‘Lysander, darling, what’s happened?’
‘What?’ I’m still half asleep. I look down, following her gaze, my trousers and my drawers are still bunched around my knees, I see my flaccid penis and the small dark tuft of hair above it.
I drag up my trousers, curl up in a ball and begin to cry uncontrollably.
‘What happened, darling?’
‘Tommy Bledlow,’ I sob, god knows why, ‘Tommy Bledlow did this to me.’
10. A Peculiar Sense of Exclusiveness
Lysander stopped reading. He felt the retrospective shame blaze through him, like the driest tinder burning, writhing, crackling hot. His mouth was parched. Come on, grow up, he said to himself, you’re twenty-seven years old – this is ancient history.
Lysander sat quiet for a moment. Bensimon had to speak first.
‘Right,’ Bensimon said. ‘Yes. So. This happened when you were fourteen.’
‘I think I’d been asleep for about two hours. I was missed at teatime. My mother was worried and came out looking for me. The gardeners said I’d gone into the wood.’
‘And you had begun to masturbate –’
‘And had fallen asleep. A dead sleep. The sun, the warmth. A good lunch . . . And then my mother found me apparently unconscious with my trousers pulled down, half-naked, exposed. No wonder she panicked.’
‘What happened to the young gardener?’
‘He was dismissed immediately, by the estate manager, without pay and references. It was that or the police. His father protested that his son had done nothing – though he had to admit he hadn’t been in the garden all afternoon – and he was dismissed as well.’
‘Who could possibly disbelieve young Master Lysander?’
‘Yes, exactly. I feel very guilty. Still do. I’ve no idea what happened to them. They lost their cottage on the estate, as well. I took ill – I remember crying for days – and I was in bed for a fortnight. Then my mother took me to a hotel in Margate. I was examined by doctors – I was given all kinds of medicines for my “nerves”. Then I was packed off to my terrible boarding school.’
‘It was never spoken of again?’
‘Never. I was the victim, you see. Ill, shattered, pale. Every time someone asked me about the incident I started to weep. So everyone was very careful with me, very worried about what I had “endured”. Walking on eggshells, you know.’
‘Interesting that you blamed the gardener’s son . . .’ Bensimon wrote something down. ‘What was his name again?’
‘Tommy Bledlow.’
‘You still remember.’
‘I’m hardly likely to forget it.’
‘He had asked you to go hunting with him – with his ferret.’
‘I’d said no.’
‘Did you have homosexual feelings for him?’
‘Ah . . . No. Or at least I wasn’t aware of any. He had been the last person I had spoken to. In my panic, in the urgency of the moment, I just plucked his name from the air.’
Lysander took a tram back to Mariahilfer Strasse. He sat in something of a daze as they made their clattering and rocking way across town. Bensimon had been the only person to whom he had ever told the truth about that summer’s day at the turn of the century and he had to admit that the recounting of his dire and dark secret had produced a form of catharsis. He felt a strange lightness, a distancing from his past and, as he looked around him, from the world he was moving through and its denizens. He contemplated his fellow passengers in Tram K – saw them reading, chatting, lost in their thoughts, staring blankly out of the window as the city flowed by – and felt a peculiar sense of exclusiveness. Like the man with the winning lottery ticket in his pocket – or the murderer returning unspotted from the scene of his crime – he sensed himself above and apart from them, almost superior. If only you knew what I have disclosed today; if only you knew how everything in my life was going to be different now . . .
This last was wishful thinking, he quickly realized. What had happened that afternoon in June 1900 was the erased passage in the narrative of his life, a long white gap between two parentheses in the account of his days as a fourteen-year-old boy. He had never thought about it subsequently – erecting an impenetrable mental cordon sanitaire – pre-empting all catalysts that might stir unwelcome memories. He had walked many times in Claverleigh Wood; he and his mother were very close; he had talked to gardeners and estate workers without once bringing Tommy Bledlow to mind. The event was gone, the incident banished – effectively lost in time – as if some diseased organ or tumour had been removed from his body and incinerated.
He paused, stepping down from the tram at his halt, wondering why he had unthinkingly chosen that image. No – he was glad that he had told everything to Bensimon. Perhaps, at root, this was all psychoanalysis could really achieve: it authorized you to talk about crucially, elementally, important matters – that you couldn’t relate to anybody else – under the guise of a formal therapeutic discourse. What could Bensimon say to him, now, that he couldn’t say to himself? The act of confession was a form of liberation and he wondered if he needed Bensimon any more. Still, he did feel almost physically different from the man who had written down the events of that day. And writing it down was important, also, he could see that. Something had changed – it had been a purging of sorts, an opening up, a cleansing.
He walked slowly and thoughtfully home from the tram-halt to the pension, stopping only to buy a hundred English Virginia cigarettes from the tobacconist at the junction of Mariahilfer Strasse and the pension’s courtyard. He wondered vaguely if he were smoking too much – what he needed was a bracing twenty-mile hike in the mountains. He started to contemplate pleasantly where he might go this weekend.
Traudl was dusting down the glass-domed owl when he pushed open the door. She didn’t curtsey, he noticed, and her welcoming smile seemed a little more knowing. Not surprisingly, Lysander thought, now we both have our own new secret to share.
‘The lieutenant would like to see you, sir,’ she said, then, glancing around, whispered, ‘Remember about the twenty crowns.’
‘Don’t worry. He’ll just assume we – you know . . .’
‘Yes. Good. Be sure to say this, sir, please.’
‘I will, Traudl. Rest assured.’
‘And I put your post in your room, sir.’
‘Thank you.’
Lysander knocked on Wolfram’s door and, summoned, went in. He could see at once from Wolfram’s wide smile and the bottle of champagne in an ice-bucket that all had gone well at the tribunal. He was back in his civilian clothes – a caramel tweed suit with chocolate-coloured tie.
‘Acquitted!’ Wolfram said with a maestro’s gesture, arms raised in a flourish, and they shook hands warmly.
‘Congratulations. I hope it wasn’t too much of an ordeal,’ Lysander said.
Wolfram busied himself with the opening and pouring of the champagne.
‘Well, they try to scare you to death, of course,’ he said. ‘All those senior officers in their dress uniforms and their most disapproving expressions – solemn, solemn faces. Keep you waiting for hours.’ He topped Lysander up. ‘If you keep your nerve, your dignity, you’re halfway there.’ He smiled. ‘Your excellent whisky was most helpful in that department.’
They clinked glasses, drank.
‘So, it’s all over,’ Lysander said. ‘What made them see sense?’
‘An embarrassing lack of evidence. But I gave them something to think about. It helped move the spotlight away from the wily Slovene.’
‘Oh, yes – what?’
‘There’s this captain in the regiment, Frankenthal. Doesn’t like me. Arrogant man. I found a way of reminding my superior officers that Frankenthal is a Jewish name.’ Wolfram shrugged. ‘Frankenthal had the key for a week, just like me.’
‘What’s his Jewishness got to do with it?’