Waiting for Sunrise

1: Measure for Measure

Lysander cleared his throat, blew his nose, apologized to the rest of the cast and picked up his playscript once more. The doors and windows were wide open so the room, Lysander reasoned, would have almost as much summer pollen blowing around it as the garden outside — hence his sneezing fit. He could see Gilda Butterfield at the far end of the long table fanning her moist neck with her fingertips. Flaming June, all right, he thought and his mind turned immediately to Blanche. Her prediction had been absolutely right — the play was an enduring and superlative success and she was off on an endless tour of it. Where now? Dublin, he thought, or was it Edinburgh? Yes, he really ought to try and –

“Ready when you are, Lysander,” Rutherford Davison said. Lysander noticed he still had his jacket on while all the other men had shed theirs because of the heat. He picked up the text.

“You must lay down the treasures of your body

To this supposed, or else to let him suffer –

What would you do?”

Davison held up his hand.

“Why do you imagine he says that?”

“Because he’s frustrated. Consumed with lust. And he’s bitter,” Lysander said, without really thinking.

“Bitter?”

“He’s a disappointed man.”

“He’s an aristocrat, he’s running the whole of Vienna.”

“Vienna’s no protection against bitterness.”

Everyone laughed, Lysander was pleased to note, even though he hadn’t intended to be humorous at all and had spoken with unconscious feeling. He had completely forgotten that Measure for Measure was set in Vienna — this strange play about lechery and purity, moral corruption and virtue — that made him think uncomfortably about the place and his recent history there. Too late to back out now, and he could hardly explain why. Davison hadn’t even smiled at his inadvertent sally, however. He was determined to be combative and provocative, Lysander could tell, following the new lead among theatre managers. He and Greville had discussed how tiresome and unnecessary this trend was just last night.

“We’ll call it a day,” Davison said, as if he sensed how stifling and uncomfortable it was to be sitting here late on a Friday afternoon. “Have a restful weekend. We’ll make a start on Miss Julie on Monday.”

The rehearsal broke up in a chatter of exultant conversation and the sound of chairs scraping back. They were in a church hall in St John’s Wood — a good rehearsal space with a small garden at the rear when some fresh air was required. The ‘International Players’ Company’, as they were known, had been formed by Rutherford Davison himself in an attempt — as he put it — to present the best in foreign drama to the sated and complacent London audiences. It was quite a clever plan, Lysander had to admit, taking his jacket off the back of the chair. The idea was to run an established, well-respected play in a repertory double bill with a new, more challenging foreign one. Last season’s offering had been a Galsworthy, The Silver Box, alongside Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. This season they were presenting Measure for Measure with Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Or rather, Fröken Julie as Davison insisted, thinking the foreign title would hoodwink the censor. Apparently the play had been banned in 1911. Davison had acquired a new translation from an American company and thought that the Swedish title might divert attention from its salacious reputation. Lysander hadn’t read Miss Julie yet but was planning to do so this weekend, if time permitted. His role was Jean, the valet, something of a challenge because he was also Angelo in Measure. He and Gilda Butterfield were the most experienced actors in the International Players so he should be flattered, he supposed, and if the plays were well received it would advance his career and reputation significantly. All very well, he thought, but if Davison kept goading him it might not be as stimulating a job as he had imagined.

“Any plans this weekend?”

Lysander turned to see Gilda Butterfield, Miss Julie herself — and Isabella in Measure. They were destined to spend a lot of time in each other’s company over the coming weeks. She was very fair with a mass of curly blonde hair tied back in a velvet bow — very Scandinavian, he supposed. A few freckles were visible across the bridge of her nose and cheeks, unmasked by her powder — a busty, hippy young woman. Strapping, outdoors-y. She was interested in him, he could tell, wondering if the job might deliver up a little romance as a bonus.

“Going down to Sussex,” he said, fishing out his cigarette case and opening it. She took a cigarette and he lit it for her. “My uncle’s back from two years exploring Africa. We’re welcoming him home.” He took one himself, lit it and they wandered towards the front door.

“Whereabouts in Sussex?” she said, adjusting her bow at the nape of her neck with both hands, leaving the cigarette in her mouth — both hands moving behind her head caused her breasts to rise and flatten against the pleated front of her blouse. For a second, Lysander acknowledged the careless carnality of the pose then reminded himself that he wasn’t ready for another dalliance. Not after Hettie.

“Claverleigh,” he said. “Do you know it? A little way beyond Lewes. Not far from Ripe.”

“My brother lives in Hove,” she said, happy now with the tightness of her bow. She exhaled, pluming the smoke away from him. “Perhaps we might find ourselves down there at the same time, one weekend.”

“That would be lovely.” Really, this was almost brazen, Lysander thought, she was giving actresses a bad name. Wait until he’d told Greville. He held the door open for her and Rutherford Davison came through.

“Ah, Lysander, can I have a quick word?”

♦

Lysander felt sweat trickling down his spine — he should have taken a bus home, not the Tube. It was hot, of course, but he knew he was sweating more than usually because he’d allowed himself to become irritated. Davison had kept him back twenty minutes after the others had left asking a lot of damnfool questions about his character, Angelo. Was he an only child or did he have siblings? If so, how many and of what sex? What did Lysander think he’d been doing before his big speech in Act II? Was he well travelled? Did he have any health problems he might be concealing? Lysander had done his best to answer the questions seriously because he knew that Davison had gone to Russia a year before, had met Stanislavsky and had fallen under the sway of his new theories about acting and drama, and was convinced that all this extraneous material and information that one invented fleshed out the character and bolstered the text. Lysander felt like saying that if Shakespeare had wanted us to know that Angelo was well travelled or suffered from piles he would have dropped in a line or two in the play to that effect. But in the interest of good relations and a peaceful time he had nodded and said ‘good point’ or ‘intriguing idea’ and ‘let me think a bit more about that’. It was a big role, Angelo, and it would be better and easier all round to have the director on his side.

At one stage, Davison had said, “There’s a book you might like to read, that you might find useful for Angelo — Die Traumdeutung by Sigmund Freud. Heard of it?”

“I’ve met the author,” Lysander had said. That shut him up.

He smiled at the memory of that afternoon in the Café Landtmann. Davison had looked at him with new respect. Perhaps they would rub along after all.

The Tube train pulled in to Leicester Square and Lysander stepped out, jamming his boater on to his head. He thought he might drop into a pub for a cooling pint of shandy and quench his thirst — try to reduce the sweatiness and discomfort he was experiencing. He came up from the station and sniffed the air — London in June, a hot June, the smell of horseshit stewing.

He and Greville Varley rented a flat on Chandos Place and there was a pub, the Peace and Plenty, round the corner from William IV Street, that he liked. Small and plain, with scrubbed floorboards and wainscotting, not tarted up with etched glass and velveteen wallpaper like so many in London. Greville wouldn’t be in, anyway, he had a matinée today. No, couldn’t be, it was Friday. Matinée tomorrow.

“Afternoon, Mr Rief. Hot enough for you?”

“Yes, thank you, Molly, but could you cool it down for tomorrow, please? — I’m off to the country.”

“All right for some, Mr Rief.”

Molly was the barmaid and the landlord’s niece, up from Devon — or was it Somerset? A round-faced, plump girl who reminded him of Traudl.

Obliging, blushing Traudl in the Pension Kriwanek, Lysander thought, taking his pint to a seat in the corner, thinking — that was my life not so long ago, those were its familiar details and textures. Someone had left a newspaper and Lysander picked it up to read the headlines and tossed it down almost immediately. He wasn’t interested in Irish Home Rule or the threat of a coal strike. So what are you interested in, he asked himself, aggressively. Your life? Your job? Your friends? Your family?

Good questions. He sipped his beer, analysing his distractions, his pleasures…Since he’d come back from Vienna so precipitately he’d moved flat and found the new place with Greville — that was good. He’d won a part in a three-reeler film and earned £ 50 for two days’ work — no complaints. He’d been to numerous auditions and landed this plum double role with the International Players’ Company — not to be sniffed at. And, oh yes, Blanche Blondel herself had called off their engagement.

He leaned back and took his boater off. Blanche…

He had rather dreaded their first encounter, and with good reason, as it turned out. He had been nervous, oddly tongue-tied, moody and irritable.

“There’s somebody else, isn’t there, in Vienna?” Blanche had said after five minutes.

“No. Yes, well…There was. It’s over. Completely.”

“So you say — but you’re giving a very good impression of a lovelorn fool pining for his girl.”

She took his ring off and handed it to him. They were in a chop-house on the Strand, dining after her show.

“I’m going to stay your friend, Lysander,” she had said, amiably. “But not your fiancée.” She reached over and squeezed his hand. “Sort yourself out, darling. And, if you still feel like it, propose to me again and we’ll see what I say.”

Lysander went up to the bar for another pint. Only four o’clock and here he was on his second. He watched Molly pour it — two long hauls at the lever and there it was, a sudsy head at the very rim. He pushed over a handful of coppers lifted from his pocket and she picked out the right change. The unnatural curls at Molly’s temples were damp with perspiration, sticking to her skin. He should marry Blanche, he thought, to hell with it — everything about that woman was right for him.

♦

“Greville? You in?” Lysander called, closing the door to the flat behind him. No reply. He dropped his keys into a bowl on the hall table. Mrs Tozer, the housekeeper, had been in cleaning and tidying and the smell of beeswax polish hit his nostrils. She had organized the post into two distinct piles for her ‘gentlemen’ and he was vaguely annoyed to see that Greville had twice as many letters as he did. The flat was on the top floor of a mansion block no more than ten years old. From Greville’s bedroom you could just see Nelson standing on his column in Trafalgar Square. There was a sitting room, two fair-sized bedrooms, a small kitchen-scullery and a bathroom with WC. A maid’s room had been converted into a joint dressing room and walk-in wardrobe — both he and Greville had far too many clothes. All the belongings he had left in the summerhouse in Vienna had been promptly shipped back to London by Munro — it was as if he had never been there at all.

Lysander shuffled through his post — bill, bill, postcard from Dublin (“Wish you were here. B”), a telegram from his mother (“PLEASE COLLECT PLOVERS EGGS FORTNUMS STOP”) and — his mouth went dry — a letter with an Austrian stamp, Emperor Franz-Josef in profile, forwarded on to him from his previous flat, the postmark over two weeks old.

He went into the sitting room and cut the letter open with a paper knife. He knew what news it contained and he sat there at the writing desk for a minute, somehow not daring to reach in and draw the slip of paper out.

“Come on!” he urged himself out loud. “Don’t be pathetic.”

One sheet of paper. Hettie’s unformed, childish handwriting.

Dearest Lysander,

It is with great happiness that I write to you with the news that our son is born. I told you he would be a boy, didn’t I? He came into this world at 10.30 p.m. on the twelfth of June. He’s a big baby, almost nine pounds, and has a powerful pair of lungs. I wanted to call him Lysander — but that was obviously out of the question — so I have decided on Lothar, instead. If you say Lysander — Lothar quickly a few times they almost blend together — or so I like to believe.

I miss you very much and I thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you did. Your escape was a great scandal here in Vienna and was written about in some newspapers. The police were roundly condemned for their uselessness and inefficiency. You can imagine my feelings when I heard you had gone and that there would be no trial.

You can always write to me care of the Café Sorgenfrei, Sterngasse, Wien. But I assume that your heart is only full of hate for me now, after what I did to you. Love our little boy, Lothar, instead of me. I will send you a photograph of him soon.

With our love,

Hettie and Lothar.

He closed his eyes and felt the warm tears well and run down his cheeks. Hettie and Lothar. He blubbed like a baby for a few minutes — like baby Lothar — head in his hands, leaning forward on the writing desk. Then he stood, went to the drinks’ cabinet and poured himself an inch of brandy, toasted Lothar Rief, wishing him a long life and good health, and drank it down. He heard Greville’s key in the lock and wiped his eyes but it was no use. Greville came in, said, “Good god, man, what’s happened?” and Lysander started weeping again.

2: Summer Evening

He took a taxi from Lewes station to Claverleigh Hall. As he went through the gates into the park, past the Elizabethan gatehouse with its twisted brick chimneys, he felt he was coming home, although, after registering the emotion initially he then questioned it, as he always did. For half his life it had been his home, true — if you defined ‘home’ as the place your surviving parent lived. He still kept his old room above the L-shaped kitchen wing that had been built on to the back when the house was extensively remodelled in the ‘Italian’ style towards the end of the last century — the façade was stuccoed, a four-columned Tuscan porch was added — but after that first recognition the sensation that he was somehow just visiting re-established itself. It would always be the domain of the Faulkners — even a long-standing stepson called Rief was something of an interloper.

Claverleigh Hall was a moderately-sized mansion house of two storeys with added dormers in the roof. Its most striking architectural feature was its main staircase — ‘important’ — curving up towards a small Soaneian dome from the entrance hall. And on the first floor was a galleried drawing room that ran the length of the building and its nine tall windows. This gallery had two fireplaces and the ceiling was regarded as over-decorated, all swags, scrolls and festoons of plaster, crests, flowers, fruit and putti crammed into the corners. It was a comfortable home, all the same, and Faulkners had been living in it for over a century since the second Baron bought it with a fortune made from a wise investment in sugar plantations in the Caribbean.

The front door was opened by Lord Faulkner’s butler, Marlowe, who took his suitcase and led him to his old room.

“How’s everything, Marlowe?”

“Very well, sir. Except the Major has cancelled for this evening.”

“That’s a shame. What’s happened?”

The Major was his uncle — Major Hamo Rief, VC, the not particularly famous explorer.

“He’s indisposed,” Marlowe confided, “but nothing serious, we’re informed.”

“So who do we have for dinner, then?”

Marlowe said it was just the family — Lord and Lady Faulkner, the Honourable Hugh Faulkner (Crickmay’s son) and his wife, May, and the ‘two little girls’. The local dignitaries who had been hoping to greet Major Rief had been postponed until the Major felt better again. Lysander relaxed. He liked his stepbrother, Hugh. A tall, genial, balding man in his forties who seemed to blink twice as much as anyone else he’d ever met. He was known as the grandest dentist in Harley Street. Lysander supposed dentistry was an odd job for someone who would be the sixth Baron Faulkner one day, but he made an excellent living and, because of his rank, was much sought after on dental matters by London high society. His wife, May, was jolly and energetic, and their two girls, Emily (12) and Charlotte (10), were funny and unspoilt.

So, a family dinner, Lysander thought — good. Perhaps he might walk over to Winchelsea the next day and pay a visit on the Major. It was a good twenty miles from Claverleigh to Winchelsea by country lanes — a day’s walk — but nothing could be better for him in his current mood, Lysander thought. He would send a telegram and alert the Major that he’d be coming.

He took two dozen well-wrapped plovers’ eggs out of his suitcase and handed then to Marlowe.

“Where can I find my mother?” he asked.

“Lady Faulkner is in the small walled garden, sir.”

