He picked up the telephone and dialled Tremlett’s extension.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Is Captain Vandenbrook back from Folkestone?’
‘I believe so, sir.’
‘Would you ask him to step into my office.’
Lysander treated himself to a lunch at Max’s oyster bar in Dean Street in Soho. He ordered a dozen oysters and a pint of hock and allowed his thoughts to return pleasingly to Blanche and the night they had spent together. She was tall, almost ungainly under the sheets – sheets that they had spread and tucked in themselves in a kind of frenzy, snatching them from his trunks, delivered by porter that morning – she was all knees and elbows, lean and bony. Her flat wide breasts with tawny nipples. It was obvious she’d had many lovers before him. That way she held his head, his hair gathered in her fists holding him still . . . Where or from whom did that trick come? He had no regrets about spontaneously asking her to take back his ring – though he wondered now, as he emptied oysters down his throat, if he had been too precipitate, over-happy, over-relieved that his old ‘problem’ hadn’t recurred with her. No – it had been as good as with Hettie. Hettie, so different. There was no sense of danger with Blanche, however, it was more a kind of rigour. Refreshing, no-nonsense Agnes Bleathby. It was the end of Hettie, of course. But that was only right as Hettie had let him down shockingly, had betrayed him instantly and without a qualm to save herself despite the fact that she was the mother of their son. Lothar meant little or nothing to Hettie Bull, he realized. Furthermore, he – Lothar’s natural father – clearly played no part in her life unless he could be useful to her in some selfish way – the marriage to Jago Lasry was the perfect example. No, Blanche had always been the girl for him. She had asked him back to her mews house in Knightsbridge for supper – her show was cancelled until the damage to the theatre was repaired. He smiled at the idea of Blanche cooking supper for him on his return from the office – a little forerunner of their domestic bliss? For the first time in many months he felt the warmth of security wash through him. Contentment – how rare that feeling was and it was only right that it should be cherished. He ordered another round of oysters and another pint of hock.
He returned to the Annexe in good spirits. He had a course of action to follow and Munro would have his answer soon, however unwelcome it might be. Vandenbrook was poised and ready. Yet again Tremlett was waiting by his door, agitated this time.
‘Ah, there you are, sir. I was beginning to think you’d gone for the day.’
‘No, Tremlett. What is it?’
‘There’s a man downstairs insisting on seeing you. Claims to be your uncle, sir – a Major Rief.’
‘That’s because he is my uncle. Send him up at once. And bring us a pot of coffee.’
Lysander sat down with a thump, realizing his head was a little blurry from all the hock, but pleased at the prospect of seeing Hamo. He didn’t come up to town often – ‘London terrifies me,’ he always said – so this was an unfamiliar treat.
Tremlett showed Hamo in and Lysander knew at once something was very wrong.
‘What is it, Hamo? Nothing to do with Femi, is it?’ The fighting in West Africa was over, as far as he knew – everything had moved to the East.
Hamo’s face was set.
‘Prepare yourself for the worst possible news, my boy . . .’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Your mother is dead.’
16. Autobiographical Investigations
There is this myth that death by drowning is the best of all deaths amongst the dozens or hundreds available to us human beings – that with drowning your end arrives simultaneously with a moment of pure exhilaration. I will hold on to that idea but the rational side of my brain asks who provided this testimonial? Where’s the evidence?
When I saw my mother’s body in the undertaker’s at Eastbourne she did, however, look serene and untroubled. Paler than usual, a slight bluish tinge to her lips, her eyes closed as if she were dozing. I kissed her cold forehead and felt a pain in my gut as I remembered the last time I’d made that gesture, holding her warm in my arms. ‘I won’t let you be dragged down by this.’
Hamo tells me there is an unopened letter at Claverleigh waiting for me but I don’t need to read it to know that it will be her confession. Hamo, in his kindness, bless him, ventured the theory that it might have been some awful accident – a slip, a fall, unconsciousness. But I told him I was convinced it was suicide and the letter would merely confirm that. Her body had been found at dawn on the shingly beach at Eastbourne, left by the retreating tide – the proverbial man out walking his dog at first light – she was fully clothed, all her jewellery removed and one shoe missing.
I find myself, all of a sudden, remembering something Wolfram Rozman said to me – it seems eons ago, back in that impossible, unimaginable world before the war began, before everybody’s lives changed for ever – when, having been asked what he would have done if the tribunal had found against him, Wolfram had said – blithely, inconsequentially – that he would have taken his own life, of course. I can bring him into my mind’s eye effortlessly – Wolfram standing there in his caramel suit, swaying slightly, tipsy from the celebratory champagne, saying in all seriousness, ‘In this ramshackle empire of ours suicide is a perfectly reasonable course of action.’ Wolfram – was it just bravado, the swagger of a born hussar? No, I recall, it was said smilingly but with absolute rigid logic: once you understand that – you will understand us. It lies very deep in our being. ‘Selbstmord’ – death of the self: it’s an honourable farewell to this world. My mother had made her honourable farewell. Enough.
Hugh and the Faulkner family are deeply shocked. I feel my grief burn in me alongside a colder, calmer anger. My mother is as much an innocent victim of this whole Andromeda affair as are those two men I killed in a sap one June night in no man’s land in northern France. The causal chain reached out to claim them just as it did Anna Faulkner.
My darling Lysander,
I will not allow myself, or my stupidity, to harm you or endanger you in any way. You should understand that what I am about to do seems an entirely reasonable course of action to me. I have a few regrets at leaving this world but they are wholly outweighed by the benefits my imminent non-being will achieve. Think of it that way, my dear – I am no longer here, that’s all. This fact, this state, was going to arrive one day therefore it has always seemed to me that any day is as good as the next. I already feel a sense of relief at having taken the decision. You are now free to move forward with full strength and confidence and with no concerns about your foolish mother. I cannot tell you how upset I was after our last conversation, how you were intent on imperilling yourself, on taking a course of action that was plainly wrong, only to spare me. You were prepared to sacrifice yourself for me and I could not allow that, could not live with that responsibility. What I am about to do is no sacrifice – you must understand that for someone like me it is the most normal of acts in a sane and rational world.
Goodbye, my darling. Keep me alive in your thoughts every day.
Your loving mother.
Images. My mother. My father. How she wept at his funeral, the endless tears. The grim flat in Paddington. Claverleigh. Her beauty. Her singing – her rich mellow voice. That terrible sunlit afternoon in Claverleigh Wood. At meals when she talked the way she would unconsciously tap the tines of her fork on her plate to emphasize the point she was making. That night I saw my father kissing her in the drawing room when they thought I was asleep. The way they laughed when I walked in, outraged. The cameo she wore with the letter ‘H’ carved in the black onyx. How she smoked a cigarette, showing her pale neck as she lifted her chin to blow the smoke away. The confidence with which she walked into a room as if she were going on stage. What else could I have been with those two as my parents? How can I best avenge her?