but to inform my father of the complaint that had been made against me, of the most hideous and vile complaint, and to instruct him that I was no longer welcome as a student in his school, that if he had his way I would be dragged before the magistrates on a charge of gross indecency.

I stayed in my room, a curious sense of calm overtaking me as if I was no longer of my own body. I inhabited a different plane for a short time, an ethereal presence watching this young, hopelessly confused lad sitting on the side of his bed, lost to the world but interested to find out what might happen next.

I was sent away from home later that day and within a few weeks most of the bruises and welts that my father had inflicted on me had begun to heal and the scars across my back and face had lost some of their sting. My left eye unsealed itself and I was able to see normally once again.

I made no protest as I was kicked out on to the street, where Mrs. Carter watched me as she watered her hydrangeas and shook her head, disappointed at where her life had brought her, for she knew in her heart that she had been born for more than this.

“Everything all right, Tristan?” she asked.

The vicarage reminded me of something from a picture postcard. It was located at the end of a small cul-de-sac with a short road leading up to it lined with trees that were just beginning to shed their leaves, and its windows were bordered by a lush spray of dark green ivy. I glanced towards the immaculate front lawn, taking in the row of ferns and bedding plants growing next to a corner rock garden. It was idyllic, a stark contrast to the small flat above the butcher’s shop in which I had spent my first sixteen years.

In the hallway, an enthusiastic small dog ran towards me, an inquisitive expression on his face, and as I reached down to pat him, he balanced with his hind legs on the floor and his front legs on my knees, patiently accepting all the pats and caresses that I was willing to bestow, his tail wagging in ecstasy at the attention.

“Bobby, get down,” said Marian, shooing him away. “You’re not frightened of dogs, are you, Tristan? Leonard couldn’t bear to have one near him.”

I looked at her, laughing a little; Bobby was hardly an intimidating presence. “Not in the least,” I said. “Although we never had one. What breed is he, anyway? A spaniel?”

“Yes, well, a King Charles. Getting on a bit now, of course. He’s almost nine.”

“Was he Will’s?” I asked, surprised that I had never heard Bobby’s name mentioned before. Some of the men over there had spoken about their dogs with more affection than they did their families.

“No, not really. He’s Mother’s, if he’s anyone’s. Just ignore him and he’ll stop pestering you eventually. Let’s go into the drawing room, I’ll just let Mother know you’re here.”

She opened the door to a comfortable parlour and I stepped inside, Bobby in tow, and looked around. It was as comfortable as I had expected it to be, the firmness of the sofas suggesting that the room was probably kept for special visitors, of which I, apparently, was one. I glanced down to find the dog sniffing around my ankles. I caught his eye and he stopped immediately, sitting on the floor and staring up at me, seemingly uncertain whether or not he approved of me yet. He cocked his head to the left, as though deciding, then began the process of trying to climb me once again.

“Mr. Sadler,” said Mrs. Bancroft, coming in a moment later, looking a little flustered. “It’s so good of you to call. I’m sure you’re very busy. Get down, Bobby.”

“It’s my pleasure,” I said, smiling at her, lying, pleased that Marian followed her mother in almost immediately with a pot of tea. More tea.

“I’m afraid my husband isn’t here yet,” she said. “He did promise to join us but sometimes he gets distracted by parishioners on the way home. I know he’s looking forward to meeting you.”

“It’s quite all right,” I said, unsettled by the fine china cups being set out on the table with their painfully small handles. Since Will’s mother had appeared, my right index finger had started to shake in that uncontrollable manner once again and I rather feared that if I attempted to drink from one of them I would end up with its contents poured down my shirt.

“I’m sure he’ll be along soon, though,” she muttered, throwing a quick look out of the window as if that might ensure his timely presence. She was very much her daughter’s mother, an attractive woman in her early fifties, composed, well turned out, elegant. “Have you both had a nice day?” she asked eventually, as if this were nothing more than a social visit.

“Very nice, thank you,” I said. “Marian showed me around the city.”

“There’s not much to see, I’m afraid,” she replied. “I’m sure that a Londoner must find us terribly boring.”

“Not at all,” I said, even as Marian sighed audibly from the armchair next to mine.

“Now, why would you say that, Mother?” she asked. “Why must we continually believe that we are less than those who happen to live a hundred miles away?”

Mrs. Bancroft looked at her and then smiled at me. “You’ll have to forgive my daughter,” she said. “She does get in a flap sometimes over the smallest things.”

“I’m not getting in a flap,” she said. “It’s just… Oh, it doesn’t matter. It just irritates me, that’s all. Continually putting ourselves down like this.”

There was a touch of the irritated teenager about Marian now, quite different from the self-assured young woman with whom I had spent most of the day. I glanced towards the sideboard, where a series of portraits of Will, taken at various points during his life, captured my attention. In the first, he was presented as a young boy, smiling cheekily in a football outfit, then he was a little older, turning around and staring as if he had been taken by surprise. And in a third, he was walking away, his face invisible, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed low.