♦

Lysander pushed through the door in the high brick wall that led to the smaller walled garden and found his mother vigorously dead-heading dahlias. She was wearing a billowy, chartreuse, light-canvas dust-coat over her frock and a wide straw hat held down on her head by a silk scarf. He kissed her cheek and smelled her perfume, violets and lavender, a little ghostly trace of his father that still clung to her.

She took his hand and led him to a wooden bench set in the right angle at the corner of the garden wall and sat him down, staring at him intently. It had been some weeks since they had seen each other and Lysander thought she was looking very well, suiting the casual informality of her gardening clothes, with wisps of her greying hair hanging down unrestrained, stirred by the breeze. Tonight at dinner she would appear entirely different, he knew, with heavy powder and rouged lips, tall and handsome, her hair wound up in an onion-shaped bun, her tightly waisted dress with its broad sash emphasizing her still youthful hour-glass figure. In the evenings she wore her décolletage cut low, the generous swell of her breasts only half hidden by some diaphanous material. She used to be on the stage, Lysander reminded himself on these occasions, and this glamorous night-time persona that she transformed herself into was her only chance to perform, these days, to be covertly stared at and desired.

“You’re looking weary, my darling,” she said, touching his cheek with her knuckles. “Working too hard, I bet. What’s the play?”

“Two plays, that’s the problem. Measure for Measure and a Swedish one called Miss Julie.”

“Isn’t it terribly immoral? How wonderful.”

“I haven’t read it yet. I’ve got it with me.”

“I remember when your father did Ibsen. Hedda Gabler. Everyone was very disturbed. What is it about these Scandinavians?”

“We’re trying to provoke a reaction, I think. Anyway, it should be interesting.” He paused. “Mother…I’ve got some rather momentous news.”

He had told his mother nothing about why and how he had had to leave Vienna — she thought it was simply the planned end of his stay. He had hinted at an entanglement — a flirtation — and she also knew that his engagement to Blanche was over. She was sorry — she liked Blanche a lot.

“You know that I told you I became involved with a young woman while I was in Vienna.”

“This English girl, Miss Bull. How could I forget a name like that? The one that made Blanche so cross — and I’m on Blanche’s side, by the way.”

“Yes. Well, I’ve had a letter from Miss Bull. She’s had a child.”

His mother looked at him. Her eyes widened, then narrowed.

“She’s not saying it’s yours.”

“It is mine. Indisputably. It’s a boy, called Lothar. Your first grandchild.”

His mother stood up, took a handkerchief from her sleeve and walked away, rather dramatically dabbing at tears, he thought.

“I knew a boy at school called Lothar,” she said, throwing the words over her shoulder. “Lothar Hinz.” She composed herself and came back over to the bench, sat down and took both his hands. “Let’s speak straightforwardly, darling, with honesty. Remember, I’m an actor’s wife so nobody could be more broad-minded. What are the problems looming over this wonderfully happy occasion?”

“The boy is mine but I don’t know when and how I’m ever going to be able to see him.”

“Another man in the picture?”

“Yes. Miss Bull’s common-law husband — as the expression goes. An unpleasant fellow, a painter called Udo Hoff.”

“Painters are always difficult. But you’re in touch with Miss Bull, at least. What’s her Christian name?”

“Esther.”

“Sounds religious to me. Is she religious?”

“Not in the least. She’s known as Hettie.”

“Hettie Bull. We have a chambermaid here called Hettie.”

“Hettie Bull is an…extraordinary person. I was completely…” Lysander paused. “She was helpful to me and I rather lost my head. She overwhelmed me. We overwhelmed each other.”

“So it was very passionate.”

“Very.”

“And little Lothar is the outcome.”

They sat there in silence for a while.

“Have you a photograph of this Hettie Bull?”

“Do you know, I haven’t. I left in such a hurry. All I have is this.”

Lysander took the libretto of Andromeda und Perseus out of his pocket and handed it to her.

“That’s her. She posed for Andromeda.”

“Very daring. She’s completely naked. She looks pretty anyway. Is she tall?”

“She’s tiny. A little slip of a thing — gamine. Electric.”

Lysander suddenly thought this was a good sign, a further indication of the success of his Vienna cure, in that he was practically talking with his mother about sex. She reached out and removed some thistle down from his lapel.

“I thought you liked tall girls, like Blanche.”

“I did. Until I met Hettie.”

She looked at the cover of the libretto again.

“Can I borrow this? It seems interesting. Did you hear the music? I don’t know the composer.”

“It was very modern, apparently. But, no, I didn’t. Do take it.”

“Lysander! Why did no one tell us you were here?”

They looked up to see, coming through the door from the large walled garden, the lanky figure of the Hon. Hugh Faulkner. He turned and shouted back through the open door.

“Girls! Uncle Lysander’s here!”

Squeals of delight followed this announcement and, seconds later, Emily and Charlotte came racing across the lawn towards them.

“I think we’ll keep this news from the rest of the family for a while,” his mother said, quietly. “Careful, girls, don’t fall and spoil your lovely dresses!”

♦

Crickmay Faulkner offered Lysander a cigar.

“Your mother tells me you’re acting in an indecent play.”

“I’ll take a cigarette, thank you. Yes, it’s Swedish, called Miss Julie.”

“I like the sound of that already. I want tickets for the first night, front row.” Crickmay smiled. “I want to be corrupted before I die.”

“Me too,” Hugh added, lighting his cigar. “I want to be corrupted too — but you’ve got a good few years left in you, Papa.” He passed the port decanter to Lysander. “What’s it about?”

“It’s about a rich, well-born woman who has an affair with a valet.”

“Marvellous. But they’ll never let you put it on.”

They laughed. Crickmay lit his cigar, coughed and slapped his chest.

“Don’t tell your mother, she’ll get cross with me.”

He was looking decidedly older these days, Lysander thought, his face slowly collapsing, big bags under his rheumy eyes and sagging cheeks. His thick white moustache needed clipping.

The three men were sitting in the dining room in their dinner jackets, smoking and drinking port, the women having retired to the drawing room. Lysander topped up his glass, feeling a little drunk. Telling his mother about Hettie and Lothar had encouraged him to drink more than he meant. Brandy and soda before dinner, too much claret with the roast lamb and now port. Better stop if he was going to walk to Winchelsea tomorrow.

“Shall we join the ladies?” Crickmay said, heaving himself to his feet with difficulty and limping out of the room.

“Bring the port, Lysander,” Hugh said. “Are you thinking about going to church tomorrow? If you won’t, I won’t.”

Lysander picked up the port decanter.

“No. I’m walking to Winchelsea tomorrow, check up on the Major.”

“Amazing fellow. Where’s he been to now?”

They walked down the wide corridor towards the Green Drawing Room.

“Somewhere in West Africa, I think. Exploring the upper reaches of the Benue River, the last I heard. He’s been away for two years.”

They turned into the drawing room, where May was playing the piano and his mother was searching through sheet music looking for a song. It was her party piece, a nod to her past that everyone indulged and enjoyed. Lysander went and stood by the fireplace, looking at her with admiration as she stood in the ogival curve of the piano, one hand resting on the music stand, and raised her chin firmly, ready to sing. It was still light outside — the deepening blue of the short summer night just beginning to overcome the last of the sun’s iridescence in the sky. Lysander felt a pressure at the base of his spine and a feeling of peace flow through him. He had a son — it was as if the news had only just registered. He had a son called Lothar. He wondered if one day he would ever bring him to Claverleigh Hall to meet his grandmother. It seemed an impossible dream. His mother began to sing and her warm vibrant voice filled the air.

“Arm und Nacken, weiss und lieblich,

Schimmern in dem Mondenscheine…”

Brahms, he recognized, one of his favourites. ‘Summer Evening’. ‘White and lovely, her arms and neck glimmer in the moonshine’. He felt the emotion well and brim in him — such a simple poem. Hettie, he thought at once — it wasn’t over, clearly. He stood and crossed to the window as his mother continued singing. He looked out through his reflection in the panes to the darkening park beyond, the sun below the horizon now, though its light still charged and brightened the blue-grey air. The ancient limes, oaks and elms in the fenced enclosure seemed to solidify, losing their individual character as trees, and became great opaque shaggy monoliths that, as the remaining sunglow removed itself from them, somehow better revealed the true artful geography of the landscape gardener who, a century before, had placed the feathery saplings here and there — on the sides of hillocks, on the edge of the small lake, and grouped them in gentle valleys — to make a near-perfect man-made landscape that he would never see.

3: The Walk to Winchelsea

Lysander was up at six o’clock and went down to the kitchen, where he gulped a quick cup of tea and had two rounds of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches made up for him. He had found a pair of corduroy trousers and some mountain boots in his wardrobe and with a linen jacket and a Panama hat he was ready for the day. He reckoned it was a twenty-three-mile walk to Winchelsea, more or less straight across country, following lanes and tracks via the villages of Herstmonceux and Battle before he briefly joined the main trunk road that would lead him down to the coast at Winchelsea.

The day was warm but there was a threat of showers, according to Marlowe, so he stuffed a rubberized cycling cape in his rucksack, along with his sandwiches and his playscript of Miss Julie, and set off across the park looking for the first of the cart-tracks that would lead him east to Herstmonceux.

He made good going in the early morning freshness over the downland, catching glimpses of the silvered sea to his right whenever he hit higher ground and the unfolding valleys opened up to afford him a view southwards. He felt good in himself, as he always did when he was walking with purpose, his mind emptying of everything except what he could see and hear around him, as he skirted the oak and beech copses, following sunken lanes hedged with hornbeam and blackthorn, hearing a late cuckoo piping its two-note song, looking down on small farms from ridge-paths, crossing trunk roads as quickly as he could, eager to remove himself from traffic and the noisy reminders of the twentieth century.

They were beginning to cut hay in the fields as he passed, the haymakers scything down the meadows and filling the air with the sweet, pungent scent of cut grass. Around the middle of the morning he realized he had slightly lost his bearings. He hadn’t seen the sea for an hour and, although he knew he was heading broadly east — the position of the sun told him that — he hadn’t come across a fingerpost or a sign for a village for a mile or two. He met a four-horse wagon jingling up a lane and asked the carter’s boy who was leading the team where he could find the road to Herstmonceux. The boy told him he’d passed Herstmonceux and he should turn back. If he went on aways he’d come to a country church. There was a signpost there that would tell him the directions.

He paused at the church, ancient and solid, faced with grey-blue flint, with a battlemented tower and a graveyard half overgrown with nettles, long grass and cow parsley. Gnarled, bent apple trees flanked the cemetery wall. He ate the first of his sandwiches here and the cheese and pickle gave him a thirst so he strode on to Battle, finding an old milestone on the verge that told him Battle was two and a half miles away. Battle with its pubs. He was making good time — a pint of ale, a cigarette and he’d be ready to move on again.

In Battle he found a quiet pub called The Windmill — it was only just noon — not far from the abbey. He bought a pint of cloudy ale for sixpence and sat down on a bench seat by the window and watched three haymakers in dirty smocks play dominoes. He took Miss Julie out of his haversack, thinking he really should try and read it through before the first rehearsal tomorrow afternoon in St John’s Wood. He read a page or two then closed the book, thinking that August Strindberg was not part of this world and it was something of an affront to both Strindberg and The Windmill pub in Battle to introduce them to each other.

Sitting in this small pub with its cool flagged floor, listening to the murmuring voices of the haymakers and the click of dominoes falling, drinking beer here in the middle of summer in England in 1914, he suddenly felt a stillness creep up on him as if he were suffering from a form of mental palsy — as if time had stopped and the world’s turning, also. It was a strange sensation — that he would be for ever stuck in this late June day in 1914 like a fly in amber — the past as irrelevant to him as the future. A perfect stasis; the most alluring inertia.

And then suddenly it was over, the mood passed, as a lorry rumbled by, tooting its horn and the world began to move again. He picked up his rucksack, eased himself into its straps and took his empty pint glass back to the bar.

As he left Battle it began to drizzle but he decided to press on, turning off the busy Hastings road as soon as he could and following a cart track that a group of foresters — cutting lengths of alder — told him would see him clear across country to Guestling Thorn. Once he was there he’d have to brave the verge of the main road to Rye with its motor traffic for a mile or two but it would lead him straight to Winchelsea and the Major.

He liked Winchelsea, he thought, as he entered the village, striding down one of its wide streets to Hamo’s cottage. All village streets should be this wide, he thought: the village was full of light, open to the sun on its high bluff. Hamo’s white weatherboarded cottage was on the western edge with a fine view over Rye Bay to Camber Sands and the expanses of Romney Marsh beyond. He knocked on the door.

4: A Very Sweet Boy

“Well, I thought you should be aware of the situation,” the Major said. “You know what I always say, Lysander — honesty is everything in life. The bedrock of all relationships. I make no bones about it, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Never have, never will.”

The Major stood with his back to a small fire in the grate of the sitting room. He was wearing an old quilted red velvet smoking jacket with a cravat and a small, white, beaded skullcap on his bald head. He looked lean and weatherbeaten, still heavily tanned, with deep lines scoring either cheek as if he’d spent months gritting his teeth. His eyes, in his dark face, were a disconcertingly pale blue.

“I totally understand, Hamo,” Lysander said. “You know that. It couldn’t matter less to me.”

A young African boy came into the room with a tray bearing a whisky bottle, two glasses and a soda siphon.

“Thank you, Femi,” the Major said.

The boy — who looked seventeen or eighteen — smiled, and set the tray down.

“Femi — this is my nephew, Lysander Rief.”

“Pleased to meet, sar,” Femi said and shook Lysander’s offered hand. He was wearing a khaki-drill suit and a knitted black tie. He was tall with a high forehead. A fine handsome African face, Lysander thought.

“Of course, it causes a bit of a stir when we go shopping in Rye, as you can imagine,” the Major said with some glee. “However, I just tell everyone he’s a visiting African prince and they calm down quickly enough.”

Femi gave a small bow and went back into the kitchen.

“Let me just go and see how our supper’s coming along,” Hamo said, and followed Femi out. Lysander stood and prowled around the room. It was full of artefacts from Hamo’s trips to west and central Africa — sculptures, pottery, calabashes, animal hides on the floor — including an entire zebra skin in front of the fire. On one wall was a glass case full of weapons — ceremonial axes and daggers and long bladed, finely etched spears as well as Hamo’s muzzle-loading elephant gun and his Martini-Henri Mark II rifle from the South African War. “The world’s most accurate rifle up to a quarter of a mile,” Hamo had told him once. “Soft lead bullet makes one hell of a mess.” Next to it was a carved ebony frieze full of fantastic creatures — huge-eared, multi-limbed goblins and what looked like hermaphrodites — it reminded Lysander of Bensimon’s bas-relief. He missed his meetings with Bensimon, he realized.

He turned as he heard Hamo come back into the room.

“Femi was my guide on the Niger,” Hamo went on. “Saved my life at least three times,” he added matter-of-factly. He looked fondly towards the kitchen. “He’s a very sweet boy. His English is coming along remarkably well.”

