Waiting for Sunrise (12 page)
‘What’s it called?’
‘Coca.’
‘Does it hurt?’
‘Not in the least. It calms me down,’ she explained. ‘It makes me more confident and sure of myself.’
‘It’s not morphine, is it?’
‘You can buy it at a chemist. But then you have to leave your name and address – but I don’t want to do that so I get it from Dr Bensimon. His is better quality, anyway, so he says.’
It worked fast. Soon she was smiling and kissing him. She said she’d had a ‘blazing row’ with Hoff before she left and that had unsettled her. On the train to Linz she became convinced someone was following her and had taken a very roundabout route from the station to the hotel to throw any such person off the scent.
‘I felt all raggedy and nervy,’ she said. ‘And now I don’t. I’m all calm. See? Do you want to try some?’
Lysander took her in his arms. ‘If I felt any happier, I’d explode.’ He kissed her. ‘You’re my medicine, Hettie. I don’t need a drug.’
‘Dr Freud uses Coca as well,’ she said, a little defensively. ‘That’s how Bensimon knows about it.’
They walked along the promenade by the Danube and ate Linzer Torte in the Volksgarten, where a band was playing military marches. Back in Lysander’s room – the bigger of their two – Hettie undressed him, removing his shirt and tie, unbuckling his belt and unbuttoning his flies. It was something she liked to do, she said, before she removed her own clothes. For Lysander it was an unconscious echo of that first day, the day his anorgasmia left him for ever, so he had no complaints.
On the Sunday he took the opportunity of being in Linz to look up a cousin of his mother – a Frau Hermine Gantz. His mother had given him the address when he said he’d like to meet some of his Austrian family. He was going to call and leave his card but at the house on Burger Strasse they had never heard of a Frau Gantz. Lysander assumed his mother had made a mistake – she hadn’t been in Austria for over twenty years, after all.
The next day, as they were packing their valises for the return to Vienna, he saw Hettie preparing her Coca solution. A precaution, she said, Hoff might still be in a bad mood – he was a very angry man.
* * *
My darling Lysander,
It won’t work. I’m going to ignore your letter. Don’t think of me, think of yourself. Find your health and your good, kind nature again and come home to your girl. I love you, my Darling One, and if I can’t stand by you in your hour of trouble and distress then what kind of a wife would I make you? No, no, a thousand times no! We are meant to be with each other and while I applaud your sweetness and unselfishness in offering to let me ‘renounce my vows’ I will not hear of such a thing again. Take your time, my love, all the time you need – three months more, six months, a year. I will be waiting for you. Everyone tells me that Vienna has the best doctors in the world so I’m sure you are absolutely in the right place to find the right answers. I’m going to tear up your letter and burn it right now (London is beastly cold, I have a fire lit at breakfast). It never happened, you never wrote it, I never read it, my love for you is as constant and sure as the ‘Rock of Gibraltar’ (you know what I mean).
All my fondest love, my darling,
Your own, Blanche.
* * *
The Café Sorgenfrei became their post office. It was a small, dark, rather grimy bohemian place in a little street near the Hoher Markt. Hoff had been banned from the café when he was an art student and had vowed never to set foot in it again, Hettie said, so it was perfect. She would leave messages for Lysander behind the bar – places and times they could meet, when she thought it was safe for him to come to the barn. Lysander communicated with her in the same way. Sometimes he left a message saying simply, ‘I have to see you,’ and gave the name of a shabby hotel near the railway station or overlooking the Danube canal and let her know he had booked a room a couple of days hence, hoping that she could find a way of being there. Invariably, she did and Lysander began to worry that Hoff would grow suspicious of these comings and goings. No, she said, he only ever thinks of one person – himself. As long as he wasn’t inconvenienced by any of her absences he remained entirely indifferent as to what she was doing or her whereabouts.
* * *
The girl of my dreams do you know her?
She smiles ’neath the diamonds of dew
When morning breaks over the moon-mists
And the stars fade away in the blue.
Sometimes in the sunshine I see her,
And hear her low song in the breeze,
Then in her wide eyes glimpse the wonder
The smile from the blue of the seas.
She’s always my beautiful girl
Bewitchingly lovely and true
Perhaps if I name her you’ll know her:
She answers to ‘Love’ – and she’s You.
* * *
Lysander evolved a plan of self-improvement to fill in the days that intervened between his meetings with Hettie. He couldn’t just moon away the hours in cafés writing love poetry so he set himself a diligent programme of self-education. He increased the German lessons with Herr Barth and also began conversation classes in French – his French was at a reasonable standard – with a retired schoolteacher, one Herr Fuchs, who lived a few blocks further up Mariahilfer Strasse.
He made daily visits to Vienna’s many museums, attended the opera and concerts, went to exhibitions in art galleries and wandered the city with his guidebook, going into every church of note that was recommended. From time to time he would take a day trip out of town to tramp the pathways of the Wienerwald or stride along mountain tracks heading for distant peaks, map in one hand, a stout ash walking stick in the other.
