William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

“Night, Mr Rief,” one of the typists said as she left. Lysander was standing in the entry hall of the clubhouse waiting for the lorry to take him back to the company billet in Swansea. The romantic vision had faded fast. Swansea was as close as he’d come to France and the front line. The 2 / 5 th(service) battalion of the E.S.L.I. had been assigned to guard coastal defences in South Wales. After a few months of patrolling the quaysides of Swansea and Port Talbot, laying barbed-wire entanglements on beaches or sitting in freezing trenches dug beside gun batteries overlooking the Bristol Channel, relief of sorts had come when ‘C’ company of the battalion, his company, had been ordered to provide shifts of perimeter guards and prisoner escorts for the newly established Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp. Lysander had volunteered to help with the translating of the internees’ many problems, had become indispensable, and so began to spend his days on duty sitting at the long table in the bar of the golf club. It was now May 1915. Greville Varley was in Mesopotamia, a lieutenant in the Dorsetshire regiment. The Lusitania had been sunk. The landings at Gallipoli did not seem to have gone well. Italy had declared war on Austro-Hungary. This monstrous global conflict was in its tenth month, and he had never even –

“Got a couple of minutes, Rief?” Teesdale was leaning out of his doorway. Lysander went back into the office, where Teesdale offered him a seat and a cigarette. Lysander felt very old sitting opposite young Teesdale with his near-invisible moustache. Old and tired.

“Have you ever thought of putting yourself up for a commission?” Teesdale asked.

“I don’t want to be an officer, sir. I’m happy as an ordinary soldier.”

“You’d have a more comfortable life. You’d have a servant. A proper bed. Eat food off a plate.”

“I’m perfectly content, sir.”

“It’s all wrong, Rief. You’re a fish out of water — an educated man who speaks a foreign language with enviable fluency.”

“Believe it or not I’m actually very happy,” he lied.

“What did you do before the war?”

“I was an actor.”

Teesdale sat up in his chair.

“Lysander Rief. Lysander Rief…Of course. Yes! D’you know, I think I actually saw you in a play.” Teesdale frowned and clicked his fingers, trying to remember. “1912. Horsham College Sixth Form Dramatic Society. We had a trip up to London…What did we see?”

Lysander ran through the plays he had been in during 1912.

“ Evangeline, It Was No One’s Fault, Gather Ye Rosebuds …”

“That’s it — Gather Ye Rosebuds . Blanche Blondel. Gorgeous woman. Stunning creature.”

“Very pretty, yes.”

“Lysander Rief — how extraordinary. I say, you wouldn’t sign me your autograph, would you?”

“A pleasure, sir.”

“Make it out to James.”

♦

Lysander sat on his bed, took his boots off and began to unwind his puttees. ‘C’ Company was billeted in the warehouse of a former sawmill and the place was redolent of sap, freshly planked wood and sawdust. It was dry and well sealed, containing four rows of wooden-frame chicken-wire beds with a big communal latrine dug outside. They were fed copiously and regularly and there were many pubs in the neighbourhood. Most of the men in ‘C’ company spent their off-duty hours as drunk as possible. There were always a dozen or so men on a charge. The warehouse yard had been swept hundreds of times, its walls and building benefitting from at least seven coats of whitewash. Idle drunken hands were put to hard work by the NCOs. Lysander kept out of trouble.

He lay down, hearing the chicken wire beneath his palliasse creak and ping under his weight, and closed his eyes. Two more days and he had a week’s leave coming. London.

“Oi, Actor!”

He looked up. Lance Corporal Merrilees stood there. Frank Merrilees was very dark with a weak chin, in his early twenties, with a sharp, malicious mind.

“Coming to the pub?”

They liked drinking with Lysander, he knew, because he had more money and would stand extra rounds. He was happy to conform to their expectations, buying, not popularity, but peace. The other men left him alone; he didn’t have to participate in the mindless bickering, persecution and mockery that occupied the others.

“Good idea,” he said, sitting up again and reaching for his boots.

The pub Merrilees liked was called The Anchor. Lysander wondered if it was anywhere near the port — he had no sense, even after weeks at the sawmill, what district of Swansea they lived in. He was shuttled to and from the billet to the camp in the back of a lorry, Swansea’s modest, rain-bright streets visible through the flapping canvas opening at the rear — that was the geographical extent of his war.

The Anchor was only a few streets’ walk away — no public transport required, which perhaps explained why it was so favoured. There was a saloon bar and a small snug, entry to which was denied the E.S.L.I soldiers. Along with Merrilees came four others of his cronies, all well known to Lysander, his drinking companions — Alfie ‘Fingers’ Doig, Nelson Waller, Mick Eltherington and Horace Lefroy. When they bought a round Lysander paid for the tumblers of spirits — whisky, brandy, rum, gin — that accompanied the pints of watery beer. That was why they tolerated him. The language as they chatted was always richly profane — fucking this and cunting that — and like the internees their conversation was a coarse litany of resentments and slights suffered, posited acts of brutal revenge or fantasies of sexual fulfilment.

“Taps shut, lads,” the barmaid called.

“Let me get the last round in,” Lysander suggested.

“You’re an officer and a gentleman, Actor,” Merrilees said, his eyes unfocussed. The others loudly agreed.

Lysander took the tray of six empty pint glasses and five tumblers up to the bar and gave his order to the barmaid, looking at her again as she pulled the pints. He recognized her, but her hair had changed colour since he was last here — it was now dyed a strange carroty-auburn. He seemed to remember she used to be fair-haired. She was petite but her stays gave her a hitched-up shelf of bosom, half-revealed by the V-neck of her satin blouse. Petite like Hettie, he found himself thinking. Her nose was bent slightly askew and she had a cleft in her chin that echoed the visible crease between her breasts. She had thick dark eyebrows.

“And three gins and two whiskies,” he added as she finished the pints. “I like your hair,” he said. “It’s changed.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m a redhead, really, going back to nature.” She had a strong Welsh accent.

Lysander took his pint off the tray and signalled to Waller to come and pick it up. The pub was slowly emptying but he’d rather talk to this girl than swear and curse with the soldiers.

“You come in here a lot, you soldier-boys.”

“It’s our favourite pub,” he said. “We’re billeted at the old sawmill, down the road.”

“But you’re not like them lot, are you?” she said, looking at him shrewdly. “I can hear it in your voice, like.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Cerridwyn,” she said. “Old Welsh name — it means ‘fair poetess’.”

“Cerridwyn,” he repeated. “Lovely name for a poetess. I write a bit of poetry, myself.” He didn’t know what made him tell her that.

“Oh, yes? Don’t we all?” Heavy scepticism. “Give us a line or two then.”

Lysander, almost without thinking, began:

“She’s always the most beautiful girl,

Bewitchingly lovely and true,

Perhaps if I name her, you’ll know her:

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