William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

My mother’s grave is in the north corner of St Botolph’s graveyard, Claverleigh’s parish church. It is a bare and rather cold patch but away from the vast spreading yews that line the path to the porch and that make the place look dark and grim. I wanted some light to shine on her. Hugh Faulkner has planted two flowering cherries on either side of the headstone. I’ll come again in the spring when they’re in blossom and think about her in more tranquil times. Her headstone reads,

ANNA LADY FAULKNER

1864–1915

Widow of Crickmay 5 thBaron Faulkner

1838–1915

Formerly wife of

Halifax Rief

1840–1899

Mother of

Lysander Rief

“For ever remembered, for ever loved”

So our complicated personal history is edited down to these stark facts and these few words and numbers.

♦

I never went back to the Annexe — I kept nothing in Room 205 — and was glad to be rid of the place with its persistent, lingering odour of antisepsis. I did return to The White Palace Hotel in Pimlico to collect my unforwarded mail and provide the management with my new address. I had grown strangely fond of flat 3 / 12 Trevelyan House and I gave up the lease on Chandos Place when the news reached me of poor Greville Varley’s death in Kut-al-Amara, Mesopotamia, from dysentery. Amongst my mail — mainly circulars and commercial solicitations (the bane of any serving officer’s postal life) — was a letter from Hettie:

Lysander, darling,

Can you forgive me? I was so horrible to you because I was so upset. However, I should never have said the things I did (particularly about Lothar — photograph enclosed). I feel ashamed and I rely on your tolerant and understanding nature. I have decided to divorce Jago and go to the United States. I want to live in a peaceful, neutral country — I’m sick of this ghastly, endless war. A friend of mine runs an ‘artists’ colony’ in New Mexico, wherever that may be, so I am going to join him and become a teacher.

I have to tell you that Jago is not taking this at all well and, perversely, thinks you are to blame. Apparently he has been going up to London and following you. When you saw him the night of the Zeppelin raid he panicked and confessed all to me.

I know we will always be friends and I wish you every bit of good luck for your forthcoming marriage (lucky girl!).

All my best love, Hettie (never more Vanora)

PS. If you could possibly find your way to send £ 50 to me care of the GPO in Liverpool I’d be undyingly grateful. I set sail for ‘Americay’ in two weeks.

LINES WRITTEN

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF CHLORAL HYDRATE

The heat, that summer in Vienna, was immense.

It slammed down out of a white sky, heavy as glass.

I do not hope

I do not hope to see

I do not hope nor see

Why were those bands playing in the Prater?

No one told me what was going on.

She was schön .

She was sympatisch .

We couldn’t be left alone

At the Hôtel du Sport et Riche.

I do not see hope

Hope does not see me

Blackblackblackblackwhiteblackblackblack

We turned on our backs in the flax

We strove in the shadows of the apple grove

We found bliss beneath the trellis of clematis

Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.

It’s black, alack — I can’t see a thing.

Tara-loo, Madame, tara-lee, tara-loo-di-do

I dream of a woman.

Blanche and I have set a date for our wedding in the spring — May 1916. Hamo is to be my best man. Blanche and I spend many nights together but I find I still need chloral hydrate to sleep. I visit Dr Bensimon in Highgate once a week and we talk through the story of the last two years. Parallelism is working, slowly — I’m beginning to live with a version of events in which the man with the moustache and the fair-haired boy scramble out of the sap before my bombs explode. They’re both lightly wounded but both regain the German lines. The more I concentrate on this story and manufacture its precise details the more its plausibility beguiles me. Perhaps one night I’ll sleep peacefully, unaided by my chemicals.

I wrote to Sergeant Foley at the Stoke Newington Hospital for the Blind but have received no reply to date. Perhaps it might be better if I don’t learn any more facts about that night — it’s been hard enough dislodging the ones that are haunting me — but I feel I need to see Foley and explain something of what was really going on.

I have an audition tomorrow — my old life returning. A revival of Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw.

♦

I sit here looking at Hettie’s photograph of Lothar that she sent me. A studio portrait of a little glum boy — close to tears, it seems — dressed to all intents and purposes as a girl in some embroidered pseudo-peasant smock. Long, dark curly hair. Does he look anything like me? One minute I think — yes, he does. And the next I think — no, not at all. Is he really, truly mine, in fact? Hettie betrayed Udo Hoff with me — might she not have been betraying me with somebody else? Can I ever be certain?

♦

And on this note I think back, as I often do, to that October dawn on Hampstead Heath as I was waiting for sunrise, waiting for Vandenbrook to arrive. I knew it would be him and I hoped that sunrise that day would bring understanding and clarity with it — or at least clearer vision. And I thought I had it as I pinned ‘Andromeda’ to Vandenbrook’s coat. Everything solved, explained. But as the day wore on other questions nagged at me, troubled me and set me thinking again, until by dusk all was confusion once more. Maybe this is what life is like — we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick.

I feel, after what I have gone through, that I understand a little of our modern world now, as it exists today. And perhaps I’ve been offered a glimpse into its future. I was provided with the chance to see the mighty industrial technologies of the twentieth-century war machine both at its massive, bureaucratic source and at its narrow, vulnerable human target. And yet, for all the privileged insight and precious knowledge that I gleaned, I felt that the more I seemed to know, then the more clarity and certainty dimmed and faded away. As we advance into the future the paradox will become clearer — clear and black, blackly clear. The more we know the less we know. Funnily enough, I can live with that idea quite happily. If this is our modern world I feel a very modern man.

♦

I met Munro at noon by the north-east lion at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. It was a grey, cold day of intermittent rain and drizzle and we were both wearing rubberized trenchcoats, like a couple of tourists. A heavy shower had passed through ten minutes before and the paving stones were glossy and lacquered, the wet smoky façades of the surrounding buildings — the Royal College of Physicians, the National Gallery, St Martin’s — almost a velvety black. The brief sun was trying vainly to break through the thick grey clouds, managing only to illumine some breeze-blown interstices, and this, coupled with the gloomy effect of the heavy purpley mass of more rain coming up the Thames estuary, cast a curious gold-leaden light on the scene, making the vistas down Pall Mall, Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue seem lit by arc-lights, artificial and strange, as if the city blocks could be struck like stage scenery and re-assembled elsewhere. I felt uncomfortable and edgy, troubled by the weather and the curious light, almost as if I were in a theatre, acting.