Waiting for Sunrise

1: A Young, Almost Conventionally Handsome Man

It is a clear and dazzling summer’s day in Vienna. You are standing in a skewed pentangle of lemony sunshine at the sharp corner of Augustiner Strasse and Augustinerbastei, across from the opera house, indolently watching the world pass by you, waiting for someone or something to catch and hold your attention, to generate a tremor of interest. There’s a curious frisson in the city’s atmosphere today, almost spring-like, though spring is long gone, but you recognize that slight vernal restlessness in the people going by, that stirring of potential in the air, that possibility of audacity — though what audacities they might be, here in Vienna, who can say? Still, your eyes are open, you are unusually poised, ready for anything — any crumb, any flung coin — that the world might casually toss your way.

And then you see — to your right — a young man striding out of the Hofgarten park. He is in his late twenties, almost handsome in a conventional way, but your eye is drawn to him because he is hatless, an anomaly in this busy crowd of Viennese folk, all hatted, men and women. And, as this young, almost conventionally handsome man walks purposefully past you, you note his fine brown, breeze-blown hair, his pale grey suit and his highly polished ox-blood shoes. He’s of medium height but broad-shouldered with something of a sportsman’s build and balance, you register, as he goes by, a couple of paces from you. He’s clean-shaven — also unusual in this place, the city of facial hair — and you observe that his coat is well tailored, cut tight at the waist. Folds of an ice-blue silk handkerchief spill easily from his breast pocket. There is something fastidious and deliberate about the way he dresses himself — just as he’s almost conventionally handsome, so is he also almost a dandy. You decide to follow him for a minute or so, vaguely intrigued and having nothing better to do.

At the entry to Michaeler Platz he stops abruptly, pauses, stares at something stuck to a hoarding and then continues on his way, briskly, as if he’s running slightly late for an appointment. You follow him around the square and into Herrengasse — the slanting sunrays picking out the details on the grand, solid buildings, casting sharp, dark shadows on the caryatids and the friezes, the pediments and the cornices, the balusters and the architraves. He stops at the kiosk selling foreign newspapers and magazines. He chooses The Graphic and pays for it, unfolding and opening it to glance at the headlines. Ah, he’s English — how uninteresting — your curiosity is waning. You turn round and wander back towards the pentangular patch of sunlight you abandoned on the corner, hoping some more stimulating possibilities will come your way, leaving the young Englishman to stride on to wherever and whomever he was so intently heading…

♦

Lysander Rief paid for his three-day-old Graphic (overseas edition), glanced at a headline — ‘Armistice Signed in Bucharest — Second Balkan War Ends’ — and ran his hand unreflectingly through his fine straight hair. His hat! Damn. Where had he left his hat? On the bench — of course — in the Hofgarten where he’d sat for ten minutes staring at a flowerbed in a fearful quandary, wondering agitatedly if he was doing the correct thing, suddenly unsure of himself, of this trip to Vienna and everything it portended. What if it was all a mistake, all vain hope and ultimately pointless? He looked at his wristwatch. Damn, again. He’d be late for his appointment if he went back. He liked that hat, his narrow-brim boater with the maroon silk band, bought in Lockett’s, on Jermyn Street. Someone would have stolen it in an instant, he was sure — another reason not to retrace his steps — and he cursed his distractedness again, setting off once more up Herrengasse. It just showed you how tense he was, he thought, how preoccupied. To rise up and walk away from a park bench and not automatically set your hat firmly on your head…He was clearly more jittery and apprehensive about this meeting than even his obvious, perfectly understandable nervousness would indicate. Calm down, he said to himself, listening to the measured click of the metalled crescents set in the leather heels of his shoes as they struck the stone paving — calm down. This is just the first appointment — you can walk away, go back to London — no one is holding a loaded gun to your head, forcing you.

He exhaled. “It was a fine day in August, 1913,” he said to himself out loud but in a low voice, just enough to change the subject and readjust his mood. “Es war ein schöner Augusttag des Jahres…ah, 1913,” he repeated in German, adding the date in English. He had trouble with numbers — long numbers and dates. His German was improving fast but he might ask Herr Barth, his teacher, to do an hour or so on numbers, to try and fix them in his head. “Ein schöner Augusttag —.” He saw another defaced poster on the wall, like the one he’d spotted as he’d walked into Michaeler Platz — that was the third he’d seen since setting out from his lodgings this morning. It had been clumsily torn from its hoarding, ripped away from wherever the glue was not strong enough to hold the paper fast. At the first poster — just next to the tram-stop near the room he was renting — his eye had been held by what remained of the body (the head had gone) of the scantily clad maiden it displayed. She was almost naked, cowering, hands pressed to her sizeable breasts, cupping them protectively, a semi-visible filmy swirl of self-supporting veil protecting her modesty at the plump juncture of her thighs. Something about the reality of the drawing was particularly compelling, however stylized the situation she was in (that airborne, handy veil) and he had paused to take a closer look. He had no idea what the context of this image was as everything else had been torn away. However, on the second defaced poster, the end of a scaly, saw-toothed reptilian tail explained why the nymph or the goddess, or whatever she was, appeared so terrified. And now on the third poster some lettering was left: ‘PERS—’ and below that ‘und’ and below that, ‘Eine Oper von Gottlieb Toll —’.

He thought: ‘Pers’…Persephone? An opera about Persephone? Wasn’t she the one dragged off to the underworld and Narcissus — was it? — had to go and fetch her back without looking round? Or was that Euridice? Or something…Orpheus? Not for the first time he resented his eccentric and patchwork education. He knew a lot about a few things and very little about a great deal of things. He was taking steps to remedy the situation — reading as widely as he could, writing his poems — but every now and then his ignorance stared him candidly in the face. One of the hazards of his profession, he admitted. And classical myths and references were certainly a bit of a jumble, not to say a prominent hole.

He looked back at the poster. Only the top half of the head had survived the shredding on this one. Arabesques of wind-lashed hair and wide eyes peering over the ragged edge of the horizontal rip as if, Lysander thought, she was staring horrified over the top of a bedsheet. Piecing together the fragments of the three posters in his head to form a notional body of the goddess, Lysander found himself briefly stirred, sexually. A naked woman, young, beautiful, vulnerable, confronted by some squamous, no doubt phallic, monster about to ravish her…And no doubt this was the purpose of the posters and no doubt, furthermore, this was what had provoked the prudish bourgeois outrage that had made some good citizen decide to vandalize the display. All very modern — all very Viennese — he supposed.

Lysander strode on, deliberately analysing his mood. Why should this poster depicting the potential ravishment of some mythological woman excite him? Was it natural? Was it, to be more precise, something to do with the pose — the cupped hands both covering and holding the soft breasts, at once coquettish and defensive? He sighed: who could answer these questions anyway? The human mind was endlessly baffling, complex and perverse. He stopped himself — yes, yes, yes. This was exactly why he had come to Vienna.

He crossed the Schottenring and the wide expanse of the square in front of the huge charcoal bulk of the university building. That’s where he should go to find out about Persephone — ask some student specializing in Latin and Greek — but something was nagging at him, however, he couldn’t recall a monster taking part in the Persephone story…He checked the streets he was passing — almost there. He stopped to let an electric tram go by and turned right down Berggasse and then left on Wasagasse. Number 42.

He swallowed, mouth suddenly dry, thinking: maybe I should just turn about, pack my bags, go home to London and resume my perfectly agreeable life. But, he reminded himself, there would still be the issue of his particular problem, unresolved…The main wide doors to the street at number 42 were open and he stepped through into the coach-entryway. There was no sign of a concierge or guardian. A steel-meshed elevator was available to carry him to the second floor but he opted for the stairway. One floor. Two. Wrought-iron banisters, varnished wooden handrail, some sort of speckled granite forming the steps, a dado rail, turf-green tiles below, white distemper above. He concentrated on these details, trying not to think about the dozens — perhaps the hundreds — of people who had preceded him up these stairs.

He reached the landing. Two solid panelled doors with fanlights stood side by side. One said ‘Privat’; the other had a small brass sign above the separate bell, tarnished, needing a polish. ‘Dr J. Bensimon’. He counted to three and rang, confirmed suddenly in the rightness of what he was doing, confident in the new, better future he was setting out to secure for himself.

2: Miss Bull

Dr Bensimon’s receptionist (a slim, bespectacled, severe-looking woman) had shown him into a small waiting room and mentioned, politely, that he was in fact some forty minutes early for his appointment. Therefore, if he wouldn’t mind waiting until? My mistake — foolish. Coffee? No, thank you.

Lysander sat in a low armless black leather chair, one of four in the room, placed in a loose semi-circle facing an empty grate below a plaster mantelpiece, and once again called on calmness to soothe his agitated mood. How could he have been so wrong about the time? He would have assumed the hour set for this consultation would have been mentally carved in stone. He looked around and saw a black bowler hat hung on the hat-and-coat-stand in the corner. The previous appointment’s, he assumed — then, seeing one hat, he realized he could have gone back to the park for his boater after all. Damn it, he said to himself. Then — fuck it — relishing the obscenity. It had cost him a guinea, that hat.

He stood up and looked at the pictures on the wall that were etchings of vast ruined buildings — moss-mantled, overgrown with weeds and saplings — all tumbled coping stones, shattered pediments and toppled columns that seemed vaguely familiar. No artist’s name came to him — another hole in his moth-eaten education. He moved to the window that overlooked the small central courtyard of the apartment building. A tree grew there — a sycamore, he saw, at least he could identify some trees — in a square of tramped browning grass, edged by the disused carriage house and looseboxes, and, as he watched, an old, aproned woman appeared from them, effortfully limp-lugging a brimming coal scuttle. He turned away and paced around, carefully folding back with the toe of his shoe the flipped-over corner of the worn Persian rug on the parquet floor.

He heard some voices — unusually urgent, raised — from the receptionist’s ante-room, then the door opened and a young woman came in and shut it behind her with a forceful bang.

“Entschuldigung,” she said, gracelessly, glancing at him, and sat down on one of the chairs and rummaged vigorously through her handbag before pulling out a small handkerchief and blowing her nose.

Lysander stepped quietly back to the window; he could sense this woman’s unease, her tension, coming off her in waves, as if some dynamo inside her were generating this febrility, this — the German word came to him, pleasingly — this A ngst.

He turned and their eyes met. She had the most unusual eyes, he saw, the palest hazel. And they were large and wide — the white visibly surrounding the iris — as if she were staring with great intensity or had been shocked in some way. Pretty face, he thought — neat nose, pointed, strong chin. Very olive skin. Foreign? Her hair was pinned up under a wide blood-red beret and she wore a dove-grey velvet jacket over a black skirt. On the jacket lapel was a large red-and-yellow shellac brooch of a crude-looking parrot. Artistic, Lysander thought. Laced ankle-boots, small feet. A very small, petite, young woman, in fact. In a state.

He smiled, turned away and looked at the courtyard. The stout old housekeeper was heading doggedly back to the stables with her empty scuttle. What did she want with all that coal in high summer? Surely –

“Sprechen Sie Englisch?”

Lysander looked round. “I am English, actually,” he said, warily. “How can you tell?” He felt annoyed that he clearly wore his nationality like a badge.

“You’ve a copy of the Graphic in your pocket,” she said, pointing at his folded newspaper. “Rather gives you away. But, anyway, most of Dr Bensimon’s patients are English so it was an easy guess.” Her accent was educated, she was obviously English herself, despite her somewhat exotic colouring.

“You don’t happen to have a cigarette on you, do you?” she asked. “By any faint and lucky chance.”

“I do, as it happens, but — ” Lysander indicated a printed sign laid on the mantelpiece. “Bitte nicht rauchen.”

“Ah. Of course. Would it be all right if I filched one for later?”

Lysander took his cigarette case from his jacket pocket, opened it and offered it to her. She chose one cigarette, said, “May I?” and took another before he could give her permission, slipping them into her handbag.

“I have to see Dr Bensimon very urgently, you see,” she said, briskly, in a no-nonsense manner. “So I do hope you don’t mind if I barge the queue.” At this she smiled at him a smile of such innocent brilliance that Lysander almost blinked.

On quick reflection, Lysander thought, he did rather mind, actually, but said, “Of course not,” and smiled back, uncertainly. He turned again to the window pane, touched the knot of his tie and cleared his throat.

“Do sit down if you want to,” the young woman said.

“I’m very happy standing. I find these low armless chairs rather uncomfortable.”

“Yes, they are, rather, aren’t they?”

Lysander wondered if he should introduce himself but then considered that a doctor’s waiting room was the kind of place where people — strangers — might prefer to preserve their anonymity; it wasn’t as if they were meeting in an art gallery or a theatre foyer, after all.

He heard a slight noise and looked over his shoulder. The woman had stood up and had gone to one of the etchings of ruins (what was that artist’s name?) and was using its glass as a mirror, tucking fallen strands of hair back under her beret and pulling down small wispy curls in front of her ears. Lysander noticed how her short velvet jacket revealed the full swell of her hips and buttocks under the black skirt. Her ankle-boots had three-inch heels yet she was still very small in stature –

“What’re you looking at?” she said abruptly, meeting his gaze in the reflection of the etching’s glass.

“I was admiring your bootees,” Lysander improvised quickly and smoothly. “Did you buy them here in Vienna? —”

She never answered, as the door to Dr Bensimon’s consulting room opened at that moment and two men stepped out, talking and chuckling to each other. Lysander knew at once which one was Dr Bensimon, an older man in his forties, quite bald with a brown trimmed beard flecked with grey. Everything about the other man — to Lysander’s eyes — shouted ‘soldier’. A navy double-breasted suit, a banded tie below a stiff collar, narrow cuffed trousers above shoes so polished they might have been patent. Tall, ascetically lean with a small neat dark moustache.

But the young woman was immediately in a kind of frenzy, interrupting them, calling Dr Bensimon’s name, apologizing and at the same time insisting on seeing him, absolutely essential, an emergency. The military man stepped back, leaned back, as Dr Bensimon — glancing at Lysander — swept the yammering woman into his room, Lysander hearing him say in a stern low voice as he did so, “This must never happen again, Miss Bull,” before the door to his consulting room shut behind them.

“Good god,” said the military type, dryly. He was English as well. “What’s going on there?”

“She seemed very agitated, I have to say,” Lysander said. “Cadged two cigarettes off me.”

“What’s the world coming to?” the man said, lifting his bowler off its wooden hook. He held it in his hands and looked candidly at Lysander.

“Have we met before?” he said.

“No. I don’t think so.”

“You seem oddly familiar, somehow.”

“I must look like someone you know.”

“Must be that.” He held out his hand. “I’m Alwyn Munro.”

“Lysander Rief.”

“Now that does ring a bell.” He shrugged, cocked his head, narrowed his eyes as if searching his memory and then smiled as he gave up and moved to the door. “Don’t feed her any more cigarettes, if I were you. She looks a bit dangerous to me.”

He left and Lysander resumed his scrutiny of the small drab courtyard outside. He extracted every possible detail from the view — the basket-weave pattern of the paving stones, the dog-toothed moulding on the arch above the stable door, a damp streak on the brickwork under a dripping tap. He kept his mind occupied. A few minutes later the young woman appeared from Dr Bensimon’s room, evidently much calmer, more composed. She picked up her handbag.

“Thank you for letting me barge ahead,” she said breezily. “And for the ciggies. You’re very kind.”

“Not at all.”

She said goodbye and sauntered out, her long skirt swinging. She glanced back at him as she closed the door behind her and Lysander caught a final glimpse of those strange, light brown, hazel eyes. Like a lion’s eyes, he thought. But she was called Miss Bull.

3: The African Bas-Relief

Lysander sat in Dr Bensimon’s consulting room, looking around him as the doctor wrote down his personal details in a ledger. The room was spacious, with three windows along one wall, simply furnished and almost entirely done in shades of white. White painted walls, white woollen curtains, a white rug on the blond parquet and a beaten silver-metalled primitive-looking bas-relief hung above the fireplace. In one corner was Dr Bensimon’s mahogany desk, backed by floor-to-ceiling glass-fronted bookshelves. On one side of the fireplace was a soft high-backed armchair, loose-covered in coarse cream linen and on the other a divan under a thick, woollen fringed blanket and two embroidered pillows. Both were facing away from the desk and Lysander, who had chosen the armchair, found he had to crane his neck round uncomfortably if he wanted to see the doctor. The room was very quiet — double windows — and Lysander could hear no sound of the city streets beyond — no clatter of electric trams, no carriages or wagons clopping by, no automobiles — it was ideally calm.

Lysander looked at the silver bas-relief. Fantastic African figures, half-man, half-animal, with extravagant headdresses, pricked out with traceries of small holes punched through the soft metal. It was strange and very beautiful — and doubtless freighted with all manner of pertinent symbolism, Lysander thought.

“Mr L.U. Rief,” Bensimon said. In the quiet room Lysander could hear the scratch of his fountain pen. His voice was lightly accented, somewhere from the north of England, Lysander guessed, Yorkshire or Lancashire, but honed down so that placing the location was impossible. He was good at accents, Lysander flattered himself — he’d unlock it in a minute or so.

“What do the initials stand for?”

“Lysander Ulrich Rief.”

“Marvellous name.”

Manchester, Lysander thought — that flat ‘A’.

“Rief — is that Scottish?”

“Old English. It means ‘thorough’, some say. And I’ve also been told it’s Anglo-Saxon dialect for ‘wolf’. All very confusing.”

“A thorough wolf. Wolfishly thorough. What about the ‘Ulrich?’ Are you part German?”

“My mother is Austrian.”

“From Vienna?”

“Linz, actually. Originally.”

“Date of birth?”

“Mine?”

“Your mother’s age is hardly relevant, I would venture.”

“Sorry. Seventh of March 1886.”

Lysander turned again in the chair. Bensimon was leaning back in his seat, at ease, smiling, fingers laced behind his shining paté.

“Best not to bother turning round all the time. Just think of me as a disembodied voice.”

4: Wiener Kunstmaterialien

Lysander walked downstairs from Bensimon’s apartment, slowly, his mind full of thoughts, some pleasurable, some dissatisfying, some troubling. The meeting had been brief, lasting only some fifteen minutes. Bensimon had written down his personal details, had discussed payment methods (bi-monthly invoicing and cash settlement) and then finally had asked him if he would like to discuss the nature of his ‘problem’.

Lysander paused in the street outside and lit a cigarette, wondering if this process he had embarked on would really help or if he would have been better going to Lourdes, say? Or to have taken up some quack’s remedy? Or become a vegetarian and wear Jaeger underwear like George Bernard Shaw? He frowned, uncertain suddenly — not a good mood to be in, not encouraging. It was his closest friend Greville Varley who had suggested psychoanalysis to him — Greville being the only other person aware of his problem (and only vaguely so, at that) — and Lysander had followed up the idea like a zealot, he now realized, cancelling all his future plans, withdrawing his savings, moving to Vienna, seeking out the right doctor. Had he been foolishly impetuous or was it merely a sign of his desperation?…

Turn left at Berggasse, Bensimon had said, then walk all the way down to the little square, to the junction of all the roads at the bottom. The shop is right in front of you — WKM — can’t miss it. Lysander set off, his mind still full of the crucial moment.

Bensimon:

So, what seems to be the nature of the problem?

Lysander:

It’s…It’s a sexual problem.

Bensimon:

Yes. It usually is. At root.

Lysander:

When I engage in lustful activity…That’s to say, during amatory congress –

Bensimon:

Please don’t search for euphemisms, Mr Rief. Plain speaking — it’s the only way. Be as blunt and as coarse as you like. Use the language of the street — nothing can offend me.

Lysander:

Right. When I’m fucking, I can’t do it.

Bensimon:

You can’t get an erection?

Lysander:

I have no problem with an erection. On the contrary — all very satisfactory there. My problem is to do with…with emission.

Bensimon:

Ah. Incredibly common. You ejaculate too soon. Ejaculatio praecox.

Lysander:

No. I don’t ejaculate at all.

♦

Lysander strolled down the gentle slope of Berggasse. Dr Freud’s rooms were here, somewhere — perhaps he should have tried for him? What was that French expression? “Why speak to the apostles when you can go to God himself?” But there was the problem of language: Bensimon was English, which was a huge advantage — a boon, even — not to be gainsaid. Lysander recalled the long silence after he had told Bensimon the curious nature of his sexual malfunction.

Bensimon:

So — you’re engaged in the sex-act but there is no orgasm.

Lysander:

Precisely.

Bensimon:

What happens?

Lysander:

Well, I can go on for a good time but the realization that nothing will happen makes me, eventually, slacken off, as it were.

Bensimon:

Detumescence.

Lysander:

Eventually.

Bensimon:

I’m going to have to think about this. Most unusual. Anorgasmia — you’re the first I’ve seen. Fascinating.

Lysander:

Anorgasmia?

Bensimon:

That’s what’s wrong with you. That’s what your problem’s called.

♦

And that was that, except for one further piece of advice. Bensimon asked him if he kept a journal, a diary, or a commonplace book. Lysander said he didn’t. He did write poetry, he said, fairly regularly, some of which had been published in newspapers and magazines, but — he shrugged modestly — he was an amateur poet, he enjoyed trying his hand at verse and made no claims at all for the lines that ensued — and, no, and he didn’t keep a journal.

“I want you to start writing things down,” Bensimon had said. “Dreams you have, fleeting thoughts, things you see and hear that intrigue you. Anything and everything. Stimulations of every kind — sexual or olfactory, auditory, sensual — anything at all. Bring these notes along to our consultations and read them out to me. Hold nothing back, however shocking, however banal. It’ll give me a direct insight into your personality and nature — into your unconscious mind.”

“My ‘id’, you mean.”

“I see you’ve done your homework, Mr Rief. I’m impressed.”