He poured Lysander another whisky and topped it up with soda.

“So you walked all the way from Claverleigh? I’ll have to take you on my next expedition.”

Hamo Rief had won his Victoria Cross in 1901 during the South African War. At the beginning of the raising of the siege of Ladysmith he had seen a troop of Boer horsemen seize two field artillery pieces and he single-handedly drove off the raiding party, recovering the guns, killing four and wounding five, but not before being wounded himself, three times. Honourably discharged from his regiment as a result of his injuries he found that the wanderlust that had taken him into the army in the first place still remained so he decided to become an amateur explorer, joining the Royal Geographical Society, and, in 1907, privately funded an expedition to West Africa, attempting to travel across the continent from the Niger River to the Nile. In fact he only managed to reach Lake Chad — where he fell ill with dengue fever — and spent several months there recuperating, using the time to gather specimens and make anthropological studies of the local tribes. The book he wrote and published on his return, The Lost Lake of Africa, became a surprise bestseller and funded this last and latest expedition, exploring, not the upper reaches of the Benue River as Lysander had thought, but various islands in the Bight of Benin.

Lysander was very glad to be with his uncle again after a gap of two years. Though he had been something of a distant figure to him during his childhood — Hamo had spent many years with his regiment in India — Lysander had grown very fond of his uncle as he’d come to know him better after his father’s death. He was full of admiration for his absolute fearlessness, military and social. Hamo didn’t resemble his older brother — he was bald and naturally skinny with a small head — but, for Lysander, he was the only remaining blood link with his dead father. Hamo talked about him without need of prompting and would regularly repeat the fact that the only person he had ever, truly loved was his brother, Halifax.

“Halifax understood me completely, you see, from a very early age,” Hamo had once confided to Lysander. “When I told him — I must have been fourteen or so — that I thought I wasn’t interested in girls he said neither was Alexander the Great. Then he read me some of Shakespeare’s sonnets — and I never looked back.”

They ate a supper of cold mutton and boiled potatoes, Femi joining them at the table. Then Hamo brought out half a Stilton cheese and a plate of hard biscuits and decanted another bottle of claret in front of a candle, showing Femi how the light at the neck of the bottle ensured that you didn’t allow the sediment to flow into the decanter.

“I’m sorry I had to cancel my ‘Welcome Home’ dinner at Claverleigh,” he said. “I’ll write to your mother in a day or two and explain. I just couldn’t face it — d’you know what I mean?”

“I completely understand.”

“I simply didn’t want to meet the mayor of Lewes or Sir Humphrey Bumphrey and his lady wife, etcetera, etcetera. And I don’t think young Femi was quite ready for that ordeal by fire, either.”

“To be honest, I don’t think old Crickmay was bothered — gets easily tired these days. Neither was my mother. I think they thought you might like it — you know, kill the fatted calf, lay on a bit of opulence after your lean years in Africa.”

Hamo poured more wine.

“She’s a sensible, lovely woman. I appreciated the gesture. Anyway, I’ve got to give a lecture in London — I’ll invite everyone to that.” He turned to Femi and put his hand on his arm. “Are you all right, my dear boy?”

“Yes, sar. Very good.”

Hamo swung his gaze back to Lysander.

“So, what’s going on in the wicked world of the theatre? Did you know Ellen Terry used to have a cottage here in Winchelsea? Lived in sin with Henry Irving. Used to dance on her lawn in bare feet and her nightdress. We’re a very tolerant little village. Broad streets, broad minds.”

Femi went up to bed once the dishes were cleared away and Hamo and Lysander sat on in front of the small fire, smoking and chatting. As Lysander hoped, the conversation began to revolve around Halifax Rief.

“It’s a source of enormous regret. It keeps happening. I said to Femi without thinking — you must meet my brother, Halifax. And then I remembered he was dead and gone, all these years. I keep saying — I must tell this to Halifax. How he’ll laugh. Hopeless.”

“You see, I was too young,” Lysander said. “I never really saw enough of him to fix him in my head. He was just ‘Father’, you know. Always off to the theatre or on tour.”

Hamo pointed the stem of his pipe at Lysander. “They have great respect for actors, Femi’s people. In fact throughout Africa — actors, dancers, musicians, showmen. You should see some of these chaps in Femi’s tribe, how they can imitate animals — egrets, leopards, monkeys. Incredible. A few daubs of paint, some feathers and a stick. And then a few gestures, the way they hold themselves — uncanny. You think you’re watching a heron, say, picking its way through marshy water, stabbing at fish with its beak. Halifax would have been amazed.”

“What was the last thing you saw him in?” Lysander knew the answer to this question but he wanted to prompt reminiscences.

“It was his Lear. Yes…About a week before he died. I was on leave in London, going back to India and the regiment. Absolutely terrifying performance. He was a big man, your father, you know, but in that play you saw him shrink, with your own eyes, saw him diminish physically. You know that speech, ‘Blow, winds and crack your cheeks!’”

“The storm scene.” Lysander spread his arms and declaimed, “‘Rage! Blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes spout till you have drenched our steeples, drown’d the cocks!’”

“Exactly. Except he did it in a quiet voice. Stood very still, hardly moved — no bombast. Sent shivers up your spine. Do you want another whisky, old chap?”

“I will, actually — I’ve got some rather momentous news. And I want to ask your advice.”

Over two more glasses of whisky Lysander told Hamo the whole story about Hettie, the rape and assault charge, his arrest and flight from Vienna to Trieste. And the birth of Lothar.

“What’s the name? Say again.”

“Lothar. Lothar Rief.”

“But now you can’t go back to Austria, I suppose. Not even disguised?”

“I don’t think I can risk it.”

“Then why don’t I go in your place? Find this girl, Hettie, and make contact discreetly. No one’ll suspect an old fellow like me.”

“Would you?”

“Like a shot.” Lysander could see the excitement glitter in his pale blue eyes. “I could find the boy. Check out what this artist, Hoff, is like — pretend to buy a painting. See what the set-up is and report back to you.”

“It might work…” Lysander began to think himself, his own excitement building. “And I’ve a friend out there,” he added. “A lieutenant in the hussars. Could be useful.”

“I don’t speak the language of course.”

“Wolfram Rozman — he speaks excellent English.”

“We’ll make a plan, Lysander, we’ll sort it out. Get young Lothar back where he belongs. Maybe I’ll kidnap him…” He shot Lysander one of his rare lopsided smiles and winked.

♦

The next morning Lysander was up and left early to catch the train from Rye back to Claverleigh. Femi was in the kitchen wearing a crudely patterned cotton robe down to his ankles, with bare feet. Suddenly he looked very African in the small cottage kitchen, with the kettle boiling on the range, the stacked dishes on the wooden draining board. He shook Lysander’s hand.

“The Major, he talk of you, many, many,” Femi said.

Lysander was touched and left the house with a new sense of purpose and for the first time since he’d heard of Lothar’s birth he felt stirrings of hope. A plan was forming. He picked up a trap waiting outside the inn at Winchelsea and was at Rye station in time for the 7. 45 to Brighton, calling at Hastings and Lewes, with the rest of the Monday morning commuters, empty-faced men in their grey suits, stiff collars and bowler hats, reading their newspapers, counting down the hours until they could catch the train home again. Lysander stood amongst them, an incongruous figure with his baggy corduroy trousers and Panama hat, his rucksack slung over one shoulder, thinking of Hamo’s plan, his singing heart making him smile spontaneously.

5: A Grotesque Insult to the Bard

Lysander’s head was still buzzing. He was experiencing that strange combination of huge mental fatigue with sheer, adrenalin-fuelled exhilaration that occurred whenever he came off stage after a first night — particularly if his role had been a sizeable one. It could last for an hour or more, he knew, as he felt his eyelids flicker and grow irresistibly heavy. Gilda was saying something to him but he couldn’t find the energy to listen. He was thinking back over his performance as Angelo, worrying that he’d rather gabbled his big speech in Act II. No doubt Rutherford would tell him in the morning…

The cab rattled over some cobblestones and woke him up. Gilda swayed with the motion and grabbed his arm to keep herself upright.

“Oops, sorry,” she said. “But don’t you think so?”

“Think what?”

“You’re not listening to me, you beast.”

“Do you think I went too fast through, ‘Is this her fault or mine? The tempter or the tempted, who sins most?’ I thought I may have rushed it.”

“Not to my ear. No, I was saying — are we mad?”

“In what way?”

“To be doing Miss Julie as well. The first night’s in two weeks, I can’t believe it.”

“It’s only ninety minutes and there’s no interval.”

“I suppose so…But it’s very intense — I think we’ll be exhausted. What have we taken on?”

The back of the cab was full of her scent — a clinging, farinaceous odour of lilies and cinnamon —’Matins de Paris’ she had said it was called when he asked. He had agreed to wait for her after the show but she had taken forty minutes to put on her finery. She was looking in her compact-mirror now, checking her hair, her lip-rouge — the palest pink. It suited her.

“We’re going to be the last there,” Lysander said.

“Then we can make an entrance. It is our night.”

“Don’t let Rutherford hear you say that.”

She laughed — her real laugh, Lysander noted, rather deep and raucous, not like her fake laugh, a kind of girly trill. He could easily distinguish them, now they had spent so much time together rehearsing Measure for Measure and Miss Julie, just as he could distinguish the real Gilda Butterfield from ‘Miss Gilda Butterfield’, the latter overlaid with many veneers of faux-gentility, pretension, archness and other affectations, the laugh being the least of it. She was talking again.

“Rutherford asked me one of his questions about Miss Julie that I really didn’t know how to answer.”

“Oh, yes, one of his ‘Stanislavsky’ questions.” He was awake now — exhilaration had vanquished fatigue. “What was it?”

“He said: what do you think happens when Julie and Jean go outside — just before the ballet sequence?”

“And you said?”

“I said I assumed they kissed.”

“Come on, Gilda. You’re a woman of the world.”

“What do they do, then?”

Lysander decided to take the risk. Something about Gilda dared him to say it. She was an actress, for god’s sake. He lowered his voice.

“They fu — they fornicate, of course.”

“Lysander! Talk about calling a spade a spade.” She laughed again, however.

“Excuse my Anglo-Saxon. But it’s very obvious. It’s very important also, for when they both come back on, that the audience realizes this. When we both come back on.”

“Now you put it that way I see what you mean, yes…” She busied herself with her mirror again, embarrassed, he supposed, wondering if he’d gone too far.

“When Jean and Julie come back on after the ballet. Everything’s changed,” he said. “They haven’t just been billing and cooing in the rose garden. They’ve been — you know, passionately, irresistibly…” He paused. “It affects the whole play. That’s why you commit suicide.”

“You sound like Rutherford,” she said. “Or have you been reading too much D.H. Lawrence?”

They were rolling down Regent Street towards the Café Royal. It was a warm clear night, not too muggy for late July. The cab pulled up and Lysander paid the driver and helped Gilda down carefully. She was wearing a very tight hobble-skirt that gave her a footstep of no more than eighteen inches and a sleeveless silk blouse freighted with flounces and ribbonry. She had a pearl choker at her throat and long white gloves almost to her armpits. Her curly blonde hair had been subdued under numerous hair-ornaments. He handed over her chiffon stole and she wound it loosely around her bare shoulders.

“You look very beautiful, Gilda,” he said. “And you were superb tonight as Isabella,” he added, sincerely.

“Stop. You’ll make me cry.”

He offered her his arm and they went into the Café through the revolving doors to be met by a manic babble of talk and laughter and a blurry wall of smoke.

“We’re with the Rutherford Davison party,” Lysander said to the maître d’.

“Upstairs, first floor,” the man said. “The smaller of the two private rooms.”

They walked up the stairs. On the landing they could hear the excited talk and laughter coming from the rest of the company through the open door of the private room, left ajar as if in welcome, expecting them. There was a pop of a champagne bottle opening and the sound of people clapping. Gilda tugged on his elbow and held him back, pausing them both in the gloom of the corridor. She looked around and took his hand and drew him to her. Their faces were close.

“What’s going on?” Lysander said.

She kissed him hard on his lips and pressed herself against him. He felt her tongue pushing, flickering, and he opened his mouth. Then she stepped back, checked the copious frilling of her blouse and readjusted her chiffon stole. Lysander took out his handkerchief and dabbed at his lips in case there were any traces of her lip-rouge. She looked at him squarely — a look that came from the real Gilda Butterfield.

“We’d better go in,” she said, “or they’ll wonder what’s become of us.”

She linked arms with him again and they walked into the room together. The company rose to their feet and applauded.

♦

Lysander allowed a waiter to pour him more champagne as he tried to listen to what Rutherford Davison was saying. He was very aware of Gilda across the room and the many glances she was throwing his way. He felt in something of a quandary. He decided to see simply where the evening would lead. A night for instincts, not rationality, he decided.

“No,” Rutherford was saying, “I think we’ll do two full weeks of Measure and then very quickly announce Miss Julie. I have a horrible feeling they’ll close us down as soon as the reviews start appearing so we want to have as many performances as possible.”

“But it was done in Birmingham this year, you said. So there’s a precedent.”

“A precedent for a very boring, prudish, safe-as-houses production. Wait till you see how we do it — what I’ve got planned.”

“It’s your company.”

Lysander had grown to like Rutherford — perhaps ‘like’ was the wrong word — he had grown to trust his intuition and his intelligence. He was not naturally a warm or open person but he seemed to know what he was doing and didn’t waver from his purpose. He had said that Measure for Measure and Miss Julie were a perfect double-bill as both plays were fundamentally about sex, even though they were written three centuries apart. Certainly the emphases and undercurrents that had been revealed this evening had set audible mutterings running through the audience a few times. He wondered what the reviews would be like — not that he’d be reading them. Rutherford said he only read reviews for adjectives and adverbs — he was hoping for ‘shocking’ and ‘daring’ — even ‘disgraceful’ would suit. We’re here to stir things up, he had said to the company. Let’s show them a Shakespeare as troubled and worldly as the sonnets. This Swan of Avon has paddled through a sewer.

Lysander moved off and wandered round the room. He ate a couple of canapés and chatted to some of the other actors and their friends, aware of Gilda circling the room in the other direction — anti- to his clockwise. It was after midnight. He went back to the bar and ordered a brandy and soda.

“Would you light my cigarette, please, kind sir?” Cockney accent. Lysander turned.

Gilda stood there, a cigarette in a jet holder, poised. A little tipsy, he thought. He took out his lighter and clicked the flame into life and offered it to the end of her cigarette. She inhaled, checked the fit of the cigarette in the holder and blew smoke from the side of her mouth. She lowered her voice to an intimate near whisper, moving her mouth close to his ear. He felt her warm breath on his neck. Goosebumps.

“Don’t you think, Lysander dear, purely in the interests of dramatic authenticity, we should practise our ‘Miss Julie’ fornication? Perhaps?”

“As long as it’s purely in the interests of the drama. What could be wrong with that?”

