Waiting for Sunrise

by William Boyd

  Lysander found that he was sweating. Stop. That way madness lies. He thought of tips of icebergs or inverted pyramids but then an image came to him from nowhere that seemed to cohere with what he had been imagining more fittingly. A winter bonfire.

  He remembered how, on very cold days in winter, when you lit a bonfire the smoke sometimes refused to rise. The slightest breeze would move it flatly across the land, a low enlarging horizontal plume of smoke that hugged the ground and never dispersed into the air as it did with a normal fire on a warmer day. He saw all the monstrous, gargantuan effort of the war as a winter bonfire – yes, but in reverse. As if the drifting, ground-hugging pall of smoke were converging – arrowing in – on one point, to feed the small, angry conflagration of the fire. All those miles of broad, dense, drifting smoke narrowing, focussing on the little crackling flickering flames burning vivid orange amongst the fallen leaves and the dead branches.

  Lysander left Room 205 and wandered the corridors of the Directorate, passing other officers and secretarial staff as he went. Nobody paid him any attention, the ringing of the phones and the dry clatter of the typewriter keys a constant aural backdrop. He peered into one room where the door was ajar and saw three officers sitting at their desks all speaking into their telephones. Two women typists faced each other typing, as if duelling, somehow. He walked down the stairs and saw the signs on the other floors –

  MOVEMENTS, RAILWAYS AND ROADS

  INLAND WATER TRANSPORT (FRANCE)

  INSPECTOR-GENERAL (ALL THEATRES)

  IRISH RAILWAYS

  He stepped out, feeling exhausted and a little overwhelmed, on to the Embankment and took some deep breaths of dirty London air. He stretched, flexed his shoulder muscles, rolled his head around, easing his neck, feeling weak and almost tearful at the magnitude of the task he’d been set. Who the hell was Andromeda? And, when he found him, what would happen then?

  4. English Courage

  ‘You know,’ Hamo said over the noise of the engine, ‘I never feel nervous about anything in life but I feel strangely nervous today.’

  They were in the Turner two-seater motoring towards Romney on Sunday morning, heading for Bonham Johnson’s lunch party.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ Lysander said, leaning towards him and cupping his hand around his mouth. ‘I felt exactly the same the other day when I went into the War Office. First day at school.’ He looked around and saw a signpost flash by – Fairfield, 2 miles. ‘Let’s stop at a pub or a hotel and have a drink first. Dutch courage. Why’s it called Dutch courage? English courage is what we need.’

  ‘Excellent idea,’ Hamo said. He was wearing a flat leather cap, reversed, and driving goggles. They had the hood of the two-seater down as the day was fine, though breezy. They both wore greatcoats and Lysander had his Trilby tied securely on his head with his scarf.

  They found a small pub in Fairfield and ordered whisky sodas at the bar.

  Hamo said, ‘I’m just terrified that one of these literary types is going to ask me about Shakespeare or Milton.’

  ‘No they won’t. You’re the one they want to see and meet. You wrote The Lost Lake. That’s what they’ll want to talk about – not Keats and Wordsworth.’

  ‘I wish I had your confidence, my boy.’

  ‘Hamo, you’ve won the Victoria Cross, for god’s sake. They’re just a bunch of idle writers.’

  ‘Still . . .’

  ‘No. Do what I do. If I don’t feel confident I act confident.’

  ‘I’ll try. That’s exactly what your father would have said. D’you know, I think another whisky would help.’

  ‘Go on, then. Me too.’

  Lysander watched his uncle go up to the bar to order another round, feeling a kind of love for him. He looked slim and upright in his dark grey suit, the ceiling light shining off his bald pate like some incipient halo. Hamo’s halo. Nice thought.

  Bonham Johnson’s house – Pondshill Place – was large and imposing – a Victorian farm of cut and moulded red brick and tall groups of chimney-stacks. At one end was a wide bow window looking over a terraced garden that fell gently to a reflecting pool surrounded by closely clipped obelisks of box trees. There was a barn and stable block to one side where the guests’ motor cars were to be parked. A farm labourer waved them into the courtyard where there were already a dozen cars in two neat rows.

