William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

He was dreaming of Hettie who was running through a wide unkempt garden holding the hand of a little dark-haired boy. Were they fleeing something — or were they just playing? He woke — upset — trying to remember the little boy’s features. Had he somehow encountered Lothar in his dream — his son whom he had never set eyes on, not even in a photograph? But Lothar was only a year old, now — this little boy was older, four or five. Couldn’t possibly be –

“You slept for nearly two hours.”

His head jerked round.

Florence Duchesne sat in a deckchair three feet away from him, in her usual black, a baggy velvet hat held on her head with a chiffon scarf.

“My god,” he said. “Scared me to death. I was dreaming.”

He sat up, regaining his bearings. The sun was lower in the sky, the hills on the left were less mountainous. France?

“Where are we?”

“We’ll be in Evian-les-Bains in an hour.” She looked at him — could that be the hint of a smile?

“I almost missed you,” she said. “I thought you hadn’t boarded. I had seen you — the chair and the sack, the curious limping way you had walked. Then, just as the steamer was about to leave, I realized. That’s him, surely? I remembered Massinger had warned me — be alert, he won’t look like the man you’re expecting to see.”

“How would Massinger know that?”

She shrugged. “I’ve no idea. He just warned me that you might be disguised. Anyway, bravo — no one would have guessed it was you.”

“You can’t be too careful…” He thought for a second. “But what’re you doing here, anyway?”

“Massinger wanted to be sure you got away safely. Asked me to chaperone you, discreetly. I’ve had a nice day out — I’ll just take the steamer back to Geneva.”

“What did you mean in your note when you said people were ‘concerned?’”

“Manfred Glockner is dead.”

“ What? ”

“He died of a heart attack. He was found unconscious in his apartment and rushed to hospital — but it was too late.”

Lysander swallowed. Jesus Christ.

“Do you know any reason why he should have died?” she asked him, casually.

“He was fine when I left him,” Lysander improvised, thinking of the meshed wire of the scourer, the strong domestic electric current…“I gave him the money, he counted it, then he told me the key to the cipher and I left.”

She was looking at him very closely.

“The money was found in his attaché case,” she said.

“How do you know?” he countered.

“I have a contact at the German consulate.”

“What kind of contact?”

“A man whose post I opened. It contained photographs that he would prefer remained private. Some of them I kept in case I had to remind him. So when I need to know something he’s very happy to tell me.”

Lysander stood up and went to the railing. He had to be very, very careful, he knew — yet he wasn’t exactly sure himself why he had lied to her so instantly. He looked across the placid lake waters at the French shore — the hills were rising again and he saw a small perfect château situated right at the water’s edge.

Madame Duchesne came to join him at the railing. He turned and had a good view of her profile as she stared at the slowly approaching shoreline. The perfect curve of her small nose, like a beak. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply and her breasts rose. There was something about her that stirred him, she –

“Beautiful château — it’s called the Château de Blonay,” she said. “I’d like to live somewhere like that.”

“Might be a bit lonely.”

“I wasn’t imagining living there alone.”

She turned to him.

“What’s the key to the cipher? Did Glockner give you the text?”

“No. It’s in my head. He told me how it worked — it’s very simple.”

“What is it?”

“It’s the bible — in German,” Lysander said. He had never expected her to ask him this, directly. “But the trick is that the first number doesn’t correspond. It’s a double-cipher. You have to subtract a figure or add to get to the right page.”

“What’s the trick? It seems very complicated.” She didn’t seem convinced, frowning. “What makes it correspond?”

“It’s probably best if I don’t tell you.”

“Massinger will want to know.”

“I’ll tell him when I see him.”

“But you won’t tell me.”

“The information in the letters is extremely important.”

“You don’t trust me,” she said, her face still impassive. “It’s obvious.”

“I do. But there are times when the less you know, the better for you. Just in case.”

“I’ve got something to show you,” she said. “Perhaps when you see it, you’ll trust me.”

She led him down the stairway and through a door and down further stairs. The churning grind of the steamer’s engines grew louder as they descended through a bulkhead to another deck.

“Where are we going?” he asked, having to raise his voice.

“I’ve hired a little cabin, right down below.”

They found themselves in a narrow corridor. Lysander had practically to shout to make himself heard.

“There are no cabins down here!”

“Round this corner, you’ll see!”

They turned the corner. A door said, “ Défense d’Entrer ” and there was a steep metal stairway rising to the upper decks again. They seemed right above the engine room.

“Wait one second!” she shouted, rummaging in her handbag.

She drew out her small, short-barrelled revolver and pointed it at him.

“Hey! No!” he yelled, completely shocked and knowing instantly that she was going to shoot him. He raised the palm of his left hand reflexively in a futile gesture of protection.

The first shot, misaimed, hit him in the left thigh, making him stagger from its impact, though he felt nothing. He saw the second, immediately after, blast through the back of his raised left hand and felt the blow, like a punch, as the bullet hit his left shoulder, canting him round sideways for the third shot to slam into his chest, high on the right-hand side.

He went down heavily on to the studded metal floor and heard the noise of her feet clatter up the stairway. He raised himself off the ground on his elbows and caught the shockingly distressing sight of his own vibrant, red blood beginning to spill and pool beneath him before he slumped back again and felt his body begin to go numb, hearing the jocular, breathy phoot-phoot! phoot-phoot! of the steamer’s whistle announcing its imminent arrival at the sunny bustling quayside of Evian-les-Bains.

So, the one agreeable bonus of all this is that I finally found a way of gaining admittance to Oxford University. Here I am in Somerville College on the Woodstock Road experiencing a simulacrum of the varsity life. While I have a room off a staircase in a quadrangle in a women’s college there are no women (apart from nurses and domestic staff) — the undergraduettes having been decanted to Oriel College for the duration of the war. We are all men here, wounded officers from France and other battlefields with our various incapacities — some shocking (the multiple amputees, the burned) and some invisible: the catatonic victims of mental dementia caused by the concussion of huge guns and images of unconscionable brutality and awfulness. Somerville is now part of the 3 rdSouthern General Hospital, as the Radcliffe Infirmary, a few yards further up the Woodstock Road, has been renamed.

Florence Duchesne shot me three times and caused seven wounds. Let’s begin with the last. Her third and final squeeze of the trigger sent a bullet through my chest, high on the right-hand side, entering two inches below my collar-bone and exiting above my shoulder blade. Her second shot blasted through my left hand — that I’d raised in futile protection — and sped on, undeterred, through it and through the muscle of my left shoulder. I remember seeing — in a split second — the flower of blood bloom on the back of my hand as the bullet passed through. The scar has healed well but I have enduring stigmata — one in the middle of my palm, and one on the back of my hand — puckered brown and rose badges the size of a sixpence. Her first shot was a miss, of sorts — a misaim, certainly: she hadn’t raised the gun sufficiently when she fired and I was hit in the top of my left thigh where the bullet smashed into a small bundle of change in my pocket, driving some of the coins deep into the rectus femoris muscle. The surgeon later told me he’d extracted four francs and sixty-seven centimes — he gave them to me in a small envelope.