Beneath the Earth by John Boyne Page A

Salzburg airport, looking forward to getting back into my lederhosen and refamiliarizing myself with the comforting smells of unpasteurized milk.
    Perhaps I would even be the boss of him then. Perhaps I would show him the ropes and introduce him to my friends in Der Glockenspiel pub and he would be my sidekick, a boy who didn’t define me by ridiculous and unsubstantiated rumours. Here comes Arthur, the locals would say as he wandered down the road. He was never supposed to achieve anything in life but somehow, against all the odds, he made a brief success once, failed to capitalize on it, but became a man who has learned to reconcile failure with an unremittingly positive attitude towards the world.
    Or – as they say in Germany – a
schleinermetzenmann.

Empire Tour

    The straining sound of a crane’s jib being extended. The thump of hammers, steel against steel. The shriek of the soldering irons. The insistent pounding of last night’s champagne behind her eyes. Agatha inched her foot back a little in the bed, hoping to make contact with Archie’s leg, but he wasn’t there and the sheets were cool to the touch. A terrible sinking feeling in her stomach. She sat up, turned and examined his pillow, her fingers moving lightly across the satin. It was slightly distressed but not terribly so. Had he come to bed at all? Had he come to bed
here
?
    She rose, naked, unsteady on her feet, and stepped over towards the window, parting the curtains slightly to look across the harbour. She longed to see the streets of London, the rain spooling in the gaps between the cobblestones, the filth choking the gutters. Instead, over there was the cool blue tide of Sydney Cove as it flowed towards Circular Quay and over here were hundreds of black-smeared workmen engaged on one interminable task: building their terrible bridge.
    It had not been her idea to travel so far from England, that was all down to Archie. She would have preferred to stay at home but everyone in their circle had undertaken an Empire Tour at some point in their lives and they’d never even travelled outside England together. It didn’t look good.
    â€˜Isn’t it just for honeymooners?’ she asked him, reluctant to leave their child and her writing for so long. ‘Couldn’t we just take a week by the lakes instead?’
    â€˜We couldn’t afford an Empire Tour when we got married,’ he told her. ‘Not on my salary alone. But now? Things are different, aren’t they? Your little books are selling. My business is growing. All that money just sitting in the bank, waiting for someone to do something frivolous with it.’
    â€˜But does it really make sense to squander our savings when we’re both perfectly content here in England?’
    â€˜You might be content,’ he said, settling down with a cigarette, a gin and tonic and a Dorothy L. Sayers, a novelist he read whenever he was in a passive-aggressive mood. ‘I need some fun.’
    There was nothing she could say to that. She knew that Archie had been bored ever since he left the air force and began working in business, that all-encompassing but ill-defined term. Occasionally she would ask him what it was that he actually did every day and he would reply, ‘Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that, it brings in the shekels, doesn’t it?’ And she had to admit that it did. He was doing quite well for himself now, far better than he ever had when he was a pilot. Although not as well as she. She was, to use a vulgarity that Archie adored, coining it in. And still he was bored. A distance had grown between them.
    She agreed that they might take six months abroad, a prospect she dreaded, and Rosalind was duly sent to stay with Clara, Agatha’s mother, with very little fuss on either of their parts. They sailed to Calais and took the Orient Express to Venice, where they argued for a week. Archie complained of how the Italians insisted on