William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

“How old is the girl?”

“I’m not sure. Nine. Eleven…”

Lysander looked at Vandenbrook as he stood by his big safe, hunched, swaying, looking at the floor.

“Good god,” Lysander said flatly. “This girl is younger than your daughters.”

“It’s not something I take any pride in,” Vandenbrook said, his voice regaining some of its old arrogance. “It’s a terrible weakness in me. I confess — fully.” He opened a cigarette box on his desk, took out and lit a cigarette.

“Have you ever been to the East End of our great city?” Vandenbrook asked. “Down by Bow and Shoreditch, those sort of places. Well, if you’ve got a little bit of spare cash you can get anything you want. Little boys and little girls, dwarfs and giants, freaks of nature, animals. Anything you can imagine.”

“Tell me about the blackmail.”

“I used to visit this girl — with her mother’s compliance — once a month or so,” he said. “I became fond of her. She was unusually unconcerned by what I asked her to…” He stopped himself. “Anyway, out of affection for her I gave her a pearl necklace. That was my mistake. It was in a box, there was the jeweller’s name, it was traced back to me. Her mother, a conniving, evil person — she wrote the deposition — now knew my name and who I was.” He sat down on the edge of the desk, suddenly looking exhausted. “About a year ago, the end of last year, 1914, this envelope arrived with precise instructions. I was to pass on all the information I was party to at the Directorate. Everything I knew — movement of stores, munitions, construction of railway branch lines, and so on. If I didn’t comply then this photograph and the girl’s testimony would be sent to the Secretary of State for War, my commanding officer, my wife and my father-in-law.” He gave a weak smile. “I assume you know who my father-in-law is.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Then you’ll understand. A little. So I wrote down what I could find out and, as directed by the instructions, left the envelope to be collected by a person unknown in a particular hotel.”

“The same hotel?”

“Various hotels on the south coast. No doubt you’ve visited them all.”

Lysander looked at the girl’s blank face and read a few lines of the deposition. “The captin use to come and akse me to sit on his nee…He took my close off and then he told me to opin my legs as wide as I could…Then he woud wash me with a flannel and warm water and tell me to…”

Vanderbrook looked at him as he scanned the page, his eyes dead, the dashing uptilted blond moustache like a bad prop, the affectation of a different man altogether.

“Did you try to find this woman and her daughter?”

“Yes, of course. I hired a private detective agency. But they were long gone from their usual haunts. They obviously sold me on. To someone. Who may have sold me on again. Many men are trapped in this way. You wouldn’t believe it. There’s a whole trade in this blackmail, passed along, from one person to another —”

“Many?”

“We’re all capable of anything,” he said. “Given the means and the opportunity.”

“The pervert’s quick and easy excuse,” Lysander replied, coldly. “Since time immemorial.”

“I don’t excuse myself, Rief, as it happens. I hate myself, I loathe my…my sexual inclinations…” he said with real feeling. “Just spare me your sanctimonious moral judgement.”

“Continue with your story.”

“Whenever a copy of this photograph and the witness statement arrived it was a sign that I should supply more information. I was also told which hotel I should leave it at. Another one came two weeks ago. The Dene Hotel, Hythe — the one you have.”

“How do you encode it?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“Your previous letters were all in code. This one wasn’t.”

“What code? I just write down the facts and figures and leave them at the hotel.”

Lysander looked at him, feeling a new panic. Somehow he knew at once Vandenbrook wasn’t lying. But then he checked himself. The man did nothing but lie, it was his raison d’être . However, he thought on, furiously investigating the ramifications of this news — if Vandenbrook didn’t transform the data into code then who did? If Vandenbrook was lying, then why did he not encode the last letter? There must be another Andromeda — or else Vandenbrook was playing another game with him. He began to feel his brain cloud.

“What should I do, Rief?”

“Do nothing — go to work, act as normal,” Lysander said, thinking — this would buy him some time. He needed more time now, definitely, the complications were multiplying rapidly.

“What’s going to happen to me?” Vandenbrook asked.

“You should hang as a traitor, if there’s any justice — but perhaps you can save yourself.”

“Anything,” he said fiercely. “I’m a victim, Rief. I didn’t want to do this but if my…my peccadillo was to become known…I just couldn’t face that, you see. The shame, the dishonour. You’ve got to help me. You’ve got to find out who’s doing this to me.”

Lysander folded up the deposition and the photograph and slipped them inside his jacket pocket.

“You can’t take that,” Vandenbrook said, outraged.

“Don’t be stupid. I can do anything I like as far as you’re concerned.”

“Sorry. Sorry. Yes, of course.”

“Go to work as usual. Try to act normally, unaffectedly. I’ll contact you when I need you.”

It was strange being in the Green Drawing Room again, Lysander thought, walking around, letting his fingertips graze the polished surfaces of the side tables, picking up a piece of sheet music and laying it on a window seat. Again, he felt this sensation that nothing had changed and indulged it, letting it linger in him. He was still an adolescent, the century was new, they had just moved to Claverleigh and in a minute or two he would see his mother come into the room, younger, pretty, frozen in time, years back. But he knew how fast the world was spinning, faster than ever. Time was on the move in this modern world, fast as a thoroughbred racehorse, galloping onwards, regardless of this war — this war was just a consequence of that acceleration — and everything was changing as a result, not just in the world around him but in human consciousness, also. Something old was going, and going fast, disappearing, and something different, something new, was inevitably taking its place. That was the concept he should keep in mind, however much it disturbed him and however he found he wanted to resist it. Perhaps he should bring it up with Bensimon — this new obsession he had with change and his resistance to it — and see if he could make any sense of his confusion.

His mother swept through the door and kissed him three times on both cheeks in the continental manner. She was wearing a pistachio-green teagown and her hair was different, swept up on both sides and held in a loose bun at the back of her head, soft and informal.

“I like your hair like that,” he said.

“I like that you notice these things, my darling son.”

She went to the wall and turned the bell handle.

“I need tea,” she said. “Strong tea. English fuel.”

He had one of those revelations and understood at once why a man would be irresistibly drawn to her — the casual, ultra-confident beauty coupled with her vivacity. He could understand why a Christian Vandenbrook would be ensnared.

Tea was served by a maid and they sat down. She stared at him over the top of her held teacup, her big eyes looking at him, watchfully.