by William Boyd
After dinner, Angus apologized, said his mother quizzed everyone like a prosecuting lawyer. I said I thought she was a little disconcerted to find herself sitting beside a half-breed. Angus found this very comical. ‘Well, if it’s any consolation,’ he said, ‘Lottie thought you were the bee’s knees.’
The next day – bone-achingly cold – we shot at birds driven through woods by beaters. Then we had a picnic lunch in a wooden hut and shot some more. I couldn’t hit a thing but blasted away energetically to keep up appearances. Dick is a crackshot – birds falling out of the sky. On Sunday I cried off, saying I thought I had a cold coming on, and stayed in the library all morning playing sevens with Lottie (who, I have to say, grows prettier with more acquaintance – she looks better without heavy make-up). But, O! – the brain-numbing tedium of country life. Every now and then Lady Enid would wander in to make sure I wasn’t ravishing her daughter on the Chesterfield. Just before lunch the butler announced that there was a telephone call for Mr Mountstuart. It was Mother: Roderick Poole had rung. ‘He tell me to say you he like you book.’
I could survive anything after that telephone call – the worst that the English pseudo-gentry could hurl at me. I felt I had risen above this bunch of stupid, charmless people (friends excepted, it goes without saying) with their talk about their dogs and their hunting and their boring families. At dinner I sat between a doctor’s wife and some cousin of Lady Enid and chatted away to them like an old friend (I have no recollection of a word I said). All I was thinking of was my book. MY BOOK! I was going to have my book published and these stupid people sat around me ignorant of this fact: they could stew in their Philistine juices for millennia as far as I was concerned.
In the morning when we were about to leave Lady Enid drew me aside. She actually smiled at me: she said her cousin had found me charming company, and she added that they were giving a dance for Lottie in the spring – in London – and she would count it a special, personal favour if I would consent to be Lottie’s escort for the evening. What could I say? But I made a silent vow to stop accepting these invitations, these importunings: these are not my people, this is not a world I want to inhabit. It’s fine for Dick: this is home from home for him – an Anglo version of his Caledonian social whirl – but not for me. Angus is agreeable enough but why should I list him among my true friends just because we were at Abbey together? These are sad English compromises: Paris has made my eyes keener. It will all be behind me soon.
[February]
Sprymont & Drew will pay me a fifty-guinea advance against a 15 per cent royalty. I asked Roderick if this was standard for a first author (to be honest, I didn’t really care, all you want at times like these is for the finished book to be in your hand). He recommended that I acquire a literary agent and he suggested a man called Wallace Douglas who had just started up his own firm after some years at Curtis Brown. Roderick and I went to his club (the Savile) to drink champagne. They will publish in the autumn. The Savile is very civilized; I wonder if I should get Roderick to put me up for membership?
*
Wallace Douglas is a beefy young man (Thirty-two? Thirty-three?) who speaks slowly with a strong Scottish burr. ‘Logan Mountstuart?’ he said, curious. ‘Any Scottish blood?’ Some generations back on my father’s side, I said. Scots are very keen to establish this fact from the outset, I’ve noticed. He dresses like a banker: three-piece suit, white shirt, institutional tie, his hair oiled and neatly parted. He looks like a burly T. S. Eliot. He agreed to take me on as a client and relieved me of five of my fifty-guineas advance.
‘So,’ he said, ‘what next?’
I’m-going to Paris for a while.’
‘Well, what about a few articles? The Mail? The Chronicled American magazines want anything on Paris. Shall I try for you?’
I felt a sudden welling-up of warmth for this confident, over-weight pragmatist. I have a feeling we will become firm friends.
‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘I’ll do anything.’
I sense my life as a writer – my writer’s life, my real life – has truly begun.
Monday, 11 March
I ring Land and suggest lunch. We meet at the Napoletana in Soho and eat meatballs and spaghetti and drink a bottle of Chianti. I tell her my news and the expression of pleasure on her face is one of authentic joy. She is so genuinely pleased for me. I wonder if I could have been quite so generous if the positions had been reversed?… We order another bottle of Chianti and – the wine going to my head – I start talking about Paris and how she should come over when I’m established in my apartment and that my literary agent – how I love to say that: my literary agent – is going to find me work in newspapers and American magazines, and then when my book is published… I pause to draw breath and she smiles at me. All I want to do is kiss her.
