by John Boyne
“Sounds very posh,” I say. “Would I be invited?”
“Certainly not. We only allow the upper echelons of society into our house. As you know, my father is a vicar, he has a certain position to uphold. We can’t just let any old so-and-so through the door.”
“Well, then, I should wait outside the house,” I announce. “And stand guard, like we’re doing here. It would remind us of this rotten place. I’d keep everyone out.”
He laughs but says nothing and I wonder whether my suggestion has seemed a little overwrought to him.
“There is one you’d have to let through,” he says after a moment.
“Oh yes? Who’s that?”
“Why, Eleanor, of course.”
“I thought you said your sister’s name was Marian.”
“It is,” he says. “But what’s that got to do with anything?”
“No, I only meant …” I begin, confused. “Well, who’s Eleanor, then, if she’s not your sister? The family Labrador or something?” I ask with a laugh.
“No, Tristan,” he says, sniggering. “Nothing of the sort. Eleanor’s my fiancée. I’ve told you about her, haven’t I?”
I turn and stare at him. I know full well that he has never once told me about her and can see from the expression on his face that he knows the same thing. He seems to be making a point of saying it.
“Your fiancée?” I ask. “You’re to be married?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking,” he says, and I think I can hear a note of embarrassment, even regret, in his voice, but I’m not sure whether it’s really there or whether I’m just imagining it. “I mean, we’ve been sweethearts for ever so long. And we’ve talked about marriage. Her family are well in with mine, you see, and I suppose it’s just always been on the cards. She’s a terrific girl. And not at all conventional, if you know what I mean. I can’t stand conventional girls, Tristan, can you?”
“No,” I say, digging the toe of my boot into the dirt and twisting it around, imagining for a moment that the soil is Eleanor’s head. “No, they make me want to throw up.”
I’m not entirely sure I know what he means when he says that she is not conventional, it seems an unusual turn of phrase, but then I remember him telling me he has been told that he snores something terrible and the phrase attacks me like a viper as I realize exactly what it is that he is saying.
“When this is all over, I’ll introduce you to her,” he says a few moments later. “I’m sure you’d like her.”
“I’m sure I would,” I say, blowing into my own hands now. “I’m sure she’s an absolute fucking delight.”
He hesitates for a moment before turning to me. “And what’s that supposed to mean?” he asks quickly.
“What?”
“What you just said: ‘I’m sure she’s an absolute fucking delight.’ ”
“Don’t mind me,” I say, shaking my head angrily. “I’m just bloody cold, that’s all. Aren’t you freezing, Bancroft? I don’t think these new uniforms are all they’re cracked up to be.”
“I’ve told you not to call me that, haven’t I?” he snaps. “I don’t like it.”
“Sorry. Will,” I say, correcting myself.
An unpleasant tension settles over us then and we don’t speak for five, perhaps ten more minutes. I rack my brain for words but can think of nothing to say. The idea that Will and this miserable Eleanor tramp are somehow involved, have been for who knows how long, tortures me and I want nothing more than to be back in my bunk with my head buried in my pillow, hoping for the quick arrival of sleep. I can’t imagine what Will is thinking but he is so silent now that I imagine he feels awkward, too, and I simultaneously try to analyse the reason why and try not to.
“Don’t you have a sweetheart at home, then?” he asks me finally, the words sounding as if they are meant in a kindly way but coming out anything but.
“You know I don’t,” I say coldly.
“Well, how would I know that? You’ve never said one way or the other.”
“Because I would have told you if I had.”
“I didn’t tell you about Eleanor,” he counters. “Or so you claim.”
“You didn’t.”
“It’s just that I don’t like to think about her up there in Norwich all on her own, pining away for me.” He means it as a joke, something to soften the nasty atmosphere of the moment, but it does no good. It just makes him appear smug and arrogant, which is the opposite of his intention. “You know one or two of the chaps are married,” he says now and I turn to look at him, interested at least in this.
“Really? I hadn’t heard. Which ones?”
“Shields for one. And Attling. Taylor, too.”
“Taylor?” I cry. “Who the hell would marry Taylor? He looks like Unevolved Man.”
“Someone did apparently. It all took place last summer, he told me.”
I shrug and act as if none of this is of any interest to me whatsoever.
“It must be awfully nice to be married,” he says then, his voice becoming dreamlike. “Can you imagine coming home every night to find your slippers toasting beside a warm fire and a hot dinner waiting for you?”
“It’s every man’s dream,” I say acidly.
“And the rest of it,” he adds. “Whenever you want it. You can’t deny that that doesn’t sound like it’s worth all the trouble.”
“The rest of it?” I ask, playing stupid.
“You know what I mean.”
I nod. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I know what you mean. You mean sex.”
He laughs and nods. “Of course sex,” he replies. “But you say it like it’s a terrible thing. Like you want to spit the word out in horror.”
“Do I?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I don’t mean to,” I say haughtily. “It’s just that I think there are some matters that are not fit for conversation, that’s all.”
“In the middle of my father’s sermons, perhaps,” he says. “Or in front of my mother and her chums during their Tuesday-night whist drives. But here? Come on, Tristan. Don’t be such a prude.”
“Don’t call me that,” I say, turning on him. “I won’t be called names.”
“Well, I didn’t mean anything by it,” he says defensively. “What has you all twisted up in knots, anyway?”
“Do you really want to know?” I ask. “Because I’ll tell you if you do.”
“Of course I want to know,” he says. “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
“All right, then,” I say. “Only we’ve been here for almost six weeks, haven’t we?”
“Yes.”
“And I thought we were friends, you and I.”
“But we are friends, Tristan,” he says, laughing nervously, although there is no humour to be found here. “Why ever would you think we’re not?”
“Perhaps because in the course of those six weeks you’ve never once mentioned to me that you had a fiancée waiting for you at home.”
“Well, you’ve never mentioned whether … whether …” He struggles to finish his sentence. “I don’t know. Whether you prefer trains to boats. It’s just never come up, that’s all.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” I say. “I’m just surprised, that’s all. I thought you trusted me.”
“I do trust you. Why, you’re the finest fellow here.”
“Do you think so?”
“Of course I do. A chap needs a friend in a place like this. Not to mention in the place we’re going next. And you’re my friend, Tristan. The best I have. You’re not jealous, are you?” he adds, laughing at the absurdity of it. “You sound just like Eleanor, you know. She’s forever goading me about this other girl, Rebecca, who she swears is sweet on me.”
“Of course I’m not jealous,” I say, spitting a little on the ground in frustration. For Christ’s sake, now there’s a Rebecca to be thrown into the pot. “Why would I be jealous of her, Will? It makes no sense.” I want to say more. I’m desperate to say more. B
ut I know that I can’t. I feel as if we are at a precipice here. And when he turns to look at me, and swallows as our eyes meet, I’m sure that he can feel it, too. I can walk out over the ledge and see whether he’ll reach out to catch me or I can take a step back. “Oh, just forget I said anything,” I say eventually, shaking my head quickly as if to dismiss every unworthy thought from it. “I was just hurt that you didn’t tell me about her, that’s all. I don’t like secrets.”
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 wi
th 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.