by John Boyne
‘Are you married then, Mr Furlong?’ I said after another extended period of silence during which time I had thrashed around in my mind for conversation topics. For a man who was looking for company, he seemed content simply to sit beside me and stare at the road ahead, as if the presence of some other human beings in the cart with him was company enough. Furlong laughed.
‘Not married yet,’ he said. ‘But I hopes to be shortly.’
‘A sweetheart?’
He blushed scarlet and I was taken aback by his modesty, a characteristic I had come across in few people. ‘I am’, he said slowly, in the manner of a courtly gentleman, ‘under something of a commitment to a young lady of my parish although an actual arrangement for nuptials has yet to be made.’
I grinned. ‘Well, good luck to you,’ I said.
‘Thank ‘ee.’
‘When do you think your arrangements will be made then?’
He paused and the smile seemed to fade slightly. ‘Someday soon,’ he said. ‘There has been a ...’ – he searched for the right word – ‘a complication. But I expect it will be solved soon enough.’
‘AH romances are complicated,’ I said cheerily, seventeen years old, once loved, and behaving for all my worth like a man of the world. T expect their resolutions make the complications all the more worthwhile in the end.’
‘Aye, I expect so,’ he said. He opened and closed his mouth several times and I guessed he was trying to tell me something but was unsure of how to begin or whether he even wanted to discuss it or not. I said nothing and stared ahead, closing my eyes for a moment to relax myself, when I heard his voice again, louder now, and without any of its previous good humour. T known Jane – that’s her name, you see, Jane – I known her a good eight year now and we’ve been under something of an understanding to each other, you see. Sometimes I takes her for walks and sometimes I visit her of an afternoon and bring her a fancy something which she always takes with great pleasure. We made a haystack once, in the summer, two year back. Six feet high, it was. Taller than me.’ I nodded and looked at him. In profile, his head was nodding and I could see a glisten in his eyes as he spoke of her.
‘Sounds like quite the courtship,’ I said in order to appear agreeable.
‘It has been,’ he agreed heartily. ‘No question that it has been. She’s a very able girl, you see.’ I nodded, although I hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant by that phrase. ‘Now she’s trying to distance herself from some army fellow who’s come through. Made himself a little forward with her and I know that she don’t like him much but can’t find the way to tell him to leave her alone. With him fighting for king and country and all that. And just passing through. He cant stay long.’
‘Nuisance,’ I muttered.
‘Takes her for walks every afternoon,’ he continued, ignoring me as if I wasn’t in the cart at all. ‘Down by the river once, I heard. Visits her and likes to sing with piano, if you can believe it, the nance. You’ll not find me singing at her, sir. Not a bit of it. Needs to pack his bags and get on with himself, that’s what I think. Stop bothering her. She’s too polite, though, you see. Too polite to tell him to be on his way. Humours him. Goes for her walks with him. Listens to his pretty voice. Makes him tea and listens to his talk of adventures in Scotland, if you please. Some might say, unkind folk, that she’s leading the poor blighter on, but I say he should just pack his bags and go, that’s all. It’s her and me who are under a commitment.’
His face was quite red now and his hands shook as he held the reins. I nodded but said nothing, seeing only too well the situation which was taking place in Bramling. I felt sorry for him but my mind was elsewhere already. I was thinking about the morning, about how we would still have a long way to travel after our sleep. About London. The night grew around us and we all fell silent. I thought of my prostitutes in Dover and drifted away with happy thoughts of them, wishing I could be there at that moment with a few pennies in my pocket to spend, and would have happily closed my eyes to dream of our encounters had not the horse come to an abrupt stop with Furlong’s cry and we all four sat up suddenly. We had arrived at our resting place for the night.
It was a small barn but we all fitted in comfortably. It smelled of cattle although there were none to be seen now. ‘They milk them here, during the day, one by one,’ said Furlong. ‘There’s a farm a mile up the road there. They bring the cows to the field to graze and in here to milk ‘em. That’s what you’re smelling. The milk.’
