His mother walked into the hotel.
His first instinct was to rush out into the lobby and surprise her, but something made him shrink back in his seat. She was wearing a fur coat and one of the new, fashionably smaller hats. She spoke to the receptionist and a porter was called and sent away. Luggage? Was she staying the night? The mâitre d’ emerged from the dining room and shook her hand, obsequiously. She must be known here . . . She was led away towards the dining room and out of his line of sight.
Lysander would have liked to put this encounter down as one of life’s many coincidences. Coincidences – the most extraordinary coincidences – happened all the time, he knew, and in a manner that would make the laziest farceur blush. But life’s strange congruences were not applicable here – every suddenly aching bone in his body was telling him that this was no accidental coming-together of the respective orbits of Vandenbrook, Rief and Anna, Lady Faulkner. Then he saw Vandenbrook come down the stairs, cigarette in hand, and turn into the dining room. He knew instantly that he was going to his mother’s table, that this rendezvous had been planned, but decided to wait five minutes before he sought his ‘ocular proof’. He strolled out of the bar and pretended to consult a map of Hythe conveniently hung to one side of the dining-room door. It was ajar and he could see at an angle into the salon. There was a fireplace and a dozen tables, half of them occupied. And there in the corner was his mother, accepting a glass of wine poured by the sommelier, and there across the table from her was Christian Vandenbrook. They toasted each other – they seemed familiar and relaxed – clearly this was not their first introduction. As they talked and consulted the menu, Lysander saw that they were displaying all the timeworn and conventional feints and poor disguises of lovers meeting in a public place and hoping the real nature of their relationship would be invisible.
8. The Colonel’s Daimler
‘I need a motor car, Tremlett,’ Lysander said. ‘I have to do a tour of the south-east. Does the Directorate have transport?’
‘There is Colonel Osborne-Way’s motor, sir. A Daimler. Sits in the garage for weeks at a time.’
‘That’ll do nicely.’
‘I think we’ll have need of your magic letter, however, sir.’
It turned out to be a big, new, maroon-and-black, 1914-model, seven-seater Daimler that had been ordered and paid for straight from the Daimler works in Coventry by the director of a chemical firm in Leipzig. It had been seized by the authorities at the outbreak of war before it could be shipped to Germany, but how it had ended up as Osborne-Way’s personal vehicle was something of a mystery. It was ideal for Lysander’s purposes, however, and Tremlett quickly and enthusiastically volunteered to act as chauffeur. Armed with copies of the relevant claims, the two of them headed off the next day – Lysander reclining grandly in the rear on mustard-yellow kid-leather seats – on a circuit of all the hotels on the Kent and Sussex coast that Christian Vandenbrook chose to frequent.
One night in Ramsgate drew a blank, but Sandwich, Deal and Hythe confirmed the pattern. They were all small, relatively expensive hotels with ardent recommendations from the better guidebooks. The hotel registers revealed that whenever Captain Vandenbrook was booked in so too was Lady Faulkner. She didn’t stay with him in Rye, nor in Hastings, however – perhaps a little too close to home, Lysander thought. All in all, over a period from September 1914 to this latest October encounter, they had spent the night in the same hotel nine times. He would not have been surprised to find similar evidence in London – they were bound to have met there also, she went up to town two or three times a month – but Vandenbrook could hardly present a claim for a night in a London hotel to the Directorate’s accounts department.
An affair of over a year, then, Lysander considered, and one that had begun while Crickmay Faulkner was still very much alive. The thought of his mother with Vandenbrook, carnally, made him uneasy and disturbed – made him instantly think of her differently, as if she had suddenly become someone entirely separate from the woman he knew and loved. But of course she wasn’t old, he told himself, she had other roles in life beyond that of his ‘mother’. She was an extremely attractive mature woman, cultured, vivacious, confident. Vandenbrook himself – sophisticated, charming, handsome, amusing, rich – was exactly the sort of man she would be attracted to. He could see that, understand that, all too clearly. He tried not to condemn her for it.
