Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  Hugo let slip today that there is a new director of the prison. I asked to see him. Request denied.

  August. At about two in the morning I was wakened by the rise and fall of a siren and I thought at once it was an air raid. Two guards came in and ordered me to get dressed. I was hurried downstairs and pushed through the front door and on to the gravel. Three other prisoners were there: we blinked and stared at each other like Victorian explorers meeting in the jungles of Africa, shy and tongue-tied. Others joined us, fetched out from the various floors of the big house: eleven in all, identically dressed in grey tunic, black trousers and heavy clogs. The alarm was genuine – there was a fire in the kitchen. Some sort of fire appliance was driven round the back of the villa and we could hear shouts and breaking glass. It was the most excitement we’d had in months and the guards were restive and curious. While they were distracted by the fuss, I turned to the man next to me and said, in English, ‘What’s your name?’ ‘Nicht verstehen,’ he whispered, ‘Deutsche.’ So this was the enemy. ‘Englander,’ I said. He looked at me, baffled, then pointed at another man: ‘Italiano,’ he said. A guard shouted to silence us. Who are we, I thought? What are we doing here in this villa by Lake Lucerne so strictly and solicitously guarded? What have we done?

  August. As usual my denied request to see the new director produced its familiar tardy results. I was led down to the drawing room and introduced to a young American with round horn-rimmed glasses. ‘I don’t exactly know what to do with you, Mr Peredes,’ he said apologetically. I went through the rigmarole of explanation again. ‘This is a security – intelligence – matter at root,’ I said. ‘If you could get the OSS to pass this on to London, then I’m sure something could be worked out.’ Then he told me that Dulles had closed down the OSS. ‘Since when?’ I said. He blinked at me, surprised: ‘Since the end of the war in Europe.’ He told me the war was over, had been over for some months, and I felt both sudden panic and huge relief. The end had to be in sight now – but why were we still being held incommunicado like this? I gave him Freya’s name and address and implored him to send a message saying I was alive and well. He said he would do his best. Please, I said, as the guard led me to the door, just do that one thing for me. ‘Battersea, England?’ he shouted after me as the door closed. ‘Battersea, London,’ I shouted back. I hope he heard.

  I catch fewer and fewer glimpses of my fellow prisoners (glimpses were all I ever had), and this infrequency means that I’m beginning to worry that I’m left alone in this villa. I asked Paulus (another guard I’ve christened) what was going on now the war was over and he said, ‘Oh, they keep us busy.’ I asked to see the director but was told that the director was now based in Berne. I said that if I didn’t get to see the director I would go on hunger strike. ‘Hey, Gonzago,’ he said, looking hurt. ‘Tranquilo, hombre.’

  15 December 1945.I left the villa by the lake last night dressed in the freshly laundered clothes in which I had been arrested. I was supplied with official-looking documentation, a form of temporary identification paper issued by the Ministry of the Interior, which announced that I was one Gonzago Peredes, citizen of Uruguay. I was driven in a truck to a railhead at the Italian border, where I joined a group of two hundred other displaced persons (mainly Croats and Romanians) and we were put on a closed train for Milan. We were interned awaiting interrogation in an internment camp (campo 33) near Certosa. My days in the villa by Lake Lucerne were over. Finally I was on my way home.

  [NOTE IN RETROSPECT. 1975. My recent reading has now convinced me that the circumstances of my arrest and incarceration in Switzerland 1944-5 were complicated by a moment of panic that occurred in Swiss military intelligence. From the beginning of the war the Swiss had a spy planted at the heart of the Nazi regime and received a flow of first-rate intelligence material from this source. In 1943 a security blunder had put this secret link at risk and the Swiss became increasingly uneasy that they were being fed compromised information and that a German invasion of Switzerland was growing more and more likely, with the aim of making the country an impregnable lynchpin in the Germans’ wider plan of ‘Fortress Europe’. This state of high sensitivity did not really begin to subside until after D-Day on 6 June 1944. My clandestine arrival in the country in early ‘44 could not have come at a worse time. I had parachuted into a snake pit of paranoia, military trepidation and raw nerves. Everything about me – the Uruguayan connection, the mysterious ‘Ludwig’, my own admission that I had come to contact high-ranking Nazis – made me the object of massive suspicion. Whoever betrayed me could have had no idea of the consternation I would cause.]