Bensimon had told him to jot these impressions and observations down as close as possible to the time they occurred and not to alter or edit them in any way. Furthermore, they were not to be written down on scraps of paper. Lysander should purchase a proper notebook — leather-bound, fine paper — and make it a true personal document, something that was contained and enduring, not just a collection of random scribblings.

“And give it a title,” Bensimon had suggested. “You know — ‘My Inner Life’, or ‘Personal Reflections’. Formalize the thing, in other words. Your dream diary, your journal of yourself — your Seelenjournal — it should be something you’ll treasure and value in the fullness of time. A record of your mind during these coming weeks, conscious and unconscious.”

At least, Lysander thought, crossing the street to the artists’ supplies shop that Bensimon had recommended — the Wiener Kunstmaterialien — at least it would be something concrete, a kind of permanent chronicle of his stay. All this talking — and all the talking he was bound to do — were simply words lost in the air. He was warming to the idea as he pushed through the swing doors into the shop, Bensimon was right, perhaps it would help him after all.

WKM was large and well lit — clusters of electric bulbs hung from the ceiling in modern, aluminium-spoked chandeliers, the gleaming coronas reflected in the shiny tan linoleum floor below them. The smell of turpentine, oil paint, untreated wood and canvas made Lysander feel welcome. He loved these kinds of emporium — alleyways of stacked artistic materials, like a cultural cornucopia, ran here and there: shelves of layered paper types, jars filled with sharp pencils, a small copse of easels, large and small, raked rows of tubes of oil paint laid out in chromatic sequence, fat gleaming bottles of linseed oil and paint thinner, canvas aprons, folding stools, stacked palettes, cobbled tins of watercolours, flat boxes of pastels, their lids open, displaying their bright contents like so many multi-coloured cigarillos. Whenever he came into shops like this he always resolved to take up sketching as a serious hobby, or watercolouring or lino-cutting — anything to give him a chance to buy some of this toothsome equipment.

He turned an aisle corner to find a small library of cartridge paper pads and notebooks. He browsed a while and picked up one with hundreds of pages, like a dictionary. No, no — too daunting, something more modest was required that could be realistically filled. He selected a pliable black leather-covered notebook, fine paper, unlined, 150 leaves. He liked its weight in his hand and it would fit in a coat pocket, like a guidebook — a guidebook to his psyche. Perfect. A title came into his head: ‘Autobiographical Investigations by Lysander Rief’…Now, that sounded exactly what Bensimon –

“We meet again.”

Lysander turned to see Miss Bull standing there. A friendly, smiling Miss Bull.

“You’re buying your notebook, aren’t you?” she said knowingly. “Bensimon should have a commission in here.”

“Are you doing the same?”

“No. I gave mine up after a couple of weeks. Trouble is I’m not really verbal, you see. I visualize — see things in images, not words. I’d rather draw than write.” She held up what she was purchasing — a small cluster of dull oddly shaped knives, some tapered sharply, some with triangular ends, like miniature trowels.

“You can’t draw with those,” Lysander said.

“I sculpt,” she explained. “I’m just ordering more clay and plaster. WKM’s the best place in town.”

“A sculptress — how interesting.”

“No. A sculpt or.”

Lysander inclined his head, apologetically. “Of course.”

Miss Bull stepped closer and lowered her voice.

“I’d really like to apologize for my behaviour earlier this morning —”

“Couldn’t matter less —”

“I was a bit…overwrought. I’d run out of my medicine, don’t you see. That’s why I had to get to Dr Bensimon — for my medicine.”

“Right. Dr Bensimon dispenses medicines as well?”

“Well, no. Sort of. But he gave me an injection. And more supplies.” She patted her handbag. “It’s marvellous stuff — you should try it if you’re ever a bit low.”

She certainly seemed different as a result of Dr Bensimon’s medicine, Lysander thought, looking at her, much more assured and self-confident. Somehow more in command of every –

“You’ve a most interesting face,” Miss Bull said.

“Thank you.”

“I’d love to sculpt you.”

“Well, I’m a bit —”

“No hurry.” She rummaged in her bag and came up with her card. Lysander read it: “Miss Esther Bull, artist and sculptor. Lessons provided.” There was an address in Bayswater, in London.

“Bit out of date,” she said. “I’ve been in Vienna for two years, now — my telephone number’s on the back. We’ve just got a telephone installed.” She looked at him challengingly. Lysander hadn’t missed the second person plural. “I live with Udo Hoff,” she said.

“Udo Hoff?”

“The painter.”

“Ah. Yes, that does — yes. Udo Hoff.”

“Have you a telephone? Are you in an hotel?”

“No to both. I’m renting rooms. I’ve no idea how long I’ll be staying.”

“You must come to the studio. Write your address down. I’ll send you an invitation to one of our parties.”

She handed him a scrap of paper from her bag and Lysander wrote down his address. A little reluctantly, he had to admit, as he wanted to be alone in Vienna: to resolve his problem — his anorgasmia, now it had a name — himself, alone. He didn’t really require or desire any kind of social life. He handed the scrap back.

“Lysander Rief,” she read. “Have I heard of you?”

“I doubt it.”

“And I’m Hettie, by the way,” she said, “Hettie Bull,” thrusting her hand out. Lysander shook it. She had a very firm grip.

5: The River of Sex

“Why am I troubled by this encounter with HB? Why am I also vaguely excited by it? She’s not ‘my type’ at all, yet I already feel somehow drawn into her life, willy-nilly, her orbit. Why? What if we’d met at a concert or a house party? We wouldn’t have thought anything of each other, I’m sure. But because we met in the waiting room at Dr Bensimon’s we know something secret about each other, already. Does this explain it? The wounded, the incomplete, the unbalanced, the malfunctioning, the ill seek each other out: like attracted to like. She won’t leave me alone, I know. But I don’t want to go to Udo Hoff’s studio, whoever he is. I came to Vienna to avoid social contact and told hardly anyone where I was going, just saying ‘abroad’ to people who pressed for details. Mother knows, Blanche knows, Greville knows, of course, and a handful of essential others. I want to treat Vienna as a kind of beautiful sanatorium full of perfect strangers — as if I had consumption and had simply disappeared until the cure was effected. I don’t think Blanche would like HB, somehow. Not at all.”

♦

There was a barely audible knock at his door — more of a scratch than a knock. Lysander put his pen down and closed his notebook, his Autobiographical Investigations, putting it in a drawer of his desk.

“Come in, Herr Barth,” Lysander said.

Herr Barth tiptoed in and shut the door as softly as he could. For a man of significant bulk he tried to move unobtrusively and with as much discretion as possible.

“Nein, Herr Rief. Not ‘Come in’. Herein.”

“Verzeihung,” Lysander apologized, drawing up an extra chair to the desk.

Herr Barth was a music teacher who came, moreover, from a long line of music teachers. His father had seen Paganini play in 1836 and, when his first son was duly born some years later, had called him Nikolas in honour of the event. As a young man Herr Barth had taken the identification to heart and wore his hair long and grew his cheek whiskers in the Paganini style, a homage he had never abandoned. Even now, approaching his seventies, he merely dyed his long grey hair and his whiskers black and still wore old-fashioned high collars and long coats with silver buttons. His instrument was not the violin, however, but the double bass — which he had played in the orchestra of the Lustspiel-Theater in Vienna for many years before he took up the family profession of music teacher. He kept his old double bass in its cracked leather case propped against the wall at the bottom of his bed in his small room at the end of the corridor, the smallest of the three rooms that were rented out in the Pension Kriwanek. He claimed to be able to teach any instrument that ‘could be carried or held in the hand’ to a level of competence — whether strings, woodwind or brass. Lysander was not aware of any pupils seeking out this offer but had happily accepted Herr Barth’s diffident suggestion, made a day after he had moved into the pension, that he help Lysander improve his German — for the sum of five crowns an hour.

Herr Barth sat down slowly, flicked away the strands of hair resting on his collar with both hands and smiled, wagging an admonitory finger.

“Only German, Herr Rief. Only this way will you advance in our wonderful and beautiful language.”

“I’d like to practise numbers today,” Lysander replied — in German.

“Ah, numbers, numbers — the great trap.”

They duly practised numbers for an hour — counting, dates, prices, change, adding, subtracting — until Lysander’s head was a reeling Babel of figures and the dinner bell rang. Herr Barth only paid for board and breakfast so he excused himself and Lysander crossed the corridor to the panelled dining room where Frau Kriwanek herself was waiting for him.

Frau K, as her three lodgers referred to her, was a woman of rigid piety and decorum. Widowed in her forties, she wore traditional Austrian clothes — moss-green dirndl dresses, in the main, with embroidered blouses and aprons, and broad buckled pumps — and projected a demeanour of excruciating politesse that was really only endurable for the length of a meal, Lysander had quickly realized. Her world admitted and contained only people, events and opinions that were either ‘nice’ or ‘pleasant’ (nett or angenehm). These were her favourite adjectives, deployed at every opportunity. The cheese was nice; the weather pleasant. The Crown Prince’s young wife seemed a nice person; the new post office had a pleasant aspect. And so on.

Lysander smiled blandly at her as he took his accustomed seat at the dining table. He sensed the years falling from him: Frau K made him feel he was in his adolescence again — younger, even, pre-pubescent. He became unmanned in Frau K’s presence, strangely cowed and respectful; he became someone he didn’t recognize — a man without opinions.

He saw there was a place set for a third party — the other lodger in the pension, Lieutenant Wolfram Rozman, apparently absent or late. Dinner was at eight o’clock, sharp. Frau K approved of Lysander — he was nice and pleasant, and English (nice people) — but the lieutenant, Lysandser instinctively felt, did not meet with Frau K’s full approval. He was not pleasant, perhaps not even nice.

Lieutenant Wolfram Rozman had done something wrong. It wasn’t exactly clear what, but his presence in the Pension Kriwanek was a form of disgrace. It was a regimental matter, Lysander had learned from Herr Barth. He had not been cashiered but had been temporarily expelled from barracks over this scandal, whatever it was, and forced to live here until judgement was delivered and his military fate decided. Lieutenant Rozman didn’t seem unduly concerned, Lysander had to admit — apparently he’d already been in the pension for nearly six months — but the longer he stayed the more Frau K found him not a pleasant man, incrementally. Even in the two weeks Lysander had been witness to their exchanges he had detected a marked sharpness in address, an increase in frosty formality.

In fact, Lysander liked Wolfram — as he’d been invited to call him almost immediately — but he studiously kept this opinion from Frau K. She smiled her thin smile at him now and rang the bell for service. The maid, Traudl, appeared almost at once with a tureen — containing clear cabbage soup with croutons — in her hands. This was the first course of dinner in the Pension Kriwanek, summer or winter. Traudl, a round-faced girl of eighteen who blushed when she spoke and blushed when she was spoken to, plonked the tureen down on the table hard enough for two splashes of soup to leap out and land on the immaculate white nap of the tablecloth.

“You will pay for the cleaning of the tablecloth, Traudl,” Frau K said evenly.

“With pleasure, Madame,” Traudl said, blushed, curtsied and left.

Frau K said grace, eyes closed, head level — Lysander bowed his — and served them both clear cabbage soup with croutons.

“The lieutenant is late,” Lysander observed.

“He’s paid for his meal, it’s up to him if he eats it.” She smiled again at Lysander. “Have you had a pleasant day, Herr Rief?”

“Very pleasant.”

♦

After the meal (chicken stew with paprika) the custom was that Frau K left and the gentlemen were permitted to smoke. Lysander lit a cigarette and resumed his normal persona now Frau K had gone, and began wondering, as he was inclined to do after any time spent with her, whether he should move to a hotel or another boarding house but, as he ran through the pros and cons, he realized that actually he was comfortable at the Pension Kriwanek and that, apart from one meal a day with Frau K, life there suited him.

The pension was in fact a large apartment on the third floor of a newish block on the south side of a courtyard off Mariahilfer Strasse about half a mile from the Ring. It had hot-water heating and electric light; the large bathroom the lodgers shared was modern (flushing toilet) and clean. When Lysander had consulted the travel agency about his trip he had stipulated that the list of boarding houses he was given had to be able to provide a comfortable bedroom with a capacious wardrobe, offer professional standard laundry services (he had very precise demands about the use of starch) and be near a tramway halt. The first address he had visited was the Pension Kriwanek, where he saw that his room was comprised of a sitting room, a curtained alcove with a double bed and a small boxy annexe that served as a dressing room with plenty of shelves and cupboard space for his clothes. He hadn’t bothered to look any further — and this was probably the fact that inspired his postprandial thoughts of leaving — should he have seen what else Vienna had to offer? Still, he had a tutor in residence, also, and that wasn’t to be overlooked.

When you entered the apartment through double doors off the third-floor landing you were confronted by a wide hall — wide enough for two cane-backed bergères and a round table with a glass-domed stuffed owl as a centrepiece. From this hall a long corridor led away to the dining room and the three lodgers’ rooms — Lysander’s, Wolfram’s and Herr Barth’s — and the bathroom they shared. At the end of this passage there was a door marked “Privat” that must give on to the kitchen area, he assumed, as well as Frau K’s rooms. He had never been through it, never dared. Traudl also lived in so she would have had a corner somewhere that was hers, as well. There seemed to be a narrow parallel service-corridor from the kitchen to the dining room — the dining room had two exits — but beyond that his sense of the pension’s geography was vague — who knew what lay behind Privat? The place was comfortable, you could keep yourself to yourself. Breakfast was served in your room, dinner was a paid-for supplement, a packed lunch could be provided at a day’s notice. He felt strangely at home, he had to admit.

Traudl came in and began to clear away the dessert dishes.

“How’re you, Traudl?” Lysander asked. She was a solid, strapping girl and clumsy with it.

On cue she let a dessert spoon drop to the carpet.

“Not very happy, sir,” she said, picking it up and rubbing away the custard stain with a napkin.

“Why’s that?”

“I’ve so many fines to pay Frau Kriwanek that I won’t earn anything this month.”

“That’s a shame. You have to be more careful.”

“Traudl? Careful? Totally impossible!” came a man’s voice.

“Good evening, Lieutenant, sir,” Traudl said, blushing.

Wolfram Rozman hauled out a chair and sat down heavily.

“Traudl, my little fluffy chicken, bring me some bread and cheese.”

“At once, sir.”

Wolfram leaned across the table and clapped Lysander on the shoulder. He was wearing a pale-blue suit and a lilac bow tie. He was a very tall man, inches taller than Lysander, with the gangly, limber laziness of movement that very tall men display. He sprawled in his seat, one arm flung over the back of the adjacent chair, and thrust his legs under the table. Lysander saw his pale-blue trousers and spats emerge on his side. He had hooded, sleepy eyes and a dense blond moustache with its tips waxed upward over loose, full lips.

Lysander offered him a cigarette that he accepted and — after fruitless rooting in his pockets for a box of matches — lit with Lysander’s lighter.

“I suppose I’m in her blackest books,” Wolfram said, blowing excellent smoke-rings. “As black as night.”

“You’re just not very ‘pleasant’ — let’s put it that way.”

“I was running back, trying not to be late and I thought — Jesus, God, no, Herrgott Sakra, I can’t stand it. So I went to a café and drank schnapps.”

“Why don’t you forget dinner, like Barth? Then you don’t have to see her.”

“The regiment is paying for everything. Not me.”

Traudl came back in with a plate of black, sliced bread and some soft creamy cheese.

“Thank you, my little mongoose.”

Traudl seemed about to say something but thought better of it, curtsied and left by the service door.

Wolfram leaned forward.

“Lysander — you know you can mount Traudl if you give her twenty crowns. Yes?”

“Mount?”

“Possess her.”

“Are you sure?” Lysander calculated quickly: twenty crowns was less than a pound.

“I do it a couple of times a week. The girl’s short of money — she’s actually quite agreeable.” Wolfram put his cigarette out in the ashtray, spread cheese on his bread and began to eat. “Big friendly country girl, they know a few special tricks, those girls — just to tell you, in case you felt like it.”

“Thanks. I’ll bear it in mind,” Lysander said, a little bemused at this revelation. What would Frau K say if she knew about these goings-on? He would look at Traudl with new eyes.

“You look surprised,” Wolfram said, munching on his bread and cheese.

“Well, that’s because I am. I had no idea. In this place of all places — the Pension Kriwanek — it’s very deceptive.”

Wolfram pointed at him with his knife.

“This place — this Pension Kriwanek — is just like Vienna. You have the world of Frau K on top. So nice and so pleasant, everybody smiling politely, nobody farting or picking their nose. But below the surface the river is flowing, dark and strong.”

“What river?”

“The river of sex.”

6: The Son of Halifax Rief

“I am in the stalls bar of the Majestic Theatre in the Strand. I am walking through a crowd of elegantly dressed society ladies — young and middle-aged. They gossip and chat and occasionally one of them glances at me. They pay me hardly any attention at all — even though I’m completely naked.”

Lysander paused. He was reading to Bensimon from Autobiographical Investigations.

“Yeeessss…” Dr Bensimon said, slowly. “That’s interesting. You dreamed this last night?”

“Yes. I wrote it down immediately.”

“But why a theatre, I wonder?”

“It’s obvious,” Lysander said. “If it wasn’t a theatre — now, that would be more interesting.”

“I don’t follow.”

“I’m an actor,” Lysander said.

“A professional actor?”

“I earn my living acting on stage, mainly in the West End of London.”

He heard Bensimon stand up and cross the room to sit down on the end of the divan opposite. Lysander turned in the armchair — Bensimon was staring at him eagerly.

“Rief,” he said. “I thought it sounded familiar. Are you any relation to Halifax Rief?”

“He was my father.”

“My god!” Bensimon seemed genuinely astonished. “I saw his King Lear in…Where was it?”

“The Apollo.”

“That’s right, yes, the Apollo…He died, didn’t he? Halfway through the run or something.”

“In ‘99. I was thirteen.”

“Good lord. You’re Halifax Rief’s son. How extraordinary.” Bensimon gazed hard at Lysander as if seeing him for the first time. “I think I can spot a resemblance of sorts. And you’re an actor as well, goodness.”

“Not as successful as my father — but I earn a fairly decent living.”

“I love the theatre. What was the last play you were in?”

“The Amorous Ultimatum.”

“Don’t know it.”

“By Kendrick Balston — drawing-room comedy. It’s just closed after four months at the Shaftesbury. That’s when I came on here.”

“Goodness…” Bensimon repeated, nodding slightly, as if something had been revealed to him. He went back to his desk and Lysander looked at the silver bas-relief. He was becoming very familiar with it, he felt, even if this was only his second session with Bensimon.

“So — you’re naked in the stalls bar of the Majestic. Are you aroused?”

“I’m enjoying being there, I suppose. I’m not ashamed of being naked in front of these people. Not embarrassed.”

“There’s no laughing or sniggering, no pointing, no mockery.”

“No. They seem to take it perfectly normally. Idle curiosity would be the strongest emotion. They just glance at me and carry on their conversation.”

“Do they ‘glance’ at your penis?”

“Ah. Yes. Yes, they do.”

There was a silence. Lysander closed his eyes, he could hear the Bensimon pen scratching away. To take his mind momentarily off their discussion he forced himself to recall the pleasures of the last weekend. He had caught the train to Puchberg and stayed the night at the station hotel there. Then he had taken the funicular to the Hochschneeberg and had walked (he had brought his hiking boots with him) all the way to the Alpengipfel peak and back. He had felt his mind clear and his spirits lift as they always did when he was hiking in the mountains or on one of his walking tours. Maybe, he thought, this was the best reason to have come to Austria — new walks, new landscapes. Every weekend he could take a train and walk in the mountains, empty his head, ignore his problems. The walking cure –

“Is this a recurring dream?” Bensimon asked.

“Yes. With variations. Sometimes there are fewer people.”

“But it’s essentially you — naked — amongst women, fully dressed.”

“Yes. It’s not always in a theatre.”

“Why do you think you dream this?”

“I was rather hoping you might tell me.”

“Let’s continue this conversation next time,” Bensimon said, bringing the session to an end. Lysander stood and stretched — he felt strangely tired, all that concentration. He slipped his notebook into his pocket.

“Keep writing everything down,” Bensimon said, showing him the door. “We’re making progress.” They shook hands.

“See you on Wednesday,” Lysander said.

“Halifax Rief’s son, how incredible.”

♦

Lysander sat in the Café Central drinking a Kapuziner and thinking about his father. As usual he tried to bring him to mind but failed. All he had was an image of a big burly man and a square fleshy face under thick greying hair. He could hear the famous voice, of course, the resonant bass rumble, but what lingered most fixedly in his memory of his father was his smell — the aroma of the brilliantine he used in his hair, his own mix, prepared by his barbers. A sharp initial astringent whiff of lavender underlayed by the richer scent of bay rum. A very perfumed man, my father, Lysander thought. And then he died.

Lysander looked around the big café with its high ceilings and glass dome. The place was quiet. A few people reading newspapers, a mother and two little girls inspecting the pastry trolley. Sun slanting through the tall windows, setting the ruby and amber lozenges of coloured glass in the panes aglow. Lysander signalled a waiter and ordered a brandy, feeling like sustaining the tranquil mood. When it arrived he tipped it in his Kapuziner and took out Blanche’s letter. The first he’d had from her since arriving in Vienna — he had written to her four times…He flattened the sheets. Royal blue ink, her strong jaggy handwriting filling the page, going right up to the edge.