In Hastings, at the Pelham Hotel, the last hotel on their itinerary, the staff had been particularly helpful and concerned. Vandenbrook had stayed there four times and must have been a heavy tipper, Lysander thought. The young receptionist was full of anxious enquiries.
‘I do hope everything was to Captain Vandenbrook’s satisfaction. We’d be most upset if he was in any way displeased.’
‘Not at all. Routine enquiry.’
‘Has something gone wrong, sir?’
‘Well,’ Lysander improvised, ‘something’s gone missing – we’re just retracing the captain’s movements over the last few weeks and months.’
‘Are you a colleague?’ the receptionist asked. She was young, eighteen or nineteen, and had arranged her hair in a curious low swipe over her forehead that was not particularly flattering, Lysander thought, it made her look a bit simple, though she evidently wasn’t. He suspected she had been subjected to the full Vandenbrook charm on many occasions.
‘Yes, I am. We work together in London.’
‘Please do tell him that his envelopes were all collected as specified. Never more than two days later.’
‘I will, thank you.’
He said goodbye, promised to pass on the affectionate good wishes of the staff of the Pelham Hotel, Hastings, to the captain and tried to walk casually back out to the street. Tremlett was smoking by the Daimler, cap pushed to the back of his head. With his eye patch he looked unusually slovenly. He threw away his cigarette as Lysander strode up to him and readjusted his cap.
‘Back to London, sir?’
‘Back to Hythe.’
‘Thought we were done for the day, sir.’
‘The devil’s work is never done, Tremlett. Quick as you like, please.’
They drove back up the coast to Hythe and returned to the Dene Hotel. Lysander walked into reception, experiencing the curious sensation of his life repeating itself. This was his third visit to the Dene Hotel in forty-eight hours.
‘Good evening, sir. Welcome back.’
‘I was just wondering . . . Did Captain Vandenbrook leave anything – in his room, perhaps?’
‘Oh, you mean the envelope. I should have said this morning. Usually a porter from the station collects it.’
The receptionist reached under his counter and drew out a large buff manila envelope. On the front was written, ‘Capt. C. Vandenbrook – to be collected.’
Lysander thanked the clerk and went into the saloon bar. It was quiet – one old man smoking a pipe in a corner and reading a newspaper. Lysander felt a coldness fall from the nape of his neck over his shoulders and back, as if he were standing in an icy draught. Mysteriously, the wound in his thigh began to ache, suddenly, a kind of burning. He knew what the envelope would contain. He ripped it open with his thumb and began to read.
‘145 thou six inch howitz shells to Béthune. 65 wagons-under-load at Le Mans. Repair of telegraph lines Hazebrouk, Lille, Orchies, Valenciennes. New standard gauge line Gezaincourt-Albert. Gun spur engineer store depots Dernancourt. 12 permanent ambulance trains Third Army Second Army.’
He turned to the next page. It went on and on. He carefully placed the three sheets of paper back into the envelope, folded it longways and slipped it in his jacket pocket. He ordered a large brandy and tried to empty his mind. He concentrated on one fact alone, it was enough – for the moment further speculation was a waste of time. He had found his Andromeda.
9. Autobiographical Investigations
I decided, for the moment, to tell no one and do nothing. Something was violently and differently wrong here
– not least the presence of my mother. I had opened the envelope expecting to see the usual columns of figures as in the previous six Glockner letters, but instead saw pages of close-written factual prose – all the raw intelligence that Vandenbrook’s role in the Directorate could provide. Not for the first time in this whole affair I felt myself wantonly adrift – seeing a few details but making no connection – and also consumed with the feeling that invisible strings were being pulled by a person or persons unknown and that I was attached to their ends. I needed time to take this new information in, time to deliberate, and I realized I had to be very careful over what my own future movements and decisions were. Perhaps it was the moment for me to go on the offensive, myself. Certain facts needed to be established before I could return to Munro and Massinger with my astounding discoveries. The first course of action was to confront Vandenbrook and see what explanation he would fabricate about the contents of his envelope. Then there was the urgent need to have a conversation with my mother.
