William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

So — Hettie Bull. I wonder if it began with the juxtaposition of the staid, solid name — daughter of John Bull, England’s icon — and the olive-skinned, big-eyed, eldritch, psychologically unbalanced gamine that is the physical reality of the young woman you see. Was ever a name less suited to a person? So many questions. But I have to testify here to the potent, unignorable catalyst of her slim naked body — so small and lissom, so enthusiastic …perhaps that’s the key? She is so unabashed and brazen. When a man knows he is wanted — when a man knows he is wanted so much that an elaborate trap is laid for him, a trap so devious that he voluntarily sheds his clothes and stands naked before the woman who is hunting him…Aching physical presence, plus manifest desire, plus absence of shame, plus perfect opportunity. Impossible to resist.

Have I been cured by Hettie Bull? Can I go back to London now and be with Blanche, full of sexual confidence at last? She will take me to her bed, I know, she’s practically said as much. So why don’t I just go home?

Be honest. Hettie Bull has cast some kind of spell over you. Her sorcery works and you want to see her again, you have to see her again, you can’t wait to see her again…But two afterthoughts nag at me: the sense that my involvement with Hettie Bull — wherever it goes from here — will bring me trouble in some form or other; and the fact that the more I become involved with Hettie the more grievous my betrayal of Blanche.

When I came home that afternoon — the little train carrying me back to Vienna through the encroaching dusk — I went to my room and, locking the door, stripped off my clothes. My body was marked with sooty fingerprints, like the lightest clustered bruises, charcoal dust from her fingertips tracing the passage of her rapid hands over my body. I washed them away with a damp flannel and put on fresh clothes, the impress of her fingers easily effaced. But as I sit here writing this I see in my mind’s eye tantalizing glimpses of her body, remembering vividly moments that we shared. The hang of her breasts as she reached over me for her Madeira glass. The way she stayed naked as I dressed, watching me from the tangled sheet and blanket, head propped on a hand. Then as I left how she slipped out of the bed and reached beneath it for the chamber pot. I stood watching her as she squatted over it, then she shooed me from the room, laughing. I think I am in serious trouble. I know I am. But what can I do?

Lysander began to see a pattern in Dr Bensimon’s questioning, began to sense the direction in which he was being gently led.

“What was your mother wearing when you came home that day?”

“She was wearing a teagown, one of her favourites — satin, a kind of coppery colour with a lot of lace and ribbon at the neck.”

“Anything else you can remember about it?”

“There was a sable trim on the sleeve and the hem. A lot of beading on the bodice.”

He looked at his notes again.

“You ate buttered toast and strawberry jam.”

“And seed cake.”

“Were there any other jams or condiments?”

“There was anchovy paste — and honey. My mother always eats honey at breakfast and teatime.”

“Describe the room you were in.”

“We call it the Green Drawing Room, on the first floor at the side off the landing on the west stair. The walls are lacquered an intense emerald green. On one wall are about thirty miniature paintings — landscapes of the estate and the house in its setting — I think done by an aunt of Lord Faulkner. Competent but rather flattered by their framing, if you know what I mean. It’s a small but comfortable room — the main drawing room is vast and looks over the south lawn — you can sit forty people easily.”

“So you made instinctively for the Green Drawing Room.”

“We always had tea there.”

“What’s on the floor?”

“A rather fine carpet — a Shiraz — and standard parquet.”

Slowly but surely the questions drew out more and more precise details. Lysander saw how this parallel day, during which nothing happened, was slowly acquiring a tactile reality — a texture and richness — that began completely to outstrip the original, disastrous day with its cluster of jangling, indistinct memories. That fatal afternoon began slowly to fade and disappear, buried under the accumulating facts and minutiae of the new parallel world. As the sessions continued, he found that he could summon up this new world far more effectively than the old; his new fictive memories, spurred on by his fonction fabulatrice , became concrete, overthrowing his painful recollections, making them vague and shadowy, to the extent that he began to wonder if they were simply the half-remembered details of a bad dream.

Soon, when tea was over, he had his mother going to the piano — a baby grand — and singing a Schubertlied in her rich mezzo-soprano. Lord Faulkner, lured by the music, joined them and smoked a cigar as he listened, the smoke making Lysander sneeze. Lord Faulkner called for another pot of tea, asking for Assam, his favourite. The fact that all this was an exercise in auto-suggestion didn’t devalue these ‘memories’ at all, Lysander saw. By a sheer act of will, persistence and precision his parallel world came to dominate his memory, exactly as Bensimon had predicted, and the bland domestic emotions of that new fictive day supplanted everything that had caused anguish and provoked insupportable shame.

As he left, retrieving his Panama hat from the hat-stand, Bensimon’s stern, bespectacled secretary appeared, an envelope in her hand. A receipt, he supposed, for last month’s fees.

“Herr Rief,” she said, not meeting his eye. “This was left for you.”

Lysander took it and read it on the stairs going down to the street. It was from Hettie.

“Come next Wednesday at six pm. U is going to Zürich. Pack an overnight bag.”

Lysander acknowledged the irrepressible surge of excitement. He felt like a boy legitimately excused school in the middle of term — that sense of unlooked-for freedom, unexpected release. Then more reproachful thoughts intruded as he strolled homeward. It was all very well feeling grateful to Hettie for ‘curing’ him but he had been snared, after all, and had tumbled guilelessly into her trap — everything had been contrived to make what took place inevitable. In his conscience he could just about forgive himself — it had been a momentary fall, his honour tarnished but not irreparably — one moment of uncontrollable passion that could be consigned to history and forgotten. No one knew, no one had been hurt. But if he went back to her and spent a night or two then that was another matter. For the sake of his engagement, his relationship and future with Blanche he should write back and say no — it couldn’t happen again or he’d be lost, he knew.

He crossed the Ring by the Burg Theatre and was instantly reminded of Udo Hoff and his architectural recriminations. And with that trigger came the fizzing surge of elation at the idea of seeing Hettie again. He began to imagine what it would be like to spend a night with her in that narrow bed, to wake in the morning, sleepy and warm, thigh to thigh, to roll over and reach for her…

Back at the pension he sat down and wrote immediately to Blanche, breaking off their engagement. It was the only honourable course to take, even if the lies were fluent. He said that various consultations with doctors and psychoanalysts in Vienna had convinced him that any cure, if it were to work, would be lengthy and complicated. Furthermore, he was troubled by the depth and severity of his ‘mental agitations’ and therefore, under these circumstances, he felt it was only fair to you, dearest Blanche, to release you from your promises and vows. He begged her forgiveness and understanding and urged her to do what she wished with the ring he had given her — throw it in the Thames, sell it, bequeath it as an heirloom to a niece or a goddaughter — whatever seemed apt. He would remember her kindness and beauty as long as he lived and he was abjectly sorry that his ‘particular unfortunate circumstances’ forbade him from becoming her devoted husband.