Darling Lysander,

You will be cross with me I know but I do miss you, my lovely man, honestly, and I keep meaning to write but you know me and how ‘frantic’ everything is. We had the copyright read-through of ‘Flaming June’ but something was wrong, apparently, and we all had to re-foregather two days later. It’s a lovely part for me and I was thinking there’s a young Guards officer that you’d be ‘perfect’ for. Shall I tell dear old Manley that you might be interested? He’ll do anything I ask him, silly besotted dear. But you’d need to come home soon, my treasure. It would be lovely to work together again. Is your mysterious ‘cure’ going well? Will it last ages? Are you taking salt baths and having cold showers and drinking asses’ milk and all that? I tell people you’ve got a ‘condition’ and they go — “Oh. Ah. Right. I see,” and rush off looking serious. I’m going down to Borehamwood tomorrow to have a ‘cinematograph test’. Dougie says I have the perfect face for the ‘flickers’ so we shall see. I had a lovely note from your mother asking me if we had decided on the ‘great day’. Do think about it, sweetness mine. I show people the ring and they say “When?” and I laugh — my bell-like laugh — and say we’re in no hurry. But I was thinking that a winter wedding might be so special. I could wear furs –

He folded the letter and put it back in his pocket, feeling vaguely sick. It was as if he were hearing her voice in his ear, reminding him what had brought him to Vienna, forcing him to confront the reality of his particular problem. He could hardly marry Blanche in these circumstances. Imagine the honeymoon night…

He lit a cigarette. Blanche had had lovers before, he knew. She had practically invited him into her bed but he had insisted on being honourable, respectful — now they were betrothed. He took his notebook from his pocket and made a swift calculation. The last time he had tried to have sexual congress with a woman had been with a young tart he’d picked up in Piccadilly. He counted back: three months, ten days ago. It was days after he had proposed to Blanche and was purely by way of necessary experiment. He remembered the small frowsty room in Dover Street, the one gas lamp, cleanish sheets on the narrow bed. The girl was pretty enough in a lurid way with her paint on but she had a black tooth that was visible when she smiled. He had started well but the inevitable result ensued. Nothing. We can try again, the girl said when he had paid her, don’t really count, do it, when nothing happens? You have to pay though — blank cartridge still makes a bang.

Lysander allowed himself a sour smile — some soldier-client had probably told her that and it had stayed in her head. He stubbed his cigarette out. Perhaps he should tell Bensimon he was engaged to Miss Blanche Blondel — it might impress him as much as Halifax Rief.

He paid his bill — remembered to put his hat on — and stepped out into the afternoon’s warm sunshine, pausing on the café steps, thinking he might walk back to the Pension Kriwanek — maybe skip supper? — wondering also where he might go this coming weekend — Baden, maybe, or even Salzburg, make a short trip of it, the Tyrol –

“Mr Rief?”

Lysander jumped unconsciously. A tall man, lean hard face, neat dark moustache.

“Didn’t mean to surprise you. How d’you do? Alwyn Munro.”

“Sorry — dreaming.” They shook hands. “Of course. We met at Dr Bensimon’s. Coincidence,” Lysander said.

“If you come to the Café Central you’ll meet everyone in Vienna, eventually,” Munro said. “How are you enjoying your stay?”

Lysander didn’t want to make small talk.

“Are you a patient of Dr Bensimon?” he asked.

“John? No. He’s a friend. We were at varsity together. I pick his brains sometimes. Very clever man.” He seemed to sense Lysander’s reluctance to continue the acquaintance. “You’re in a rush, I can see. I’ll let you get on.” He fished in his pocket for a card. Handed it over. “I’m at the Embassy here, if you ever need anything. Good to see you.”

He touched the brim of his bowler with a forefinger and stepped into the café.

Lysander strolled back to Mariahilfer Strasse, enjoying the sun. He took his jacket off and slung it over his shoulder. The Tyrol, he thought, yes — real mountains. Then, as he was about to cross the Opernring he saw another of the defaced, ripped posters. This time the head of the monster was left — some kind of dragon-crocodile amalgam — and the composer’s full name: Gottlieb Toller. He thought he might ask Herr Barth if he knew anything about him. He heard the sound of a band playing a militarized version of a Strauss waltz and he adjusted his pace to keep in step with the thump of the bass drum. He thought of Blanche’s beautiful long face, her thin, bony wrists rattling with bangles, her tall slim frame. He did love her and he wanted to marry her, he told himself — it wasn’t pretence or social convention. He owed it to her to try and become well again, to be a normal man happily married to a wonderful woman. He had to see this through.

He crossed the Ring with due caution and as he did so the band altered its tune to a quickstep or a polka. He felt his spirits lift with the rhythm as he ambled up Mariahilfer Strasse, the music fading slowly behind him, merging with the traffic noise, as the band marched off to its barracks, civic duty done, the good people of Vienna entertained for an hour or so. Lysander felt the sun warm his shoulders and a curious congregation of emotions assail him — pride in what he had done for himself, seeking his cure on his own terms, pleasure in strolling the now familiar streets of this foreign city and, as a muted undertone, a thin enjoyable melancholy at being so far from Blanche and her all-knowing, understanding eyes.

7: The Primal Addiction

“What about masturbation?” bensimon asked.

“Well, it usually works. Nine times out of ten, let’s say. No real problems there.”

“Ah. The primal addiction.”

“Sorry?”

“Dr Freud’s expression…” Bensimon held his pen poised. “What’s your stimulus?”

“It varies.” Lysander cleared his throat. “I, ah, tend to think of people — women — that I’ve been attracted to in the past and then imagine a — ” he paused. Now he understood why it was useful not to be facing one’s interlocutor. “I imagine a situation in which everything goes well.”

“Of course, that’s a hypothesis. The hypothesized perfect world. Reality’s far more complicated.”

“Yes, I do know it’s a fantasy,” he said, trying to keep the irritation out of his voice. Sometimes Bensimon was so literal-minded.

“But that’s useful, that’s useful,” Bensimon said. “Have you heard of ‘Parallelism?’”

“No. Should I?”

“No, not at all. It’s a theory I’ve developed myself as a kind of adjunct to the main line of Dr Freud’s psychoanalysis. Maybe we’ll come back to it later.”

Silence. He could hear Dr Bensimon making little popping noises with his lips. Pop-pop-pop. Annoying.

“Is your mother alive?”

“Very much so.”

“Tell me about her. What age is she?”

“She’s forty-nine.”

“Describe her.”

“She’s Austrian. Speaks fluent English with hardly any accent. She’s very elegant. Very fashionably smart.”

“Beautiful?”

“I suppose so. She was a very beautiful young woman. I’ve seen photographs.”

“What’s her name?”

“Anneliese. Most people call her Anna.”

“Mrs Anneliese Rief.”

“No. Lady Faulkner. After my father died she married again to a Lord Faulkner.”

“How do you get along with your stepfather?”

“Very well. Crickmay Faulkner’s older than my mother — considerably older. He’s in his seventies.”

“Ah.” Lysander could hear the pen scratching.

“Do you ever think about your mother in a sexual way?”

Lysander managed to suppress his weary sigh. He had expected better from Bensimon, really.

“No,” he said. “Not at all. Never. Ever. No.”

8: A Dashing Cavalry Officer

Lysander looked at Wolfram in astonishment. He was standing in the hallway in full military uniform, his sabre dragging on the floor, shako under his arm, spurred black boots with knee guards. He looked huge and magnificent.

“My god,” Lysander said, admiringly. “Are you going on parade?”

“No,” Wolfram said, a little gloomily. “My tribunal is today.”

Lysander walked round him. The uniform was black with heavy gold frogging, like writhing snakes, on the plastron front. A furred dolman jacket hung from one shoulder. His shako had a red plume matching the red facings on the jacket collar and the stripes down the side of his trousers.

“Dragoons?” Lysander guessed.

“Hussar. Have you got anything to drink, Lysander? Something strong? I must confess to having some nervousness.”

“I’ve got some Scotch whisky, if you like.”

“Perfekt.”

Wolfram came into his room and sat down, his sabre clinking. Lysander poured him some whisky into a tooth glass that he knocked back with one gulp and held out at once for a refill.

“Very good whisky — I think.”

“You don’t want to have whisky on your breath at the tribunal.”

“I’ll smoke a cigar before I go in.”

Lysander sat down, looking at this Ruritanian ideal of a dashing cavalry officer. When he puts his shako on, Lysander reckoned, he’ll be seven feet tall.

“What’s the tribunal about?” he asked. He felt he could reasonably try to ascertain what was the cause of Wolfram’s limbo in Pension Kriwanek, now judgement day had arrived.

“A question of missing funds in the officers’ mess,” Wolfram said, equably. He explained: the Colonel of the regiment was retiring and officers had contributed to a fund to buy him a splendid present. Donations were made anonymously, money being slipped into the slot of a locked cashbox set on a dresser in the mess dining room. When the box was finally opened they found only enough money to buy the colonel “a medium-sized box of Trabuco cigars, or a couple of bottles of Hungarian champagne,” Wolfram said. “Clearly we either gave very little money to our beloved Colonel or someone had been pilfering.”

“Who had the key to the box?”

“Whoever was on the rota to be supervisory officer of the mess each week. The box was there for three months. Three months equals twelve weeks, which equals twelve suspects. Any one of whom had plenty of time to make a copy of the key and take the money. I was one of those twelve supervisory officers.”

“But why do they suspect you?” Lysander felt a stir of outrage on Wolfram’s behalf.

“Because I’m a Slovene in a German regiment. German-speaking Austrians, I mean. There’s a couple of Czechs but the German officers will always suspect the Slovene — so I spent six months here while they decided what to do with me.”

“But that’s ridiculous. Just because you’re a Slovene?”

Wolfram smiled at him, tiredly.

“How many countries are there in our great empire?”

“Austria, Hungary and…” Lysander thought. “And Croatia —”

“You haven’t even started. Carnolia, Moravia, Galicia, Bosnia, Dalmatia — it’s a vegetable soup, a great big stinking salad. Not to mention the Italians or the Ukrainians. I’ll take one more whisky.”

Lysander poured it for him.

“You have Austria.” Wolfram moved the bottle and put down the glass beside it. “You have Hungary. The rest of us are like the harem for these two powerful Sultans. They take us when they want, violate us when they feel the need. So — who stole the Colonel’s money? Ah, must be the wily Slovene.”

There was a knock on the door and Traudl looked in, blushing.

“Lieutenant Rozman, sir, your Fiaker is here.”

Wolfram stood, did up the buttons on his collar, pulled on his gloves, grabbed his sabre.

“Good luck,” Lysander said and they shook hands. “You’re an innocent man, you’ve nothing to fear.”

Wolfram smiled, shrugged. “No human being is entirely innocent…”

“True, I suppose. But you know what I mean.”

“I’ll be fine,” Wolfram said. “The wily Slovene has a few surprises up his sleeve.” He gave a little bow, clicked his heels — his spurs rattled, dryly — and he left.

Lysander returned to his desk and opened Autobiographical Investigations, feeling a certain mild despondency. Win or lose, Wolfram’s stay at the pension must be nearly over — he would either be returning to barracks, vindicated, or, disgraced, be cast adrift on to the sea of civilian life. Back to Slovenia, probably…He would miss him. He began to jot down some of the facts in the case of Lt. Wolfram Rozman. ‘No human being is entirely innocent’, he wrote, and the thought came to him that, if one were planning to steal something, it would indeed be a clever ploy to make sure that there were a dozen other potential suspects. A cluster of suspects obscuring the guilty one. He underlined the sentence: ‘No human being is entirely innocent’. Perhaps it was time to tell Bensimon his darkest, most shameful secret…

There was another knock on his door. He looked at his wristwatch — Herr Barth wasn’t due for an hour. He said, “Come in,” and Traudl appeared again and shut the door behind her.

“Hello, Traudl. What can I do for you?”

“Frau Kriwanek is visiting her sister and Herr Barth is sleeping in his room.”

“Well, thank you for the information.”

“As he was leaving Lieutenant Rozman gave me twenty crowns and told me to come and see you.”

“What for?”

“To give you some pleasure.”

At this she stooped and lifted her thick skirt and apron to her waist and in the penumbra they cast Lysander saw the pale columns of her thighs and the dark triangle of her pubic hair.

“It won’t be necessary, Traudl.”

“What about the twenty crowns?”

“You keep them. I’ll tell Lieutenant Rozman we had a very nice time.”

“You’re a kind, good man, Herr Rief.” Traudl curtsied.

No human being is entirely innocent, Lysander thought, going to the door and opening it for her. He searched his trouser pockets for change, thinking to tip her, but all he found was a visiting card. She didn’t need tipping anyway — she’d just earned twenty crowns.

“I can come another time,” Traudl said.

“No, no. All’s well.”

He shut the door behind her. River of sex, indeed. He glanced at the card in his hand — whose was this?

“Captain Alwyn Munro DSO,” he read. “Military Attaché, British Embassy, Metternichgasse 6, Vienna III.”

Another bloody soldier. He put it on his desk.

9: Autobiographical Investigations

It is the summer of 1900. I am fourteen years old and am living at Claverleigh Hall in East Sussex, the country seat of my stepfather, Lord Faulkner. My father has been dead for a year. My mother married Lord Faulkner nine months after my father’s funeral. She’s his second wife, the new Lady Faulkner. Everybody in the neighbourhood is pleased for old Lord Crickmay, a bluff, kindly man in his late fifties, a widower with one grown-up son.

I still don’t really know what I feel about this new arrangement, this new family, this new home. Claverleigh and its estate remain largely terra incognita to me. Beyond the two walled gardens there are woods and fields, copses and meadows, paddocks and two farms spread out across the downs of East Sussex. It’s a large well-run estate and I feel a permanent alien in it even though the servants in the house, the footmen, the housemaids, the coachmen and the gardeners, are all very friendly. They smile when they see me and call me ‘Master Lysander’.

I have been removed from my school in London — “Mrs Chalmers’ Demonstration School for Boys” — and am being tutored by the local curate, the Reverend Farmiloe, an old and learned bachelor. My mother tells me that, most likely, I shall be sent to a boarding school in the autumn.

It is a Saturday so I have no lessons but the Reverend Farmiloe has asked me to read a poem by Alexander Pope called ‘The Rape of the Lock’. I am finding it very hard-going. After lunch I take my book and wander out into the big walled garden, looking for a secluded bench where I can continue my laborious reading. I like poetry, I learn it easily by heart, but I find Alexander Pope almost incomprehensible — not like Keats or my favourite, Tennyson. The gardeners and the boys are out in the long herbaceous borders weeding and greet me as I pass: “Good day, Master Lysander.” I say hello — I know most of them by now. Old Digby the head gardener, Davy Bledlow and his son Tommy. Tommy is a couple of years older than me and has asked if I would like to go out hunting rabbits with him one day. He has a prize ferret called Ruby. I said, no thank you. I don’t want to hunt and kill rabbits — I think it’s cruel. Tommy Bledlow is a big lad with a broken nose flattened on his face that makes him look strange — a threatening clown. I leave the walled garden and cross the fence into Claverleigh Wood by the stile.

The sun shines down through the fresh green leaves of the ancient oaks and beeches. I find a mossy angle between two gnarled buttressing roots of a big oak. I am lying in a patch of sunshine and enjoying the warmth on my body. There’s a faint breeze. In the distance I can hear the sound of a train chuffing along the Lewes to Pevensey line. Birds are singing — a thrush, I think, a blackbird. It’s ideally peaceful. A warm summer’s day at the beginning of the new century in the south of England.

I open my book and begin to read, trying to concentrate. I stop and remove my boot and socks. Flexing my toes, I read on.

“Sol through white curtains shot a tim’rous ray

And op’d those eyes that must eclipse the day.”

In eighteenth-century London, a beautiful young woman is lying in bed, about to wake up, dress herself and start her social life — that much was fairly clear. I ease back so my head is in shadow and my body in sunlight.

“Belinda still her downy pillow breast,”

Not ‘breast’, I see, but ‘prest’. Why did I read breast? The association of downy pillow, a girl in her night clothes, disarrayed and open enough perhaps to reveal — I turned the page.

“…Shock, who thought she slept too long

Leapt up, and wak’d his mistress with his tongue.”

Who’s this ‘Shock’? But I am thinking of the downstairs maid — isn’t she called Belinda? — I think so, the tall one with the cheeky face. She has ‘downy pillows’, all right. That time I saw her kneeling, relaying a fire, with her sleeves rolled up and her buttons undone. I know what a ‘mistress’ is — but how did he wake her with his tongue?…

I feel my penis stirring agreeably under my trousers. The sun is warm in my lap. I glance around — I’m quite alone. I undo my belt and fly buttons and pull my trousers and my drawers down to my knees. The sun is warm. I touch myself.

I think of Belinda the downstairs maid. Think of breasts, soft like pillows, of a tongue waking a mistress. I grip myself. Slowly I begin to move my fist up and down…

The next thing I remember is my mother calling my name.

“Lysander? Lysander, darling…”

I’m dreaming. And then I realize I’m not. I’m waking slowly, as if I’ve been drugged. I open my eyes, blink, and see my mother standing there silhouetted by the sun-dazzle. My mother standing there looking down at me. Very upset.

“Lysander, darling, what’s happened?”

“What?” I’m still half asleep. I look down, following her gaze, my trousers and my drawers are still bunched around my knees, I see my flaccid penis and the small dark tuft of hair above it.

I drag up my trousers, curl up in a ball and begin to cry uncontrollably.

“What happened, darling?”

“Tommy Bledlow,” I sob, god knows why, “Tommy Bledlow did this to me.”

10: A Peculiar Sense of Exclusiveness

Lysander stopped reading. He felt the retrospective shame blaze through him, like the driest tinder burning, writhing, crackling hot. His mouth was parched. Come on, grow up, he said to himself, you’re twenty-seven years old — this is ancient history.

Lysander sat quiet for a moment. Bensimon had to speak first.

“Right,” Bensimon said. “Yes. So. This happened when you were fourteen.”

“I think I’d been asleep for about two hours. I was missed at teatime. My mother was worried and came out looking for me. The gardeners said I’d gone into the wood.”

“And you had begun to masturbate —”

“And had fallen asleep. A dead sleep. The sun, the warmth. A good lunch…And then my mother found me apparently unconscious with my trousers pulled down, half-naked, exposed. No wonder she panicked.”

“What happened to the young gardener?”

“He was dismissed immediately, by the estate manager, without pay and references. It was that or the police. His father protested that his son had done nothing — though he had to admit he hadn’t been in the garden all afternoon — and he was dismissed as well.”

“Who could possibly disbelieve young Master Lysander?”

“Yes, exactly. I feel very guilty. Still do. I’ve no idea what happened to them. They lost their cottage on the estate, as well. I took ill — I remember crying for days — and I was in bed for a fortnight. Then my mother took me to a hotel in Margate. I was examined by doctors — I was given all kinds of medicines for my ‘nerves’. Then I was packed off to my terrible boarding school.”

“It was never spoken of again?”

“Never. I was the victim, you see. Ill, shattered, pale. Every time someone asked me about the incident I started to weep. So everyone was very careful with me, very worried about what I had ‘endured’. Walking on eggshells, you know.”

“Interesting that you blamed the gardener’s son…” Bensimon wrote something down. “What was his name again?”

“Tommy Bledlow.”

“You still remember.”

“I’m hardly likely to forget it.”

“He had asked you to go hunting with him — with his ferret.”

“I’d said no.”

“Did you have homosexual feelings for him?”

“Ah…No. Or at least I wasn’t aware of any. He had been the last person I had spoken to. In my panic, in the urgency of the moment, I just plucked his name from the air.”

♦

Lysander took a tram back to Mariahilfer Strasse. He sat in something of a daze as they made their clattering and rocking way across town. Bensimon had been the only person to whom he had ever told the truth about that summer’s day at the turn of the century and he had to admit that the recounting of his dire and dark secret had produced a form of catharsis. He felt a strange lightness, a distancing from his past and, as he looked around him, from the world he was moving through and its denizens. He contemplated his fellow passengers in Tram K — saw them reading, chatting, lost in their thoughts, staring blankly out of the window as the city flowed by — and felt a peculiar sense of exclusiveness. Like the man with the winning lottery ticket in his pocket — or the murderer returning unspotted from the scene of his crime — he sensed himself above and apart from them, almost superior. If only you knew what I have disclosed today; if only you knew how everything in my life was going to be different now…

This last was wishful thinking, he quickly realized. What had happened that afternoon in June 1900 was the erased passage in the narrative of his life, a long white gap between two parentheses in the account of his days as a fourteen-year-old boy. He had never thought about it subsequently — erecting an impenetrable mental cordon sanitaire — pre-empting all catalysts that might stir unwelcome memories. He had walked many times in Claverleigh Wood; he and his mother were very close; he had talked to gardeners and estate workers without once bringing Tommy Bledlow to mind. The event was gone, the incident banished — effectively lost in time — as if some diseased organ or tumour had been removed from his body and incinerated.

He paused, stepping down from the tram at his halt, wondering why he had unthinkingly chosen that image. No — he was glad that he had told everything to Bensimon. Perhaps, at root, this was all psychoanalysis could really achieve: it authorized you to talk about crucially, elementally, important matters — that you couldn’t relate to anybody else — under the guise of a formal therapeutic discourse. What could Bensimon say to him, now, that he couldn’t say to himself? The act of confession was a form of liberation and he wondered if he needed Bensimon any more. Still, he did feel almost physically different from the man who had written down the events of that day. And writing it down was important, also, he could see that. Something had changed — it had been a purging of sorts, an opening up, a cleansing.

He walked slowly and thoughtfully home from the tram-halt to the pension, stopping only to buy a hundred English Virginia cigarettes from the tobacconist at the junction of Mariahilfer Strasse and the pension’s courtyard. He wondered vaguely if he were smoking too much — what he needed was a bracing twenty-mile hike in the mountains. He started to contemplate pleasantly where he might go this weekend.