John Bensimon’s beard has turned quite grey since I last saw him in Vienna. He’s put on some weight also, yet there’s something strangely diminished about him, I feel, though on reflection it was perhaps the fact that it was England where we eventually met again that was responsible. To be a psychoanalyst practising in Vienna, with your smart consulting rooms just a few blocks away from Dr Freud’s, was a more dramatic and self-enhancing state of affairs than showing your patient into a converted bedroom at the back of a terraced house in Highgate.
Bensimon seemed genuinely pleased to see me, I sensed – perhaps I came trailing clouds of his former glory – and he shook my hand warmly, even though I had knocked on his front door unannounced at the end of the afternoon. He introduced me to his wife, Rachel – a demure, timid woman – and his twin daughters, Agatha and Elizabeth, before he showed me up to his study with a view through the windows of the sooty backs of terraced houses and the long thin gardens that trailed scruffily from them, containing the usual assortment of various-sized, dilapidated sheds that haunt the cluttered ends of these city plots, with their blistered tar-paper roofs, broken windows and creosoted weatherboarding, washing lines and brimming rainwater barrels.
He still had his desk, his turned-away couch and armchair and, I was glad to see, the silver African bas-relief from Wasagasse.
‘Not quite the same,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘But we must try to do the best with what we have.’
‘How’s business?’ I asked.
‘Slow, let’s say,’ he conceded with a rueful smile. ‘People in England haven’t yet realized how much they need us. It’s not at all like Vienna.’ He offered me the couch or the armchair. ‘Is this a social visit, or can I help you professionally?’
I told him that I wanted to reinstate our old relationship – perhaps a weekly consultation, I said, going to the armchair. I sat down and focussed on the familiar fantastic beasts and monsters, for a moment enjoying the illusion that I was still in 1913 and nothing had happened to me since. In a very real sense, the disturbing thought came to me, I had changed enormously, irrevocably – I was a different person.
‘Is it the old problem?’ he asked. ‘I still have all your files.’
‘No, that seems well and truly solved, happily,’ I said. ‘My new problem is that I can’t sleep at night. Or, rather, that I don’t want to sleep at night because I always seem to dream the same dream.’
I told him my dream – the recurring jumbled experience of my night in no man’s land that always culminated with my bombing of the sap and the image of the two torchlit faces looking up at me – the man with the moustache and the fair-haired boy.
‘What happens next?’ he asked.
‘I wake up. Usually my face is wet with tears, though I don’t recall weeping in the dream. I’m taking chloral hydrate – it’s the only thing that makes me sleep the night through.’
‘How long have you been taking that?’
‘Some months – since Switzerland,’ I said without thinking.
‘Oh, you’ve been to Switzerland. How interesting. Were you there long?’
‘A matter of days.’
‘Right.’ Discreet silence. ‘Well, we’d better take you off the chloral – its long-term consequences can be rather drastic.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can become over-dependent on it. Its effects can be disturbing. You can – how shall I put it? – you begin to lose your grip on reality.’
‘Whatever reality is . . . Sometimes I want nothing more than to lose my grip on reality. I just want to get to sleep at night.’
‘That’s what everyone says. And then . . .’
‘Well – perhaps we could try hypnosis once more.’
‘Actually, I think this is a perfect opportunity for Parallelism. But let’s take you off the chloral first.’
He wrote me out a prescription for another ‘somnifacient’ and told me that his fee in England was two guineas an hour. We made an appointment for the following week. Cheap at the price, I thought, suddenly hugely relieved that I’d come to see him. I believed that Dr Bensimon could cure me of anything. Well, almost anything.
Talking of which, I told him as I left that I had seen Hettie Bull again and his face darkened.
‘It’s none of my business, but I’d have nothing to do with that young woman, Mr Rief,’ he said. ‘She’s very dangerous, very unstable.’
