by William Boyd
Wednesday, 30 November
Monte Carlo. Hotel Bristol et Majestic. Lottie is having a nap in our room and I am sitting in the foyer scribbling these lines. The honeymoon is well and successfully underway. She is so sweet and lovely, my new wife. We spent our first night at Claridge’s (Lottie was a virgin – she said she was sore – Land never said this. I must stop thinking and writing about Land). The next day we caught the boat train to Paris and came on overnight on a sleeper to this curious little principality.
The wedding was – all right, I suppose. I made Angus my best man so as not to have to choose between Ben, Peter and Dick (who were all ushers). The strangest thing was seeing Tess again, now so smart and prosperous-looking in her wide hat and fur coat. When we spoke she looked me straight in the eye and every conversation seemed to have its secret subtext. I know she has told Peter nothing, just as I know she is still attracted to me. I must say the locals are a dire bunch. Some of Lottie’s friends from London seem more interesting but I dread the thought that when we move this will become our social circle. I’ve just ordered a brandy and soda. I shouldn’t drink this early in the afternoon but, what the hell, I am on my honeymoon.
[December 1932–January 1933]
Movements. Monte Carlo – La Spezia (to see Shelley’s last house at Lerici) – Pisa – Sienna – Rome. Rome – Paris (on an aeroplane – this is the way to travel). Paris – London. London – Thorpe Geldingham.
1933
[February]
Thorpe Hall, Thorpe Geldingham, Norfolk. Our home is halfway between Swaffham and Norwich. ‘Hall’ sounds a little grand for what is in fact a perfectly agreeable two-storey, redbrick farmhouse, Georgian, but with bay windows and a porch added in the last century to make it seem more substantial and justify the epithet ‘Hall’. This is our wedding present from Aelthred and Enid. The garden is about two acres and has a stream at its bottom that runs into a large pond – today quite frozen over. We are in dead of winter and one’s mood is correspondingly moribund.
Lottie and her mother spend all day buying furniture and meeting decorators while I sit in my study and pretend to work. I had to let Glebe Place go – there was no justifying the expense of keeping up a London house, empty – and all my books and paintings, my rugs and throws, are assembled in this small room with its view of the frozen grey garden. I realize I own very few possessions. Everything we have here in Thorpe, or almost everything, has been provided by my parents-in-law: the house, its furnishings, the motor car in the barn. Lottie is adorable, so excited to be creating this home for the two of us. She’s started calling me Logie – which I can just about bear in the privacy of the marital bed – but I heard Enid say this morning, ‘Perhaps Logie’s dressing room should be panelled?’ I couldn’t stand being Logie Mountstuart to the whole of Norfolk.
I walk around ‘my’ garden. We have a gardener, a cook and a housemaid. I go into my study and spread out my books and dictionaries for The Cosmopolitans. I’m planning to translate a sizeable selection of their poetry. After an hour’s work I see I’ve managed to translate two lines – which read and scan very badly. So I go into the drawing room and pour myself a whisky and soda and smoke a cigarette. I can hear the cook and the maid talking in the kitchen. It is 3.30 in the afternoon and already the winter night is gathering outside. Perhaps I’ll go to London next week – see Mother, go to the London Library, lunch with Peter if he’s free. The vicar is having supper with us tonight, for some reason.
[March]
To Edgefield for the weekend. This is the third weekend we have spent with my in-laws since the year began. I remonstrated gently with Lottie about why we have to stay so often with them when her mother practically lives in our house. Lottie put on her ‘hurt’ face and said that Edgefield is her home – just because I never had a proper home I don’t understand. I shut up.