  ‘Oh good,’ Hamo said. ‘Looks like a big crowd. I can hide myself.’

  The main door to Pondshill Place was opened by a butler, who invited them to ‘go through to the saloon’. This was the drawing room with the big curved bay window and was already occupied by upward of twenty people – all very casually dressed, Lysander noticed, glad that he had decided on a suit of light Harris tweed. He saw some men without ties and women in brightly coloured print dresses. He whispered, ‘Relax!’ to Hamo and they helped themselves to a glass of sherry from a tray held by an extremely pretty young maid, Lysander noticed.

  Bonham Johnson was a very stout man with longish thinning hair and a grizzled pointed beard that made him look vaguely Jacobean, Lysander thought. He introduced himself and launched into a fluent and protracted hymn of praise to The Lost Lake of Africa – ‘Extraordinary, unparalleled.’ Even Hamo yielded in the face of this encomium and Lysander happily let Johnson lead him away across the room, hearing him ask, ‘Do you know Joseph Conrad? No? You’ll have a lot in common.’

  Lysander headed back to the maid with the sherry and helped himself to another glass.

  ‘What time is lunch being served?’ he asked, fixing her with his eyes. She was strikingly pretty. What was she doing serving Bonham Johnson’s guests?

  ‘About one-thirty, sir. Still a few more guests to arrive.’

  ‘This may seem a strange question. But have you ever thought of –’

  ‘Lysander?’

  He turned round and for a brief second didn’t recognize her. The hair was darker, cut short with a severe straight fringe across the eyebrows. She was wearing a jersey dress with great lozenges of colour blocks – orange, buttercup-yellow, cinnamon. He felt himself shiver, visibly. The shock-effect was palpable, unignorable.

  ‘Hettie . . .’

  ‘I’m so glad you could come. I told Bonham that your uncle would be the best way to lure you here.’ She leaned forward and kissed his cheek and he smelled her scent again, for the first time in a year and a half. Now he had tears in his eyes. He closed them.

  ‘So it was all your doing . . .’

  ‘Yes. I had to find a way of seeing you. You’re not going to be beastly to me, are you?’ she said.

  ‘No. No, I’m not.’

  ‘Are you all right? You’ve gone quite pale.’

  ‘Is Lothar here?’

  ‘Of course not. He’s in Austria.’

  This was impossible. He felt he was in some kind of emotion-race, feelings and sensations succeeding each other in a frantic, spinning helter-skelter.

  ‘Can we get out of here?’ he managed to say.

  ‘No. Jago would be horribly suspicious. In fact he won’t even like me talking to you for very long.’

  ‘Who’s Jago?’

  ‘My husband – Jago Lasry.’

  Lysander sensed he was meant to react to the name but he had never heard of the man.

  Hettie looked at him sardonically.

  ‘Come on, don’t play those games with me. Jago Lasry, author of Crépuscules. Mmm? Ring a bell? The Quick Blue Fox and other stories. Yes?’

  ‘I’ve been in the army since the war started – very out of touch.’

  She moved closer and he was reminded of how small-made and tiny she was – the top of her head reaching his chest. She lowered her voice.

  ‘I’m sitting beside you at lunch but we must pretend to be strangers – almost-strangers, anyway. And I’m not called Hettie any more. I’m Venora.’

  ‘Venora?’

  ‘A Celtic name. I always hated being called Hettie. It seemed fine in Vienna but it’s all wrong here
. Imagine being Hettie Lasry! See you at lunch.’

  She walked away and Lysander, still in awful turmoil, mistily watched her ease her way through the crowd of guests to greet one of the tieless young men. A small wiry fellow, in his late twenties, Lysander supposed, with a dark patchy beard, wearing a maroon corduroy suit. Jago Lasry, author of Crépuscules. He saw the man’s head turn to seek him out. So Hettie/Venora had been behind this invitation . . . he wondered what she wanted of him. He drained his sherry glass and went back for a refill.

  He heard the rest of Hettie’s story at lunch – in fits and starts, out of sequence, with many a doubling-back and re-explanation, at his insistence. To his shock he discovered she had been living in England since the beginning of the year. She had left Vienna in November 1914 and had crossed into Switzerland, making her roundabout way back home via Italy and Spain.