“Nothing. Even Rutherford would approve.”

“Then I think it’s an excellent idea. My place isn’t far. I’m alone tonight. We can practise there undisturbed.” Greville was in Manchester, touring in Nance Oldfield with Virginia Farringford.

The tempter or the tempted, who sins most? he thought to himself, feeling very tempted. He looked her in the eye — she didn’t flinch

“Why don’t you go down,” Gilda said, smiling, “find a cab and I’ll be there in five minutes?”

She blew him a kiss, making a moue with her lips, and glided away from him. Lysander felt that breathless pressure in his chest and blood-heat around the neck and ears that signalled his excitement. It was probably a very, very bad idea and no doubt he would curse himself for the rest of the run but for the first time since Vienna and Hettie he felt like being with a woman — felt like being with Gilda Butterfield, to be precise.

He said his goodbyes and went downstairs. The maître d’ sent a boy out to hail him a cab and he stood there waiting, humming a song to himself — ‘My Melancholy Baby’ — full of eager anticipation and pushing the thought to the back of his mind that this evening would also be the acid test of his Bensimon cure. There had never been a problem with Hettie but then there had never been anyone since Hettie…He saw a man he vaguely knew collecting his hat and coat from the cloakroom. Their eyes met and recognition was immediate. Alwyn Munro sauntered over towards him.

“Lysander Rief, the great escapologist, as I live and breathe.”

They shook hands. For some reason, Lysander noted, he was pleased to see Munro.

“Celebrating?” Munro said, indicating his dinner jacket and buttonhole.

“First night. Measure for Measure.”

“Congratulations. Funnily enough we were just talking about you today,” Munro said, looking at him shrewdly. “Where’re you living now? I’ve something to send you.”

Lysander gave him his address in Chandos Place.

“Still in Vienna?” Lysander asked.

“No, no. We’ve almost all got out now. Now the war seems inevitable.”

“War? I thought it was just general sabre-rattling. Austria and Serbia, you know.”

“And the Russians and the Germans and the French rattling their sabres too. It’ll be us in a few days. You wait and see.”

Lysander felt something of a fool. “I’ve been very caught up in rehearsals,” he said, feebly.

“Everything is moving incredibly fast,” Munro said. “Even I can’t keep up.”

“Cab’s here, sir,” the boy said and Lysander searched his pocket for some pennies to tip him. He was aware, out of the corner of his eye, that Gilda was coming slowly down the stairs. He’d better jump into the cab quickly — it wouldn’t do for them to be seen leaving together.

“Must dash,” he said to Munro, touching him apologetically on the elbow. “Good luck with your war.”

♦

Gilda’s body was quite extraordinary, Lysander thought. Like nothing he’d seen or experienced before — not that he was any kind of expert on women’s naked bodies, having only studied half a dozen or so, in his time. But Gilda seemed to him almost as if she were another species of woman, so incredibly pale was she with a rash of freckles over her chest and between her small, uptilted breasts, the nipples the palest rose, almost invisible. Freckles dusted her back and shoulders and here and there — on her ribs, on her upper arms, on her thighs — were small flat moles, pinheads, constellations of them, like flicked brown paint. Just the body’s pigmentation gone a bit awry, he supposed, the freckles like tiny faded tattoos. He had wondered, when she began to undress, how he would react to her translucent pallor but he found her whiteness and her stippling of pale brown very alluring.

He had insisted on wearing a preservative so she had insisted on rolling it on. This set the tone of genial amusement for the rest of the night — “Fits you like a one-fingered glove, sir,” she said in her Cockney accent — and they continued to talk banteringly throughout.

“I love your markings,” Lysander said as she eased her legs wide to receive him. “You’re like a banana that’s been too long in the fruitbowl, you know — sort of sea-creature.”

“Thanks a lot. I don’t.”

“I feel I should be able to read you like tea-leaves.”

“Ha-ha. I’m thinking of getting them removed.”

“Don’t you dare. You’re unique. Like a quail’s egg.”

“What lovely compliments. Sea-creature, quail’s egg. Quite the charmer, Mr Rief, oh yes…”

His orgasm duly came — to his intense pleasure — but they didn’t try for a second time. It was late and they were both tired, they admitted, what with the first night and the party. Maybe in the morning.

And now she was sleeping in his bed as he dressed, one long white haunch revealed, the rumpled sheet just failing to cover the clean edge of her golden triangle of hair. Miss Julie…Well, well, well. He knotted a cravat at his throat and pulled on a jacket. He had no milk or tea, no coffee, sugar or bread and butter in the flat — just a pot of marmalade. He thought he would run out for some provisions. They could have breakfast in bed and see what led on from there. Rutherford didn’t want them back at the theatre until the afternoon.

He stepped over the tangled pile of her clothes — skirt, blouse, shift, corset, camisole, knickers, hosiery, shoes — and let himself quietly out of the room. He trotted down the stairs in a fine mood. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a disaster, after all, to start a brief affair with Gilda, he thought. Might make Blanche jealous if people gossiped and whispered about it.

He stepped out on to Chandos Place. He’d run up to Covent Garden, that would be quickest — buy her a bunch of flowers.

Jack Fyfe-Miller, in naval uniform, was crossing the street towards him.

“Rief! Good morning! I was just going to slip this through your letter-box. Munro wanted you to have it as soon as possible.” He handed him a stiff brown envelope.

“What’s this?”

“A surprise…You’re looking very well. Your play had an extremely bad review in the Mail this morning. ‘Shocking,’ it said. A grotesque insult to the Bard.”

“We were rather hoping for that.”

Fyfe-Miller seemed to be looking at him intently.

“Is everything all right?” Lysander asked.

“I was just thinking — I last saw you on the quayside at Trieste. Somehow I knew we’d meet again.”

“And now we have. You and Munro, both, in under twelve hours. Quite a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it?”

“You taking up a life on the ocean wave again?”

“No, no. All British fleets have been ordered back to war bases. I’m off down to Portsmouth.”

“War bases? Really? Does that mean —”

“Yes. It’s looking rather serious.” He smiled and gave him a salute. “See you again soon, no doubt,” he said, and headed back towards Trafalgar Square.

Lysander put the envelope in his pocket and hurried up to Covent Garden to do his shopping. He didn’t want Gilda to wake before he came back.

6: Autobiographical Investigations

I couldn’t believe what was in the envelope that Fyfe-Miller handed to me. I opened it after Gilda had gone (around ten o’clock — second time, very satisfactory) to find a formal invoice from the War Office detailing the amount I owed to His Majesty’s Government. The 10, 000 crowns of forfeited bail came to £ 475. Herr Feuerstein’s legal fees and expenses were totalled at an exorbitant £ 350 and food, drink and laundry were estimated at an equally preposterous £ 35. No rent charged for the summerhouse, I noted, gratefully. Grand total: £ 860. I laughed. “Full remittance would be appreciated at your earliest convenience.” I am earning £ 8 10 shillings a week in the International Players’ Company. My savings are virtually exhausted because of my lengthy stay in Vienna. I owe my mother over £ 100. The expenses of my daily life (rent, clothing, food, etcetera) are considerable. Roughly calculating, I reckon that if I could stay working fifty-two weeks of the year (and name me an actor who can or does) I might be able to pay off this debt in five years — in 1919. Compound interest, moreover, is being added at 5 per cent per annum. I tore the invoice up.

I’m deeply grateful to Munro and Fyfe-Miller — they were crucially instrumental in my escape from Vienna but, from one jaundiced angle — mine, I admit — the whole ploy looks like a clever money-making scheme for the Foreign Office. I could spend most of my life paying this off.

♦

Rehearsal for Miss Julie this morning. I must say I’m having no problems learning the lines, unlike Gilda. I find the two idioms — Shakespeare and Strindberg — ideally distinct, the lines learned seeming to occupy different cubbyholes of my brain. Not so Gilda, who is still reading from the script, much to Rutherford’s annoyance. His exasperation this morning almost made her cry. I consoled her and we stole a kiss — as much as we’ve managed to achieve since that first night (and morning) of the First Night party. If anything she seems to have cooled somewhat, as if regretting giving herself to me. She’s perfectly friendly but she always seems busy after the show. Sick mother, friends in town — there’s always a good excuse.

Rutherford wants us both to re-enter after the ballet with our clothes in disarray and with wisps of straw in our hair. He actually suggested I come on stage buttoning my flies. Gilda is advocating more decorum but I can see how adamant Rutherford is — there will be battles ahead. He is determined to have us banned within twenty-four hours.

♦

Strange dream about Hettie. I was drawing her — she was naked — in the barn. There was a banging at the door and we both cowered down, expecting it to be Hoff. But instead my father walked in.

♦

I overheard this conversation at Leicester Square Tube station as I waited for a train. It was between two women (working class, poor), one in her twenties, one younger, sixteen or so.

Woman: I saw her up Haymarket, then in Burlington Arcade.

Girl:

She told me she had a job hat-binding in Mayfair.

Woman:

She’s not hat-binding, all painted like that.

Girl:

She said she was sad. That’s why she was drinking.

Woman:

I’m sad. We’re all sad — but we don’t carry on like that.

Girl:

She could’ve been a lady’s maid, she said. Five pound a year and all her grub. Now she makes five pound a week, she says.

Woman:

She’ll end up in a rookery. I bet my life. Selling herself for thruppence to a shoe-black.

Girl:

She’s a good soul, Lizzie.

Woman:

She’s half mad and three parts drunk.

♦

A subject for Mr Strindberg, perhaps, were he still with us. The river of sex flows as strongly in London as it does in Vienna.

♦

August the fifth. War was declared on Germany last night at 11. 00 p.m., Greville said when he came in. I went out this morning to find a paper but they had all been sold. This evening we had barely twenty people in the auditorium but we performed the play with as much zest as if it had been a full house. Rutherford very cast down — says we’re bound to close at the end of the week. So, the world will be denied Lysander Rief and Gilda Butterfield in August Strindberg’s Miss Julie. Gilda was upset. I said German troops had advanced into Belgium and attacked Liège, a fact that made our little theatrical problems and regrets seem insignificant. “Not to me,” she said fiercely. For a second I thought she was going to slap my face.

♦

7^th August. I see in the paper that HMS Amphion has been sunk by a mine off Yarmouth. For some odd reason I wondered if the Amphion had been Fyfe-Miller’s ship — and that thought suddenly brought the war alive to me in a way that days of shouting headlines hadn’t. It was personalized in the shape of an imagined Fyfe-Miller drowned at sea off Yarmouth. It made me cold and fearful.

♦

I was being measured for a new suit at my tailor’s yesterday and I said to Jobling that I rather fancied a ‘waist-seam’ coat. “Very American, sir,” he said, as if that was an end to the matter. I said I thought the waist-seam was flattering. “You’ll be wanting slanting pockets next,” Jobling said, with a chuckle. Not a bad idea, I retorted. “Your father would turn in his grave, sir,” he said and went on to talk about Grosvenor cuffs and double collars. And that was that. My father’s ghost is still determining what I can wear.

♦

A letter from Hettie arrived in this afternoon’s post. The stamp was Swiss.

My dear Lysander,

Isn’t this the most terrible business? I cry all day at the awful folly of it all. Why would Britain declare war on us? What has Vienna done to London or Paris? Udo says this is a purely Balkan affair but other countries are just using it as an excuse. Is this true?

I’m very, very frightened and I wanted to send this letter to you with all urgency to tell you what I have decided to do in these awful circumstances. My position is difficult, as you will be well aware. I am a British subject living in a country with which Britain is in a state of war. Udo has offered to adopt Lothar, the better to protect him and to make his nationality secure. I may be interned but Lothar would be safe — so of course I agreed. Once the papers are drawn up he will take Udo’s name and become ‘Lothar Hoff’. It’s for the best, my dear one — I can and must only think of Lothar, I mustn’t think of myself nor of your feelings, though I can easily imagine them.

Lothar is very well, a happy healthy boy. I wish us all happier and more secure times.

With love from us both, Hettie.

Hamo tried to console me — he was very affectionate and warm. Think of the little chap, he said, it’s for the best. I came down last night (Sunday) to stay in Winchelsea with Hamo and Femi. Hamo is thinking of adopting Femi himself, he said, as there has already been fighting in West Africa between the British and the German colonies. Togoland has been invaded by British and Empire forces.

Last night we stayed up late, talking. I said that I assumed all his plans for making a trip to Vienna must now be abandoned.

“No can do, dear boy,” he said. “But as soon as this damn war ends, I’ll be there. With a bit of luck it might not last that long.”

I sit in the spare bedroom, under the eaves of this little cottage, writing this up, wondering what to do as everything seems to conspire against me. There is a stiff gale blowing up tonight, ripping the first leaves off the trees. I suppose I should try to find another job as the theatres show no sign of closing but the thought of auditions makes me feel sick. From somewhere in the lane the lid of a dustbin has been lifted off and sent clattering and spinning down the alleyway, its tinny percussion discordant and unnerving beneath the sudden giant rushings of the wind off the sea.

7: Illegal and Enemy Aliens

A fine rain had started falling as the lorry shuddered to a halt outside the camp. Lysander and the new detachment of guards jumped down from the rear.

“Fuck me,” Lance Corporal Merrilees said. “Fucking rain.”

“Meant to clear up this afternoon,” Lysander said, taking his cap off and looking up at the mass of grey clouds above his head. Cold drops hit his upturned face.

“All right for you, Actor, ain’t it? All fucking warm and cosy.”

Merrilees led his section off around the perimeter wire and Lysander kicked the mud of his boots before going up the steps into the clubhouse.

The Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp had been the Bishop’s Bay Golf Club before the war started and before it was requisitioned by the Home Office as a holding facility for ‘illegal and enemy aliens’. A few miles west down the coast from Swansea, round the headland from the Mumbles, it had been transformed into a fenced prison camp of some forty wooden huts, each sleeping twenty people on bunk beds, constructed along the length of the eighteenth fairway. The clubhouse became the administrative centre and the members’ lounge was reconfigured into the camp’s canteen, capable of serving three sittings of two hundred prisoners a time, if required. The camp’s population fluctuated between four hundred and six hundred internees, men, women and children. Other areas of the golf course had been wired off as football and hockey pitches but there was not much demand for these, Lysander had noticed. The prevailing mood amongst the internees was one of glum injustice; grumbling and petulant lethargy their principal pastimes.

Lysander knocked on the camp-commandant’s door. “Capt. J. St.J. Teesdale’ it said on a temporary sign outside. Lysander stepped inside on Teesdale’s cry of ‘Enter!” and forced himself to smile and say, “Good morning, sir.” Teesdale had arrived only two weeks before and was finding his new authority something of a trial and a burden. He was nineteen years old and having some trouble growing his first moustache.

“Morning, Rief,” he said. “Nasty-looking one for the middle of May.”

“Ne’er cast a clout ‘til May be out,” Lysander said.

“Say again?”

“An ancient adage, sir. Summer doesn’t start until May is over.”

