by William Boyd
[September]
I ran into Peter [Scabius] at the London Library and he invited me to join him for a drink. He was meeting a ‘friend’, he said. In the pub the friend was already there: a young woman, in her early thirties, I would say, sitting on a stool at the bar with a gin and tonic in front of her and smoking a cigarette in a holder. ‘This is Gloria Nesmith,’ he said. ‘Ness-Smith, Petey,’ she corrected him, then to me: ‘Pleased to meet you,’ though it was immediately clear she wasn’t. I could tell that I was a deliberate gooseberry – Peter had brought me along to pre-empt some row. She was a small, pretty woman with prominent cheekbones. Her voice was curious, almost stagey, and she was wearing very high heels to give herself a few more inches. She smoked her cigarette, finished her drink and then said she had to leave. As she kissed Peter goodbye I saw her dig her nails into the back of his hand. After she’d left he held it out: three little crescents welling blood. ‘She’s incredibly dangerous,’ he said. ‘I should give her up but she fucks like a stoat.’ I said I wasn’t familiar with the simile. ‘You wouldn’t be,’ he said, pleased with himself. ‘I made it up, just for Gloria. You’d have to fuck her yourself to know what I mean.’ He looked at me slyly. ‘Maybe you should,’ he said. ‘Get her off my hands.’ ‘How’s Penny?’ I asked. ‘You bastard,’ he said, laughing.
[November]
Vanderpoel is no longer in the navy – he’s the headmaster of a girls’ boarding school near Shrewsbury. I took the train down to meet him and we had an edgy uncomfortable lunch together in his ugly new house. He’s removed his gingery matelot’s beard – which is a mistake aesthetically – but maybe it’s required that the headmaster be clean-shaven. Lunch was served by his young wife (Jennifer, I think) who promptly disappeared and I could hear a baby crying somewhere. Perhaps a wife and a child are also necessary elements for headmastering. Who knows? Who cares? Vanderpoel was not particularly pleased to see me, but he had read Peter’s article in The Times when it had appeared, so was at least familiar with the abrupt failure of ‘Operation Shipbroker’ and the consequences that had befallen me. He was hardly curious, I have to say. But I had plenty of questions, the first being: whose idea was the whole thing?
‘That chap Marion’s,’ he said. ‘He was seconded to us for a few months.’
Who was he? Where had he come from?
‘Not sure. Could have been from Supreme Headquarters, now I come to think of it. Maybe the Foreign Office. I think he was a diplomat before the war. He was very well connected anyway.’ He looked at me patiently. ‘It was a long time ago, Mountstuart. I can’t remember all the details. And, anyway,’ he went on, ‘even with a little bit of hindsight you have to admit “Shipbroker” was a first-class idea. Who knows how many Nazis we might have caught.’
‘First class or not,’ I said, ‘I was betrayed. I was set up like a sitting duck. The police were waiting for me at the hotel. Only NID had all the details on me. You, Rushbrooke and Marion.’
‘I resent that.’
I showed my exasperation. ‘I’m not accusing you. But somebody sent me on that mission knowing I’d be arrested almost immediately. You must see that.’
‘It wasn’t me and it certainly wasn’t Rushbrooke.’
‘Where’s Marion now?’
He said he had no idea. He, Vanderpoel, was a member of a dining club of ex-NID staff and he promised he would ask around, discreetly. I had one further question.
‘Do you know if Marion had any connection to the Duke of Windsor?’
Vanderpoel actually laughed at this, a strange wheezy sound, and he covered his mouth with his hand.
‘Really, Mountstuart,’ he said, ‘you are priceless.’
1949
[Saturday, 1 January]
Saw in the New Year at Peter’s home in Wandsworth. Quite a large party, forty or so, most of whom I’d never met. Peter’s wife Penny is sweet and jolly, plumper since her two children. I was surprised to see Gloria Ness-Smith there and told her so. I think she liked my bluntness, liked the implication. There was no need for any pussyfooting between us. ‘He wouldn’t dare not invite me,’ she said. ‘I’d kill him.’ She used to be a nurse, she said, and now worked as a secretary in Peter’s publishers. ‘But not for long,’ she added. I suspect Penny’s role as Mrs Scabius hasn’t much longer to run.
