I shrugged and poured more tea, putting extra sugar in mine this time and stirring it slowly, watching as the spoon created a whirlwind in the murky brown soup.
“Those girls,” she continued with an irritated sigh, “they think that war is an enormous lark. They see their brothers and their sweethearts getting dressed up in their finery. And then they come back and the uniforms are more dishevelled but, oh my, don’t the men look handsome and experienced. Well, I was just like that. I read Will’s letters and I thought, Oh, but you’re there at least! And what I wouldn’t give to be there! I didn’t realize just how difficult it was. I still don’t, I imagine.”
“And the letters told you all this?” I asked, hoping to steer her back towards this subject.
“No, I only fully understood after everything that happened. I only appreciated the cruelty of the place then. So, in a way, I was rather frustrated by my brother’s tone. But then, after a while, the letters grew more cheerful and I was pleased about that.”
“Oh yes?”
“Yes. He told me in his third letter about the chap who had the bunk next to his. A Londoner, he said, but not a bad bloke all the same.”
I smiled and nodded, looking down at my tea, hearing him say the words in my head.
Ah, Tristan…
“He told me how you and he would pal around together, how everyone needed someone to talk to when they were feeling down and how you were always there for him. I was glad of that. I’m glad of it now. And he said that it made things easier because you were the same age and you were both missing home.”
“He said I was missing home?” I asked, looking up in surprise.
She thought about it for a moment and corrected herself. “He said that you didn’t talk about your home very much,” she replied. “But he could tell that you missed it. He said there was something in your silence that was very sad.”
I swallowed and thought about it. I wondered why he had never challenged me on this.
“And then there was all that business with Mr. Wolf,” she said.
“Oh, he told you about him, did he?” I asked.
“Not at first. But later. He said that he’d met a fascinating chap who had all sorts of controversial views. He told me about them. You know what they were better than I, I dare say, so I needn’t explain.”
“No.”
“But I could tell he was interested in Mr. Wolf’s beliefs. And then after he was murdered—”
“It was never proven that Wolf was murdered,” I said irritably.
“Do you believe he wasn’t?”
“All I know is that there was never any proof,” I said, aware even as I said it that it was a bootless answer.
“Well, I know that my brother was convinced of it. He said it was put about that an accident had taken place but he had no doubt in his mind that the poor boy was killed. He said he didn’t know who did it, whether it was Sergeant Clayton, Left or Right, some of the other recruits, or a combination of all the above. But he was quite certain about it. They came for him in the dead of night, he said. I believe that was when he began to change, Tristan. With Mr. Wolf’s death.”
“Yes,” I said. “Well, a lot of things took place over those few days. We were under enormous strain.”
“After that, the carefree boy I had known, the boy who was frightened of course about what lay ahead, vanished and in came this new chap, a chap who wanted to talk about right and wrong rather than Right and Left.” She smiled at her joke, then grew immediately serious once again. “He asked me to give him details of what the newspapers were saying about the war, the debates that were taking place in Parliament, whether there was anyone who was standing up for the rights of man, as he called them, over the sound of the rifles. I didn’t recognize him in those letters, Tristan. But I was intrigued by who he had become and tried to help. I told him as much as I knew and, by then, you were all in France and his tone changed even further. And then… well, you know what happened then.”
I nodded and sighed and we sat very quietly for what felt like a long time, considering our different memories of her brother, my friend.
“And did he… did he say anything more about me?” I asked eventually, feeling that the moment to discuss those letters had passed but by God I might never get the chance again and I had to know. I had to know how he felt.
“I’m sorry, Tristan,” she said, looking a little shamefaced. “I have a rather awful thing to tell you. Perhaps I shouldn’t, I don’t know.”
“Please do,” I said, urging her on.
“The truth is that you were such a big part of his letters all through that time at Aldershot. He told me all the things you did together; it made you sound like a pair of mischievous children, if I’m honest, with your jokes and japes. I was glad you had each other and I rather liked the sound of you. I thought he was quite besotted with you, to be honest, as preposterous as that sounds. I remember once reading a letter and thinking, Dear Lord, must I hear nothing more than what Tristan Sadler did this day or said on that day? He really thought you were the bee’s knees and the cat’s pyjamas.”
I stared at her and tried to smile but could feel my face turning into a rictus of pain instead and hoped she wouldn’t notice.
“And then he wrote to say that you had all shipped out,” she continued. “And the thing is, from that first letter after you left Aldershot, he never mentioned you again. And for a while I didn’t like to ask.”
“Well, why would you?” I asked. “After all, you didn’t even know me.”
“Yes, but…” And here she stopped for a moment and sighed before looking back up at me as if she had a terrible secret, the weight of which was almost too much for her to bear. “Tristan, this is going to sound rather odd but I feel I ought to tell you. You can make of it what you will. The thing is… I said that when I received your letter a few weeks ago it came as rather a shock to me. I thought I must have misunderstood and I went back to read Will’s letters afterwards but it seems to be quite clear there, so I can only imagine that he was either confused by what was going on or had simply written your name when he meant to write another. The whole thing is very odd.”
“It wasn’t easy out there,” I said. “When men wrote letters in the trenches, why, we often had no time or hardly any paper or pencils to do it. And the question of whether or not those letters even got through was one that we didn’t like to think about too much. All that time and energy, perhaps for nothing.”
“Yes,” she said. “Only I think most of Will’s letters did get through. And certainly all the ones from those first months in France, because I received one almost every week and I really can’t imagine that he would have had time to write more than that. So he was writing and telling me what was happening, trying to spare me some of the worst moments to stop me worrying too much, and because you’d become something of a character in my head, because you’d been such a big part of his earlier letters, I finally summoned up the nerve to ask him in one of my replies exactly what had happened to you, whether you had been posted to the same place together and were still part of the same regiment.”
“But we were,” I said, confused by this. “You know we were. We trained together, we took the boat to France together, we fought in the same trenches. I don’t think we were ever apart really.”
“Yes, but when he replied,” said Marian, hesitating, looking almost embarrassed by her words, “he told me that he had some bad news for me.”
“Bad news,” I said, more of a statement than a question, and I had a sudden anxious idea of what this might be.
“He said… I’m so sorry, Mr. Sadler, I mean, Tristan, but it’s really not me who has this wrong because, as I said, I went back and checked, it was just that he must have been so confused, what with all the shelling and the bombing and those awful, awful trenches—”