by William Boyd
‘What happened to the young gardener?’
‘He was dismissed immediately, by the estate manager, without pay and references. It was that or the police. His father protested that his son had done nothing – though he had to admit he hadn’t been in the garden all afternoon – and he was dismissed as well.’
‘Who could possibly disbelieve young Master Lysander?’
‘Yes, exactly. I feel very guilty. Still do. I’ve no idea what happened to them. They lost their cottage on the estate, as well. I took ill – I remember crying for days – and I was in bed for a fortnight. Then my mother took me to a hotel in Margate. I was examined by doctors – I was given all kinds of medicines for my “nerves”. Then I was packed off to my terrible boarding school.’
‘It was never spoken of again?’
‘Never. I was the victim, you see. Ill, shattered, pale. Every time someone asked me about the incident I started to weep. So everyone was very careful with me, very worried about what I had “endured”. Walking on eggshells, you know.’
‘Interesting that you blamed the gardener’s son . . .’ Bensimon wrote something down. ‘What was his name again?’
‘Tommy Bledlow.’
‘You still remember.’
‘I’m hardly likely to forget it.’
‘He had asked you to go hunting with him – with his ferret.’
‘I’d said no.’
‘Did you have homosexual feelings for him?’
‘Ah . . . No. Or at least I wasn’t aware of any. He had been the last person I had spoken to. In my panic, in the urgency of the moment, I just plucked his name from the air.’
Lysander took a tram back to Mariahilfer Strasse. He sat in something of a daze as they made their clattering and rocking way across town. Bensimon had been the only person to whom he had ever told the truth about that summer’s day at the turn of the century and he had to admit that the recounting of his dire and dark secret had produced a form of catharsis. He felt a strange lightness, a distancing from his past and, as he looked around him, from the world he was moving through and its denizens. He contemplated his fellow passengers in Tram K – saw them reading, chatting, lost in their thoughts, staring blankly out of the window as the city flowed by – and felt a peculiar sense of exclusiveness. Like the man with the winning lottery ticket in his pocket – or the murderer returning unspotted from the scene of his crime – he sensed himself above and apart from them, almost superior. If only you knew what I have disclosed today; if only you knew how everything in my life was going to be different now . . .
This last was wishful thinking, he quickly realized. What had happened that afternoon in June 1900 was the erased passage in the narrative of his life, a long white gap between two parentheses in the account of his days as a fourteen-year-old boy. He had never thought about it subsequently – erecting an impenetrable mental cordon sanitaire – pre-empting all catalysts that might stir unwelcome memories. He had walked many times in Claverleigh Wood; he and his mother were very close; he had talked to gardeners and estate workers without once bringing Tommy Bledlow to mind. The event was gone, the incident banished – effectively lost in time – as if some diseased organ or tumour had been removed from his body and incinerated.
He paused, stepping down from the tram at his halt, wondering why he had unthinkingly chosen that image. No – he was glad that he had told everything to Bensimon. Perhaps, at root, this was all psychoanalysis could really achieve: it authorized you to talk about crucially, elementally, important matters – that you couldn’t relate to anybody else – under the guise of a formal therapeutic discourse. What could Bensimon say to him, now, that he couldn’t say to himself? The act of confession was a form of liberation and he wondered if he needed Bensimon any more. Still, he did feel almost physically different from the man who had written down the events of that day. And writing it down was important, also, he could see that. Something had changed – it had been a purging of sorts, an opening up, a cleansing.
He walked slowly and thoughtfully home from the tram-halt to the pension, stopping only to buy a hundred English Virginia cigarettes from the tobacconist at the junction of Mariahilfer Strasse and the pension’s courtyard. He wondered vaguely if he were smoking too much – what he needed was a bracing twenty-mile hike in the mountains. He started to contemplate pleasantly where he might go this weekend.
Traudl was dusting down the glass-domed owl when he pushed open the door. She didn’t curtsey, he noticed, and her welcoming smile seemed a little more knowing. Not surprisingly, Lysander thought, now we both have our own new secret to share.