Gloria was drinking gin and had her drink topped up twice as we chatted. At one stage she leant into me, her pushed-up breasts flattening against my arm. ‘Peter envies you,’ she said. I asked what on earth for? Peter was the paradigm of the successful novelist – why should he envy me? ‘He envies you your glamorous war,’ she said. ‘He can’t buy that. He can buy everything else, but he can’t buy that, and he envies you.’ There was pure glee in her chuckle. Jesus Christ, I thought. Then she leant into me once more, before wandering off to look for Peter, leaving me with an unequivocal erection. At midnight, I told myself that, even if I wasn’t happy, my load of unhappiness was maybe beginning to diminish, ever so slightly.
[February]
Letter from Vanderpoel. Colonel Marion died in April 1945, in a ‘motor vehicle’ accident in Brussels. According to Vanderpoel there were two other fatalities. He had asked his old NID contacts, but as far as he could establish there was nothing suspicious in Marion’s death and he had no apparent connections to the Duke of Windsor.
So much for my great vendetta, so much for the tireless hunt for my betrayer. Isn’t this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs – the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth. I wanted to hunt down Marion, wanted to confront him, but instead am left with the banal conclusion that, more than likely, there was no conspiracy, and that the Duke and Duchess had not plotted with their powerful friends to have done with me. Hard to live with, this: hard to come to terms with the fact that it was just another botched operation, another baffling run of bad luck… Feelings of depression; feelings of frustration; feelings of emptiness in the face of all this randomness – done down by the haphazard, yet again.
[April]
Hôtel Rembrandt. Paris. I’ve come here to work on my novella, The Villa by the Lake. It can only be a novella, I’ve decided, a cryptic, Kafkaesque, Camusian, sub-Rex Warnerish parable of my bizarre incarceration. I’ve no idea how to end it, however. Perhaps Paris will inspire me. Wallace said he could obtain a large advance if I wanted, but I persuaded him not to. It’s one of those works that will have to find its own voice and conclusion – and even then I won’t know if it has succeeded. It seems to be going relatively well. All I do is try to recapture the routines and atmosphere of the villa with maximum fidelity, but I’m aware that the reality was so strange that readers will think it all profoundly symbolic and metaphorical. That’s my fond hope, anyway. Also I realize that any hint of pretension, any effort to turn up the significance, will be fatal. The more I make it resolutely true to life, the more all metaphorical interpretation will be unconsciously supplied by the reader.
There is a pretty girl called Odile who works in Ben’s gallery. In her mid twenties, dark, with short untidy hair and big eyes. She wears black all the time and gold strappy sandals on her unabashedly grimy feet. Ben told her I was writing a book about my time in prison during the war and I could tell she was intrigued. If I can’t have Gloria Ness-Smith, perhaps Odile will consent to be my passport back to the world of human sexual relations.
My routine is straightforward. I wake up, take two aspirin for my hangover headache, and go out for a breakfast of coffee and croissant at a café. I buy a newspaper and my lunch – a baguette, some cheese, some saucisson and a bottle of wine. By the time I come back my room has been cleaned and I sit down at my work table and try to write. I eat out in the evenings, usually at the Leepings – it’s open house, Ben says – but I like to give them some time without me so I take myself off to Balzar or chez Lipp, or other brasseries for a solitary meal. I don’t mind a day spent entirely in my own c
ompany but I do drink a lot in compensation: a bottle at lunch, a bottle in the evening, plus apéritifs and digestifs.
I asked Odile if I could take her to dinner and she said yes, immediately. We went to Chez Fernand, a little place I’ve found on the rue de I’Université. Odile dreams only of going to New York when Ben opens his gallery there, so we speak English to each other to help her practise. It strikes me that this may be the real nature of my appeal: her own pet anglophone. She has brown, long-lashed eyes; downy olive skin.
