Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  The price of alcohol in this hotel beggars belief.

  I went down to the ministry early in the morning before the staff arrived and waited. I stopped a young man who seemed to be about the right age and asked him if he was Gunnarson. No, he said, you couldn’t mistake Gunnarson, he was exceptionally tall. Look, he pointed, here he comes. I watched Gunnarson go into the building: he glanced at me, half curiously. He was tall and athletic-looking, his blond hair so fair it was almost white. I thought: this is the man Freya wanted after me… I felt quite sick.

  I waited outside until lunchtime and when Gunnarson emerged went up to him and introduced myself. He was a good half-head taller than me. He had a large hooked nose and looked fit and burly – which is not an adjective you usually associate with exceptionally tall men. He looked like someone who could climb mountains all day long. He seemed more irritated to meet me than anything else, though he perked up a bit when I offered to buy him lunch.

  He took me to a nearby restaurant and ordered some kind of fish stew served with a creamy gravy with cooked radishes and sodden hot lettuce. I could eat nothing and sipped at a hilariously expensive beer while he shovelled food into his mouth as if he were stoking a boiler. I can only think it is his sheer height and bulky energy that attracted Freya. Physically he is the opposite of me in almost every detail. I’m tall and slim enough, but my posture is bad and nothing about my demeanour and comportment suggests urgency. I never walk fast, for example, if I can help it.

  When he finished his stew he ordered the inevitable plate of sweet cakes. As he wolfed these down, he looked at me curiously.

  ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘I feel I know you.’ He spoke good, almost accentless English.

  ‘You’ve probably heard a lot about me.’

  ‘I’ve seen so many photographs of you, yet I didn’t recognize you.’

  ‘I don’t take a flattering photograph.’

  ‘No. I think it was because for me you’ve always been dead. And now here you are in front of me alive. Strange.’

  ‘And Freya and Stella are dead.’

  At this he clenched his jaw and took a few deep breaths.

  ‘She was very beautiful,’ he said. ‘I loved her very much.’

  ‘So did I.’

  ‘Stella was a lovely child.’

  I asked him not to talk about Stella. It wasn’t so bad talking about Freya – because my time with Freya had been far longer than his – but I had missed the last two years of Stella’s short life and I couldn’t bear the fact that this stranger had known her when she was six and seven and I had not.

  ‘Why did you want to meet me?’ he asked. ‘It must be… painful.’

  ‘It is,’ I admitted, ‘but I had to see you, see what you were like. To try to understand. Fill in the gap.’

  He scratched his head and frowned. Then he said, ‘You mustn’t blame her.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  He ignored me. ‘She was convinced you were dead, you see, it was as simple as that. It was the absolute silence that convinced her. She said if you were alive there would have been something – a word, even. She was lonely. And then I came along.’

  I knew what it was like to be lonely. ‘I don’t blame her,’ I said, almost stupidly, as if repeating the words were enough to convince myself. ‘How was she to know I was still alive?’

  ‘Exactly. She thought you were dead, you see. She had to get on with her life.’

  ‘Yes – I can see that.’

  We talked on in a series of random questions and answers and I was able to piece together a picture of Freya’s life while I was away. I realized Gunnarson had his own problems too: he had his own grief; and he had to reconcile himself, now that I was alive and sitting opposite him, to the fact that he was and would always be Freya’s second choice, that her heart had really belonged to me. I was more like the cuckolded husband confronting the lover – and my mind kept forming pictures of Freya and Gunnarson, naked, making love in our bed. I had to curb my imagination violently. It was nobody’s fault, just too desperately, hopelessly sad.

  He said he had to be back at work.

  ‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘You sold my house. I’d like the money.’

  He paused. ‘It was my house. Freya left it to me in her will.’

  ‘I bought that house. That is my house, by natural law.’

  ‘Luckily we don’t live by natural law.’

  ‘You’re a thief,’ I said.

  He stood up. ‘You’re upset. I won’t hold it against you.’

  There is a small artificial lake at the centre of this ramshackle town called the Tjörn that is populated by many wild ducks. I bought a bottle of Spanish brandy at the hotel and went down to the lake to drink myself insensible. The brandy tasted like marzipan-flavoured cooking oil and I could only manage a few mouthfuls.