‘The lieutenant would like to see you, sir,’ she said, then, glancing around, whispered, ‘Remember about the twenty crowns.’
‘Don’t worry. He’ll just assume we – you know . . .’
‘Yes. Good. Be sure to say this, sir, please.’
‘I will, Traudl. Rest assured.’
‘And I put your post in your room, sir.’
‘Thank you.’
Lysander knocked on Wolfram’s door and, summoned, went in. He could see at once from Wolfram’s wide smile and the bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket that all had gone well at the tribunal. He was back in his civilian clothes – a caramel tweed suit with chocolate-coloured tie.
‘Acquitted!’ Wolfram said with a maestro’s gesture, arms raised in a flourish, and they shook hands warmly.
‘Congratulations. I hope it wasn’t too much of an ordeal,’ Lysander said.
Wolfram busied himself with the opening and pouring of the champagne.
‘Well, they try to scare you to death, of course,’ he said. ‘All those senior officers in their dress uniforms and their most disapproving expressions – solemn, solemn faces. Keep you waiting for hours.’ He topped Lysander up. ‘If you keep your nerve, your dignity, you’re halfway there.’ He smiled. ‘Your excellent whisky was most helpful in that department.’
They clinked glasses, drank.
‘So, it’s all over,’ Lysander said. ‘What made them see sense?’
‘An embarrassing lack of evidence. But I gave them something to think about. It helped move the spotlight away from the wily Slovene.’
‘Oh, yes – what?’
‘There’s this captain in the regiment, Frankenthal. Doesn’t like me. Arrogant man. I found a way of reminding my superior officers that Frankenthal is a Jewish name.’ Wolfram shrugged. ‘Frankenthal had the key for a week, just like me.’
‘What’s his Jewishness got to do with it?’
‘He’s not a Jew – his family converted to Catholicism a generation ago. But still . . .’ Wolfram smiled, mischievously. ‘They should have changed their name.’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘My dear Lysander – if they can’t pin the crime on a Slovene then a Jew is even better.’ Wolfram drained his glass. ‘Serves the disagreeable fellow right. And I have a month’s leave, by way of apology for my “ordeal”. So – you’ll still see a bit more of me. Then we go on manoeuvres at the end of September.’ He smiled. ‘How was the country girl, eh?’
‘Oh, Traudl, yes. Most enjoyable. Thank you very much.’ Lysander changed the subject quickly. ‘What would you have done if they hadn’t acquitted you?’
Wolfram thought for a second. ‘I would have killed myself, most likely.’ He frowned, as though thinking through the options, rationally. ‘A bullet to the head, most likely. Or poison.’
‘Surely not? My god.’
‘No, no – you have to understand, Lysander, here in Vienna, in this ramshackle empire of ours, suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action. Everyone will know your true feelings and why you had no choice but to do it – no one will condemn you or blame you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Once you understand that you will understand us.’ Wolfram smiled. ‘It lies very deep in our being. Selbstmord – death of the self: it’s an honourable farewell to this world.’
They finished the bo
ttle and Lysander went back to his room feeling the effects of the alcohol. He thought he might skip dinner tonight – maybe go out to a café and carry on drinking. He felt buoyant, pleased about Wolfram, of course, and pleased that he himself had finally opened up the sealed casket of his past.
Propped on his desk was his post. A letter from Blanche, one from his bank in London and one with an Austrian stamp and handwriting he didn’t recognize. He tore it open. It was an invitation to the Vernissage of an exhibition of ‘recent work’ by the artist Udo Hoff at an art gallery – the Bosendorfer-Renz Galerie für moderne Kunst – in the centre of town. Written across the bottom in green ink in large bulbous letters was the injunction: ‘Do come! Hettie Bull.’
11. Parallelism
Lysander had moved from the chair to the divan at Bensimon’s suggestion. He wasn’t sure yet what this displacement and change in bodily alignment would signify, but Bensimon had been insistent. His head propped on pillows, Lysander still had an excellent view of the African bas-relief.
‘How old was your mother when your father died?’ Bensimon asked.
‘Thirty-five . . . Thirty-six. Yes.’
