William Boyd - Waiting for Sunrise

“But that’s ridiculous. Just because you’re a Slovene?”

Wolfram smiled at him, tiredly.

“How many countries are there in our great empire?”

“Austria, Hungary and…” Lysander thought. “And Croatia —”

“You haven’t even started. Carnolia, Moravia, Galicia, Bosnia, Dalmatia — it’s a vegetable soup, a great big stinking salad. Not to mention the Italians or the Ukrainians. I’ll take one more whisky.”

Lysander poured it for him.

“You have Austria.” Wolfram moved the bottle and put down the glass beside it. “You have Hungary. The rest of us are like the harem for these two powerful Sultans. They take us when they want, violate us when they feel the need. So — who stole the Colonel’s money? Ah, must be the wily Slovene.”

There was a knock on the door and Traudl looked in, blushing.

“Lieutenant Rozman, sir, your Fiaker is here.”

Wolfram stood, did up the buttons on his collar, pulled on his gloves, grabbed his sabre.

“Good luck,” Lysander said and they shook hands. “You’re an innocent man, you’ve nothing to fear.”

Wolfram smiled, shrugged. “No human being is entirely innocent…”

“True, I suppose. But you know what I mean.”

“I’ll be fine,” Wolfram said. “The wily Slovene has a few surprises up his sleeve.” He gave a little bow, clicked his heels — his spurs rattled, dryly — and he left.

Lysander returned to his desk and opened Autobiographical Investigations , feeling a certain mild despondency. Win or lose, Wolfram’s stay at the pension must be nearly over — he would either be returning to barracks, vindicated, or, disgraced, be cast adrift on to the sea of civilian life. Back to Slovenia, probably…He would miss him. He began to jot down some of the facts in the case of Lt. Wolfram Rozman. ‘No human being is entirely innocent’, he wrote, and the thought came to him that, if one were planning to steal something, it would indeed be a clever ploy to make sure that there were a dozen other potential suspects. A cluster of suspects obscuring the guilty one. He underlined the sentence: ‘No human being is entirely innocent’. Perhaps it was time to tell Bensimon his darkest, most shameful secret…

There was another knock on his door. He looked at his wristwatch — Herr Barth wasn’t due for an hour. He said, “Come in,” and Traudl appeared again and shut the door behind her.

“Hello, Traudl. What can I do for you?”

“Frau Kriwanek is visiting her sister and Herr Barth is sleeping in his room.”

“Well, thank you for the information.”

“As he was leaving Lieutenant Rozman gave me twenty crowns and told me to come and see you.”

“What for?”

“To give you some pleasure.”

At this she stooped and lifted her thick skirt and apron to her waist and in the penumbra they cast Lysander saw the pale columns of her thighs and the dark triangle of her pubic hair.

“It won’t be necessary, Traudl.”

“What about the twenty crowns?”

“You keep them. I’ll tell Lieutenant Rozman we had a very nice time.”

“You’re a kind, good man, Herr Rief.” Traudl curtsied.

No human being is entirely innocent, Lysander thought, going to the door and opening it for her. He searched his trouser pockets for change, thinking to tip her, but all he found was a visiting card. She didn’t need tipping anyway — she’d just earned twenty crowns.

“I can come another time,” Traudl said.

“No, no. All’s well.”

He shut the door behind her. River of sex, indeed. He glanced at the card in his hand — whose was this?

“Captain Alwyn Munro DSO,” he read. “Military Attaché, British Embassy, Metternichgasse 6, Vienna III.”

Another bloody soldier. He put it on his desk.

It is the summer of 1900. I am fourteen years old and am living at Claverleigh Hall in East Sussex, the country seat of my stepfather, Lord Faulkner. My father has been dead for a year. My mother married Lord Faulkner nine months after my father’s funeral. She’s his second wife, the new Lady Faulkner. Everybody in the neighbourhood is pleased for old Lord Crickmay, a bluff, kindly man in his late fifties, a widower with one grown-up son.

I still don’t really know what I feel about this new arrangement, this new family, this new home. Claverleigh and its estate remain largely terra incognita to me. Beyond the two walled gardens there are woods and fields, copses and meadows, paddocks and two farms spread out across the downs of East Sussex. It’s a large well-run estate and I feel a permanent alien in it even though the servants in the house, the footmen, the housemaids, the coachmen and the gardeners, are all very friendly. They smile when they see me and call me ‘Master Lysander’.

I have been removed from my school in London — “Mrs Chalmers’ Demonstration School for Boys” — and am being tutored by the local curate, the Reverend Farmiloe, an old and learned bachelor. My mother tells me that, most likely, I shall be sent to a boarding school in the autumn.

It is a Saturday so I have no lessons but the Reverend Farmiloe has asked me to read a poem by Alexander Pope called ‘The Rape of the Lock’. I am finding it very hard-going. After lunch I take my book and wander out into the big walled garden, looking for a secluded bench where I can continue my laborious reading. I like poetry, I learn it easily by heart, but I find Alexander Pope almost incomprehensible — not like Keats or my favourite, Tennyson. The gardeners and the boys are out in the long herbaceous borders weeding and greet me as I pass: “Good day, Master Lysander.” I say hello — I know most of them by now. Old Digby the head gardener, Davy Bledlow and his son Tommy. Tommy is a couple of years older than me and has asked if I would like to go out hunting rabbits with him one day. He has a prize ferret called Ruby. I said, no thank you. I don’t want to hunt and kill rabbits — I think it’s cruel. Tommy Bledlow is a big lad with a broken nose flattened on his face that makes him look strange — a threatening clown. I leave the walled garden and cross the fence into Claverleigh Wood by the stile.

The sun shines down through the fresh green leaves of the ancient oaks and beeches. I find a mossy angle between two gnarled buttressing roots of a big oak. I am lying in a patch of sunshine and enjoying the warmth on my body. There’s a faint breeze. In the distance I can hear the sound of a train chuffing along the Lewes to Pevensey line. Birds are singing — a thrush, I think, a blackbird. It’s ideally peaceful. A warm summer’s day at the beginning of the new century in the south of England.

I open my book and begin to read, trying to concentrate. I stop and remove my boot and socks. Flexing my toes, I read on.

“Sol through white curtains shot a tim’rous ray

And op’d those eyes that must eclipse the day.”

In eighteenth-century London, a beautiful young woman is lying in bed, about to wake up, dress herself and start her social life — that much was fairly clear. I ease back so my head is in shadow and my body in sunlight.

“Belinda still her downy pillow breast,”

Not ‘breast’, I see, but ‘prest’. Why did I read breast? The association of downy pillow, a girl in her night clothes, disarrayed and open enough perhaps to reveal — I turned the page.

“… Shock , who thought she slept too long

Leapt up, and wak’d his mistress with his tongue.”

Who’s this ‘Shock’? But I am thinking of the downstairs maid — isn’t she called Belinda? — I think so, the tall one with the cheeky face. She has ‘downy pillows’, all right. That time I saw her kneeling, relaying a fire, with her sleeves rolled up and her buttons undone. I know what a ‘mistress’ is — but how did he wake her with his tongue?…