Wolfram eventually quit the pension – to Frau K’s evident pleasure – rejoining his regiment for extensive manoeuvres in Galicia. It was something of an emotional farewell, but he and Lysander resolved to stay in touch however their respective lives might separate them. Wolfram vowed to come by on his next leave – ‘We’ll go to Spittelberg, get drunk and find ourselves two lively young girls.’ The lodger who replaced him was a middle-aged engineer called Josef Plischke. Taciturn, upright and faintly pompous he was the perfect companion for Frau K at her dinners. Lysander changed his pension rates to breakfast only, pleading poverty rather than terminal boredom. He had to budget, alas, he told Frau K, and it was true – his funds were diminishing. His affair with Hettie was costing him money – he paid for everything as she was entirely dependent on Hoff for money. Hoff, Lysander learned, was a surprisingly wealthy man, enriched by an inheritance from his late parents as well as by the increasingly high prices his paintings were fetching.
Lysander sent a telegram to his mother and asked if she could wire him another £20.
* * *
Winter arrived with full force in December – heavy frosts and snow flurries – and the stove in the old barn, for all its redoubtable size, proved an inadequate source of warmth. When he stayed there, Lysander would haul the mattress off the bed and drag it through to the main room, laying it in front of the stove, twin doors open so the flames could be seen.
Hettie found a book of pornographic Japanese prints in Hoff’s library and brought them to the barn so they could experiment. She took his penis in her mouth. He tried and failed to sodomize her. They had a go at emulating the contorted positions illustrated, studying the pages as if they were architects inspecting a blueprint.
‘Your leg is meant to be over my shoulder not under my armpit.’
‘I’ll break my leg if I put it there.’
‘Are you inside me? I can’t feel you.’
‘I’m about three inches away. I can’t reach, it’s impossible.’
She still chose to undress him, loving the moment, she said, when she could tug down his trousers and drawers and his ‘boy’ would sway free.
One day she said to him as they lay in bed in their shabby hotel overlooking the Danube canal, ‘Why don’t you kiss my breasts? Every man I’ve known likes to do that.’
Lysander thought: all the better to keep anorgasmia at bay – but said, ‘I don’t know why I don’t . . . Maybe it seems a bit infantile to me.’
‘Nothing wrong with being infantile. Come here.’
She sat up in bed and, at her beckoning, he nuzzled up to her. She cupped her breast and carefully offered the nipple – pert between two fingers – to his mouth.
‘See? It’s nice. I like it anyway.’
* * *
Hettie insisted that he come to the New Year party at Hoff’s studio. Lysander was very reluctant at first but Hettie encouraged him.
‘It’s even
less
suspicious if you come, don’t you see? He doesn’t suspect a thing. You have to come – I want to kiss you at midnight.’
So Lysander duly went and felt out of place at this loud gathering of artists, patrons and gallery owners. He hugged the corners of the large studio, content to keep his eyes on Hettie as she patrolled the room in her Balinese pantaloons and chequerboard jacket and her tinkling shoes. Udo Hoff didn’t seem to know who he was – several times their eyes met, Hoff’s blankly taking in another stranger in his house.
Immediately after midnight Hettie led him down a dark passageway bulky with hung coats, scarves and hats and kissed him, her tongue deep in his mouth, his hands on her breasts. Seconds later the light went on and Hoff appeared, evidently quite drunk. Hettie was searching the coats.
‘Ah there you are,
mein Liebling
, Mr Rief is going – he wanted to say hello and goodbye.’
‘It’s easier to find a coat when you’ve got the light on.’
‘Mr Rief couldn’t find the switch.’
Lysander and Hoff shook hands, Hoff now gazing at him intently, though a little unfocussed.
‘Thank you for a wonderful party,’ Lysander said.
‘You’re the Englishman, aren’t you?’
‘Yes. That’s me.’
‘A happy new year to you. How is your cure going?’
‘I’m pretty well cured – I should say. Yes, I think that’s fair comment.’
Hoff congratulated him and then demanded Hettie help him find more champagne, he said. When his back was turned, Hettie blew Lysander a kiss and left with Hoff. Five minutes later Lysander managed to find his coat and hat and he wandered outside, still trembling from the narrow escape. A love affair wasn’t an arc, as he’d heard it described, it was a far more variable line on a graph – undulating or jagged. It wasn’t smooth, however much pleasure one was deriving from it, day by day. He headed down the drive. Snow was falling, big soft flakes, the road to the station whitening in front of his eyes, unsmirched by wheel tracks, the world going quiet and muffled as a few final, distant bells continued to ring in 1914.
* * *
‘I think you’re right,’ Bensimon said. ‘We’ve done everything – been very thorough. We might as well admit it and call it a day.’