The Absolutist (12 page)

A slight pause.

“But it wasn’t a secret,” he says quietly.

“Well, whatever it was,” I say. “Let’s forget about it, yes? I’m just tired, that’s all. I don’t know what I’m saying.”

He shrugs and looks away. “We’re both tired,” he says. “I don’t even know why we’re arguing.”

“We’re not arguing,” I insist, staring at him, feeling tears springing up behind my eyes because I would be damned rather than argue with him. “We’re not arguing, Will.”

He steps closer and stares at me, then puts a hand out and touches me gently on the arm, his eyes following it as if it’s acting independently of him and he’s wondering where it might travel next.

“It’s just I’ve always known her,” he says. “I suppose I’ve just always thought we were meant for each other.”

“And are you?” I ask, my heart pounding so heavily in my chest as his hand remains on my arm that I am convinced he will be able to hear it. He looks up at me, his face caught in a mixture of confusion and sadness. He opens his mouth to say
something, thinks better of it and, as he does so, our eyes remain locked on each other for three, four, five seconds and I’m sure that one of us will say something or do something, but I’m relying on him for I cannot risk it and now, for the briefest moment, I think he might but he changes his mind just as quickly and turns away, shaking his arm as if he wants to rattle it loose, cursing in exasperation.

“For fuck’s sake, Tristan,” he hisses and walks away from me, disappearing into the darkness, and I can hear his new boots tramping in the soil as he makes his way around the circumference of the barracks, on the lookout for anyone who has no business being there and upon whom he might take out whatever aggression he is feeling.

My nine weeks at Aldershot are almost at an end and I wake in the middle of the night for the first time since my arrival. In another thirty-six hours we are due to pass out, but it’s not anxiety about what lies ahead for our regiment once we are officially soldiers that breaks my sleep. It’s the sound of a muffled commotion coming from across the room. I raise my head off the pillow and the noises quieten for a moment or two before returning even stronger: an unsettling reverberation of dragging and kicking, then a shushing sound, a door opening, then closing, and silence again.

I open my eyes a little wider and look across at Will, asleep in the bed next to mine, one bare arm draped over the side, his lips slightly parted, a great bunch of dark hair falling over his forehead and into his eyes. Muttering something in his sleep, he flicks it away with the fingers of his left hand and rolls over.

And I fall asleep again.

At drill the following morning, Sergeant Clayton orders us into our ranks and we are an immediate eyesore to him, for sticking
out in the second row, third spot along, is the empty place of a missing person, a soldier AWOL. It is the first time this has happened since we disembarked from the train in April.

“I feel I need barely ask this question,” Sergeant Clayton says, “because I trust that if any of you men had an answer to it you would have already come to me. But does anyone know where Wolf is?”

There is complete silence from the ranks. No one turns their head as we might have done nine weeks earlier. We simply stand there and stare directly ahead. We have been trained.

“I thought not,” he continues. “Well, I might as well tell you that our self-proclaimed conscientious objector has disappeared. Taken himself off in the night like the coward that he is. We’ll catch up with him sooner or later, I can promise you that. If anything, I take a certain pleasure in the fact that when you pass out on Friday, there will not be a coward among your ranks.”

I’m a little surprised by what he has said but don’t think too much of it; I don’t for a moment think that Wolf has absconded and am sure that he’ll turn up sooner or later with a perfectly ridiculous excuse for his absenteeism. Instead, my mind has turned to questions of what will happen on Saturday morning. Will we be dispatched on the train to Southampton immediately and then find ourselves on an overnight passage to France? Will we be in the middle of things over there by Monday morning? Will I live another week? These are far more pressing concerns to me than whether or not Wolf has made a bid for freedom.

I am in Will’s company, walking back later that afternoon from the mess hut towards the barracks, when I sense a great commotion ahead and notice the men gathered in groups, engaged in excited conversation.

“Don’t tell me,” says Will. “The war’s over and we all get to go home.”

“Who do you think won?” I ask.

“Nobody,” he replies. “We both lost. Look out, here comes Hobbs.”

Hobbs, having noticed us walking along, comes bounding over like a slightly overweight golden retriever. “Where have you chaps been?” he asks breathlessly.

“To Berlin, to see the kaiser and tell him to give it all up as a bad lot,” says Will. “Why, what’s the matter?”

“Haven’t you heard, then?” asks Hobbs. “They found Wolf.”

