‘145 thou six inch howitz shells to Béthune. 65 wagons-under-load at Le Mans. Repair of telegraph lines Hazebrouk, Lille, Orchies, Valenciennes. New standard gauge line Gezaincourt-Albert. Gun spur engineer store depots Dernancourt. 12 permanent ambulance trains Third Army Second Army.’
He turned to the next page. It went on and on. He carefully placed the three sheets of paper back into the envelope, folded it longways and slipped it in his jacket pocket. He ordered a large brandy and tried to empty his mind. He concentrated on one fact alone, it was enough – for the moment further speculation was a waste of time. He had found his Andromeda.
9. Autobiographical Investigations
I decided, for the moment, to tell no one and do nothing. Something was violently and differently wrong here – not least the presence of my mother. I had opened the envelope expecting to see the usual columns of figures as in the previous six Glockner letters, but instead saw pages of close-written factual prose – all the raw intelligence that Vandenbrook’s role in the Directorate could provide. Not for the first time in this whole affair I felt myself wantonly adrift – seeing a few details but making no connection – and also consumed with the feeling that invisible strings were being pulled by a person or persons unknown and that I was attached to their ends. I needed time to take this new information in, time to deliberate, and I realized I had to be very careful over what my own future movements and decisions were. Perhaps it was the moment for me to go on the offensive, myself. Certain facts needed to be established before I could return to Munro and Massinger with my astounding discoveries. The first course of action was to confront Vandenbrook and see what explanation he would fabricate about the contents of his envelope. Then there was the urgent need to have a conversation with my mother.
John Bensimon’s beard has turned quite grey since I last saw him in Vienna. He’s put on some weight also, yet there’s something strangely diminished about him, I feel, though on reflection it was perhaps the fact that it was England where we eventually met again that was responsible. To be a psychoanalyst practising in Vienna, with your smart consulting rooms just a few blocks away from Dr Freud’s, was a more dramatic and self-enhancing state of affairs than showing your patient into a converted bedroom at the back of a terraced house in Highgate.
Bensimon seemed genuinely pleased to see me, I sensed – perhaps I came trailing clouds of his former glory – and he shook my hand warmly, even though I had knocked on his front door unannounced at the end of the afternoon. He introduced me to his wife, Rachel – a demure, timid woman – and his twin daughters, Agatha and Elizabeth, before he showed me up to his study with a view through the windows of the sooty backs of terraced houses and the long thin gardens that trailed scruffily from them, containing the usual assortment of various-sized, dilapidated sheds that haunt the cluttered ends of these city plots, with their blistered tar-paper roofs, broken windows and creosoted weatherboarding, washing lines and brimming rainwater barrels.
He still had his desk, his turned-away couch and armchair and, I was glad to see, the silver African bas-relief from Wasagasse.
‘Not quite the same,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts. ‘But we must try to do the best with what we have.’
‘How’s business?’ I asked.
‘Slow, let’s say,’ he conceded with a rueful smile. ‘People in England haven’t yet realized how much they need us. It’s not at all like Vienna.’ He offered me the couch or the armchair. ‘Is this a social visit, or can I help you professionally?’
I told him that I wanted to reinstate our old relationship – perhaps a weekly consultation, I said, going to the armchair. I sat down and focussed on the familiar fantastic beasts and monsters, for a moment enjoying the illusion that I was still in 1913 and nothing had happened to me since. In a very real sense, the disturbing thought came to me, I had changed enormously, irrevocably – I was a different person.
‘Is it the old problem?’ he asked. ‘I still have all your files.’
‘No, that seems well and truly solved, happily,’ I said. ‘My new problem is that I can’t sleep at night. Or, rather, that I don’t want to sleep at night because I always seem to dream the same dream.’
I told him my dream – the recurring jumbled experience of my night in no man’s land that always culminated with my bombing of the sap and the image of the two torchlit faces looking up at me – the man with the moustache and the fair-haired boy.
‘What happens next?’ he asked.
‘I wake up. Usually my face is wet with tears, though I don’t recall weeping in the dream. I’m taking chloral hydrate – it’s the only thing that makes me sleep the night through.’
‘How long have you been taking that?’
‘Some months – since Switzerland,’ I said without thinking.
‘Oh, you’ve been to Switzerland. How interesting. Were you there long?’
‘A matter of days.’
‘Right.’ Discreet silence. ‘Well, we’d better take you off the chloral – its long-term consequences can be rather drastic.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You can become over-dependent on it. Its effects can be disturbing. You can – how shall I put it? – you begin to lose your grip on reality.’
‘Whatever reality is . . . Sometimes I want nothing more than to lose my grip on reality. I just want to get to sleep at night.’
‘That’s what everyone says. And then . . .’
‘Well – perhaps we could try hypnosis once more.’
‘Actually, I think this is a perfect opportunity for Parallelism. But let’s take you off the chloral first.’
He wrote me out a prescription for another ‘somnifacient’ and told me that his fee in England was two guineas an hour. We made an appointment for the following week. Cheap at the price, I thought, suddenly hugely relieved that I’d come to see him. I believed that Dr Bensimon could cure me of anything. Well, almost anything.
Talking of which, I told him as I left that I had seen Hettie Bull again and his face darkened.
‘It’s none of my business, but I’d have nothing to do with that young woman, Mr Rief,’ he said. ‘She’s very dangerous, very unstable.’
This evening I was leaving the Annexe when I heard a shout, ‘Rief! I say! Over here!’ I looked round to see a man standing on the other side of the Embankment, leaning on the river wall. I crossed the roadway and saw that it was Jack Fyfe-Miller – but dressed as a stevedore in a flat cap with a scarf at his throat, moleskin trousers and heavy boots. We shook hands and I looked him over, professionally.
‘Almost convincing,’ I said. ‘But you need some dirt under your nails – rubbed into your cuticles. You’ve got the hands of a curate.’
‘The expert speaks.’
‘Black boot polish,’ I advised. ‘Lasts all day.’
‘Where’re you headed?’ he asked, staring at me with his usual strange intensity.
‘Walking back to my hotel.’
‘Ah, hotel life. Lucky for some.’
‘There’s nothing special about it. A small hotel in Pimlico – very average.’
‘Have you got a girl, Rief?’
‘What? No, not really. I used to be engaged to be married, once upon a time . . .’
‘When I find my girl I’ll get married – but she has to be spot-on right for me. Hard, that.’
I was inclined to agree, but said nothing as we walked along in silence for a while, Fyfe-Miller doubtless preoccupied with thoughts of his spot-on girl. From time to time he kicked at the fallen leaves on the pavement with his hobnails like a sulky adolescent, scuffing the stone and sending sparks flying. We walked under the railway bridge that led to Charing Cross and up ahead I saw the grand château-esque rooftops of Whitehall Court. I wondered if that was where he had come from, and perhaps the sight of the building and memories of our last meeting there stirred him as he suddenly became animated again and stopped me.