by William Boyd
His idea – his inspiration – came from a performance of his father’s that he remembered when Halifax Rief had played Poor Tom, Tom O’Bedlam, Edgar in disguise, the madman whom King Lear meets during the storm. To feign Tom’s madness his father had put axle grease in his hair to make stiff spikes, had smeared more grease on his lip below his nose and had filled his shoes with sharp gravel. The transformation had been extraordinary – unable to walk normally or comfortably, his gait had become at once rolling and jerky, and the smear of grease looked like snot from an uncontrollably running nose. The uncombed, outlandish greasy hair added an extra aura of filth and neglect. A tattered jerkin had finished off the transmutation.
Lysander couldn’t go that far but he aimed in that direction. He picked up some round pebbles from the gravelled pathways and put them in his brown shoes that he loosely and partially laced. Then he unbuttoned the cuffs on his serge jacket and rolled them up towards his elbow, letting the link-free cuffs of his shirt dangle. He buttoned the jacket badly, fitting buttons to the wrong buttonholes so it gaped askew at the neck. He put his tie in his pocket. Then he scissored off clumps of his hair at random, adding swipes of Vaseline – not forgetting a thick snot-smear under his nose. Then he picked up his seatless chair and his looped skein of straw, slung it over one shoulder and his linen sack over the other and shuffle-limped off to the jetty where the steamer was berthed. He looked, he assumed, like some poor itinerant gypsy simpleton, earning a few centimes by repairing furniture.
He could see no police or evident plainclothesmen eyeing the small queue of passengers waiting to board. He let most of them embark before he clambered painfully up the gangway, showed his ticket and went immediately to the seats at the stern, where he sat down, head bowed, muttering to himself. As expected, no one wanted to sit too close to him. No passports were required as the steamer was making a round trip and would be back in Geneva at the end of the day. Massinger would have received his telegram and would have plenty of time to make his way to Evian in time for the steamer’s arrival. Once they were together he could brief him on the essential contents of the Glockner letters. He imagined it would not take long to discover who was the source of the information in the War Office – only a few people could be privy to that mass of detail.
He heard the engines begin to thrum and vibrate through the decking beneath his feet and he allowed himself a small thrill of exultation. He had done it – it had not been easy, it had been the opposite of easy – but he had done the job he had been sent to do. What more could anyone ask of him?
The steamer began to ease away from the pier and head out into the open waters of the lake. The morning was cloudy with a few patches of blue sky here and there but, when the sun broke through, the dazzle from the lake-surface made his eyes sting so he sought the shade of the awnings. Soon they were out in the main water, at full steam, making for Nyon, and Lysander felt he could safely go below and remove his disguise.
In the lavatory, as cleaned-up as he could make himself, he stamped and levered the kitchen chair into pieces and stuffed the lengths of splintered pine and the bundle of straw into the dark empty cupboard that ran beneath the two sinks. He put on his Macintosh and his flat golfing hat and checked himself in the mirror, adjusting his cuffs and re-buttoning his coat correctly. Fine – just another tourist enjoying a tour of the lake. He tossed his empty linen sack into the cupboard as well – everything he needed was in his pockets. He flushed the lavatory for form’s sake and unlocked the door.
After Nyon, the steamer ceased hugging the shore and made directly across the lake for Ouchy, the port of Lausanne. From Ouchy the course was directly to Vevey before turning back a half-circle west, with Montreux and its wooded hills in full view, the wide mouth of the Rhône backdropped by the jagged peaks of the Dents du Midi in the distance.
He wandered down to the stern and leaned on the railings, looking out at the wake and the retreating vistas of Geneva and its ring of low hills and distant mountains. There were a few of the famous Genevan barques out on the water, low free-boarded, two-masters with big-bellied, sharply pointed triangular sails that seemed to operate independently. From certain angles they looked like giant butterflies that had settled for a moment on the lake, their wings poised and still, to drink. He watched their slow progress and waited until there was no other passenger near him and quickly tossed his small revolver into the water. He turned, no one had noticed. He walked away from the stern.
