The Absolutist

by John Boyne

  I frowned, realizing that I hadn’t even asked Marian what she did in Norwich, how she spent her days, how she filled her time. It was typical of boys like me; we were so wrapped up in ourselves that we didn’t think the world held a place for anyone else. I heard a quick ringing sound, the chiming of the bell over the door as someone left, thanked Jane and said goodbye.

  Before leaving the café, I patted my pockets, checking for my wallet and the packet of letters, which was still in my overcoat, and satisfied that all was in place I opened the door and went outside. Marian was right: it was a beautiful day. Bright and warm with no breeze but no overbearing sunshine either. It was a perfect day to go for a stroll and I had a sudden vision of Will walking along these cobbled streets next to some unfortunate lovesick girl who would be doing all she could to keep up with him, sneaking sly glances at his handsome face, dreaming that perhaps at the next turning, where no one could see them, he would do the most unexpected but natural thing in the world and turn to her, take her in his arms and pull her to him.

  I shook my head, dismissed the idea, and looked around for Marian. She was standing no more than ten or twelve feet away from me, but not alone. The man from the café had followed her out and was standing before her, gesticulating wildly. I didn’t know what to make of it and simply stared at them before registering that there was something aggressive about his behaviour. I walked quickly towards them.

  “Hello,” I said. “Everything all right here?”

  “And you,” said the man, raising his voice and jabbing a finger in my face as he glared at me with thunder in his eyes, “you can just take a step back, friend, because none of this concerns you and I swear I won’t be responsible for my actions if you come any closer. Do you understand me?”

  “Leonard,” said Marian, stepping forward and placing herself between him and me. “This has nothing to do with him. You’ll leave it alone if you know what’s good for you.”

  “You don’t tell me what to do, Marian,” he said, which at least made me understand that these two knew each other and he wasn’t just some stranger assaulting her in the street. “You won’t answer my letters, you won’t speak to me when I call at the house, and then you take up with someone else and flaunt it in front of my eyes. Who do you think you are, anyway?” he asked, this last question addressed to me, and I looked at him in astonishment, not knowing what I could possibly say in response. He was in a pure rage, his cheeks scarlet with anger, and I could see that it was all he could do to stop himself from pushing Marian out of the way and knocking me to the ground; instinctively, I took a pace back. “That’s right, you’d better back away,” he added, so pleased by this move that he began to advance further towards me, probably thinking that he could intimidate me. The truth was that I wasn’t in the least frightened of him; I simply had no desire to involve myself in some sort of street brawl.

  “Leonard, I said stop it!” shouted Marian, pulling at his coat and dragging him back. A few people passing on the street stared at us with a mixture of interest and contempt but kept walking, shaking their heads as if they expected nothing better of our type. “It’s not what you think. You’ve got everything wrong, as usual.”

  “Got it wrong, have I?” he asked, turning to her as I studied him a little more closely. He was taller than me, with brown hair and a ruddy complexion. He looked like someone who knew how to handle himself. The only thing detracting from his strong physical presence was a pair of owl-type spectacles perched on his face, which made him look more academic. And yet the argument against this was the commotion that he was causing here on the street. “Got it wrong? When I see the two of you sitting there for almost an hour, chatting away to each other like a pair of cooing mynah birds? And I saw you take his hand, Marian, so please don’t tell me there’s nothing going on when I know what my own eyes are telling me.”

  “And what if there is something going on?” she shouted in reply, the colour coming into her cheeks, too. “What if there is? What business is it of yours, anyway?”

  “Don’t give me that,” he began, but she stepped closer to him, her face almost in his as she roared at him.

  “I’ll say whatever I like, Leonard Legg! You have no hold over me. Not any more. You mean nothing to me now.”

  “You belong to me,” he insisted.

  “I don’t belong to anyone!” she cried. “Least of all you. Do you think I’d ever look at you again? Do you? After what you did?”