[May-June]
Thorpe Geldingham. Well named. I am the gelded writer: the capon, the bullock, the castrato. I simply can’t work here. I rise late, I do The Times crossword, I have a gin and tonic at eleven, and a bottle of wine at lunch. Then I go to my study and doze over my books. I have a whisky and soda and a stroll in the afternoon, a bath, change, mix a cocktail, dine, drink more wine, finish with a brandy and a cigar. Lottie appears to be in seventh heaven. I am twenty-seven years old and my life seems to have been ambushed somehow. Out there in the world my two books are selling, my name appears above articles in newspapers and magazines, but here I stew in this rural purgatory. I see my parents-in-law far too often. Angus comes down from London and stays from time to time, but I daren’t invite any of my other friends. We give dinner parties, we are invited to dinner parties where I try to drink as much as possible. I go up to London once a fortnight to see Wallace, Roderick, my mother and those of my friends that are free for lunch. I’m no longer invited to London parties – it’s as if my marriage and my move to Norfolk have erased my name from every guest list in the city.
Que je m’ennuie
Dans ce cabaret du Néant
Qu’est notre vie
[Léon-Paul Fargue]
Monday, 10 July
Lottie has just returned from a visit to the doctor in Norwich and has informed me that she is pregnant. The child is due in early December – a March conception, then. What were you doing in March, Logan? No idea. How do you feel? Be honest. I feel numb, shocked, panicky, angry. Do you feel happy, knowing you’re to be a father? I blame myself – I used no protection, yet I have a drawerful of condoms in my bathroom. I must be calm. There has never been a conversation between us about starting a family.
Lottie was thrilled, but when she saw the look on my face she began to wail. I reassured her, said it was a shock but in fact I couldn’t be happier. She stopped wailing and telephoned her mother. She returned to say that Aelthred and Enid insisted on us driving over to Edgefield for a celebratory dinner this evening. I quizzed Lottie gently about her prophylactic. Sometimes she forgot to put it in, she confessed – but it doesn’t matter, does it, darling? It must be fate. Fatal fate.
August
Lottie is unwell. She is delicate. The health of the baby is paramount. The first summer in years with no travel abroad. I writhe in agonies of wanderlust. London is empty, everyone away. Strange dreams of Spain dominate my mind.
Alicante. Cartagena. The road from Seville to Granada.
Cante Andaluz ringing in my inner ear. Oily taste of salt cod and tortilla. That hawk-nosed girl in the brothel at Almería who opened her dressing gown as I passed her doorway to let me see her naked body.
*
New gramophone. A present for myself. Liszt, Chopin all day. Brahms so beautiful it makes me suicidal. Debussy: terrible envie de Paris.
What was the name of that hotel in Juan-les-Pins? Hotel du Midi? Central-Moderne? Beau Séjour?
All writers should be poor in their youth. The urge to earn produces enormous stamina and resources of energy.
I’m not writing but, thank God, have suddenly discovered the joys of reading.
Authors of the moment: Sterne, Gerhardi, Chekhov, Turgenev, Mansfield.
Moved on to Monteverdi, day and night. Lottie, irritable and tetchy, hates the sound of music in the morning. ‘Why is that, my darling?’ ‘It’s not normal to listen to music before lunch.’ Define normal.
It is easier to read in the country than in the city. Discuss.
Chekhov: ‘I am neither liberal, conservative, gradualist, monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else.’
Logan Mountstuart, his moods:
(a) normal – outwardly calm, inwardly stoical
(b) abnormal – drink-induced sentimentality. Everything in life is sweet and lovely
(c) dangerous – outwardly taciturn, inwardly rampant self-loathing
I remember Evelyn [Waugh] saying that Oxford was the worst preparation for adult life. He said he was far more mature at the end of his school career than at the end of his university care
er. Doesn’t apply to me. EW, like Peter, loved Oxford; I couldn’t wait to leave the place.
Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto. [Thanks to life which has given me so much.]
I am forcing myself to read a page of To the Lighthouse each day and am finding it incredibly hard going. It seems such a silly book: compared to Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf is so ‘girly’ in her writing. Silly. Girly. My God, what an impressive critical vocabulary, Mountstuart. I’d better start writing criticism again if this is the best I can do. Must be losing my grip.
First chill in the evening. Urge to have the fire lit in my study. The endless summer is over. This afternoon a late ray of sun hit the vast cloud of midges over the garden pool. The air full of shifting golden dust.