‘Still a young woman.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘How did she take your father’s death?’
Lysander thought back, remembering his own awful shock, his utter misery, when the news had been delivered. Through the dark mists of his own fraught recollection he remembered how abject his mother had been.
‘She took it very badly indeed – not surprisingly. She adored my father – she lived for him. She abandoned her own career when they married. She travelled with him when he travelled. When I was born I went with them also. He had his own theatre company, you see, apart from his work in the London theatres. She helped him run it, did the day-to-day administration. We were touring constantly all over England, Scotland, Ireland. We lived in rented houses, flats – never really had a place of our own. When he died we were living in a flat in South Kensington. For all his fame and success my father died virtually bankrupt – he’d sunk all his money into the Halifax Rief Theatre Company. There was very little left over for her. I remember we had to move to lodgings in Paddington. Two rooms, one fireplace, sharing a kitchen and a bathroom with two other families.’
Lysander could recall those rooms vividly. Grimy, uncleaned windows, worn, patched oilcloth on the floor. The smell of soot from the station nearby, the hoot and whistle from the marshalling yards, the metallic clash and thunder of railway wagons and the sound of his mother, morning and night, weeping quietly. Then somehow she met Crickmay Faulkner and everything changed.
Lysander thought before he added, ‘For a while she rather took to drink. Very discreetly – but in the months after the funeral she drank a lot. She was never unseemly but when she came to bed I could smell it on her.’
‘Came to bed?’
‘We had a sitting room and a bedroom in those lodgings,’ Lysander said. ‘We shared the bed. Until Lord Faulkner proposed marriage and he set us up in a larger house in Putney where I had my own room.’
‘I see. How did your mother meet your father? Did he come to Vienna?’
‘No. My mother sang in a chorus of a touring German opera company. They were touring England and Scotland in 1884. She had – has – a very fine mezzo-soprano voice. She was in Glasgow performing in Wagner’s Tristan at the King’s that was alternating with the Halifax Rief Theatre Company’s production of Macbeth. They met backstage. Love at second sight, my father used to say.’
‘Why second sight?’
‘Because he said that at first sight his thoughts were hardly “amorous”. If you see what I mean.’
‘I do, I do. “Love at second sight.” A pretty compliment.’
‘Why are you asking me all these questions about my mother, Dr Bensimon? I’m no Oedipus, you know.’
‘Heaven forfend, I’m sure you’re not. But I think what you told me – what you read out to me the last time – holds the key to your eventual recovery. I’m just trying to get more context about you, about your life.’
Lysander registered the sound of his chair being pushed back. The session was over.
‘Do you remember I asked you if you’d heard of Parallelism?’ Bensimon had crossed the room into the very edge of his field of vision. A shadow with his hand extended. Lysander swung his legs off the divan, stood up and was offered a small book, little more than a pamphlet. He took it. Navy-blue cover with silver lettering. Our Parallel Lives, an introduction, by Dr J. Bensimon MB, BS (Oxon).
‘I had it privately printed. I’m working on the full-length version. My magnum opus. Taking rather a long time, I’m afraid.’
Lysander turned the book over in his hands.
‘Can you give me the gist?’
‘Well, bit of a challenge. Let’s say that the world is in essence neutral – flat, empty, bereft of meaning and significance. It’s us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling, purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want. In theory.’
‘Sounds very radical.’
‘On the contrary – it’s very commonsensical, once you get to grips with it. Have a read, see what you think.’ He looked at Lysander, searchingly. ‘I hesitate to say this, and I very rarely make this leap, but I have a feeling Parallelism will cure you, Mr Rief, I really do.’
12. Andromeda
Lysander felt uneasy and strangely unsure of himself on the day of Udo Hoff’s Vernissage. He hadn’t slept well and even as he shaved that morning he felt a little odd and jittery – uncharacteristically nervous about going to the exhibition, about meeting Hettie Bull again. He soaped his brush in his shaving mug and worked the lather into his cheeks, chin and around his jaw, wondering automatically, as he pursed his lips and ran the brush under his nose, whether he ought to grow a moustache. No, came the usual, instant answer. He had tried it before and it didn’t suit him; it made him look dirty, he thought, as if he had forgotten to wipe away a smear of oxtail soup from his upper lip. He had the wrong colour of brown hair for a moustache. You needed stark contrast, he thought, to justify a moustache on a young face – like that chap Munro at the embassy, black and neat, as if he’d stuck it on.