Traudl was dusting down the glass-domed owl when he pushed open the door. She didn’t curtsey, he noticed, and her welcoming smile seemed a little more knowing. Not surprisingly, Lysander thought, now we both have our own new secret to share.

“The lieutenant would like to see you, sir,” she said, then, glancing around, whispered, “Remember about the twenty crowns.”

“Don’t worry. He’ll just assume we — you know…”

“Yes. Good. Be sure to say this, sir, please.”

“I will, Traudl. Rest assured.”

“And I put your post in your room, sir.”

“Thank you.”

Lysander knocked on Wolfram’s door and, summoned, went in. He could see at once from Wolfram’s wide smile and the bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket that all had gone well at the tribunal. He was back in his civilian clothes — a caramel tweed suit with chocolate-coloured tie.

“Acquitted!” Wolfram said with a maestro’s gesture, arms raised in a flourish, and they shook hands warmly.

“Congratulations. I hope it wasn’t too much of an ordeal,” Lysander said.

Wolfram busied himself with the opening and pouring of the champagne.

“Well, they try to scare you to death, of course,” he said. “All those senior officers in their dress uniforms and their most disapproving expressions — solemn, solemn faces. Keep you waiting for hours.” He topped Lysander up. “If you keep your nerve, your dignity, you’re halfway there.” He smiled. “Your excellent whisky was most helpful in that department.”

They clinked glasses, drank.

“So, it’s all over,” Lysander said. “What made them see sense?”

“An embarrassing lack of evidence. But I gave them something to think about. It helped move the spotlight away from the wily Slovene.”

“Oh, yes — what?”

“There’s this captain in the regiment, Frankenthal. Doesn’t like me. Arrogant man. I found a way of reminding my superior officers that Frankenthal is a Jewish name.” Wolfram shrugged. “Frankenthal had the key for a week, just like me.”

“What’s his Jewishness got to do with it?”

“He’s not a Jew — his family converted to Catholicism a generation ago. But still…” Wolfram smiled, mischievously. “They should have changed their name.”

“I don’t follow.”

“My dear Lysander — if they can’t pin the crime on a Slovene then a Jew is even better.” Wolfram drained his glass. “Serves the disagreeable fellow right. And I have a month’s leave, by way of apology for my ‘ordeal’. So — you’ll still see a bit more of me. Then we go on manoeuvres at the end of September.” He smiled. “How was the country girl, eh?”

“Oh, Traudl, yes. Most enjoyable. Thank you very much.” Lysander changed the subject quickly. “What would you have done if they hadn’t acquitted you?”

Wolfram thought for a second. “I would have killed myself, most likely.” He frowned, as though thinking through the options, rationally. “A bullet to the head, most likely. Or poison.”

“Surely not? My god.”

“No, no — you have to understand, Lysander, here in Vienna, in this ramshackle empire of ours, suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action. Everyone will know your true feelings and why you had no choice but to do it — no one will condemn you or blame you.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Once you understand that you will understand us.” Wolfram smiled. “It lies very deep in our being. Selbstmord — death of the self: it’s an honourable farewell to this world.”

They finished the bottle and Lysander went back to his room feeling the effects of the alcohol. He thought he might skip dinner tonight — maybe go out to a café and carry on drinking. He felt buoyant, pleased about Wolfram, of course, and pleased that he himself had finally opened up the sealed casket of his past.

Propped on his desk was his post. A letter from Blanche, one from his bank in London and one with an Austrian stamp and handwriting he didn’t recognize. He tore it open. It was an invitation to the Vernissage of an exhibition of ‘recent work’ by the artist Udo Hoff at an art gallery — the Bosendorfer-Renz Galerie für moderne Kunst — in the centre of town. Written across the bottom in green ink in large bulbous letters was the injunction: “Do come! Hettie Bull.”

11: Parallelism

Lysander had moved from the chair to the divan at Bensimon’s suggestion. He wasn’t sure yet what this displacement and change in bodily alignment would signify, but Bensimon had been insistent. His head propped on pillows, Lysander still had an excellent view of the African bas-relief.

“How old was your mother when your father died?” Bensimon asked.

“Thirty-five…Thirty-six. Yes.”

“Still a young woman.”

“I suppose so.”

“How did she take your father’s death?”

Lysander thought back, remembering his own awful shock, his utter misery, when the news had been delivered. Through the dark mists of his own fraught recollection he remembered how abject his mother had been.

“She took it very badly indeed — not surprisingly. She adored my father — she lived for him. She abandoned her own career when they married. She travelled with him when he travelled. When I was born I went with them also. He had his own theatre company, you see, apart from his work in the London theatres. She helped him run it, did the day-to-day administration. We were touring constantly all over England, Scotland, Ireland. We lived in rented houses, flats — never really had a place of our own. When he died we were living in a flat in South Kensington. For all his fame and success my father died virtually bankrupt — he’d sunk all his money into the Halifax Rief Theatre Company. There was very little left over for her. I remember we had to move to lodgings in Paddington. Two rooms, one fireplace, sharing a kitchen and a bathroom with two other families.”

Lysander could recall those rooms vividly. Grimy, uncleaned windows, worn, patched oilcloth on the floor. The smell of soot from the station nearby, the hoot and whistle from the marshalling yards, the metallic clash and thunder of railway wagons and the sound of his mother, morning and night, weeping quietly. Then somehow she met Crickmay Faulkner and everything changed.

Lysander thought before he added, “For a while she rather took to drink. Very discreetly — but in the months after the funeral she drank a lot. She was never unseemly but when she came to bed I could smell it on her.”

“Came to bed?”

“We had a sitting room and a bedroom in those lodgings,” Lysander said. “We shared the bed. Until Lord Faulkner proposed marriage and he set us up in a larger house in Putney where I had my own room.”

“I see. How did your mother meet your father? Did he come to Vienna?”

“No. My mother sang in a chorus of a touring German opera company. They were touring England and Scotland in 1884. She had — has — a very fine mezzo-soprano voice. She was in Glasgow performing in Wagner’s Tristan at the King’s that was alternating with the Halifax Rief Theatre Company’s production of Macbeth. They met backstage. Love at second sight, my father used to say.”

“Why second sight?”

“Because he said that at first sight his thoughts were hardly ‘amorous’. If you see what I mean.”

“I do, I do. ‘Love at second sight.’ A pretty compliment.”

“Why are you asking me all these questions about my mother, Dr Bensimon? I’m no Oedipus, you know.”

“Heaven forfend, I’m sure you’re not. But I think what you told me — what you read out to me the last time — holds the key to your eventual recovery. I’m just trying to get more context about you, about your life.”

Lysander registered the sound of his chair being pushed back. The session was over.

“Do you remember I asked you if you’d heard of Parallelism?” Bensimon had crossed the room into the very edge of his field of vision. A shadow with his hand extended. Lysander swung his legs off the divan, stood up and was offered a small book, little more than a pamphlet. He took it. Navy-blue cover with silver lettering. Our Parallel Lives, an introduction, by Dr J. Bensimon MB, BS (Oxon).

“I had it privately printed. I’m working on the full-length version. My magnum opus. Taking rather a long time, I’m afraid.”

Lysander turned the book over in his hands.

“Can you give me the gist?”

“Well, bit of a challenge. Let’s say that the world is in essence neutral — flat, empty, bereft of meaning and significance. It’s us, our imaginations, that make it vivid, fill it with colour, feeling, purpose and emotion. Once we understand this we can shape our world in any way we want. In theory.”

“Sounds very radical.”

“On the contrary — it’s very commonsensical, once you get to grips with it. Have a read, see what you think.” He looked at Lysander, searchingly. “I hesitate to say this, and I very rarely make this leap, but I have a feeling Parallelism will cure you, Mr Rief, I really do.”

12: Andromeda

Lysander felt uneasy and strangely unsure of himself on the day of Udo Hoff’s Vernissage. He hadn’t slept well and even as he shaved that morning he felt a little odd and jittery — uncharacteristically nervous about going to the exhibition, about meeting Hettie Bull again. He soaped his brush in his shaving mug and worked the lather into his cheeks, chin and around his jaw, wondering automatically, as he pursed his lips and ran the brush under his nose, whether he ought to grow a moustache. No, came the usual, instant answer. He had tried it before and it didn’t suit him; it made him look dirty, he thought, as if he had forgotten to wipe away a smear of oxtail soup from his upper lip. He had the wrong colour of brown hair for a moustache. You needed stark contrast, he thought, to justify a moustache on a young face — like that chap Munro at the embassy, black and neat, as if he’d stuck it on.

He dressed with care, selecting his navy-blue lightweight suit, black brogues and a stiff-collared white shirt that he wore with a scarlet, polka-dotted, four-in-hand tie. A splash of bold colour to show how artistic he was. His father would not have approved — a natty and particular dresser himself, Halifax Rief always maintained that it should take a good five minutes before anyone noticed your style or the care and thought that lay behind the clothes a man wore. Any form of ostentation was vulgar.

Lysander decided to visit the Kunsthistorisches Hofmuseum on the Burgring. It was a gesture, he knew, and a futile one at that, but he was imagining himself at the gallery for Hoff’s exhibition, the room full of people, all expert and opinionated about art, ancient and modern. What could he say to such intellectuals, art critics, collectors and connoisseurs? He was conscious again of the huge gaps in his knowledge of general culture. He could quote pages of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Sheridan, Ibsen, Shaw — or at least those parts of the playwrights’ work he’d had to con in his career. He had read a lot of nineteenth-century poetry — poetry he loved — but he knew very little of what was perceived to be ‘avant-garde’. He bought newspapers and magazines and kept up with world events and European politics, to a degree, and he realized that, on first impression, he presented a highly plausible rendition of a worldly, informed, educated man — but he knew how flimsy the disguise was whenever he encountered people with real brains. You’re an actor, he rebuked himself, so act intelligent! There’s plenty of time to acquire knowledge, he thought, you’re not remotely a fool, there’s a lot of native brain-power there. It’s not your fault that you were badly educated, moving from school to school. Your adult life has been focussed on your theatrical career — auditions, rehearsals, small roles becoming more significant. Only in the last play he’d been in, The Amorous Ultimatum, could he have been legitimately considered a leading man — or second leading man, at any rate — his name on the poster in the same type-size as Mrs Cicely Brightwell, no less, and no better benchmark to show how far he’d come in only a few years. His father would have been proud of him.

In the museum he wandered through the grand galleries on the first floor, looking at the gloomy, varnished images of saints and madonnas, mythical gods and melancholy crucifixions, stepping close to read the names of the artists on the bottom of the frame and mentally checking them off. Caravaggio, Titian, Bonifazio, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. He knew these names, of course, but he could now say, “Do you know Bordone’s Venus and Adonis? I was looking at it just today — yes, funnily enough — in the Hofmuseum. Splendid, very affecting.” He began to relax a little. It was just an act, after all, and that was his métier, his talent, his calling.

He wandered on. Now all the painters were Dutch — Rembrandt, Franz Hals, Hobbema, Memling. And what was this? Attack by Robbers by Philip Wouverman. Dark and powerful, the swarthy brigands armed with silver cutlasses and spiky halberds. “Do you know Wouverman’s work? Very striking.” Where were the Germans? Ah, here we are — Cranach, D’Pfenning, Albrecht Dürer…But names were beginning to jumble and distort in his head and he felt a sudden tiredness hit him. Too much art — museum-fatigue. Time for a cigarette and a Kapuziner. He had enough names in his head to sustain any fleeting social chit-chat — it wasn’t as if he was going to be interviewed for a job as a curator, for heaven’s sake.

He found a coffee stall on the Ring and leaned on its counter, smoking a Virginia and sipping his coffee. It really was a splendid boulevard, he thought — nothing remotely like it in London, the Mall was the only contender, but feeble in comparison — the great circular sweep of the roadways girdling the old town, the careful positioning of the huge buildings and palaces, their parks and gardens. Very beautiful. He looked at his wristwatch — he still had an hour or so to kill before he could reasonably make an entrance at the gallery. He wondered what Udo Hoff would be like. Bound to be very pretentious, he imagined, exactly the sort of man who could lure and impress a Hettie Bull.

He sauntered along the Ring towards the steepling tower of the Rathaus. He could hear, as he approached, an amplified voice shouting and he saw, as he drew near, a crowd of some hundreds gathered in the small park in front of the town hall. A wooden stage had been erected, some six feet high, and on it a man was giving a hectoring speech through a megaphone.

Automobiles and motor diligences whizzed by as the day began to lose its heat. The evening rush homeward had begun. Tourists in horse-drawn carriages clip-clopped along the pavement edge like vestiges of another age. Bicycles everywhere, swerving through the traffic. Lysander crossed the boulevard over to the Rathaus, watching the oncoming vehicles carefully, and joined the murmuring crowd.

They were all working men, it seemed, and they had come to this meeting symbolically wearing their work clothes. Carpenters in dungarees with hammers hooked to their belts, masons in leather aprons, motor engineers in their bib-and-brace overalls, chauffeurs in gauntlets and double-breasted overcoats, foresters with long two-handled saws. There was even a group of several dozen miners, black with coal dust, their teeth yellow in their smirched faces, the whites of their eyes stark and disturbing.

Lysander moved closer to them, curious, strangely fascinated by their black faces and hands. He realized this was the first time he had seen real miners close to, as opposed to images of them in magazines and books. They were paying concentrated attention to the speaker, who was barking on about jobs and wages, about immigrant Slav labour that was undercutting the rightful earnings of the Austrian working man. Cheers and clapping broke out as the speech became more incendiary. A man bumped into him and apologized, politely, not to say effusively.

Lysander turned. “It’s quite all right,” he said.

He was a young man, in his early twenties, with a grey felt hat, minus its band, and his long dark hair hung over his collar — his beard was patchy and unbarbered. Oddly, because the weather was fine, he was wearing a short, yellow rubberized cycling-coat. Lysander saw that he was shirtless under the cycling-coat — a vagrant, a madman — the sour smell of poverty came off him.

Loud cheers rose from the crowd at some sally from the speaker.

“They just don’t understand,” Cycling-coat said fiercely to Lysander. “Empty words, hot air.”

“Politicians,” Lysander said, rolling his eyes in ostensible sympathy. “All the same. Words are cheap.” He was beginning to be aware of glances coming his way. Who is this smart young man in his polka-dot tie talking to the madman? Time to leave. He walked away around the group of miners — black troglodytes come up from the underworld to see the modern city. Suddenly Lysander felt the idea for a poem grow in him.

♦

The Bosendorfer-Renz gallery was in a street off Graben. Lysander hovered some distance away at first, watching to see that guests were actually going in — he needed the security of other bodies. He approached the door, invitation in hand, but no one seemed to be checking on the identity of invitees so he slipped it back in his pocket and followed an elderly couple into what seemed more like an antique shop than an art gallery. In the small window were a couple of ornately carved chairs and a Dutch still life on an easel (apples, grapes and peaches with the inevitable carefully perched fly). At the rear of this first room was a corridor — bright lights beckoned and a rising hum of conversation. Lysander took a deep breath and headed on in.

It was a large high-ceilinged room, like a converted storage area, lit by three electric chandeliers. Long sections of wooden partitions mounted on small wheels broke up the space. It was busy, forty to fifty people had already arrived, Lysander was glad to see — he could lose himself. Hoff’s canvases were hung from a high picture rail; here and there small sculptures and maquettes stood on thin chest-high plinths. He decided to do a quick tour of the paintings, say hello to Miss Bull, congratulate Hoff and disappear into the night, duty done.

Hoff’s work, at first glance, appeared conventional and unexceptional — landscapes, townscapes, one or two portraits. But on closer inspection Lysander registered the strange and subtle light effects. A view of a meadow with a wood beyond seemed bathed in the glow of powerful arc-lights, the shadows cast densely black, razor-edged, turning the banal panorama into something sinister and apocalyptic, making you wonder what blazing light in the sky caused this baleful iridescence. A Saharan sun shining on a northern European valley. There was another sunset which was so lurid that it seemed the sky itself was diseased, rotting. In a townscape — Village in the Snow — Lysander suddenly noticed that two houses had no doors or windows and the village church had a round ‘O’ on its steeple, not a cross. What secrets were harboured here in this humble village?

As he went round the room spotting these potent anomalies, Lysander found that he was growing impressed with Hoff’s subtly oblique and disturbing vision. The largest painting was a full-length portrait of a heavily made-up woman in an embroidered kaftan sitting in a chair — Portrait of Fräulein Gustl Cantor-De Castro — but a second glance revealed that the kaftan was unbuttoned in her lap to reveal her pubis. The arrowhead of dark hair had seemed part of the decorative frieze-motif on the richly embroidered kaftan. When he saw this, Lysander felt a genuine frisson of shock as he realized what he was looking at. The flat stare of the hard-faced woman appeared to be directed exclusively at him, making him seem either complicit in the exposure of her sex — she had undone these buttons just for him — or else he was a voyeur, caught in the act.

He turned away and saw a waiter circulating with a tray of wine glasses. Lysander helped himself to one — it was a Riesling, a little too warm — and moved away to a corner to survey the crowd, most of whom seemed more interested in talking to each other than looking at Udo Hoff’s new paintings. He wondered who was Hoff. You could spot the artists — one with a shaven head, one with no tie, one bearded fellow in a paint-spattered smock as if he’d just come from his studio. Absurd to demarcate yourself so obviously, Lysander thought — no class. He could see no sign of Miss Hettie Bull, however.

He set down his empty glass on a table and wandered off to glance at what was hanging on the mobile partitions. He jerked to a halt, almost comically, at what he saw next. Turning a corner to investigate what was on the reverse side of a partition filled with small, framed drawings of jugs and bottles he found himself in front of the cartoon, the original design, of a theatre poster. There it was — a near-naked woman cupping her breasts as some blunt-faced rearing dragon-monster, like a scaly eel, threatened her — one orange eye glowing and a snake’s forked tongue extended in the direction of her loins. Written on it was “ANDROMEDA UND PERSEUS eine Oper in vier Akten von GOTTLIEB TOLLER”. So Udo Hoff had designed the offending poster, the shreds and scraps of which he had seen throughout Vienna…One mystery solved. And Perseus not Persephone.

Lysander stepped back for a better view. It was a provocative and disturbing image, no doubt. The scaly neck and head of the monster with its solitary septic eye. Even the most innocent bourgeois could see what was meant to be symbolized here, no doubt about it. And the woman pictured, Andromeda, she seemed –

“Did you ever see it?” An English voice — Manchester accent.

Lysander turned. Dr Bensimon stood there in evening dress — white bow tie, tailcoat — his beard recently trimmed and neatened. They shook hands, Lysander finding it strange to see his doctor here, out of his context. Then he remembered Miss Bull was a patient, also.

Bensimon had obviously been thinking along similar lines. “Never thought to find you here, Mr Rief. Took me aback when I saw you.”

“Miss Bull invited me.”

“Ah. All is explained.” He looked again at the poster and gestured at it. “The opera only had three performances in Vienna — at a Kabarett called ‘Hell’ — die Hölle. It was the only place that would put it on. Then it was banned by the authorities.”

“Banned? Why?”

“Gross indecency. Mind you, I would have banned it for the music. Intolerable screeching atonality. Richard Strauss gone insane.” He smiled. “I’m very old-fashioned in only one thing — music. I like a good melody.”

“What was indecent about it?”

“Miss Bull.”

“She sang?”

“No, no. She was Andromeda, sort of. Can’t you see the likeness in the portrait? You know the myth: Andromeda is chained to some rocks by the seashore as a placatory offering to a sea-monster, Cetus. Perseus comes along, kills Cetus, rescues her, they get married, etcetera, etcetera. Well, the soprano playing Andromeda — forget her name — could have passed easily for a heavyweight boxer. So Toller came up with the idea of a stand-in Andromeda for the monster-attack — our Miss Bull. There was an actually very impressive shadow-play — an Oriental puppet-effect for the monster projected somehow on the back wall — huge. Perseus was stage-front singing some interminable tenor aria — twenty minutes it seemed like — while Andromeda was being menaced. The soprano was off stage wailing and screaming. Cacophony, is the only word.”

Lysander was curious. “What was so indecent about Miss Bull’s Andromeda?”

“She was entirely naked.”

“Oh. I see. Right, yes…”

“Well, she had a few yards of some semi-transparent gauze around her. Left nothing to the imagination, let’s say.”

“Very brave of her.”

“Not short on audacity, our Miss Bull. Anyway, you can imagine the outrage. The brouhaha. They closed the theatre, ripped down every poster they could find. Poor Toller was charged with everything — immorality, indecency, pornography. Threw the book at him.” Bensimon shrugged. “So he killed himself.”

“What?”

“Yes. Hanged himself in the actual theatre — in ‘Hell’. Very dramatic statement. And sad, of course.”

They stood there for a few seconds looking at the poster in silence. There was a distinct resemblance to Hettie Bull, Lysander saw, now he looked at Andromeda’s face and not her naked body.

“I’d better be going,” Bensimon said. “I’ve an official dinner, hence the get-up. Dozens of doctors, for my sins. Have you seen Miss Bull yet?”

“No,” Lysander said. They looked around the crowded room. Lysander suddenly saw her — her small figure. He pointed. “There she is.”

“We should say hello,” Bensimon said, and they made their way across the room towards her.

Hettie Bull was standing with three men. As he and Bensimon crossed the room through the crowd towards her, Lysander noticed that she was wearing billowing cerise harem-style pantaloons, a short black satin jacket with diamanté buttons and a collar and tie. Her mass of hair was loosely piled up on her head and secured with many tortoiseshell combs. A small appliquéd bag hung from her shoulder on a braided cord reaching almost to her knees. When she turned to greet them Lysander heard a soft tinkling from ground level and looked down to see small silver bells sewn to the front of her shoes. Bensimon made his farewells and left. Hettie Bull turned to Lysander. Her big hazel eyes.