This evening I was leaving the Annexe when I heard a shout, ‘Rief! I say! Over here!’ I looked round to see a man standing on the other side of the Embankment, leaning on the river wall. I crossed the roadway and saw that it was Jack Fyfe-Miller – but dressed as a stevedore in a flat cap with a scarf at his throat, moleskin trousers and heavy boots. We shook hands and I looked him over, professionally.
‘Almost convincing,’ I said. ‘But you need some dirt under your nails – rubbed into your cuticles. You’ve got the hands of a curate.’
‘The expert speaks.’
‘Black boot polish,’ I advised. ‘Lasts all day.’
‘Where’re you headed?’ he asked, staring at me with his usual strange intensity.
‘Walking back to my hotel.’
‘Ah, hotel life. Lucky for some.’
‘There’s nothing special about it. A small hotel in Pimlico – very average.’
‘Have you got a girl, Rief?’
‘What? No, not really. I used to be engaged to be married, once upon a time . . .’
‘When I find my girl I’ll get married – but she has to be spot-on right for me. Hard, that.’
I was inclined to agree, but said nothing as we walked along in silence for a while, Fyfe-Miller doubtless preoccupied with thoughts of his spot-on girl. From time to time he kicked at the fallen leaves on the pavement with his hobnails like a sulky adolescent, scuffing the stone and sending sparks flying. We walked under the railway bridge that led to Charing Cross and up ahead I saw the grand château-esque rooftops of Whitehall Court. I wondered if that was where he had come from, and perhaps the sight of the building and memories of our last meeting there stirred him as he suddenly became animated again and stopped me.
‘Any sign of Andromeda? Any news?’ he asked abruptly.
‘Ah, no. But I think I’m getting close.’
‘Getting close, eh?’ he smiled. ‘Hard on Andromeda’s trail.’
Not for the first time I wondered if Fyfe-Miller were entirely sane.
‘It’s a question of narrowing the investigation down,’ I said, playing for time. ‘Analysing exactly who had access to that particular information.’
‘Don’t take too long, Rief, or your precious Andromeda may fly the coop.’ At which point he took his hat off, gave me a mocking theatrical bow and then turned back the way we had come, shouting at me, over his shoulder, ‘Boot polish under the fingernails, I’ll remember that!’
I wandered back to The White Palace thinking about what he had said. It was a fair point, actually – I co
uldn’t take my own sweet time – Vandenbrook could easily grow suspicious. Was this some kind of a warning I’d been given? Had Munro and Massinger ordered Fyfe-Miller to turn up the pressure on me? . . . I bought the Evening News and read that Blanche Blondel had opened at the Lyceum the previous night in The Conscience of the King to triumphant acclaim. Blanche – perhaps I’d pop in a note at the stage door . . . Fyfe-Miller had inadvertently reminded me of her and I thought it might be a good moment to see her again.
10. The History of Unintended Consequences
Lysander did some quick research on Christian Vandenbrook’s life and background. Vandenbrook had been caught up in the mass retreat from Mons in the first hectic weeks of the war and had been knocked unconscious by an artillery explosion that left him in a coma for three days. He suffered thereafter from periodic bleeding from the ears and his sense of balance left him for some months. He was declared unfit for active service and joined the General Staff in London. Lysander wondered how this agreeable move had come about, then he discovered that Vandenbrook’s father-in-law was Brigadier-General Walter McIvor, the Earl of Ballatar, hero of the Battle of Waitara River in the Maori Wars in New Zealand. Vandenbrook was married to the earl’s younger child, his daughter, Lady Emmeline, and they had two daughters themselves, Amabel and Cecilia. A very well-connected man, then, married into wealth and prestige. That explained how he achieved the grand house in Knightsbridge and the other quietly munificent trappings of his life on a captain’s pay. But did it explain why he should choose to betray his country? Or why he was having an affair with Anna, now the dowager Lady Faulkner? Obviously the sooner he confronted Vandenbrook the sooner answers to these questions might ensue.