Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd

the fact that the more I become involved with Hettie the more grievous my betrayal of Blanche.
    When I came home that afternoon – the little train carrying me back to Vienna through the encroaching dusk – I went to my room and, locking the door, stripped off my clothes. My body was marked with sooty fingerprints, like the lightest clustered bruises, charcoal dust from her fingertips tracing the passage of her rapid hands over my body. I washed them away with a damp flannel and put on fresh clothes, the impress of her fingers easily effaced. But as I sit here writing this I see in my mind’s eye tantalizing glimpses of her body, remembering vividly moments that we shared. The hang of her breasts as she reached over me for her Madeira glass. The way she stayed naked as I dressed, watching me from the tangled sheet and blanket, head propped on a hand. Then as I left how she slipped out of the bed and reached beneath it for the chamber pot. I stood watching her as she squatted over it, then she shooed me from the room, laughing. I think I am in serious trouble. I know I am. But what can I do?
     
     
    18. Mental Agitations
     
    Lysander began to see a pattern in Dr Bensimon’s questioning, began to sense the direction in which he was being gently led.
    ‘What was your mother wearing when you came home that day?’
    ‘She was wearing a teagown, one of her favourites – satin, a kind of coppery colour with a lot of lace and ribbon at the neck.’
    ‘Anything else you can remember about it?’
    ‘There was a sable trim on the sleeve and the hem. A lot of beading on the bodice.’
    He looked at his notes again.
    ‘You ate buttered toast and strawberry jam.’
    ‘And seed cake.’
    ‘Were there any other jams or condiments?’
    ‘There was anchovy paste – and honey. My mother always eats honey at breakfast and teatime.’
    ‘Describe the room you were in.’
    ‘We call it the Green Drawing Room, on the first floor at the side off the landing on the west stair. The walls are lacquered an intense emerald green. On one wall are about thirty miniature paintings – landscapes of the estate and the house in its setting – I think done by an aunt of Lord Faulkner. Competent but rather flattered by their framing, if you know what I mean. It’s a small but comfortable room – the main drawing room is vast and looks over the south lawn – you can sit forty people easily.’
    ‘So you made instinctively for the Green Drawing Room.’
    ‘We always had tea there.’
    ‘What’s on the floor?’
    ‘A rather fine carpet – a Shiraz – and standard parquet.’
    Slowly but surely the questions drew out more and more precise details. Lysander saw how this parallel day, during which nothing happened, was slowly acquiring a tactile reality – a texture and richness – that began completely to outstrip the original, disastrous day with its cluster of jangling, indistinct memories. That fatal afternoon began slowly to fade and disappear, buried under the accumulating facts and minutiae of the new parallel world. As the sessions continued, he found that he could summon up this new world far more effectively than the old; his new fictive memories, spurred on by his fonction fabulatrice , became concrete, overthrowing his painful recollections, making them vague and shadowy, to the extent that he began to wonder if they were simply the half-remembered details of a bad dream.
    Soon, when tea was over, he had his mother going to the piano – a baby grand – and singing a Schubertlied in her rich mezzo-soprano. Lord Faulkner, lured by the music, joined them and smoked a cigar as he listened, the smoke making Lysander sneeze. Lord Faulkner called for another pot of tea, asking for Assam, his favourite. The fact that all this was an exercise in auto-suggestion didn’t devalue these ‘memories’ at all, Lysander saw. By a sheer act of will, persistence and precision his parallel world came to dominate his memory, exactly as