  “After what I did?” he said, laughing in her face. “That’s rich, that is. Why, even the fact that I’m willing to put the past in the past and still marry you should show you the kind of man I am. Getting mixed up with a family like yours won’t do me any favours, will it, and still I’m willing to do it. For you.”

  “Well, don’t bother,” she said, lowering her voice; in an instant she had regained her dignity. “Because if you think I would ever marry you, if you think that I would debase myself so much—”

  “You debase yourself? Why, if my parents even knew that I was talking to you, let alone forgiving you—”

  “You have nothing to forgive me for,” she cried, throwing her arms in the air in frustration. “It is I who should forgive you. But I don’t,” she insisted, stepping close to him again. “I don’t. And I never, ever will.”

  He glared at her, breathing heavily through his nose like a bull getting ready to charge, and for a second I thought that he was going to assault her, so I moved forward, and as I did so, he turned to look at me and the fury that filled him was transferred from Marian’s direction to my own. Without warning I found myself on the ground in a daze, one hand pressed to my nose from which—to my surprise—there was no blood pouring, but my cheek felt raw and tender and I realized that he had missed my nose entirely and punched me right of centre, knocking me off my feet and sending me sprawling to the ground.

  “Tristan!” cried Marian, rushing over and leaning down to examine me. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so,” I said, sitting up and looking at my assailant. Every fibre of my being wanted to stand up and hit him back, to punch him all the way to Lowestoft, if need be, but I didn’t do it. Like Wolf, I would not fight.

  “Come on, then,” he said, goading me into action and assuming a stance such as a professional boxer might take, pathetic clown that he was. “Get on your feet, then, and show me what you’ve got.”

  “Get out of here, Leonard,” said Marian, turning on him. “Go, before I call the police.”

  He laughed but seemed a little disturbed by this suggestion and perhaps irritated by the fact that I was refusing to stand up and fight him. He shook his head and spat on the ground, the phlegm landing only a foot or two from my left shoe. “Coward,” he said, looking down at me contemptuously. “No wonder she likes you. It’s what the Bancrofts go in for, after all, isn’t it?”

  “Just leave, please,” said Marian quietly. “For God’s sake, Leonard, can’t you just leave me alone? I don’t want you.”

  “This isn’t over,” he said, turning away. “Don’t think this is over, because it isn’t.”

  He took one more look at the two of us, huddled together on the pavement, and shook his head in contempt before making his way down one of the side streets and disappearing out of sight. I turned to Marian in confusion only to find her close to tears now as she held her face in her hands.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Tristan, I’m so, so sorry.”

  Later, when I was back on my feet, we began to walk side by side along the streets of Norwich town centre. A slight bruise was forming on my cheek but no serious damage had been done. Mr. Pynton would no doubt look at me with disapproval the following day, remove his pince-nez and give a deep sigh, putting it all down to the high spirits of youth.

  “You must think terribly of me,” she said, after a lengthy silence.

  “Why would I?” I asked. “It wasn’t you who hit me.”

  “No, but it was my fault. At least partly,
anyway.”

  “You know that man, obviously.”

  “Oh yes,” she said in a regretful voice. “Yes, I know him, all right.”

  “He seems to think that he has some sort of hold over you.”

  “He did. Once,” she replied. “We were an item once, you see.”

  “Are you serious?” I asked, rather surprised, for although I had pieced this together from the row earlier, I found it hard to imagine either Marian being involved with such a creature or a scenario in which a chap who had secured her hand would ever let it go.

  “Well, don’t sound so shocked,” she said with a hint of amusement in her tone. “I have had my share of suitors in my time.”

  “No, I didn’t mean—”

  “We were engaged to be married. That was the plan, anyway.”

  “And something went wrong?”

  “Well, obviously, Tristan,” she said, turning to me in frustration. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t take it out on you,” she added a moment later. “It’s just … well, I’m terribly embarrassed by how he attacked you like that and I feel ashamed of myself on account of it.”

  “I don’t see why,” I said. “It seems to me that you broke it off just in time. You could have been married to the brute. Who knows what kind of life he might have led you?”

