William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

The shot in the chest caused my lung to collapse and I think produced the copious flow of blood that I saw before I passed out. My good fortune — if such a concept is valid in a case of multiple gunshot wounds — is that six of my seven wounds were entry and exit. Only the pocketful of coins denied egress and — now I’m feeling much better — only my thigh still causes me discomfort and makes me walk with a limp and, for the moment, compels the use of a cane.

I’m also lucky in that, after Florence Duchesne shot me and disappeared, some mechanic or stoker emerged from the engine room and found me lying there in the widening pool of my own blood. I was swiftly taken to a small nursing home in Evian and then Massinger, who eventually tracked me down, had me transferred immediately across country by private motor ambulance to the British base hospital at Rouen.

I convalesced there for four weeks as my injured lung kept filling with blood and had to be aspirated regularly. My left hand was in a cast as some small bones had been broken by the bullet on its way through but the persistent problem was my left thigh. The bullet and the small change were extracted in Rouen but the wound seemed continually to re-infect itself and had to be drained and cleaned and re-dressed. I was obliged to walk around on crutches for most of my stay there.

I was shipped back to England and Oxford towards the end of August. My mother came to visit me almost as soon as I was installed in Somerville. She rushed into my room wearing black and for a fraught, shocked moment I thought Florence Duchesne had returned to finish me off. Crickmay Faulkner had died a month before — while I was in Geneva, in fact — and my mother was still in mourning.

She told me that the worst night of her life had occurred when she received the telegram that I was ‘missing in action’. Crickmay was close to death and she thought her son had been snatched away, also. The next morning, however, she had a visit from a ‘naval officer” — bearded, with a most curious, eerie smile, she said — who had come all the way to Claverleigh to tell her that I was believed to have been captured, unharmed. She found it very hard to understand how it came about that I was now in hospital in England, “riddled with bullets’. I told her that the naval officer (it could only have been Fyfe-Miller) had been well intentioned but not in possession of all the facts.

Despite her new status of widow she seemed in excellent spirits, I had to admit, and she’d made the most of her mourning subfusc with a lot of black lace and ostrich feathers on display. Crickmay’s passing was a blessing, she said, much as she loved him, sweet old man, and Hugh was preparing a perfectly adorable cottage on the estate to serve as a kind of dower house for her. The charity fund was growing incrementally and she was to be presented at court to Queen Mary. After we had walked through the quadrangle and I had seen her into her taxi, one of my fellow wounded — who knew about my former life — wondered if she were an actress. When I told him no, he asked, “Is she your girl?” War affects people in all manner of different ways, I suppose — in my mother’s case she was flourishing, visibly rejuvenated.

I received a telegram from Munro today, commiserating and congratulating simultaneously, and saying that we needed to assess the intelligence from the Glockner letters. And when that moment came he had a proposition to put to me. I reasoned that with Glockner dead the pressure to find the War Office source might have reduced somewhat — whoever our traitor was would have to seek out someone new to communicate with and that would obviously take some time.

♦

Hamo has just left. He was very affected to see me — I was in bed, having just had my lung aspirated again — a concern that took the form of very specific questions about my wounds: what exactly were the physical sensations I felt at the moment of impact? Was the pain instant or did it arrive later? Did I find that the shock anaesthetized me in any way? Did the numbness endure for the length of time I lay out on the battlefield — and so on. I answered him as honestly as I could but kept deliberately vague about the reality of who had shot me and where. “I had the strangest feelings when I was wounded, that’s why I ask,” Hamo said. “I’ve seen men screaming in agony from a broken finger, yet there I was, blood everywhere, and all I felt was a kind of fizzing, like pins and needles.” When he left he took my hand and squeezed it hard. “Glad to have you back, dear boy. Dear brave lad.”

♦

I walked up St Giles this evening all the way to the Martyrs’ Memorial and back — as far as I’ve walked anywhere since Geneva. I stopped in a pub on the return journey and had half a pint of cider. People looked at me oddly — my pallor and my stick signalling the ‘price’ I’ve paid, I suppose. I keep forgetting I’m an officer in uniform (Munro has arranged for me to be resupplied). Lt. Lysander Rief, East Sussex Light Infantry, recovering from wounds. It was a warm late summer evening and St Giles with its ancient, soot-black college to one side and the Ashmolean Museum on the other looked timeless and alluring — motor cars and tradesmen’s lorries excepting, of course — and I rather envied people who had had the chance to study and live here. Too late for me now, alas.

♦

I was sitting on a bench in the front quad this afternoon, around the corner from the porter’s lodge, reading a newspaper in the sun, when one of the nurses appeared. “Ah, there you are, Mr Rief. You’ve just had a visitor in your room. We didn’t know where you were.” And stepping diffidently into view came Massinger, in civilian clothes.

He sat beside me on the bench, very tense and awkward, and seemingly unwilling to look me in the eye.

“I never thanked you properly,” I said, wanting to ease the mood. “Whisking me off to Rouen. Private ambulance and all that. The best of care, really.”

“I owe you an apology, Rief,” he said, looking down at his hands in his lap, fingers laced as if he were at prayer. “I can’t tell you how glad I was to see you alive in Evian. How glad I am today.”

“Thank you,” I said. Then, curious, asked, “Why so? Particularly.”

“Because I think — I have this horrible feeling that I ordered you killed. Terrible error, I admit. I got it all wrong.”

He explained. There had been a rapid exchange of telegrams between him and Madame Duchesne on the Monday morning after Glockner’s death had been discovered and reported. Madame Duchesne had been very suspicious, convinced that it had something to do with me and my meeting with him. They had even spoken by telephone about an hour before my steamer was due to depart. Massinger had received my telegram by then and knew from the steamer timetable when I would be leaving. At this point he had ordered Madame Duchesne to accompany me on the boat, interrogate me and, if she had any reason to believe I was a traitor, she was to take the necessary steps to bring me to justice.

I listened to this in some shock.

“Then when I saw her at Evian she told me she’d shot you,” Massinger said. “You can imagine how I felt.”

“Saw her?”

“We met on the quayside. She said you had lied about the cipher-key — the source text. She said you were hiding something. She was convinced that you had murdered Glockner. She was incredibly suspicious of you. I think your disguise was enough proof for her.”

“Yes, how did you know that I’d disguise myself?”

Massinger looked a little taken aback at this, confused.

“Munro told me. Or was it Fyfe-Miller? About what happened in Vienna when I saw them there.”

“You were in Vienna?”