  ‘Why didn’t you bring Lothar with you?’

  ‘He’s much happier in Austria. He’s living in Salzburg with one of Udo’s aunts. Happy as anything.’

  ‘Have you got a photograph of him?’

  ‘I have, but . . . not here. Jago doesn’t know about Lothar, as it happens. Let’s keep it between ourselves, if you don’t mind.’

  She had met Jago Lasry shortly after her return and they had married in May (‘Love at first glimpse,’ she said), so it transpired, and they were currently living in Cornwall in a cottage owned by Bonham Johnson. Lasry was a protégé of Johnson, who had been very generous with introductions to publishers and editors and the provider of small loans, when required, so Hettie told him. Lysander glanced across the table at Lasry – a skinny, intense man who appeared to eat his food with the same concentration and urgency as he spoke. He suspected Bonham Johnson was more than a little in love with his protégé.

  ‘I told Jago that you and I had met briefly in Vienna,’ Hettie said. ‘That we were both seeing the same doctor there. Just in case he was suspicious.’

  ‘Bensimon’s back in London, you know. I heard from him.’

  Hettie looked at him in that strange way she had. A bizarre mixture of sudden interest and what seemed like potential threat.

  ‘Just like the old days, eh?’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  She looked away and asked the person next to her to pass the salt. Lysander felt her hand on his thigh under the table and her fingers quickly searching for and finding the bulge of his penis. She gripped him hard through the cloth of his trousers, then ran her fingertips up and down. He reached for his wine glass, as if it would give him support – he thought he might swoon or cry out. She took her hand away.

  ‘I have to see you,’ he said, quietly, a little hoarsely, talking into his plate, trying not to look at her, slicing his lamb into small pieces to keep his mind occupied. ‘I’m staying in London. A small hotel in Pimlico called The White Palace. They’ve a telephone.’

  ‘I don’t know if I can get up to London. Difficult – but I can try.’

  ‘Send me a postcard – The White Palace Hotel, Pimlico, London, South West.’

  Now she had turned to look at him again and he stared into those slightly-too-wide, pale hazel eyes. He realized that seeing her again here was a watershed. He felt he knew himself once more, understood the kind of person he was, what he needed, what he asked of life.

  ‘I promise I’ll do my best,’ she said. ‘Listen. You couldn’t lend me some money, by any chance, could you?’

  ‘Surprisingly nice fellow, that Bonham Johnson,’ Hamo said. ‘Put me completely at my ease. What a fuss I made for nothing – I could tell he was musical at once.’

  ‘Musical?’

  ‘One of us.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’

  ‘What did you need ten pounds for?’ Hamo asked, stooping to crank the starting handle of the Turner. ‘Lucky I had some cash on me.’

  ‘I had to lend it to that woman I introduced you to. Vanora Lasry.’

  ‘Very generous of you,’ Hamo said, clambering on board the now gently shuddering vehicle. ‘To lend all that money to a perfect stranger.’

  ‘That was her, Hamo,’ Lysander confessed with relief. ‘That was Hettie Bull – the mother of my son.’

  ‘Good god!’

  They pulled away out of the stable block and headed back across flat expanses of the marsh towards the main road to Rye. Lysander leaned close and shouted a brief explanation of what had taken place into Hamo’s ear. As he listened, Hamo’s head shook more regularly in bemusement and sympathy.

  ‘I’ve got nothing to say to you, dear boy. Not a word of reproach. I know exactly what you’re feeling. La coeur a ses raisons. Oh, yes!’

  They motored along at a steady speed, the light fading, and when they caught glimpses of the Channel as the road took them closer to the coast they saw the setting sun burnishing the sea, like hammered silver. Lysander felt both exhilarated and confused. Meeting Hettie again made him achingly conscious once more of the irrefutable nature of his obsession with her. Obsession – or love? Or was it something more unhealthy – a kind of craving, an addiction?

  He and Hamo sat up late, talking, drinking whisky – Lysander taking the opportunity to relate Hettie’s story in more detail.

  ‘Are you going to see her again?’ Hamo asked.

  ‘Yes. I have to.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise – now she’s married and all that?’

