William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

Bensimon seemed genuinely pleased to see me, I sensed — perhaps I came trailing clouds of his former glory — and he shook my hand warmly, even though I had knocked on his front door unannounced at the end of the afternoon. He introduced me to his wife, Rachel — a demure, timid woman — and his twin daughters, Agatha and Elizabeth, before he showed me up to his study with a view through the windows of the sooty backs of terraced houses and the long thin gardens that trailed scruffily from them, containing the usual assortment of various-sized, dilapidated sheds that haunt the cluttered ends of these city plots, with their blistered tar-paper roofs, broken windows and creosoted weatherboarding, washing lines and brimming rainwater barrels.

He still had his desk, his turned-away couch and armchair and, I was glad to see, the silver African bas-relief from Wasagasse.

“Not quite the same,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “But we must try to do the best with what we have.”

“How’s business?” I asked.

“Slow, let’s say,” he conceded with a rueful smile. “People in England haven’t yet realized how much they need us. It’s not at all like Vienna.” He offered me the couch or the armchair. “Is this a social visit, or can I help you professionally?”

I told him that I wanted to reinstate our old relationship — perhaps a weekly consultation, I said, going to the armchair. I sat down and focussed on the familiar fantastic beasts and monsters, for a moment enjoying the illusion that I was still in 1913 and nothing had happened to me since. In a very real sense, the disturbing thought came to me, I had changed enormously, irrevocably — I was a different person.

“Is it the old problem?” he asked. “I still have all your files.”

“No, that seems well and truly solved, happily,” I said. “My new problem is that I can’t sleep at night. Or, rather, that I don’t want to sleep at night because I always seem to dream the same dream.”

I told him my dream — the recurring jumbled experience of my night in no man’s land that always culminated with my bombing of the sap and the image of the two torchlit faces looking up at me — the man with the moustache and the fair-haired boy.

“What happens next?” he asked.

“I wake up. Usually my face is wet with tears, though I don’t recall weeping in the dream. I’m taking chloral hydrate — it’s the only thing that makes me sleep the night through.”

“How long have you been taking that?”

“Some months — since Switzerland,” I said without thinking.

“Oh, you’ve been to Switzerland. How interesting. Were you there long?”

“A matter of days.”

“Right.” Discreet silence. “Well, we’d better take you off the chloral — its long-term consequences can be rather drastic.”

“What do you mean?”

“You can become over-dependent on it. Its effects can be disturbing. You can — how shall I put it? — you begin to lose your grip on reality.”

“Whatever reality is…Sometimes I want nothing more than to lose my grip on reality. I just want to get to sleep at night.”

“That’s what everyone says. And then…”

“Well — perhaps we could try hypnosis once more.”

“Actually, I think this is a perfect opportunity for Parallelism. But let’s take you off the chloral first.”

He wrote me out a prescription for another ‘somnifacient’ and told me that his fee in England was two guineas an hour. We made an appointment for the following week. Cheap at the price, I thought, suddenly hugely relieved that I’d come to see him. I believed that Dr Bensimon could cure me of anything. Well, almost anything.

Talking of which, I told him as I left that I had seen Hettie Bull again and his face darkened.

“It’s none of my business, but I’d have nothing to do with that young woman, Mr Rief,” he said. “She’s very dangerous, very unstable.”

♦

This evening I was leaving the Annexe when I heard a shout, “Rief! I say! Over here!” I looked round to see a man standing on the other side of the Embankment, leaning on the river wall. I crossed the roadway and saw that it was Jack Fyfe-Miller — but dressed as a stevedore in a flat cap with a scarf at his throat, moleskin trousers and heavy boots. We shook hands and I looked him over, professionally.

“Almost convincing,” I said. “But you need some dirt under your nails — rubbed into your cuticles. You’ve got the hands of a curate.”

“The expert speaks.”

“Black boot polish,” I advised. “Lasts all day.”

“Where’re you headed?” he asked, staring at me with his usual strange intensity.

“Walking back to my hotel.”

“Ah, hotel life. Lucky for some.”

“There’s nothing special about it. A small hotel in Pimlico — very average.”

“Have you got a girl, Rief?”

“What? No, not really. I used to be engaged to be married, once upon a time…”

“When I find my girl I’ll get married — but she has to be spot-on right for me. Hard, that.”

I was inclined to agree, but said nothing as we walked along in silence for a while, Fyfe-Miller doubtless preoccupied with thoughts of his spot-on girl. From time to time he kicked at the fallen leaves on the pavement with his hobnails like a sulky adolescent, scuffing the stone and sending sparks flying. We walked under the railway bridge that led to Charing Cross and up ahead I saw the grand château-esque rooftops of Whitehall Court. I wondered if that was where he had come from, and perhaps the sight of the building and memories of our last meeting there stirred him as he suddenly became animated again and stopped me.

“Any sign of Andromeda? Any news?” he asked abruptly.

“Ah, no. But I think I’m getting close.”

“Getting close, eh?” he smiled. “Hard on Andromeda’s trail.”

Not for the first time I wondered if Fyfe-Miller were entirely sane.

“It’s a question of narrowing the investigation down,” I said, playing for time. “Analysing exactly who had access to that particular information.”

“Don’t take too long, Rief, or your precious Andromeda may fly the coop.” At which point he took his hat off, gave me a mocking theatrical bow and then turned back the way we had come, shouting at me, over his shoulder, “Boot polish under the fingernails, I’ll remember that!”

I wandered back to The White Palace thinking about what he had said. It was a fair point, actually — I couldn’t take my own sweet time — Vandenbrook could easily grow suspicious. Was this some kind of a warning I’d been given? Had Munro and Massinger ordered Fyfe-Miller to turn up the pressure on me?…I bought the Evening News and read that Blanche Blondel had opened at the Lyceum the previous night in The Conscience of the King to triumphant acclaim. Blanche — perhaps I’d pop in a note at the stage door…Fyfe-Miller had inadvertently reminded me of her and I thought it might be a good moment to see her again.

Lysander did some quick research on Christian Vandenbrook’s life and background. Vandenbrook had been caught up in the mass retreat from Mons in the first hectic weeks of the war and had been knocked unconscious by an artillery explosion that left him in a coma for three days. He suffered thereafter from periodic bleeding from the ears and his sense of balance left him for some months. He was declared unfit for active service and joined the General Staff in London. Lysander wondered how this agreeable move had come about, then he discovered that Vandenbrook’s father-in-law was Brigadier-General Walter McIvor, the Earl of Ballatar, hero of the Battle of Waitara River in the Maori Wars in New Zealand. Vandenbrook was married to the earl’s younger child, his daughter, Lady Emmeline, and they had two daughters themselves, Amabel and Cecilia. A very well-connected man, then, married into wealth and prestige. That explained how he achieved the grand house in Knightsbridge and the other quietly munificent trappings of his life on a captain’s pay. But did it explain why he should choose to betray his country? Or why he was having an affair with Anna, now the dowager Lady Faulkner? Obviously the sooner he confronted Vandenbrook the sooner answers to these questions might ensue.