“I don’t mind so very much,” I said, turning back to Mrs. Cantwell. “Boys his age are interested, I know. He’s, what … seventeen?”
“Just turned, yes. He was that angry last year when the war ended.”
“Angry?” I asked, frowning.
“It sounds ridiculous, I know. But he’d been planning on going for so long,” she said. “He read about it in the newspaper every day, following all the boys from around here who went off to France. He even tried to sign up a couple of times, pretending to be older than he was, but they laughed him straight back to me, which, to my way of thinking, sir, was not right. Not right at all. He only wanted to do his bit, after all, they didn’t need to make fun of him on account of it. And when it all came to an end, well, the truth is that he thought he’d missed out on something.”
“On having his head blown off, most likely,” I said, the words ricocheting around the walls, splattering shrapnel over both of us. Mrs. Cantwell flinched but didn’t look away.
“He wouldn’t see it like that, Mr. Sadler,” she replied quietly. “His father was out there, you see. He was killed very early on.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. So the accident at the threshing machine was fiction, after all.
“Yes, well, David was only just thirteen at the time and there never was a boy who loved his father as much as he did. I don’t think he’s ever got over it, if I’m honest. It damaged him in some way. Well, you can see it in his attitude. He’s so angry all the time. So difficult to talk to. Blames me for everything, of course.”
“Boys his age usually do,” I said with a smile, marvelling at how mature I sounded when in truth I was only her son’s elder by four years.
“Of course I wanted the war to end,” she continued. “I prayed for it. I didn’t want him out there, suffering like the rest of you did. I can’t even imagine what it must have been like for you. Your poor mother must have been beside herself.”
I shrugged and turned the gesture quickly into a nod; I had nothing to say on that point.
“But there was a part of me, a small part,” she said, “that hoped he would get to go. Just for a week or two. I didn’t want him in any battles, of course. I wouldn’t have wanted him to come to any harm. But a week with the other boys might have been good for him. And then, peace.”
I didn’t know whether she was referring to peace in Europe or peace in her own particular corner of England but I said nothing.
“Anyway, I just wanted to apologize for him,” she said, smiling. “And now I’ll leave you to your tea.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Cantwell,” I said, seeing her to the door and watching for a moment as she scurried down the corridor, looking left and right at the end as if she didn’t know which direction she should go in, even though she had most likely lived there for nearly all her adult life.
Back inside my room, with the door closed again, I ate the sandwich slowly, conscious that to rush it might upset the fragile equilibrium of my stomach, and sipped the tea, which was hot and sweet and strong, and afterwards I began to feel a little more like myself. I could hear occasional movements in the corridor outside—the walls of my room were paper-thin—and resolved to be asleep before any of my neighbours in rooms three or five returned for the night. I could not risk lying awake: it was important to feel refreshed for the day that lay ahead of me.
Setting aside the tray, I stripped off my vest and washed my face and body in cold water at the sink. It quickly dripped down upon my trousers so I pulled the curtains, turned the light on and stripped naked, washing the rest of myself as well as I could. A fresh towel had been laid on the bed for me but it was made from the type of material that seemed to grow wet very quickly and I rubbed myself down with it aggressively, as we had been shown on our first day at Aldershot, before hanging it over the side of the basin to dry. Cleanliness, hygiene, attention to detail, the marks of a good soldier: such things came instinctively to me now.
A tall mirror was positioned in the corner of the room and I stood in front of it, examining my body with a critical eye. My chest, which had been well toned and muscular in late adolescence, had lost most of its definition in recent times; it was pale now. Scars stood out, red and livid across my legs; there was a dark bruise that refused to disappear stretched across my abdomen. I felt desperately unattractive.
Once, I knew, I had not been so ugly. When I was a boy, people thought me pleasant to look at. They had remarked as much to me and often.
Thinking of this brought Peter Wallis to my mind. Peter and I had been best friends when we were boys together, and with thoughts of Peter it was but a short stroll to Sylvia Carter, whose first appearance on our street when we were both fifteen was the catalyst for my last. Peter and I had been inseparable as children, he with his curly rings of jet-black hair, and me with that unhelpful yellow mop that fell into my eyes no matter how often my father forced me into the chair at the dinner table and cut it back quickly with a heavy pair of butcher’s scissors, the same ones he used to cut the gristle from the chops in the shop below.
Sylvia’s mother would watch Peter and me as we ran off down the street together with her daughter, the three of us locked in youthful collusion, and she would worry about what trouble Sylvia might be getting herself into, and it was not an unjustified concern, for Peter and I were at an age when we talked of nothing but sex: how much we wanted it, where we would look for it, and the terrible things we might do to the unfortunate creature who offered it.
During that summer we all became most aware of each other’s changing bodies when we went swimming, and Peter and I, growing older and more confident in ourselves, attracted Sylvia’s teasing stares and flirtatious remarks. When I was alone with her once, she told me that I was the best-looking boy she had ever seen and that whenever she saw me climbing from the pool, my body sleek with water, my swimming trunks black and dripping like the skin of an otter, I gave her the shivers. The remark had both excited and repelled me, and when we kissed, my lips dry, my tongue uncertain, hers anything but, the thought passed through my mind that if a girl like Sylvia, who was a catch, could find me attractive, then perhaps I wasn’t too bad. The idea thrilled me, but as I lay in bed at night, bringing myself off with quick, dramatic fantasies that were just as quickly dispelled, I imagined scenarios of the most lurid kind, none of which involved Sylvia at all, and afterwards, spent and feeling vile, I would curl up in the sweat-soaked sheets and swallow back my tears as I wondered what was wrong with me, what the hell was wrong with me, anyway.
That kiss was the only one we ever shared, for a week later she and Peter declared that they were in love and had decided to devote their lives to each other. They would marry when they were of age, they announced. I was mad with envy, tortured by my humiliation, for, without realizing it, I had fallen desperately in love; it had crept up on me without my even noticing it, and seeing the pair of them together, imagining the things that they were doing when they were alone and I was elsewhere, left me in bitter twists of anguish, feeling nothing but hatred for them both.
But still, it had been Sylvia Carter who had told me when I was an inexperienced boy that my body had given her the shivers, and as I looked at it now, beaten and bruised from more than two years of fighting, my once-blond hair a muddy shade of light brown and lying limply across my forehead, my ribs visible through my skin, my left hand veined and discoloured in places, my right prone to the most inexcusable shakes and shudders, my legs thin, my sex mortified into muteness, I imagined that if I were still to give her the shivers they were more likely to be spasms of revulsion. That my companion in the railway carriage had thought me beautiful was a joke; I was hideous, a spent thing.