  Wednesday, 19 December

  Campo 33. Certosa. Strange to be accumulating possessions again. My own suitcase, a change of clothing, a shaving kit, some American magazines – signs of my re-entry into the real world. I managed to speak to a British liaison officer called Crozier this afternoon. An intelligent man, he could see that my story was true, however fantastical it seemed on first hearing. I almost wept with joy when I saw credulity replacing scepticism in his eyes. He said he would cable London immediately. I asked him to cable Freya also and handed him a letter I’d written to her. He promised it would be delivered and gave me a notebook and pen and ink. He suggested that I write everything down in the form of a memorandum while the details were relatively fresh and warned me there would be some strenuous debriefing and interrogation up ahead before I would be sent back home. So tonight I will write down all I can remember about the ill-fated ‘Operation Shipbroker’. But after my conversation with Crozier my heart was distinctly lighter: I walked back through the swarming camp towards my hut, through the riff-raff, the dispossessed and les misérables of Europe, looking about me with a fond and benevolent eye. Hitler is dead, evil vanquished, we have won the war. Logan Mountstuart’s life can begin again.

  1Klee died on 29 June.

  2. The magazine, recently launched and edited by Cyril Connolly, to which Grigson contributed.

  3. Seep. 44.

  4. David Eccles, on secondment to Lisbon from the Ministry of Economic Warfare.

  5. France had surrendered on 22 June. Britain now stood alone against the Axis powers.

  6Piper Alistair Fletcher was in the Scots Guards.

  7. This was a plot by the Germans to lure the Duke to Spain and ‘safety’.

  8Churchill had cabled: ‘I have now succeeded in overcoming War Office objections to the departure of Fletcher.’

  9PRO FO 931 33/180 in the Public Record Office.

  10. The British battleships Repulse and the Prince of Wales had been sunk by the Japanese in December. Hong Kong was occupied. The Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor occurred on 7 December 1941.

  11Melville Road had been damaged by a near-miss in April. Before repairs could be effected the house was burgled.

  12Lady Laeticia had married Sir Hugh Leggatt (Bart.), a widower and neighbouring landowner twice her age, in 1941.

  13Louis MacNeice (1907-63), poet, then working as a talks producer at the BBC.

  14Major Grey Philips – the Duke’s comptroller.

  15Oakes, who had discovered the world’s second-richest gold mine in Canada, was the richest man in Nassau and the colony’s biggest benefactor.

  16Actually the Banco de Continente.

  17Philip Guedalla (1889-1944), writer, a friend of the Windsors who wrote a pro-Windsor account of the Abdication Crisis, The Hundred Days (1934).

  18Godfrey was sacked in 1942.

  19Fleming had fallen in love with Ann O’Neill, later Ann Rothermere, and later still Mrs Ian Fleming.

  20It was published in June 1943 by Murray Ginsberg Ltd. By November sales were over 30,000.

  21Double Lives (1943).

  The Post-War Journal

  The post-war journal is a strange and often disturbing document, not surprisingly, given the desperate circumstances that met Logan Mountstuart on his return to England in late January 1946.

  The brutal facts are these.

&nbs
p; When LMS did not check into the Hôtel du Commerce in February 1944 and was arrested the next day he effectively disappeared from the surface of the earth as far as NID was concerned. The last person who could testify to having seen him alive was Flight-Sergeant Chew – who had watched him step out into the night air through the hatch in the side of the Liberator bomber. The contact ‘Ludwig’ reported that LMS had never gone to the hotel as arranged. All attempts at discovering what had happened to him were fruitless. (This makes one wonder who the ‘Ludwig’ was that sent the message to the Hotel Cosmopolitan – giving some credence to LMS’s persistent accusation that he was betrayed).

