Waiting for Sunrise (37 page)

‘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 was 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.

Going through Osborne-Way’s list it’s at once obvious that a significant number of the officers in the Directorate could not possibly have access to all the information in the Glockner letters. However, I’ve decided as a matter of policy and subterfuge to interview everyone – I don’t want to concentrate on any particular group and thereby raise suspicions. Andromeda, whoever he is, mustn’t develop the slightest concern over this supplementary enquiry into Sir Horace Ede’s Commission on Transportation. So, I’ve summoned Tremlett and given him the entire list of interviewees. I begin with one Major H.B. O’Terence, responsible for ‘Travelling claims by land. Visits of relatives to wounded in hospital in France’. He’s going to be a busy man in the coming days and weeks – best to finish with him first.

It has proved to be both a shock and unusually destabilizing to have seen Hettie. All my sex-feelings for her have returned in an instant. Incredible desire. Old images of her naked and what we did with each other. And all my contradictions and confusions about her crowd in as well. Vanora Lasry – I can hardly believe it. And what about Lothar? Your son, your little boy. Again, emotions wax and wane. One second he seems unreal, a product of my imagination, a fantasy – and then, the next, I find myself thinking of this little boy, this baby, living in a suburb of Salzburg with Udo Hoff’s aunt. Does Hettie care? Why wouldn’t she tell her new husband that he has a stepson? I bought Lasry’s book of poems,
Crépuscules
. Modern nonsense in the main. Free verse is both seductive and dangerous, I can see – it can be a licence to be pretentious and obscure. Lasry often abuses it, in my opinion. I take more care.

SEVENTH CAPRICE IN PIMLICO

The dawn created itself

And turned to see what had been lit.

Rubbish, litter, broken glass and a bit

Of green England, unsmirched, a glance

At something beautiful. Behold the dance:

The girls advance,

The boys decline.

Emerging from the Piccadilly Line

I find the tropic odours of Leicester Square

Beguile and mesmerize.

I roam the streets at midnight. The glare

Of gaslights an artificial sunrise.

‘
Les colombes de ma cousine

Pleurent comme un enfant
.’

I asked Tremlett to do me a favour and to look up the casualty lists of the Manchester Fusiliers – to check whether a Lt. Gorlice-Law or a Sergeant Foley appeared. He came back with the news that Lt. Gorlice-Law had died of wounds on June 27th and a Sgt. Foley was in a hospital in Stoke Newington. ‘He must be blind, sir,’ Tremlett said, pointing to his patch. ‘That’s where they took my peeper out.’ So Gorlice-Law died the day after our raid into no man’s land . . . I feel I have to try and see Foley and find out exactly what happened that night after I crawled away and left them. Feelings of guilt inexorably creep over me. Was it my fault? No, you fool. You were ordered to bomb that sap to create a diversion. After that the gods of war and luck took over and you were as much subject to their fatal whim as any of the thousands of soldiers facing each other on both sides of the line.

6. Unlikely Suspects

Lysander interviewed the officers of the Directorate over the next three days in the cramped and antiseptic quarters of Room 205. All were conducted in the same tone of apologetic tedium and polite routine – he wanted to make no one remotely suspicious or alarmed. He asked for their understanding – he knew he was wasting precious time – and strove to be as amiable as possible, but the men he saw were uniformly wary and resentful – sometimes even contemptuous. Osborne-Way had obviously been at work preparing the ground.

He ended up with a list of six key names, including the Director, Osborne-Way, himself. All these men were capable, theoretically, of reproducing the specific type of information contained in the Glockner letters. Four of them were responsible for ‘Movement and control of war material and stores to France’. One dealt with control of ports, one with railway material – ‘tanks, road metal, timber, slag and coal’. One was a rare civilian in the Directorate who was solely concerned with the compilation of shipping statistics – so every fact ended at his desk. Apart from Osborne-Way (an unlikely suspect, though Lysander refused to rule him out – unlikely suspects were more suspect in his opinion) the two men who most interested him were a Major Mansfield Keogh (Royal Irish Regiment) who was the Assistant Director of Movements – Osborne-Way’s number two – and a Captain Christian Vandenbrook (King’s Royal Rifle Corps) who supervised the ‘despatch to France of ammunition, ordnance, supplies and Royal Engineers’ stores’.

In principle the Directorate of Movements retained no more responsibility once stores were landed at Le Havre, Rouen or Calais; at that moment the Quartermaster General’s department at headquarters in St Omer took over. However, in practice, there were always problems – trains went missing, ammunition found itself in the wrong depots, ships were sunk in the Channel. Significantly, Lysander thought, both Keogh and Vandenbrook had been to France independently on three occasions in 1915 (Osborne-Way had been twice) to liaise with the Director of Railway Transport and his staff and to supervise the construction of marshalling yards and sidings behind the lines. There was ideal opportunity to discover everything the Glockner letters contained.

Keogh was a quiet, earnest, efficient man who seemed consumed by some private sadness. He was civil and prompt with his answers but Lysander felt he regarded him as a mere nothing – a buzzing fly, a crumpled piece of paper, a leaf on the pavement. Keogh looked at him with empty eyes. By contrast, Vandenbrook was the most open and charming of his interviewees. He was a small, lithe, handsome man with perfect, even features and a fair moustache with the ends dashingly turned up. His teeth – he smiled regularly – were almost unnaturally white, Lysander thought. Vandenbrook was the only person he talked to who asked him about himself and who seemed happy to acknowledge that he’d seen him on stage before the war. Lysander knew his past life was common knowledge in the Directorate – he had overheard Osborne-Way refer to him as the ‘bloody actor-chappie’ more than once – but only Vandenbrook made overt and unconcerned reference to his stage career and Lysander liked him for it.

The War Diary of the Directorate had revealed the facts about Keogh’s and Vandenbrook’s trips to France. Tremlett supplied him with the ledger that detailed all the departmental ‘travelling claims by land’. Keogh had responsibility for the port of Dover; Vandenbrook for Folkestone. Both men visited the ports every few days, where the Directorate kept branch offices, and their expenses – train tickets, hotels, taxis, porters, meals and refreshments – were docketed, copied and filed. Lysander decided to investigate Keogh first, then Vandenbrook, then Osborne-Way. Save the biggest beast for last.