William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

They were beginning to cut hay in the fields as he passed, the haymakers scything down the meadows and filling the air with the sweet, pungent scent of cut grass. Around the middle of the morning he realized he had slightly lost his bearings. He hadn’t seen the sea for an hour and, although he knew he was heading broadly east — the position of the sun told him that — he hadn’t come across a fingerpost or a sign for a village for a mile or two. He met a four-horse wagon jingling up a lane and asked the carter’s boy who was leading the team where he could find the road to Herstmonceux. The boy told him he’d passed Herstmonceux and he should turn back. If he went on aways he’d come to a country church. There was a signpost there that would tell him the directions.

He paused at the church, ancient and solid, faced with grey-blue flint, with a battlemented tower and a graveyard half overgrown with nettles, long grass and cow parsley. Gnarled, bent apple trees flanked the cemetery wall. He ate the first of his sandwiches here and the cheese and pickle gave him a thirst so he strode on to Battle, finding an old milestone on the verge that told him Battle was two and a half miles away. Battle with its pubs. He was making good time — a pint of ale, a cigarette and he’d be ready to move on again.

In Battle he found a quiet pub called The Windmill — it was only just noon — not far from the abbey. He bought a pint of cloudy ale for sixpence and sat down on a bench seat by the window and watched three haymakers in dirty smocks play dominoes. He took Miss Julie out of his haversack, thinking he really should try and read it through before the first rehearsal tomorrow afternoon in St John’s Wood. He read a page or two then closed the book, thinking that August Strindberg was not part of this world and it was something of an affront to both Strindberg and The Windmill pub in Battle to introduce them to each other.

Sitting in this small pub with its cool flagged floor, listening to the murmuring voices of the haymakers and the click of dominoes falling, drinking beer here in the middle of summer in England in 1914, he suddenly felt a stillness creep up on him as if he were suffering from a form of mental palsy — as if time had stopped and the world’s turning, also. It was a strange sensation — that he would be for ever stuck in this late June day in 1914 like a fly in amber — the past as irrelevant to him as the future. A perfect stasis; the most alluring inertia.

And then suddenly it was over, the mood passed, as a lorry rumbled by, tooting its horn and the world began to move again. He picked up his rucksack, eased himself into its straps and took his empty pint glass back to the bar.

As he left Battle it began to drizzle but he decided to press on, turning off the busy Hastings road as soon as he could and following a cart track that a group of foresters — cutting lengths of alder — told him would see him clear across country to Guestling Thorn. Once he was there he’d have to brave the verge of the main road to Rye with its motor traffic for a mile or two but it would lead him straight to Winchelsea and the Major.

He liked Winchelsea, he thought, as he entered the village, striding down one of its wide streets to Hamo’s cottage. All village streets should be this wide, he thought: the village was full of light, open to the sun on its high bluff. Hamo’s white weatherboarded cottage was on the western edge with a fine view over Rye Bay to Camber Sands and the expanses of Romney Marsh beyond. He knocked on the door.

“Well, I thought you should be aware of the situation,” the Major said. “You know what I always say, Lysander — honesty is everything in life. The bedrock of all relationships. I make no bones about it, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Never have, never will.”

The Major stood with his back to a small fire in the grate of the sitting room. He was wearing an old quilted red velvet smoking jacket with a cravat and a small, white, beaded skullcap on his bald head. He looked lean and weatherbeaten, still heavily tanned, with deep lines scoring either cheek as if he’d spent months gritting his teeth. His eyes, in his dark face, were a disconcertingly pale blue.

“I totally understand, Hamo,” Lysander said. “You know that. It couldn’t matter less to me.”

A young African boy came into the room with a tray bearing a whisky bottle, two glasses and a soda siphon.

“Thank you, Femi,” the Major said.

The boy — who looked seventeen or eighteen — smiled, and set the tray down.

“Femi — this is my nephew, Lysander Rief.”

“Pleased to meet, sar,” Femi said and shook Lysander’s offered hand. He was wearing a khaki-drill suit and a knitted black tie. He was tall with a high forehead. A fine handsome African face, Lysander thought.

“Of course, it causes a bit of a stir when we go shopping in Rye, as you can imagine,” the Major said with some glee. “However, I just tell everyone he’s a visiting African prince and they calm down quickly enough.”

Femi gave a small bow and went back into the kitchen.

“Let me just go and see how our supper’s coming along,” Hamo said, and followed Femi out. Lysander stood and prowled around the room. It was full of artefacts from Hamo’s trips to west and central Africa — sculptures, pottery, calabashes, animal hides on the floor — including an entire zebra skin in front of the fire. On one wall was a glass case full of weapons — ceremonial axes and daggers and long bladed, finely etched spears as well as Hamo’s muzzle-loading elephant gun and his Martini-Henri Mark II rifle from the South African War. “The world’s most accurate rifle up to a quarter of a mile,” Hamo had told him once. “Soft lead bullet makes one hell of a mess.” Next to it was a carved ebony frieze full of fantastic creatures — huge-eared, multi-limbed goblins and what looked like hermaphrodites — it reminded Lysander of Bensimon’s bas-relief. He missed his meetings with Bensimon, he realized.

He turned as he heard Hamo come back into the room.

“Femi was my guide on the Niger,” Hamo went on. “Saved my life at least three times,” he added matter-of-factly. He looked fondly towards the kitchen. “He’s a very sweet boy. His English is coming along remarkably well.”

He poured Lysander another whisky and topped it up with soda.

“So you walked all the way from Claverleigh? I’ll have to take you on my next expedition.”

Hamo Rief had won his Victoria Cross in 1901 during the South African War. At the beginning of the raising of the siege of Ladysmith he had seen a troop of Boer horsemen seize two field artillery pieces and he single-handedly drove off the raiding party, recovering the guns, killing four and wounding five, but not before being wounded himself, three times. Honourably discharged from his regiment as a result of his injuries he found that the wanderlust that had taken him into the army in the first place still remained so he decided to become an amateur explorer, joining the Royal Geographical Society, and, in 1907, privately funded an expedition to West Africa, attempting to travel across the continent from the Niger River to the Nile. In fact he only managed to reach Lake Chad — where he fell ill with dengue fever — and spent several months there recuperating, using the time to gather specimens and make anthropological studies of the local tribes. The book he wrote and published on his return, The Lost Lake of Africa , became a surprise bestseller and funded this last and latest expedition, exploring, not the upper reaches of the Benue River as Lysander had thought, but various islands in the Bight of Benin.