“Right.” He looked at some papers on his desk. “I’m afraid it’s Frau Schumacher, first up. Insisting on seeing a doctor again.”

Lysander collected his ledger and a bundle of files and empty forms and followed Teesdale from the Club Secretary’s office to the ‘19^th Hole’ bar. Here a couple of middle-aged typists from Swansea coped with the camp’s administration, with the help of a solitary telephone, seated at desks at one end of the long room, while at the other, in front of a wide bay window, was a long trestle table where the day’s meetings and interviews took place. Through the window was a panorama of a choppy Bristol Channel with its massed continents of clouds — mouse-grey and menacing — beyond the links and the first tee. The walls were covered with framed photographs of golfers past — foursomes and monthly medal winners and amateur champions of the South Wales golfing fraternity holding silver trophies aloft. The bar had been cleared of its bottles and glasses, its shelves filled with rows of cardboard box files, one for each internee. Lysander found it one of the most depressing rooms he’d ever occupied.

Frau Schumacher sat at the trestle table, her back to the window, her arms folded across her chest belligerently, her chubby features set in a dark, implacable frown. She started to cough as she saw Lysander and Teesdale come in. Lysander took his seat opposite; Teesdale drew his chair out of range of Frau Schumacher’s staccato volley of dry coughs. Lysander opened Frau Schumacher’s file.

“Guten Morgen, Frau Schumacher, wie geht es Ihnen heute?”

It took an hour to persuade Frau Schumacher to go back to her hut with the promise, in writing, that she would see a doctor within twenty-four hours, or sooner, if one could be found in Swansea. Lysander didn’t dislike her, even though he saw her almost every two days, as almost everyone who was held in Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp had a long line of genuine grievances, not least their incarceration. There were merchant seamen — including half a dozen morose Turks — whose German colliers had been impounded in Swansea docks at the declaration of war; some twenty schoolchildren from Munich (awaiting repatriation) who had been visiting Wales on a late-summer cycling holiday; many proprietors of local businesses — butchers, tea-shop owners, an undertaker, music teachers — who had German names or ancestry. Frau Schumacher herself had been visiting her cousin in Llanelli, who was married to a Welshman named Jones. The household had been woken on the morning of August 5 and Frau Schumacher arrested — she had been due to return to Bremen on the sixth.

Bad luck, Lysander thought, rotten luck, stepping outside for some fresh air, already feeling tired after an hour’s translating of the Schumacher gripes and grudges. He turned up the collar of his tunic and jammed his cap on his head, searching his pockets for his cigarettes. He found them, lit one and wandered down a fairway towards the line of low dunes and the narrow beach beyond. Somebody shouted, “Hey, Actor!” from one of the watchtowers and he replied with a cheery thumbs-up.

It was still drizzling but he didn’t really care, content to stand alone on the beach and watch the wind whip the foam from the waves of the restless, steely sea. Ilfracombe was just about opposite, he calculated, many miles away out of sight on the other side of the wide channel. He’d been on holiday there once, in 1895, when he was nine. He remembered trying to persuade his father to come shrimping with him and failing. “No, darling boy, shrimping’s not for me.” He finished his cigarette and threw it towards the waves and strolled back towards the clubhouse. A small queue of internees had formed and they looked at Lysander expressionlessly as he walked past.

“Busy day,” Teesdale said, as they watched the first man shuffle in. “How come you speak German so well, Rief?”

“I lived in Vienna before the war,” Lysander said, thinking — what a simple expression, seven words, and what multitudes did they contain. He should have them carved on his tombstone.

“Better get started,” he said, sensing that Teesdale wanted to chat.

“What school did you go to, by the way?”

“I went to many schools, sir. Peripatetic childhood.”

♦

Of all the stupid decisions he had made in his life, Lysander thought, perhaps the stupidest had occurred that morning he had left Hamo’s cottage in Winchelsea and went to Rye to catch the train back to London. He had half an hour to wait and so had wandered aimlessly into town, his head full of bitter thoughts of Hettie and his unseen baby boy, Lothar, soon to be Udo Hoff’s son, in name, at any rate. In the window of an empty greengrocer’s shop he saw a large printed banner. “E.S.L.I. ‘THE MARTLETTS’. DO YOUR BIT FOR ENGLAND, LADS!” A plump sergeant lounged in the doorway and caught Lysander’s eye.

“You’re a fine-looking fellow. Strong and lively, I’ll warrant. Just the sort we need.”

And so Lysander had heeded this unlikely siren, had entered the shop and enlisted. He became Private 10099 in the 2 / 5^th (service) battalion of the East Sussex Light Infantry regiment. Two days later he reported to the E.S.L.I. depot in Eastbourne for six weeks of basic training. It was an act of penance more than one of duty, he told himself. At least he was doing something and all he craved was mindless routine and mindless discipline. He would go to France to fight the common foe and somewhere in the romantic back of his mind he had a vision of himself marching triumphantly into Vienna to claim a first joyful meeting with his little boy.

“Night, Mr Rief,” one of the typists said as she left. Lysander was standing in the entry hall of the clubhouse waiting for the lorry to take him back to the company billet in Swansea. The romantic vision had faded fast. Swansea was as close as he’d come to France and the front line. The 2 / 5^th (service) battalion of the E.S.L.I. had been assigned to guard coastal defences in South Wales. After a few months of patrolling the quaysides of Swansea and Port Talbot, laying barbed-wire entanglements on beaches or sitting in freezing trenches dug beside gun batteries overlooking the Bristol Channel, relief of sorts had come when ‘C’ company of the battalion, his company, had been ordered to provide shifts of perimeter guards and prisoner escorts for the newly established Bishop’s Bay Internment Camp. Lysander had volunteered to help with the translating of the internees’ many problems, had become indispensable, and so began to spend his days on duty sitting at the long table in the bar of the golf club. It was now May 1915. Greville Varley was in Mesopotamia, a lieutenant in the Dorsetshire regiment. The Lusitania had been sunk. The landings at Gallipoli did not seem to have gone well. Italy had declared war on Austro-Hungary. This monstrous global conflict was in its tenth month, and he had never even –

“Got a couple of minutes, Rief?” Teesdale was leaning out of his doorway. Lysander went back into the office, where Teesdale offered him a seat and a cigarette. Lysander felt very old sitting opposite young Teesdale with his near-invisible moustache. Old and tired.

“Have you ever thought of putting yourself up for a commission?” Teesdale asked.

“I don’t want to be an officer, sir. I’m happy as an ordinary soldier.”

“You’d have a more comfortable life. You’d have a servant. A proper bed. Eat food off a plate.”

“I’m perfectly content, sir.”

“It’s all wrong, Rief. You’re a fish out of water — an educated man who speaks a foreign language with enviable fluency.”

“Believe it or not I’m actually very happy,” he lied.

“What did you do before the war?”

“I was an actor.”

Teesdale sat up in his chair.

“Lysander Rief. Lysander Rief…Of course. Yes! D’you know, I think I actually saw you in a play.” Teesdale frowned and clicked his fingers, trying to remember. “1912. Horsham College Sixth Form Dramatic Society. We had a trip up to London…What did we see?”

Lysander ran through the plays he had been in during 1912.

“Evangeline, It Was No One’s Fault, Gather Ye Rosebuds…”

“That’s it — Gather Ye Rosebuds. Blanche Blondel. Gorgeous woman. Stunning creature.”

“Very pretty, yes.”

“Lysander Rief — how extraordinary. I say, you wouldn’t sign me your autograph, would you?”

“A pleasure, sir.”

“Make it out to James.”

♦

Lysander sat on his bed, took his boots off and began to unwind his puttees. ‘C’ Company was billeted in the warehouse of a former sawmill and the place was redolent of sap, freshly planked wood and sawdust. It was dry and well sealed, containing four rows of wooden-frame chicken-wire beds with a big communal latrine dug outside. They were fed copiously and regularly and there were many pubs in the neighbourhood. Most of the men in ‘C’ company spent their off-duty hours as drunk as possible. There were always a dozen or so men on a charge. The warehouse yard had been swept hundreds of times, its walls and building benefitting from at least seven coats of whitewash. Idle drunken hands were put to hard work by the NCOs. Lysander kept out of trouble.

He lay down, hearing the chicken wire beneath his palliasse creak and ping under his weight, and closed his eyes. Two more days and he had a week’s leave coming. London.

“Oi, Actor!”

He looked up. Lance Corporal Merrilees stood there. Frank Merrilees was very dark with a weak chin, in his early twenties, with a sharp, malicious mind.

“Coming to the pub?”

They liked drinking with Lysander, he knew, because he had more money and would stand extra rounds. He was happy to conform to their expectations, buying, not popularity, but peace. The other men left him alone; he didn’t have to participate in the mindless bickering, persecution and mockery that occupied the others.

“Good idea,” he said, sitting up again and reaching for his boots.

The pub Merrilees liked was called The Anchor. Lysander wondered if it was anywhere near the port — he had no sense, even after weeks at the sawmill, what district of Swansea they lived in. He was shuttled to and from the billet to the camp in the back of a lorry, Swansea’s modest, rain-bright streets visible through the flapping canvas opening at the rear — that was the geographical extent of his war.

The Anchor was only a few streets’ walk away — no public transport required, which perhaps explained why it was so favoured. There was a saloon bar and a small snug, entry to which was denied the E.S.L.I soldiers. Along with Merrilees came four others of his cronies, all well known to Lysander, his drinking companions — Alfie ‘Fingers’ Doig, Nelson Waller, Mick Eltherington and Horace Lefroy. When they bought a round Lysander paid for the tumblers of spirits — whisky, brandy, rum, gin — that accompanied the pints of watery beer. That was why they tolerated him. The language as they chatted was always richly profane — fucking this and cunting that — and like the internees their conversation was a coarse litany of resentments and slights suffered, posited acts of brutal revenge or fantasies of sexual fulfilment.

“Taps shut, lads,” the barmaid called.

“Let me get the last round in,” Lysander suggested.

“You’re an officer and a gentleman, Actor,” Merrilees said, his eyes unfocussed. The others loudly agreed.

Lysander took the tray of six empty pint glasses and five tumblers up to the bar and gave his order to the barmaid, looking at her again as she pulled the pints. He recognized her, but her hair had changed colour since he was last here — it was now dyed a strange carroty-auburn. He seemed to remember she used to be fair-haired. She was petite but her stays gave her a hitched-up shelf of bosom, half-revealed by the V-neck of her satin blouse. Petite like Hettie, he found himself thinking. Her nose was bent slightly askew and she had a cleft in her chin that echoed the visible crease between her breasts. She had thick dark eyebrows.

“And three gins and two whiskies,” he added as she finished the pints. “I like your hair,” he said. “It’s changed.”

“Thank you,” she said. “I’m a redhead, really, going back to nature.” She had a strong Welsh accent.

Lysander took his pint off the tray and signalled to Waller to come and pick it up. The pub was slowly emptying but he’d rather talk to this girl than swear and curse with the soldiers.

“You come in here a lot, you soldier-boys.”

“It’s our favourite pub,” he said. “We’re billeted at the old sawmill, down the road.”

“But you’re not like them lot, are you?” she said, looking at him shrewdly. “I can hear it in your voice, like.”

“What’s your name?” he asked.

“Cerridwyn,” she said. “Old Welsh name — it means ‘fair poetess’.”

“Cerridwyn,” he repeated. “Lovely name for a poetess. I write a bit of poetry, myself.” He didn’t know what made him tell her that.

“Oh, yes? Don’t we all?” Heavy scepticism. “Give us a line or two then.”

Lysander, almost without thinking, began:

“She’s always the most beautiful girl,

Bewitchingly lovely and true,

Perhaps if I name her, you’ll know her:

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

Cerridwyn was impressed, he saw — moved, even. Perhaps no one had recited poetry to her before.

“You never writ that,” she said. “You learned it.”

“I can’t prove it. But it’s all mine, I’m afraid.”

“Well — sounds lovely to me. What’s that last line again?”

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

Suddenly he felt the urge to possess her, to unfasten that satin blouse and unpin her lurid hair. In an instant, also, he saw that she had registered this change in the look he was giving her. How does this happen, he wondered? What atavistic signals do we inadvertently send out?

“It’s my day off on Monday,” she said, meaningfully.

“I’m going to London on leave on Monday,” he said.

“Never been to London.”

“Why don’t you come with me?”

“You could show me around, like.”

“I’d love to.” This was madness, Lysander knew. “I’ll meet you at Swansea station. Nine o’clock. At the ticket office.”

“Ach. You won’t be there.”

“Yes, I will.”

“What’s your name?” she asked making it sound like a challenge, a test of his sincerity.

“Lysander Rief.”

“Strange name.”

“No stranger than Cerridwyn.”

Merrilees lurched up and said they’d better be getting back.

“Nine o’clock, Monday morning,” Lysander said, over his shoulder, taking Merrilees’s elbow and helping him out.

On the way back to the sawmill there was a lot of foul-mouthed lewd banter about Lysander and the barmaid. Lysander switched his mind off and let the speculation swirl around him. He was thinking, pleasurably: train to London, slap-up lunch in a chop-house or an oyster bar. A little hotel he knew in Paddington. Ticket home to Swansea on the milk train for Cerridwyn. An adventure for them both.

Sergeant Mott was standing at the sawmill gates, his long baton twirling in his hand. They were all dead drunk except Lysander. Merrilees saluted and fell over.

“Fuck off out of it, you scum,” Mott said. “It’s the actor I’m interested in.”

The others disappeared in a second.

“I’m not drunk, Sarge,” Lysander said. “Honest. Just had a couple of pints.” He was frightened of Mott.

“I don’t care,” he said. “Someone wants to see you in the office.”

Captain Dayson, company commander, had his billet in the sawmill office building across the yard. Lysander buttoned his tunic, straightened his cap on his head and knocked on the door.

“Ah, Rief, there you are,” Dayson said, in his usual drawl. He was a lazy man, more than happy with the internment camp job, hoping it would see the war out. “You’ve a visitor.”

Lysander stepped into the room.

Alwyn Munro rose to his feet. He was in uniform and Lysander saw that he had Lieutenant-Colonel’s pips on his shoulders. Promoted. Lysander remembered to salute.

“Hard man to find, Rief,” Munro said, and they shook hands.

“What can I do for you?” Lysander asked, his mind frantic with other questions.

“I’ll tell you on the way back to London,” he said. “I’ve a motor car waiting outside. Do you want to get your kit together?”

8: Autobiographical Investigations

The journey back proved strangely uneventful. I sat in the rear of a large military staff car beside Munro, with some sort of pennant fluttering on the front mudguard, as it sped towards London. As we left the outskirts of Swansea, Munro offered me a cigarette and I asked him what was going on.

“You know what?” he said, as if the idea had just come to him. “Why don’t you just enjoy your well-earned leave? Relax, indulge yourself. Next Monday morning report to this address. In civilian clothes.”

He took out a little notebook and wrote down a number and a street.

