I thought about it. It seemed so strange to hear her say this to me. “It always surprised me that it wasn’t Peter you liked the best,” I said.
“I don’t know why,” she said. “I mean, he was lovely, I was very fond of him, but I only went with him because you rejected me. It all seems so silly now, doesn’t it? So trivial. The way we behaved. But it felt so important back then. That’s what growing up is like, I suppose.”
“Yes,” I said, still astonished that she could possibly have liked me more than Peter, astonished that anyone could. “And Peter?” I asked tentatively. “Is he still—?”
“Oh no,” she said. “He left about eight months ago, I think. He’s training for the navy, didn’t you hear? I see his mother sometimes, though, and she tells me he’s doing well. No, there are only girls around here now, Tristan. It’s frightful. You’d have your pick of us if you stuck around.”
As soon as the words were out of her mouth I could see that she regretted them, for she went scarlet and looked away, uncertain how to recover the moment. I felt embarrassed, too, and couldn’t look at her.
“I have to ask,” she said eventually. “All that business. With you and Peter, I mean. It wasn’t what they said, was it?”
“Well, that depends,” I replied. “What did they say?”
“Peter… well, he told me something. Something that you did. I said he must have got it wrong, that it couldn’t be, but he insisted that—”
“He was telling the truth,” I said quietly.
“Oh,” she said. “I see.”
I was unsure how to explain it to her, not even sure that I wanted to or needed to, but I had not spoken of this for so long that I felt a sudden urge to and turned to her. “He had nothing to do with it, you see,” I explained. “He never would have felt the same. But it had always been there. In my mind, that is. There’s always been something wrong with me on that score.”
“Something wrong with you?” she asked. “Is that how you see it?”
“Of course,” I replied, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure it matters so much. I fell in love myself recently with someone entirely unsuitable. He threw me over the minute he got what he wanted. Said I wasn’t potential wife material, whatever that might be.”
I laughed a little. “Sorry,” I said. “So you and Peter…?”
“Oh no,” she said, shaking her head. “No, that barely outlasted you. He was a poor substitute, that’s the truth of it. And once you were gone I couldn’t see the point of keeping up with him. I was only doing it to drive you insane with jealousy, for all the good it did me.”
“That’s astonishing to me, Sylvia,” I said in disbelief. “To hear you say that.”
“Only because you can’t understand someone not thinking that Peter was the bee’s knees. He was rather selfish, really, when you think of it. And mean. You were such close friends and the moment he realized how you… how you really felt, he dropped you like a hot potato. And after all those years, too. Vile.”
I shrugged. My feelings for Peter hadn’t entirely evaporated, although I could at least now recognize them for what they really were, an adolescent crush. Nevertheless I hated thinking of him in this context. I liked to think that he was still my friend, somewhere in the world, and that if we met again, which I hoped we would some day, all past enmities would be forgotten. Of course we never did.
“Anyway,” she said, “he took it badly. Chased me around for months until my father had to put a stop to it. Then he wouldn’t speak to me again. I saw him just before he went, though, and we had a decent chat but it wasn’t the same. The problem was that for the three of us, nothing ever settled right, did it? He loved me but I didn’t feel the same. I loved you and you weren’t interested. And you…”
“Yes, me,” I said, turning my face away from her.
“Is there anyone now?” she asked, and I looked back, surprised by how daring she was. I couldn’t imagine anyone else asking such a scandalous question.
“No,” I said quickly. “No, of course not.”
“Why ‘of course not’?”
“Sylvia, please,” I said irritably. “How could there be? I shall stay alone.”
“But you don’t know that, Tristan,” she said. “And you must never say it. Someone could come along and—”
I jumped up and blew warm air into my clenched fists, which had grown cold as we sat there. I was weary of this conversation. I didn’t want to be patronized by her.
“I should be getting along,” I said.
“Yes, of course,” she replied, standing up now, too. “I hope I haven’t upset you.”
“No. Only I have to get to the shop and then back home again later. I still have a lot to do before I leave tomorrow.”
“All right,” she said, leaning forward and kissing me lightly on the cheek. “Take care of yourself, Tristan,” she added. “And survive, do you hear me?”
I smiled and nodded. I liked the way that she had phrased it. I turned my head and glanced down the street towards my father’s shop, seeing an old, familiar customer emerging with a bag of meat under his arm.
“Right,” I said. “Here goes nothing. I hope at least one of the three of them will be happy to see me.” I noticed a cloud fall across her face as I said this, her expression growing confused again for a moment and then full of understanding, even horror, and I stared at her, the smile fading from my face.
“What?” I asked. “What’s the matter?”
“‘The three of them’?” she said, echoing my phrase. “Oh, Tristan,” she said as she pulled me most unexpectedly towards her once again, triggering a memory of that afternoon under the chestnut tree when she had kissed me and I had pretended to love her.
There were no customers in the shop and no one behind the counter. By rights, my stomach should have been turning somersaults by now but instead I felt nothing. A sense of release, perhaps, if that even. I recognized the smells immediately, the sour mix of meat and blood and disinfectant, which took me right back to my childhood. Closing my eyes for a moment, I could see myself as a boy running down the back stairs into the cold-room on Monday mornings, when Mr. Gardner would arrive with the carcasses that my father would butcher through the week and sell to his customers, never wasting a cut, never mean with the weights. It was from that same cold-room that he emerged while I was remembering this, carrying a tray of pork chops, closing the door behind him with his shoulder.
On a countertop, far away from the reach of customers, I could see his fine range of boning knives and slicers, but I turned away from them in case they should give me ideas.
“With you in a minute, sir,” he said, barely glancing in my direction as he pulled the glass cover off the display case before him and settled the tray in an empty spot. He hesitated for the briefest of moments, the tray hovering in the air, and then he closed the cover once again, looked up and steadied himself, swallowing, and to his credit appeared to be at a loss for words.
We looked at each other. I examined his face for signs of remorse, for anything that might indicate shame, and for a second I thought I could see it there. But just as quickly it vanished, and was replaced by a cold stare, a look of disgust, and an attitude of repugnance that a creature like me could have been spawned from his body.
“I leave tomorrow,” I told him. “I have nine weeks of training at Aldershot. And then I go. I thought you’d want to know.”
“I assumed you were already over there,” he replied, picking up a bloodstained cloth from the counter and rubbing his hands in it. “Or did you not want to go?”
“I wasn’t eligible for a long time on account of my age,” I said, recognizing the slight.