William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

“Yes. I have to.”

“Are you sure that’s wise — now she’s married and all that?”

“Very unwise, I’d have thought. But I can’t see any alternative, Hamo. I’m sort of in thrall to her.”

“I understand. Oh, yes, I understand.”

Hettie had introduced Lysander to Jago Lasry after lunch was finished and Lysander felt himself being scrutinized, the suspicion and scepticism overt. Hettie linked arms with her husband, trying to emanate uxorious contentment.

“We both had the same doctor in Vienna,” Lysander said, searching for something bland and conventional to say to this coiled, angry, small man.

“Same quack, you mean.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

“How far would you go, Mr Rief?”

“Let’s say Dr Bensimon was a great help to me, therapeutically. Made a huge difference.”

“He just fed Vanora drugs.”

“Freud himself used Coca. Wrote a book about it.”

They then had a short, fervid discussion about the demerits of Sigmund Freud and Freudianism. Lysander began to feel increasingly out of his depth as Lasry spoke of Carl Jung and the 4 thInternational Psychoanalytical Conference in Munich in 1913, subjects Lysander knew nothing about. He found himself trying to place Lasry’s accent — Midlands, he thought, Nottingham coalfields — but before he could be any more precise Johnson drew Lasry away to meet “the editor of the English Review ”. Lysander stood there swaying, exhausted.

“I’d better join him,” Hettie said. “I can see you’ve put him in one of his moods.”

“Why didn’t you come to me the moment you were back in England?” Lysander said, suddenly aggrieved and hurt.

“I thought it was pointless — thought you’d never forgive me for Lothar. And the police. And all the rest.”

Lysander remembered his travails in Vienna at Hettie’s hands, experiencing a sudden vivid recall of his anger and frustration. He wondered why he couldn’t sustain these brief, intense rages that Hettie provoked. What was it about her? How did she undermine them so easily?

“I forgive you,” he said, weakly. “Come and see me in London. Please. We’ll sort everything out.”

And what did he mean by that? — he thought as he went up the stairs to his bedroom that night, his head numb and muddy with all the whisky he’d drunk and the swarm of emotions that had persecuted him all day. As he undressed he remembered that the hunt for Andromeda was meant to begin in earnest the next morning. In his troubled half-drunkenness he thought that, actually, in a house in Romney in the heart of Romney Marsh he had met the real Andromeda herself once more, in all her importunate beauty.

Coincidence? What was the Viennese connection in the Andromeda affair, he wondered dozily. If Hettie hadn’t accused him of rape, if he hadn’t called on Munro at the embassy, if he hadn’t artfully engineered his own escape, then his current life would be entirely different. But what was the point of that? The view backward showed you all the twists and turns your life had taken, all the contingencies and chances, the random elements of good luck and bad luck that made up one person’s existence. Still, questions buzzed around his brain all night as he tossed and fidgeted, punched and turned his pillows, opened and closed the windows of his room, waiting for sunrise. He managed to sleep for an hour and was up and dressed at dawn, off to the Winchelsea Inn for a pony and trap to take him into Rye. Monday, 27 thSeptember, 1915. The hunt was on.

Ibought a newspaper this morning on my walk to the Annexe. ‘Great offensive at Loos’; ‘Enemy falls back before our secret weapon’; ‘Significant advances across the whole front despite heavy casualties’. The vapid vocabulary of jingoistic military journalism. It had all started this weekend while I was at Winchelsea and at Bonham Johnson’s lunch party as I was sipping sherry, feeling Hettie grip me under the table and arguing about Freud with her obnoxious husband. There are long faces in the Annexe, however. Here in the Directorate we quickly know when the ambulance trains are full. Provision was made for 40, 000 wounded men and already it appears inadequate. Not enough heavy artillery, ammunition dumps insufficiently supplied. Our cloud of poison gas seems to have had the most partial effectiveness — reports have come in complaining that it hung in the air over no man’s land or else drifted back into our trenches to blind and confuse our own men waiting to attack. The one thing we can’t supply from the Directorate of Movements is a stiff westerly breeze, alas.

♦

Going through Osborne-Way’s list it’s at once obvious that a significant number of the officers in the Directorate could not possibly have access to all the information in the Glockner letters. However, I’ve decided as a matter of policy and subterfuge to interview everyone — I don’t want to concentrate on any particular group and thereby raise suspicions. Andromeda, whoever he is, mustn’t develop the slightest concern over this supplementary enquiry into Sir Horace Ede’s Commission on Transportation. So, I’ve summoned Tremlett and given him the entire list of interviewees. I begin with one Major H.B. O’Terence, responsible for ‘Travelling claims by land. Visits of relatives to wounded in hospital in France’. He’s going to be a busy man in the coming days and weeks — best to finish with him first.

♦

It has proved to be both a shock and unusually destabilizing to have seen Hettie. All my sex-feelings for her have returned in an instant. Incredible desire. Old images of her naked and what we did with each other. And all my contradictions and confusions about her crowd in as well. Vanora Lasry — I can hardly believe it. And what about Lothar? Your son, your little boy. Again, emotions wax and wane. One second he seems unreal, a product of my imagination, a fantasy — and then, the next, I find myself thinking of this little boy, this baby, living in a suburb of Salzburg with Udo Hoff’s aunt. Does Hettie care? Why wouldn’t she tell her new husband that he has a stepson? I bought Lasry’s book of poems, Crépuscules . Modern nonsense in the main. Free verse is both seductive and dangerous, I can see — it can be a licence to be pretentious and obscure. Lasry often abuses it, in my opinion. I take more care.

SEVENTH CAPRICE IN PIMLICO

The dawn created itself

And turned to see what had been lit.

Rubbish, litter, broken glass and a bit

Of green England, unsmirched, a glance

At something beautiful. Behold the dance:

The girls advance,

The boys decline.

Emerging from the Piccadilly Line

I find the tropic odours of Leicester Square

Beguile and mesmerize.

I roam the streets at midnight. The glare

Of gaslights an artificial sunrise.

“ Les colombes de ma cousine

Pleurent comme un enfant .”

I asked Tremlett to do me a favour and to look up the casualty lists of the Manchester Fusiliers — to check whether a Lt. Gorlice-Law or a Sergeant Foley appeared. He came back with the news that Lt. Gorlice-Law had died of wounds on June 27 thand a Sgt. Foley was in a hospital in Stoke Newington. “He must be blind, sir,” Tremlett said, pointing to his patch. “That’s where they took my peeper out.” So Gorlice-Law died the day after our raid into no man’s land…I feel I have to try and see Foley and find out exactly what happened that night after I crawled away and left them. Feelings of guilt inexorably creep over me. Was it my fault? No, you fool. You were ordered to bomb that sap to create a diversion. After that the gods of war and luck took over and you were as much subject to their fatal whim as any of the thousands of soldiers facing each other on both sides of the line.