The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  Seven months later, in July 1794, I received a most unexpected letter. I had returned to London and was following the Revolution only through the newspapers which spoke of Paris as the very blood-filled vein of Europe, leaking and haemorrhaging across its own society. I shuddered when I thought what life must be like there and worried for Tom, even though I had left Paris with no more illusions about his character. I had decided that it would be best for me to stay out of the city entirely; for one thing, I didn’t trust my nephew not to take it into his head one day to denounce me for a traitor, at which point I could be destined for a wholly undeserved appointment with the guillotine, and for another, I simply did not want to have any part of such great bloodshed. However, my plans were suddenly altered when I received the following missive:

  Paris, 6 July 1794

  Dear Monsieur Zéla,

  I write to you with some regret, Monsieur. Things have gone in an unhappy direction here and it is important that you come to see me – I fear for three lives right now and cannot persuade Tom to see what is going on – he is mad, Monsieur, on his power – there is trouble to come – he speaks of you often and would like to see you – please come if you can.

  Yours,

  Thérèse Nantes

  Naturally, I was surprised, for I did not expect to hear from my nephew again, let alone the woman with whom he lived. I spent a day or two mulling over the contents of her letter, my mind swaying between a desire to stay as far away from Paris as possible and my inability to refuse her request, which she had made sound so urgent. A few days later, I arrived at her door.

  ‘All has changed and Tom is too closely aligned to Robespierre now,’ she told me, settling into her chair breathlessly, her features more bloated than I remembered them, owing no doubt to her pregnancy. ‘He has become the most loyal general the man has, but the tide is turning against them. I have tried to convince Tom to leave Paris but he refuses.’

  ‘But how can that be?’ I asked. ‘Surely he holds so much power here still? The newspapers say that -’

  ‘There is too much going on,’ she said, glancing towards the window nervously, as if at any moment a counter-Revolutionary might spring through the glass and slit her neck from ear to ear. ‘Everyone in control – Saint-Just, Carnot, Collot d’Herboid, Robespierre himself – they are at each other’s throats. Their alliance is falling apart around our ears and they will not all survive it, I promise you that. Now Robespierre is not even attending the meetings of the Committee of Public Safety after yet another argument and they are sure to try to arrest him because of it. It is inevitable. And if he falls, we all do.’

  ‘It’s nothing like inevitable, citizen,’ said Tom, suddenly appearing in the doorway and surprising us both. ‘Hello, Matthieu,’ he said coldly, dropping the ‘Uncle’ now. ‘What brings you back to Paris? I thought we disgusted you over here.’

  I looked at Therese in surprise before staring back at him. ‘You didn’t know I was coming?’ I asked. ‘I assumed that -’

  ‘He came because he was worried about you,’ said Therese. ‘Even in England they can tell what is going on here right now. They are not so far away as you think.’

  ‘What’s going on’, he said angrily, ‘is that we are going to win through. Robespierre is inspirational at the moment. He is going around forming alliances with even those who once opposed him. He will lead alone, just mark my words.’

  ‘In this atmosphere?’ she screamed. ‘You are fooling yourself. The very nature of life here now is to distrust anyone with power. He will end up with his head on the scaffold the moment he achieves anything. That will be his reward. And yours too if you are not careful!’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. ‘He is too strong for that. He has the army after all.’

  ‘The army don’t care any more,’ she cried, collapsing in pain as she held on to her stomach. ‘We have to leave Paris. We have to get out now, all of us. Matthieu can take us with him, can’t you? You can take us back to London. You can see the condition I am in,’ she added, referring to her swelling stomach. ‘I want to leave before the baby is born,’ she said firmly.

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose so,’ I said, fully aware that it was not as simple as her just saying it. Tom would have to be persuaded.

  ‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said. ‘Not a chance.’ The argument continued for some time, back and forth between two stubborn people. Eventually I left, saying that I would return over the next few days to see how she was but I could stay no longer than that. I assured Therese that she was welcome to join me on my trip back to England if she wanted to but she claimed that, no matter what happened, she could not leave Tom. It seemed that, in the face of love, all her revolutionary principles of a year earlier had become unimportant.

  A few days later, Robespierre, with Tom by his side, launched a bitter attack on his former friends and colleagues, those who were still in a position of authority in Paris. He claimed that they were trying to undo the work of the Republic and demanded that both the Committee for Public Safety and the Committee for General Security, both of which he had been a member of himself, be destroyed and new committees set up to organise the political process. There was little response from the members at the time, so amazed were they by his arrogance and fearlessness, his stupidity, but I myself was present the following evening at the Jacobin club when he repeated his charges and demands.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ I hissed at Tom, grabbing him by the arm as he passed me by on the way out. ‘This man is signing his own death warrant. Can you not see that?’

  ‘Let me go,’ he said, pulling away from me, ‘unless you want me to have you arrested on the spot. Do you want that, Matthieu? Because I could see you executed tomorrow morning if I wanted to.’

  I stood back and shook my head, horrified by the look of insane power in the eyes of my nephew, this mere foot soldier. And although it hurt me, I was less than surprised when, within twenty-four hours, the arrests were made. Several of the other leaders attempted to kill themselves before the guillotine could take them, only one, Lebas, having the ability to do it right. Robespierre’s brother Augustin jumped from a top storey window but succeeded only in breaking his thigh, the incompetent fool. The paralysed revolutionary Couthon threw himself down a stone stairway and was stuck there, unable to escape, his wheelchair mocking him from the top stair, until the soldiers came to arrest him. And Tom’s hero, Robespierre himself, put a gun to his head and succeeded merely in shooting off the lower part of his jaw, thus ensuring that his last twenty-four hours on earth were filled with pain. Beneath his eyes he saw a constant run of blood similar to the one he had himself helped to create.

  Therese insisted on going to the Place de la Concorde on the morning of the executions. I racked my brain to think of some way to save my nephew but knew that it was impossible; he was already doomed. As the tumbrel arrived in the square, I was reminded of the days when we had first come to the city, he almost as innocent then as his unborn child was now, and remembered those people we had ourselves seen beheaded, including the man whose actions had begun all this in the first place, Louis XVI.

  As the cart made its way through the crowd, the people went crazy, baying for the blood of their one-time hero, who sat at the front of the tumbrel screaming back at them in his madness, his face half collapsed from the bullet he had sent through his jaw the previous day. He grasped the sides of the cart and jumped from side to side like a wild animal, screeching at the crowds until his eyes were almost falling from his head. All around him, the seeds he had sown. In the air, the bloodlust he had created for France. Behind him, sitting stoically, looking more disgusted with the people on whose part he had become a revolutionary, sat my nephew Tom. Therese was in tears, and I feared that she would give birth there and then. I tried to convince her to leave but she refused. Something made her want to stay until the end, to see this through to its natural conclusion, and nothing I could have said would have made her change her mind.


  Robespierre was first for the blade and, when he reached the platform, the makeshift tourniquet holding his face together was pulled away and he had to be held into the scaffold by force, this sometime orator’s screams and shrieks becoming more and more incoherent until they were finally silenced by the guillotine. Tom, on the other hand, shrugged off his captors and placed his own head on the block, not even so much as glancing upwards before it landed in the basket on top of Robespierre’s.

  Such a great cheer accompanied the former’s execution that hardly anyone noticed Tom’s similar fate, except of course for Therese and me, whose hearts sank as he lost his head. Paris stank of blood. I imagined the very Seine becoming red with the innards of the city’s so-called citizens. Before my nephew’s body had even turned cold, Therese and I were sailing back to England, away from the Revolution, away from that city of death, and leaving our fallen, bloodthirsty boy behind us.

