The Absolutist (29 page)

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.