“What do you think of Udo’s paintings?” she asked.

“I like them. Very much. No, I do.”

She was staring at him intently but her mood seemed calm and assured. Perhaps she’d taken some more of Dr Bensimon’s medicine. She looked vaguely androgynous in her little jacket with its collar and tie.

“Then you must tell him yourself,” she said and moved off on chiming feet to tap the elbow of a man standing a few yards away, engaged in a conversation with two women wearing wide floppy hats. Hettie brought him over.

“Udo Hoff — Mr Lysander Rief.”

Lysander shook hands. Hoff was a very thick-set, burly man in his thirties, shorter than Lysander, with an immense breadth of chest and shoulder, a shaven head and a pointed russet beard. He seemed over-muscular, like a circus strong-man, almost bursting the stressed buttons of his shirt front, his thick neck straining at his collar.

“Mr Rief’s also with Dr Bensimon,” Hettie explained. “That’s how we met.”

Lysander immediately wished she hadn’t explained as Hoff seemed to look him up and down with new hostility and something of a sneer crossed his features.

“Ah, the Viennese cure,” he said. “Is this the latest fashion in London?” He spoke good accented English.

“No. Not at all,” Lysander said, defensively. The man seemed suddenly keen to provoke him. So — mollification, charm. He would be pleasant and nice, Frau K would be proud of him.

“I really admire your paintings — very striking. Most intriguing.”

Hoff made a flipping gesture with the palm of one hand as if a fly were bothering him.

“How are you enjoying our city?” he asked in a flat voice. Lysander wondered if this was some kind of joke or test. He decided to take it as genuine.

“Very much. I was just thinking this evening, as I walked along the Ring before coming here, how impressive it was. Exceptionally well laid out with a generosity of scale that you won’t find in —”

“You like the Ring?” Hoff said, incredulous.

“Emphatically. I think it’s —”

“You do realize these are new buildings, only a few decades old, if that?”

“I have read my guidebook carefully —”

Hoff actually prodded him on the arm with a finger, his eyebrows circumflexing in a strange anguished frown.

“I abominate the Ring,” Hoff said, a little tremor in his voice. “The Ring is a grotesque bourgeois sham. It’s an offence to the eye, to one’s sense of what is right, one’s most basic values. I close my eyes when I see the Ring. New buildings masquerading as something ancient and venerable. Shameful. We Viennese artists live in a permanent sense of shame.” He poked him again in the arm as if to add emphasis and walked away.

“Good god…Sorry about that,” Lysander said to Hettie. “I had no idea it was a sensitive subject.”

“No, we artist types aren’t meant to ‘like’ the Ring,” she said, then lowering her voice, added, “But I have to say I do, rather.”

“Same here. There’s nothing like it in London.”

She raised her face to him. She’s so gamine, Lysander thought, I feel I could pick her up with one hand.

“When am I going to sculpt you?” she said. “You’re not leaving town, are you?”

“No — no plans. Actually, things are going rather well with Dr Bensimon — I’ll be here for at least another month.”

“Then come to my studio one afternoon, I can do some preliminary drawings.” She rummaged in her little bag and scribbled down an address on a scrap of paper.

“It’s on the outskirts. You can get the train to Ottakring and walk from the station. Maybe take a cab the first time just to be sure. Shall we say Monday at four?”

“Ah, yes,” Lysander looked at her address. Was this wise? — but he was oddly tempted. “Thank you.”

She put her hand on his arm. “Wonderful. You’ve a most interesting face.” She glanced around. “I’d better go and find Udo in case he gets even angrier. See you on Monday.” She smiled and walked away, the tinkle of her bells swiftly lost in the hum and chatter of the conversation.

13: Autobiographical Investigations

When God turned his hand from the making of man

And woman, of matter much finer,

Some black flux and rust, well seasoned with dust

Remained — so he fashioned the miner.

Miner — delver not climber

Miner — world’s underground designer

Miner — ocean liner (?)

Miner — confine her/repiner/incliner/diner

Quite pleased with first verse. Bit stuck.

♦

Hettie Bull. Bullish man — Udo Hoff. Bull in a china shop. Bull fighter. Matador. Little jacket. White shirt and tie. Bull fighting bull.

♦

“Happy people are never brilliant. Art requires friction.” Who said that? Nonsense. Art is the pursuit of a kind of harmony and integrity. A harmonious life full of integrity is artistic. Ergo. Q.E.D.

Dream. I was shaving and then in the mirror my face turned into my father’s. How are you, old son? he said. I’m well, father, I said. I miss you. Step through the mirror and join me, then, he said, come on, lad. I touched the mirror and his face turned back to mine.

♦

I remember an argument I had with Blanche because she’d left me a note written in pencil. I said that was disrespectful — she wrote to me as if she were jotting down a list of groceries — you didn’t write in pencil to someone you loved. She called me a silly arrogant prig. She was right — sometimes I think a fundamental priggishness is my worst feature. Not priggishness, so much, as worrying or making a fuss about things that are of no consequence at all.

♦

Great acting is being able to say “Pass the salt, please,” without sounding weird or odd or stupid or portentous. Great acting is being able to say “Horror! Horror! Horror!” without sounding weird or odd or stupid or portentous.

♦

Life is more than love. Turn that around. Love is more than life. Makes just as much sense. This is less true if you say LOVE = SEX–LOVE. Life is more than sex-love. Sex-love is not more than life. True. Didn’t Dostoevsky say something similar? You never step into the same river twice, similarly there is never a simple, single thought. The simplest thought can be qualified again and again and again. I have a headache — because I drank too much schnapps with Wolfram, who made me laugh. The simple headache has its history, its penumbra, and is touched by my pre-headache life and (I hope) my post-headache life. Everything is unbelievably complicated. Everything.

14: The Fabulating Function

“I read your little book,” Lysander said, stretching himself out on the divan. “Most interesting. I think I understand it. Well, sort of.”

“It’s basically about using your imagination,” Dr Bensimon said. “I’m going to pull the curtains today, if you don’t mind.”

Lysander heard him drawing the curtains on the three windows and the room grew dim and tenebrous, lit only by the lamp on Bensimon’s desk. As he crossed back to his seat his giant shadow flicked across the wall by the fireplace.

As far as Lysander was able to comprehend, Bensimon’s theory of ‘Parallelism’ worked approximately along the following lines. Reality was neutral, as he had explained — ’gaunt’ was a word he used several times to describe it. This world, unperceived by our senses, lay out there like a skeleton, impoverished and passionless. When we opened our eyes, when we smelled, heard, touched and tasted we added the flesh to these bones according to our natures and how well our imagination functioned. Thus the individual transforms ‘the world’ — a person’s mind weaves its own bright covering over neutral reality. This world is created by us as a ‘fiction’, it is ours alone and is unique and unshareable.

“I think I find the idea of the world being ‘fictive’ a bit tricky,” Lysander said, with some hesitation.

“Pure common sense,” Bensimon said. “You know how you feel when you wake up in a good mood. The first cup of coffee tastes extra delicious. You go out for a stroll — you notice colours, sounds, the effect of sunlight on an old brick wall. On the other hand, if you wake up gloomy and depressed, you have no appetite. Your cigarette tastes sour and burns your throat. In the streets the clanging of the trams irritates you, the passers-by are ugly and selfish. And so on. This happens unreflectingly — what I’m trying to do is make this power, that we all have in us, a conscious one, to bring it to the front of your mind.”

“I see what you mean.” This made a sort of sense, Lysander acknowledged. Bensimon continued.

“So — we human beings bring to the world what the French philosopher Bergson calls ‘La Fonction Fabulatrice’. The fabulating function. Do you know Bergson’s work?”

“Ah. No.”

“I’ve rather appropriated this idea of his and reworked it. The world, our world, is for each one of us a unique blend — a union, a fusing — of this individual imagination and reality.”

Lysander said nothing, concentrating on the bas-relief over the fireplace, wondering how Parallelism was going to cure his anorgasmia.

Bensimon was speaking again. “You know that old saying: ‘The gods of Africa are always African.’ That is the fiction the African mind has created — its fusing of imagination and reality.”

Perhaps that explains the bas-relief, Lysander thought.

“I can understand that,” he said, cautiously. “I can see how that works. An African god will hardly be Chinese. But how does that apply to my particular problem?”

Lysander heard Bensimon move his chair from behind his desk and set it down close to the end of the divan. Heard the creak of leather as he sat down.

“In precisely this way,” he said. “If the everyday world, everyday reality, is a fiction we create then the same can be said of our past — the past is an aggregate of fictive realities we have already experienced — our memories. What I’m going to try and make you do is change those old fictions you’ve been living with.”

This was all becoming a bit complex, Lysander thought.

“I’m going to use a bit of very mild hypnosis on you. A very gentle and shallow hypnotic state. That’s why the room is dark. Close your eyes, please.”

Lysander did so.

Bensimon’s voice changed register, going deeper and strangely monotone. He spoke very slowly and deliberately.

“Relax. Try to relax totally. You’re inert, lying immobile. You feel that total relaxation begin in your feet. Slowly it begins to travel up your legs. Now you feel it in your calves. Now it’s reached your knees…Your thighs…Breathe as slowly as possible. In — out. In — out. It’s climbing your body, now it’s in your chest, filling your body, total relaxation.”

Lysander felt a kind of swoon flow through him. He was completely conscious but he felt in a form of semi-paralysis, as if he couldn’t lift a finger, floating an inch above the blanket. Bensimon began to count down in his deep, monotone voice.

“Twenty, nineteen, eighteen…You are completely relaxed…Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen…”

Now Lysander felt fatigue envelop him, his eyes locked shut, Bensimon’s voice oddly distant and muffled as he counted down to zero.

“Think back to that day,” Bensimon went on. “You’re a young boy, fourteen years old. You have your book in your hand, ‘The Rape of the Lock’. You walk through the walled garden. You greet the gardeners. You climb the stile into the wood. It’s a glorious sunny day, warm and balmy, the birds are singing. You walk into the wood and you sit down at the foot of an ancient oak. You start to read. The sun warms you. You begin to nod. You fall asleep. Fast asleep. You sleep for two hours, you’re late for tea. You wake up. You pick up your book and you go back to the house where your mother is waiting for you. You apologize for being late and the two of you go into the drawing room to have your tea…”

♦

“Open your eyes.” A dry slap. Slap-slap.

Lysander did so at once, suddenly tense, forgetting where he was for an instant. He’d fallen asleep. Had he missed something crucial? Bensimon opened the curtains and daylight filled the room again.

“Did I fall asleep. I’m terribly sorry if I —”

“For a matter of seconds. Quite natural. You’ll remember everything I said.”

“I remember apologizing for being late for tea.”

“Exactly.” Bensimon crossed the room. “You weren’t in a trance. You were simply imagining being in a parallel world. A world where you went to sleep in a wood on a sunny afternoon, woke up and returned home for tea. Concentrate on that day in your parallel world. Fill it with detail and concentrate on the emotions that day generated. Use your fonction fabulatrice. In this parallel world nothing happened. Reality and imagination fuse to form the fiction that we live by. Now you have an alternative.”

♦

Lysander ordered a brandy in the Café Central. He thought about what had happened in that session, obeying Bensimon’s instructions to concentrate on the details of the parallel world he had created — that sunny day where nothing happened except that he nodded off over his book as he lay under an oak tree in Claverleigh Wood. Yes, he could see himself waking, rubbing his eyes, rising to his feet a little stiffly and unsteadily, picking up his book and walking home. Over the stile, through the walled garden — all the gardeners gone — and into the Hall through a side door, clattering up the stairs to the green drawing room where his mother was waiting and tea had been laid out on the circular table. Thinking — yes, she has rung the bell for more hot water to freshen the pot because I was late and the tea had cooled. There would be triangles of buttered toast and strawberry jam and a slice of seed cake, my favourite. I sit down and brush a blade of grass off my trousers. My mother picks up the silver teapot — no, it’s the pale-green china one with the pattern of coiling ivy leaves and the chip in its lid — and as she pours my cup of tea she asks me, “How’s the reading going, darling?”

Lysander paused, brandy glass held halfway to his lips. It was so real. Completely real and, to him, entirely true. He had chosen to go into a parallel world and had brought his imagination to bear. Extraordinary. His mother was wearing…What? A tangerine rest-gown with wide Magyar sleeves. A jade bracelet that clinked against her teacup. Stevens, the footman, cleared away the tray. It was so easy. What was it called? His fonction fabulatrice. He had made a familiar world and created a day in it where nothing untoward had happened. He felt only happiness…Maybe he should read some more of this Bergson person. He sipped his brandy, felt its warmth slide down his throat, its sweet smoky mellowness, and smiled to himself.

15: The Studio at Ottakring

There was a letter from Blanche in Lysander’s post that morning. He ripped it open with his thumb and for a brief second he caught a residual odour of rose water, the scent she used. She had covered four leaves of lilac writing paper, dense with her big, jagged scrawl.

Darling One and Only,

Flaming June is going to be an enormous success — I can feel in my bones that it’s going to run and run for months. When are you coming home? Are you feeling better in yourself? Your little kitten wants to curl up in your lap again. I have a part in a ‘film’ — can you believe it? Loads of lovely money. You must have a test when you come back. It’s so easy — no lines to learn! I think your handsome face will be perfect and the whole experience is simply fun, as easy as pie compared to what we do night after night in the theatre –

He put the letter down, deciding to finish it later, and noticing with some irritation that Blanche hadn’t bothered to answer any of his questions. Writing letters to each other was meant to be a form of dialogue, a conversation — but Blanche wrote as if the traffic was one way, a declamation about her feelings and what she was up to that paid not the slightest notice to his replies. When he wrote to her he always had her latest letter by his side. A correspondence should feed off its two parts; monologues — however lively and intimate — were not necessarily interesting.

His mood of mild irritation persisted as he walked to the Stadtbahn station and bought his return ticket to Ottakring. He looked out of the window at the western suburbs of Vienna as the little train chuffed around its branch line to its destination. Suddenly he didn’t feel like posing for Miss Bull and being drawn by her — why had he agreed? But Miss Bull was persistent, it was hard to say no to her — this much he’d already learned.

At Ottakring he showed the driver of a two-horse Fiaker the address of the studio and climbed up into the cab. They rattled further westward, past rows of allotments and orchards of apple trees and a large graveyard with a wooden paling fence before turning up a muddy farm lane. The cab stopped at a gate painted a vibrant scarlet and Lysander stepped down and paid the modest fare. Already he was thinking of his journey home: it was all very well taking a cab from the station but how did one return to the station? He would stay an hour — no more.

From the gate, a clinker path led to what looked like an old stone barn at the edge of a tree-lined field in which two shire horses grazed. Flower pots were clustered round the front door to the barn, bright with marguerites and zinnias. He pushed the gate open and set a brass bell, mounted on a whippy length of curved metal, clanging loudly. Miss Bull appeared at the doorway almost immediately. They shook hands. She was wearing a knee-length canvas smock covered in splashes of clay and plaster.

“Mr Lysander Rief, you’re actually here. I can’t believe it!” she cried and led him into her studio.

The old barn had been converted into a capacious, windowless, ceilingless sculpture-room. A wide section of the tiled roof had been removed and replaced with glass panes. In the corner was a large squat cast-iron stove with a tall thin chimney pipe climbing up in a series of angled lengths to the roof. Along one wall ran a line of trestle tables covered with trays and pots and variously sized blocks of wood. Twisted wire armatures were stacked at one end. In another corner was a seating area — four cane chairs round a low table with a bright throw on it and a jug of anemones. In the very middle of the room on a high turning table was a crude clay sculpture, three feet tall, of a crouching minotaur — a blunt bovine head with stubby horns set on a massy, muscled body beneath. Beside it stood a small dais, with a square of carpet cut to fit the surface. Lysander looked around.

“Marvellous light,” he said, thinking this was the sort of remark to make on entering an artist’s studio.

Miss Bull removed her smock to reveal that she was wearing a cream muslin blouse over a mid-calf black serge skirt. She had wooden clogs on her feet. Her dark hair was tousled, pinned and piled up on her head with long strands falling from it carelessly. There were no paintings on view.

“Does Hoff work here?” Lysander asked.

“No, no. We live across the field, about half a mile away. Udo’s family home. We both tried working in his studio but it was a disaster — we did nothing but fight. So I rented this old place and renovated it after a fashion.” She pointed up. “Got some proper light in.” She indicated a door at the far end. “There’s a bedroom in there, if I feel like a snooze, and a sink and scullery. Thunderbox outside round the back.”

“Very nice.” He corrected himself. “Ideal.”

“Have a glass of Madeira,” she said, going to the trestle table and pouring the wine into two small tumblers. Lysander wandered over and they clinked glasses and drank. He didn’t really like fortified wines — sherries and ports and the like — and immediately felt a small dry headache form over one eye.

“This is impressive,” he said, gesturing at the crouching minotaur.

“I’m going to cast it in bronze,” Miss Bull said. “If I can afford it. Udo posed — never again. Moaning, complaining. I pose nude for him all the time. Most unfair.” She put her glass down and picked up a large drawing pad and a stick of charcoal. “Talking of which — shall we get to work?”

“Should I stand on the dais?”

“Yes. But once you’ve got your clothes off.”

Lysander smiled reflexively, assuming this was a typical Miss Bull-style risqué joke.

“Clothes off?” he said. “Most amusing.”

“I don’t sculpt the clothed figure. So there’s no point in me drawing you with your clothes on.” She smiled and pointed to the door at the end of the big room. “You can change in there.”

“Fine. Right.”

It was a small basic bedroom with whitewashed walls and rough planked floor covered with a rag-rug. There was a single iron-framed bed with a brown blanket and a dresser with a plain jug and ewer. On the ledge of a small window that looked over a vegetable garden lost amongst its rank weeds was a small glass jar filled with dried grasses, the only sign of individuality.

Lysander stood in the middle of the room thinking what to do. What was going on here? For a second he considered the option of opening the door again, striding out and telling her that it was impossible and that he had to leave. But he knew Miss Bull would think the less of him if he did that. He didn’t want her to see him as a prig or an insecure stuffed-shirt. He emptied his mind as best he could and began to undress.

When he was down to his socks and his drawers he began to feel a stirring of excitement at the audacity of what he was about to do. He looked at his clothes laid neatly on the bed. Last chance. He slipped off his socks and tugged at the bow of the waistcord. As his drawers fell he felt his genitals cool. There was a towel on a towel-rail by the dresser and he tied it around him and stepped back into the studio. Miss Bull was sitting in a wicker chair that she’d drawn closer to the dais. She held out something that looked like a small leather sling.

“It just struck me. Would you prefer a cache-sexe? I don’t mind.”

“No, no. Au naturel — all the same to me.”

He stepped up on to the dais, feeling the coarse carpet under the soles of his feet and hearing his suddenly thumping heart in his ears.

“Ready when you are,” Miss Bull said, calmly.

He let the towel fall and concentrated his gaze on the sooty chimney rising from the stove opposite, hearing only the hurried scratch of the charcoal on Miss Bull’s sketch pad. He squared his shoulders and told himself to relax, once more. He was not the tallest of men but he knew he had a good slim-waisted, broad-shouldered figure — certainly his tailor was always complimenting him on his build. “Classic, Mr Rief. The ‘manly ideal’ — you should see my other customers. Gor blimey.”

“Could you turn to your left slightly? Perfect.”

Lysander turned, trying to think of himself as some kind of Greek Olympian, a discus-thrower or javelin-hurler, stripped off for the games. What was all the fuss about the naked body, anyway? Especially in the context of art — think of all the nudes ever painted, the unclothed statues in public gardens, Michelangelo’s David, the innumerable Venuses and bare-buttocked gods and gladiators. He took a deep breath, allowing his fingers to graze his thighs. Relax, relax, relax.

“Could you put your hands on your hips?”

He did so, clenching his buttocks involuntarily, suddenly chastened by the thought of Udo Hoff, crossing the meadow from his own studio to see how his mistress was getting on…No, don’t let your thoughts go there. Think of a parallel world, your parallel world…He shut down his mind.

He heard the legs of the wicker chair scrape back and the wooden clattering sound of Miss Bull’s footsteps — walking away and then returning.

“Shall we have a break?” she said. “You’ve earned another glass of Madeira.”

Now he could look at her. She stood there smiling, holding out the glass for him. He stooped and picked up the towel, holding it casually in front of him, and stepped down to the floor, taking the glass from her. But now he couldn’t tie the towel around him, he had no hands free — but what the hell, he thought. He was enjoying the sensation — they might as well be standing at the bar of a café, chatting. Miss Bull seemed totally unperturbed. It was just another life-class to her, of course.

“You stood admirably still.”

“Thank you.”

“Anyone would have thought you’d done this before.”

“It’s a definite first.” He took a huge gulp of Madeira and then another — too sweet for his taste but he needed the rush of alcohol.

“D’you want to see what I’ve done?” Miss Bull was holding out the sketch pad, a strange smiling expression on her face. It seemed both absurd and yet entirely natural that he was standing here naked in this room with only a hanging towel ‘to protect his modesty’, as the saying went, three feet away from a young woman, fully clothed in a muslin blouse, a serge skirt and wooden clogs. She took the glass from his hand and replaced it with her sketch pad.

Lysander looked at the drawing. Very detailed and three-dimensional, the charcoal shaded and blurred by the rub of her fingertips. A strong confident hand, a very capable draughtswoman. He felt his throat close and a nerve-tremor run across his shoulder blades.

He cleared his throat. “What would you call this? ‘A study of male genitalia?’”

“You have a shortish foreskin, I noticed,” she said, lowering her voice confidentially. “For a moment I thought you must be circumcised, like Udo.” She took a step towards him. “But as I looked more closely I saw that you weren’t.”