“And what will happen then?” I asked.

“You’ll be given new orders,” he said, a little coldly, I thought, implying I would have no choice in the matter. “You’re a serving soldier, Rief, don’t forget.”

And he wouldn’t divulge anything else. We talked in desultory fashion about the course of the war — the big attack at Aubers Ridge — and my experiences in the E.S.L.I. and my work at the Bishop’s Bay Camp.

“I think you can consider that chapter in your life closed,” was all he said.

So here I sit in a small hotel in Bayswater (Greville and I have sublet the Chandos Place flat) with a week of leave awaiting me. My mind is empty — I have no expectations and speculation would be fruitless. God knows what Munro has lined up for me but it must be more interesting than Frau Schumacher’s constant health issues.

Funnily enough, my little nugget of regret about my Swansea life concerns Cerridwyn. I can see her — all dressed up for her trip to London — standing outside the ticket office at Swansea station waiting to meet me. And then the nine o’clock train will leave. Of course, she’ll wait for the next one just in case, but with hope dwindling as time goes by, and, after an hour or so when I don’t appear, she will go home, cursing the tribe of men and their endless, selfish duplicities.

9: The Claverleigh Hall War Fund

“It’s a huge success. I could never have predicted it. We’ve already made over £ 200 and it’s not even lunchtime. We made £ 500 yesterday,” Lysander’s mother said, speaking in tones of humbled incredulity, as they stood on the main drive looking at the rows of parked motor cars and charabancs and a hundred-yard queue of people waiting to pay their shilling entrance fee to the ‘CLAVERLEIGH HALL GRAND FÊTE’ — as the banner at the gateway to the park proclaimed.

“Bravo,” Lysander said. “Lucky Belgian refugees.”

“Oh no,” she said. “We’re much bigger than that now. We’ve just sent another six ambulances to France.”

The Claverleigh Hall charity had started shortly after the outbreak of war as a blanket-drive, a local scheme to provide warm clothing, blankets and tents for Belgian refugees. Anna Faulkner had been galvanized by their initial success and the Claverleigh Hall War Fund, as it then became, provided her with a focus for her energies and her organizing capacity that Lysander had not seen demonstrated for years — not since she had effectively run the administrative side of the Halifax Rief Theatre Company, anyway. Suddenly she had a cause and the considerable sums of money she raised meant that her voice was listened to. She started going up to London once or twice a week for meetings with civil servants at the Home Office and then senior soldiers at the War Office once the Claverleigh Hall Field Ambulances came into being. Her new plan was to open a training school for nurses to deal specifically with the most common wounds and ailments suffered by the troops on the Western Front. Who needs a midwife when you’re suffering from trench-foot? was one of her more memorable slogans and she began to be invited to sit on committees and add her name to petitions and other good causes. She was looking even younger, if that were possible, Lysander thought. That’s what having a purpose in life gave you.

“How’s Crickmay today?” he asked. He hadn’t seen his stepfather since he’d arrived.

“No change. Very poorly. Wheezing, coughing. He can hardly get out of bed, poor darling.”

“I’ve got to go back to London after lunch,” he said.

“He won’t be at lunch,” she said. “I’ll pass on your best wishes. He’ll see you next time you’re down.”

Then she hurried away to change the brimming cash-box at the entry-gate and Lysander set off on a wander round the park, past the stalls selling jams and cakes, the coconut shy, the beer tent, the dog show, the jokey races — egg-and-spoon, three-legged, sack — the livestock exhibits and the gymkhana — keeping an eye out for Hamo, who had arrived an hour earlier and had gone in search of some seed potatoes for his vegetable garden.

He found him at the cricket nets where, for sixpence, you were granted the chance to bowl at two of Sussex County Cricket Club’s leading batsmen — Vallance Jupp and Joseph Vine.

Hamo was looking on in some amazement.

“Some of these kids are astonishing,” he said. “That nipper there just bowled out Jupp twice in one over. Very embarrassing for him — the ball span two feet.”

“Any news of Femi?” Lysander asked. He knew that Femi had gone back to West Africa, homesick and unhappy in Winchelsea.

“He’s arrived in Lagos. But I don’t suspect I shall hear much more. He’s got money and he speaks good English now — he’ll be fine…” Hamo looked south, towards the Channel, towards Africa, symbolically. “It was last winter that finished him — that and being stared at all the time. It’s amazing how rude the English can be when they see something unfamiliar. As soon as this war’s over I’ll go out and join him. Set up a business together, bit of trading.” Hamo turned his burning pale blue eyes on Lysander. “I do love him dearly, you know. Miss him every second of the day. A completely honest, sweet person. Straight and true.”

“You’re very lucky,” Lysander said and changed the subject. “I hear Crickmay’s not well at all.”

“He can hardly breathe. Some sort of terrible congestion of the lungs. Walks ten paces — has to rest for five minutes. Just as well your mother’s got this great charity thing going. Otherwise she’d just be sitting around waiting for him to die.”

They wandered through the fête. There was a big crowd gathered round an artillery piece — a howitzer — and a small, sturdy aeroplane with a blunt nose, all doped canvas and stretched wires. Lysander saw that the East Sussex Light Infantry had a recruiting tent erected and a sizeable queue of young men had formed in front of it. Swansea was waiting for them.

“I haven’t had the most exciting war, I realize,” Lysander said as they passed the queue.

“I wouldn’t complain,” Hamo said. “It’s a filthy awful business.”

“However, I’ve a feeling it’s all going to change.”

He told Hamo about Munro’s visit to Swansea and his new instructions.

“Sounds very rum to me,” Hamo said. “Civilian clothes? Don’t agree to do anything rash.”

“I don’t think I’ve much choice,” Lysander said. “It was made very clear that these were orders to be obeyed.”

“Any fool can ‘obey’ an order,” Hamo said, darkly. “The clever thing is to interpret it.”

“I’ll remember that.”

Hamo stopped and touched his arm.

“If you need my help, my boy, don’t hesitate. I’ve a few friends in the military, still. And remember I’ve been in a scrape or two, myself. I’ve killed dozens of men, you know. I’m not proud of it — not in the least. It’s just a fact.”

“I don’t think it’ll come to that, but thanks all the same.”

They left the crowded park, shouts and cheers rising in the air as someone breasted the tape in the sack race, and walked up the drive to the Hall where luncheon was waiting for them.

10: The One-On-One Code

The number and the street turned out to be a four-storey terraced house in Islington with a basement below a finialled iron railing, a stuccoed first floor with a bay window, and the top two of soot-blackened brick. Completely normal and undistinguished, Lysander thought, as he rang the bell. A uniformed naval rating let him in and showed him into the front room. It was virtually empty — there was a chair in the middle of the floor facing a gate-legged table with three other chairs set around it. Lysander took off his raincoat and hat and sat down to wait. He was wearing a three-piece suit of lightly checked grey flannel, a stiff-collared shirt and his regimental tie. The E.S.L.I would be proud of him.

Munro came in, also suited, and shook his hand. He was followed by an older man in a cutaway frock coat — very old fashioned — who was introduced as Colonel Massinger. Massinger had a sallow, seamed face and a rasping voice as if he were recovering from laryngitis. His thinning dark hair was flattened against his skull with copious, gleaming oil and his teeth were noticeably brown as if stained from chewing tobacco. Then Fyfe-Miller appeared, jovial and energetic, and Lysander’s mind began to work faster. Tea was offered and politely declined. In fact he realized he was suddenly feeling a little nauseous — this encounter seemed more like a tribunal — he doubted if he’d be able to drink a cup of tea without heaving.

After a few pleasantries (“Enjoy your leave?”) he was handed a piece of paper by Massinger. Written on it were columns of numbers. He studied it — it made no sense.

3 14 11 2

11 21 2 3

24 15 7 10

3 2 2 7

And so on.

“What do you make of that?” Munro asked.

“Some sort of code?”

“Precisely. We have an agent working for us in Geneva who, over the last few months, has intercepted six letters containing sheets of paper like this.”

An ‘agent’, Lysander thought? ‘Intercepted’? What is this, he wondered, some War Office intelligence briefing?

“This type of code is classic,” Munro said. “It’s called a one-on-one cipher because it can’t be cracked — impossible — as its key is known only to the person sending it and the person receiving it.”

“Right.”

“What we need you to do, Rief,” Massinger butted in, as if he was in a hurry and had to go off to another appointment somewhere, “is to go to Geneva, meet our agent there who will then lead you to the man who is receiving these messages.”

“May I ask who this man is?”

“A German consular official.”

Lysander felt a near-uncontrollable urge to begin laughing. He wondered if refusing a cup of tea had been a mistake. He would have liked something to sip.

“And what would I do then?”

“Persuade this consular official to give us the key that will allow us to decrypt this cipher.”

Lysander said nothing. He nodded his head a few times as if this were the most reasonable task in the world.

“How do you imagine I might ‘persuade’ him?”

“Use your ingenuity,” Fyfe-Miller interrupted.

“A large bribe would probably be the most effective method,” Munro said.

“Why me?”

“Because you’re completely unknown,” Colonel Massinger said. “Geneva is like a cesspit of spies and informants, agents, couriers. Buzz, buzz, buzz. Any Englishman arriving in the city, whatever his cover story, is noted within minutes. Logged, investigated and, sooner or later, exposed.”

Lysander was fairly sure that his features remained impassive.

“I’m English,” he said, reasonably. “So surely the same thing will inevitably happen to me.”

“No,” Massinger said, showing his stained teeth in a faint smile. “Because you will have ceased to exist.”

“Actually, I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea after all.”

Fyfe-Miller went to the door and tea was ordered, duly appeared, and they all helped themselves to a cup from the pot.

“Maybe I put that last statement a little over-dramatically,” Massinger said, stirring his tea endlessly. Clink-clink-clink. “You would be reported ‘Missing in Action’. And during that time you would journey to Geneva under a different identity. Clandestinely.”

“Your new identity will be that of a Swiss railway engineer,” Munro continued. “Your arrival in Switzerland, your ‘return home’, as it were, will cause no notice. You will contact our agent and receive further instructions.”

“Am I allowed to know what this is all about?”

Munro looked at Massinger. Massinger stopped stirring his tea.

“It’s very complicated, Rief,” Massinger said. “I don’t know if you’ve been following the war news closely, but this year we have embarked on several significant ‘pushes’ — big attacks — at Neuve Chapelle, Aubers Ridge and recently at Festubert. They haven’t been complete disasters but let’s say we failed signally in almost all of our objectives.” He put his cup down. “It was as if we were expected, if you know what I mean. Trenches opposite were reinforced, new redoubts built, reserves were in place for counter-attacks, extra artillery behind the support lines. Almost uncanny…We suffered very, very heavy casualties.”

His voice trailed off and he looked, for a second, a worried and almost desperate man.

Munro took over.

“We think — to be blunt — that, somewhere in our high command, there is…” he paused, as if the concept were eluding him. “No, there’s no other way of putting it — there’s a traitor. Passing on intelligence of our forthcoming attacks to the enemy.”

“And you think these coded messages are evidence,” Lysander said.

“Exactly.” Fyfe-Miller leaned forward. “The beauty of this is that, as soon as we have these codes deciphered, we’ll know who he is. We’ll have him.”

Fyfe-Miller was staring at him with that odd hostile-friendly intensity he had. Lysander felt his mouth go dry and a muscle-tremor start up in his left calf. Fyfe-Miller smiled at him.

“We know what you can do, Rief — remember? We’ve seen your capabilities in Vienna, seen you in action. That’s why we thought of you. You speak excellent German and you’re an unknown face and an unknown quantity. You’re intelligent, you think on your feet.”

“I don’t suppose I can do anything but volunteer.”

Munro spread his hands apologetically.

“It’s not an option available to you, I’m afraid,” he said. “Not volunteering.”

Lysander exhaled. In a way, he thought, being backed into a corner was better than being asked to do your duty.

“However,” Massinger said, “there is the matter of your outstanding debt to His Majesty’s Government since the Vienna business. Somewhere above one thousand pounds, now, I believe.”

“We would see this mission as payment in full,” Munro said. “A recognition of the somewhat unorthodox nature of the task we’re asking you to perform.”

“Fair exchange is no robbery,” Fyfe-Miller said.

Lysander nodded as if he knew what he was talking about. He kept hearing Hamo’s words: any fool can obey an order — it’s how you interpret it that counts.

“Well, that’s an incentive, at any rate,” he said, with admirable calm, he thought. “I’m ready when you are.”

Everybody smiled. Another pot of tea was called for.

11: Autobiographical Investigations

Fyfe-Miller then took me upstairs to a bedroom. On the bed was a suitcase that he flipped open.

“It’s your new uniform,” he said. “You’re now a lieutenant — on lieutenant’s pay — attached to the General Staff. We’ll take you up to the line — we think we’ve calculated the best place — and you can go out on a patrol one night — ” he stopped and smiled. “Don’t look so worried, Rief. You’re going to have masses of briefings before you go. You’ll know the plan better than your family history. Why don’t you try it on?”

Fyfe-Miller stepped out on to the landing while I undressed and put on my new uniform, complete with red, staff-officer flashes on the lapels. It fitted perfectly and I said as much to Fyfe-Miller.

“Your tailor, Jobling, was very helpful.” He looked at me and smiled one of his slightly manic grins. “To the manor born, Rief. Very smart.”

Once again I wonder what machinations have been going on behind the scenes. How had they known about Jobling? Perhaps not so hard to find out, I suppose. I think of these three men and their new influence over me and my destiny: Munro, Fyfe-Miller and Massinger. A duo I know — a little — and an unknown. Who’s in charge of this show? Massinger? If so, whom does he report to? Is Fyfe-Miller a subordinate to the other two? Questions build. My life seems to be running on a track I have nothing to do with — I’m a passenger on a train but I have no idea of the route it’s taking or its final destination.

♦

I’ve moved hotel, from Bayswater to South Kensington. I have a bedroom and a small sitting room with a fireplace — should I need a fire. The days are growing noticeably milder as summer begins to make its presence felt.

And for me, suddenly — as someone who’s about to go there — the news from the front seems acutely relevant. I find I am following the bloody, drawn-out end of the battle of Festubert with unusual interest. I read the news of this great triumph for the British and Empire troops (Indians and Canadians also participated) but even to the uninitiated the cavils and the qualifications in the accounts of the battle stand out. ‘Brave sacrifice’, ‘valiant struggle’, ‘in the face of unceasing enemy fire’ — these tired phrases give the game away. Even some semi-covert criticism: ‘insufficient numbers of our heavy guns’. Casualties acknowledged to be in the tens of thousands. Maybe more.

♦

Mother has forwarded my mail. To my surprise there’s a letter from Dr Bensimon which I here transcribe:

My dear Rief,

I trust all is well, in every sense of the word. I wanted to let you know that I and my family left Vienna as soon as it was clear that war was inevitable. I have set up practice here in London should you ever have the need to avail yourself of my professional services. In any event, I should be pleased to see you. My consulting rooms are at 117, Highgate Hill. Telephone: HD 7634.

