by William Boyd
I walked out this evening to the bottom of the garden and smoked a cigarette. Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty years’ time, if we’re still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years’ time I’ll be in my mid sixties and I realize that these forward projections that you make, so unreflectingly, in your life are beginning to run out. Suppose I’d said in forty years’ time? That would be pushing it. Fifty? I’ll probably be gone by then. Sixty? Dead and buried, for sure. Thank Christ I didn’t plant an oak. Is that a good definition of marking the ageing watershed? That moment when you realize – quite rationally, quite unemotionally – that the world in the not-so-far-distant future will not contain you: that the trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see them.
Friday, 14 October
We have a little girl. Born at 8 o’clock this morning. I had a telephone call from the hospital and went round immediately. Freya was exhausted and dark-eyed. The baby was brought out for me and I held her in my arms, a little angry red thing, tiny hands beating the air as she screamed her lungs raw. We are going to call her Stella – our personal star. Welcome to the world, Stella Mountstuart.
1939
Saturday, 14 January
Distressing letter from Tess Scabius, addressed to me alone and marked ‘Personal and Confidential’. In it she tells the story, as she sees it, of Peter’s constant infidelities and the appalling strain they put on the marriage. She asks for my help: ‘I never suspected this of Peter when I married him and I know you would never imagine him capable of this sort of behaviour. Quite apart from the harlots in London he is now seeing a woman in Marlow. He still regards you as his closest friend. He admires you and respects you. Logan, I cannot ask you to make Peter love me again as he used to, but for pity’s sake he has to be asked to stop these shameful affairs. I am at the end of my tether and I know everyone in the village is aware of what is going on. Can he not be a gentleman and spare me and our children this cruel humiliation?’ And more of the same. Poor Tess.
Friday, 20 January
I rang Peter and he asked me to luncheon at LuigI’s to celebrate the publication of his third thriller, Three Days in Marrakesh. I should have said he left The Times last year. He is, by all surprising accounts, a far more successful writer than I am. I’m glad to say I do not possess a scintilla of envy for him.
*
Later. We lunched, and it was most enjoyable. He has changed, Peter – there is a worldlier, coarser streak in him. In mid sentence his eyes would follow a young waitress as she walked across the room and he endlessly passed remarks about the other women in the restaurant: That’s not her husband’, ‘She could be a beauty if she dressed better’, ‘You can smell the sexual frustration coming off her’ and such like. Maybe this is the effect of constant adulteries. Though he confessed he felt more relaxed with prostitutes: he says he’s a regular with two or three. He recommended the practice to me – pleasure without responsibility, he said. I reminded him I was extremely happily married. ‘No such thing,’ he said. It was the perfect cue, so I told him about Tess’s letter. That shook him: he went very silent and I could see there was a fury building in him. ‘Why would she write to you?’ he kept saying. I didn’t enlighten him. But at least I’ve done my duty by Tess. I wrote to her telling her what I’d done. Those days in Oxford seem centuries ago, now.
Newspaper placards in Soho as I catch a bus home: FRANCO AT THE GATES OF BARCELONA.
[March]
Well, that’s it, I suppose, now Hitler’s in Prague.35 Oliver Lee was right, and now ‘Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist.’ My sentiments of last October look like foolish wistful desperate dreams. And Franco has all Spain now – which will please Mother. I write this at the kitchen table as Freya holds the baby to her breast. In the cupboard beside her the gasmasks sit in their cardboard boxes – never returned. War must come now and Danzig will be the next crisis. And what will you do in this coming conflict, Logan? What will Daddy do in this war?
Roderick has offered me the job of reader at Sprymont & Drew at £30 a month. I asked for £40 and he told me Plomer36 at Cape gets the same, so I could hardly argue. I suspect Roderick is trying to tie me into the firm as I had told him Summer at Saint-Jean was almost finished. One has to wonder at his logic: journalism is so time consuming, and now that I have to read manuscripts all week and compile reports on them, it is going to make it virtually impossible to write anything else.
Small but sustained success of Les Cosmopolites in France. Cyprien writes to say he is being feted again as if it were 1912 and he was an eminent man of letters, ‘grace à toi.’ I must go back to Paris before Armageddon arrives.
[July]
Aldeburgh. We’ve rented a small house in the town here for July and August – forever drawn back to Norfolk for some reason. I go up to London when business demands but I’ve relished our first two weeks here and am reluctant to move. The fresh silver light off the North Sea, the lure of vanishing horizons. I work all morning, writing journalism or, more than likely, reading manuscripts for S&D (which seems to be taking up more and more of my time). Then if the weather’s fair we have a picnic on the beach – take a travelling rug, a thermos and sandwiches, sit on the shore and watch the waves roll in on to the pebbly strand. Stella is a beautiful, round-faced, plump-cheeked, blue-eyed, golden-haired stereotype of a baby girl. Curious and jolly. We sit her down and put a pile of pebbles in front of her and we watch the baby pick up, examine and let fall pebble after pebble while we sit and chat. Freya’s started to help with the reading of some of the S&D manuscripts – I think she rather misses the BBC.
