Waiting for Sunrise (36 page)

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.