[March]
Wallace – I call him Wallace, now – has contracted me to write three articles for Time & Tide and also, remarkably, for the Herald Tribune (on the ‘Parisian Literary Scene’); £30 for the first and £15 for the second. He says that if these are well received there should be plenty more. I can’t wait, and yet I find I am making excuses for putting off my trip. The Land-issue’s not resolved: I cannot go to Paris without something being understood, something established between us.
Tuesday, 2 April
It is late, 11.00 p.m., and I am sitting alone in an empty compartment sipping whisky from my flask as the boat train rumbles out of Waterloo through London’s grimy ill-lit suburbs towards Tilbury. I will be in Paris by dawn.
Land and I dined at PrevitalI’s and then she came to the station to see me off. I kept trying to make her fix a date for her visit but all she would talk about was the election, Ramsay MacDonald, Oliver Lee, the constituency and so on. The train was about to leave when I drew her behind a trolley piled with mailbags and said, ‘Land, for Christ’s sake, I love you,’ and I kissed her. Well, she kissed me back all right: we only stopped when a couple of porters whistled at us. ‘Come to Paris,’ I said. ‘I’ll send for you as soon as I’m set up.’ ‘Logan, I’ve got a job.’ ‘Come for a weekend.’ ‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘Write to me.’ Then she took my face between her hands and kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Logan,’ she said, ‘we have all the time in the world.’ Nunc scio quid sit Amor [Now I know what love is].
[April]
I went to Anna last night at Chez Chantal but somehow it wasn’t the same and she sensed it. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked. ‘Tout va bien?’ I assured her it was and pulled her close to me as if to prove it but it was obvious nothing more was going to happen. I left the bed and paced about the room. Then I poured myself a glass of wine. Anna sat up in the bed, her breasts exposed, looking at me patiently.
‘Is there somebody else you like?’ she asked. ‘Here in Paris?’
‘No. There’s a girl in London… ‘I decided to tell her everything. ‘I’ve known her for ages. We were at university together. She’s not particularly beautiful. She’s intelligent – of course. Her family is fascinating. I can’t seem to get her out of my mind.’
‘Come and tell me all about her.’
So I sat on the bed, we drank some wine, smoked a cigarette and I talked about Land for half an hour. My time was up and when I kissed her goodbye and pressed myself up against her I knew that my sexual energies had returned and regretted that I hadn’t made the most of my two hours with her. I said I would see her again in a couple of days (she was working a five-day week now). But the Land-spell had been broken.
[April]
Move into the Hotel Rembrandt on the rue des Beaux-Arts. For 50 francs a day I get a small bedroom and a sitting room under the eaves and I can have a tin bath of hot water whenever I want for an extra 5 francs. It’s almost as good as an apartment of my own. Ben has quit his place on the rue de Grenelle and now lives in a single room above his new gallery – there is simply no space for me. The gallery is on the rue Jacob and he’s called it ‘Leeping Frères’ – he c
laims the ‘Fréres’ conveys a sense of longevity, the notion of a family business. He does have a brother – Maurice – considerably older than him, a lawyer or an accountant in London, I believe. Wallace has managed to get me a monthly piece in the Mercury at ten guineas a time. Not wild about the Mercury – the scent of pipe smoke, beer and wet tweed lingers about it – but beggars mustn’t be choosers.
Wednesday, 8 May
The Leeping Frères vernissage. I go at 7.00 p.m. – no one there. Ben is very nervous, worried about the quality of the show. He has a Derain, a couple of small Légers, a lot of lurid Russian stuff and a small Modigliani drawing. During the next couple of hours perhaps a dozen people wander in and out but nothing is sold. I buy the Modigliani for £5 and refuse to take a reduction. Ben is cast down and I mutter the usual platitudes, Rome not having been built in a day, and so on.
Anyway, I take him to the Flore for some champagne.
‘Look what you’ve achieved, Ben.’