I managed to persuade Lottie to let us have Lionel for a weekend, given we were close at hand. It was not a success. Lionel seemed terrified of Freya and I began to wonder what nonsense Lottie had put in his head – or that bitch Enid more like. He seemed more relaxed with me and I tried to do the right sort of Daddish things. We kicked a football around the garden for an hour and eventually he said, ‘Daddy, how long do we have to play this game?’ To be blunt he seems an average child with nothing remarkable in any area as far as I can see – not bright, not charming, not funny, not cheeky, not handsome. And to make matters worse he has all the worst aspects of the Edgefield physiognomy. Once he asked me if I was married to Freya. Of course I am, I said. He frowned at this and said, ‘But I thought you were married to Mummy.’ I explained. ‘Does that mean you’re not really my Daddy?’ he asked. I’ll always be your Daddy, I said and, God help me, almost started to cry.
[July]
Fleming asked me to lunch at the Carlton Grill. It seems he’s still a stockbroker but now has some sort of clandestine role in the Admiralty. He said ‘a lot of people’ had been very impressed with my articles on the Spanish War. I told him that 90 per cent of what I’d written had been published in America. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘those are the ones that impressed us.’ He talked about the future war as if it were already taking place and asked me what my plans were. To survive,’ I said. He laughed and leant across the table and said – very cloak and daggery – that he would count it a personal favour if I ‘would hold myself in readiness for a special post’. He said the job would be based in London but would be a vital one for our war effort. Why me? I asked. Because you write well, you’ve seen war at first hand and you have no illusions about it. On the way out, and I’m sure this was arranged, we bumped into an older man, in a grey suit of very old-fashioned cut, who was introduced as Admiral Godfrey. I was being quietly evaluated.
Monday, 7 August
Tess Scabius is dead. She drowned in the Thames, Peter told me – incoherently – over the phone. She hadn’t returned home at tea time after a walk and Peter wandered down to the river to look for her. He saw a crowd of people and police about half a mile downstream and strolled o
ver to see what the fuss was all about – to find they had just dragged Tess out of the water. She’d been gathering flowers and slipped on the bank. And she couldn’t swim. ‘A terrible ghastly accident,’ he said.
What a hellish awful shock. Dear Tess. I think back to our stolen Sundays in Islip and the intense storm of emotions that was generated in that hard damp bed in the little cottage. And I acknowledge what you did for me, Tess. Accident? I doubt it. I think she had had enough. Thank God, thank Christ, at least I bearded Peter about his rutting and fucking. I told Freya, who could see how upset I was, and I told her something of our shared history: the challenges at school; Tess’s audacious following of Peter to Oxford. I said I thought I’d been a bit in love with her at the time and jealous of Peter. I thought it best not to tell her of our affair.
Sunday, 3 September
Battersea. A warm hot day. Freya and I listen to the prime minister’s broadcast announcing that we were now at war with Germany.37 Stella crawls about the kitchen floor making little high-pitched yipping sounds, which signal intense and almost insupportable pleasure. I hug Freya and kiss her brow. Don’t join the army, she whispers, I beg you. So I tell her about Fleming’s offer and we pray it holds good.
Later I walk out into the garden alone and look up at the blue sky and the few cruising clouds. It’s steamy and warm. Church bells are ringing. I feel strangely relieved: like a seriously ill patient suddenly being diagnosed – It’s serious, Mr Mountstuart, but there is no need to despair.’ The confirmation of the worst news does, paradoxically, clear the mind: at least the way ahead is obvious and people know what they have to do. But as I stand in my narrow garden this warm summer day I wonder if it will end in oblivion for the three Mountstuarts and I feel fear seep through me like icy water.
1Anna Nickolaevna Brogusova: the prostitute LMS regularly frequented in Paris 1928–9.
2André Maurois (1885–1967), French writer, had published, in 1923, his own romantic biography of Shelley, entitled Ariel.
3Oliver Lee, MP for Stockwell South, 1927–55.
4F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) was in Paris at the time.
5A Farewell to Arms.
6Prime Minister of France at the time.
7Ramsay MacDonald had formed the second Labour government in June.
8Cyril Connolly (1903–1974), critic and writer. He and his wife, Jean, were currently living at 312a, King’s Road.
9Lady Maud ‘Emerald’ Cunard (1872–1945), society hostess, mother of Nancy.
10Waugh was twenty-seven and had recently been divorced from his first wife.
11Cyprien Dieudonné (1888–1976), belletrist and poet. Part of a group known as Les Cosmopolites, which included Valéry Larbaud, Léon-Paul Fargue, Henry Levet, etc.
12Mahatma Gandhi (1868–1948) had recently been released from prison and was participating in the Round Table conference with the Viceroy of India.
13In fact they collapsed in July.
14LMS’s tailors in Maddox Street, London WI.
15At some stage in 1932 the two had met again. Peter Scabius was now an assistant editor at The Times. Peter and Tess’s son, James, was born in 1931.
16The British Union of Fascists, founded in 1931.
17John Galsworthy had won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.
18Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933.
19Sally Ross, his fiancée.
20Juan Gris (1887–1927), painter.
21Tender is the Night.
22A painter friend of Duncan Grant.