Saturday, 9 December
Our son is born, here at home in Thorpe, just before midday. I was in the drawing room, fearful and apprehensive, when the midwife came in all smiles and took me up to Lottie. Lottie exhausted but happy. I feel that I have a brick wedged somewhere behind my ribcage making it very hard to breathe. A sense of my life being entirely out of my control – which is not the same as out of control. We are going to call him Lionel Aelthred Mountstuart.
Sunday, 31 December
Analysis of the year. I can hardly be bothered to write this. No travel. Norfolk – London – Norfolk. Growing hatred of England and its countryside, hatred of railway travel, hatred of church spires glimpsed through windows of railway carriages. Hatred of ploughed fields. Hatred of grass. Hatred of the upholstery in railway carriages. Hatred of (please fill in blank space).
I have a fine house, three servants (four if you count the nurse), a pretty, rich wife, and a new son.
Ambitions: to see Venice, Greece. To finish The Cosmopolitans.
Work: two bad chapters of The Cosmopolitans. Five articles, two book reviews. Pathetic. Yet my royalty cheques tell me I am a successful writer. TMI and TGF still flourish and thereby create an illusion of industry and success. How long can it last?
Friends made: none.
Friends lost: none.
Friends renewed: Peter, (Tess?).
Friends in limbo: Angus (he is fundamentally shallow – un nul).
1934
Thursday, 25 January
Terrible, awful moment at the font yesterday during the christening when I suddenly realized that no son of mine should ever be called Lionel, let alone Lionel Aelthred, but it was too late. What a legacy, Lionel Mountstuart. I shall have to think up a nickname for him: Budge, Midge, Bobo – anything. Peter was a godfather with Angus; Brenna Aberdeen and Ianthe Forge-Dawson godmothers. Brenna is actually good fun (in small doses). I can’t abide Ianthe – Lottie’s best friend.
Peter stayed the night. We sat up late with the port decanter and talked. Tess couldn’t come as she’s expecting child number two to arrive at any moment. Something in Peter’s tone of voice – he’s in London Monday to Friday, now – made me suspect that the marriage is in difficulties. He told me he was writing a detective novel in his spare time – following my example.
Friday, 16 February
Stood for a good ten minutes at the foot of Lionel’s crib watching him sleeping. I tried to analyse my feelings as honestly as possible but could find nothing in me other than banalities: how all babies look similar in their first three months of life; that it is amazing they have such tiny toenails and fingernails; and what a shame it is that speech arrives so late. Perversely, now is the time I would most like to talk to him. Imagine if by some miracle a baby could speak in its first weeks of life – how we would see the world afresh, anew.
At supper Lottie speculated on where we might go this summer and said that we would require a house big enough to accommodate a baby’s room and a nurse’s – and we’d need at least two spare bedrooms in case ‘Mummy and Daddy’ visited or the Forge-Dawsons came to stay. Cornwall might be fun, mightn’t it, Logie?
[February]
Here is my problem, this is why my work stagnates. I spent all afternoon trying to translate five lines of Henry Levet’s Afrique occidentale:
Dans la vérandah de sa case, à Brazzaville,
Par un torride clair de lune Congolais
Un sous-administrateur des colonies
Feuillette les ‘Poésies’ d’Alfred de Musset…
Car il pense encore a cette jolie Chillienne…
It only works in French, in English it becomes banal, clumping, it loses all its aching melancholy romance. This is how Les Cosmopolites haunt me – heat, Africa, literature, cafard, sex… But it only works in French. ‘In the torrid Congolese moonlight/A minor colonial official/riffles through the “poems” of Alfred de Musset.’ No no no. Give it up, Mountstuart.
Wednesday, 21 February
Yesterday, after lunch, making no progress with chapter three of The Cosmopolitans, I decided to motor into Norwich to buy a ream of typing paper – at least it was a vaguely writerly thing to do on a Tuesday afternoon. I told Lottie I’d be back in time for supper and headed off. Just as I arrived at Norfolk it hailed, briefly, heavily, for a few seconds, and then the sun came out very bright and clear. Road works – gas mains – diverted the traffic round towards the station and spontaneously I pulled into the station car park. I sat there for a while thinking about my life and what I was going to do and then went and bought a one-way ticket to London.