“Would you like to take a closer look?” asked Mrs. Bancroft, noticing my interest, and I nodded, going over to the sideboard, where I took each one down individually and examined it. It was all that I could do not to run my finger along the contours of his face.

“You don’t have any pictures of him in uniform, I see.”

“No,” said Mrs. Bancroft. “I did have one. When he first enlisted, I mean. We were terribly proud, of course, so it seemed like the right thing to do. But I took it down. I don’t want to be reminded of that part of his life, you see. It’s in a drawer somewhere but…”

Her voice trailed off and I didn’t pursue it. It had been the wrong question to ask. A moment later, however, I noticed another portrait, this one of a man who was wearing a uniform, although not the type that Will or I had ever worn. He had a placid expression on his face, as if he were resigned to whatever Fate had in store for him, and a rather extraordinary moustache.

“My father,” said Mrs. Bancroft, lifting the picture off the sideboard and staring at it with a half-smile. Her other hand caressed my arm for a moment in an unconscious gesture and I felt comforted by it. “Neither Marian nor William ever knew him, of course. He fought in the first Transvaal conflict.”

“Oh yes,” I said, nodding. When I was growing up, the Boer War and its predecessor were the great conflict memories of my parents’ generation and they were often talked about still. Everyone had a grandfather or an uncle who had fought at Ladysmith or Mafeking, laid down their lives on the sloping hills of Drakensberg or come to a horrible end in the polluted rivers of the Modder. People spoke of the Boers, a race who had simply chosen not to be overrun by invaders from a different hemisphere, as the last great enemy of the British people and their war as our last great conflict. A bitter irony, I suppose.

“I barely knew my father,” said Mrs. Bancroft quietly. “He was only twenty-three when he was killed, you see, and I was only three. My mother and he married young. I don’t have many memories of him, but those that I have are happy ones.”

“These bloody wars have a habit of taking all the men in our family,” remarked Marian from her armchair.

“Marian!” cried Mrs. Bancroft, looking quickly back at me as if I might have taken offence.

“Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” she said. “And not just the men, either. My grandmother—my mother’s mother, that is—she was killed in the Transvaal, too.”

I raised an eyebrow, sure that she could not possibly have this right.

“Don’t be so ridiculous, Marian,” said Mrs. Bancroft, putting the picture down again and looking at me with an unsettled expression. “My daughter is liberated, Mr. Sadler, and I’m not sure that’s entirely a good thing. I myself have never had any interest in being liberated.” I was reminded again of Mrs. Wilcox, disgracing herself over a Schlegel lunch.

“All right, she wasn’t killed in the Transvaal exactly,” admitted Marian, relenting a little. “But she didn’t survive my grandfather’s death.”

“Marian, please!” snapped Mrs. Bancroft.

“Well, why shouldn’t he know? We’ve nothing to hide. My grandmother, Tristan, found herself unable to live without my grandfather and took her own life.”

I looked away, certain that I did not want to be included in this confidence.

“It’s not something that we talk about,” said Mrs. Bancroft, her voice losing its anger now and becoming more sorrowful. “She was very young, my mother, when he was killed. And she was only nineteen when I was born. I imagine she simply couldn’t handle the responsibility and the grief. I’ve never blamed her for it, of course. I’ve tried to understand.”

“But there’s no reason why you should blame her, Mrs. Bancroft,” I said. “When these things happen, they’re tragedies. No one does something like that because they want to; they do it because they are ill.”

“Yes, I expect you’re right,” she said, sitting down again. “Only it was a great source of shame for our family at the time, a terrible irony after my father brought us such pride with his actions in the war.”

“Curious, isn’t it, Tristan,” asked Marian, “how we consider the death of a soldier to be a source of pride rather than a source of national shame? It’s not as if we had any business being in the Transvaal in the first place.”

“My father did his duty, that’s all,” said Mrs. Bancroft.

“Yes, and a fat lot of good it did him, too,” remarked Marian, standing up and walking towards the window, staring out at the rows of dahlias and chrysanthemums that her mother, no doubt, had planted in neat rows along the edges.

I sat down again, wishing I had never been brought here. It was as if I had walked onstage into the middle of a dramatic play, where the other characters are already engaged in a battle that has been going on for some years but which only now, upon my arrival, is allowed to reach a climax.

I heard the front door open and close; the dog sat up immediately, alert to a familiar presence, and I had a sense that whoever was standing outside the drawing room was hesitating before opening the door.

“Mr. Sadler,” said Reverend Bancroft, entering the room a moment later, taking my hand in both of his and holding it there before him while looking me directly in the eyes. “We’re so glad you were able to visit us.”

“I can’t stay long, I’m afraid,” I replied, aware how rude this sounded as my first response to him but not caring very much. I felt that I had spent enough time in Norwich by now and was anxious to return to the station and London and the solitude of home.

“Yes, I’m sorry I was delayed,” he said, glancing at his watch. “I had intended to be here before four but I got caught up with a parish matter and time just escaped me. I trust my wife and daughter have been keeping you entertained in the meantime?”

“He wasn’t here for entertainment, Father,” said Marian, standing by the doorway with her arms folded before her. “And I very much doubt whether he has received any.”

