Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  Before I left I tracked down one of the artists Marius had bought from. On the invoice he claimed he had paid $200 for an infantile daub of a yacht at sea (described as ‘in faux-naïf style’). Paul Clampitt was the artist’s name and I discovered him at a dubious private college in Newark called the Institution of American Artists, where he was doing some sort of course in graphic design. I asked if he had any paintings for sale, a friend of mine had bought one, which I’d liked. Sure, he said, and spread out a dozen on the table – $25 dollars each. I bought one and asked for a receipt.

  Ben was distressed and angered when I presented him with this evidence. ‘He has to go,’ he said, with real bitterness. He asked if I thought I could run the gallery on my own and I said, of course. Ben said he would deal with everything: Marius would be gone by the time I returned. He shook me warmly by the hand and said he was very grateful. ‘It’s rare in this stinking business to find someone you can trust,’ he added, with some vehemence. I’m a little concerned, myself, about the eventual outcome of all this.

  Dined with Cyprien Dieudonné, the picture of the handsome, distinguished man of letters. White hair just slightly on the long side, curling over his collar. A cane with a silver handle – the little gesture towards dandyisme. He has just been awarded the Légion d’honneur and is candidly proud, claiming that I had had something to do with this recognition (Les Cosmopolites, amazingly, is still in print, selling a few dozen copies a year). I said it told you more about France and its innate respect for writers. This septugenarian, a minor poet who hadn’t published a line of verse in decades, whose heyday had been before the Great War, was still regarded as a cultural asset by the state. We raised a glass to each other, toilers in the same vineyard. I doubt there are a dozen people in England – outside my family or circle of friends – who know who I am and what I have written.

  Monday, 3 October

  Mother is bedridden, coughing, pale, weak. Encarnación administers to her as best as possible, but she’s an old lady too. The house is grim and condemnable. Two teenagers and their baby son live in the basement, the last of the paying guests. I call a doctor and he prescribes antibiotics. Bronchitis, he says, lot of it about. It’s not so much that Mother is ill, it seems to me, but that she’s weary from the effort of struggling on. I go to her bank and discover that the loans taken out with the house as collateral effectively mean that the place is owned by the bank. I pay off her £23 overdraft and deposit a further £100. I’m not a rich man myself – when I subtract Alanah’s salary – and I can’t really afford these altruistic gestures.

  Reading Ian [Fleming’s] novel, Live and Let Die. An impossible task, knowing Ian as I once did – I can only see him in it: suspension of disbelief quite impossible. Can he have any idea how much of himself he is exposing? Still, it whiled away an hour or three.

  To the passport office to collect my new passport, valid for another ten years. In 1965 I’ ll be fifty-nine and the thought makes me feel faint. What’s happened to my life? These ten-year chunks that are doled out to you in passports are a cruel form of memento mori. How many more new passports will I have? One (1965)? Two (1975)? Such a long way off, 1975, yet your passport life seems all too brief. How long did he live? He managed to renew six passports.

  Thursday, 6 October

  Turpentine Lane. I telephone Peter. Gloria answers. Peter is away in Algeria researching his next novel. Algeria? You know, the uprising: he thought it might be a good background to his book. Why don’t you come round for a drink, Gloria says? So I go. Peter now lives in Belgravia in a large flat in Eaton Terrace. Gloria very soignée – a lot of plump cleavage on show for 6.30 in the evening. We flirt uncontrollably. When I leave we kiss and I am allowed to squeeze those breasts of hers. ‘Shall we start our affair here,’ she says, ‘or at your place?’ I suggest Turpentine Lane – more discreet. ‘Tomorrow night,’ she says, ‘8 o’clock.’

  Friday, 7 October

  Gloria has just left. It’s 11.15. ‘What a curious little den you have, Logan Mountstuart. Like a monk’s cell. A randy monk I hope.’ She had a bottle of gin with her: she was not to know the old Tess-associations that I would make. Her small curvy body is surprisingly firm – you expect her to be all soft and plump but she’s actually tense and rubbery, like a gymnast. I notice that between us we’ve drunk the best part of a bottle. It was good, energetic, no-nonsense, mutually satisfying sex. However, I’m quite pleased to be going back to New York tomorrow.

