She seemed to relax finally – expiation had occurred.
‘And you remembered I liked Dubonnet,’ she said.
They looked at each other candidly.
‘You like Dubonnet and you don’t drink champagne.’
‘And you used to be a famous actor.’
‘An actor, certainly . . . You said you wanted to tell me something.’
She looked more serious now.
‘My contact at the consulate told me an interesting detail – I obliged him to tell me an interesting detail – before he was arrested and taken away. They were paying funds to the person who sent the letters to Glockner. A lot of money, transferred through Switzerland.’
‘I imagined money was the reason. Was there a name?’
‘No.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘This is all he said. But the money they sent was a lot. Already over two thousand pounds. It seems a lot for one man. I thought – maybe there is a cell. Maybe there are two, or three . . .’
Lysander wasn’t surprised to have this confirmed but he feigned some perplexity – frowning, tapping his fingers.
‘Have you told this to anyone else?’
‘Not yet. I wanted to tell you first.’
‘Not Massinger?’
‘I think with Glockner dead he feels the matter is closed.’
‘Could you keep this to yourself for a while? It would help me.’
‘Of course.’ She smiled at him again. ‘Very happy to oblige, as they say.’
He sat back and crossed his legs.
‘Are you going to stay in London now?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Massinger wants to put me into Luxembourg – to count troop trains. He wants me to become the special friend of a lonely old station master.’
‘La veuve Duchesne, once more.’
‘It’s very effective – instant respect. People keep their distance. No one wants to trouble you in your terrible grief.’
‘Why do you do it?’
‘Why do you?’ She didn’t bother to let him reply. ‘Massinger pays me very well,’ she said, simply. ‘I appreciate money because at one stage in my life I was without it. Completely. And life was not easy . . .’ She put her glass down and turned it this way and that on its coaster. They were silent for a moment.
‘How do you find Massinger?’ she asked, still looking down.
‘Difficult. He’s a difficult personality.’
Now she looked him in the eye.
‘I find it difficult to trust him entirely. He changes his mind – a lot.’
Was this a subtle warning, Lysander wondered. He decided to remain neutral.
‘Massinger’s worried about his job, his role. They want to shut down Geneva and Switzerland – concentrate on Holland.’
‘I’m going to Luxembourg via Holland. I have to meet a man called Munro.’
‘Munro runs Holland – I think. There’s some rivalry, inevitably.’
‘I could have gone to Luxembourg from Switzerland very easily. Do you think that’s significant?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, honestly. He reflected that they shouldn’t actually be talking to each other like this but he felt her constant doubts and suspicions were exactly like his. You thought you had possession of key facts, of certainties, but they disappeared and were facts and certainties no more.
‘I’m just like you,’ he said. ‘Following instructions. Trying to think ahead. Be aware of potential problems. Trying not to slip up.’ He smiled. ‘Anyway, I wish you luck. I’d better go.’ He rose to his feet and she did the same. She took a card out of her bag and handed it to him.
‘I expect to be in London a few more days,’ she said. ‘It would be nice to see you again. I remember our dinner in Geneva – un moment agréable.’
He looked at her card – a card supplied by the hotel she was staying at, Bailey’s Hotel, Gloucester Road. There was a telephone number.
‘I’ll telephone you,’ he said, not really knowing why – or even if – he should try to see Florence Duchesne one more time. But somehow he didn’t want this to seem like a final parting so he held out this prospect, at least, that they would meet again.
At the front door, outside on the pavement, they made their farewells. She was going to explore, she said, this was her first visit to London. They shook hands and Lysander felt the extra pressure as her squeeze on his fingers tightened and she looked him directly in the eye again. Was that a warning – was he to be careful? Or was it a covert reminder that she expected to be telephoned and would like to see him again? Lysander watched her walk away, the cut of her musquash coat making it sway to and fro, and he speculated about different short-term futures, courses of action, of how he had once imagined Florence Duchesne tipsy on champagne, naked, laughing . . . it didn’t seem such a fantasy any more. He hailed a passing cab and asked to be taken to the Annexe.
