William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

“You’re making things worse for yourself by not telling anyone,” she said, quietly and steadily. “Aren’t you?”

“It’s complicated. Very. I don’t want you involved in this mess,” I said. “That’s why I need a bit more time.”

She turned and held out her arms as if she wanted to be embraced so I went to her and she hugged herself to me.

“I won’t let you be dragged down by this,” she said softly. “I won’t.”

“Mother — please — don’t be so dramatic. Nobody’s going to be ‘dragged down’. You’ve done nothing — so don’t even think about it. Whoever’s blackmailing Vandenbrook has been very clever. Very. But I’ll find a way, don’t worry. He can be outsmarted.”

“I hope so.” She squeezed my shoulders. I enjoyed having her in my arms. We hadn’t held each other like this since my father had died. I kissed her forehead.

“Don’t worry. I’ll get him.”

I hoped I sounded confident because I wasn’t, particularly. I knew that as soon as I told the Vandenbrook story to Munro and Massinger then everything would emerge rapidly and damagingly — the Fund, the meetings, the hotels, the dinners. To my alarm, as I began to think through this sequence of events, I thought I could see a way in which even I could be implicated. Which reminded me.

“I’d better go,” I said, releasing her. “I just need one thing. You remember I gave you that libretto, the one with the illustration on the cover of the girl. Andromeda und Perseus .”

“Oh, yes,” she said, with something of her old wry cynicism returning. “How could I forget? The mother of my grandchild with no clothes on.” She moved to the door. “It’s in my office.” She paused. “What’s the news of the little boy?”

“Lothar? He’s well, so I’m told — living with a family in Salzburg.”

“Lothar in Salzburg…What about his mother?”

“I believe she’s back in England,” I said evasively.

She gave me a knowing look and went to fetch the libretto. I glanced at my wristwatch — I was still in good time to catch the last train to London from Lewes. But when my mother came back in I could see at once she was unusually flustered.

“What is it?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s the strangest thing. Your libretto — it’s missing.”

♦

Sitting in the Lewes — London train. Brain-race, thought-surge. Her office is a study on the top floor where she does her charity administration. Two desks for secretaries, a couple of white wooden bookshelves with a few books and a mass of files slid into them. She said she was convinced this was where she’d put the libretto. We searched — nothing. Books go missing, I said, it wasn’t important. It was a book I gave to her almost eighteen months ago, after all. Anything could have happened to it.

As I write this, a man sitting opposite me is reading a novel and, from time to time, picking his nose, examining what he has mined from his nasal cavities and popping the sweetmeat into his mouth. Amazing the secrets we reveal about ourselves when we think we’re not being observed. Amazing the secrets we can reveal when we know we are.

♦

Back in my room at The White Palace I find a small bundle of post is awaiting me. One envelope contains a list from a letting agency of four furnished mansion flats, available for short lease, in the Strand and Charing Cross area. I’m excited by the prospect of having my own place, again — and of Hettie being able to stay with me there, incognito and unembarrassed. Another telegram, to my surprise, is from Massinger. He suggests a rendezvous in a Mayfair tearoom at four o’clock tomorrow. The Skeffington Tearooms in Mount Street.

Later. I’ve spent the last hour drinking whisky from my hip-flask and writing down lists of names in various configurations and placements, joining them with dotted lines and double-headed arrows, placing some in parentheses and underlining others three times. At the end of this fruitless exercise I still find myself wondering why Massinger could possibly want to talk to me.

Lysander chose the second of the four furnished flats he was shown by the breathless, corpulent man from the letting agency. It was on the third floor of a mansion block in Surrey Street, off the Strand, called Trevelyan House: one bedroom, a small sitting room, a modern bathroom and a kitchen — though the kitchen was no more than a cupboard with a sink and an electric two-ring heater and a bleak view of the white ceramic bricks of the central air-well. In truth, any of the flats would have served his rudimentary purpose perfectly well but there was something newer about the curtains, the carpets and the furniture in number 3 / 12 that was immediately appealing — no greasy edge to the drapery, no flattened worn patch before the fire or cigarette burns on the mantelpiece. All he needed now, he felt, was something bright and primary coloured — a painting, a couple of new lampshades, cushions for the sofa — to make it more personal, to make it his rather than everybody’s.

He signed the lease, paid a month’s deposit and was given two sets of keys. He had his linen and his household goods from Chandos Place in store and would hire a porter to bring them around to Trevelyan House right away. He could walk to the Annexe from here in under ten minutes, he reckoned — another unlooked-for bonus in his and Hettie’s ‘love nest’. He felt the old excitement mount in him at the prospect of seeing her again — at the prospect of being naked in a bed with her again — and noted how the promise of unlimited sensual pleasure blotted out all rational, cautious advice that he might equally have given himself. Hettie — Vanora — was a married woman, now; moreover, her new husband was a jealous and angry man. Hoff and Lasry: two men with fiery, irrational tempers, quick to take the slightest offence — what drew Hettie to these types? Also, the current complications of Lysander’s own life should have dictated against the introduction of new circumstances that would add to them. “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” he said to himself, as if that old adage took care of all sensible matters. He had a new home and, perhaps more importantly, only he knew its address.

♦

The Skeffington Tearooms in Mount Street were unabashed about their striving for gentility, Lysander saw as he approached. Elaborately worked lace curtains screened the tea-drinkers from the curious gaze of passers-by; the name of the establishment was written in black glass in a very flourished white copperplate, tightly coiled curlicues ending in gilt flowerlets or four-leafed clovers. A serving maid in a tiny bonnet and a long white pinny was sweeping the pavement outside. It didn’t seem a Massinger type of place at all.

Inside was a single large long room lit by crystal chandeliers and lined on three walls by semi-circular maroon velour Chesterfield booths. Two rows of highly polished tables with neat doilies and a centrally placed flower arrangement filled the rest of the area. The hushed tinkle of silverware on crockery and a low murmur of discreet conversation greeted him. It was like entering a library, Lysander felt, with a library’s implicit prohibitions against unnecessary noise — quiet footsteps, please, coughs and sneezes to be muffled, no laughter at all.

An unsmiling woman with a pince-nez checked that Massinger’s name had been entered in the ledger and a summoned waitress led him across the room to a booth in the far corner. Massinger sat there, smoking, wearing a morning suit, of all things, and reading a newspaper. He looked up to see Lysander and did not smile, merely holding up the newspaper and pointing to a headline. “English County Cricket to be abandoned in 1916.”