23See The Diary of Virginia Woolf Volume IV: 1931–5.
24The writer (1908–64). Creator of James Bond.
25King George V and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). The Prince of Wales now became King Edward VIII.
26The club in St James’s.
27Waugh was currently engaged to Laura Herbert, whom he later married.
28The King, having abdicated, became Duke of Windsor. He broadcast his reasons for his decision to the nation on 11 December.
29Martha Gellhorn (1908–98). Journalist. Later became the third Mrs Hemingway. In Madrid she was working for Collier’s Weekly magazine.
30The Spanish Earth, a documentary, directed by Joris Ivens.
31Joan Miró (1893–1983), Catalan artist. Hemingway owned The Farm’, purchased in 1925 for $250.
32Provided exclusively for Hemingway by the Republican government.
33The initials stand for ‘Complete And Utter Cunt’ – LMS’s ultimate term of abuse.
34Europe came close to war in the autumn of 1938 as Hitler threatened to march into German-speaking Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, flew to Munich and there, in a four-power meeting (Germany, Italy, France, Britain), it was agreed that the Sudetenland be ceded to Germany. The Czechs were not invited to be present. Chamberlain returned triumphant from Munich bearing a piece of paper signed by Hitler expressing the desire ‘of our two peoples never to go to war together’.
35Hitler’s troops entered Prague on 15 March ostensibly ‘to protect’ Bohemia and Moravia from the newly seceded Slovakian state.
36William Plomer (1903–73). South African writer and reader at Jonathan Cape Ltd for many years.
37Hitler had invaded Poland on 1 September. Britain had issued an ultimatum that the German forces had to have withdrawn by 11.00 a.m. on the 3rd. Hitler had not complied.
The Second World War Journal
True to his word, Ian Fleming was in touch during the first week of the war and Logan Mountstuart was offered a job in the Naval Intelligence Division. This celebrated intelligence service was housed in the Admiralty Buildings off the Mall and was run, in 1939, by Admiral John Godfrey (Fleming was his assistant). Mountstuart was created a lieutenant (special branch) in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. Within the organization of NID he was attached to the propaganda department with particular responsibility for monitoring intelligence coming out of Spain and Portugal and was also instructed to come up with clever schemes to ensure that both countries stayed neutral. At first this involved no more than the placing of anti-German stories (which had relevance to Spain and Portugal) in as many press outlets as possible. Mounstuart also advocated leafleting the populations of the key cities, Lisbon, Oporto, Barcelona and Madrid. He liked NID: it was a relaxed, faintly raffish but proudly efficient institution. He also thought he looked very smart in his navy blue uniform (handmade at Byrne & Milner) with its undulating gold bands at the wrist.
Initially Freya and Stella went to stay with the Deverells in Cheshire but, as the foreseen mass bombing of London never occurred, they moved back in early 1940. Peter Scabius volunteered to serve in the Auxiliary Fire Brigade. Ben Leeping and his family left Paris in October 1939 and he set up a small gallery (still Leeping Frères) off Duke Street in St James’s. The keeping of a diary during wartime by serving men and officers was forbidden. LMS seems to have been aware of this and the narrative flow is often interrupted until something of genuine interest happened to him.
1940
Monday, 10 June
I took Faustino’s Mirós into Ben’s gallery today and laid them out on the floor of his viewing room. He practically had to grab a chair to stop himself falling over. ‘Have you any idea what a collection like this means?’ he said. I explained their strange provenance. ‘Well, I suppose possession is nine tenths of the law,’ Ben said. ‘You’ve no idea who they belonged to?’ I told him it was a mystery, but such aspects of the story that could be established would be vouched for by Ernest Hemingway.
Ben seemed all a-quiver, as if his brain were working too fast. He kept saying that this was the sort of thing that happened once or twice in a dealer’s lifetime. I said I was short of money, that they’d sat in a cupboard in my house for three years and something had to be done. In the end Ben paid me £300 for them but said he would sell the biggest one on my behalf – when, he wasn’t sure: he would wait until the market was right or the perfect buyer or b
uyers came around. He was almost overpoweringly grateful to me but not so grateful that he couldn’t spot a bargain. Paul Klee1 is very ill, he said, and offered me an extra hundred pounds for my little Klee. I said I’d hold on to it for the moment, thank you very much.
Lunched in a restaurant by the BBC – liver sausage and salad. Is rationing beginning to bite already? Did my talk on Joyce with Geoffrey Grigson (prickly, chippy man), but I was very complimentary about Horizon2and he was mollified, somewhat.
Wednesday, 26 June
One of our new commanders in NID turns out to be James Vanderpoel3 – who I was at school with. Still the same powerful stocky figure but now with a pointed ginger beard. A navy man through and through and, I think, a little discomfited to find me amongst his underlings. We went for a walk in Green Park and reminisced about Abbey. He told me some news about my coevals and I realized I’d lost all interest in them. Telephone call from Dick Hodge this evening. Great excitement: he’s joined the Royal Marines. I told him I was in the Wavy Navy. Doing what, he asked? Very hush-hush, I said. How wonderful to be able to use that expression in all seriousness.