The Absolutist (35 page)

He steps forward and slaps me on the face; not a punch, as he might deliver to another man, but a slap. My head turns with the force of it but I’m stunned into silence and inaction.

“Are you expecting something from me, Tristan? Is that what it is?” he continues. “Because you’re not going to get it. Understand that, can’t you?”

And now he slaps me again and I let him.

“Do you think I would have anything to do with a man like you?”

Right in front of me now, he slaps me for a third time; my right cheek is inflamed with pain but still I cannot hit him back.

“My God! When I think of what we’ve done together it makes me sick. Do you realize that? It makes me want to retch.”

A fourth slap and now I rush at him, seeing red, ready to pounce, ready to punch him in my anger, but he misinterprets my actions and pushes me away and I fall again on my bruised shoulder and this time it hurts like hell.

“Get off me!” he shouts. “Jesus Christ, Tristan, I’m about to die and you want one last go at me for old times’ sake, is that it? What kind of man are you, anyway?”

“That’s not what I—” I begin, stumbling back to my feet.

“Fucking hell!” he snaps, leaning over me. “I’m about to die! Can’t you just leave me alone for five fucking minutes to get my thoughts together?”

“Please, Will,” I say, tears of anger spilling down my cheeks as I reach for him. “I’m sorry, all right? We’re friends—”

“We’re not fucking friends!” he shouts. “We were never friends! Can’t you understand that, you fool?” He marches to the door and bangs on it repeatedly, shouting through the bars. “Get him out of here!” he yells, pushing me against the door. “I want a few minutes’ peace before I die.”

“Will,” I say, but he shakes his head; still, he pulls me to him one last time.

“Listen to me,” he says, whispering in my ear. “And remember what I tell you: I am not like you. I wish to fuck I had never met you. Wolf told me all about you, told me what you were, and I stayed your friend out of pity. Because I knew that no one else would be your friend. I despise you, Tristan.”

I feel dizzy. I never would have believed that he could be so cruel but he seems to mean every word that he is saying. I feel tears coming to my eyes. I open my mouth but find I have no words for him. I want to lie on my bunk, my face to the wall, pretending that he doesn’t exist, but at that moment I hear footsteps running down towards our door, a key in the lock. It opens. And two men step inside and stare at us both.

I stand in the courtyard for what seems an age, feeling as if my head will explode. There’s a fireball of fury within me. I hate him. All he made me do, all he said to me. The way he led me on. I feel a searing pain in my shoulder from where he knocked me off my feet twice, and my face is tender from his slaps. I look back towards where he remains locked up, with Corporal Harding and the chaplain. I want to go back down there, grab him by the neck and bang his head on the stone floor until his
brains have spilled out. I want him to fucking die. I love him but I want him to fucking die. I can’t live in a world where he exists.

“I need one more!” shouts Sergeant Clayton to Wells.

But Wells shakes his head. “Not me,” he says.

I look in front of me at the firing squad already assembled—the sun has risen, it’s six o’clock—five men in a row, a gap for the sixth.

“You know I can’t, sir,” says Wells. “It has to be an enlisted man.”

“Then I’ll do it myself!” roars Clayton.

“You can’t, sir,” insists Wells. “It’s against regulations. Just wait. I’ll go back to the trench and find someone. One of the new boys, someone who doesn’t know him.”

I don’t recognize the five boys lined up to shoot Will. They look terrified. They look clean. Two of them are visibly shaking.

I march over to them and Clayton looks at me in surprise. “You need a sixth man?” I ask.

“No, Sadler,” says Wells, staring at me in astonishment. “Not you. Go back to the trenches. Find Morton. Send him to me, all right?”

“You need a sixth man?” I repeat.

“I said not you, Sadler.”

“And I said I’ll do it,” I say, picking up the sixth rifle as the hatred courses through my veins. I twist my jaw to relieve some of the pain in my cheek but it feels like he’s slapping me again every time I do so.

“There we are, then,” snaps Sergeant Clayton, giving the signal to the guardsman to open the door. “Bring him up. It’s time.”

“Sadler, think about this, for God’s sake,” hisses Wells, grabbing me by the arm, but I brush him off and take my place in line. I want his fucking head on a plate. I check the round, lock it in place. I stand between two boys, ignoring them both.

“Corporal Wells, get out of the way,” snaps Sergeant Clayton, and then I see him, I see Will being led up the steps by the guardsman, a black mask placed over his eyes, a piece of red cloth pinned above his heart. He walks hesitantly until he is standing at the stoop. I stare at him, I remember everything, I hear his words in my ears and it is all I can do not to rush at him and tear him limb from limb.

Sergeant Clayton gives the order for us to stand to attention, and we do, six men side by side, rifles raised.

What are you doing?
I think, a voice of reason in my head, a voice pleading with me to think about what I’m doing. A voice I choose to ignore.

“Take aim!” cries Clayton, and in that moment, Will, brave to the last, whips his blindfold away, wanting to face his killers as they gun him down. His expression is one of fear but strength, too, resilience. And then he notices me standing in line and his expression changes. He is shocked. He stares. His face collapses.

“Tristan,” he says, his last word.

And the command comes, and the index finger of my right hand presses on the trigger and, in a heartbeat, six guns have discharged, mine as quickly as anyone’s, and my friend lies on the ground, unmoving, his war over.

Mine about to begin.

I
SAW HER ONCE AGAIN
.

It was almost sixty years later, the autumn of 1979. Mrs. Thatcher had come to power a few months earlier and there was a sense that civilization as we knew it was about to come to an end. My eighty-first birthday had been reported in the newspapers and I received a letter from a literary society, informing me that I was to be presented with a misshapen piece of bronze cast inside a block of wood with a silver pen emerging from its crown but it was mine only if I was willing to don a tuxedo, attend a dinner, deliver a short speech and an even shorter reading, and generally make myself available for a day or two to the press.