“I was just about to ask Mr. Sadler about the letters,” said Mrs. Bancroft, and we all turned to look at her. “My daughter said that you were in possession of some letters,” she added, and I nodded quickly, grateful for the diversion.

“Yes,” I said, reaching into my pocket. “I should have given them to you earlier, Marian. It was the point of my visit, after all.”

I placed the packet on the table before me. Marian stared at it, a collection of envelopes tied up in a red ribbon, her neat handwriting visible on the outside of the uppermost one, but did not step forward yet. Her mother didn’t pick them up, either; she merely sat and stared at them as if they were bombs that might go off if she handled them too roughly.

“Will you excuse me a moment?” said Marian finally, rushing from the room like a whirlwind, keeping her back to me the entire time, Bobby charging after her in pursuit of adventure. Her parents watched her as she left and bore stoic, mournful expressions.

“Our daughter might come across as a little brittle at times, Mr. Sadler,” said Mrs. Bancroft, turning back to look at me with a regretful expression. “Particularly when she’s with me. But she loved her brother very much. They were always very close. His death has damaged her badly.”

“She doesn’t come across as brittle at all,” I replied. “I’ve only known her a few hours, of course. But still, I think I can understand her pain and her grief.”

“It’s been very difficult for her,” she continued. “Of course it’s been difficult for all of us, but we each handle adversity in our own way, don’t we? My daughter has a very forceful way of expressing her grief while I prefer not to allow my emotions to be on display. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing, it’s simply the way that I was brought up. My grandfather took me in, you see,” she explained. “After my parents’ deaths. He was a widower, the only relative I had left. But he was not emotional, no one could accuse him of that. And I suppose he brought me up in the same way. My husband, on the other hand, is much more likely to wear his heart on his sleeve. I rather admire him for that, Mr. Sadler. I’ve tried to learn from him over the years but it’s no good. I think perhaps the adults we become are formed in childhood and there’s no way around it. Would you agree?”

“Perhaps,” I said. “Although we can fight against it, can’t we? We can try to change.”

“And what are you fighting against, Mr. Sadler?” asked her husband, removing his spectacles and wiping the lenses with his handkerchief.

I looked away with a sigh. “The truth, sir, is that I am tired of fighting and would prefer never to have to do so again.”

“But you won’t have to,” said Mrs. Bancroft, frowning. “The war is over now at last.”

“There’ll be another one along in a moment, I expect,” I said, smiling at her. “There usually is.”

She made no reply to this, but reached forward and took my hand in hers. “Our son was very keen to enlist,” she told me. “Perhaps it was wrong of me to keep his grandfather’s portrait on display all these years.”

“It wasn’t, Julia,” said Reverend Bancroft, shaking his head. “You’ve always been proud of your father’s sacrifice.”

“Yes, I know, but William was always fascinated by it, that’s the thing. Asking questions, wanting to know more about him. I told him all I could, of course, but the truth is that I knew very little. I still know very little. But I worry sometimes that it was my fault, William signing up like that. He might have waited, you see. Until they called him.”

“It would only have been a matter of time, anyway,” I told her. “It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“But he would have been in a different regiment,” she said. “Been sent over there on a different day. The course of his life would have been altered. He might still be alive,” she insisted. “Like you.”

I took my hand back and looked away. There was an accusation in those last two words, one that struck me to my core.

“You knew our son well, then, Mr. Sadler?” asked Reverend Bancroft after a moment.

“That’s right, sir,” I said.

“You were friends with him?”

“Good friends,” I replied. “We trained together at Aldershot and—”

“Yes, yes,” he said quickly, waving this aside. “Do you have any children, Mr. Sadler?”

“No,” I said, shaking my head, a little surprised by the question. “No, I’m not married.”

“Would you like some?” he asked me. “One day, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, unable to meet his eye. “I haven’t given it a lot of thought.”

“A man should have children,” he insisted. “We are put here to propagate the species.”

“There are plenty of men who do their share of that,” I said light-heartedly. “They make up for the rest of us shirkers.”

Reverend Bancroft frowned at this; I could tell that he wasn’t pleased by the flippancy of the remark. “Is that what you are, Mr. Sadler?” he asked me. “Are you a shirker?”

“No, I don’t believe so. I did my bit.”

“Of course you did,” he said, nodding. “And here you are, safe at home again.”

“Just because I wasn’t killed does not mean that I didn’t fight,” I said, annoyed by his tone. “We all fought. We put ourselves in terrible places. Some of the things we saw were horrific. We’ll never forget them. And as for the things we did, well, I need hardly tell you.”

“But you must tell me,” he said, leaning forward. “Do you know where I was this afternoon? Do you know why I was late?” I shook my head. “I thought you might have overheard us. This morning, I mean. At the cathedral.”

I lowered my head and felt my cheeks redden a little. “You recognized me, then. I wondered if you had.”

“Yes, immediately,” he replied. “In fact, this morning, when you ran off, I had a very clear idea of exactly who you were. My daughter had already told me of your impending visit. So you were very much to the fore of my mind. And you’re the same age as William. Not to mention that I was sure you had played a part in the war.”