  [When LMS returned he discovered that Marius had already left the gallery. Ben’s stern ultimatum had been softened somewhat and Marius had been given the opportunity and the money to start up his own gallery and see if he could redeem himself in the eyes of his stepfather. With little delay he had opened the ML gallery on E. 57th Street. LMS took over the running of Leeping Fils. He had no further contact with Marius, each taking care to keep out of the other’s way.

  In August of 1956 Mercedes Mountstuart died as the result of complications following pneumonia. She was seventy-six years old. LMS flew back to London to attend the funeral. He took advantage of being in Europe and went on a brief clandestine holiday with Gloria Scabius. They met in Paris and motored south in easy stages towards Provence and the Mediterranean.]

  1956

  Sunday, 5 August

  Movements. Paris – Poitiers. Dire hotel. Poitiers – Bordeaux. Hotel Bristol – fine. Then two days in Quercy with Cyprien at his chartreuse. Cyprien seemed untypically daunted by Gloria (‘Elle est un peu féroce, non?’). Back to Bordeaux for a night. Row in the Chapon Fin. Back in the hotel Gloria threw a shoe at me and it broke a mirror. She refused to speak to me all day until we reached Toulouse. ‘Where do you want to eat?’ I asked. ‘Anywhere you aren’t, you bastard-cunt,’ was her reply. We ate at the Café de la Paix –excellent. Both drank a bottle of wine each, then several Armagnacs. Friends again. In the morning Gloria telephoned Peter – he thinks she’s travelling with an American girlfriend, called Sally. It seems very risky but for some reason I don’t care. I feel – and this may be self-delusion – that this is Gloria’s affair and not mine. I could be any old gigolo. Toulouse – Avignon. Gloria, quite drunk at lunch, dug the tines of her fork into my thigh and drew blood. I said one more act of violence and I’d be on the next plane back to London. She’s behaved quite well since.

  Monday, 6 August

  Cannes. Lunch with Picasso at his new house, La Califorme. Vulgar, but with vast rooms and a spectacular view of the bay. A young woman called Jacqueline Roque in situ as resident muse. Picasso very taken with Gloria. She sat between him and Yves Montand while I lusted after Simone Signoret at the other end (‘Looks like a barmaid,’ bitchy Gloria said. I agreed: ‘Yes, a fabulously beautiful French barmaid.’). Gloria very amorous tonight, said she’s never had a more enjoyable holiday in her life. Picasso said to me that he thought she was typiquement anglaise – au contraire, I said. He did a quick sketch of us both while we stood on the terrace after lunch –took him about thirty seconds – but he signed and dated it and unfortunately presented it to Gloria. No getting it back now.

  Wednesday, 15 August

  I fly back tomorrow so I went to Brompton Cemetery to look at Mother’s grave. Encarnación has gone to live with a niece in Burgos and Sumner Place has been claimed by the bank. Mother died with an accumulation of small debts, some of which I will pay. Everything has been left to me in her will, but there’s not a penny to pass on. All of Father’s small fortune that he left us both utterly gone – and I find I’m still upset by the fact. Not so much because some of that money was meant for me, more because I know how appalled he would be at such fiscal irresponsibility.

  Gloria has ‘loaned’ me the Picasso drawing (‘I can hardly hang it in Eaton Terrace, darling, really. Even Peter might smell a rat.’) I had it framed and it now hangs above the gas fire in the sitting room, the only picture on the wall. Peter’s Algerian novel, The Red and the Blue and the Red, is selling furiously and Gloria seems happy t
o help him spend his royalties. She kissed me goodbye at Le Bourget and said, ‘Thank you, Logan, darling, for a super holiday, but I don’t think we should see each other again until 1958.’ She leaves me with a clear conscience: she told me Peter has an endless succession of girlfriends, whom he refers to as his research assistants. Clear conscience vis-à-vis Peter – but what about Alannah?

  To my tailors for a final fitting: one pinstripe, charcoal; one lightweight grey flannel for the summer; and my standard midnight-blue double-breasted. Apparently I’ve put on five inches around the waist since 1944. ‘It’ll be all those hamburger sandwiches, sir,’ Byrne said.