“But
why
can’t I say no?” I asked Leavitt, my publisher, thirty-two years old, all braces and Brylcreemed hair, who was insisting that I accept the invitation; he had inherited me two books earlier when Davies, my long-term editor and friend, passed away.

“Well, it would be very rude, for one thing,” he said, speaking to me as if I were an infant who needed chastising for refusing to come downstairs and say hello to the guests, sing a song or two. “The prize is rarely awarded. In fact you would be only the fourth recipient.”

“And the other three are all dead,” I remarked, looking at the names of those writers—two poets and a novelist—who had received it before. “That’s what happens when you start
accepting awards like this. There’s nothing left to play for any more. And so you die.”

“You’re not going to die, Tristan.”

“I’m eighty-one,” I pointed out. “I admire your positivity but even you, Leavitt, have to admit that there’s a very real possibility.”

But the pleas went on and I found myself too exhausted to say no—resistance itself might have killed me—so I showed up and sat at a top table, surrounded by bright young things who made charming conversation and told me how much they admired me but how they were trying for a very different effect with their work, although, of course, it was vital for young people to continue to read those who had gone before.

The society furnished me with seven extra tickets for the event, which I thought was a bit inconsiderate as they knew that I had spent my life as a single man and had no family at all, not even a nephew or niece to keep me company and collect my letters after I passed away. I considered sending them back, or distributing them at a nearby university where I offer occasional talks, but in the end I offered them to certain loyal people who had looked after my business interests over the years—agents, publicists and so on, most of whom had long since retired—and they seemed only too happy to give up an evening to spend time celebrating me, a throwback of sorts to when we were all on the cutting edge of things together.

“Who would you like to sit next to you at the dinner?” a secretary asked, calling me up in the middle of the morning; a great disturbance as I write between the hours of eight and two.

“Prince Charles,” I said, without giving it much thought. I had met him once at a garden party and he’d rather impressed me with some off-the-cuff remarks about Orwell and poverty, but that was about as far as our acquaintance went.

“Oh,” said the secretary, sounding a little put out. “I don’t think he’s on the guest list.”

“Well, then, I shall leave that in your capable hands,” I replied, hanging up the phone and then taking it off its cradle for the rest of the day.

In the end a young man was placed to my left—he had recently been named the greatest young writer in the world, or some such thing, on the basis of a short novel and a collection of stories. He had flowing blond locks and reminded me a little of Sylvia Carter in her prime. As he spoke, he waved a cigarette about and blew smoke in my face. I found him almost unbearable.

“I hope you don’t mind,” he said, reaching under the table for a bag from Foyles of Charing Cross Road. “I bought some of your books earlier. Would you mind signing them?”

“Not at all,” I said. “To whom should I make them out?”

“Why, to me, of course,” he said, grinning, delighted with himself. I was certain that a night devoted to me was simply a ruse designed to ensure his presence at the party.

“And who might you be?” I asked politely.

Books duly signed, bag returned to the safety of the under-table, he winked at me and placed a hand on my forearm.

“I read you at uni,” he confided in such a careful tone that it was rather like he was admitting to an unhealthy interest in young girls of school-going age. “I must admit I hadn’t heard of you until then. But I thought some of your books were bloody good.”

“Thank you. And the others? Not so ‘bloody good’?”

He winced and considered it. “Look, it’s not for me to say,” he said, scattering ash over his prawn cocktail before proceeding to tell me of the various flaws they contained, how it was all very well to place such and such in a certain context, but throw in a complication like this or that and the whole house of cards
fell down. “But look, we wouldn’t have the literature of today if the last few generations hadn’t been there to lay down such solid foundations. You deserve high praise for that at least.”

“But I’m still here,” I pointed out, a ghost at my own table.

“But of
course
you are,” he said, as if he were confirming the fact for me; as if I had asked the question in order to reassure myself because of some ongoing dementia, an uncertainty about my continued existence.

Anyway, the point is that I went along and speeches were made, photographs taken, books signed. There was a telegram from Harold Wilson, who claimed to be an admirer but misspelled my name. (He addressed me as “Mr. Sandler.”) Another from John Lennon.

“You fought in the Great War?” a journalist from
The Guardian
asked me in a long interview to coincide with the presentation of the prize.

“I didn’t think it was all that great,” I pointed out. “In fact, if memory serves, it was bloody awful.”

“Yes, of course,” said the journalist, laughing uncomfortably. “Only you’ve never written about it, have you?”

“Haven’t I?”

“Not explicitly, at least,” he said, his face taking on an expression of panic, as if he had suddenly realized that he might have forgotten some major work along the way.

“I suppose it depends on one’s definition of explicit,” I replied. “I’m pretty sure I’ve written about it any number of times. On the surface, occasionally. A little buried, at other times. But it’s been there, hasn’t it? Wouldn’t you agree? Or do I delude myself?”

“No, of course not. I only meant—”

“Unless I’ve failed utterly in my work, that is. Perhaps I haven’t made my intentions clear at all. Perhaps my entire writing career has been a busted flush.”

“No, Mr. Sadler, of course not. I think you misunderstood me. It’s clear that the Great War plays a significant part in your—”

At eighty-one, one has to find one’s fun where one can.

I stayed in a hotel in London on the night of the dinner, having left the city some fifteen years earlier and retired, as they say, to the country. Despite numerous requests from old friends to linger in the bars of London with them until the small hours and put my health and life expectancy at peril, I said my goodbyes at a respectable hour and made my way back to the West End, looking forward to a decent night’s sleep and the early train home. And so it was with some surprise that I heard one of the porters calling out to me as I passed the reception desk.