Waiting for Sunrise

  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 2/10th 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 lin
e 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.’