“No. I’m not circumcised,” he managed to say, feeling a warm flush spread across his neck and chest — the gulps of Madeira only now working on him. He felt his penis stir and thicken, as though aware it was being discussed and responding.

Miss Bull allowed her gaze to drop below his waist and with one hand moved the hanging towel aside.

“Now that’s what I call a study in male genitalia,” she said. He felt her other hand run softly down his back making him shiver. Her fingertips scraped across his buttocks.

“Shall we go to bed?” she asked, leaning into him, looking up, smiling, her big hazel eyes full of laughter.

16: A Devilish Plan

Dr Bensimon looked at Lysander quizzically.

“Well, that’s somewhat extraordinary. I have to say.”

“I know,” Lysander admitted, shaking his head in similar bafflement.

“Everything functioned?”

“Absolutely problem-free. As normal. In fact I did it again — just to prove to myself that it wasn’t some kind of fluke.”

“Twice?”

“Within the space of forty minutes, say.”

Lysander thought back — two days after the event he still felt bemused and marvelling. They had gone into the small bedroom and then, in a maelstrom of his clothes being flung off the blanket and Miss Bull ridding herself of blouse, skirt, camisole, shift and knickers, they found themselves in the iron bed, her little slim lithe body tense and squirming in his arms, his arousal insistent and demanding. Certain details initially printed themselves on his mind — her dark hair spread wide on the pillow, her surprisingly full breasts with perfectly round small nipples, her fingertips sooty with charcoal — but from then on he seemed to go into a form of sexual trance, everything blurring as he concentrated. And when the release came and his orgasm arrived it took him by complete surprise, so much so that he shouted — “MY GOD!” — in astonishment and pleasure, that made her ask him if he was all right.

They separated, rolled apart and Lysander buried his face in the thin pillow, feeling tears in his eyes as Hettie — Hettie, now, no longer Miss Bull — went to fetch the Madeira bottle and the glasses. They drank, they caressed each other, they talked.

“This was all a devilish plan, wasn’t it?” he accused her.

“Yes. I admit — I confess. Ever since that first day when we met in Dr Bensimon’s rooms. When I was in such a state, remember?”

“Yes.”

“But, even so, I found I couldn’t get you out of my mind, for some reason. Maybe because you let me barge in and were so understanding. Not horrible, but kind. And pretty.”

“And so you plotted and planned and came up with this diabolical scheme.”

“But I was worried it might not work. You might have stormed off in a fit, outraged. But, I thought, seeing as you’re an actor —”

“How did you know I was an actor?”

“I asked Dr Bensimon what you did…I thought, seeing as you were an actor, you might rise to the challenge.”

“No pun intended.”

“I can call you Lysander, now, can’t I?” she said, kissing his chin and reaching down for him.

“I think you’d better.”

And then they made love again and Lysander experienced and enjoyed his second orgasm, somehow even more satisfying than the first because it was prefigured and if his mind was going to interpose itself it had had plenty of warning. Miraculously, he climbed steadily to a second climax of sensation and duly climaxed.

Dr Bensimon was tapping the end of his pen on his desk pad of blotting paper, thinking hard.

“Who was your partner? A prostitute?”

“Ah…No.”

“Was she someone who conformed to your sexual preferences, your ‘type’, I mean.”

“Actually, no…Not really my type at all.”

“Most intriguing. Can you explain it?”

Lysander thought again. “I don’t know. Perhaps you helped in some way — all our conversations. Perhaps it was Parallelism…”

17: Autobiographical Investigations

Hettie Bull — who would have thought?…But how to explain it? How to describe and understand the effect she has on me? I was attracted to her from the outset, I now see, which defies logic — or my emotional logic, anyway, as I know my eye veers towards those tall rangy girls and women, with long necks and thin wrists — tall rangy women like Blanche. How and where do these sensual tastes generate themselves? Why does one respond to dark hair rather than blonde? To plumpness rather than slimness, say? What is it about the configuration of a face — of eyebrows in relation to a nose, the height of a forehead, the fullness of lips, the changing geometry of a smile — that makes me, in particular, and not someone else, quicken and react? Is it the stirring of some atavistic notion of the ideal mating partner, our primitive sexual nature superseding the rational civilized mind — “That’s the one, that’s the one” — and thereby leading us astray?

So — Hettie Bull. I wonder if it began with the juxtaposition of the staid, solid name — daughter of John Bull, England’s icon — and the olive-skinned, big-eyed, eldritch, psychologically unbalanced gamine that is the physical reality of the young woman you see. Was ever a name less suited to a person? So many questions. But I have to testify here to the potent, unignorable catalyst of her slim naked body — so small and lissom, so enthusiastic…perhaps that’s the key? She is so unabashed and brazen. When a man knows he is wanted — when a man knows he is wanted so much that an elaborate trap is laid for him, a trap so devious that he voluntarily sheds his clothes and stands naked before the woman who is hunting him…Aching physical presence, plus manifest desire, plus absence of shame, plus perfect opportunity. Impossible to resist.

Have I been cured by Hettie Bull? Can I go back to London now and be with Blanche, full of sexual confidence at last? She will take me to her bed, I know, she’s practically said as much. So why don’t I just go home?

Be honest. Hettie Bull has cast some kind of spell over you. Her sorcery works and you want to see her again, you have to see her again, you can’t wait to see her again…But two afterthoughts nag at me: the sense that my involvement with Hettie Bull — wherever it goes from here — will bring me trouble in some form or other; and the fact that the more I become involved with Hettie the more grievous my betrayal of Blanche.

When I came home that afternoon — the little train carrying me back to Vienna through the encroaching dusk — I went to my room and, locking the door, stripped off my clothes. My body was marked with sooty fingerprints, like the lightest clustered bruises, charcoal dust from her fingertips tracing the passage of her rapid hands over my body. I washed them away with a damp flannel and put on fresh clothes, the impress of her fingers easily effaced. But as I sit here writing this I see in my mind’s eye tantalizing glimpses of her body, remembering vividly moments that we shared. The hang of her breasts as she reached over me for her Madeira glass. The way she stayed naked as I dressed, watching me from the tangled sheet and blanket, head propped on a hand. Then as I left how she slipped out of the bed and reached beneath it for the chamber pot. I stood watching her as she squatted over it, then she shooed me from the room, laughing. I think I am in serious trouble. I know I am. But what can I do?

18: Mental Agitations

Lysander began to see a pattern in Dr Bensimon’s questioning, began to sense the direction in which he was being gently led.

“What was your mother wearing when you came home that day?”

“She was wearing a teagown, one of her favourites — satin, a kind of coppery colour with a lot of lace and ribbon at the neck.”

“Anything else you can remember about it?”

“There was a sable trim on the sleeve and the hem. A lot of beading on the bodice.”

He looked at his notes again.

“You ate buttered toast and strawberry jam.”

“And seed cake.”

“Were there any other jams or condiments?”

“There was anchovy paste — and honey. My mother always eats honey at breakfast and teatime.”

“Describe the room you were in.”

“We call it the Green Drawing Room, on the first floor at the side off the landing on the west stair. The walls are lacquered an intense emerald green. On one wall are about thirty miniature paintings — landscapes of the estate and the house in its setting — I think done by an aunt of Lord Faulkner. Competent but rather flattered by their framing, if you know what I mean. It’s a small but comfortable room — the main drawing room is vast and looks over the south lawn — you can sit forty people easily.”

“So you made instinctively for the Green Drawing Room.”

“We always had tea there.”

“What’s on the floor?”

“A rather fine carpet — a Shiraz — and standard parquet.”

Slowly but surely the questions drew out more and more precise details. Lysander saw how this parallel day, during which nothing happened, was slowly acquiring a tactile reality — a texture and richness — that began completely to outstrip the original, disastrous day with its cluster of jangling, indistinct memories. That fatal afternoon began slowly to fade and disappear, buried under the accumulating facts and minutiae of the new parallel world. As the sessions continued, he found that he could summon up this new world far more effectively than the old; his new fictive memories, spurred on by his fonction fabulatrice, became concrete, overthrowing his painful recollections, making them vague and shadowy, to the extent that he began to wonder if they were simply the half-remembered details of a bad dream.

Soon, when tea was over, he had his mother going to the piano — a baby grand — and singing a Schubertlied in her rich mezzo-soprano. Lord Faulkner, lured by the music, joined them and smoked a cigar as he listened, the smoke making Lysander sneeze. Lord Faulkner called for another pot of tea, asking for Assam, his favourite. The fact that all this was an exercise in auto-suggestion didn’t devalue these ‘memories’ at all, Lysander saw. By a sheer act of will, persistence and precision his parallel world came to dominate his memory, exactly as Bensimon had predicted, and the bland domestic emotions of that new fictive day supplanted everything that had caused anguish and provoked insupportable shame.

As he left, retrieving his Panama hat from the hat-stand, Bensimon’s stern, bespectacled secretary appeared, an envelope in her hand. A receipt, he supposed, for last month’s fees.

“Herr Rief,” she said, not meeting his eye. “This was left for you.”

Lysander took it and read it on the stairs going down to the street. It was from Hettie.

“Come next Wednesday at six pm. U is going to Zürich. Pack an overnight bag.”

Lysander acknowledged the irrepressible surge of excitement. He felt like a boy legitimately excused school in the middle of term — that sense of unlooked-for freedom, unexpected release. Then more reproachful thoughts intruded as he strolled homeward. It was all very well feeling grateful to Hettie for ‘curing’ him but he had been snared, after all, and had tumbled guilelessly into her trap — everything had been contrived to make what took place inevitable. In his conscience he could just about forgive himself — it had been a momentary fall, his honour tarnished but not irreparably — one moment of uncontrollable passion that could be consigned to history and forgotten. No one knew, no one had been hurt. But if he went back to her and spent a night or two then that was another matter. For the sake of his engagement, his relationship and future with Blanche he should write back and say no — it couldn’t happen again or he’d be lost, he knew.

He crossed the Ring by the Burg Theatre and was instantly reminded of Udo Hoff and his architectural recriminations. And with that trigger came the fizzing surge of elation at the idea of seeing Hettie again. He began to imagine what it would be like to spend a night with her in that narrow bed, to wake in the morning, sleepy and warm, thigh to thigh, to roll over and reach for her…

Back at the pension he sat down and wrote immediately to Blanche, breaking off their engagement. It was the only honourable course to take, even if the lies were fluent. He said that various consultations with doctors and psychoanalysts in Vienna had convinced him that any cure, if it were to work, would be lengthy and complicated. Furthermore, he was troubled by the depth and severity of his ‘mental agitations’ and therefore, under these circumstances, he felt it was only fair to you, dearest Blanche, to release you from your promises and vows. He begged her forgiveness and understanding and urged her to do what she wished with the ring he had given her — throw it in the Thames, sell it, bequeath it as an heirloom to a niece or a goddaughter — whatever seemed apt. He would remember her kindness and beauty as long as he lived and he was abjectly sorry that his ‘particular unfortunate circumstances’ forbade him from becoming her devoted husband.

He sealed the envelope with a mixture of emotions — guilt, sadness and exhilaration — also modest self-satisfaction at promptly ending the duplicity combined with a thrilling sense of liberation. He was a free man now — his wretched anorgasmia a horrible memory, a thing of the past. Who could say where this liaison with Miss Hettie Bull would lead? But he made a promise to himself not to look any further into the future than his next encounter with her. There was a real element of danger added to the excitement, of course — a cuckolded lover in the wings — not to mention Hettie’s own deep instabilities (he had witnessed them breaking through — he wasn’t ignoring them) but for the moment next Wednesday at 6. 00 p.m. was all he could think about.

At dinner that night, Wolfram said to him, “You seem in excellent spirits this evening, Lysander.”

“I am,” he confessed. “I’ve realized that coming to Vienna was the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

“I’m glad to hear that, Herr Rief,” Frau K said. “I’ve always said that Vienna is the most pleasant city in Europe.”

“In the world,” Lysander added. “The most pleasant city in the world.”

19: The Arc of a Love Affair

In late September Lysander arranged with Hettie to meet for a long weekend in Linz. They travelled there separately and each, for the sake of appearances, booked a separate room in the Goldener Adler Hotel. Hettie told Hoff that she wanted to look at a seam of marble that had been unearthed in a quarry near Urfahr. He didn’t seem in the least suspicious, she said.

The change in being away from Vienna would be marked, Lysander thought. Their snatched afternoons and rare nights in the barn always suffered from a persistent undercurrent of anxiety — fear of discovery. It wasn’t just the prospect of Hoff finding them together — it could just as easily be a neighbour or a friend dropping by unannounced. To spend two entire nights as normal lovers would surely affect their moods. Everything would be different. Lysander was entranced by the prospect but initially Hettie seemed oddly edgy and nervous. For the first time he saw her inject Bensimon’s medicine. She poured some white powder from a small envelope into a glass of water to make a solution, then filled her syringe with it, injecting it with practised ease into a vein in the crook of her elbow.

“What’s it called?”

“Coca.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not in the least. It calms me down,” she explained. “It makes me more confident and sure of myself.”

“It’s not morphine, is it?”

“You can buy it at a chemist. But then you have to leave your name and address — but I don’t want to do that so I get it from Dr Bensimon. His is better quality, anyway, so he says.”

It worked fast. Soon she was smiling and kissing him. She said she’d had a ‘blazing row’ with Hoff before she left and that had unsettled her. On the train to Linz she became convinced someone was following her and had taken a very roundabout route from the station to the hotel to throw any such person off the scent.

“I felt all raggedy and nervy,” she said. “And now I don’t. I’m all calm. See? Do you want to try some?”

Lysander took her in his arms. “If I felt any happier, I’d explode.” He kissed her. “You’re my medicine, Hettie. I don’t need a drug.”

“Dr Freud uses Coca as well,” she said, a little defensively. “That’s how Bensimon knows about it.”

They walked along the promenade by the Danube and ate Linzer Torte in the Volksgarten, where a band was playing military marches. Back in Lysander’s room — the bigger of their two — Hettie undressed him, removing his shirt and tie, unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his flies. It was something she liked to do, she said, before she removed her own clothes. For Lysander it was an unconscious echo of that first day, the day his anorgasmia left him for ever, so he had no complaints.

On the Sunday he took the opportunity of being in Linz to look up a cousin of his mother — a Frau Hermine Gantz. His mother had given him the address when he said he’d like to meet some of his Austrian family. He was going to call and leave his card but at the house on Burger Strasse they had never heard of a Frau Gantz. Lysander assumed his mother had made a mistake — she hadn’t been in Austria for over twenty years, after all.

The next day, as they were packing their valises for the return to Vienna, he saw Hettie preparing her Coca solution. A precaution, she said, Hoff might still be in a bad mood — he was a very angry man.

My darling Lysander,

It won’t work. I’m going to ignore your letter. Don’t think of me, think of yourself. Find your health and your good, kind nature again and come home to your girl. I love you, my Darling One, and if I can’t stand by you in your hour of trouble and distress then what kind of a wife would I make you? No, no, a thousand times no! We are meant to be with each other and while I applaud your sweetness and unselfishness in offering to let me ‘renounce my vows’ I will not hear of such a thing again. Take your time, my love, all the time you need — three months more, six months, a year. I will be waiting for you. Everyone tells me that Vienna has the best doctors in the world so I’m sure you are absolutely in the right place to find the right answers. I’m going to tear up your letter and burn it right now (London is beastly cold, I have a fire lit at breakfast). It never happened, you never wrote it, I never read it, my love for you is as constant and sure as the ‘Rock of Gibraltar’ (you know what I mean).

All my fondest love, my darling,

Your own, Blanche.

The Café Sorgenfrei became their post office. It was a small, dark, rather grimy bohemian place in a little street near the Hoher Markt. Hoff had been banned from the café when he was an art student and had vowed never to set foot in it again, Hettie said, so it was perfect. She would leave messages for Lysander behind the bar — places and times they could meet, when she thought it was safe for him to come to the barn. Lysander communicated with her in the same way. Sometimes he left a message saying simply, “I have to see you,” and gave the name of a shabby hotel near the railway station or overlooking the Danube canal and let her know he had booked a room a couple of days hence, hoping that she could find a way of being there. Invariably, she did and Lysander began to worry that Hoff would grow suspicious of these comings and goings. No, she said, he only ever thinks of one person — himself. As long as he wasn’t inconvenienced by any of her absences he remained entirely indifferent as to what she was doing or her whereabouts.

The girl of my dreams do you know her?

She smiles ‘neath the diamonds of dew

When morning breaks over the moon-mists

And the stars fade away in the blue.

Sometimes in the sunshine I see her,

And hear her low song in the breeze,

Then in her wide eyes glimpse the wonder

The smile from the blue of the seas.

She’s always my beautiful girl

Bewitchingly lovely and true

Perhaps if I name her you’ll know her:

She answers to ‘Love’ — and she’s You.

Lysander evolved a plan of self-improvement to fill in the days that intervened between his meetings with Hettie. He couldn’t just moon away the hours in cafés writing love poetry so he set himself a diligent programme of self-education. He increased the German lessons with Herr Barth and also began conversation classes in French — his French was at a reasonable standard — with a retired schoolteacher, one Herr Fuchs, who lived a few blocks further up Mariahilfer Strasse.

He made daily visits to Vienna’s many museums, attended the opera and concerts, went to exhibitions in art galleries and wandered the city with his guidebook, going into every church of note that was recommended. From time to time he would take a day trip out of town to tramp the pathways of the Wienerwald or stride along mountain tracks heading for distant peaks, map in one hand, a stout ash walking stick in the other.

Wolfram eventually quit the pension — to Frau K’s evident pleasure — rejoining his regiment for extensive manoeuvres in Galicia. It was something of an emotional farewell, but he and Lysander resolved to stay in touch however their respective lives might separate them. Wolfram vowed to come by on his next leave — “We’ll go to Spittelberg, get drunk and find ourselves two lively young girls.” The lodger who replaced him was a middle-aged engineer called Josef Plischke. Taciturn, upright and faintly pompous he was the perfect companion for Frau K at her dinners. Lysander changed his pension rates to breakfast only, pleading poverty rather than terminal boredom. He had to budget, alas, he told Frau K, and it was true — his funds were diminishing. His affair with Hettie was costing him money — he paid for everything as she was entirely dependent on Hoff for money. Hoff, Lysander learned, was a surprisingly wealthy man, enriched by an inheritance from his late parents as well as by the increasingly high prices his paintings were fetching.

Lysander sent a telegram to his mother and asked if she could wire him another £20.

♦

Winter arrived with full force in December — heavy frosts and snow flurries — and the stove in the old barn, for all its redoubtable size, proved an inadequate source of warmth. When he stayed there, Lysander would haul the mattress off the bed and drag it through to the main room, laying it in front of the stove, twin doors open so the flames could be seen.

Hettie found a book of pornographic Japanese prints in Hoff’s library and brought them to the barn so they could experiment. She took his penis in her mouth. He tried and failed to sodomize her. They had a go at emulating the contorted positions illustrated, studying the pages as if they were architects inspecting a blueprint.

“Your leg is meant to be over my shoulder not under my armpit.”

“I’ll break my leg if I put it there.”

“Are you inside me? I can’t feel you.”

“I’m about three inches away. I can’t reach, it’s impossible.”

She still chose to undress him, loving the moment, she said, when she could tug down his trousers and drawers and his ‘boy’ would sway free.

One day she said to him as they lay in bed in their shabby hotel overlooking the Danube canal, “Why don’t you kiss my breasts? Every man I’ve known likes to do that.”

Lysander thought: all the better to keep anorgasmia at bay — but said, “I don’t know why I don’t…Maybe it seems a bit infantile to me.”

“Nothing wrong with being infantile. Come here.”

She sat up in bed and, at her beckoning, he nuzzled up to her. She cupped her breast and carefully offered the nipple — pert between two fingers — to his mouth.

“See? It’s nice. I like it anyway.”

♦

Hettie insisted that he come to the New Year party at Hoff’s studio. Lysander was very reluctant at first but Hettie encouraged him.

“It’s even less suspicious if you come, don’t you see? He doesn’t suspect a thing. You have to come — I want to kiss you at midnight.”

So Lysander duly went and felt out of place at this loud gathering of artists, patrons and gallery owners. He hugged the corners of the large studio, content to keep his eyes on Hettie as she patrolled the room in her Balinese pantaloons and chequerboard jacket and her tinkling shoes. Udo Hoff didn’t seem to know who he was — several times their eyes met, Hoff’s blankly taking in another stranger in his house.

Immediately after midnight Hettie led him down a dark passageway bulky with hung coats, scarves and hats and kissed him, her tongue deep in his mouth, his hands on her breasts. Seconds later the light went on and Hoff appeared, evidently quite drunk. Hettie was searching the coats.

“Ah there you are, mein Liebling, Mr Rief is going — he wanted to say hello and goodbye.”

“It’s easier to find a coat when you’ve got the light on.”

“Mr Rief couldn’t find the switch.”

Lysander and Hoff shook hands, Hoff now gazing at him intently, though a little unfocussed.

“Thank you for a wonderful party,” Lysander said.

“You’re the Englishman, aren’t you?”

“Yes. That’s me.”

“A happy new year to you. How is your cure going?”

“I’m pretty well cured — I should say. Yes, I think that’s fair comment.”

Hoff congratulated him and then demanded Hettie help him find more champagne, he said. When his back was turned, Hettie blew Lysander a kiss and left with Hoff. Five minutes later Lysander managed to find his coat and hat and he wandered outside, still trembling from the narrow escape. A love affair wasn’t an arc, as he’d heard it described, it was a far more variable line on a graph — undulating or jagged. It wasn’t smooth, however much pleasure one was deriving from it, day by day. He headed down the drive. Snow was falling, big soft flakes, the road to the station whitening in front of his eyes, unsmirched by wheel tracks, the world going quiet and muffled as a few final, distant bells continued to ring in 1914.