He had a small basket of food but it was enough only to feed himself with a little left over. I declined his offer to share, feeling it would be rude to deprive him of his meal after he had driven us so far for so many hours, but Dominique ate a leg of chicken which he forced on her, and Tomas would have greedily eaten the lot if she had not insisted that she share her portion with him. I watched as they ate, my mouth salivating, still resonant with the taste of the chewing tobacco, but claimed I felt ill from the motion of the cart so as not to appear the martyr. We talked for a little more time, the four of us, and Dominique grew animated now, asking him many questions about his village and the activities of – as she put it – the surrounding ten square miles, as if she was considering changing our London plans now that we had a horse and cart to take us elsewhere. It sounded a pleasant enough place but then I was not too concerned with our final destination, so sure was I that I could make a go of our lives anywhere, as long as we were together. It grew darker in the barn as our candle burned out but in its flicker her smile, as she told some tale of a show she had once seen in Paris where the girls had worn no underwear and the men had been tied to their seats in order to avoid a riot, made me long to hold her, to take her in my arms and feel my body become one with hers. My mind swam with the madness of my desire for her and I wondered whether I could get through an evening without wanting to kiss her. I questioned our friendship, whether it was simply based on my desire to touch her, to be touched by her, and found that I no longer heard a word of her conversation as I simply stared at her face and body and allowed my head to be filled with visions of the two of us together. I longed to tell her how I felt but the words were not to be found. My mouth opened and closed and despite Tomas and despite Furlong I found myself close to falling on top of her as the room would swim in darkness around us and there would be just us, just the two of us, just Dominique and Matthieu. No one else.
‘Matthieu,’ said Dominique, pushing me gently on the arm and snapping me out of my daze. ‘You look as if you are about to collapse with exhaustion.’
I smiled and looked around the group, blinking several times as I tried to focus on them. Tomas was already curled up asleep in a corner, his jacket taken off and thrown carelessly across his body. Furlong was watching Dominique as she stepped outside the barn for a few moments and walked not so far away that we could not hear her pissing in the grass, a sound which embarrassed me as we sat there in silence. When Furlong and I went outside upon her return to do similar, I tried to move further away but he stopped short and I was obliged to stand alongside him as he talked.
‘You’re a lucky lad to have a sister like that,’ he said, laughing. ‘She’s something for the eyes, ain’t she? And those stories she tells, saucy girl. Why, she must have suitors all the way from here to Paris and back.’
Something in the tone of his voice offended me and I looked across at him sharply as he shook himself dry. ‘She keeps to herself and to Tomas and I,’ I said gruffly. ‘We still have a distance to travel and we have no time for suitors or anything of that sort.’ I decided immediately that we would continue on to London in the morning and nowhere else.
‘I meant no harm,’ said Furlong as we stepped back inside and settled ourselves in the remaining two corners of the barn for a night’s sleep. ‘Some things just cry out to be said, that’s all,’ he whispered in my ear as he left me, his breath stinking now from the chicken he had brought with him. ‘Like some deeds just cry out for the doing, am I right?’
I dreamed first of Paris and of my mother and of a time when I was a child when she had made me hold the end of a huge, colourful rug while she beat it soundly with a carpet-beater. The dust which rose off it had made me cough and had gone down my throat, producing tears, much like the tobacco had done earlier on. Paris gave way to another city, an unknown one, where a man led me by the hand through a bazaar and handed me a candle which he lit with a golden lighter. And here is a light that only you can see, he told me in mid-conversation. As it burned, the marketplace surrendered to a horse fair, where men shouted to outbid each other, and a fight ensued. A man rushed towards me, his fist pulled back, his whole face grim with determined anger, and as he made to hit me I jerked back into consciousness, my legs stabbing into the air and for a moment I knew not where I was.