“It’s that obvious, is it?”

“It’s as if you aren’t entirely convinced that the world you’ve returned to is the one you left behind. I see it on the faces of the boys in the parish, the ones who came home, the ones Marian works with. I act as a sort of counsellor to some of them, you see. Not just on spiritual matters, either. They come to me looking for some kind of peace that I fear I am ill equipped to provide. Sometimes I think that many of them half believe that they died over there and that this is all some kind of strange dream. Or purgatory. Or even hell. Does that make sense, Mr. Sadler?”

“A little,” I said.

“I’ve never fought, of course,” he continued. “I know nothing of that life. I’ve lived a very peaceful existence, in the Church and here with my family. We’re accustomed to the older generation looking down on the younger and telling them that they know nothing of the world, but things are rather out of kilter now, aren’t they? It is your generation who understands the inhumanity of man, not ours. It’s boys like you who have to live with what you have seen and what you have done. You’ve become the generation of response. While your elders can only look in your direction and wonder.”

“This afternoon,” I said, sitting down again, “you wanted to tell me where you were.”

“With a group of parishioners,” he said, smiling bitterly. “There’s a plan to erect a monument, you see. To all the boys from Norwich who died in the war. Some type of large stone sculpture with the names of every boy who laid down his life. It’s happening in most of the cities around England, you must have heard of it.”

“Of course,” I said.

“And most of the time, it’s organized through the Church. The parish council looks after the fund-raising drives. We commission a sculptor to come up with a design, one is chosen, the names of all the fallen are collected and soon, in a workshop somewhere, a man sits down on a three-legged stool beside a mass of rock and, with hammer and chisel in hand, cuts lines into the stone to commemorate the boys we lost. Today was the day when the final decisions on this were being made. And I, of course, as vicar, was required to be there.”

“Ah,” I said, nodding quietly, already able to see where he was going with this.

“Can you understand what that is like, Mr. Sadler?” he asked me, tears filling his eyes.

“Of course not,” I said.

“To be told that your own son, who has given his life for his country, cannot be represented on the stone because of his cowardice, because of his lack of patriotism, because of his betrayal? To hear those words spoken of a boy whom you have brought up, whom you have carried on your shoulders at football matches, whom you have fed and washed and educated? It’s monstrous, Mr. Sadler, that’s what it is. Monstrous.”

“I’m very sorry,” I said, aware as the words left my mouth how impotent they were.

“And what does sorry do? Does it bring my boy back to me? A name on a stone, it means nothing really, but still it means something. Does that make any sense?”

“Yes, of course. It must be difficult to bear.”

“We have our faith to sustain us,” said Mrs. Bancroft, and her husband threw her a sharp look, which suggested to me that he wasn’t entirely convinced that that was the case.

“I don’t know much about that, I’m afraid,” I said.

“You’re not a religious man, Mr. Sadler?” asked the vicar.

“No. Not really.”

“Since the war, I find that the young people are either moving closer to God or turning away from him entirely,” he replied, shaking his head. “It’s confusing to me. Knowing how to guide them, I mean. I fear I’m becoming rather out of touch with age.”

“Is it difficult being a priest?” I asked.

“Probably no more difficult than it is holding any other job,” he said. “There are days when one feels one is doing good. And others when one feels that one is of no use to anyone whatsoever.”

“And do you believe in forgiveness?” I asked.

“I believe in seeking it, yes,” he said. “And I believe in offering it. Why, Mr. Sadler, what do you need to be forgiven for?”

I shook my head and looked away. I thought that I could stay in this house for the rest of my life and never be able to look this man and his wife directly in the eye.

“I don’t really know why Marian brought you here,” he continued, after it became clear that I was not going to reply. “Do you?”

“I didn’t even know that she was planning on it,” I said. “Not until we were already on the street outside. I presume she thought that it would be a good idea.”

“But for whom? Oh, please don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Sadler, I don’t mean to make you feel unwelcome, but there isn’t anything you can do to bring our son back to us, is there? If anything, you’re just a further reminder of what took place in France.”

I nodded, acknowledging his truth.

“But there are those people, you see, and our daughter is one of them, who must root around and root around, trying to discover the reason why things have happened. I’m not one of them and I don’t believe my wife is either. Knowing the whys and the wherefores doesn’t change a blasted thing, after all. Perhaps we’re just looking for someone to blame. At least…” He hesitated for a moment now and smiled at me. “I’m pleased that you survived things, Mr. Sadler,” he said. “Truly I am. You seem like a fine young man. Your parents must have been pleased to have you back safely.”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” I told him with a shrug, a throwaway remark that shocked his wife more than anything I had said so far.

“What do you mean?” she asked, looking up.

“Only that we’re not close,” I said, sorry now that it had come up at all. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not really something that I—”

“But that’s ridiculous, Mr. Sadler,” she announced, standing up and looking at me furiously, her hands on her hips in an attitude of despair.

“Well, it isn’t my choice,” I explained.

