The Absolutist Read Free Page B

Street that morning, already knowing that they were lost, left behind on my train-carriage seat when I reached up to help the novelist with her suitcase before disembarking, and they probably lay there still, or had found their way into the pockets of another.
    PROPRIETOR: J. T. CLAYTON .
    It had to be a coincidence. Sergeant Clayton had been a Newcastle man, as far as I knew. His accent had certainly betrayed him as one. But had I heard that his father had been something high up at a brewery? Or was I confusing him with someone else? No, it was ridiculous, I decided, shaking my head. There must be thousands of Claytons spread across England, after all. Tens of thousands. This couldn’t be the same one. Refusing to succumb to painful speculation, I pushed open the door and stepped inside.
    The bar was half filled with working men, who turned to glance at me for only a moment before looking away and returning to their conversations. Despite being a stranger, I felt at ease there, a contentment born out of a sense of isolated companionship. As the years have passed, I have spent far too many hours in pubs, hunched over unsteady, ale-stained tables, reading and writing, tearing at beer mats as I’ve raised my characters from poverty to glory while dragging others down from mansion to gutter. Alone, always alone. Not drinking too much, but drinking all the same. A cigarette in my right hand, a scorch mark or two on my left cuff. That caricature of me, writing my books in the corner snugs of London saloons, the one that irritates me so and has caused me, in later life, to rise up, bristling and whinnying in interviews like an aggravated horse, is not, in fact, a mistaken one. After all, the clamour of the crowded public house is infinitely more welcoming than the stillness of the empty home.
    “Yes, sir?” said a hearty-looking man standing behind the bar in his shirtsleeves, wiping a cloth along the countertop to remove the beaded lines of spilled beer. “What can I get for you?”
    I passed an eye across the row of taps that stood before him, some of the names unfamiliar to me, local brews perhaps, and chose one at random.
    “Pint, sir?”
    “Yes please,” I said, watching as he selected a glass from the rack behind him and then, in an instinctive gesture, held it by its base up to the light to examine it for fingerprints or dust marks before, satisfied, tilting it at a precise angle against the tap and beginning to pour. There were flakes of pastry in his heavy moustache and I stared at them, both repulsed and fascinated.
    “Are you the proprietor?” I asked after a moment.
    “That’s right, sir,” he said, smiling at me. “John Clayton. Have we met before?”
    “No, no,” I said, shaking my head as I rooted a few coins out of my pocket. I could relax now.
    “Very good, sir,” he said, placing the pint before me, apparently unconcerned by my question. I thanked him and made my way across to a half-empty corner of the pub, where I removed my coat and sat down with a deep sigh. Perhaps it had been for the best that my room had not been ready, I decided, staring at the dark brown ale settling in the glass before me, its frothy head winking as the tiny bubbles made their way north, anticipating as I did so the great satisfaction that first mouthful would offer me after my train journey.
I could sit here all night
, I thought.
I could become very drunk and cause a scene. The police might arrest me, lock me in a cell and send me back to London on the first train tomorrow morning. I wouldn’t have to go through with it. The whole thing would be taken out of my hands
.
    I sighed deeply, dismissing the notion, and took my book from my pocket, glancing for a moment at the jacket with the feeling of safety that a set of bound-together pages has always afforded me. On that mid-September Monday of 1919, I was reading
White Fang
by Jack London. My eyes focused on the dust-jacket image: a silhouetted cub testing the air