William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

He sealed the envelope with a mixture of emotions — guilt, sadness and exhilaration — also modest self-satisfaction at promptly ending the duplicity combined with a thrilling sense of liberation. He was a free man now — his wretched anorgasmia a horrible memory, a thing of the past. Who could say where this liaison with Miss Hettie Bull would lead? But he made a promise to himself not to look any further into the future than his next encounter with her. There was a real element of danger added to the excitement, of course — a cuckolded lover in the wings — not to mention Hettie’s own deep instabilities (he had witnessed them breaking through — he wasn’t ignoring them) but for the moment next Wednesday at 6. 00 p.m. was all he could think about.

At dinner that night, Wolfram said to him, “You seem in excellent spirits this evening, Lysander.”

“I am,” he confessed. “I’ve realized that coming to Vienna was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Herr Rief,” Frau K said. “I’ve always said that Vienna is the most pleasant city in Europe.”

“In the world,” Lysander added. “The most pleasant city in the world.”

In late September Lysander arranged with Hettie to meet for a long weekend in Linz. They travelled there separately and each, for the sake of appearances, booked a separate room in the Goldener Adler Hotel. Hettie told Hoff that she wanted to look at a seam of marble that had been unearthed in a quarry near Urfahr. He didn’t seem in the least suspicious, she said.

The change in being away from Vienna would be marked, Lysander thought. Their snatched afternoons and rare nights in the barn always suffered from a persistent undercurrent of anxiety — fear of discovery. It wasn’t just the prospect of Hoff finding them together — it could just as easily be a neighbour or a friend dropping by unannounced. To spend two entire nights as normal lovers would surely affect their moods. Everything would be different. Lysander was entranced by the prospect but initially Hettie seemed oddly edgy and nervous. For the first time he saw her inject Bensimon’s medicine. She poured some white powder from a small envelope into a glass of water to make a solution, then filled her syringe with it, injecting it with practised ease into a vein in the crook of her elbow.

“What’s it called?”

“Coca.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not in the least. It calms me down,” she explained. “It makes me more confident and sure of myself.”

“It’s not morphine, is it?”

“You can buy it at a chemist. But then you have to leave your name and address — but I don’t want to do that so I get it from Dr Bensimon. His is better quality, anyway, so he says.”

It worked fast. Soon she was smiling and kissing him. She said she’d had a ‘blazing row’ with Hoff before she left and that had unsettled her. On the train to Linz she became convinced someone was following her and had taken a very roundabout route from the station to the hotel to throw any such person off the scent.

“I felt all raggedy and nervy,” she said. “And now I don’t. I’m all calm. See? Do you want to try some?”

Lysander took her in his arms. “If I felt any happier, I’d explode.” He kissed her. “You’re my medicine, Hettie. I don’t need a drug.”

“Dr Freud uses Coca as well,” she said, a little defensively. “That’s how Bensimon knows about it.”

They walked along the promenade by the Danube and ate Linzer Torte in the Volksgarten, where a band was playing military marches. Back in Lysander’s room — the bigger of their two — Hettie undressed him, removing his shirt and tie, unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his flies. It was something she liked to do, she said, before she removed her own clothes. For Lysander it was an unconscious echo of that first day, the day his anorgasmia left him for ever, so he had no complaints.

On the Sunday he took the opportunity of being in Linz to look up a cousin of his mother — a Frau Hermine Gantz. His mother had given him the address when he said he’d like to meet some of his Austrian family. He was going to call and leave his card but at the house on Burger Strasse they had never heard of a Frau Gantz. Lysander assumed his mother had made a mistake — she hadn’t been in Austria for over twenty years, after all.

The next day, as they were packing their valises for the return to Vienna, he saw Hettie preparing her Coca solution. A precaution, she said, Hoff might still be in a bad mood — he was a very angry man.

My darling Lysander,

It won’t work. I’m going to ignore your letter. Don’t think of me, think of yourself. Find your health and your good, kind nature again and come home to your girl. I love you, my Darling One, and if I can’t stand by you in your hour of trouble and distress then what kind of a wife would I make you? No, no, a thousand times no! We are meant to be with each other and while I applaud your sweetness and unselfishness in offering to let me ‘renounce my vows’ I will not hear of such a thing again. Take your time, my love, all the time you need — three months more, six months, a year. I will be waiting for you. Everyone tells me that Vienna has the best doctors in the world so I’m sure you are absolutely in the right place to find the right answers. I’m going to tear up your letter and burn it right now (London is beastly cold, I have a fire lit at breakfast). It never happened, you never wrote it, I never read it, my love for you is as constant and sure as the ‘Rock of Gibraltar’ (you know what I mean).

All my fondest love, my darling,

Your own, Blanche.

The Café Sorgenfrei became their post office. It was a small, dark, rather grimy bohemian place in a little street near the Hoher Markt. Hoff had been banned from the café when he was an art student and had vowed never to set foot in it again, Hettie said, so it was perfect. She would leave messages for Lysander behind the bar — places and times they could meet, when she thought it was safe for him to come to the barn. Lysander communicated with her in the same way. Sometimes he left a message saying simply, “I have to see you,” and gave the name of a shabby hotel near the railway station or overlooking the Danube canal and let her know he had booked a room a couple of days hence, hoping that she could find a way of being there. Invariably, she did and Lysander began to worry that Hoff would grow suspicious of these comings and goings. No, she said, he only ever thinks of one person — himself. As long as he wasn’t inconvenienced by any of her absences he remained entirely indifferent as to what she was doing or her whereabouts.

The girl of my dreams do you know her?

She smiles ‘neath the diamonds of dew

When morning breaks over the moon-mists

And the stars fade away in the blue.

Sometimes in the sunshine I see her,

And hear her low song in the breeze,

Then in her wide eyes glimpse the wonder

The smile from the blue of the seas.

She’s always my beautiful girl

Bewitchingly lovely and true

Perhaps if I name her you’ll know her:

She answers to ‘Love’ — and she’s You.

Lysander evolved a plan of self-improvement to fill in the days that intervened between his meetings with Hettie. He couldn’t just moon away the hours in cafés writing love poetry so he set himself a diligent programme of self-education. He increased the German lessons with Herr Barth and also began conversation classes in French — his French was at a reasonable standard — with a retired schoolteacher, one Herr Fuchs, who lived a few blocks further up Mariahilfer Strasse.