‘Look what you’ve achieved: you’ve written a book.’
‘You’ve got your own gallery in Paris, for Christ’s sake. And we’re only babies.’
‘I need cash,’ he says darkly. ‘I have to buy now. Now.’
‘Patience, patience.’ I sound like a maiden aunt.
A couple – who know Ben – stop by our table and are introduced as Tim and Alice Farino, Americans both. He is tanned and handsome, losing his hair fast. She is small and pretty with a frowning intense face, as if running on too much energy.
‘You didn’t come to my opening,’ Ben complains – he obviously knows them well.
‘God, I thought it was next week,’ Farino says, lying easily.
‘We forgot,’ Alice says. ‘We had a fight. A bad one – we had to make up. You wouldn’t have wanted us in your nice new gallery.’
Farino reddens immediately, clearly not as languid as he affects to be. We all laugh, the moment defused.
They are here to meet some other Americans and we are asked to join their group at the rear of the café. In the confusion of arrival and because I’ve drunk too much I don’t catch any of the dozen names that are thrown at me. I sit beside a burly square-faced fellow with a moustache. He’s very drunk and keeps shouting down the table at a smaller pointy-faced man, ‘You are full of shit! You are so full of shit!’ It seems some sort of infantile joke between them: they both guffaw helplessly. Ben leaves because he sees a girl he knows sitting alone. I drink on in silence, quite happily, nobody taking much notice of me, fresh bottles of wine arriving by magic at the table. Then Alice Farino slides in beside me and asks me how I know Ben and what I’m doing here in Paris. When I tell her I’m waiting for my book to be published she reaches over me and tugs at the sleeve of the square-faced fellow and introduces us. Logan Mountstuart – Ernest Hemingway. I know who he is but I keep it to myself. He can hardly string two words together by this stage and becomes offensively mock English, all ‘old chap’, ‘Old bean’, ‘old sport’. Alice says: ‘Don’t be a fucking bore, Hem. You’re giving us a bad name.’ I decide I quite like Alice Farino. I slip away to join Ben, who’s with a pale long-faced young French woman with a demure and serious air called Sandrine – I don’t catch her last name. I suspect – with the clarity of vision that heavy drinking sometimes produces in me – that Ben has a serious interest in her. He confirms this as I steer him back to rue Jacob. He is infatuated with her, he says, and it’s causing him anguish because her father has absolutely no money and she is divorced with a young child, a boy. ‘I can’t marry for love,’ he says. ‘It’s not part of the plan.’
He goes to the lavatory to be sick and I prowl around inspecting the stacked canvasses. This room is even smaller than the one at rue Grenelle – a bed, a desk and chair and a filing cabinet. As I mooch about I spot on the desktop an envelope with familiar handwriting.
‘You had a letter from Peter?’ I ask when Ben comes back in.
Ben looks vaguely shifty beneath his pallor. ‘Yes, I was going to tell you – but what with one thing and another… He’s married Tess.’
He hands me the letter. It’s true: they are married and living in Reading, where Peter is working as a sub-editor on the Reading Evening News. Tess is unreconciled with her parents and Peter has been cut off by his father. He says he has never been happier in his life.
I feel a green stain of envy seep through me, followed by a twinge of worry. Why did Peter write to Ben and not me? Has Tess confessed all?
‘There’s probably a letter waiting for you in London,’ Ben says, bless him.
‘Probably,’ I say.
Thursday, 9 May
I am coming out of my bank (with the money for the Modigliani) when I bump into Hemingway. ‘Paris is a village,’ he says, then apologizes for his behaviour, explaining how the presence of a particular friend4 always makes him ‘roaring and meanly drunk’. We wander along the boulevard Saint-Germain, enjoying the spring sunshine, and he asks me how I know the Farinos. I explain. ‘Tim is the laziest man in Europe,’ Hemingway says. ‘But she’s real cute.’ We exchange addresses (he’s married, it turns out) and agree to meet again. We both have books appearing in the autumn5 – he seems quite amiable after all.