  In NID, after a few weeks of total silence, it was assumed that LMS had met with a fatal accident or been killed – a fate that befell many agents who parachuted into Europe. The parachute could have failed to open; he could have made a landing on a mountainside and broken a leg, fallen into a lake or been dropped in the wrong place – in occupied France rather than Switzerland. None of these could be discounted and as the days went by NID feared the worst.

  In March, Freya Mountstuart was visited by Commander Vanderpoel, who informed her that her husband was missing, presumed dead. He told her only that LMS was an NID agent and had parachuted ‘somewhere in Europe’ on a secret mission. The effect on Freya can be imagined. The devastating news was confirmed when she was awarded a war-widow’s pension. To all intents and purposes Logan Mountstuart was dead. LMS’s mother was informed and so was Lionel. A mass was held in Brompton Oratory attended by a few friends (Peter Scabius, notably) and some colleagues from NID (Plomer, Fleming, Vanderpoel).

  Freya and her young daughter now had to cope as best they could. Some months later, probably in August, she met Skuli Gunnarson, twenty-nine years old, a member of the Icelandic Liaison Committee based in London. They began to see each other socially and in October they became lovers. Freya’s letters home to her father and brother mention Skuli with increasing frequency. Stella also liked him a great deal, it was reported.

  In December, Freya married Skuli Gunnarson and he moved into Melville Road. Mercedes Mountstuart was a witness to the wedding and toasts were drunk to LMS’s memory at the small party held afterwards in a room above the Lamb and Flag, Battersea.

  In late January 1945 Freya discovered she was pregnant. Two days later she and Stella were killed by the blast from a v-2 rocket as they were walking home after infant school. Thirteen other people were killed in the explosion.

  In October 1945 Gunnarson sold Melville Road and returned to Iceland.

  LMS arrived from Milan at an RAF base in Wiltshire in January 1946. He cabled Freya and went straight to London, to Melville Road – where he discovered his house was now owned and occupied by a Mr and Mrs Keith Thomsett and their three children. It was Mrs Thomsett who inadvertently set the sequence of appalling discoveries in motion when she remarked to a frantic and worried LMS that it was ‘a terrible shame about that poor Mrs Gunnarson and her daughter’.

  The post-war journal is the hardest of all in which to fix the month, let alone the day. LMS’s random and inaccurate datings are all that can be relied upon. Even the years may be suspect.

  1946

  Hodge is a cunt, soi disant and says he has every right to be one, having left a leg in Italy. I am a cunt for letting him rile me, poor pathetic bastard.

  Walked the river, seeking beauty. Saw it but felt nothing. We drank a bottle and a half of whisky between us last night. Hodge stinks: I told him to have a bath. He says he hates the sight of his scarred stump.

  FreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreya FreyaFreya

  FreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreya

  FreyaStellaStellaFreya

  Freya

  Stella

  Freya

  Stella

  FREYAFREYAFREYAFREYA

  Free

  Right

  Everloved

  Young

  Always adored

  Stella, my daughter. Freya, my wife. Stella Mountstuart. Freya Mountstuart

  [The journal is full of these anguished doodlings.]

  Took Dick out on a drive up the tweed valley to Peebles. Cool blustery day, the first fatigued leaves ripped off the trees. All the way he talked about the mistake he had made in never getting married. ‘Look at me now,’ he said. ‘Who’d take me. A one-legged drunk.’ Tonight, sitting by the fire, I began to weep quietly – couldn’t help myself, came on with absolute spontaneity – thinking of Freya and Stella. ‘Stop blubbing,’ Dick said. ‘You’re only feeling sorry for yourself, it’s got nothing to do with Freya and Stella. They’re fine, they’re atomized dust blowing in the breeze. Free as air. They’re not thinking about you. I can’t abide self-pity, so shut up or get out.’ I almost hit him. I went to my bedroom. Can’t sleep.

