William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

What’s that?

Lysander:

Weaponry. Of every imaginable type. These cities are trying to destroy each other.

Munro:

Yes…It does make you think…

♦

He was silent for a while and kicked out a foot at a pigeon that was pecking too close to his brilliant shoes. The bird flapped away a few feet.

Munro:

Why did you kill Vandenbrook?

Lysander:

I didn’t. He killed himself. When I confronted him with the evidence about the libretto. He drew a gun and shot himself. Search his house — you’ll find the vital clue. The Andromeda und Perseus libretto is the key to all this.

Munro:

We can’t search his house. It wouldn’t do. Grieving widow, little weeping girls who’ve lost their father. Distinguished officer who took his own life, injured in battle, suffering from the awful pressures and stress of modern warfare…No, no. And his father-in-law would have something to say about us sending men in and tearing the place apart.

Lysander:

Then you’ll have to take my word for it, won’t you?

♦

Silence. We looked at each other, giving nothing away.

Munro:

I was sorry to hear about your mother.

Lysander:

Yes. It’s a real tragedy. She just couldn’t cope, I suppose. But it was something she wanted to do. I respect that.

Munro:

Of course…Of course…What about you, Rief? What do you want to do now?

Lysander:

I want my honourable discharge. No more army for me. My war’s finished.

Munro:

I think we can arrange that. It’s the least you deserve.

♦

We shook hands, said a simple goodbye and walked away from each other, Munro heading back down Northumberland Avenue to Whitehall Court and me strolling up the Strand to Surrey Street and 3 / 12 Trevelyan House. I didn’t look back and I assume Munro didn’t, either. It was over.

It is a dark, foggy, drizzly night in London, near the end of 1915. The fog, pearly and smoky, seems to curl and hang — as if from a million snuffed candles — around the city blocks like something almost growing and sinuously weedy, blanketing and vast, seeking out doorways and stairways, alleyways and side streets, the levels of the roofs quite invisible. The streetlamps drop a struggling moist yellow cone of luminescence that seems to wane as soon as the light hits the shining pavement in its small hazed circle, as if the effort of piercing the engulfing murky darkness and falling there were all it could manage.

You are standing shivering in the angle of two walls in Archer Street, peering out, trying to discern the late-night world go by, your attention half-caught by the small crowd of enthusiastic theatre-goers waiting with their programmes for an autograph as the cast of Man and Superman leaves the stage door after the show. Exhalations of rapture, an impromptu smatter of applause. Eventually the people drift away as the actors come through, sign, chat briefly and leave.

The light is switched off but you see that the door opens one last time and a man appears with a raincoat and a hat in his hand. He looks up at the opaque night sky, checking on the dismal weather, and you will probably recognize him as Mr Lysander Rief, who is playing the part of John Tanner, the leading role in Man and Superman , by Mr George Bernard Shaw. Lysander Rief looks tired — he looks like a man who is not sleeping well. So why is he quitting the theatre so discreetly, the very last to leave? He puts his hat on and sets off and — vaguely curious — you decide to follow him, left into Wardour Street and then quickly right into Old Compton Street. You keep your distance as you watch him make his way home through the thickening condensations of the night. He pauses frequently to look around him and, as he goes, he takes an odd swerving course along the street, crossing and re-crossing the roadway, as if keen to avoid the bleary yellow circles cast by the streetlamps. You give up after a minute — you’ve better things to do — and you leave Mr Lysander Rief to make his erratic way home, wherever that may be, as best he can. Good luck to him — he’s evidently a man who prefers the fringes and the edges of the city streets, its blurry peripheries — where it’s hard to make things out clearly, hard to tell exactly what is what, and who is whom — Mr Lysander Rief looks like someone who is far more at ease occupying the cold security of the dark; a man happier with the dubious comfort of the shadows.

EOF