  “Only I wasn’t the one who broke it off,” she explained. “It was Leonard. Oh, don’t look so surprised, please. The truth is I would have had no choice but to throw him over in the long run but he got in first, which is to my eternal regret. You must realize why, surely?”

  “It was over Will, wasn’t it?” I said, everything becoming clear now.

  “Yes.”

  “He threw you over because of what people might say?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, as if she were embarrassed by it, even after so much time had passed.

  “And you think I’m a cad,” I said, smiling at her, which caused her to laugh. She looked across towards the market, where a group of about forty stalls were positioned together in a tight rectangle, each one covered with a brightly coloured tarpaulin; they were selling fruit and vegetables, fish and meat. There were a lot of people gathered around them, mostly women, shopping bags at the ready, passing what little money they had to the stallholders and engaging in long, complaining conversations with each other as they did so.

  “He wasn’t that bad really,” she said. “I did love him once. Before all this, all that, I should say—”

  “The war, you mean?”

  “Yes, the war. Before that he was a different person. It’s hard to explain. We’ve known each other since we were fifteen or sixteen. We were always sweet on each other. Well, I was sweet on him, anyway—he was in love with a friend of mine, or as much in love as you can be at that age.”

  “Everything’s a mess at that age.”

  “Yes, I think you’re right. But anyway, he threw this other girl over in favour of me, which led to terrible arguments between our families. And that girl, who was a good friend of mine, never spoke to me again. It was a terrible scandal. I’m quite ashamed when I look back on it, but we were young so there’s no point losing any sleep over it. The fact remains that I was crazy about him.”

  “But you seem so mismatched,” I said.

  “Yes, but you don’t know him. We are different, now. Well, everyone is, I suppose. But we were happy for a time. So he asked me to marry him and I said yes. Now I can scarcely think of anything worse.”

  I thought about it but remained silent. I knew little about the relations between men and women, the intimacies that bound them together, the secrets that might drive them apart. Sylvia Carter was the sole experience I had had with girls and it was hard to imagine that one kiss, six years before, could be the end of the thing for me, but it was, of course.

  “Was he over there?” I asked, considering it, for he was about the same age as Marian, I thought, only a few years older than me. “Leonard, I mean.”

  “No, he couldn’t go,” she said, shaking her head. “He’s terribly short-sighted, you see. He had an accident when he was sixteen. Fell off his bike, the clot, and hit his head against a stone. He was found unconscious in the road and by the time they got him to the doctor he didn’t know who or where he was. The upshot was that he’d damaged some of the ligaments in his eyes. The right eye is almost entirely blind while the left gives him terrible gyp, too. He hates it, of course, although you’d never know there was anything wrong just by looking at him.”

  “No wonder he missed my nose when he punched me, then,” I said, trying to suppress a smile, and Marian turned to me, complicit for a moment in my laughter. “I saw him earlier,” I added. “In the café, I mean. He was watching us. He tried to engage me when I went to the bathroom.”

  “If I’d known he was there I would have left,” she said. “He follows me around now, trying to make things right between us. It’s tiresome.”

  “And because of his eyes, he couldn’t enlist?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “And, to be fair to him, he was terribly cut up about it. I think he felt that it made him less of a man in some way. Of his brothers—he had four of them—two enlisted before 1916 and the other two, the younger ones, came in on the Derby Scheme. Only one came back alive and he’s very ill. Had some sort of a breakdown, I believe. Stays at home most of the time. I hear his parents have a rotten time of it, which gives me no pleasure. Anyway, I know that Leonard feels awful about the fact that he couldn’t fight. He’s quite brave, you see, and terribly patriotic. It was awful for him when it was all going on and he was the only young man here in town.”

  “Awful for him?” I asked, irritated by this. “I would say it was wonderful for him.”

