The Harlequin by Nina Allan

Author:Nina Allan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sandstone Press Ltd
Published: 2015-10-09T00:00:00+00:00

Nigel Seward’s real name had been Nigel Fletcher. He was a milk-skinned, softly spoken lad, a physical weakling, the kind of man who got called a nancy even when he wasn’t. As it happened, Fletcher was married, but if it hadn’t been for his preternatural skill at cards, Beaumont had no doubt the rest of the unit would have given him a hard time. As it was, his luck at the game granted him an exemption, a notoriety that was even enhanced by his physical weakness.

Beaumont liked Fletcher, but it was clear to him from an early stage that he would not survive. Writing about Fletcher brought him back to life, at least for a while. Beaumont was used to writing essays, to explaining himself on paper, but the act of writing down anything this personal felt strange to him. He could not help noticing how inferior his observations seemed with Stephen Lovell’s. In the war diaries Lovell had asked him to give to Rose Thorpe, every image seemed to be backed up by a cogent argument. Beaumont’s writing was simply itself, a description of things that had happened and little more. Beaumont did not know if it was any good. He knew only that writing about Fletcher and his card games had made him feel he was doing something that made sense.

For a week he kept the typewritten sheets hidden in his desk, not certain what, if anything, he should do with them. Then he placed them in an envelope and sent them to The Fiery Furnace, a literary periodical he knew Dickie Ferguson had subscribed to. For the first hour after he posted the envelope, Beaumont was filled with a sense of quiet exaltation. After the hour had elapsed he became increasingly nervous, convinced he’d made a grave mistake, that what he had naively thought of as ‘his writing’ would reveal him as a charlatan and a fool. He entertained fantasies of rushing down to the postal sorting office and retrieving his envelope before it could be delivered, or of writing to The Fiery Furnace, insisting that his submission had been a mistake and should not be read. To alleviate his distress, he did his best to convince himself he was working himself into a frenzy over nothing, that the best thing to do was to forget about the envelope altogether. He told himself his submission would most likely remain, unopened, on somebody’s desk until finally someone decided to throw it away.

A fortnight later Beaumont received a letter from the editor, saying that his essay was interesting and unusual and that they would like to publish it. Beaumont experienced a satisfaction that seemed out of all proportion with the level of his accomplishment. He supposed that this was because in writing about the war he had taken a step towards doing something that might eventually make sense of the life he had returned to.

Fletcher’s death had been as pointless and as horrific as the thousands of others. But in naming his fate, Beaumont had at least granted Fletcher some of the dignity that was his due.

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