  [October?]

  NORTHWICH (CHESHIRE)

  George Deverell seems crushed by his loss. His manner is polite but dazed, as if he’s just come round from being knocked unconscious. He seems unperturbed by his ex-son-in-law’s return from the dead. ‘Wonderful to see you, Logan,’ he will say from time to time and pat me lightly on the shoulder as if to confirm that I am indeed flesh and blood. Then you see him inwardly withdraw and shrivel up – I’ve come back and am alive but his daughter and granddaughter have gone for ever.

  Robin has taken over the running of the timber yard completely and is worried by the quiet depth of his father’s misery. He, by contrast, was intensely curious about my experiences. Muttering oaths and expletives as I told him about my parachute jump, my arrest and long months in the villa, going, ‘Bloody hell’, ‘That’s barbaric!’, ‘Jesus Christ’ and the like.

  Two days ago a letter arrived from Iceland containing a banker’s draft for £400. Gunnarson, the honourable Icelander.

  All my belongings are here, boxed and stored – my books, my manuscripts, all my paintings. Even pieces of furniture that the Thomsetts didn’t purchase. I have no home but all the ingredients of home.

  1947

  [March]

  It was my forty-first birthday last week. I see I forgot to note the arrival of my fortieth last year – small wonder. For the record, then, I who once had a wife, a child and a perfect family home now, in my forty-first year, have none of these and live in a damp and fusty room in my mother’s decrepit house. I am rich enough, financially speaking: two years’ back pay screwed out of the Ministry of Defence (with the help of Noel Lange [LMS’s lawyer]), plus the money Gunnarson sent from the house sale. I gave my mother a hundred pounds and told her to spend it on Sumner Place – fresh paint, new carpets, etc. – but I think she’s lost the energy. The house is not exactly a rat-infested slum but hundreds of careless paying-guests have left it grimy and knocked-about. Mother and Encarnación, both arthritic and wheezy, bicker at each other in Spanish. I go for meandering strolls through Chelsea and South Kensington, wondering what to do with myself.

  In Battersea I found the crater made by the v-2. The end of a terrace of houses gone, wooden hoardings round the huge hole. It would have been sudden. The rocket falling silently out of the sky as the two of them walked along, hand in hand, heading back home from school. Just the flash, the noise and then oblivion.

  I can see nothing of myself in Lionel. Perhaps something around the eyes. My eyebrows. The boy has your eyebrows, sir. And he had my hairline: the sharp prow of a widow’s peak. Lottie was cool – I don’t think she can ever forgive me. And Leggatt seems a dotard, not long for this world, I would say. He asked me where I served in the war and I said the Bahamas and Switzerland. ‘I said where did you serve, not where did you go on holiday.’ I told him I had been in the navy and that seemed to shut him up.

  Lionel and I managed to wander round the garden alone for half an hour. He is a quiet diffident boy, nearly fourteen now (Christ!), his eyes always cast down, stiff fingers pushing constantly at his forelock. I asked him if he was happy at Eton. ‘Yes, sir, pretty
much… Sort of.’ Please don’t call me ‘sir’, I said. Call me Father or Daddy. He looked anguished. ‘But I call mummy’s husband “Father” now,’ he said.2 Call me Logan, then, I said. Never call me ‘sir’.

  State of literary play. The Mind’s Imaginings – out of print. The Girl Factory – out of print. The Cosmopolitans – out of print (except in France). Income from journalism – nil.

  Wallace says it takes two to tango. I have to help him find me work. I said I’d been silent too long, everyone thinks I’m dead. Then Wallace had a bright idea: what about your old friend Peter Scabius? What about him?

  *

  Peter [Scabius]’s piece on me in The Times (‘One Writer’s War’) seems to have done the trick: people know I am around once more and I’ve had a small flurry of congratulatory postcards, letters and telephone calls. Roderick has renewed my old job as reader on a piecework basis (£5 per report); Louis MacNeice has invited me to give a talk on ‘Post-War French Painting’ and the Swiss Ambassador has written a letter to the paper denying the existence of the villa by Lake Lucerne and effectively accusing me of being a dangerous fantasist. Many magazines have invited me to write about the Harry Oakes murder, but I’ve declined – I’m keeping my powder dry.