  Is this worth recording? I experienced what can only be described as a spasm of happiness – the first since I heard the news – when I managed to work out (with a toothpick) a shred of mutton that had been stuck in a crevice between two back teeth. It had been resistant to everything it was so firmly wedged. I grinned spontaneously. Must have been real pleasure. My mind forgetting. Am I healing?

  Hodge lectured me again on Freya and Stella. Thirteen other people died when that explosion happened, he said. Thousands of Londoners died from bombs or rockets, many of them women and children. Millions of people died in the war. You could have been a German Jew – lost your entire family in the gas chambers – wife, children, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents. It’s an awful bloody terrible tragic thing but you have to see them as victims of a global armed conflict, like the millions of other victims. Innocent people die in a war. And now we’re casualties too. I said, you can’t equate my wife and child with your fucking leg. Yes I fucking well can, he bellowed at me. To me – to me – my lost leg is more important than your lost wife and child.

  Couldn’t sleep so I pulled on a coat over my pyjamas, put on a pair of gumboots and walked around the gardens. One of those light, star-filled, northern nights. An owl hooted and I walked through a cloud of perfume from some scented shrub, almost palpable, it seemed to flow round me carried by the breeze. I urinated, hearing the patter of my urine on the gravel clearly, like a fire crackling. I mooched around, not thinking, just taking in the information my senses provided, not cold, until the first birds began to sing and the dawn-light began to restore the colours to the old house and its unkempt garden.

  Lucy [Sansom]1 took me to an old café she knew in Leith while we waited for the boat. She’s much stouter and her hair is greying but, beneath the accumulation of flesh, you can still see the pretty girl I used to fantasize about. She was very sweet to me: the perfect antidote to Dick’s brusque rationalizations. We drank tea and ate toast and jam. Outside Edinburgh rain turned the grey sooty stone black, like velvet. Lucy has a cottage at Elie in Fife, which she offered to lend me if I ‘needed some peace and quiet to work’. What work? I said. You’re a writer, for God’s sake, she said. You’ve got to keep on writing. She asked me if I was sure I was doing the right thing. I said I had to. I said that it was the only chance of a purging – a sense of it finally being over.

  September 1st

  We should dock at Reykjavik tomorrow. It’s been good being at sea these last few days. The voyage calming and restful. I stand at the rail for hours and look at the sea and the sky. Why does the sea induce these feelings of transcendence in us? Is it because an unobstructed view of overarching sky meeting endlessly stirring water is as close as we can come on this earth to a visual symbol of the infinite? I feel more at peace than I have for months.

  Reykjavik. Impressions of a town of painted concrete and corrugated iron and of various-sized, tarpaulin-covered things. When in doubt the Icelanders seem to cover anything with a tarpaulin. It was raining heavily when we docked and in the hour it took me to disembark, find a taxi rank, wait in the queue and be driven to the hotel, the rain stopped, the sun shone fie
rcely, it rained, hailed and the sun shone again. If this is the norm it will drive me mad. I’m staying at the Borg. I had a lunch of German sausage, pickled cucumber and smoked salmon and a plate of small sweet cakes as a dessert. Now I begin my search for Gunnarson.

  It has taken me two days to find Gunnarson; everyone has been politely helpful in answering my inquiries. There’s a pretty girl on reception who has translated when required (her name is Katrin Annasdottir). Gunnarson turns out to be a civil servant in the Icelandic equivalent of the Ministry of Agriculture. I wrote him a letter and handed it in at the door, telling him who I was and that I was staying at the Borg. Tonight comes a message saying that he, Gunnarson, has no reason or need to meet me.