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.”