I walked out on to the platform remembering my ends of term at Abbey and how this station symbolized only disappointment and defeat to me. But today as I stood there waiting for the London train, empty handed, unburdened – apart from my raincoat and my hat – I felt as free and excited as I had ever been before. Norwich Station: gateway to the world. It was a wonderfully pure form of selfishness; I was thinking of no one but myself – not Lottie, not Lionel, not my mother. All I wanted to do was discard the life I had and start another one afresh.
Wallace talked me out of it. I went to his offices on the Strand and told him what I’d done and asked him to find me a newspaper or a magazine prepared to send me abroad, anywhere, now. He calmed me down and asked me what had happened. I told him.
‘What about your motor?’ he said.
‘It’s parked outside the station.’
‘And the keys are in your pocket?’
‘Ah… Yes.’ I produced them: evidence of my thoughtlessness.
‘Passport?’
‘At home.’
Good, solid, sensible, pragmatic Wallace. So, we worked out plan Β. I telephoned Lottie and told her I was in London, spinning some tale about how I’d rung Wallace and he’d summoned me down forthwith on urgent business. I told her I’d be back tomorrow. Wallace invited me to spend the night at his home in Wandsworth and there, for the first time, I met his wife (Heather) and their three sons and two daughters, aged between fifteen and nine years old. Somehow I had never even bothered to be curious about Wallace’s domestic life and I looked on in some amazement to see him in the middle of this large, genial family.
After dinner we sat in the drawing room. The room was lined with bookshelves filled with the various editions of his clients’ work. He asked me where I wanted to go. Africa, Japan, Russia, I said. But where would you really like to go, he insisted gently? Spain. Right, he said, that shouldn’t be too hard to arrange.
MARCH
Hôtel Rembrandt. Paris. Wallace has managed to contract me for three articles for the Graphic: £5 for 500 words on Granada, Seville and Valencia. No expenses. Slightly under my usual rate but I wasn’t in a position to haggle. I also managed to whip up a couple of commissions for Art Review so I should emerge from the excursion with a little profit. I said goodbye to Lottie and Lionel, managing to keep the silly smile of exultation off my face. Why did I wait so long? I must never let this damaging frustration build up again. I have to recognize that I’m simply not equipped, temperamentally, to stay at home and live a circumscribed, rural, English life. I absolutely need variety and surprise; I have to have the city in my life – I’m essen
tially urban by nature – and also the prospect and reality of travel. Otherwise I’ll desiccate and die.
Yesterday Ben took me to meet Picasso at his studio. Ben doesn’t know him that well and Picasso seemed a bit grumpy and uncommunicative until Ben happened to mention I was en route for Spain, at which point he warmed up and gave me the addresses of two excellent restaurants in Barcelona. I asked him what he was working on and he said, wait and see. He spoke French with a thick Spanish accent. He was wearing a shirt and tie – it seemed odd to put on a tie to paint. He seemed a small, aggressive man and I sensed in him a wariness of Ben and me. What were these two young Englishmen doing in his studio? There must be an ulterior motive. I suppose he was right, in a way. Not that I cared: I was just glad to be out of England.
I dined with Pierre Lamartine, my publisher at Cahier Noir. He’s a slim, pensive man with a lock of hair draped across his forehead like Herr Hitler. He’s given to long pauses in his conversation. I told him about The Cosmopolitans and he managed to seem politely interested, though clearly, like all my other publishers, he would like another novel. ‘Les Cosmopolites sont…’ Long pause. ‘Un peu vieux jeu,’ he said with an apologetic shrug.
Tomorrow I catch the train south from the Gare d’Orsay. I should be in Bordeaux in time for dinner at the Chapon Fin. Then I plan to go Bordeaux – Toulouse – Perpignan, cross the border at Port Bou and from there on down the coast to Barcelona – Valencia – Granada – Seville. I think I may even head on to Lisbon after Seville and perhaps catch a steamer home to Southhampton.
Là, tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté
Luxe, calme et volupté