Waiting for Sunrise (48 page)

PS. If you could possibly find your way to send £50 to me care of the GPO in Liverpool I’d be undyingly grateful. I set sail for ‘Americay’ in two weeks.

LINES WRITTEN

UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF CHLORAL HYDRATE

The heat, that summer in Vienna, was immense.

It slammed down out of a white sky, heavy as glass.

I do not hope

I do not hope to see

I do not hope nor see

Why were those bands playing in the Prater?

No one told me what was going on.

She was
schön
.

She was
sympatisch
.

We couldn’t be left alone

At the Hôtel du Sport et Riche.

I do not see hope

Hope does not see me

Blackblackblackblackwhiteblackblackblack

We turned on our backs in the flax

We strove in the shadows of the apple grove

We found bliss beneath the trellis of clematis

Roll me over, lay me down and do it again.

It’s black, alack – I can’t see a thing.

Tara-loo, Madame, tara-lee, tara-loo-di-do

I dream of a woman.

Blanche and I have set a date for our wedding in the spring – May 1916. Hamo is to be my best man. Blanche and I spend many nights together but I find I still need chloral hydrate to sleep. I visit Dr Bensimon in Highgate once a week and we talk through the story of the last two years. Parallelism is working, slowly – I’m beginning to live with a version of events in which the man with the moustache and the fair-haired boy scramble out of the sap before my bombs explode. They’re both lightly wounded but both regain the German lines. The more I concentrate on this story and manufacture its precise details the more its plausibility beguiles me. Perhaps one night I’ll sleep peacefully, unaided by my chemicals.

I wrote to Sergeant Foley at the Stoke Newington Hospital for the Blind but have received no reply to date. Perhaps it might be better if I don’t learn any more facts about that night – it’s been hard enough dislodging the ones that are haunting me – but I feel I need to see Foley and explain something of what was really going on.

I have an audition tomorrow – my old life returning. A revival of
Man and Superman
by George Bernard Shaw.

I sit here looking at Hettie’s photograph of Lothar that she sent me. A studio portrait of a little glum boy – close to tears, it seems – dressed to all intents and purposes as a girl in some embroidered pseudo-peasant smock. Long, dark curly hair. Does he look anything like me? One minute I think – yes, he does. And the next I think – no, not at all. Is he really, truly mine, in fact? Hettie betrayed Udo Hoff with me – might she not have been betraying me with somebody else? Can I ever be certain?

And on this note I think back, as I often do, to that October dawn on Hampstead Heath as I was waiting for sunrise, waiting for Vandenbrook to arrive. I knew it would be him and I hoped that sunrise that day would bring understanding and clarity with it – or at least clearer vision. And I thought I had it as I pinned ‘Andromeda’ to Vandenbrook’s coat. Everything solved, explained. But as the day wore on other questions nagged at me, troubled me and set me thinking again, until by dusk all was confusion once more. Maybe this is what life is like – we try to see clearly but what we see is never clear and is never going to be. The more we strive the murkier it becomes. All we are left with are approximations, nuances, multitudes of plausible explanations. Take your pick.

I feel, after what I have gone through, that I understand a little of our modern world now, as it exists today. And perhaps I’ve been offered a glimpse into its future. I was provided with the chance to see the mighty industrial technologies of the twentieth-century war machine both at its massive, bureaucratic source and at its narrow, vulnerable human target. And yet, for all the privileged insight and precious knowledge that I gleaned, I felt that the more I seemed to know, then the more clarity and certainty dimmed and faded away. As we advance into the future the paradox will become clearer – clear and black, blackly clear. The more we know the less we know. Funnily enough, I can live with that idea quite happily. If this is our modern world I feel a very modern man.

I met Munro at noon by the north-east lion at the foot of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. It was a grey, cold day of intermittent rain and drizzle and we were both wearing rubberized trenchcoats, like a couple of tourists. A heavy shower had passed through ten minutes before and the paving stones were glossy and lacquered, the wet smoky façades of the surrounding buildings – the Royal College of Physicians, the National Gallery, St Martin’s – almost a velvety black. The brief sun was trying vainly to break through the thick grey clouds, managing only to illumine some breeze-blown interstices, and this, coupled with the gloomy effect of the heavy purpley mass of more rain coming up the Thames estuary, cast a curious gold-leaden light on the scene, making the vistas down Pall Mall, Whitehall and Northumberland Avenue seem lit by arc-lights, artificial and strange, as if the city blocks could be struck like stage scenery and re-assembled elsewhere. I felt uncomfortable and edgy, troubled by the weather and the curious light, almost as if I were in a theatre, acting.

MUNRO: Why are we meeting like this, Rief? All very melodramatic.

LYSANDER: Indulge me. I like public spaces at the moment.

MUNRO: We found ‘Andromeda’, of course, up on the heath, with your note on him. The police called us . . . Everything tidied up nicely. We’re grateful, I must say.

LYSANDER: He was very clever, Vandenbrook. Very.

MUNRO: Not clever enough. You caught him and dealt with him. I read your deposition – very thorough.

LYSANDER: Good. He was never being blackmailed, you see. That was the first of his clever ideas. He had everything prepared in case he was ever found out. There was no ten-year old girl, no genuine statement, no pearls. It gave him an excuse – and it might have saved him the hangman if he hadn’t shot himself.

MUNRO: Yes . . . How did you know it was him – in the end?

LYSANDER: I admit – I’d been completely convinced by his blackmail story. Then he gave himself away – just a little slip up. Even I didn’t notice it when he said it – it was something I remembered a few hours later as I was trying to get to sleep.

MUNRO: You’re going to tell me what it was, I’m sure.

LYSANDER: That night we all met at the theatre, Vandenbrook made a reference to the cover of
Andromeda und Perseus
.

MUNRO: Glockner’s source-text –

LYSANDER: Exactly. I mentioned it – the opera – and he said he had heard it was a ‘saucy’ opera. How could he know? He’d never seen it. But he had seen the libretto with its provocative cover because he’d stolen it from my mother’s office and used it as the master-text for the Glockner code.

MUNRO [thinking]: Yes . . . What was that meeting in the variety theatre all about?

LYSANDER: I wanted Vandenbrook to look you over – you, Fyfe-Miller and Massinger. See if he could identify you. I still believed he was being blackmailed at that stage.

MUNRO: Are you saying you suspected one of us?

LYSANDER: I’m afraid so. It seemed the obvious conclusion at the time. I was convinced it was one of you three – that one of you was the real Andromeda. Until he made his slip-up.

MUNRO: I don’t understand –

LYSANDER: When I was in Vienna I knew this Austrian army officer who had been accused of stealing from the officers’ mess. I’m sure now that he was guilty but there were eleven other suspects. So he hid behind a screen of other suspects and manipulated them very adroitly – just like Vandenbrook. And he got away with it. When there are many suspects the inclination is to suspect anyone and everybody – which means you probably never find the real suspect. It’s a very clever ruse. But I had this strong feeling that the whole business was connected to Vienna in some way. You had been in Vienna, Fyfe-Miller as well – and so had Massinger, apparently.

MUNRO: Yes, Massinger came to Vienna. And you were in Vienna, also.

LYSANDER: So I was. And Hettie Bull. And Dr John Bensimon. The only person who hadn’t been there was Vandenbrook. And that’s what gave him away. He hadn’t been there, yet he knew about
Andromeda und Perseus
. And, most importantly, what was on the cover of the Viennese libretto. Glockner’s Dresden libretto had no ‘saucy’ cover. Just plain black lettering on white. A tiny, fatal, error. But I was the only person who knew that. The only one.