  ‘Very unwise, I’d have thought. But I can’t see any alternative, Hamo. I’m sort of in thrall to her.’

  ‘I understand. Oh, yes, I understand.’

  Hettie had introduced Lysander to Jago Lasry after lunch was finished and Lysander felt himself being scrutinized, the suspicion and scepticism overt. Hettie linked arms with her husband, trying to emanate uxorious contentment.

  ‘We both had the same doctor in Vienna,’ Lysander said, searching for something bland and conventional to say to this coiled, angry, small man.

  ‘Same quack, you mean.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go that far.’

  ‘How far would you go, Mr Rief?’

  ‘Let’s say Dr Bensimon was a great help to me, therapeutically. Made a huge difference.’

  ‘He just fed Vanora drugs.’

  ‘Freud himself used Coca. Wrote a book about it.’

  They then had a short, fervid discussion about the demerits of Sigmund Freud and Freudianism. Lysander began to feel increasingly out of his depth as Lasry spoke of Carl Jung and the 4th International Psychoanalytical Conference in Munich in 1913, subjects Lysander knew nothing about. He found himself trying to place Lasry’s accent – Midlands, he thought, Nottingham coalfields – but before he could be any more precise Johnson drew Lasry away to meet ‘the editor of the English Review’. Lysander stood there swaying, exhausted.

  ‘I’d better join him,’ Hettie said. ‘I can see you’ve put him in one of his moods.’

  ‘Why didn’t you come to me the moment you were back in England?’ Lysander said, suddenly aggrieved and hurt.

  ‘I thought it was pointless – thought you’d never forgive me for Lothar. And the police. And all the rest.’

  Lysander remembered his travails in Vienna at Hettie’s hands, experiencing a sudden vivid recall of his anger and frustration. He wondered why he couldn’t sustain these brief, intense rages that Hettie provoked. What was it about her? How did she undermine them so easily?

  ‘I forgive you,’ he said, weakly. ‘Come and see me in London. Please. We’ll sort everything out.’

  And what did he mean by that? – he thought as he went up the stairs to his bedroom that night, his head numb and muddy with all the whisky he’d drunk and the swarm of emotions that had persecuted him all day. As he undressed he remembered that the hunt for Andromeda was meant to begin in earnest the next morning. In his troubled half-drunkenness he thought that, actually, in a house in Romney in the heart of Romney Marsh he had met the real Andromeda herself once more, in all her importunate beauty.

  Coincidence? What wa
s the Viennese connection in the Andromeda affair, he wondered dozily. If Hettie hadn’t accused him of rape, if he hadn’t called on Munro at the embassy, if he hadn’t artfully engineered his own escape, then his current life would be entirely different. But what was the point of that? The view backward showed you all the twists and turns your life had taken, all the contingencies and chances, the random elements of good luck and bad luck that made up one person’s existence. Still, questions buzzed around his brain all night as he tossed and fidgeted, punched and turned his pillows, opened and closed the windows of his room, waiting for sunrise. He managed to sleep for an hour and was up and dressed at dawn, off to the Winchelsea Inn for a pony and trap to take him into Rye. Monday, 27th September, 1915. The hunt was on.

  5. Autobiographical Investigations

  I bought a newspaper this morning on my walk to the Annexe. ‘Great offensive at Loos’; ‘Enemy falls back before our secret weapon’; ‘Significant advances across the whole front despite heavy casualties’. The vapid vocabulary of jingoistic military journalism. It had all started this weekend while I was at Winchelsea and at Bonham Johnson’s lunch party as I was sipping sherry, feeling Hettie grip me under the table and arguing about Freud with her obnoxious husband. There are long faces in the Annexe, however. Here in the Directorate we quickly know when the ambulance trains are full. Provision was made for 40,000 wounded men and already it appears inadequate. Not enough heavy artillery, ammunition dumps insufficiently supplied. Our cloud of poison gas seems to have had the most partial effectiveness – reports have come in complaining that it hung in the air over no man’s land or else drifted back into our trenches to blind and confuse our own men waiting to attack. The one thing we can’t supply from the Directorate of Movements is a stiff westerly breeze, alas.