I walk Odile back to her Métro station. I lean forward to kiss her on the cheeks and she moves her face so that our lips meet. We kiss gently, the tips of our tongues touching and I feel that old familiar weakness spread at the base of my spine. We agree to see each other later in the week.
Friday, 15 April
Odile was here last night. We ate at the Flore and came back to the hotel. She has a lithe, girl’s body. I was useless, incapable of maintaining a semi-erection for more than a few seconds. My mind was swarming with images of Freya – she might as well have been in the room watching us. Odile patiently masturbated me and, when that had no prolonged effect either, generously bent her head to take my cock in her mouth, but I told her not to bother.
She sat up and lit a cigarette as I tried to explain how my wife had died in the war and how I still couldn’t get over it. In the war? she said. But the war was a long time ago. I agreed it was and apologized. She said, ‘Maybe I better go,’ and dressed and left me. I slept a few hours of a sound and dreamless sleep.
But when I woke – an hour ago now – I felt a quality of despair and darkness grip me that was entirely new. Three years on I am living as vividly with the loss of Freya as I have ever done. And the rain is falling outside. The melancholy drip, drip, drip.
I have taken my two aspirin for my morning headache and have taken two more and two more and two more and two more and two more and two more. I fetched my bottle of whisky out of the cupboard and put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign. I have begun to drink my whisky, slowly washing down the remaining aspirin in my pill bottle.
I know what I am doing but somehow the situation seems quite unreal – as if I’m on stage acting in a play. I just feel – I don’t know what I feel. The decision came to me this morning and I don’t think it has much to do with the humiliation of last night. I know it must be done. It’s a rainy, grey morning in Paris. All over the city there must be other people dying, on the point of death or dead. I’m another to add to their number. I don’t fear death, I simply think for me here, now, it’s the best and only solution. The decision came to me, quite matter-of-factly. I drink more whisky. I will keep on writing. People will say: did you hear about Logan Mountstuart? He killed himself in Paris. I drink more whisky. There are no more pills. I begin to feel drunk – or is this the beginning? I am committing suicide. It seems absurd. Forty-three years was long enough for me. I wasn’t a complete failure. There is some of my work that will
[At this point the words become an illegible scribble and stop.]
1She was now a lecturer in Medieval History at Edinburgh University.
2During the years of LMS’s disappearance and presumed death, Lionel had been formally adopted by Leggatt as his son and heir. LMS made no recorded objection to this state of affairs.
3India and Pakistan were formally separated on 15 August 1947.
4Probably Graham Sutherland (1903-80).
5Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister at the time of the Abdication Crisis.
The New York Journal
Logan Mountstuart was discovered an hour later by Odile, who popped by the hotel on her way to work to recover her cigarette lighter – a prized silver Zippo – which she’d left on the bedside table. LMS was rushed to hospital, where his stomach was pumped, he was sedated and put on a saline drip. Two days later he left to spend a month with the Leepings before returning to Turpentine Lane. No one in London, including his mother, ever seemed to have learned about the suicide attempt.
He began a process of psychiatric care and analysis at Atkinson Morley’s, a neuropsychiatric hospital in Wimbledon, where he was a patient of Dr Adam Outridge. Dr Outridge prescribed a mild sedative and sleeping pills and advised LMS to cut down on his drinking. Dr Outridge also encouraged him to proceed with his novella, The Villa by the Lake, which was published in 1950 to serious and enthusiastic acclaim (‘One of the most haunting and unusual novels to have come out of the last war’ – Listener) and very modest sales.
Meanwhile Ben Leeping opened his New York gallery, Leeping Fils, in May 1950 on Madison Avenue between E. 65th and 66th Streets. Marius Leeping moved to New York to run the gallery. At the core of Leeping Fils’ business would be the ‘classic’ modernists of twentieth-century European painting, but Marius’s brief was to be on the lookout for new talent emerging in New York. Artists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell were starting to create a stir and the ‘Abstract Expressionist’ movement, as it shortly after became known, was beginning to turn the attention of the art world away from Paris to New York.