On any other day he would have enjoyed the spectacular views but he patrolled the decks restlessly, instead, his mind busy and agitated. There was a small glassed-in salon set behind the tall thin smoke stack where light meals and refreshments were served, but he didn’t feel hungry; he felt suddenly weary, in fact, exhausted from the stress of the last twenty-four hours. He climbed some steps to a small sun-deck in front of the bridge where he hired a canvas deckchair from a steward for two francs. He sat down and pulled the peak of his cap over his eyes. If he couldn’t sleep at least he might doze – some rest, a little rest, was what he needed, all he asked for.
He was dreaming of Hettie who was running through a wide unkempt garden holding the hand of a little dark-haired boy. Were they fleeing something – or were they just playing? He woke – upset – trying to remember the little boy’s features. Had he somehow encountered Lothar in his dream – his son whom he had never set eyes on, not even in a photograph? But Lothar was only a year old, now – this little boy was older, four or five. Couldn’t possibly be –
‘You slept for nearly two hours.’
His head jerked round.
Florence Duchesne sat in a deckchair three feet away from him, in her usual black, a baggy velvet hat held on her head with a chiffon scarf.
‘My god,’ he said. ‘Scared me to death. I was dreaming.’
He sat up, regaining his bearings. The sun was lower in the sky, the hills on the left were less mountainous. France?
‘Where are we?’
‘We’ll be in Evian-les-Bains in an hour.’ She looked at him – could that be the hint of a smile?
‘I almost missed you,’ she said. ‘I thought you hadn’t boarded. I had seen you – the chair and the sack, the curious limping way you had walked. Then, just as the steamer was about to leave, I realized. That’s him, surely? I remembered Massinger had warned me – be alert, he won’t look like the man you’re expecting to see.’
‘How would Massinger know that?’
She shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. He just warned me that you might be disguised. Anyway, bravo – no one would have guessed it was you.’
‘You can’t be too careful . . .’ He thought for a second. ‘But what’re you doing here, anyway?’
‘Massinger wanted to be sure you got away safely. Asked me to chaperone you, discreetly. I’ve had a nice day out – I’ll just take the steamer back to Geneva.’
‘What did you mean in your note when you said people were “concerned”?’
‘Manfred Glockner is dead.’
‘What?’
‘He died of a heart attack. He was found unconscious in his apartment and rushed to hospital – but it was too late.’
Lysander swallowed. Jesus Christ.
‘Do you know any reason why he should have died?’ she asked him, casually.
‘He was fine when I left him,’ Lysander improvised, thinking of the meshed wire of the scourer, the strong domestic electric current . . . ‘I gave him the money, he counted it, then he told me the key to the cipher and I left.’
She was looking at him very closely.
‘The money was found in his attaché case,’ she said.
‘How do you know?’ he countered.
‘I have a contact at the German consulate.’
‘What kind of contact?’
‘A man whose post I opened. It contained photographs that he would prefer remained private. Some of them I kept in case I had to remind him. So when I need to know something he’s very happy to tel
l me.’
Lysander stood up and went to the railing. He had to be very, very careful, he knew – yet he wasn’t exactly sure himself why he had lied to her so instantly. He looked across the placid lake waters at the French shore – the hills were rising again and he saw a small perfect château situated right at the water’s edge.
Madame Duchesne came to join him at the railing. He turned and had a good view of her profile as she stared at the slowly approaching shoreline. The perfect curve of her small nose, like a beak. Her nostrils flared as she inhaled deeply and her breasts rose. There was something about her that stirred him, she –
‘Beautiful château – it’s called the Château de Blonay,’ she said. ‘I’d like to live somewhere like that.’
‘Might be a bit lonely.’
‘I wasn’t imagining living there alone.’
She turned to him.
‘What’s the key to the cipher? Did Glockner give you the text?’