He knew he would have to work late that night. Tremlett, with the aid of the magic letter from C.I.G.S., had managed to secure all of Osborne-Way’s claims for travel and expenses that he had submitted to the War Office. The proviso for their release was that they could only be out of the building for one night.
Tremlett dumped the heavy ledger on his desk.
‘Is Captain Vandenbrook in his office?’ Lysander asked.
‘Captain Vandenbrook is in Folkestone, sir. Back tomorrow morning.’
That was good, he thought – Vandenbrook carrying on as normal. ‘Right,’ he said to Tremlett. ‘Bring me the War Diary and the travelling-claims-by-land dockets.’
He spent the next two hours going through Osborne-Way’s claims and collating them with Vandenbrook’s movements but there was no visible overlap. In fact Osborne-Way had been in France on at least two occasions when Lysander was sure that Glockner’s letters had been left at hotels in Sandwich and Deal. One thing was clear, however – Osborne-Way had enjoyed himself in France. Nights in expensive restaurants in Amiens; a weekend in Paris at the Hôtel Meurice – on what business? – everything charged to the War Office and the British taxpayer. Frustrated, Lysander wondered if he could score some petty revenge and have Osborne-Way’s extravagance brought to the attention of someone senior to him, a quiet word that might have the effect of –
He became aware of loud voices and hurrying feet in the corridor outside Room 205.
Tremlett knocked on the door and peered in. His eye patch was slightly askew.
‘We’re going up top, sir. Zeppelin coming over!’
Lysander unhooked his greatcoat from the back of the door and followed him out and up the stairs to the roof of the Annexe. Half a dozen people were gathered on the flat area by the lift housing staring westwards where the long lucent fingers of searchlights stiffly searched through the night sky, looking for the dirigible. There was the distant popping of anti-aircraft fire and every now and then a shrapnel star-shell burst high above them.
Lysander looked out over the night city, some seven storeys up from street level. To his eyes it could have been peacetime – motor cars and omnibuses, headlights gleaming, shop fronts lit beneath their awnings, ribbons of streetlamps casting their pearly glow. Here and there were areas of approximate darkness but it was almost inviting, he imagined, to the captain of this airship somewhere overhead. Where shall I drop my bombs? Here? Or there? And, as if his thoughts had been read, the first searchlight found the Zeppelin and then another two joined it. Lysander’s first thought was, my god, so huge – gigantic – and serenely beautiful. It was very high and moving forward steadily – how fast, he couldn’t tell. The increasing noise from the artillery fire blocked out the sound of its engines as it seemed to float unaided above them, driven on by night winds rather than its motors.
Another gun, nearer, began to fire – Pop! Pop! Pop!
‘That’s the gun in Green Park,’ Tremlett said in his ear, then shouted out into the darkness, ‘Give ’em hell, lads!’
More cheers came up from the others on the r
oof as Lysander looked up at the Zeppelin, awestruck, he had to admit, at the vast lethal beauty of the giant silvery flying machine caught in the crossbeams of three searchlights, now almost overhead, it seemed.
‘It’s eight thousand feet up,’ Tremlett said. ‘At least.’
‘Where are our planes? Why can’t we shoot it down?’
‘Do you know how long it takes one of our planes to climb to eight thousand feet, sir?’
‘No. Not the faintest.’
‘About forty minutes. He’ll be long gone. Or else he’ll drop ballast and jump up another thousand feet. Easy as pie.’
‘How do you know all this, Tremlett?’
‘My little brother’s in the Royal Flying Corps. Stationed at Hainault. He’s always – WOAH! FUCK ME! –’
The first bomb had exploded. Not far from the Embankment – a sudden violent wash of flame, then the shock wave and the flat crack of the explosion.
‘That’s the Strand,’ Tremlett yelled. ‘Fuckin’ hell!’
Then there was a short series of explosions – Blat! Blat! Blat! – as bombs fell swiftly one after the other, Tremlett bellowing his commentary.