  Thursday, 23 August

  Jackson Pollock has killed himself and a girl in a car crash on Long Island. Sadness, but no real surprise in the art world: everyone agrees he would have killed himself one way or another very soon. Ben telephoned me from Paris and told me to buy any Pollock I could lay my hands on. But they’re rubbish, I said. The man was a hopeless artist and he knew it – that’s why he had a death wish. Who cares? Ben said, just buy them. And he was right: prices are already climbing. I picked up two of the appalling later stuff for $3,000 and $2,500. Herman Keller says he knows someone who has a drip painting from 1950 but he wants $5,000. All right, I said, with huge reluctance. Ben is delighted.

  Friday, 19 October

  I bumped into Marius Leeping on Madison Avenue today. He was coming out of a hotel and looked flushed and unsteady on his feet – too many cocktails. It was 4.00 in the afternoon. I smiled politely, nodded hello and tried to pass by but he grabbed my arm. He called me a ‘petit connard’ and a ‘goddam creep’ who was trying to come between him and his father. I said that if anything was going to come between a son and his father, then the son stealing $30,000 from his father might explain it. He took a swing at me and missed. I pushed him away. I’m fifty years old and can’t be brawling with young men in the streets of New York any more. ‘I’m gonna get you, you fucking prick!’ he yelled at me. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I said and wandered off. A few New Yorkers stopped for a second to smile: no big deal, a couple of crazy foreigners having an argument.

  1957

  Sunday, 13 April

  Mystic House. I walked into the girls’ bedroom today and Arlene was standing there naked. Small sharp-pointed breasts, downy shading of pubic hair. Sorry! I said breezily and about-turned. Of course, she’s fourteen, but I still think of them both as the little kids they were when I first met them. I took the precaution of mentioning the incident to Alannah, just in case Arlene did. ‘My, she’s growing,’ I remarked, or something innocuous like that. ‘Just don’t make a habit of it,’ she said. I said I didn’t like her tone or implication. She told me to go fuck myself. I said I’d rather do that than fuck you – though the chance would be a fine thing. And so we had a nasty spiteful little row saying the most wounding words we could think of. What’s going wrong? For one ghastly moment I thought she might have found out about Gloria, but that’s impossible. Gail senses this tension between us: ‘Why are you and Mommy always fighting?’ ‘Oh, we’re just getting old and ornery,’ I say. Arlene can’t look me in the eye since my intrusion.

  Monday, 3 June

  Curious meeting yesterday with Janet [Felzer]. It was about business, she said, not pleasure, but she didn’t want to meet in either of our offices. All right, I said, how about the steps of the Metropolitan Museum? No, no, she said, too obvious. We eventually plumped for a bookstore on Lexington Avenue.

  Janet asked: did I know Caspar Alberti? Yes, I said, he’s a client –he bought a little Vuillard off me. He’s broke, Janet said. How do you know? I just do: he’s going to auction off his entire collection. How do you know? I repeated. A little bird told me, she said – he’s had a valuer round. He needs money fast, she said knowingly, and then, she added coyly, can you raise $100,000? Why? Because if you can, and I can, and someone else I know can, then we can buy Alberti’s collection for $300,000. What do we do then? We sit on it for a year and sell it off, split everything three ways. You’ll double your money – guaranteed.

  I telephoned Ben in Paris and he wired me the money right away. I was surprised and vaguely ashamed: somehow I felt I was being brought down to Marius Leeping’s level – as if I occupied a world where the underhand thrived and the dishonest man flourished.

  [June]

  I get up at 7.00 usually – not sleeping so well these days – shower, dress and go through to breakfast. Shirley [the maid] has everything ready for me and the girls. I eat scrambled eggs on toast. The girls arrive, eat their cereals, drink their milkshakes, munch on cookies. I pour some coffee and smoke my first cigarette of the day. Gail is indefatigably chatty; Arlene seems always in some kind of a fuss or crisis to do with clothes or homework. Alannah arrives, prompt at 8.30, looking immaculate, has a coffee and a cigarette before Shirley takes the girls off to school. Sometimes I share a taxi with Alannah but I always like the city at this time of the morning and usually choose to walk a few blocks, buy a newspaper and pick up a cab to the gallery.

  I’m always the first to arrive. I open up, switch on the lights, collect the mail and then settle down in my office with the binoculars waiting for the girl to show. From the back of our building we have a good view of the rear of a Fifth Avenue apartment block. There’s a girl who lives on the fourth floor who seems to get up between 9.30 and 10.00 most days and draws back her curtains. She must feel she’s not observed from directly opposite but she’s forgotten about those of us who can see into her room obliquely.