‘No. It’s in my head. He told me how it worked – it’s very simple.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the bible – in German,’ Lysander said. He had never expected her to ask him this, directly. ‘But the trick is that the first number doesn’t correspond. It’s a double-cipher. You have to subtract a figure or add to get to the right page.’
‘What’s the trick? It seems very complicated.’ She didn’t seem convinced, frowning. ‘What makes it correspond?’
‘It’s probably best if I don’t tell you.’
‘Massinger will want to know.’
‘I’ll tell him when I see him.’
‘But you won’t tell me.’
‘The information in the letters is extremely important.’
‘You don’t trust me,’ she said, her face still impassive. ‘It’s obvious.’
‘I do. But there are times when the less you know, the better for you. Just in case.’
‘I’ve got something to show you,’ she said. ‘Perhaps when you see it, you’ll trust me.’
She led him down the stairway and through a door and down further stairs. The churning grind of the steamer’s engines grew louder as they descended through a bulkhead to another deck.
‘Where are we going?’ he asked, having to raise his voice.
‘I’ve hired a little cabin, right down below.’
They found themselves in a narrow corridor. Lysander had practically to shout to make himself heard.
‘There are no cabins down here!’
‘Round this corner, you’ll see!’
They turned the corner. A door said, ‘Défense d’Entrer’ and there was a steep metal stairway rising to the upper decks again. They seemed right above the engine room.
‘Wait one second!’ she shouted, rummaging in her handbag.
She drew out her small, short-barrelled revolver and pointed it at him.
‘Hey! No!’ he yelled, completely shocked and knowing instantly that she was going to shoot him. He raised the palm of his left hand reflexively in a futile gesture of protection.
The first shot, misaimed, hit him in the left thigh, making him stagger from its impact, though he felt nothing. He saw the second, immediately after, blast through the back of his raised left hand and felt the blow, like a punch, as the bullet hit his left shoulder, canting him round sideways for the third shot to slam into his chest, high on the right-hand side.
He went down heavily on to the studded metal floor and heard the noise of her feet clatter up the stairway. He raised himself off the ground on his elbows and caught the shockingly distressing sight of his own vibrant, red blood beginning to spill and pool beneath him before he slumped back again and felt his body begin to go numb, hearing the jocular, breathy phoot-phoot! phoot-phoot! of the steamer’s whistle announcing its imminent arrival at the sunny bustling quayside of Evian-les-Bains.
PART FOUR
LONDON, 1915
1. Autobiographical Investigations
So, the one agreeable bonus of all this is that I finally found a way of gaining admittance to Oxford University. Here I am in Somerville College on the Woodstock Road experiencing a simulacrum of the varsity life. While I have a room off a staircase in a quadrangle in a women’s college there are no women (apart from nurses and domestic staff) – the undergraduettes having been decanted to Oriel College for the duration of the war. We are all men here, wounded officers from France and other battlefields with our various incapacities – some shocking (the multiple amputees, the burned) and some invisible: the catatonic victims of mental dementia caused by the concussion of huge guns and images of unconscionable brutality and awfulness. Somerville is now part of the 3rd Southern General Hospital, as the Radcliffe Infirmary, a few yards further up the Woodstock Road, has been renamed.
Florence Duchesne shot me three times and caused seven wounds. Let’s begin with the last. Her third and final squeeze of the trigger sent a bullet through my chest, high on the right-hand side, entering two inches below my collar-bone and exiting above my shoulder blade. Her second shot blasted through my left hand – that I’d raised in futile protection – and sped on, undeterred, through it and through the muscle of my left shoulder. I remember seeing – in a split second – the flower of blood bloom on the back of my hand as the bullet passed through. The scar has healed well but I have enduring stigmata – one in the middle of my palm, and one on the back of my hand – puckered brown and rose badges the size of a sixpence. Her first shot was a miss, of sorts – a misaim, certainly: she hadn’t raised the gun sufficiently when she fired and I was hit in the top of my left thigh where the bullet smashed into a small bundle of change in my pocket, driving some of the coins deep into the rectus femoris muscle. The surgeon later told me he’d extracted four francs and sixty-seven centimes – he gave them to me in a small envelope.