‘They’re going for the theatres! Fuckin’ Ada! That’s Drury Lane! That’s Aldwych!’
Lysander felt a bolus of vomit rise in his throat. Blanche was in a play at the Lyceum. Jesus Christ. Wellington Street, corner of Aldwych. He held his watch up – it would be just about the interval now. He looked up to see the Zeppelin turn slowly, heading northwards, up towards Lincoln’s Inn. There were more thumps as bombs fell, out of sight.
‘Big fire there!’ Tremlett yelled. ‘Look, they got the Lyceum!’
Lysander turned and raced through the roof access door and pelted down the stairway. He burst out on to the Embankment – the noise of police bells and fire engines, whistles, shouts, all coming down from the Strand and, in the distance, the sound of even more bombs dropping. He ran up Carting Lane past the Hotel Cecil to the Strand. Here he could see the flames, tall as the buildings, a bright unnatural orange lighting the façades on Aldwych and Wellington Street. Gas, he thought, a gas main’s gone up. People were rushing along the Strand towards the source of the fire. He pushed his way through them and sprinted up the slope of Exeter Street. There was a thick dust cloud here and all the street lights had been blown out. He turned the corner to see glass and bricks scattered on the road and the first fuming crater. The earth itself seemed to be burning at its centre and fringes. Three bodies lay huddled at the side of the road, like tramps sleeping. The fire was blazing garishly at the end of the street and he ran towards it. He could see it was at the side of the Lyceum itself, the gas main billowing flames forty feet high. Bells, shouts, screams. A woman in a sequinned gown stumbled out of the darkness past him, whimpering, the frayed stump of her right arm twitching at her shoulder. A man in an evening suit lay on his back, both arms thrown wide, not a mark visible on him.
Half a gable-end had come down here and the way forward was blocked by a wall of tumbled bricks six feet high. He could hear women screaming and the shouts of police in Wellington Street bellowing, ‘Keep back! Keep back!’ He scrabbled up the brickwork and slipped, bashing his elbow. He tried again on the north side of Exeter Street where he could at least gain some purchase from the opposite façades. Glass shone here, glittering shards of orange-diamond jewels – every window in the street blasted out. He was thinking of the Lyceum, where the dressing rooms were – his father had played there all the time in the eighties. Maybe it hadn’t been the interval – Blanche would have been safer on stage – but he hadn’t seen the wretched play yet so he had no idea where she would have been.
He hauled his way up the sliding brick wall. At the top the gas flare made his shadow monstrously huge on the building front, flickering and undulating. The crater was immense, ten feet deep. More bodies and bits of bodies were scattered about it – the pub at the corner, The Bell, was ablaze. People went to the pub from the Lyceum at the interval – the bomb had caught it at its fullest. Beyond the blaze he could see the police forming a cordon to keep the appalled but curious onlookers away from the soaring flames of the venting gas main.
He heard bricks falling to the road, a sharp egg-cracking sound, and looked up just in time to see a window embrasure topple outwards and drag down the half wall beneath it. He flung himself out of the way and fell awkwardly down the slope to the pavement, winded. Lights were flashing in front of his eyes as he struggled to regain his breath. He hauled himself to his knees and saw a figure a few yards away across the street, standing still in the shadows, apparently looking straight at him.
‘Give us a hand, will you?’ Lysander shouted, wheezily.
The figure didn’t move. A man with a hat and the collar of his coat folded up – impossible to see anything more with the street lights gone. The man was standing at the right angle of Exeter Street where it turned down to the Strand, where he’d seen the first dead bodies.
Lysander rose to his feet shakily, perturbed, and the figure stayed where it was, apparently staring directly at him. What was going on? Why was he just staring, doing nothing? The gas main flared again and for a moment more light was cast – the figure raised his hand to shield his face.
‘I see you!’ Lysander yelled – not seeing him but wanting to provoke him, somehow. ‘I know who you are! I see you!’
The figure immediately turned and ran around the corner – disappeared.