Friday, 7 June
Summer has arrived in Paris. I went to Anna’s but her room was stifling hot so we made sure our business was over with quickly. I ordered a bottle of Chablis and an ice bucket and we lounged on the bed, chatting and drinking. I told her I was returning to London in the next few days and she said, almost automatically, that she would miss me and she hoped I would be back in Paris soon.
‘We are friends, aren’t we, Anna?’ I said.
‘Of course. Special friends. You come here, on fait l’amour. We’re like real lovers, except you pay.’
‘No, I mean, it’s more than that, different. You know all about my life. I know about you and the Colonel.’
‘Of course, Logan. And you’re very generous.’
I wondered if it was some kind of house rule that Madame Chantal imposed: that every declaration of affection, sincere or insincere, had to be counterbalanced by a gentle reminder of the true – fiscal – nature of the relationship. I was a little hurt.
And, for some reason, after I left – it was early evening – I decided to wait. I hid in a doorway until the Colonel arrived. At about 8 o’clock Anna emerged from Chez Chantal and the two of them set off, wordless, arm in arm. I followed them down to the Métro station and entered the carriage behind theirs at the last second. I saw them get off at Les Halles and, taking care not to be seen, watched them from a distance all the way to their apartment building. I noted the number and the street name. Now, I wonder why I did this. What do I expect to gain?
Describe your state of mind. Insecure. Uncertain. Feverish.
Outline your emotions. Sexual obsession. Guilt. Intense physical pleasure at being alone in Paris. Hatred of time: wanting to be this age on this day in this week, this month, this year, for ever. Can only imagine the long slow slide awaiting me. Anna-fever vies with Land-fever. But I can satisfy Anna-fever five times a week if necessary. Which seems to provoke Land-fever.
Why are you so obsessed with Paris? In Paris I feel free.
Thursday, 13 June
I go back to London tomorrow. This morning, just before lunch, I went back to Les Halles and waited outside Anna’s building for about an hour, hoping she’d come out. I wanted to meet her just once, far from the ambience and implications of Chez Chantal; I wanted us to encounter each other casually in the street and I would raise my hat and we’d say good day to each other and exchange a few banalities about the weather and go our separate ways. I needed to add a different dimension to our relationship, something everyday that had nothing to do with a brothel or paid-for sex. But of course she never appeared, my feet began to ache, and I felt a fool.
I was passing a little bistro du coin, looking for a bus stop, when I glanced inside and saw the Colonel sitting there, reading a newspaper, a gl
ass of pastis in front of him. Spontaneously, I went in and ordered a beer and sat down casually at the table beside him. Close to, he looked considerably older than Anna – in his fifties I would guess. His clothes were shabby but clean and he wore a yellow bow tie with a matching handkerchief overflowing from his breast pocket. Something of a dandy, then. His little moustache, upswept at the ends, was more grey than black, as was his hair, sleekly oiled back without a part. As he rose to return his newspaper to the rack, I went to claim it. The headlines were all about Poincaré’s6 ill-health.
‘Sad to be ill on such a beautiful day,’ I said in French.
He looked at me and smiled – there was no recognition of course. I felt awkward, realizing I had made love to – had fucked – his wife several dozen times: I wanted to blurt it out – how we both cared for Anna in our own way, how we shared her, about all the tips I gave her that were as much to help him – as if it would make us better acquaintances, somehow.
He made some remark about Poincaré being decrepit, anyway, but I couldn’t understand because his French was so rapid-fire and colloquial – impeccable, in fact.
We went back to our seats and struck up a desultory conversation. He could tell I was English, he said, from my accent – adding, in the polite way all French people do, that I spoke their language remarkably well. I fished a bit, said I thought I could detect a slight accent inflecting his own speech. I surprised him: he was a Parisian born and bred, he declared. I steered the conversation round to a report in the paper of Communist riots in Germany and said they should call the army out, asking him, by the way, about his own military experience. He said he had enlisted in 1914 but had been rejected because of his bad lungs. I bought him another drink and learned a little more: he had been a travelling salesman but his firm had gone bankrupt, and since then… He looked at his watch, said he had to go, shook my hand and left. Clearly no colonel in the White Russian Army, then.