The shot in the chest caused my lung to collapse and I think produced the copious flow of blood that I saw before I passed out. My good fortune – if such a concept is valid in a case of multiple gunshot wounds – is that six of my seven wounds were entry and exit. Only the pocketful of coins denied egress and – now I’m feeling much better – only my thigh still causes me discomfort and makes me walk with a limp and, for the moment, compels the use of a cane.
I’m also lucky in that, after Florence Duchesne shot me and disappeared, some mechanic or stoker emerged from the engine room and found me lying there in the widening pool of my own blood. I was swiftly taken to a small nursing home in Evian and then Massinger, who eventually tracked me down, had me transferred immediately across country by private motor ambulance to the British base hospital at Rouen.
I convalesced there for four weeks as my injured lung kept filling with blood and had to be aspirated regularly. My left hand was in a cast as some small bones had been broken by the bullet on its way through but the persistent problem was my left thigh. The bullet and the small change were extracted in Rouen but the wound seemed continually to re-infect itself and had to be drained and cleaned and re-dressed. I was obliged to walk around on crutches for most of my stay there.
I was shipped back to England and Oxford towards the end of August. My mother came to visit me almost as soon as I was installed in Somerville. She rushed into my room wearing black and for a fraught, shocked moment I thought Florence Duchesne had returned to finish me off. Crickmay Faulkner had died a month before – while I was in Geneva, in fact – and my mother was still in mourning.
She told me that the worst night of her life had occurred when she received the telegram that I was ‘missing in action’. Crickmay was close to death and she thought her son had been snatched away, also. The next morning, however, she had a visit from a ‘naval officer’ – bearded, with a most curious, eerie smile, she said – who had come all the way to Claverleigh to tell her that I was believed to have been captured, unharmed. She found it very hard to understand how it came about that I was now in hospital in England, ‘riddled with bullets’. I told her that the naval officer (it
could only have been Fyfe-Miller) had been well intentioned but not in possession of all the facts.
Despite her new status of widow she seemed in excellent spirits, I had to admit, and she’d made the most of her mourning subfusc with a lot of black lace and ostrich feathers on display. Crickmay’s passing was a blessing, she said, much as she loved him, sweet old man, and Hugh was preparing a perfectly adorable cottage on the estate to serve as a kind of dower house for her. The charity fund was growing incrementally and she was to be presented at court to Queen Mary. After we had walked through the quadrangle and I had seen her into her taxi, one of my fellow wounded – who knew about my former life – wondered if she were an actress. When I told him no, he asked, ‘Is she your girl?’ War affects people in all manner of different ways, I suppose – in my mother’s case she was flourishing, visibly rejuvenated.
I received a telegram from Munro today, commiserating and congratulating simultaneously, and saying that we needed to assess the intelligence from the Glockner letters. And when that moment came he had a proposition to put to me. I reasoned that with Glockner dead the pressure to find the War Office source might have reduced somewhat – whoever our traitor was would have to seek out someone new to communicate with and that would obviously take some time.
Hamo has just left. He was very affected to see me – I was in bed, having just had my lung aspirated again – a concern that took the form of very specific questions about my wounds: what exactly were the physical sensations I felt at the moment of impact? Was the pain instant or did it arrive later? Did I find that the shock anaesthetized me in any way? Did the numbness endure for the length of time I lay out on the battlefield – and so on. I answered him as honestly as I could but kept deliberately vague about the reality of who had shot me and where. ‘I had the strangest feelings when I was wounded, that’s why I ask,’ Hamo said. ‘I’ve seen men screaming in agony from a broken finger, yet there I was, blood everywhere, and all I felt was a kind of fizzing, like pins and needles.’ When he left he took my hand and squeezed it hard. ‘Glad to have you back, dear boy. Dear brave lad.’