There was no point in chasing, Lysander thought, and anyway, he had to find Blanche. He climbed up and slithered down the other side of the brick pile and ran up to the stage door of the Lyceum. A policeman was sheltering inside.
‘The actors! I’ve a friend –’
‘Can’t come in here, sir. Everyone’s gathered down on the Strand.’
Lysander realized there was no way through by Wellington Street so he had to go back the way he’d come. He picked his way cautiously up the brick wall and saw now that there were policemen and ambulances collecting the bodies. Safe. He ran past them and down to the Strand heading for Aldwych. There was a big surging crowd here. The Strand Theatre opposite had emptied and the streets were full of well-dressed theatre-goers milling about, smoking and chatting excitedly – bow ties, feathers, silk, jewels. He looked around him. Where were the actors?
‘Lysander! I don’t believe it!’
It was Blanche, a mug of coffee in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Someone’s overcoat was thrown around her shoulders like a cape.
He felt weak finding her like this, unmanned suddenly. He went towards her and kissed her cheek, tasting greasepaint. In the rippling light from the gas main she looked almost grotesque in her white Regency wig – a painted loon with dark, arched eyebrows, a beauty spot and red lips.
‘Were you caught in the blast?’
He looked down at himself. He was covered in brick dust, the left knee of his trousers was ripped and flapping, he had no hat, a knuckle was dripping blood.
‘No. I was working and saw the bombs and so came looking for you. I was worried . . .’
‘Ah, my Lysander . . .’
They hugged each other, held each other close. Her whole body was shaking violently, trembling.
‘You can’t go home in that state,’ he said, softly, taking her hands. ‘Come to my flat and tidy up. Have a proper drink. It’s two minutes away.’
14. Autobiographical Investigations
Blanche has gone. It’s nine in the morning. She sent to the Lyceum for her clothes. The newspapers say seventeen people died in the raid – the ‘Great Raid on Theatreland’. Bizarrely, I owe everything to the pilot of that Zeppelin – my first night in 3/12 Trevelyan House was spent with Blanche. Blanche. Blanche naked with her wide low-slung breasts, her jutting hips, long slim thighs like a boy, her white powdered face, the beauty spot, lipstick kissed away. How she slipped her fingers in my hair, gripping, and held my face above hers, eye to unblinking eye, as I climaxed. Deliverance. Relief. Watching her c
ross the room naked to find my cigarettes, standing there, pale odalisque, lighting one, then lighting one for me.
Question: who was that man in the shadows watching me?
Only now do I sense the after-shock, feel my nerves set on edge. The Zeppelin, the bombs, the dead bodies, the screams. Seeing Blanche again, being with her, made me push everything else to the back of my mind, including that strange meeting in Exeter Street – part of the madness and horror of the night. Was somebody trying to frighten me? A warning? Vandenbrook was in Folkestone, in theory – but I can’t believe that he’d ever try anything so self-destructive, so against his best interests. I’m his only hope.
I sit here and re-run the seconds’ glimpse I had of him sprinting away. Why do I think of Jack Fyfe-Miller? What makes me think that? No – surely mistaken identity. But, this much is clear, someone was waiting outside the Annexe, saw me dash out and followed me as I ran towards the bombs . . .
Last night as we lay in each other’s arms we spoke.
ME: I still have the ring – our ring . . .
BLANCHE: What are you trying to say, my darling?
ME: That, you know, maybe we should never have broken off our engagement. I suppose.
BLANCHE: Am I meant to read that as a re-proposal of sorts?
ME: Yes. Please say yes. I’m a complete fool. I’ve missed you, my love – I’ve been living in a daze, a coma.
Then we kissed. Then I went and took the ring from the card pocket inside my jacket.
ME: I’ve been carrying it with me. Good luck charm.
BLANCHE: Have you needed a lot of luck, since we split up?
ME: You’ve no idea. I’ll tell you all about it one day. Oh. Perhaps I should ask. What about Ashburnham?
BLANCHE: Ashburnham is a nonentity. I’ve banished him from my presence.
ME: I’m delighted to hear it. I just had to ask.