Sincere salutations, John Bensimon

PS. The results of our Vienna sessions in 1913 were published in this year’s Spring number of Das Bulletin für psychoanalytische Forschung. You go by the pseudonym ‘The Ringmaster’.

I feel warmed and touched by this communication. I always liked and respected Bensimon but I was never quite sure what he thought about me. “In any event, I should be pleased to see you.” I take that as clear encouragement, almost friendly, an explicit invitation to make contact.

Every day, Monday to Friday, I go to the house in Islington to be briefed by Munro, Fyfe-Miller and, increasingly, Massinger. I study maps and, in the basement, familiarize myself with a detailed sand-model of a portion of our front line. I thought this must be a War Office intelligence operation but I’m beginning to suspect it originates in some other secret government department. One day, Massinger referred inadvertently to a person known as ‘C’ a couple of times. I overheard him say to Fyfe-Miller, with some fervour, even suppressed anger, “I’m running Switzerland but ‘C’ thinks it’s a waste of time. He thinks we should be concentrating our efforts in Holland. We’re counting on Rief to prove him wrong.” What the hell does that mean? How am I meant to respond to that challenge? When I had an opportunity I asked Fyfe-Miller who this ‘C’ was but he said simply, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Stuff and nonsense.”

My Swiss railway engineer identity takes rapid shape. It’s based closely on an actual engineer — a man suffering from chronic duodenal ulcers in a Belgian sanatorium. We have quietly borrowed much of his identity as he lies in his ward, semi-conscious, suffering, hope fading. My name is Abelard Schwimmer. I’m unmarried, my parents are dead, I live in a small village outside Zürich. I saw my passport today — a very authentic-looking document filled with stamps and frankings from the borders I’ve crossed — France, Belgium, Holland and Italy. I’m to arrive in Geneva by ferry from the French side of the lake at Thonon and make my way to a medium-sized commercial hotel. The agent I’m to contact goes by the name of ‘Bonfire’. The Ringmaster meets the Bonfire. Bensimon would chuckle at that if he knew.

♦

This morning Munro took me to a military firing range east of Beckton and instructed me in the use of the Webley Mark VI Service Revolver. I fired off many dozens of rounds at the targets and was fairly accurate. It was a powerful weapon and my forearm began to ache.

“I hope I won’t be called upon to use this thing,” I said.

“We try to foresee every eventuality, Rief,” was all he replied. “Have you ever thrown a grenade?”

“No.”

“Let’s have a try, shall we? The Mills bomb. Very straightforward as long as you can count from one to five.”

Back in Islington he gave me certain crucial pieces of information. The address of a safe house in Geneva. The secret telephone number of the military attaché at the consulate — ’Only to be used in the most dire emergency’. The number of an account at the Federal Bank of Geneva where I could draw the funds necessary for the bribe. And an elaborate double-password that would enable me to identify Agent Bonfire — and vice versa, of course.

“Take your time but commit them to memory, I suggest,” Munro added. “Or if you can’t rely on your memory have them tattooed on a very private part of your anatomy.”

I think I can certify that this is Munro’s first attempt at a joke.

♦

I dined with Blanche last night at Pinoli’s in Soho, one of her favourite places. She was about to start a run of The Reluctant Hero at the Alhambra and told me that the theatres were as busy as peacetime. I felt envious, experiencing a sudden urge to rejoin my old life, to be back on stage, acting, pretending. Then it struck me that this was precisely what I was about to do. Even the title of her play was suddenly apt. It rather sobered me.

“I do like you in your uniform,” she said. “But I thought you were a private.”

“I’ve been promoted,” I said. “I’m off to France soon. In fact…”

She looked at me silently, her eyes full of sudden tears.

“Oh, god, no,” she said, then gathering herself added, “I’m so sorry…” She looked at her hands — at her missing engagement ring, I supposed — then she said, abruptly, “Why did it all go so wrong for us, Lysander?”

“It didn’t go wrong. Life got in the way.”

“And now a war’s got in the way.”

“We can still be —”

“Don’t say it!” she said sharply. “I detest that expression.”

So I said nothing and cut a large corner off my gammon steak. When I bit into it I felt my crown go.

♦

“I can make you another,” the Hon. Hugh Faulkner said to me. “But, in the present unfortunate circumstances, it’ll take a while.”

“Just stick it back on if you can,” I said. “I’m off to France any day now.”

“Five of my Varsity friends are dead already,” he said gloomily. “I don’t dare to think how many from school.”

There was no reply I could reasonably make so I stayed silent. He said nothing either, kicking at the chrome base of the chair with the toe of his shoe. I was sitting in Hugh’s special reclining chair in his clinic in Harley Street.

“We all need a bit of luck,” I said, to bring him out of his lugubrious reverie and to stop the tap-tap-tapping of his toe.

“Well, you were damn lucky you didn’t swallow it, there’s a stroke of luck for you,” he said, holding the crown up to his powerful overhead light. “Amazing to think they used to make these out of ivory.” He unbuttoned the cuffs of his coat and rolled them back. “Open wide and let’s have a look.”

I did so and Hugh brought the big light close and peered in my mouth. He was wearing a three-piece dark suit and a tie I recognized but couldn’t place. He started to poke around in my mouth with his sharp metal probe.

“Actually, I have to say that your teeth look in fairly good condition —”

“Aaargh!”

“Sorry, sorry!”

He had touched a nerve or else pushed his pick deep into a soft smudge of decay.

I was pale and sweaty. Rigid.

“My god, Hugh…Jesus! That was agony.”

“Sorry. I just touched that big filling at the back — upper right second molar.”

“Is it rotten?”

“No, no. There’s nothing wrong with the tooth,” Hugh said, chuckling. “What you felt there was an electric shock. Two bits of metal touch and the saliva acts as an electrolyte. Ouch! It’s like a piece of silver foil when you break off a chocolate bar. You know, sticking to the chocolate. You start to eat and — a little electric shock. Nothing wrong with your teeth.” He stepped back and ran his hands through his hair, smiling apologetically. “Anyway, let’s stop messing about and stick the thing back on.”

THE ELECTROLYTE

When I saw your face at the door

In a dancing dream of dervishes

It was like a probe touching a molar

(Electrolyte of love).

Then I saw you true.

The evening mist gathers in the valley

My hands I move

And fold it flat

Into a neat square bundle

And give it to you.

I’m sitting in my old bedroom at Claverleigh. I’ve just been in to see Crickmay to say goodbye. I’m off tomorrow — to France. The sound of Crickmay’s breathing is like some ancient wheezing pump trying to empty a flooded mine. Air and water intermixed.

He managed to gasp goodbye and squeeze my hand.

Outside in the corridor Mother seemed upset but under control.

“How long will you be away?” she asked.

“I’m not sure. A month or two, maybe a bit longer.” Massinger had not been precise. All duration would be determined by operational necessities and by Agent Bonfire.

“He won’t be here when you come back,” she said, flatly.

“What will you do?”

“I’ll be fine. I could spend twenty-four hours a day on the charity, if need be. I don’t know what I’d have done without it, actually. We’ve a staff of six now in the office at Lewes.”

“That’s wonderful.” I kissed her cheek and she took my hands, stepping back to look me up and down.

“You look very handsome in your uniform,” she said. “Your father would have been very proud.”

I feel hot tears in my eyes just thinking about this.

12: L’Officier Anglais

Munro and Lysander lunched in Aire, a dozen miles behind the front line. Apart from the fact that everyone in the restaurant was male and in uniform, Lysander thought, the gustatory and vinous experience was pretty much the same had they been there in 1912. They ate an excellent coq au vin, drank a carafe of Beaujolais, were presented with a selection of a dozen cheeses and rounded the meal off with a tarte tatin and a Calvados.

“The condemned man ate a hearty meal,” Lysander said.

“I admire your gallows humour, Rief, but I have to say it isn’t called for. You’re going to experience no — or at least minimal — risk. We’re going to a quiet sector — only three casualties in the last month.”

Lysander wasn’t particularly reassured by Munro’s palliative: a casualty was a casualty. There might only be one casualty this month — and it might be him. And yet everyone would be applauding the increasing quietness of the quiet sector all the same.

They were driven by staff car to the rear-area of the southernmost extremity of the British lines, where the British Expeditionary Force’s First Army abutted the French Tenth Army. They passed through the town of Béthune and turned off a main road to drive down farm tracks until they reached the billet of the 2 / 10^th battalion of the Loyal Manchester Fusiliers. A log-and-fascine road led them to a meadow fringed with apple orchards and filled with rows of bell tents. A sizeable field kitchen was in one corner and from a neighbouring pasture came the shouts and cheers and thumps of leather on leather that signalled a football match was taking place.

Lysander stepped out of the car feeling like a new boy on his first day at school — excited, apprehensive and faintly queasy. He and Munro were directed to the battalion H.Q. situated in a nearby requisitioned farmhouse, where Munro handed over the official papers to a taciturn and clearly disgruntled adjutant — who took his time reading what they contained, making little gasping sounds in his throat as he did so, as if they substituted for the expletives he’d have preferred to use.

“Signed by Haig himself,” he said, looking at Lysander with some hostility. “You’re to be ‘afforded every assistance’ you require, Lieutenant Rief. You must be a very important man.”

“He is,” Munro interrupted. “It’s essential that everything is done to help the lieutenant in every possible way. Do you understand, Major?”

“I understand but I don’t understand,” the major said, laconically, rising to his feet. “Follow me, please.”

Well, that’s it, Lysander thought. That’s done it: Munro’s pushed it too far, it’s like being blackballed at a club — the major’s face was a picture of superior disdain. He took them along a brick path to a cow-byre where several camp beds were set up. He pointed one out to Lysander.

“Dump your kit there. I’ll have a servant assigned. Dinner at six in the mess tent.”

“Leave him to me,” Munro said as they watched the major stroll off. “I’ll have another quiet word with our fine fellow.” He smiled. “Scare him to death.”

Sometimes, Lysander thought, it was an advantage having someone like Munro on your side. All the same, he sat in silence throughout the meal in the mess tent. No other officer made any effort to engage him in conversation, but more, he thought, out of extreme caution than contempt. God knows what Munro had said. So he tackled his meal, a beef stew with dumplings and a steam pudding with custard, feeling full and uncomfortable but sensing it would only incur further opprobrium if he pushed his plates away half-eaten.

As soon as was polite, he went back to his camp bed in the cow-byre and smoked a cigarette.

“Mr Rief, sir?”

He sat up. A sergeant stood in the doorway.

“I’m Sergeant Foley, sir.”

They saluted each other. Lysander still felt a little strange being addressed as ‘sir’. Foley was a squat dense man in his late twenties, he guessed, with a pronounced snub nose. He had a thick Lancashire accent that somehow suited his muscled frame.

“There’s a wiring party going up. We can follow them.”

They didn’t waste any time getting rid of me, Lysander thought, as he quickly gathered up a few essential belongings — a bottle of whisky, cigarettes, torch, compass, map, his kitbag with the two grenades, a scarf and spare socks. He left his raincoat behind — it was a warm clear night — and followed Foley out, feeling sudden misgivings stiffen his limbs and making his breathing a task he had to concentrate on. Keep calm, keep calm, he said to himself, remember it’s a quiet sector — all fighting is elsewhere — that’s why you’re here. You’ve been fully briefed and trained, you’ve studied maps, you’ve been given simple instructions — just follow them.

He and Foley stayed at the rear of the wiring party as they tramped up a mud road and turned off it into a communication trench, waist-deep at first but gradually deepening until breastworks on each side reduced the evening sky to a strip of orange-grey above his head.

By the time they reached the support lines Lysander was beginning to feel tired. Foley showed him to the officers’ dugout and there Lysander introduced himself to a Captain Dodd, the company commander — an older man in his mid-thirties with a drooping, damp-looking, curtain moustache, and two very young lieutenants — called Wiley and Gorlice-Law — who could barely have been twenty, Lysander thought, like senior prefects at a boarding school. They knew who he was, word must have been sent ahead, and they were polite and welcoming enough, but he could see them eyeing the red staff-officer flashes on his lapels with suspicion, as if he were contagious in some way. He was assigned one of the bunk beds and took his whisky bottle out of his kitbag as a donation to the dugout. Everyone had a tot immediately and the atmosphere became less chilly and formal.

Lysander relayed his cover-story — that he was here from ‘Corps’ to reconnoitre the ground in front of the British and French trenches and to try and identify, if possible, the German troops opposite.

“They’ve burnt off most of the grass in front of their wire,” Dodd said, pessimistically. “Difficult to get close.”

Lysander took out his trench map and asked him to identify the precise section of the trenches where the British line ended and the French began. Dodd pointed to a V-shaped salient that jutted out into no man’s land.

“There,” he said. “But they’ve filled it with wire. You can’t get through.”

“Never the twain shall meet,” Wiley said, cheerily.

“Foley’s the man to take you out,” Gorlice-Law said. “Apparently he loves patrolling.” He was spreading anchovy paste on a hard biscuit and he bit into it with relish, like a boy in the school tuck-shop, munching away. “Delicious,” he said, adding in apologetic explanation, “I’m always starving — can’t think why.”

Dodd sent Wiley out to walk the front-line trench and check on the sentries. Lysander topped up their mugs with more whisky.

“They say it’s bad luck when staff come up to the line from Corps,” Dodd remarked, gloomily. He wasn’t exactly a ray of sunshine, Lysander thought.

“Well, I’ll be gone the day after tomorrow,” Lysander said. “You won’t remember me.”

“That’s all very well, but you’ll have still come up, don’t you see? Right here, to us,” Dodd said, persistently. “So what kind of attack are you planning?”

“Look, it’s just a recce,” Lysander said, wanting to tell him he wasn’t a real staff officer at all, therefore there would be no malign curse involved. “Nothing may come of it.”

“You wouldn’t tell us anyway, would you?” Gorlice-Law said, reaching for another biscuit. “Deadly secret and all that. Hush-hush.”

“Have another drop of whisky,” Lysander said.

♦

He slept fitfully in his thin hard bunk, kept awake by his ever-turning mind and by Dodd’s long, deep snores. He heard the whistles of the dawn ‘stand-to’ and breakfasted on tea and jam sandwiches brought to him by Dodd’s batman. Foley arrived and offered to show him the front-line trench, to ‘have a gander’ at no man’s land.

The trenches at this, the furthest right-hand wing of the British Expeditionary Force, were narrow, deep and well-maintained, Lysander saw. Dry too, with a duckboard floor and a solidly revetted fire-step and a thick crowning berm of sandbags. Apart from the sentries standing on the fire-step the other soldiers huddled in scrapes and small half-caves hollowed out from the facing wall — eating, shaving, cleaning their kit. Lysander was amused to see that most of them were wearing shorts and their knees were brown — as if they were on a strange sort of a summer holiday — as he followed Foley along the traverses to a net-covered loophole. He was handed a pair of binoculars.