♦

“I think you’re right,” Bensimon said. “We’ve done everything — been very thorough. We might as well admit it and call it a day.”

“I can’t thank you enough, doctor. I’ve learned so much.”

“You’re absolutely convinced the problem has completely gone.”

Lysander paused — sometimes he wondered if Bensimon had any inkling that he and Hettie Bull were lovers. How could he tell him that Hettie had proved that his problem had gone, dozens and dozens of times? She was still Bensimon’s patient, of course.

“Let’s say recent experience — recent experiences — have convinced me all is functioning normally.”

Bensimon smiled — man to man — letting his inscrutable professional mask slip for a moment.

“I’m glad Vienna provided other compensations,” he said, dryly, walking him to the door. “I’m going to write up your case if you don’t mind — anorgasmia cures are worth documenting — and present it as a paper at our next conference, maybe publish it in some learned journal.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, you’ll be thoroughly disguised by an initial or a pseudonym. Only you and I will know who’s being discussed.”

“I’d like to read it,” Lysander said. “I’ll give you my address — my family home, I can always be reached there.”

They shook hands and Lysander thanked him again. He liked Dr Bensimon, he had told him his most intimate secrets and he felt he could trust the man absolutely — and yet he had to acknowledge that he didn’t really know him at all.

He settled his final account with the stern secretary, earning a wan smile as they shook hands in farewell, and he took his now familiar stroll from the consulting rooms on Wasagasse along the Franzenring. This is the last time, he realized, a little saddened but at the same time pleased that his essential purpose in coming to Vienna had been so thoroughly achieved. What was it Wolfram had said? A ‘river of sex’ flowing underneath the city. That had been his salvation — along with Dr Bensimon’s Parallelism. He was well, life should be simpler, the way ahead obvious yet, since coming here, everything was a hundred times more complex. He had Hettie in Vienna and Blanche in London and absolutely no idea what he should do.

He walked past the big café — Café Landtmann — and realized that in all these months of passing it he’d never once gone in and so retraced his steps. It was roomy and plain, a little faded and grander than the cafés he chose to frequent — a place to come in the summer, he thought, and sit outside on the pavement. He took a seat in a booth with a good view of the traffic whizzing by on the Ring, lit a cigarette, ordered a coffee and a brandy and opened his notebook. Autobiographical Investigations by Lysander Rief. He flicked through the pages, full of notes, descriptions of dreams, a few sketches, drafts of poems — it was another legacy of his stay in Vienna. Bensimon had urged him to continue writing in it as part of his therapy. “It may seem a bit banal and inconsequential,” Bensimon had said, “but you’ll come back to it once a few months have gone by and be fascinated.”

The café was quiet, caught in that lull between the bustle of lunch, the great Viennese punctuation mark in the day, and the first arrival of those seeking coffee and cakes in the afternoon. Waiters polished cutlery and folded napkins, others flapped out clean linen tablecloths or leaned on their serving stations, gossiping. From somewhere in the rear came the ceramic clatter of plates being stacked. The maître d’ combed his hair discreetly, using a silver tray propped against the wall as a mirror. Lysander looked around — very few customers — but then his eye was caught by a man a few tables away, wearing a tweed suit and an old-fashioned cravat tie, reading a newspaper and smoking a cigar. He was in his late fifties, Lysander guessed, and had fine greying hair combed flat against his head; his beard was completely white and trimmed with finical neatness. Lysander put his notebook down and sauntered over.

“Dr Freud,” he said. “Forgive me for interrupting but I just wanted to shake your hand. I’ve been most successfully treated by one of your ardent disciples, Dr Bensimon.”

Freud looked up, folded his newspaper and rose to his feet. The two men shook hands.

“Ah, John Bensimon,” Freud said, “my other Englishman. We’ve had our disagreements, but he’s a good man.”

“Well, whatever they may be I’ve had the most rewarding psychoanalytical sessions with him. I know how much he respects you — he refers to you constantly.”

“Are you English?”

“Yes. Well, half. And half Austrian.”

“Which explains your excellent German.”

“Thank you.” Lysander took a polite step backwards ready to take his leave. “It’s an honour to shake your hand. I won’t keep you from your newspaper further.”

But Freud seemed not to want to let the conversation end. He stayed him with a little gesture of his cigar.

“How long have you been seeing Dr Bensimon?”

“Several months.”

“And you’ve finished?”

“I feel — let’s say — as far as I’m concerned my psychosomatic problem is a thing of the past.”

Freud drew on his cigar, thinking. “That’s very swift,” he said, “impressive.”

“It was his theory of Parallelism that finally made all the difference. Remarkable.”

“Oh ‘Parallelism’,” Freud almost scoffed. “I’ll make no comment. Good day to you, sir. I wish you well.”

The great man himself, Lysander thought, going back to his seat, pleased he’d had the courage to approach him. Definitely an encounter for the memoirs.

♦

He hadn’t seen Hettie for four days and he was missing her badly. In fact, he calculated, he hadn’t seen her for a week…It was the longest period since the affair began that they had been apart. He scribbled a note to her and decided to go at once to the Café Sorgenfrei. Perhaps there would be something there from her, also. Out in the streets it was cold but not freezing and the new year’s snow was turning to slush, the tyres of the passing automobiles splattering the brown muck on the legs of pedestrians who ventured too close to the roadway.

Watching the passing motor cars carefully, Lysander wondered, not for the first time, if he should learn to drive. Perhaps that could be another part of his Viennese education — then he realized he could hardly afford the price of driving lessons. He had just paid Frau K his next month’s rent in advance and found himself left with only just over a hundred crowns. He’d cancelled his German and French classes until further notice and had telegraphed his mother once again for more money. It made him feel inadequate — why should his mother be subsidizing his love affair with Hettie, he thought. He admitted to himself that he’d been living these last weeks in a self-imposed decision-free limbo, happy to drift in the here-and-now. The problem was — and he had to face it as his money ran out and a return to London beckoned — that he was finding it very hard to imagine a future without Hettie. Was this the beginning? Sexual infatuation shading into love? And yet, during all the weeks of the affair, despite all the endearments and confessions of powerful emotion on both their parts, she had never once spoken of leaving Hoff.

What to do?…he pushed his way through the swing door of the Café Sorgenfrei and elbowed aside the heavy velvet curtain that kept the draughts out. Grey strata of smoke hung in the air and made his eyes smart as he approached the bar to hand over his envelope. There was the young barman in his puce waistcoat — what was his name? — and his preposterous dragoon-guardsman’s whiskers.

“Good afternoon, Herr Rief,” he said, taking Lysander’s letter. “And we have a little package for you.” He reached below the bar and drew out a flat parcel tied with string. Lysander felt a small surge of joy. Bless Hettie — they must have been thinking of each other, simultaneously. He ordered a glass of Riesling and took the package over to a table by the window. He opened it carefully to see that it contained a libretto. Andromeda und Perseus eine Oper in vier Akten von Gottlieb Toller. The cover was a colour reproduction of Hoff’s poster — Hettie in all her nakedness…He riffled through the pages, imagining a note would fall out and when nothing did he then turned back to the title page to look for an inscription. There it was; “For Lysander, with all my love, Andromeda.” And below that in a series of distinct lines, he read,

There are times when I am wholly confident in the destiny of HB

But there are other times when I find that I am

not completely honest

Superficial

Facing-both-ways

Cowardly.

Lysander wondered why, given his reduced financial resources, he had decided to pay the two-crown supplement to have dinner that night with Frau K and Josef Plischke. Perhaps he just wanted some company, however trying and mediocre. The main course — after the cabbage soup with croutons — was Tafelspitz, a boiled-beef stew of ancient lineage, Lysander thought, concocted days ago and allowed to simmer endlessly on a stove in the invisible kitchen. And still the gravy was watery and the meat sinewy and stringy. Plischke ate with enthusiasm, complimenting Frau K on her cuisine in a tone of leaden sycophancy that drew Frau K’s most pleasant thin smile from her.

As they chatted, about some aerial demonstration this summer at Aspern with a dozen flying machines, Lysander mentally did his accounts — he had telegraphed his mother two days ago asking for another £ 20. With luck that should arrive in his bank tomorrow and, with further luck and careful husbandry, that amount should keep him going for another month or two. He decided not to think what might occur beyond that time when his money would run out yet again. Perhaps he should try and find a job himself — maybe teach English to the Viennese? But two months more in Vienna meant two months more of Hettie. He realized, with a small shock of self-awareness, that he was beginning to define his life around her –

There was a loud banging at the door and he heard Traudl go to answer it. For a second he imagined it might be Wolfram, drunk, come to carry him off to the bordellos of Spittelberg.

Traudl appeared at the dining-room door, flushed and trembling.

“Madame,” she said in a small voice. “It’s the police.”

Frau K’s face pinched itself into a rictus of disgust at this violation of her pension’s probity and marched out into the hall. Plischke burrowed in his mouth with a toothpick, searching for shreds of Tafelspitz. Lysander looked at him — that imperturbability was a bit too swiftly donned. What have you been up to, Josef Plischke?

Frau K reappeared in the doorway.

“They wish to see you, Herr Rief.”

Lysander made the instant assumption and felt the shock in his gut. His mother. Dead? Fatally ill? He felt sick and threw down his napkin.

There were three policemen in the hall. Grey uniforms, black leather belts. Shiny, peaked, badged helmets with flat tops. One man wore a short cape and it was he who saluted and introduced himself as Inspector Strolz.

“You are Herr Lysander Rief?”

“Yes. What’s happening? Is there some kind of problem?”

“I’m afraid so.” Strolz smiled, apologetically. “You are under arrest.”

Lysander heard Frau K’s shocked gasp from the door to the dining room behind him.

“This is completely ridiculous. What are you arresting me for?”

“Rape.”

Lysander thought for a second that he might fall over. “This is absurd. There’s obviously been some kind of mistake —”

“Please come with us. There will be no need for handcuffs if you do exactly as we say.”

“May I collect a few possessions from my room?”

“Of course.”

Lysander went to his room, his brain a babbling confusion of supposition and counter-supposition. He stood there frozen — Strolz watching him from the doorway — trying to think what he might need. His overcoat, his hat, his wallet. His notebook? No. He suddenly felt very fearful and alone and had an idea. He rummaged in his desk drawer, finding what he was looking for.

He went back into the hall, avoiding Frau K’s eye, and asked Strolz if he could be permitted to say a word to his friend, Herr Barth.

“As quickly as possible.”

Strolz stood behind him as Lysander knocked on Herr Barth’s door and heard him say, “One minute,” then, “Come in.”

Lysander realized that for all the months they had been living next door to each other this was only the second time he had been in Herr Barth’s tiny bedroom. He saw the piled, tottering towers of sheet music, the music stand with his damp woollen combinations draped over it to dry, the huge double bass in its container in the corner by the sagging bed with its embroidered coverlet.

“Did I hear the word ‘police’, Herr Rief? They’re not after me, are they?”

“No, no. I’m the one who’s been arrested — it’s a ghastly mistake — but I have to go with them. Could you contact this person and say I’ve been arrested? I’d be most grateful. They’ll know what to do.”

He handed over Alwyn Munro’s card. “He’s at the British Embassy.”

Herr Barth took it, beaming at this deliverance.

“Count on me, Herr Rief. First thing in the morning.” He glanced over Lysander’s shoulder, spotting Strolz standing there a few paces back, and lowered his voice. “They are fools, ignorant fools, the police. Just be extremely polite, that’s all they understand. They’ll be impressed. You’ll be fine.”

Lysander went back into the hall where he saw that the front door was now open. Frau K stood by it, hands clenched together, a look of pure hatred in her eyes directed at the man who had brought this disgrace on her establishment.

“It’s all a terrible mistake,” Lysander said as he walked past her, followed by the three policemen. “I’ve done nothing. I’ll be back tomorrow.”

But something in him told him he wouldn’t and he knew also that, had there been no witnesses present, Frau K would have spat in his face.

The policemen took him downstairs to a police van parked at the junction with Mariahilfer Strasse. They opened rear doors and he clambered in. Through the small paneless barred window cut in one side he watched the snowy vistas of Vienna roll by — the opera house, the Hofburg palace, the Hofburg Theatre — all the monuments of this old/new city flashing by like something in a stereoscope — until they arrived at the Polizeidirektion on the Schottenring.

20: Little Boy or Little Girl?

The van turned off the Schottenring and drove through a giant archway into a central courtyard and the huge wooden doors swung — slowly, soundlessly — shut behind it. Lysander was led into the building and along a wide passageway to an interview room. There was a smell of disinfectant in the air and the empty corridors were disconcertingly full of the sound of footsteps echoing from elsewhere in the building, as if the place were populated by the ghosts of prisoners past forever being marched to and from their cells.

Lysander took his seat and faced impassive, efficient Inspector Strolz across a desk. Strolz took down his details, writing in a thick ledger with a dipping-pen and inkpot like a Victorian clerk. Lysander sat there in his overcoat, hat on his knee, trying to keep his mounting sense of outrage — accompanied by flickering undertones of panic — under control. When he was formally charged he decided the time had come to ask a few salient questions.

“Whom, exactly, am I meant to have raped?”

Strolz consulted his notebook.

“Fräulein Esther Bull. On or around the third of September, last year, 1913.”

“That’s completely impossible.” He was thinking back. The third of September had to be that first time, that first day he went to the barn. “It’s impossible because…” he continued, unable to keep the tremor of offence, of injustice, out of his voice, “because Fräulein Bull and I have been engaged in…” He paused. “We have been lovers for four months. In these circumstances I don’t understand how she can accuse me of rape. Don’t you see, inspector? You don’t ‘rape’ someone and then enjoy a love affair — a warm, passionate, affectionate love affair — with the victim, subsequently, for many months thereafter. It defies logic and justice.”

Strolz took this in, nodding. “Be that as it may, this information has no relevance here and now, Herr Rief. In a courtroom it may carry more weight.”

“But why would she come up with this rape story?”

“Fräulein Bull is four months pregnant. She alleges that she was raped by you that day, September the third. That was the day the child was conceived, apparently.”

Lysander sat there, wordless, deeply shocked. Conceived? He had seen Hettie a week ago and she’d said nothing…Four months pregnant? What was going on?

“If you bring Miss Bull here,” he finally managed to speak. “Then everything will be sorted out. This farce, this farrago will —”

“Unfortunately that won’t be possible. Furthermore, the charge against you is a joint one, brought by Fräulein Bull and her common-law husband…” Strolz looked at his notebook again. “Herr Udo Hoff. In fact it was Herr Hoff who contacted the police.” He closed the ledger and stood up. “You’ll be taken to a magistrate’s court tomorrow for the formal arraignment — so tonight you’ll be our guest. Do you have everything you need? Cigarettes? May I have some coffee sent down?”

Lysander was escorted to his cell down a flight of stairs to the semi-basement area of the building. The door was locked behind him. There was a glassed-in electric bulb recessed in the ceiling, a wooden bed with a straw mattress and a blanket, a sink with a single tap and a tin chamber pot with a hinged lid. In the exterior wall there was a small, high, barred window. Through a slotted vent in the door a voice informed him that the light would be turned off in ten minutes.

Ten minutes later, he lay in his bed, in the dark, in his overcoat, smoking, trying to work out a possible sequence of events. Importunate questions gabbled in his head. When had Hettie discovered she was pregnant? Why did she tell Hoff? She must have decided to — for some unimaginable personal reason, he supposed — at which point the scandalized Hoff went to the police. Then Hettie must have lied, he reasoned on, in order to save herself and concocted this story about his visit to the studio during which, at some time in the afternoon, he — Lysander — had sexually assaulted her. She couldn’t have confessed to the subsequent affair, obviously. But why not, when she knew she was pregnant? But how could she be pregnant? She had told him she was infertile — she claimed her menses came, if at all, months apart, and she hardly noticed them. Consequently he had never used a prophylactic. Had she been lying? Had she wanted to trap him, somehow?

Then for a minute or two he experienced a kind of incoherent rage at Hettie; a sense of injustice being done to him that made him almost breathless at the effrontery, the crazy malice that was involved. He sat up, gasping physically for his breath, as though he had been stifled somehow, and ordered himself to calm down. He felt light-headed, almost dizzy and began to worry about his blood pressure. There was nothing to be gained by allowing his feelings to surge so tumultuously out of control. Clear logical thought was his best weapon — making himself ill would gain him nothing.

He calmed himself, yet he grew increasingly worried as the night wore on and as he went over the different narratives and options again and again. It became clear to him that his only defence was to expose the affair — to let the world (and Hoff) know the precise details of the liaison. And what could Hoff say in the face of that evidence? Nothing. The case would be thrown out, surely?

He lay in the dark and periodically paced around his small cell. He finished his pack of cigarettes, waiting for sunrise, unable to sleep or rest, his mind frenetically, pulsatingly active. There was only this one course of action — to destroy Hettie’s preposterous story and expose her as a liar. He thought of her gift of the Andromeda libretto and its cryptic message on the title page. It was her pre-emptive confession to him, he now saw, and he wondered also if she had meant it to serve as a warning.

♦

The van took him and two other shabby villains to a magistrate’s court early in the morning. At 8. 10 a.m. Lysander found himself facing a sleepy presiding judge who had a fragment of egg-white lodged in the bristles of his wide tobacco-stained moustache. Lysander was formally charged with rape, bail was denied — bail was not permitted in cases of rape, he was told by the judge — and the date for his trial was established as May 17 1914. He had no lawyer, and so was taken back to the central police station and re-deposited in his small cell. At ten o’clock he was given a bowl of carrot soup and a hunk of black bread. He asked if he could speak to Inspector Strolz but was told that Inspector Strolz had left on a fortnight’s leave.

Lysander began to experience a form of creeping terror at his impotence that he recognized as the beginnings of despair. How could he possibly find a lawyer? He supposed the court would appoint one for his trial in May. The trial was over three months away. Was he going to be kept in this cell until then or transferred to a prison? He began to curse Hettie for this hideous, ridiculous lie. Why not tell Hoff the simple truth? What did she think would be achieved by this god-awful nightmare of a mess that she had landed him in?

He banged on the door until someone came and he asked for paper and pencil and was refused.

He urinated in his chamber pot.

He washed his hands and face in the sink and dried them on the lining of his greatcoat.

He lay down and managed to doze for an hour.

He took off his coat and tie and did some basic gymnastic exercises — press-ups, star-jumps, running on the spot until he was breathless.

He urinated in his chamber pot.

He sat on his bed and forced his brain into activity, trying to recall the sequence and detail of the affair. Dates, times, places. He remembered the names of all the hotels they had stayed in — every fact that made the affair concrete and irrefutable. Then he found his thoughts straying to Hettie herself and the unignorable new fact that she was carrying his child. He almost wept. He sniffed, coughed, inhaled and willed himself to anger, stirred by the thought that the foetus would almost certainly be aborted, another ghastly consequence of this hideous predicament she had created. Hoff would see to that, oh yes. Boy or girl, he found himself wondering? Little boy or little girl?…

He was given a thick slice of cold fatty sausage, a chunk of cheese with black bread and a lukewarm mug of coffee.

He looked at his wristwatch. It was 2. 30 in the afternoon.

♦

The day seemed to take a week of subjective time to crawl to its conclusion. He watched the small rectangle of sky that was visible through his cell window darken as the sun began to set. A little vermilion touched the cloud base. The aural sub-current of the cell wing continued without change as the hours maundered by. Clangs, shouts, footsteps, the rumble of trolley wheels, the occasional laugh, the rasping of a stiff-bristled brush sweeping the corridor outside again and again.

When it was quite dark the electric light was switched on. He did some more press-ups, wondering where this fitness urge had sprung from. With the edge of a button he scored a dash in the plaster of the cell wall. Day one. He managed an ironic smile at this melodramatic gesture. Why had he smoked all his cigarettes last night?

The door was unlocked and a policeman looked in.

“Follow me,” he said.

Lysander duly followed him up the stairs and into another corridor, where he was shown into a windowless room with a table and two chairs. He sat down, keeping his mind empty. Could this be Hettie, decided to rescue him? Two minutes later Alwyn Munro entered the room.

Lysander felt like embracing him. Herr Barth had done what he had promised — wonderful, salt-of-the-earth, true friend Herr Barth. How he loved that man! He shook Munro’s hand warmly.

“Bit of a pickle, eh?” Munro said, jocularly, sitting down and offering him a cigarette.

“It’s not true. All lies. I’ve been having an affair with her for months.” Lysander drew on his cigarette so avidly his head reeled.

Munro slid a business card across the table.

“This is your lawyer. A very good man. He couldn’t make them set bail, I’m afraid. That’s the problem with rape cases. Luckily for you it seems Miss Bull has suddenly altered the charge to ‘assault’. The bail for assault is very high — ten thousand crowns.”

“But that’s absurd!” Lysander complained. “Assault? I’m meant to have ‘assaulted’ Miss Bull? I’m not a criminal. How is one meant to lay one’s hands on that kind of money? Why’s it been set so high?”

“It seems Hoff’s father was a very respected District Commissioner. Friends in high places. Ministers, senior civil servants, judges…Does seem a bit punitive.”

“I can’t raise that amount — who do they think I am?”

“Don’t worry — we’ve paid it.” Munro smiled. “Consider it a loan — but not interest-free, alas.”

Lysander experienced a jolt of elation. He swallowed. His hands were shaking.

“My god…I’m incredibly grateful. Does this mean I can go?”