  Chapter 15

  July 1999

  It was my first visit to the set where Tommy’s soap opera was filmed and the security precautions that I found in place as I attempted to gain entry struck me as preposterous. Arriving on foot at the studio, I was first name-checked on a security guard’s clearance list. He looked me up and down with something approaching outright contempt before acknowledging with a snort that I was in fact expected. When I made it through to the reception area I was pushed through a metal detector to make sure that I was not carrying any recording or photographic equipment or, possibly, sub-machine guns. I then had to sign a declaration regarding the same thing and promise that any scene or action that I saw take place on set would not be revealed or spoken about outside of there. I was not allowed to profit financially from any aspect of television business which I might become privy to upon access, nor was I ever to speak of these things to anyone. I began to wonder why we did not have similar security restrictions at our own television station, before realising that the reason was because they were ridiculous, and in place purely to massage the egos of the actors beyond.

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ I told the young bored-looking guard who talked me through all the above rules in advance. ‘Do I really look like I’m going to be selling your ridiculous secrets to the tabloids? Do I look like that sort of person? I mean, I barely know the name of the show.’

  ‘I don’t know what that sort of person looks like, to tell you the truth,’ he responded gruffly, scarcely looking at me as he made some notes on his clipboard. ‘All I know is that I have a job to do and I do it. What’s your business here anyway? You auditioning?’

  ‘No,’ I said, offended by the very suggestion.

  ‘It’s just that I heard they’re looking for a new love interest for Maggie.’

  ‘Well, it’s not me.’

  ‘I thought about going up for it myself, but my agent said I’d be cutting off younger roles that might come along if I became well known playing a middle-aged man.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. Even the security guards there had agents. ‘Well, I am not auditioning, thank you very much. And I am not middle-aged. I was invited here by my nephew to see the filming in progress. He thinks it will broaden my experiences, which I doubt. They’re not exactly narrow as it stands.’

  ‘Who’s your nephew?’ he asked me, handing me back my watch and keys, which had set off the alarm system on the metal detector a few moments earlier.

  ‘One of the actors,’ I said quickly. ‘Tommy DuMarque. Thank you.’ I put my watch back on my wrist.

  ‘You’re Tommy’s uncle?’ asked the security guard, a broad smile crossing his face now as he stepped back to look me up and down, searching for a family resemblance no doubt. There was hardly any point in him doing that; any similarities between myself and any of the Thomases were watered out many generations ago. Each successive one is far more handsome than I could ever dream of being, although my physical solidity is a condition which none of their number has ever succeeded in achieving. ‘That’s a surprise, Mr ...’ – he looked down at his clipboard – ‘Zelly.’

  ‘It’s Zéla.’

  ‘I didn’t think he had any family at all, to tell you the truth. Just girls. Lots of girls, the lucky son of a -’

  ‘Well, he has me,’ I said quickly, looking around to see where I should go from there, whether a strip or cavity search was going to be the next indignity. ‘But I’m it. There’s just the two of us left.’

  ‘You want to go down that corridor there and you’ll come into another reception room at the end,’ he said, anticipating my next question now that the formalities of who I actually was were out of the way. ‘There’s a girl at the desk there and you can just ask her to page Tommy for you from there. He knows you’re coming, yeah?’

  I nodded and thanked him and walked down the corridor he had indicated. On either side of me there were large, framed photographs of who I assumed to be the actors and actresses in the show, past and present. Each of them had two names printed under their frames, their real name and their character’s name, as well as the years of their appearances in the show. I barely recognised any of them, except for one or two I had seen before in sitcoms of twenty years ago or in the tabloids of today. Towards the end of the corridor there was a dark, moody shot of my nephew with the words ‘Tommy DuMarque – Sam Cutler – 1991 – date’ inscribed underneath it. I looked at it for a moment and couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride, not to mention a slight smile cross my face, at my nephew’s success. The photo was stylised and professionally shot – no one, not even my nephew, could look that good – but it was nice to see none the less. I pushed the door open and introduced myself to the girl at the desk, who made a quick phone call before pointing me in the direction of the armchairs where I sat for a few moments waiting for him to appear. I noticed that in all the time that I sat there, she rarely took her eyes off me but continued masticating on her chewing gum noisily, a habit that never fails to disgust me.