“You’re safe enough from snipers,” Foley said. “You can see through the net but they can’t see in.”

Lysander raised the binoculars and peered out over no man’s land. Long grass and self-seeded corn badged with rusty clumps of docks. In the middle distance, directly in front of them, was a small ruin — more like a pile of smashed and tumbled stones — and some way off were three leafy, lopsided elms with some of their main branches blasted off. It looked tranquil and bucolic. A warm breeze was blowing, setting the rough meadow that was no man’s land in easy flowing motion, the tall grasses and the docks bending before the gentle combing wind.

“How far are their trenches?” he asked.

“Couple of hundred yards away, here. You can’t see them, the ground rises in the middle, ever so slightly.”

Lysander knew this, just as he knew that the shattered masonry was the remains of a family tomb. This was to be his reference point at night.

“What about that ruin?”

“They ran a sap out to it for a listening post but we bombed them out a month ago. They haven’t come back.”

“I want to have a good look at it tonight, Sergeant. Are there drainage ditches?”

“A few. Quite choked and overgrown. See that clump of willows — to the right?”

Lysander swivelled his binoculars. “Yes.”

“That’s the start of the deepest one. Runs across our front then dog-legs into Frenchie’s wire.”

Lysander made some token notes on his map — he had his bearings clearer now — and he had his little torch and his compass. He should be all right.

“What time do you want to go out?” Foley asked. Lysander noticed the pointed absence of ‘sir’, now.

“When it’s darkest. Two o’clock, three o’clock.”

“It’s a very short night. Summer solstice’s just gone.”

“We won’t be out long. I just have to confirm a few details. You’ll be back in half an hour. We’ll be back,” he added quickly.

“Mr Gorlice-Law is coming with us, it seems,” Foley said. “He’s not done any patrolling yet. Captain Dodd thought it might be a nice dry-run for him.”

“No,” Lysander said. “Just you and me, Foley.”

“I’ll look after the little chap, don’t you worry, sir.” He smiled. “Best to keep the captain happy.”

♦

In the afternoon two RFC spotter aeroplanes flew over the trenches and for the first time Lysander heard gunfire from the German lines. Then there was a distant shouting from somewhere in no man’s land. A solitary voice. The men began to laugh among themselves.

“What’s he shouting? Who is it?” Lysander asked Foley.

“He crawls out most afternoons when it’s quiet and abuses us. You could set your watch by him.”

Lysander stood up on the fire-step and listened. Faintly but distinctly from the long grass came the cry of, “Hey, English cunts! Go home, fucking English cunts!”

Lysander thought he could hear laughter from the German lines also.

♦

After the evening ‘stand-to’, he began to feel his nervousness increase again. Once more he silently ran through his instructions, mentally ticked off everything he had to do. Covertly, he checked the two Mills № 5 bombs in his pack and verified, for the twentieth time, that the detonators were in. Gorlice-Law was full of enthusiasm for the patrol, blackening his face and cleaning and loading and reloading his revolver.

“We’re just looking at the ground,” Lysander felt obliged to tell him. “I don’t think it’s worth your while.”

“I only arrived two days ago,” Gorlice-Law said. “I can’t wait.”

“Well, the first sign of trouble and we run for it.”

Dodd made him clean his face and set up the ‘dining table’ — half a door placed on two ammunition boxes — saying, “I don’t intend to sit down to eat with a blackamoor, Lieutenant,” and they were served up a supper of tinned stew and biscuits followed by tinned plum-duff and the rest of Lysander’s whisky. As it grew darker, Foley arrived with the rum ration. It was strong liquor, Lysander thought, with a powerful odour of molasses and thick like cough medicine. He could see that Gorlice-Law was feeling the effects on top of the whisky — he had a glazed expression on his face and it was visibly obvious when he tried to concentrate — eyebrows buckling in a frown, lips pursed, his speech slow and deliberate.

Towards half past two in the morning, Lysander steered him up the trench to join Foley at the jumping-off point. A short wooden ladder was set against the facing wall opposite the gap in the wire. Foley wore a rolled-up Balaclava on his head, a dirty leather jerkin with a webbing belt around it, shorts, sandshoes and extra socks tied round his knees. He had a revolver in his pocket and a whistle on a lanyard round his neck.

“Three blasts and we head for home,” he said, looking at Lysander, askance.

“What is it, Foley?”

“You’re fully dressed, sir. Like you were going on parade.”

“I don’t have any other kit with me.”

Foley had a tin of black candle grease and he painted some stripes on Lysander’s face. He turned to look at Gorlice-Law, who had stripped himself of jacket, webbing and puttees and had thrust his revolver in his belt.

“You do everything I say, now, Mr Gorlice-Law. Understand?”

“Yes, Sergeant.”

Foley put up a pink Verey rocket to let the battalion front know that a patrol was going out and they clambered up the ladder and over the sandbags, advancing at a crouch through the wire and on into the engulfing darkness of no man’s land.

♦

It was a moonless night and yet Lysander was still astonished at how quickly he lost his bearings as they crawled through the long grass. After a minute or so he had no idea in which direction he was heading as he followed Foley — with Gorlice-Law bringing up the rear. A white flare went up from the German lines and for a few seconds the world turned brightly monochrome. He had a sudden temptation to stand up and see where he was. They all froze.

“Where’s the ruin?” he hissed at Foley as the glaring light dimmed and fizzled out.

“About fifty yards, diagonal, right.”

“Take us towards it.”

Foley changed course and they crawled on. A few miles north some kind of ‘stunt’ was taking place — star shells and distant artillery, the throat-clearing expectoration of machine-gun fire. Lysander glanced back — nothing was happening in the 2 / 10^th Loyal Manchester Fusiliers’ trenches, however. Black sleeping countryside. Even the precautionary, exploratory rocket-flares seemed to have died down. Everybody keen on a good night’s sleep.

“How far are we now?” Lysander tapped Foley’s ankle.

“Over that little rise and you’re there.”

It was time.

“Stay here,” he said to Foley. “Don’t leave him.”

“No, sir. Don’t go alone. Let me come with you.”

“It’s an order, Foley. Look after the lieutenant.”

Lysander crawled away from them up the slope — just the smallest undulation, but it gave him enough height to see the pale tumbled blocks of stone from the demolished tomb. He looked right for the ravaged elms and thought he saw their darker shape against the night sky. Ruins, elms, drainage ditch — at least he had physical reference points to aim for in the fluid blackness and the whispering grass all around him.

He slithered down the reverse side of the slope towards the ruined tomb. It must have been quite an edifice, he thought, as he drew nearer, some local dignitary who wanted his family name to last. Well, he hadn’t reckoned for –

Lysander froze. He heard a squeaking noise. Rats?…But it was too sustained. Dripping water? Then it stopped. He slipped his torch out of his kitbag and the two Mills bombs. Pull the pin, count to three, throw and move away, smartly. These explosions would be the diversion, the cause of his ‘death’ that would allow him to make the French lines.

The squeaking noise started again. It was very faint. He was up against the first blocks of stone from the crumbled wall. He aimed his torch in the direction he thought the noise was coming from and switched it on for a second. In the brief flare of light he saw two white faces turn and look up from a trench-sap dug deep under the base of the tomb. He saw a man with a black moustache and a very fair young boy’s face and the turning spindle of a roll of telephone wire being unwound — squeaking quietly.

He switched off the torch, pulled the pin out of the bomb and tossed it into the sap. Clatter. Oaths. He did the same with the second and, in a running crouch, scrambled off in what he thought was the direction of the elms.

After what seemed an eternity he heard the bombs detonate — seconds apart — the flat blap! blap! of the explosions in the confined space below the tomb. Somebody started to scream.

Lysander dropped to his knees. The screaming continued, ragged and high-pitched. Almost immediately random gunfire began to come from both lines of trenches — sentries shocked awake by the bombs going off. Rockets curved up into the night sky — green, red, white. Suddenly he was in a world of glaring primary colours. Then came the whistle and thud of rifle grenades. A machine gun began to traverse. Lysander was now crawling on his belly, not daring to look up. He reckoned he must be sixty or seventy yards south of the ruin. Where were the fucking elms? Then he heard, in a moment’s silence, the anguished shout of, “Foley? Foley! Where are you?” A powerful white light from a rocket showed him he was past the elms. He had gone further than he thought — now he needed to change course to find the willows and the drainage ditch. He huddled in a ball and shone his torch on his compass. He was heading straight for the German lines — east — he should be going south. He turned through ninety degrees and set off again. There was a cacophony of shooting coming from behind him and now he could hear the bass crump of big mortars being fired. His little diversion had got somewhat out of hand — he hoped Foley and Gorlice-Law had made it back safely.

He fell into the drainage ditch and thoroughly soaked himself from the four inches of water in the bottom. He squatted and leaned back against the bank, allowing his breathing to calm. A few more rockets were going up but the shooting seemed to be dying down. False alarm. Nothing of consequence. Just a scare.

He took out his map again, hooded his torch with his cupped hand and tried to see where he was. If this ditch was the one Foley had described then he had only to follow it a hundred yards or so before it began to angle right and bring him up to the French wire. Then all he needed to look out for were the green rockets from the French lines that would tell him where to come in. Assuming all was going to Munro’s plan…He looked at his watch. 3. 30. It would begin to grow light in an hour or so — time to make a move.

He sloshed his way along the ditch and, sure enough, it did begin to bear right but then it seemed to come to an abrupt halt in the face of some ancient culvert. Lysander peered into the blackness. In theory, the front-line wire of the French Tenth Army should be facing him. But no sign of any of the green rockets that Munro had promised. Every ten minutes one would go up, he had said. Surely they would have heard the noise and the fuss caused by his bombs going off?

He thought then about the two bombs he had thrown into the sap below the tomb. He saw in his mind’s eye the snapshot of the two faces looking up at him — the man with the moustache and the fair boy — utterly shocked, astonished. Two signallers laying a telephone wire, setting up the listening post again, he assumed. He also had to assume that his bombs had killed or seriously wounded them both. There had been that screaming. Anguished, feral. The panic in the dark as the Mills bombs clattered off the stone. Fingers groping, searching, swearing frantically, then — BOOM!..

He felt himself start to shiver and he hugged his knees to his chest — no point in thinking about that, of what had happened to those two signallers. How was he to know that they would be there? No, he decided, the best course of action was to stay put and wait until sunrise. Then he might know what to do next.

♦

It was rather eerie and beautiful to watch the sky begin to lighten behind the German lines and as the dawn advanced he was able to make out the key features of the landscape — there were the three elms to his right and in front of him the dark cross-hatchings of the French wire. The culvert mouth was a crude stone arch and rushes were growing thickly around it, drawing on the extra moisture the drainage ditch provided. A breeze sprang up and he began to smell the smoke drifting across no man’s land as braziers were lit in the trenches. He felt hungry — some crispy rashers of bacon and a hunk of bread dripping with hot fat would do nicely, thank you.

Very carefully he parted the rushes above the culvert and saw the dense wire of the French lines about twenty yards away. Very thick and professionally laid, he thought. He couldn’t squirm through that. He saw a grey column of smoke rise from the trenches beyond, snatched at by the breeze, but no sign of a breastwork of sandbags or a sentry’s loophole.

He cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted.

“Allo! Allo! Je suis officier anglais!”

After about five seconds he shouted “Allo!” again and was answered by the crack of a rifle shot.

“Je suis un officier anglais! Je ne suis pas allemand!”

More shots followed but none came near him. Then he heard a shout from the French lines.

“Tu pense que nous sommes crétins, Monsieur Boche? Vas te faire enculer!”

Lysander felt a moment of helplessness. Maybe talking in French was wrong.

“I’m English!” he shouted. “English officer. I’m lost! Perdu!”

There were some more haphazard rifle shots. He looked over his shoulder at the German lines, hoping the Germans wouldn’t be provoked into shooting back, or else he’d find himself in a cross-fire.

“Parlez-vous anglais?” he shouted again. “I’m an English officer! I am lost!”

There was more swearing at him — colourful expressions he didn’t know or vaguely understood to do with various sexual acts involving animals and close members of his family.

He sat back in some despair. What should he do? He thought he might have to wait until night fell and make his way back to the Manchesters. Then it would be just his filthy luck to be shot by a nervous sentry, jumpy after last night’s exchange. But assuming he made it back how would he explain himself — the whole Geneva operation might be put at risk? Stupid fucking plan, he thought, anyway. Why did he have to disappear, ‘missing in action’? Why not simply go to Geneva as Abelard Schwimmer?

“Officier anglais?” The shout came from the French lines. Then, “Are you there?” in English.

“Yes, I’m here! In the ditch! Le fossé!”

“Move to your left. When you are seeing…” The voice stopped.

“Seeing what?”

“Un poteau rouge!”

“A red post! Je comprends!”

“That is the entry to come through the…Ah, notre barbelé.”

“I’m coming! Don’t shoot! Ne tirez pas!”

“Coming ver’ slow!”

Lysander hauled himself out of the drainage ditch and began to crawl to his left, staying as flat as he could, suddenly feeling very exposed. He squirmed and wriggled along for a minute or so until he saw a red post hammered in by a gap in the maze of wire. He changed course and crawled towards it — now he could see it marked a zigzag path through the labyrinth.

“Je suis là!” he shouted.

He crawled slowly into the wire entanglement and saw the sandbagged breastwork up ahead.

“I’m coming!” he shouted, suddenly completely terrified, convinced he was being lured close just to be picked off. He held his cap up, his khaki English army cap, and waved it above his head. Strong arms reached for him as he gained the sandbags and hauled him over, lowering him gently to the bottom of the trench.

He lay there on the ground for a moment, his breath coming back, looking up at giants standing over him — bearded filthy men in dirty blue uniforms, all of them smoking pipes, bizarrely. They stared back at him, curious.

“C’est sûr,” one of them said. “Un véritable officier anglais.”

♦

He was sitting in a dugout in the support lines, an enamel mug of black unsweetened coffee in his hand, experiencing a level of exhaustion that he’d never encountered before. It was all he could do to raise the mug to his lips, like lifting a heavy boulder or lead cannonball. He put the mug down and closed his eyes. Sleep. Sleep for a week. He had handed the sealed letter from his pack to the officer whose dugout this was — where the bearded blue giants had led him. Cigarette, that’s what he needed. He patted his pockets — then remembered he’d left them behind in Dodd’s dugout. Dugout Dodd. Wiley and Gorlice-Law. Was that Gorlice-Law’s shout for Foley? He just hoped that all –

“There he is. Our bad penny.”

He looked round, blinking. Fyfe-Miller stood there in the doorway. Smart in a jacket with leather cross-belting, jodhpurs and highly-polished riding boots. The French officer stood behind him.

“Notre mauvais centime,” Fyfe-Miller translated for the French officer, making no attempt at an accent. He helped Lysander to his feet, grinning his wild grin. Lysander felt like kissing him.

“Phase one completed,” Fyfe-Miller said. “That was the easy bit.”