It makes me sound like a maiden aunt.” She hesitated, bit her lip, then spoke again in a less flippant tone. “I suppose I should ask you why you wrote to me.”
I cleared my throat; so here we were at last. “It’s like I said in the letter,” I told her. “I have something of Will’s—”
“My letters?”
“Yes. And I thought you might want them back.”
“It was kind of you to think of me.”
“I know he would have wanted me to return them to you,” I said. “It seemed only right.”
“I don’t mean this to sound critical, but you have held on to them for rather a long time.”
“I assure you, I’ve never so much as opened an envelope.”
“Of course not. I don’t doubt that for a moment. I just wonder why you took so long to get in touch, that’s all.”
“I haven’t been well,” I told her.
“Yes, of course.”
“And I didn’t feel I was up to meeting you.”
“It’s perfectly understandable.”
She looked out of the window for a moment and then turned back to me. “Your letter came as more of a surprise to me than you might imagine,” she said. “But I had heard your name before.”
“Oh yes?” I asked cautiously.
“Yes. Will wrote often, you know. Particularly when he was training at Aldershot. We had a letter from him every two or three days.”
“I remember,” I said. “I mean, I remember that he used to sit on his bed with a notepad, scribbling away in it. The men used to rag him about it, said he was writing poetry or something, the way so many did, but he told me he was writing to you.”
“Poetry is even more frightful than novels,” she remarked with a shudder. “You mustn’t think me a terrible philistine, you know. Although I can see how you might with the things I’m saying.”
“Not at all. Anyway, Will didn’t care what anyone said. He wrote, as you say, all the time. They seemed like awfully long letters.”
“They were. Some of them,” she said. “I think he had aspirations towards literature, you know. He employed some very arch phrases, trying to heighten the experience a little, I thought.”
“Was he any good?”
“Not really,” she said, then laughed. “Oh, I don’t mean to belittle him. Please don’t misunderstand me, Mr. Sadler.”
“Tristan,” I said.
“Yes, Tristan. No, I only mean that he was obviously trying to tell me things in those letters, to explain how he was feeling, the sense of dread and anticipation that came with training at Aldershot. He seemed to spend an awful lot of time looking forward to the war. Sorry, I don’t mean ‘looking forward’ as in ‘being excited’ about it—”
“Looking ahead?” I suggested.
“Yes, just that. And it was interesting, because he said so much but also so little. Does that make sense at all?”
“I think so,” I replied.
“He told us all about his routines, of course. And about some of the men who were training with him. And the man in charge—Clayton, was it?”
I felt my body grow a little rigid at the name; I wondered how much she knew of Sergeant Clayton’s responsibility in the whole business or the orders he had given at the end. And the men who had obeyed him. “Yes,” I said. “He was there from start to finish.”
“And who were the other two? Left and Right, Will called them.”
“Left and Right?” I asked, frowning, unsure what she meant by this.
“He said they were Sergeant Clayton’s assistants or something. One always stood on his left side, the other on his right.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding now. “He must have meant Wells and Moody. That’s odd. I never heard him refer to them as Left and Right before. It’s rather funny.”
“Well, he did, all the time,” she said. “I’d show you the letters, Tristan, but do you mind if I don’t? They are rather private.”
“Of course,” I said, not realizing how much I wanted to read them until she told me that I couldn’t. The truth was that I had never really given much consideration to the content of his letters home. At Aldershot, I had never written to anyone. But once, during the course of the French campaign, I wrote a long letter to my mother, asking her forgiveness for the pain I had caused. I attached a note to my father in the envelope, telling him that I was well and keeping healthy, lying that things over there were not quite as bad as I had expected them to be. I told myself that he would be pleased to hear from me, but I never received a reply. For all I knew he had been the first to pick the letter off the mat some morning and had thrown it away, unopened and unread, before I could cast further shame on his household.
“They sounded like terrible terrors, Left and Right,” she remarked.
“They could be,” I said, considering it. “They were rather terrorized themselves, to be honest. Sergeant Clayton was a difficult man. When we were training he was bad enough. But when we were over there…” I shook my head and exhaled loudly. “He’d been before, you see. A couple of times. He’s not a man I have any respect for—in fact, even thinking about him makes me feel ill—but he’d had it hard, too. He told us once about his brother being killed in front of him, about his… well, about his brains being splattered over his own uniform.”
“Good God,” she said, putting her cup down.
“It was only later that I learned he’d already lost three other brothers in the fighting. He didn’t have it easy, Marian, that’s the truth. Although it doesn’t excuse what he did.”
“Why?” she asked, leaning forward. “What did he do?”
I opened my mouth, fully aware that I was not yet ready to answer this question. I didn’t even know if I ever would be. For, after all, to reveal Clayton’s crime would be to admit my own. And I tried to keep that as firmly bottled up inside myself as possible. I was here to return a packet of letters, I told myself. Nothing more.
“Did your brother… did Will mention me much in those letters?” I asked after a moment, my natural eagerness to know overpowering my dread of what he might have told her.
“He certainly did,” she said, hesitantly, I thought. “Particularly in the early letters. Actually, he spoke of you quite a lot.”
“Really?” I said in as calm a tone as I could muster. “I’m pleased to hear it.”
“I remember his first letter arrived only a couple of days after he got there,” she said, “and he told me that it seemed all right really, that there were two troops of twenty and he’d been put in with a bunch who didn’t seem the most intellectually stimulating lot.”
I laughed. “Well, that’s true,” I said. “I don’t think we had much education to share around, any of us.”
“Then, in his second letter, a few days later, he sounded a little more down, as if the excitement of arriving had worn off and he was facing up to what he was left with. I felt bad for him then, and when I wrote back I told him that he had to make friends, to put his best foot forward, the usual nonsense that people who know nothing about anything, like me, say when they don’t want their own days to be ruined by worrying about others.”
“I imagine you’re being hard on yourself there,” I said gently.
“No, I’m not. I didn’t know what to say, you see. I was rather excited about him going off to war. Does that make me sound like a monster? But you have to understand, Tristan, I was younger then. Of course I was younger, that’s obvious. But I mean that I was less informed. I was one of those girls that I despise so much.”
“And what girls are those?” I asked.
“Oh, you’ve seen them, Tristan. You live in London, they’re everywhere there. And, I mean, for pity’s sake, you came back from the war in your fine uniform, you must have been on the receiving end of so many of their favours.”