Ben Leeping felt that Marius’s age (he was twenty-three) and inexperience demanded that he have an older associate director of the gallery whom he could trust and, just as importantly, one on whom Ben Leeping could rely as well. LMS, now fully recovered, and his novella published, was the obvious choice.
Thus it was, at the end of 1950, that Ben Leeping offered him the job of associate director of Leeping Fils at a salary of $5,000 a year. The real purpose of the appointment was to have someone keep a close and guiding eye on Marius. LMS did not need much persuading: he closed up Turpentine Lane and sailed for New York in March 1951.
When LMS arrived in New York he spent a few days in a hotel before renting an apartment on E. 47th Street between First and Second Avenues (the first of many New York addresses he was to occupy in a peripatetic existence). It was not the most salubrious of areas but was a convenient twenty minutes’ walk from the gallery.
He and Marius then began a thorough and comprehensive trawl of all the established and new galleries in New York as well as the transient co-op galleries showing the younger artists’ work. Ben Leeping had provided a $25,000 acquisition fund for them to make their initial purchases, money furnished by the final sales of the Peredes Mirós (of which LMS’s Miró netted him some $9,000).
At a party, about two months after he arrived, LMS met a divorcée called Alannah Rule who worked in the legal department of NBC. She had two young daughters, Arlene (eight) and Gail (four). LMS began to see Alannah socially. Their affair began – with perfect timing, as LMS always said – on 4th July 1951.
The New York Journal commences in September of that year.
1951
Friday, 21 September
So here I am in New York, writing again, working again, fucking again, living again. I decided to restart this journal largely because I’m beginning to grow worried about Marius and want to have some aide-mémoire about his actions and behaviour. Ben has absolute faith in him but I’m starting to wonder if it’s somewhat misplaced. I also think his taste is bizarre, not to say dangerously skewed. We argue constantly about what is good and bad and what artists we should try to patronize. I have a horrible premonition about Marius and this gallery and want to have all the evidence I might need well documented and to hand.
For example: I’m always the first here in the morning, even before Helma (our receptionist). More often than not Marius doesn’t show up until after lunch. My whole strategy, agreed with Ben, was to add to our core European stock as shrewdly as possible and not worry about making a splash. The town is full of galleries and co-ops – Myers and de Nagy, Felzer, Lonnegan, Parsons, Egan – to name our obvious rivals. Reputations flare up and die away within the space of a few weeks and we need to make sure that anyone we show – given our pedigree and the Parisian clouds of glory that we trail – has some legs. Marius – let’s be blunt, and this has nothing to do with his charm – has
no aesthetic judgement as far as I can see. He seems to react on a whim, or worse, the whim of the last person he was talking to. Anything that Greenberg1 suggests he takes up uncritically. I keep telling him: don’t board a crowded train leaving the station, let’s find our own with lots of empty seats where we can stretch our legs. He doesn’t listen – any bandwagon rolling by will do.
Still, I enjoy these mornings in the gallery before the clients and Marius turn up. We are on the first floor – rather, the second floor, in American parlance – and I stand in the window looking down on Madison watching the people and the traffic going by. Helma brings me a cup of coffee and I smoke my first cigarette of the day. At moments like these I think I’m dreaming – I can’t believe I’m living and working here, that this opportunity turned up in my life.
To Alannah’s tonight. A whole weekend together, as the children are away with her ex-husband. We’re going to look for somewhere for me to rent in Greenwich Village. I think I need to be closer to the action.
Sunday, 23 September
We found a small apartment on Cornelia Street, off Bleecker. It’s a basement of a brick row house (what is it about me and basements? Why do I like the semi-subterranean life?), unfurnished with a bedroom, sitting room, tiny kitchen and shower room. An Italian family occupy the two floors above.