It was still dark – despite all I had dreamed, it was perhaps no more than fifteen minutes after I had gone to sleep – but I was freezing with the cold and my stomach pained me. I heard a thumping sound from the other side of the barn and hoped that it would lull me back to sleep quickly. It was joined by a throaty breathing and a muffled complaint, the sound of a mouth trying to scream while a hand holds it tight. I sat and listened as full consciousness returned to me and then jumped, in sudden recognition, as I looked around, my eyes trying to grow accustomed to the blackness. There was Tomas, shifting slightly in his sleep, a finger in his mouth, emitting a sigh of contentment. And there was an empty corner, which Furlong had left. And there was a struggle opposite me and the picture of a man above a woman, still clothed but with a hand missing, a hand working its way between them somewhere to undo clothing, to break through. I threw myself at him and he gasped but recovered quickly, a hand lashing out to hit me which sent me sprawling across the barn in a daze. He was strong and powerful, much more than I had ever imagined, and I lay there struggling to pull myself back into action. I heard Dominique shout in agony and then her cry became muffled again as he whispered to her and sent his hand beneath her dress once again. I stood up, my hands in my hair, knowing not what to do, aware that another attempt on my part to pull him off could lead to my death and possibly hers and Tomas too. Instead, I ran outside the barn into the cold night, where the moon threw a thin prism of light on to the cart, which I threw myself at before running back inside, back behind Furlong who by the relaxed motions of his hand and his release of Dominique’s mouth appeared to be getting closer to his intention. He lifted himself off her slightly, positioned his body back a little and was about to fall inside her when my hands came down, and the sharp serrated edge of the knife he had shown me earlier slid, as if through melting butter, between his powerful shoulder blades. His body drew a deep intake of breath -hollow and animal-like – as he jerked upwards, his shoulders bouncing backwards to relieve the pain as his hands grasped aimlessly in the air. I jumped back towards the wall of the barn, knowing that this was it, that I had only one chance to finish Furlong off and that chance was already behind me and if I had not succeeded we would all pay the price within minutes. Dominique scrambled out from beneath him and also plastered herself to the opposite wall as he slowly stood and spun around, staring at us with wide, disbelieving eyes, before swaying and falling backwards, the knife making a wretched sound as it pushed up inside his body – even the handle – a few more inches.
There was silence for some minutes before Dominique and I came shivering towards his corpse, looking down on the mouth which was leaking a thin line of blood and staring up at us in a finished rage. My body shook and, without meaning to, I vomited on him, my empty stomach somehow finding something new for me to deliver upon his face, covering those awful eyes for good. I stood back up in horror and looked towards Dominique.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, idiotically.
Chapter 8
The Opera House
I received an extraordinary letter some weeks before my 104th birthday in 1847, which saw me leave my then home in Paris – where I had returned for a couple of years after a brief spell in the Scandinavian countries – and travel to Rome, a city I had never ventured into before. I was going through a particularly peaceful time in my life. Carla had finally died of the consumption, ridding me of the plague which our torturously enduring marriage had created for me. My nephew Thomas (IV) had joined me in my lodgings a few weeks after her funeral – a happy affair at which I got drunk on brandy and sang the praises of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, which was being published in monthly editions at the time – and I had agreed to let him stay on afterwards as his apprenticeship as a stagehand with a local theatre paid him very little and the hovel he was renting was unfit for human habitation. He was not an unpleasant lad to have around; at nineteen years old he was the first of the Thomases to have blond hair, a characteristic he had inherited from his mother’s side of the family. He would sometimes bring friends home late at night to discuss the latest plays. They would help themselves to my supply of liquor and, although I could tell that he was more than popular with one or two of the actresses who came by, it seemed to me that the young men used him more for the wealth of his acquaintance than the pleasure of his company.
I had been gainfully employed myself for several years as an administrator of local government funding. There had been a plan to erect some new theatres in the environs of the city and I was responsible for selecting suitable locations and producing reasonable costings and timeframes for their construction. Only two of my eight detailed proposals were ever actually constructed, but they were popular successes both of them, and my name was being spoken of in society with great admiration. I was living a profligate lifestyle and socialising most evenings, my single status allowing me once again to mingle with the ladies of the city without any hint of a scandal.