  “Yes, I can see why you would say that,” she agreed. “But try to see it from his point of view. He wanted to be over there with the rest of you, not stuck here with a bunch of women. He doesn’t fit in at all with the men who came back. I’ve seen him sitting in the corner of the public houses, not mixing with the fellows he used to go to school with. How can he, after all? He can’t share their experiences, he doesn’t know what they’ve been through. Some of them try to involve him, I think, but he gets aggressive about it and I think they’ve given up. Why should they humour him, I suppose, is their attitude. They have nothing to reproach themselves for.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. I could see what she was getting at and was willing to admit that he probably felt bad about things but, still, I couldn’t bring myself to sympathize with a man who had been lucky enough to escape the trenches simply because he felt emasculated by this same good fortune.

  “Well, if he didn’t get to fight then he’s certainly making up for it now,” I said. “What does he mean, anyway, hitting me like that?”

  “I suppose he thought there was something between us,” she explained. “And he can be terribly jealous.”

  “But he was the one who threw you over!” I said, instantly regretting the unchivalrous nature of my remark, and she turned to look at me, scowling.

  “Yes, I’m well aware of that, thank you, but clearly he regrets it now.”

  “And you don’t?”

  She hesitated only briefly before shaking her head. “I regret that a situation came about that led him to feel he had to break it off with me,” she said. “But I don’t regret that he did it. Does that make any sense?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “But now he wants me back, which is a bore. He wrote to me and said as much. He follows me around town, and shows up at the house whenever he’s had too much to drink, which is a couple of times a week at least. I’ve told him there’s no chance at all and he might as well resign himself to it but he’s as stubborn as a mule. Really, I don’t know what I’m going to do about him. It’s not as if I can speak to his parents—they won’t have anything to do with me. And it’s not as if I can ask my father to talk to him. He won’t even acknowledge that Leonard exists any more.” She took a deep breath bef
ore expressing in words what we were both thinking. “What I need, of course, is my brother.”

  “Perhaps I should have said something,” I said.

  “What would you have said? You don’t know him, you don’t know the circumstances.”

  “No, but if you’re upset about it—”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Tristan,” she said, looking at me with an expression that suggested she was not to be patronized, “but you barely know me. And I don’t need your protection, as grateful as I am that you are willing to offer it.”

  “Of course not. I just meant that as your brother’s friend—”

  “But don’t you see?” she asked. “That’s what makes it worse. It was his parents, you see. They put the most awful pressure on him. They run a greengrocer’s, here in town, and rely on the goodwill of the community to keep their business going. Well, of course everyone knew that Leonard and I were to be married, so after Will died most of the town stopped shopping at Legg’s. They were looking for someone to attack, you see. And it wasn’t as if they could take it out on my father. He was their vicar, after all. There were certain conventions that had to be upheld. So the Leggs were the next best thing.”

  “Marian,” I said, looking away, wishing there was a bench nearby where we could sit quietly. I felt a strong urge to remain silent for a long time.

  “No, Tristan,” she insisted. “Let me finish. You might as well know it. We tried to carry on for a while but it was obvious that it was no good. The Leggs were shunning me, the town was shunning the Leggs, it was horrible, all of it, and so Leonard decided that he’d had enough and threw me over for his family’s sake. Of course his father put it about within a few hours and, by the next day, everyone was shopping there again. Business could go on as normal, hurrah. Never mind that I was going through the worst time of my life, grieving for the brother I’d lost; never mind that the person I relied on most to see me through those days decided that he couldn’t stand the sight of me. But now that things have begun to blow over and no one wants to talk about it any more, he’s decided that he wants me back. Everyone around here wants to act as though nothing ever happened and there never was a boy called Will Bancroft who grew up around them and played on their streets and went out and fought their blasted war for them—” She was raising her voice now and I could see a few people passing by looking at her with expressions that suggested they were thinking, Ah yes, the Bancroft girl, we shouldn’t expect much more from her than shouting in the streets. “Now that that’s all behind us, Tristan, my poor Leonard has decided that he made a terrible mistake and damn his father and damn his mother and damn their blessed cash register but he wants me back. Well, he shan’t have me, Tristan, he shan’t have me. Not today, not tomorrow. Never.”