“But they know that you’re well? That you’re alive?”

“I think so,” I said. “I’ve written, of course. But I never receive any reply.”

She stared at me with an expression of outright ferocity on her face. “I fail to understand the world sometimes, Mr. Sadler,” she said, her voice catching a little. “Your parents have a son who is alive but whom they do not see. I have a son whom I wish to see but who is dead. What kind of people are they, anyway? Are they monsters?”

I spent my final week before Aldershot debating whether or not I should see my family before I left. It seemed perfectly plausible that I would lose my life over there, and although we had not spoken in more than eighteen months, I felt there might be the possibility of a reconciliation in the face of such an uncertain future. And so I decided to pay a visit the afternoon before leaving for the training camp, alighting at Kew Bridge Station on a chilly Wednesday and making my way along the road towards Chiswick High Street.

The streets blended together with a mixture of familiarity and distance; it was as if I had dreamed this place up but was being allowed to visit once again in a state of consciousness. I felt strangely calm and put this down to the fact that I had, for the most part, been happy here as a child. It was true that my father had often been violent with me but there was nothing unusual in that; after all, he was no more violent than the fathers of most of my friends. And my mother had always been a kind, if distant, presence in my life. I felt that I would like to see her again. I put her refusal to see me or respond to my letters down to my father’s insistence that she cut off all communication with me entirely.

As I got closer to home, though, I found my nerves beginning to overwhelm me. The run of shops, with my father’s butcher’s at the end, came into sight. Next to it were the houses where Sylvia’s and Peter’s families lived. The flat where I had grown up was easy to spot and I hesitated now, taking refuge on a bench for a few minutes, pulling a cigarette from my pocket for Dutch courage.

I glanced at my watch, wondering whether or not I should abandon the whole thing as a bad lot and take the next bus back to my quiet flat in Highgate for a final, solitary dinner and a good night’s sleep before the next day’s train took me to my new life as a soldier, and had all but determined to do so, had even stood up and turned around on the street to head back towards Kew, when I collided with a person walking towards me who dropped a basket of shopping on the ground in surprise.

“I’m so sorry,” I said, reaching down and gathering the apples, bottle of milk and carton of eggs that had fallen but remained mercifully intact. “I wasn’t looking where I was going.” I glanced up then, aware that the person I was talking to had not responded, and was taken aback to see who was standing there. “Sylvia,” I said.

“Tristan?” she replied, staring at me. “It’s never you.”

I shrugged my shoulders, indicating that yes, it was, and she looked away for a moment, placing the basket on the bench beside us, and biting her lip. Her cheeks flushed a little, perhaps in embarrassment, perhaps in confusion. I felt no embarrassment at all, despite what she knew about me. “It’s good to see you,” I said finally.

“And you,” she said, extending an awkward hand now, which I shook. “You’ve hardly changed at all.”

“I hope that’s not true,” I said. “It’s been a year and a half.”

“Has it really?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, examining her now, noticing differences. She was still a beauty, of course, even more beautiful now at seventeen than she had been at fifteen, but that was to be expected. Her hair, a bright shade of sunshine blonde, lay loose around her shoulders. She was slim and dressed to compliment her figure. A slash of red lipstick gave her an exotic air and I wondered where she had found it; the fellows I worked with at the construction firm were forever on the search for lipstick or stockings for their sweethearts; luxuries like this were hard to come by.

“Well, this is awkward, isn’t it?” she said after a pause, and I rather admired her for her refusal to pretend otherwise.

“Yes,” I said. “It is a bit.”

“Don’t you ever want the ground to open up and swallow you whole?”

“Sometimes,” I admitted. “Not as often as I once did.”

She considered this, perhaps wondering exactly what I meant by it; I wasn’t sure myself. “How are you, anyway?” she asked. “You look well.”

“I’m all right,” I said. “And you?”

“I work in a factory, if you can believe it,” she told me, pulling a face. “Did you ever expect me to end up as a factory girl?”

“You haven’t ended up as anything yet. We’re only seventeen.”

“It’s hateful but I feel I must do something.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding.

“And you?” she asked carefully. “You’re not yet—?”

“Tomorrow morning,” I told her. “First thing. Aldershot.”

“Oh, I know a few chaps who went there. They said it was all right, really.”

“I shall find out soon enough,” I said, wondering how long this would go on for. It felt false and uneasy and I suspected that both of us would have quite liked to lower our guard and speak to each other without artifice.

“You’re back to see your family, I presume?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I thought it would be good to see them before I went off. It might be the last time, after all.”

“Don’t say that, Tristan,” she said, reaching a hand out and touching my arm. “It’s bad luck. You don’t want to jinx yourself.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I only meant that it felt right to come back. It’s been… well, I’ve already said how long it’s been.”

She looked embarrassed. “Shall we sit for a moment?” she asked, glancing towards the bench, and I shrugged as we sat down together. “I wanted to write to you,” she said. “Well, not at first, of course. But later. When I realized what we had done to you.”

“It was hardly your fault,” I said.

