William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

Wolfram busied himself with the opening and pouring of the champagne.

“Well, they try to scare you to death, of course,” he said. “All those senior officers in their dress uniforms and their most disapproving expressions — solemn, solemn faces. Keep you waiting for hours.” He topped Lysander up. “If you keep your nerve, your dignity, you’re halfway there.” He smiled. “Your excellent whisky was most helpful in that department.”

They clinked glasses, drank.

“So, it’s all over,” Lysander said. “What made them see sense?”

“An embarrassing lack of evidence. But I gave them something to think about. It helped move the spotlight away from the wily Slovene.”

“Oh, yes — what?”

“There’s this captain in the regiment, Frankenthal. Doesn’t like me. Arrogant man. I found a way of reminding my superior officers that Frankenthal is a Jewish name.” Wolfram shrugged. “Frankenthal had the key for a week, just like me.”

“What’s his Jewishness got to do with it?”

“He’s not a Jew — his family converted to Catholicism a generation ago. But still…” Wolfram smiled, mischievously. “They should have changed their name.”

“I don’t follow.”

“My dear Lysander — if they can’t pin the crime on a Slovene then a Jew is even better.” Wolfram drained his glass. “Serves the disagreeable fellow right. And I have a month’s leave, by way of apology for my ‘ordeal’. So — you’ll still see a bit more of me. Then we go on manoeuvres at the end of September.” He smiled. “How was the country girl, eh?”

“Oh, Traudl, yes. Most enjoyable. Thank you very much.” Lysander changed the subject quickly. “What would you have done if they hadn’t acquitted you?”

Wolfram thought for a second. “I would have killed myself, most likely.” He frowned, as though thinking through the options, rationally. “A bullet to the head, most likely. Or poison.”

“Surely not? My god.”

“No, no — you have to understand, Lysander, here in Vienna, in this ramshackle empire of ours, suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action. Everyone will know your true feelings and why you had no choice but to do it — no one will condemn you or blame you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Once you understand that you will understand us.” Wolfram smiled. “It lies very deep in our being. Selbstmord — death of the self: it’s an honourable farewell to this world.”

They finished the bottle and Lysander went back to his room feeling the effects of the alcohol. He thought he might skip dinner tonight — maybe go out to a café and carry on drinking. He felt buoyant, pleased about Wolfram, of course, and pleased that he himself had finally opened up the sealed casket of his past.

Propped on his desk was his post. A letter from Blanche, one from his bank in London and one with an Austrian stamp and handwriting he didn’t recognize. He tore it open. It was an invitation to the Vernissage of an exhibition of ‘recent work’ by the artist Udo Hoff at an art gallery — the Bosendorfer-Renz Galerie für moderne Kunst — in the centre of town. Written across the bottom in green ink in large bulbous letters was the injunction: “Do come! Hettie Bull.”

Lysander had moved from the chair to the divan at Bensimon’s suggestion. He wasn’t sure yet what this displacement and change in bodily alignment would signify, but Bensimon had been insistent. His head propped on pillows, Lysander still had an excellent view of the African bas-relief.

“How old was your mother when your father died?” Bensimon asked.

“Thirty-five…Thirty-six. Yes.”

“Still a young woman.”

“I suppose so.”

“How did she take your father’s death?”

Lysander thought back, remembering his own awful shock, his utter misery, when the news had been delivered. Through the dark mists of his own fraught recollection he remembered how abject his mother had been.

“She took it very badly indeed — not surprisingly. She adored my father — she lived for him. She abandoned her own career when they married. She travelled with him when he travelled. When I was born I went with them also. He had his own theatre company, you see, apart from his work in the London theatres. She helped him run it, did the day-to-day administration. We were touring constantly all over England, Scotland, Ireland. We lived in rented houses, flats — never really had a place of our own. When he died we were living in a flat in South Kensington. For all his fame and success my father died virtually bankrupt — he’d sunk all his money into the Halifax Rief Theatre Company. There was very little left over for her. I remember we had to move to lodgings in Paddington. Two rooms, one fireplace, sharing a kitchen and a bathroom with two other families.”

Lysander could recall those rooms vividly. Grimy, uncleaned windows, worn, patched oilcloth on the floor. The smell of soot from the station nearby, the hoot and whistle from the marshalling yards, the metallic clash and thunder of railway wagons and the sound of his mother, morning and night, weeping quietly. Then somehow she met Crickmay Faulkner and everything changed.

Lysander thought before he added, “For a while she rather took to drink. Very discreetly — but in the months after the funeral she drank a lot. She was never unseemly but when she came to bed I could smell it on her.”

“Came to bed?”

“We had a sitting room and a bedroom in those lodgings,” Lysander said. “We shared the bed. Until Lord Faulkner proposed marriage and he set us up in a larger house in Putney where I had my own room.”

“I see. How did your mother meet your father? Did he come to Vienna?”

“No. My mother sang in a chorus of a touring German opera company. They were touring England and Scotland in 1884. She had — has — a very fine mezzo-soprano voice. She was in Glasgow performing in Wagner’s Tristan at the King’s that was alternating with the Halifax Rief Theatre Company’s production of Macbeth . They met backstage. Love at second sight, my father used to say.”

“Why second sight?”

“Because he said that at first sight his thoughts were hardly ‘amorous’. If you see what I mean.”

“I do, I do. ‘Love at second sight.’ A pretty compliment.”

“Why are you asking me all these questions about my mother, Dr Bensimon? I’m no Oedipus, you know.”

“Heaven forfend, I’m sure you’re not. But I think what you told me — what you read out to me the last time — holds the key to your eventual recovery. I’m just trying to get more context about you, about your life.”

Lysander registered the sound of his chair being pushed back. The session was over.

“Do you remember I asked you if you’d heard of Parallelism?” Bensimon had crossed the room into the very edge of his field of vision. A shadow with his hand extended. Lysander swung his legs off the divan, stood up and was offered a small book, little more than a pamphlet. He took it. Navy-blue cover with silver lettering. Our Parallel Lives, an introduction , by Dr J. Bensimon MB, BS (Oxon).

“I had it privately printed. I’m working on the full-length version. My magnum opus. Taking rather a long time, I’m afraid.”

Lysander turned the book over in his hands.

“Can you give me the gist?”

“Well, bit of a challenge. Let’s say that the world is in essence neutral — flat, empty, bereft of meaning and significance. It’s us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling, purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want. In theory.”