  Another door swung open and I did a double take as my nephew came through it, looking in my direction sheepishly, his eyes barely raised off the ground. The receptionist sat up straight as he entered the room and stuck her gum behind her ear before beginning to tap away at her word processor fervently, watching the star out of the corner of her eye all the time.

  ‘Tommy,’ I said as he approached me, wondering what fresh horrors were about to appear now. ‘Good Lord! What on earth happened to you?’ He was wearing faded blue jeans and a small black T-shirt which accentuated the toning of his chest as well as the definition of the trapezoid muscles around the neck. His forearms were strong and tanned and I wondered how someone in such good condition could get himself into such scrapes, for his left eye bore the signs of an all too recent beating – it was half closed in upon itself and there were ugly purple stains swelling above it like a small hill of unattractive colour. His cheek was inflamed, and the corner of his upper lip was split in two, a dried line of blood sticking to his chin in a most ill-favoured fashion. I shook my head in dismay. ‘How did this ...?’

  ‘It’s all right, Uncle Matthieu,’ he said, leading me back through the door from which he had appeared a moment before. ‘I’m all right. It happened this morning. Carl found out about what was going on between Tina and me and he was waiting for me when I came home and beat the crap out of me. So relax, I’ll survive.’

  ‘Carl ...’ I said, wondering whether this was an acquaintance of his whom I may have met at some point and forgotten, for he said the name in the most nonchalant manner. ‘Carl did this to you?’

  ‘Tina’s pregnant, you see,’ he continued, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. ‘Of course we don’t know whether Carl or me or this new barman in the pub is the father and we can’t do a test ‘cos Tina’s got some weird genetic condition that means it might cause the baby some trauma or something if we try to find out. So we have to wait until it’s born. Bit of a cliff-hanger, I suppose.’

  I stared at him, unsure what on earth he was talking about,
before the penny dropped. ‘Carl,’ I said, relieved, laughing now. ‘He’s some relation of yours, isn’t he?’

  ‘Sort of. He’s my mother’s ex-husband’s adopted son by his second wife. We’re not really related but we share the same surname. Sam Cutler, Carl Cutler. People think we’re closer than we actually are. We’ve never really got on. He resents me for -’

  ‘I have to start watching your show,’ I said again, for the hundredth time, interrupting his character history. T can never remember who any of these people are.’

  ‘Well, that’s why you’re here today,’ he said and we were now on a familiar set, one I had seen before on a few occasions, the living room of the Cutlers’ small terraced house in the East End of London.

  ‘Two minutes, Tommy,’ said a small, bearded man with an earpiece as he passed us by, patting my nephew on the bicep with some familiarity.

  ‘OK, you go sit over there,’ said my nephew, indicating a chair in the corner. ‘And stay very quiet. I’ve just got to wrap this scene up and then I’m all yours.’

  I nodded and went in the direction he had indicated. There were four cameras at various points around the set and about fifteen technicians. Seated at the table in the living room, having her make-up touched up by what looked like a twelve-year-old girl, was a familiar figure, Tommy’s screen mother, a woman who had made something of a name for herself in the 1960s as a comic film star. Her career had gone downhill in the seventies and mid-eighties but she had returned to prominence from the first day of the show’s transmission and was now cordially referred to as a national treasure. Minnie was her character’s name, and Moanin’ Minnie her affectionate nickname in the tabloids. Also seated at the table was a young lad of about fifteen whom I had never seen before and who I suspected was the new teen idol who had been drafted in to help boost ratings with a certain quarter of the audience. While she shrugged her shoulders quickly to assume the body of her character, he sat hunched up over a magazine, chewing his nails, his right hand stuck halfway down the throat it seemed to me.