  Peter was – what? – impressed, astonished, admiring? – when we met. Somewhat in awe by what I’d been through. His own war was uneventful: fire watching, then the Ministry of Information and another novel – Iniquity – to follow up the success of Guilt. ‘You’ve got to use all that stuff,’ he said to me. ‘It’s heaven sent. Money in the bank.’ I humoured him and said I was writing a memoir to be called ‘From Nassau to Lucerne’, although I remained resolutely uninspired. If I had no money it might be different, I realize, but I’ve more than enough for the next year or so. I spend almost nothing, living very quietly, though I’ve started to go to pubs again, the bigger and more crowded the better.

  Mother says her varicose veins cause her continual pain. Encarnación is suffering from piles. I go to the optician to be fitted for reading glasses. The house of mirth.

  I have had no sexual contact, no intimacy of any kind, since February 1944 (my last days and Freya). Only sporadic bouts of masturbation testify to the fact that the libidinous side of my brain has not shut down entirely. What sick Victorian cleric dubbed the practice self-abuse? Self-help, more like, self-support, self-solace. Auto-eroticism keeps you sane. I should record this for curiosity’s sake; the image in my mind as I pleasure myself these days is not Freya (too achingly sad) but Katrin Annasdottir, the receptionist at the Borg Hotel in Reykjavik. Obviously something more must have registered in me during our few encounters apart from her helpfulness and efficiency. Funny, these sensual fingerprints left on your imagination, only revealing themselves much later. Like invisible ink emerging when warmed by a light bulb or candleflame. What was it about Katrin that sneaked its way into my sexual archive?

  [July-August]

  In the George with MacNeice and Johnnie Stallybrass from the BBC. MacNeice banging on at me to write a radio play about my months in the villa. Make it a monologue, make it mythic, make it a dream, he says, you can do anything on radio. Good money too: with one radio play – broadcast three times – he says I can make as much as a schoolteacher does in a year. MacNeice is off to India to report on the Partition.3 I envy him. Sudden desire for travel. Buxom girl behind the bar in the George. Tight blouse flattening her fat breasts. The sap may be rising at last.

  Friday, 10 October

  Dinner at Ben’s. About a dozen of us crowded round two pushed-together tables in his dining room. Five of my Mirós hanging on the wall. A mixture of friends, potential buyers, artists and family. Ben uses these dinners as a kind of informal private view, changing the pictures on the wall according to who is coming and how deep their pockets are. As he welcomes each guest he says, ‘Don’t be shy. If you like something, speak up. Everything on the walls is for sale.’

  Sandrine never stirs from her seat: Ben does all the clearing and serving, aided on this occasion by Marius. He’s twenty now – a handsome boy in a sulky, brooding way. Clothilde [Leeping – Ben and Sandrine’s daughter] is away at boarding school. I sat beside Sandrine and she indicated a dark, delicate-featured, good-looking man. She whispered, ‘Ben thinks he’s the only real talent in English painting. The only one he wants to buy.’ I asked her what his name was. Southman,4 she said. I should keep a note. Ben tells me he thinks he’ll sell the Mirós soon but not until he’s back in Paris – he’s asking huge sums. They move back to Paris at the end of the year. Ben has found new premises for a gallery. ‘The Americans are coming back,’ he says. ‘I’m going to make you a lot of money.’

  [December]

  Baldwin5 dead. Makes me think of the Duke and Duchess – how they hated him. I’m laid up with a bad flu that has gone bronchial – cough like a sea lion’s, throat-tearing. As I lie here shivering, despite the two bar-radiators pointing at me on either side of the bed, I have a vision about my future life. It’s a question, it seems to me, of who travels lightest, travels furthest’. Huge desire to be as free of ‘things’ and possessions as possible. All that stuff I have packed up in boxes… What bliss it would be not to have to think about it all any more.

  1948

  [January]

  I have bought a basement flat in Pimlico. 10 B, Turpentine Lane. It has a bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bathroom. You descend steepish steps to the front door. From the back bedroom there is a view of a small garden to which I have no access. The sitting-room window looks out on to the deep basement well. All the essentials seem in good running order and there are new gas fires in the bedroom and sitting room. I am having it painted white distemper and the floor will be lined throughout in rubberized cork tiles. I need only the most essential furniture: two armchairs, a bed and bedside table, a long table and chair for me to work at. I sold (almost) all my books to Gaston’s in the Strand and will sell my paintings to Ben.