“No, but I had a hand in it. Do you remember that time we kissed? Under the chestnut tree?”

“As if it was yesterday,” I replied, smiling a little, almost laughing. “We were just children.”

“Maybe,” she said, smiling back. “But I fancied you something rotten.”

“Really?”

“Oh yes. You were all I could think about for the longest time.”

I thought about it. It seemed so strange to hear her say this to me. “It always surprised me that it wasn’t Peter you liked the best,” I said.

“I don’t know why,” she said. “I mean, he was lovely, I was very fond of him, but I only went with him because you rejected me. It all seems so silly now, doesn’t it? So trivial. The way we behaved. But it felt so important back then. That’s what growing up is like, I suppose.”

“Yes,” I said, still astonished that she could possibly have liked me more than Peter, astonished that anyone could. “And Peter?” I asked tentatively. “Is he still—?”

“Oh no,” she said. “He left about eight months ago, I think. He’s training for the navy, didn’t you hear? I see his mother sometimes, though, and she tells me he’s doing well. No, there are only girls around here now, Tristan. It’s frightful. You’d have your pick of us if you stuck around.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth I could see that she regretted them, for she went scarlet and looked away, uncertain how to recover the moment. I felt embarrassed, too, and couldn’t look at her.

“I have to ask,” she said eventually. “All that business. With you and Peter, I mean. It wasn’t what they said, was it?”

“Well, that depends,” I replied. “What did they say?”

“Peter… well, he told me something. Something that you did. I said he must have got it wrong, that it couldn’t be, but he insisted that—”

“He was telling the truth,” I said quietly.

“Oh,” she said. “I see.”

I was unsure how to explain it to her, not even sure that I wanted to or needed to, but I had not spoken of this for so long that I felt a sudden urge to and turned to her. “He had nothing to do with it, you see,” I explained. “He never would have felt the same. But it had always been there. In my mind, that is. There’s always been something wrong with me on that score.”

“Something wrong with you?” she asked. “Is that how you see it?”

“Of course,” I replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure it matters so much. I fell in love myself recently with someone entirely unsuitable. He threw me over the minute he got what he wanted. Said I wasn’t potential wife material, whatever that might be.”

I laughed a little. “Sorry,” I said. “So you and Peter…?”

“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head. “No, that barely outlasted you. He was a poor substitute, that’s the truth of it. And once you were gone I couldn’t see the point of keeping up with him. I was only doing it to drive you insane with jealousy, for all the good it did me.”

“That’s astonishing to me, Sylvia,” I said in disbelief. “To hear you say that.”

“Only because you can’t understand someone not thinking that Peter was the bee’s knees. He was rather selfish, really, when you think of it. And mean. You were such close friends and the moment he realized how you… how you really felt, he dropped you like a hot potato. And after all those years, too. Vile.”

I shrugged. My feelings for Peter hadn’t entirely evaporated, although I could at least now recognize them for what they really were, an adolescent crush. Nevertheless I hated thinking of him in this context. I liked to think that he was still my friend, somewhere in the world, and that if we met again, which I hoped we would some day, all past enmities would be forgotten. Of course we never did.

“Anyway,” she said, “he took it badly. Chased me around for months until my father had to put a stop to it. Then he wouldn’t speak to me again. I saw him just before he went, though, and we had a decent chat but it wasn’t the same. The problem was that for the three of us, nothing ever settled right, did it? He loved me but I didn’t feel the same. I loved you and you weren’t interested. And you…”

“Yes, me,” I said, turning my face away from her.

“Is there anyone now?” she asked, and I looked back, surprised by how daring she was. I couldn’t imagine anyone else asking such a scandalous question.

“No,” I said quickly. “No, of course not.”

“Why ‘of course not’?”

“Sylvia, please,” I said irritably. “How could there be? I shall stay alone.”

“But you don’t know that, Tristan,” she said. “And you must never say it. Someone could come along and—”

I jumped up and blew warm air into my clenched fists, which had grown cold as we sat there. I was weary of this conversation. I didn’t want to be patronized by her.

“I should be getting along,” I said.

“Yes, of course,” she replied, standing up now, too. “I hope I haven’t upset you.”

“No. Only I have to get to the shop and then back home again later. I still have a lot to do before I leave tomorrow.”

“All right,” she said, leaning forward and kissing me lightly on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Tristan,” she added. “And survive, do you hear me?”

I smiled and nodded. I liked the way that she had phrased it. I turned my head and glanced down the street towards my father’s shop, seeing an old, familiar customer emerging with a bag of meat under his arm.

“Right,” I said. “Here goes nothing. I hope at least one of the three of them will be happy to see me.” I noticed a cloud fall across her face as I said this, her expression growing confused again for a moment and then full of understanding, even horror, and I stared at her, the smile fading from my face.

“What?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”

“‘The three of them’?” she said, echoing my phrase. “Oh, Tristan,” she said as she pulled me most unexpectedly towards her once again, triggering a memory of that afternoon under the chestnut tree when she had kissed me and I had pretended to love her.