“Not exactly. There are special conditions.” Munro leaned back in his chair as if to gain a more objective view. “You’re to be confined to the grounds of the British Embassy until your trial. Actually, it’s not the embassy but the temporary consulate where we attachés work.” He smiled. “A little bit of Grossbritannien in Vienna, all the same.”

“Why keep me there?”

“They obviously think you’ll make a run for it rather than stand trial. And as we’ve put up the bail they’re making us responsible for seeing that you don’t escape.”

Lysander’s elation began to drain away.

“So I’m swapping an Austrian cell for a British one.”

“I think you’ll be much more comfortable.” Munro shrugged. “Best we could do. They’re very serious here about crimes like rape, sex-murders, assaults and so on.”

“I haven’t raped or assaulted anyone.”

“Of course. I’m just explaining why they’ve demanded these conditions. We’ve got a little place for you out at the back. Small garden. You won’t be locked up but you can’t leave the premises.” Munro stood. “Shall we go?”

21: A Small Villa in the Classical Style

The temporary consulate building was in fact a small villa in the classical style, somewhat dilapidated, some three streets away from the embassy itself in Metternichgasse, opposite the botanical gardens. Lysander’s ‘prison’ was a two-storey, octagonal stone summerhouse at the end of a high-walled parterre that ran from the rear terrace of the villa. He had an octagonal bedroom on the top floor and an octagonal sitting room on the ground floor with a small fireplace. No lavatory and no bathroom but it was comfortable enough, he had to admit. He could walk the gravelled, weedy pathways of the neglected parterre whenever he felt like fresh air or needed exercise. Food was brought to him on a tray from a nearby restaurant three times a day, his fire was lit, a jug of hot water provided every morning for his ablutions, his laundry was collected and returned (he had sent for his clothes and belongings from the Pension Kriwanek) and his chamber pot was discreetly emptied and replaced by a variety of embassy servants who seemed to change almost daily. He rarely saw the same face more than twice. He had been told that he would be charged for food and laundry services. All costs accrued would be added to the 10, 000 crowns already owed to His Majesty’s Government — not to mention his steadily accumulating legal fees.

Lysander had several meetings with his lawyer, a Herr Feuerstein, a serious young man, about Lysander’s age, who wore a pince-nez and a neat beard, and who tutted and frowned darkly and muttered to himself as he went over the facts of Lysander’s case as if determined not to provide his client with a scintilla of hope or optimism. He did agree, however, that the best defence was the revelation of the affair. And so he took down everything, in his tiny copperplate hand, that Lysander could remember of his dozens of encounters with Hettie. He volunteered to visit the hotels they had frequented in Vienna, Linz and Salzburg to make copies of the register and perhaps even take clandestine photographs of Hettie’s barn/studio. He asked Lysander to draw him a detailed plan of the barn and provide the best inventory he could of its contents. He may be a pessimist, Lysander thought, but at least he’s a thorough pessimist.

Lysander also had daily visits from Alwyn Munro and the other attaché — the naval attaché — a man called Jack Fyfe-Miller. Fyfe-Miller was a blond, burly young man in his early thirties, with a full, fair beard — ideally seafaring for a naval attaché, Lysander thought — who had won a rugby blue at Cambridge. After their first few encounters Lysander decided to label him ‘stupid’. Fyfe-Miller had seen him on stage in London (in The Taming of the Shrew) and seemed only curious about theatre-life and actresses in particular. He kept asking; do you know Ellen Terry? Have you ever met Dolly Baird? What’s Mrs Mabel Troubridge really like? But from time to time he would make a remark that showed deeper intellectual reserves and Lysander began to think that the bluffness and the heartiness was something of an act.

After a week in the summerhouse at the end of the parterre he felt thoroughly settled in, routines were established and he was living an approximation of a normal life. He decided to ask Munro if there was any way a meeting with Hettie could be arranged.

“Not sure that’s a good idea,” Munro said.

“If I could speak to her — even for a few minutes — I’m sure we could sort out everything.”

They were walking the tufted, mossy pathways of the parterre around the small cement basin of the dry fountain at its centre. On a pile of tumbled, parched boulders a lichened stone cherub held a gaping fish aloft as if it were gasping for air rather than providing the conduit for the fountain’s water that would never spout and flow again.

“Look,” Lysander said, pointing to a small paint-blistered door in the garden’s back wall. “Smuggle her in through there and no one will be the wiser. Just give me a moment alone with her — she’ll drop the case.”

Munro thought, smoothing his neat moustache with a forefinger.

“Let me see what I can do.”

22: Autobiographical Investigations

Hettie. This utter madness — how could you have done this to me? Stop. No. First the facts, the dialogue. She came, last night, just before eleven o’clock. Jack Fyfe-Miller brought her in through the door in the back wall and waited outside in the cab as we talked. She stayed for twenty minutes.

We kissed, like old and practised lovers, with real passion, as if none of this craziness had happened. She clung to me, telling me how much she was missing me and asked me how I was. I felt the grotesque absurdity of the situation — as if I’d had a bout of flu and she hadn’t seen me while I convalesced. For a few seconds the mad raging anger took me over and I had to step away and turn my back on her.

Hettie:

Is everything all right? Are you well?

Me:

How am I? How am I? I’m terrible. I’m miserable. I’m abject. How do you think I am?

Hettie:

Seems a nice little house you have here. It’s sweet. Is this your garden?

Me:

Hettie, I’m a prisoner on bail. I’m going to be tried for assault. For ‘sexually assaulting’ you.

Hettie:

I know. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t think what to say when Udo found out. So I just blurted out anything that came to mind. Anything to make him stop shouting at me.

♦

In the fraught emotion of the reunion I forgot that she was pregnant — carrying our child. I put my hand on her belly — it seemed very flat.

Me:

You don’t feel pregnant.

Hettie:

I hadn’t a clue I was. You know I thought I was infertile. I was convinced I was — truly. I didn’t feel sick or anything. Didn’t put on weight, nothing, not the slightest indication. But then my nipples began to go darker and Udo saw and took me to the doctor who examined me and said I was four months pregnant.

Me:

I never noticed your nipples.

Hettie:

Because you saw them all the time. You hadn’t noticed the gradual change. I hadn’t either, to be honest. Udo hadn’t seen my breasts for weeks. He was shocked — took me straight to the doctor. When Udo heard I was pregnant he got in this towering rage so I said it was you.

Me:

But I didn’t rape you, or assault you, if I recall. If I recall you undressed me — effectively.

Hettie:

Because I knew you liked that sort of thing.

Me:

What’re you talking about?

Hettie:

I read your file — when I was at Dr Bensimon’s. He had to leave the room when I was there for a consultation and he left your file on his desk. He was gone for about ten minutes and I got bored, saw your file. I was curious –

Me:

That’s completely outrageous!

Hettie:

I don’t recall you complaining. Just because I knew about your dreams, your fantasies…

Me:

No, no. All part of the therapy. No extra charge –

Hettie:

Don’t be cynical. But it was Udo who said you must have attacked me and I sort of said, well, yes, I suppose so, yes, he must have. I don’t know why. He was in such a fury. I said you’d overpowered me and before I knew it I was agreeing with him. Anything to stop him shouting. I’m really sorry, my darling. You have to forgive me — I was in such a panic.

♦

I felt an immense lassitude pour through me, a kind of terminal fatigue.

Me:

Why didn’t Udo think it was his child?

Hettie:

Because — well — we don’t have normal sexual relations any more. Not for over a year now. He knew at once he wasn’t his.

Me:

What do you mean, ‘he’?

Hettie:

He’s a boy — the baby — I know.

Me:

But you realize that when I go on trial I’m going to tell the truth — about you and me and our affair.

Hettie:

No! No, you can’t do that. Udo will kill me — and the child.

Me:

Nonsense. He can’t do that. He’s not a monster.

Hettie:

You don’t know what he’s capable of. He’ll throw me out, destroy me somehow. He’ll find a way of punishing me and the baby — our baby.

Me:

Then leave him. Walk away. Come to London and live with me. What do you owe him? Nothing –

Hettie:

Everything. When I met him in Paris I was…I was in serious trouble. Udo saved me. Brought me to Vienna. Without him I’d be dead — or worse. I implore you, Lysander, I beseech you — don’t let him know about us.

Me:

You’re not going to have an abortion.

Hettie:

Never. He’s ours. Yours and mine, my darling.

♦

Just at that moment Fyfe-Miller appeared and rapped on the French window. Hettie kissed me goodbye and her last whispered words were, “I beg you, Lysander. Say nothing. Don’t destroy me.”

♦

This morning I had a meeting with Herr Feuerstein. I asked him, assuming I was found guilty, what sentence I could expect. “Eight to ten years, if you’re lucky,” he said. Then added: “But you’re not going to be found guilty, Herr Rief. The case will fall apart the minute you give your evidence.” He flourished his dossier. “I’ve got everything. The hotels in Vienna, in Linz, in Salzburg. Testimonials from the staff. How do you say it in English? A ‘cakewalk’.” He allowed himself a rare smile. I thought — if Feuerstein is that confident then it’s all over for Hettie. “I’m really looking forward to it,” Feuerstein added. “May 17^th can’t come quickly enough.”

Now I’m waiting for Munro and Fyfe-Miller to come for a meeting, here in the summerhouse. I’m going to tell them there’s only one thing I can do. This case must never come to trial.

23: A New Brass Key

Lysander sat in his octagonal sitting room facing Alwyn Munro and Jack Fyfe-Miller. Snow flurries swooped softly against the French windows and the fire in the grate struggled against the cold of the day. For some reason Fyfe-Miller was in his naval uniform — a row of medal ribbons on his chest — that had the effect of making him more serious and noteworthy, a serving officer of the line. Munro was in a three-piece, heavy tweed suit as if he were off for a shooting weekend in Perthshire.

“I’ve been thinking, over these last few days,” Lysander said carefully. “And one thing has become absolutely clear to me. I can’t risk going to trial.”

“Feuerstein tells me your defence is impregnable,” Munro said.

“We all know how easy it is for things to go wrong.”

“So you want to run for it,” Fyfe-Miller said, lighting a cigarette. Once again Lysander saw how the bland exterior concealed a quick mind.

“Yes. In a word.”

The two looked at each other. Munro smiled.

“We had a private bet about how long it would take you to arrive at this conclusion.”

“It’s the only way, as far as I’m concerned.”

“There are real problems,” Munro said, and proceeded to outline them. The British Embassy, like every embassy in Vienna, was riddled with informers. One in three of the Austrian staff, he reckoned, was in the pay of the Interior Ministry. He added that this was completely normal and only to be expected — the same conditions applied in London.

“Therefore,” he added, “if you left us you would be missed very swiftly. You’re being watched all the time, even though it doesn’t seem like it. Someone would alert the police.”

Fyfe-Miller spoke up. “Also, as your gaolers, as it were, we would be honour-bound to report your absence to the authorities. And, of course, your bail would be forfeit.”

Lysander decided to ignore this last point. “But what if I slipped away in the middle of the night? It’d be hours before I was noticed.”

“Not so. The middle of the night would be the worst possible time. The watchmen, the police at the gate, the night staff — everyone’s more alert at night. I’m pretty sure there are a couple of police plainclothesmen out there, sitting in a motor, twenty-four hours, waiting, watching. The middle of a working day is far more discreet.” Munro smiled. “Paradoxically.”

“If you left,” Fyfe-Miller said, speculatively, “you’d have the maximum of an hour’s start, I’d say. If no one else had reported you then we would have to — after an hour.”

“Better to assume a fifteen-minute start,” Munro said. “They’re not fools.”

“Where would you head for, Alwyn?” Fyfe-Miller asked, disingenuously.

“Trieste. It’s practically Italian anyway — they hate the Austro-Hungarians. Head for Trieste, take a steamer to Italy. That’s what I’d do.”

Lysander picked up the sub-textual message. He was by now fully aware of what was taking place here; Munro and Fyfe-Miller were laying out a course of action, almost a set of instructions for him to follow. Do what we tell you, they were saying, and you will be safe.

“What station serves Trieste, by the way?” Lysander asked in the same spirit of innocent enquiry.

“The Südbahnhof. Change at Graz. Ten-, twelve-hour journey,” Fyfe-Miller said.

“I’d go straight to the Lloyds office in Trieste and buy a steamer ticket to…” Munro frowned, thinking.

“Not Venice.”

“No. Too obvious. Maybe Bari — somewhere much further south than anyone would expect.”

Lysander said nothing, content to listen, aware of what was going on in this duologue.

Munro held up a warning finger. “You’d have to assume that the police would go straight to every station.”

“Yes. So you might need some form of disguise. Of course, they’d also presume you’d be heading north, back to England. So heading south would be the right option.”

“You’d need money,” Munro said, taking out his wallet and counting out 200 crowns, laying the notes on the table in a fan. “What’s today? Tuesday. Tomorrow afternoon, I’d say. Be in Trieste by dawn on Thursday.”

“Bob’s your uncle.”

The two men looked at Lysander candidly, no hint of conspiracy or collusion in their eyes. Their pointed absence of guile carried its own message — we’ve been having a conversation here, pure and simple. A conversation about a hypothetical journey — read nothing more into it. We take no responsibility.

“The risks are grave,” Munro said, as if to underline this last fact.

“If you were caught it would rather look like an admission of guilt,” Fyfe-Miller added.

“You’d need to be clever. Think ahead. Imagine what it would be like — what to do in any eventuality.”

“Use your ingenuity.”

Munro stood and headed for the door, Fyfe-Miller following. The money was left lying on the table.

Lysander went to the door and opened it for them. He knew exactly what was expected of him, now.

“Most interesting,” he said. “Thanks.”

“See you tomorrow,” Munro said. Fyfe-Miller gave a smart salute and Lysander watched them stride briskly back to the consulate through the falling snow.

At the end of the afternoon, the snow having abated, leaving the low box-hedges of the parterre with an inch of white icing, Lysander went for a stroll around the garden, thinking hard. He had the money in his pocket, Munro and Fyfe-Miller had outlined the best route out of Austria. Once he was in Trieste he would be safe — Italians outnumbered Austrians there twenty-to-one. Some tramp-steamer or cargo ship would take him to Italy for a few crowns. Then his eye was caught by something unfamiliar — a glint, a gleam of light. He wandered over.

In the lock of the small door in the back wall was a new brass key, bright and untarnished, shining in the weak afternoon sun. Lysander slipped it in his pocket. So, that was it — tomorrow afternoon, after lunch, he thought. The dash for freedom.

24: Ingenuity

Lysander deliberately left half his lunch — stewed pork with horseradish — uneaten. He told the surly fellow with buck teeth who came to take it away that he wasn’t feeling well and was going to bed. As soon as he was alone again he slipped on his coat, gathered up a few essential belongings that could be distributed amongst his various pockets, lifted his hat off the hook on the back of the door and stepped outside.

It was a breezy day of scudding clouds and almost all the snow had melted. He took a turn around the garden to make it seem he was on his usual post-prandial walk and, as he reached the small door in the back wall, unlocked it and was through in a second, pulling it to and locking it again from the outside. He threw the key back over the wall into the garden. He looked around him — an anonymous side street in the Landstrasse district, not a part of Vienna he was familiar with. He walked up to a main road and saw that it was named Rennweg — now his bearings returned. He was about five minutes walk from the South Railway Station where he could catch his train to Trieste — but he knew he had to use his ingenuity, first. He saw two cabs waiting outside the State Printing Works and ran across Rennweg to hail one.

He was at Mariahilfer Strasse in fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes was the start that Munro and Fyfe-Miller said he should allow himself. He could be sitting in the Südbahnhof now with a ticket to Trieste in his hand. Was he making a mistake? Use your ingenuity, Munro had said. It wasn’t so much advice as a warning, he thought.

Lysander rang the bell at the landing door of the Pension Kriwanek, saying a small prayer. Let Frau K be out (she was usually out after lunch, shopping or visiting) and let Herr Barth be in.

The door opened and Traudl stood there — her face rapidly pantomiming surprise and shock. Her blush rose to her hairline.

“Oh my god!” she said. “Herr Rief! No!”

“Hello, Traudl. Yes, it’s me. Is Frau Kriwanek in?”

“No. Please, what are you doing here, sir?”

“Is Herr Barth in?”

“No, he’s not in, either.”

Good and damn, Lysander said to himself and gently pushed his way past Traudl into the hall. There were the two bergères and the stuffed owl under its glass dome, relics of his former happy life, Lysander thought, feeling a spasm of anger that he’d been forced to relinquish it.

“Would you open Herr Barth’s room, please, Traudl?”

“I don’t have a key, sir.”

“Of course you have a key.”

Meekly, she turned and headed down the corridor to Herr Barth’s room, removing the bunch of house keys from her apron pocket, and unlocked the door.

“Don’t tell anyone I was here, Traudl. Understand? I’ll explain everything to Herr Barth later — but you mustn’t say a word to anyone else.”

“Frau Kriwanek will know, Herr Rief. She knows everything.”

“She doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know about you and Lieutenant Rozman…”

Traudl hung her head.

“I would hate to have to tell Frau Kriwanek what you and the lieutenant got up to.”

“Thank you, Herr Rief. I would be most grateful for your silence on this matter.”

“And remember you owe me twenty crowns, Traudl.”

“I’ll tell no one. Not a soul. I swear.”

Lysander gestured for Traudl to enter Herr Barth’s little room. “After you,” he said, and followed her in.

25: Trieste

Lysander sat looking out of the window of the Graz express, watching the early morning sunlight glance and shimmer off the Golfo di Trieste as he caught glimpses of the sea in between the numerous tunnels the train barrelled through on its descent to the coast and the city. These vistas of the Adriatic and its rocky coastline were symbolic of his salvation, he told himself; he should store them away in his memory-archive. Here he was, arriving at the very edge of Austria-Hungary and he would be leaving it for ever in a matter of hours. He was hungry — he hadn’t eaten since his abandoned lunch the day before and he promised himself a decent breakfast at the station restaurant as soon as they arrived. He had just over 100 crowns left, more than enough to book passage on a steamer to Ancona — no need to go as far south as Bari. Once in Ancona he would go to Florence and have money wired to him there, then he would make his way home through France. Now he was almost in Trieste all these plans seemed entirely feasible and logical.

With complaining groans of braking metal the Graz express slowed to a halt at Trieste’s Stazione Meridionale and Lysander stepped out on to the platform. Seeing signs in Italian was already enough for him. He had made it, he was free –

“Rief?”

He turned very slowly to see Jack Fyfe-Miller stepping down from the first-class carriage with a small leather grip in his hand.

Lysander felt his bowels ease with this small deliverance.

“Bravo,” Fyfe-Miller said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Bet you’re hungry. Let me buy you breakfast.”

They went to the Café Orientale in the Lloyds building on the Piazza Grande where Lysander ordered and ate a six-egg omelette with a ham steak and consumed many small sweet bread rolls. Fyfe-Miller drank a spritzer and smoked a cigarette.

“We were very impressed,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Munro and I were there at the Südbahnhof looking out for you. We thought you were never coming, I must say — thought you’d left it too late. They had the police there very quickly. We were beginning to get worried — then along you came, swearing in Italian, carrying a double bass.”

“I was using my ingenuity, as instructed.”

Lysander had stuffed a pillow from Herr Barth’s bed under his shirt and buttoned his overcoat around this new pot-belly. He had taken Herr Barth’s ancient hard-felt top hat and punched a dent in it. The big double bass in its leather container was surprisingly light, though bulky. He had locked Traudl in Herr Barth’s room and had hailed a cab on Mariahilfer Strasse for the station. Once there, he bought his ticket for Trieste (third class) and with many a “Mi scusi”, “Attenzione” and “Lasciami passare” had made his way noisily to the platform. People looked round, he saw children smiling and pointing, policemen glanced at him. A station porter helped him heave the double bass on board. No one was looking for a plump Italian double-bass player in a greasy topper. He found a seat by the window and waited, as calmly as he could, for the whistle-blast announcing their departure.

“Sometimes being ostentatious is the best disguise,” Lysander said.

“So we saw…What happened to the double bass?”

“I left it on the train when we changed at Gratz. Feel a bit guilty about that.”

“We were very impressed, Munro and I. We had a good laugh before I jumped on the train after you.”

“Did you report me missing?”

“Of course. After an hour — but they already knew. The informers in the embassy were miles ahead of us. However, we were suitably outraged and very apologetic. Very shamefaced.”

After breakfast Fyfe-Miller bought him his ticket to Ancona and they walked along to the new port to find the mole where the mail-steamer was berthed.

Fyfe-Miller shook his hand at the foot of the gangway.

“Goodbye, Rief. And damned well done. I’m sure you’ve made the right decision.”

“I’m sorry to leave,” Lysander said. “There’s a lot of unfinished business in Vienna.”

“Well, you won’t be able to go back, that’s for sure,” Fyfe-Miller said with his usual bluntness. “Now you’re a fugitive from Austro-Hungarian justice.”

The thought depressed him. There was a toot from the steam whistle on the smoke-stack.

“Thanks for all your help — you and Munro,” Lysander said. “I won’t forget.”

“Neither will we,” Fyfe-Miller said, with a broad smile. “You owe His Majesty’s Government a considerable sum of money.”

They shook hands, Fyfe-Miller wished him bon voyage and Lysander boarded the scruffy coastal cargo vessel. Steam was got up and the mooring ropes were cast off, thrown on board and the little ship left the busy harbour of Trieste. Lysander stood on the rear deck, leaning on the balustrade, watching the city recede, with its castle on its modest hill, admiring the splendour of the rocky Dalmatian coastline. All very beautiful in the winter sunshine, he acknowledged, feeling a melancholy peace overwhelm him and wondering if he would ever see this country again, thinking ruefully that his business with it — Hettie and their child — had every chance of remaining unfinished for ever.