  Being a part-time voyeur like this has made me develop a concept I call ‘Voyeur’s Luck’. I can sit at my desk, binoculars fixed on her two windows, and the phone will ring and that’s the moment she’ll take her nightdress off. By the time I have dealt with the call, snatched up the binoculars again, she’ll have her bra on. These missed opportunities used to aggravate me cruelly, but now I console myself with my concept. Voyeur’s Luck will see me all right, one way or another.

  Such as last Friday, when I was with an early client and so thought I’d miss out completely on the show. But I popped back into the office for a second and there she was, naked in the window, standing in front of her closet, wondering what to wear. I’m now quite reconciled to the role that chance plays in all this. I come in each morning, I check her curtains, I look through my binoculars, I give it a minute or two, and if nothing’s happening I continue with my day. I suppose that over the two years or so I’ve been aware of her I must get a good look at her body once or twice a month.

  She’s no beauty this girl: slightly overweight with wiry corkscrew hair, a jutting chin and a weak mouth. I bumped into her once in a deli on Madison Avenue and almost said, ‘Hi.’ It was strange to be standing in line beside her at the checkout, knowing her as I did, watching her make her selection of clothes each day from her wardrobe. I wanted to say, ‘I love the red brassiere.’ She bought some menthol cigarettes, I noticed. I know when she goes on vacation and I know when she returns. She is, in a curious way, ‘my girl’. The relationship is wholly one-sided but that’s how I refer to her when I pick up my binoculars: ‘Wonder if I’ll see my girl today?’ I don’t want to learn her name or anything more about her.

  [June]

  I told my psychiatrist, Dr John Francis Byrne, about the girl. ‘Does she excite you?’ he asked in his flat voice. ‘Do you masturbate afterwards?’ I said no, which is true, and tried to explain what measure of excitement I derived from my casual, opportunistic voyeurism. After all, as I said to Byrne, I don’t creep around spying on women. There I was sitting in my office and this girl across the way opens her curtains and walks around her room with no clothes on. But you bought some binoculars, Byrne said. That was curiosity, I said, I was interested in the details. What I liked about this ritual was that its candour and intimacy provided the frisson rather than anything more overtly sexual – it’s like a Degas or a Bonnard, I tried to explain: you know, ‘Woman Drying Her Hair’, ‘Marthe in the Bath’. Byrne
thought about this: ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I know what you mean.’

  Dr Byrne had been recommended to me by Adam Outridge, but I didn’t make contact until earlier this year – out of boredom rather than neurosis. All was not well between Alannah and me, and I suddenly felt the need for someone to talk to.

  Byrne is a sardonic, world-weary fellow in his sixties. Sharp mind, well informed. He’s a tall man who carries his excess weight well. I asked him if he knew he had the same name as the man who was the model for ‘Cranly’ in James Joyce’s novels – J. F. Byrne. I’m aware of that, Byrne said, but so what? It’s not a particularly remarkable coincidence. That’s true, up to a point, I said – I had a tailor in London called Byrne. But to have exactly the same Christian names – that is a coincidence. Byrne was unimpressed: look at you, he said, you’ve an unusual surname but it’s the same as the man whom Boswell accompanied on his Grand Tour. Does that make you feel any more different? Any better? But there’s another twist, I said, I’ve met Joyce, I’ve read his books, I’ve read Byrne’s memoir of him and now you’re my psychiatrist. Don’t you think the serendipity is getting a little out of hand? I don’t think this is a fruitful line to explore, Byrne said. Tell me about this girl: is she stacked?

  When I first met Byrne I asked him what his professional persuasion was – Freudian, Jungian, Reichian, whatever. None of the above, he said. I’m basically a good, old-fashioned S&M man. S&M? Sex and Money. He explained: in his experience, if you were not clinically ill – like a schizophrenic or a manic depressive – then 99 per cent of his patients’ neuroses were generated by either sex or money, or both. If we get to the bottom of the sex problem or the money problem, then these sessions can be quite productive. He smiled his wan smile: know thyself, sort of thing. So, which category do you fall in? he asked. I think I’m one of your sex-men, I said.