There were no customers in the shop and no one behind the counter. By rights, my stomach should have been turning somersaults by now but instead I felt nothing. A sense of release, perhaps, if that even. I recognized the smells immediately, the sour mix of meat and blood and disinfectant, which took me right back to my childhood. Closing my eyes for a moment, I could see myself as a boy running down the back stairs into the cold-room on Monday mornings, when Mr. Gardner would arrive with the carcasses that my father would butcher through the week and sell to his customers, never wasting a cut, never mean with the weights. It was from that same cold-room that he emerged while I was remembering this, carrying a tray of pork chops, closing the door behind him with his shoulder.

On a countertop, far away from the reach of customers, I could see his fine range of boning knives and slicers, but I turned away from them in case they should give me ideas.

“With you in a minute, sir,” he said, barely glancing in my direction as he pulled the glass cover off the display case before him and settled the tray in an empty spot. He hesitated for the briefest of moments, the tray hovering in the air, and then he closed the cover once again, looked up and steadied himself, swallowing, and to his credit appeared to be at a loss for words.

We looked at each other. I examined his face for signs of remorse, for anything that might indicate shame, and for a second I thought I could see it there. But just as quickly it vanished, and was replaced by a cold stare, a look of disgust, and an attitude of repugnance that a creature like me could have been spawned from his body.

“I leave tomorrow,” I told him. “I have nine weeks of training at Aldershot. And then I go. I thought you’d want to know.”

“I assumed you were already over there,” he replied, picking up a bloodstained cloth from the counter and rubbing his hands in it. “Or did you not want to go?”

“I wasn’t eligible for a long time on account of my age,” I said, recognizing the slight.

“How old are you now, then?”

“Seventeen,” I said. “I lied. Told them I was eighteen and they let me in.”

He considered this and nodded. “Well, I’m not sure why you thought I’d be interested but I suppose it’s worth knowing,” he said. “So unless you’re after a bit of mince or—”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him, trying hard to keep my voice steady.

“Tell you?” he said, frowning. “Tell you what?”

“She was my sister, for pity’s sake.”

He had the decency to look away, to stare down at the joints of meat that were spread out before him and not answer me immediately. I saw him swallow again, consider an answer, turn to look at me with just a hint of regret on his face and then, perhaps sensing it himself, run a bloodied hand across his eyes and cheeks and shake his head.

“It had nothing to do with you,” he said. “It was family business.”

“She was my sister,” I repeated, feeling the tears start to form now.

“It was family business.”

We said nothing for a few moments. A woman slowed down as she approached the front window, examined some of the meat on display, then looked up, appeared to change her mind and carried on walking.

“How did you hear, anyway?” he asked me finally.

“I met Sylvia,” I said. “Just today. After I got off the bus. It was a coincidence that we should run into each other. She told me.”

“Sylvia,” he said, snorting in disgust. “That one’s no better than she ought to be. She was fast back then and she’s fast now.”

“You could have written to me,” I said, refusing to speak about anyone but Laura. “You could have found me and told me. How long was she ill?”

“A few months.”

“Was she in pain?”

“Yes. A great deal.”

“Jesus Christ,” I said, bending over slightly, an aching pain at the pit of my stomach.

“For God’s sake, Tristan,” he said, coming around from behind the counter now and standing before me; it was all that I could do not to take a step back from him in disgust. “You couldn’t have done anything to help her. It was just one of those things. It spread through her body like wildfire.”

“I would have wanted to see her,” I said. “I’m her brother.”

“Not really,” he said in a casual tone. “You were once, I suppose. I’ll give you that. But that was all a long time ago. I think she’d pretty much forgotten you by the end.”

To my surprise, he put an arm around my shoulder then and I thought he was going to embrace me, but instead he turned me around and walked with me slowly towards the door.

“The truth is, Tristan,” he said as he guided me back out on to the street, “you weren’t her brother any more than you are my son. This isn’t your family. You have no business here, not any more. It would be best for all of us if the Germans shoot you dead on sight.”

He closed the door in my face then and turned away. I watched him as he hesitated for a moment in front of the display case, examining the various cuts of meat, counting them off in his head, before disappearing back into the cold room and out of my life forever.

“Perhaps I was wrong,” said Marian as we made our way back through the city, walking in the direction of the railway station. “I rather ambushed you, didn’t I? Bringing you in to meet my parents like that.”

“It’s all right,” I said, lighting a much-needed cigarette and letting the smoke fill my lungs and calm my nerves. The only thing that might have matched it for pure pleasure was a pint of cold ale. “They’re decent people.”

“Yes, I suppose they are. We drive each other mad on a daily basis but I suppose that’s par for the course. Given the choice, I’d like a home of my own. Then they could visit and we could be friends and there wouldn’t be any more of these daily confrontations.”

“I’m sure you’ll marry some day,” I said.

“A home of my own,” she insisted. “Not someone else’s. Like you have.”

“Mine is just a small flat,” I told her. “It’s comfortable but, believe me, it’s nothing like you have here.”

“Still, it’s all yours, isn’t it? You answer to no one.”