  It strikes me now that I may have picked up a façon de vivre at the villa on Lake Lucerne. Less is more. We shall see.

  Wednesday, 11 February

  Paris. Ben took me as his guest to a grand dinner at the house of a man called Thorvald Hugo, a great collector of modern art. Picasso was there and his new muse, Françoise [Gilot]. Very pretty girl – mind you, so was Dora Maar (more my type). Picasso is quite bald now and the hair on the side of his head is grey. Face seamed and belligerent. He was full of energy and humour: the more he appeared to be enjoying himself the more Françoise became moody and on edge. He had no memory of meeting me before (why should he?), but when Ben told him I had been in Madrid in 1937 he became very curious and moved round the table to sit beside me. I said I’d been there with Hemingway, whom he knew a bit. He had seen Hemingway in Paris after the Liberation and told me how Hemingway claimed to have killed an SS officer. ‘That man killed a lot of animals,’ he said, ‘but animals don’t shoot back.’ He wants to take me to dinner, he says, and talk some more.

  Ben thinks I’m mad to sell my paintings. I said, just because I’m selling these doesn’t mean I won’t be buying some more. He’ll give me a fair price. His new gallery is on the rue du Bac but from the way he talks it seems to me he sees Paris purely as a springboard to propel him into New York. He’s planning to rent space there for a show next year. That’s where the real money is, he says. That’s where he’ll sell the Mirós.

  Back to days and nights of walking through my favourite Paris quartiers – a flâneur and a noctambule once again. On the surface Paris looks unchanged, as beautiful and as transporting as it always has been, untouched by whatever went on during the war. But there are food shortages and darker currents flow beneath the surface. Everyone not a Communist seems terrified by the Communists. A jangly, hysterical atmosphere.

  I was sitting in the Flore watching the tourists trying to spot Sartre (he doesn’t come here any more because of the tourists trying to spot him) when I had the glimmerings of an idea for a nove
l. A man goes to his doctor and is told he has a week left to live. The novel is about the last seven days of life he has left to him and what he does in them: an attempt to encapsulate all forms of human experience in one week. Everything from impregnating a woman to committing a murder… To be pondered. For the first time in ages a quiver of literary excitement. There is something in this.

  To the Brasserie Lipp. Me, Ben, Sandrine, Marius, Picasso, Françoise. Picasso talks a great deal about Dora [Maar], which doesn’t seem to bother Françoise. I asked how she was and Picasso said she was going mad. We talked about my visits to Spain in the Civil War, and Picasso was very intrigued by my story of the machine gun, to the extent of making me act it out. Did you hit the armoured car, he asked? Yes. Did you kill them? I doubt it, I said. But you saw the bullets strike the car? Indubitably.

  Picasso seems to me one of these wild, stupid geniuses – more Yeats, Strindberg, Rimbaud, Mozart, than Matisse, Brahms, Braque. It’s quite tiring being with him.

  We parted at midnight and walked homeward, Ben, Sandrine, Marius and I – relieved to be out of the Picassian pressure-cooker. Ben cock-a-hoop: Picasso has agreed to sell him directly (not through Kahnweiler [his usual dealer]) two pictures for his New York show. He put his arm round my shoulder: just keep talking about Spain, he said. Marius was unable to understand how someone as young and pretty as Françoise wanted to be with a man forty years older than her. We all laughed. As we gently teased Marius for his naivety, I felt simultaneously the ineffable sadness of my loss and also a growing comfort, a warmth – a realization that these old friends of mine, the Leepings, were in a way my true family, that my life was and would always be bound up with theirs, whatever happened.

  Turpentine Lane. Back from Paris. All the work in the flat is finished and the place looks like a cross between a laboratory and a stage set for some experimental play. There is nothing ‘modern’ about it at all – no glass or chrome or leather, no curved wood or abstract wall hangings. It is about the absence of adornment, the nonexistence of clutter. The light struggles to reach the sitting room and I leave the lamps on all day. This is my bunker and I will be happy enough here, I think.