He dressed with care, selecting his navy-blue lightweight suit, black brogues and a stiff-collared white shirt that he wore with a scarlet, polka-dotted, four-in-hand tie. A splash of bold colour to show how artistic he was. His father would not have approved – a natty and particular dresser himself, Halifax Rief always maintained that it should take a good five minutes before anyone noticed your style or the care and thought that lay behind the clothes a man wore. Any form of ostentation was vulgar.
Lysander decided to visit the Kunsthistorisches Hofmuseum on the Burgring. It was a gesture, he knew, and a futile one at that, but he was imagining himself at the gallery for Hoff’s exhibition, the room full of people, all expert and opinionated about art, ancient and modern. What could he say to such intellectuals, art critics, collectors and connoisseurs? He was conscious again of the huge gaps in his knowledge of general culture. He could quote pages of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sheridan, Ibsen, Shaw – or at least those parts of the playwrights’ work he’d had to con in his career. He had read a lot of nineteenth-century poetry – poetry he loved – but he knew very little of what was perceived to be ‘avant-garde’. He bought newspapers and magazines and kept up with world events and European politics, to a degree, and he realized that, on first impression, he presented a highly plausible rendition of a worldly, informed, educated man – but he knew how flimsy the disguise was whenever he encountered people with real brains. You’re an actor, he rebuked himself, so act intelligent! There’s plenty of time to acquire knowledge, he thought, you’re not remotely a fool, there’s a lot of native brain-power there. It’s not your fault that you were badly educated, moving from school to school. Your adult life has been focussed on your theatrical career – auditions, reh
earsals, small roles becoming more significant. Only in the last play he’d been in, The Amorous Ultimatum, could he have been legitimately considered a leading man – or second leading man, at any rate – his name on the poster in the same type-size as Mrs Cicely Brightwell, no less, and no better benchmark to show how far he’d come in only a few years. His father would have been proud of him.
In the museum he wandered through the grand galleries on the first floor, looking at the gloomy, varnished images of saints and madonnas, mythical gods and melancholy crucifixions, stepping close to read the names of the artists on the bottom of the frame and mentally checking them off. Caravaggio, Titian, Bonifazio, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. He knew these names, of course, but he could now say, ‘Do you know Bordone’s Venus and Adonis? I was looking at it just today – yes, funnily enough – in the Hofmuseum. Splendid, very affecting.’ He began to relax a little. It was just an act, after all, and that was his métier, his talent, his calling.
He wandered on. Now all the painters were Dutch – Rembrandt, Franz Hals, Hobbema, Memling. And what was this? Attack by Robbers by Philip Wouverman. Dark and powerful, the swarthy brigands armed with silver cutlasses and spiky halberds. ‘Do you know Wouverman’s work? Very striking.’ Where were the Germans? Ah, here we are – Cranach, D’Pfenning, Albrecht Dürer . . . But names were beginning to jumble and distort in his head and he felt a sudden tiredness hit him. Too much art – museum-fatigue. Time for a cigarette and a Kapuziner. He had enough names in his head to sustain any fleeting social chit-chat – it wasn’t as if he was going to be interviewed for a job as a curator, for heaven’s sake.
He found a coffee stall on the Ring and leaned on its counter, smoking a Virginia and sipping his coffee. It really was a splendid boulevard, he thought – nothing remotely like it in London, the Mall was the only contender, but feeble in comparison – the great circular sweep of the roadways girdling the old town, the careful positioning of the huge buildings and palaces, their parks and gardens. Very beautiful. He looked at his wristwatch – he still had an hour or so to kill before he could reasonably make an entrance at the gallery. He wondered what Udo Hoff would be like. Bound to be very pretentious, he imagined, exactly the sort of man who could lure and impress a Hettie Bull.