“Look, you really don’t have to walk with me all the way back,” I told her. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful but I’m sure I can find my way.”

“It’s all right,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t mind. We’ve come this far together, after all.”

I nodded. The evening was starting to close in, the sky was growing darker and the air colder. I buttoned my overcoat and took another drag of my cigarette.

“What will you do now?” she asked me after a few minutes, and I turned to her, frowning.

“I’ll go back to London, of course,” I said.

“No, I don’t mean that. I mean tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that. What are your plans for the future, now that the war is behind us?”

I thought about it. “Tomorrow morning I shall be back at my desk at the Whisby Press,” I said. “There will be manuscripts to read, rejection letters to send out, books to edit. We’re doing a presentation of future titles to some booksellers next week so I have to prepare a few notes on each one.”

“You enjoy working there, do you?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said enthusiastically. “I like being around books.”

“So you think you’ll stay where you are? Seek promotion? Become a publisher yourself?”

I hesitated. “I might like to try my hand at writing,” I told her; it was the first time I had admitted this aloud to anyone. “It’s something I’ve dabbled in a little over the last few years. I feel I might like to take it more seriously now.”

“There aren’t enough novels in the world already?” she asked, teasing me a little, and I laughed.

“A few more won’t hurt anyone,” I said. “I don’t know, I might not be any good, anyway.”

“But you’re going to try?”

“I’m going to try,” I agreed.

“Of course, Will was a great reader,” she said.

“Yes, I saw him with a book from time to time,” I said. “Sometimes one or two of the fellows might have brought something with them and it would get passed from hand to hand.”

“He was reading from the time he was three years old,” she told me. “And he tried his hand at writing, too. He wrote a completion for The Mystery of Edwin Drood in a most ingenious way when he was only fifteen.”

“How did it end?”

“In exactly the way that it should,” she replied. “Edwin came home to his family, safe and well. Eternal happiness ensues.”

“Do you think that’s the ending that Dickens intended?”

“I think it’s the ending Will believed would be the most satisfying. Why are we stopping?”

“This is Mrs. Cantwell’s boarding house,” I said, looking up the steps towards the front door. “I just have to collect my holdall. We can part here, if you like.”

“I’ll wait for you,” she said. “The station’s only across the road. Might as well make sure you get there safely.”

I nodded. “I’ll only be a minute or two,” I said, running up the steps.

Inside, Mrs. Cantwell was nowhere to be seen but her son, David, was behind the reception desk, consulting a chart, the tip of a pencil pressed to his tongue.

“Mr. Sadler,” he said, looking up. “Good evening.”

“Good evening,” I said. “I’ve just come to collect my holdall.”

“Of course.” He reached down and picked it up from behind the desk, passing it across to me. “Did you have a good day, then?”

“Yes, thanks,” I said. “We’ve settled everything regarding the bill already, haven’t we?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, following me as I walked towards the door. “Will we be likely to see you again in Norwich?”

“No, I don’t think so,” I said, turning to smile at him. “I rather think this will be my one and only visit.”

“Oh dear. We didn’t disappoint you that much, I hope?”

“No, not at all. It’s just… Well, I don’t imagine my work will bring me through here again, that’s all. Goodbye, Mr. Cantwell,” I said, extending my hand, and he looked at it for a moment before shaking it.

“I want you to know that I tried to fight, too,” he said, and I nodded and shrugged. “They said I was too young. But I wanted it more than anything in the world.”

“Then you’re a fool,” I said, opening the door and letting myself out.

Marian took my arm as we made our way across to the station and I was both flattered and upset by the gesture. I had waited so long to write to her, spent so much time planning this meeting, and here I was, ready to return home, and I still had not steeled myself to tell her about her brother’s last hours. We walked in silence, though, and she must have been thinking the same thing, for it was only when we entered the station itself that she stopped, removed her arm and spoke again.

“I know he wasn’t a coward, Mr. Sadler,” she said. “I know that. I need to know the truth about what happened.”

“Marian, please,” I said, looking away.

“There’s something you’re not telling me,” she said. “Something that you have been trying to say all day but haven’t been able to. I can tell, I’m not stupid. You’re desperate to say it. Well, we’re here now, Tristan. Just the two of us. I want you to tell me exactly what it is.”

“I have to get home,” I said nervously. “My train—”

“Doesn’t go for another forty minutes,” she said, looking up towards the clock. “We have time. Please.”

I took a deep breath, thinking, Will I tell her? Can I tell her?

“Your hand, Tristan,” she said. “What’s the matter with it?”

I held it out flat in front of me and watched as the index finger trembled erratically. I watched it, interested, then pulled it away.

“I can tell you what happened,” I said finally in a quiet voice. “If you really want to know.”

“But of course I want to know,” she replied. “I don’t believe I can go on if I don’t know.”

I stared at her and wondered.

“I can answer your questions,” I said quietly. “I can tell you everything. Everything about that last day. Only I’m not sure that it will offer you any solace. And you certainly won’t be able to forgive.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, sitting down on a bench. “It’s the not knowing that is most painful.”

“All right, then,” I said, sitting next to her.