William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

He returned to the Annexe in good spirits. He had a course of action to follow and Munro would have his answer soon, however unwelcome it might be. Vandenbrook was poised and ready. Yet again Tremlett was waiting by his door, agitated this time.

“Ah, there you are, sir. I was beginning to think you’d gone for the day.”

“No, Tremlett. What is it?”

“There’s a man downstairs insisting on seeing you. Claims to be your uncle, sir — a Major Rief.”

“That’s because he is my uncle. Send him up at once. And bring us a pot of coffee.”

Lysander sat down with a thump, realizing his head was a little blurry from all the hock, but pleased at the prospect of seeing Hamo. He didn’t come up to town often — “London terrifies me,” he always said — so this was an unfamiliar treat.

Tremlett showed Hamo in and Lysander knew at once something was very wrong.

“What is it, Hamo? Nothing to do with Femi, is it?” The fighting in West Africa was over, as far as he knew — everything had moved to the East.

Hamo’s face was set.

“Prepare yourself for the worst possible news, my boy…”

“What’s happened?”

“Your mother is dead.”

There is this myth that death by drowning is the best of all deaths amongst the dozens or hundreds available to us human beings — that with drowning your end arrives simultaneously with a moment of pure exhilaration. I will hold on to that idea but the rational side of my brain asks who provided this testimonial? Where’s the evidence?

When I saw my mother’s body in the undertaker’s at Eastbourne she did, however, look serene and untroubled. Paler than usual, a slight bluish tinge to her lips, her eyes closed as if she were dozing. I kissed her cold forehead and felt a pain in my gut as I remembered the last time I’d made that gesture, holding her warm in my arms. “I won’t let you be dragged down by this.”

Hamo tells me there is an unopened letter at Claverleigh waiting for me but I don’t need to read it to know that it will be her confession. Hamo, in his kindness, bless him, ventured the theory that it might have been some awful accident — a slip, a fall, unconsciousness. But I told him I was convinced it was suicide and the letter would merely confirm that. Her body had been found at dawn on the shingly beach at Eastbourne, left by the retreating tide — the proverbial man out walking his dog at first light — she was fully clothed, all her jewellery removed and one shoe missing.

I find myself, all of a sudden, remembering something Wolfram Rozman said to me — it seems eons ago, back in that impossible, unimaginable world before the war began, before everybody’s lives changed for ever — when, having been asked what he would have done if the tribunal had found against him, Wolfram had said — blithely, inconsequentially — that he would have taken his own life, of course. I can bring him into my mind’s eye effortlessly — Wolfram standing there in his caramel suit, swaying slightly, tipsy from the celebratory champagne, saying in all seriousness, “In this ramshackle empire of ours suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action.” Wolfram — was it just bravado, the swagger of a born hussar? No, I recall, it was said smilingly but with absolute rigid logic: once you understand that — you will understand us. It lies very deep in our being. “ Selbstmord ” — death of the self: it’s an honourable farewell to this world. My mother had made her honourable farewell. Enough.

Hugh and the Faulkner family are deeply shocked. I feel my grief burn in me alongside a colder, calmer anger. My mother is as much an innocent victim of this whole Andromeda affair as are those two men I killed in a sap one June night in no man’s land in northern France. The causal chain reached out to claim them just as it did Anna Faulkner.

My darling Lysander,

I will not allow myself, or my stupidity, to harm you or endanger you in any way. You should understand that what I am about to do seems an entirely reasonable course of action to me. I have a few regrets at leaving this world but they are wholly outweighed by the benefits my imminent non-being will achieve. Think of it that way, my dear — I am no longer here, that’s all. This fact, this state, was going to arrive one day therefore it has always seemed to me that any day is as good as the next. I already feel a sense of relief at having taken the decision. You are now free to move forward with full strength and confidence and with no concerns about your foolish mother. I cannot tell you how upset I was after our last conversation, how you were intent on imperilling yourself, on taking a course of action that was plainly wrong, only to spare me. You were prepared to sacrifice yourself for me and I could not allow that, could not live with that responsibility. What I am about to do is no sacrifice — you must understand that for someone like me it is the most normal of acts in a sane and rational world.

Goodbye, my darling. Keep me alive in your thoughts every day.

Your loving mother.

Images. My mother. My father. How she wept at his funeral, the endless tears. The grim flat in Paddington. Claverleigh. Her beauty. Her singing — her rich mellow voice. That terrible sunlit afternoon in Claverleigh Wood. At meals when she talked the way she would unconsciously tap the tines of her fork on her plate to emphasize the point she was making. That night I saw my father kissing her in the drawing room when they thought I was asleep. The way they laughed when I walked in, outraged. The cameo she wore with the letter ‘H’ carved in the black onyx. How she smoked a cigarette, showing her pale neck as she lifted her chin to blow the smoke away. The confidence with which she walked into a room as if she were going on stage. What else could I have been with those two as my parents? How can I best avenge her?

♦

Dr Bensimon saw me two hours ago. I telephoned him as soon as I had returned from Eastbourne.

“I wish I could say it was an effort fitting you in at such short notice,” he said. “But you’re my only patient today.”

I lay on the couch and told him bluntly and with no preamble that my mother had killed herself.

“My god. I’m very sorry to hear that,” he said. Then, after a pause, “What do you feel? Do you feel any guilt?”

“No,” I said immediately. “Somehow I want to feel guilt but I respect her too much for that. Does that make any sense? It was something she thought about and decided to do. In cold logic. And I suppose she had every right.”

“It’s very Viennese,” Bensimon said, then apologized. “I don’t mean to be flippant. Choosing that option, I mean. You’ve no idea how many of my patients did the same — not spontaneously — but after a great deal of thought. Calm, rational thought. Have you any idea what made her do it?”

“Yes. I think so. It’s connected with what I’m doing myself…” I thought again. “It’s to do with this war and the work I’m doing. She was actually trying to protect me, believe it or not.”

“Do you want to talk about her?”

“No, actually, I want to ask you about something — about someone else. Do you remember that first day we met, in Vienna, at your consulting rooms?”

“The day Miss Bull was so insistent. Yes — not easily forgotten.”

“There was another Englishman present, from the Embassy — a military attaché — Alwyn Munro.”

“Yes, Munro. I knew him quite well. We were at university together.”

“Really? Did he ever ask you anything about me?”

“I can’t answer that,” he said, apologetically. “Very sorry.”