Somehow news of my Parisian administrative abilities reached Rome, and I was invited to accept a new position as administrator of the arts within that city. The original letter, which was sent by a high-ranking official in their local government, was vague and hinted of enormous plans for the future while making few concrete statements about the nature of those schemes. However I was intrigued by the proposal – not to mention the amount of money which was on offer, not just for budgeting purposes but also for my own salary – and wanting to leave Paris anyway, I decided that I would accept. I spoke to Thomas one evening and made it clear that, while he was perfectly entitled to stay in Paris on his own, he was also welcome to come with me to Rome. The fact that he would be obliged to find suitable lodgings after my departure for Italy probably swung his decision – and sealed for him the natural fate of his ancestry – and he decided to pack up his few belongings and join me on my voyage.
Unlike the first time I had left Paris, some ninety years before, I was now a man of some success and wealth and hired a private coach to take us on the five day trip from capital to capital. It was money well spent, for the alternatives to such private travel were too hideous even to contemplate, but the journey itself was none the less miserable, involving bad weather, bumpy roads and a rude, arrogant driver who appeared to resent the fact that he was employed to drive anyone anywhere. By the time we arrived in Rome, I was ready to swear that I would make the city my home for ever – even if I should live to be a thousand – as I could not bear the idea of another journey as awful as that one had been.
An apartment had been rented for us in the heart of the city and we travelled there directly. I was pleased to see that it had been furnished with some taste and was delighted by the view that my bedroom gave over a picturesque market square, one not dissimilar to the haunt of my Dover youth, where I had robbed from stall to stall and from person to person in my necessary attempts to feed myself and my family.
I have never known such heat,’ said T
homas, collapsing in a wicker chair in the living room. ‘I thought Paris was hot in the summer, but this ... This is intolerable.’
‘Well, what choice do we have?’ I asked with a shrug, unwilling to be quite as negative as him so early into our Roman life, particularly if the object of criticism was something as uncontrollable as the weather. ‘We cannot dictate the climate. You spend too much time indoors as it is and are as white as chalk. A little sun will be good for your complexion.’
‘That’s the fashion, Uncle Matthieu,’ he said childishly. ‘Honestly, don’t you know anything?’
‘What is the fashion in Paris may not be the fashion in Rome,’ I told him. ‘Go out. Discover the city. See the people. Find work,’ I urged him.
‘I will, I will.’
‘We’re here now and there are many opportunities to be had and I can’t be expected to support you for ever.’
‘We’ve just got here! We’ve just walked in the door’
‘Well, walk out of it again. Find work,’ I repeated with a smile. I wasn’t trying to irritate him – I was fond of the lad after all – but I did not want to see him sitting in our apartment day after day, relying on me to bring him his dinner and his ale, watching as his youth and beauty passed him by. Sometimes I think I have been too generous with the Thomases. Maybe if I had been a little less charitable, a little less willing to be the person who caught them whenever they fell over, at least one of them might have made it past their mid-twenties. ‘Discover the joys of self-reliance,’ I begged him, seven years after Emerson.
The following day, I ventured towards the central offices of the local government agency to meet Signor Alfredo Carlati, the gentleman who had written to me in Paris and had invited me to bring to Italy whatever expertise to which I could lay claim. With some difficulty I located the building in which Signor Carlati was based and was a little nervous to find that it was a somewhat dilapidated structure on the less prosperous side of central Rome. The door on the ground floor was hanging wide open – something to do with the fact that the upper hinge which might have held it in place had no screws attached on one side – and as I stepped inside I could distinctly hear, from an office to my right, the sound of a man and woman screaming at each other in what was to me an almost untranslatable babble. Naturally I am fluent in French, but my Italian was poor and it was to be some months before I felt confident. The natural inclination of the natives to speak at high speed did not help matters either. I stepped closer to the door and looked for any sign as to what the office might contain before placing an ear against the wood and listening to the din from within. Whatever was taking place inside, it appeared that the woman was getting the better of the argument for, while she continued to shriek and scream at what can only have been a rate of one hundred words per minute, the man’s tone had shrunk audibly and all he could manage was a defeated ’si’ whenever she paused for breath. Her voice grew clearer and clearer as she shouted until I realised that she had obviously approached the door from the inside and was now standing directly on the other side, only a few feet away from me. I jumped back as she swung it open and her screaming stopped in mid-sentence as she saw me there, smiling inanely at her.