“Oh,” I reply, a little disappointed. “Is that all?”

“What do you mean, ‘Is that all?’ It’s enough, isn’t it?”

“Where did they find him?” asks Will. “Is he all right?”

“About four miles from here,” replies Hobbs. “In the forest where we went on marches in the early weeks.”

“Up there?” I ask in surprise, for it’s an unpleasant, squalid place, filled with marshes and freezing cold streams, and Sergeant Clayton had abandoned it long ago for drier terrain. “What on earth was he doing up there? That’s no place to hide out.”

“You really are quite dim, aren’t you, Sadler?” said Hobbs, breaking into a broad grin. “He wasn’t hiding out there. He was
found
there. Wolf’s dead.”

I stare at him in surprise, quite unable to take this in. I swallow, considering the awfulness of the word, and repeat it quietly, but as a question now, not a statement.

“Dead?” I ask. “But how? What happened to him?”

“I haven’t got the full story yet,” he says. “But I’m working on it. Seems he was discovered face down in one of the streams up there, his head split open. Must have been trying to run away, tripped over a rock in the dark and fell face forwards. Either the wound killed him or he drowned. Not that it matters either way; he’s gone now. And good riddance, I say, to our resident feather man.”

My instincts kick in and I grab Will’s arm just as he lashes out to punch Hobbs in the face.

“What’s the matter with you?” asks Hobbs, jumping back in surprise and turning on Will. “Don’t tell me you’ve signed up to his rot, too? Not going to turn yellow on us on the eve of our getting out of this place, I hope?”

Will struggles against my arm for a moment longer, but I’m his match in strength and only when I feel his muscles slacken and his arm begin to relax do I release him. I watch him, though, as he glares at Hobbs, pure anger on his face, before he turns around and marches away, back in the direction from which we have come, throwing his arms up in the air in disgust as he does so before disappearing out of sight.

I decide not to follow him and instead return to my bunk and lie on my back, ignoring the conversations of the men around me who are coming up with ever more fantastic theories on how exactly Wolf has gone to his maker, and think about it myself. Wolf, dead. It seems beyond possible. Why, the man was only a year or two older than I, a healthy specimen with his whole life before him. I spoke to him only yesterday; he said that he’d played a geography quiz with Will while they were on duty together and Will had let himself down badly.

“He’s not the brightest card in the pack, is he?” Wolf asked me at the time, infuriating me into silence. “I don’t know what you see in him, really I don’t.”

Of course I know that there’s a war on and that we will each face death sooner than we should in the natural order of things, but we haven’t even left England yet. We haven’t seen the back of Aldershot, for that matter. Our barrack of twenty is already down to nineteen, the slow inevitable crumbling of our numbers beginning before we pass out. And all these other boys laughing about it, calling him a coward and a feather man, would they find as much to celebrate if I had died? If Rich had? Will? It’s too much to bear.

And still I despise myself for what I’m thinking. For while I no longer have reason to be jealous of his friendship with Will, God forgive me but I feel a certain satisfaction that it cannot be revived.

When Will hasn’t returned by nightfall, I go in search of him, as we are by now less than ninety minutes from curfew. It’s our last night together as recruits, for the following day we will pass out and be told of the army’s plans for us, and in celebration of this we have been given the evening off and are allowed to wander at will, with the condition that we are back in our bunks with lights out by midnight or Wells and Moody will know the reason why.

Some of the men, I know, have gone into the nearby village, where a local pub has been our gathering place on those rare occasions when we have been granted liberty. Some are with the sweethearts in the local villages they have got together with over the weeks here. Others have gone for long, private walks, perhaps to be alone with their thoughts. One poor fool, Yates, has said that he is taking a last march up the hills for old times’ sake and has been ragged mercilessly by the men for his ardour. But Will has simply vanished.

I check the pub first but he isn’t there; the landlord tells me that he was in earlier and sat alone in a corner. One of the locals, an elderly gentleman, offered him a pint of ale in honour of his uniform and Will refused, casting an aspersion on his warrant badge, and a fight nearly ensued. I ask whether he’d been halfcut when he left but am told no, he’d had two pints, no more than that, then stood up and left without another word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Like what?”

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

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

“What do you mean, ‘not yet’?”

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

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

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

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

“Why not? It’s the truth, isn’t it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Who else knew about this?” I ask.

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