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.