William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

“That would be lovely.” Really, this was almost brazen, Lysander thought, she was giving actresses a bad name. Wait until he’d told Greville. He held the door open for her and Rutherford Davison came through.

“Ah, Lysander, can I have a quick word?”

♦

Lysander felt sweat trickling down his spine — he should have taken a bus home, not the Tube. It was hot, of course, but he knew he was sweating more than usually because he’d allowed himself to become irritated. Davison had kept him back twenty minutes after the others had left asking a lot of damnfool questions about his character, Angelo. Was he an only child or did he have siblings? If so, how many and of what sex? What did Lysander think he’d been doing before his big speech in Act II? Was he well travelled? Did he have any health problems he might be concealing? Lysander had done his best to answer the questions seriously because he knew that Davison had gone to Russia a year before, had met Stanislavsky and had fallen under the sway of his new theories about acting and drama, and was convinced that all this extraneous material and information that one invented fleshed out the character and bolstered the text. Lysander felt like saying that if Shakespeare had wanted us to know that Angelo was well travelled or suffered from piles he would have dropped in a line or two in the play to that effect. But in the interest of good relations and a peaceful time he had nodded and said ‘good point’ or ‘intriguing idea’ and ‘let me think a bit more about that’. It was a big role, Angelo, and it would be better and easier all round to have the director on his side.

At one stage, Davison had said, “There’s a book you might like to read, that you might find useful for Angelo — Die Traumdeutung by Sigmund Freud. Heard of it?”

“I’ve met the author,” Lysander had said. That shut him up.

He smiled at the memory of that afternoon in the Café Landtmann. Davison had looked at him with new respect. Perhaps they would rub along after all.

The Tube train pulled in to Leicester Square and Lysander stepped out, jamming his boater on to his head. He thought he might drop into a pub for a cooling pint of shandy and quench his thirst — try to reduce the sweatiness and discomfort he was experiencing. He came up from the station and sniffed the air — London in June, a hot June, the smell of horseshit stewing.

He and Greville Varley rented a flat on Chandos Place and there was a pub, the Peace and Plenty, round the corner from William IV Street, that he liked. Small and plain, with scrubbed floorboards and wainscotting, not tarted up with etched glass and velveteen wallpaper like so many in London. Greville wouldn’t be in, anyway, he had a matinée today. No, couldn’t be, it was Friday. Matinée tomorrow.

“Afternoon, Mr Rief. Hot enough for you?”

“Yes, thank you, Molly, but could you cool it down for tomorrow, please? — I’m off to the country.”

“All right for some, Mr Rief.”

Molly was the barmaid and the landlord’s niece, up from Devon — or was it Somerset? A round-faced, plump girl who reminded him of Traudl.

Obliging, blushing Traudl in the Pension Kriwanek, Lysander thought, taking his pint to a seat in the corner, thinking — that was my life not so long ago, those were its familiar details and textures. Someone had left a newspaper and Lysander picked it up to read the headlines and tossed it down almost immediately. He wasn’t interested in Irish Home Rule or the threat of a coal strike. So what are you interested in, he asked himself, aggressively. Your life? Your job? Your friends? Your family?

Good questions. He sipped his beer, analysing his distractions, his pleasures…Since he’d come back from Vienna so precipitately he’d moved flat and found the new place with Greville — that was good. He’d won a part in a three-reeler film and earned £ 50 for two days’ work — no complaints. He’d been to numerous auditions and landed this plum double role with the International Players’ Company — not to be sniffed at. And, oh yes, Blanche Blondel herself had called off their engagement.

He leaned back and took his boater off. Blanche…

He had rather dreaded their first encounter, and with good reason, as it turned out. He had been nervous, oddly tongue-tied, moody and irritable.

“There’s somebody else, isn’t there, in Vienna?” Blanche had said after five minutes.

“No. Yes, well…There was. It’s over. Completely.”

“So you say — but you’re giving a very good impression of a lovelorn fool pining for his girl.”

She took his ring off and handed it to him. They were in a chop-house on the Strand, dining after her show.

“I’m going to stay your friend, Lysander,” she had said, amiably. “But not your fiancée.” She reached over and squeezed his hand. “Sort yourself out, darling. And, if you still feel like it, propose to me again and we’ll see what I say.”

Lysander went up to the bar for another pint. Only four o’clock and here he was on his second. He watched Molly pour it — two long hauls at the lever and there it was, a sudsy head at the very rim. He pushed over a handful of coppers lifted from his pocket and she picked out the right change. The unnatural curls at Molly’s temples were damp with perspiration, sticking to her skin. He should marry Blanche, he thought, to hell with it — everything about that woman was right for him.

♦

“Greville? You in?” Lysander called, closing the door to the flat behind him. No reply. He dropped his keys into a bowl on the hall table. Mrs Tozer, the housekeeper, had been in cleaning and tidying and the smell of beeswax polish hit his nostrils. She had organized the post into two distinct piles for her ‘gentlemen’ and he was vaguely annoyed to see that Greville had twice as many letters as he did. The flat was on the top floor of a mansion block no more than ten years old. From Greville’s bedroom you could just see Nelson standing on his column in Trafalgar Square. There was a sitting room, two fair-sized bedrooms, a small kitchen-scullery and a bathroom with WC. A maid’s room had been converted into a joint dressing room and walk-in wardrobe — both he and Greville had far too many clothes. All the belongings he had left in the summerhouse in Vienna had been promptly shipped back to London by Munro — it was as if he had never been there at all.

Lysander shuffled through his post — bill, bill, postcard from Dublin (“Wish you were here. B”), a telegram from his mother (“PLEASE COLLECT PLOVERS EGGS FORTNUMS STOP”) and — his mouth went dry — a letter with an Austrian stamp, Emperor Franz-Josef in profile, forwarded on to him from his previous flat, the postmark over two weeks old.

He went into the sitting room and cut the letter open with a paper knife. He knew what news it contained and he sat there at the writing desk for a minute, somehow not daring to reach in and draw the slip of paper out.

“Come on!” he urged himself out loud. “Don’t be pathetic.”

One sheet of paper. Hettie’s unformed, childish handwriting.

Dearest Lysander,

It is with great happiness that I write to you with the news that our son is born. I told you he would be a boy, didn’t I? He came into this world at 10.30 p.m. on the twelfth of June. He’s a big baby, almost nine pounds, and has a powerful pair of lungs. I wanted to call him Lysander — but that was obviously out of the question — so I have decided on Lothar, instead. If you say Lysander — Lothar quickly a few times they almost blend together — or so I like to believe.

I miss you very much and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you did. Your escape was a great scandal here in Vienna and was written about in some newspapers. The police were roundly condemned for their uselessness and inefficiency. You can imagine my feelings when I heard you had gone and that there would be no trial.