by William Boyd
Back at my beach shack, another beer in front of me, I resume my pose, notebook and pen in hand, but my eyes are flashing around me – there’s too much on offer today; the passing parade is profligate. In front of me, seated round a table, are eight French adolescents – four girls, four boys, about sixteen and seventeen, all – to my eye – tanned, slim and attractive. The girls are smoking and it’s clear from the group’s demeanour that they all know each other well – the talk is about where they should go tonight. The boys and girls are relaxed and at ease with each other in a manner that would have been unthinkable to schoolboys of my generation. Consider this: me, Peter, Ben and Dick – aged seventeen – sitting at a beach bar like this with four girls. I can’t – the imagination stalls.
And suddenly I wonder: is it more of my bad luck to have been born when I was, at the beginning of this century and not be able to be young at its end? I look enviously at these kids and think about the lives they are living – and will live – and posit a kind of future for them. And then, almost immediately, I think what a futile regret that is. You must live the life you have been given. In sixty years’ time, if these boys and girls are lucky enough, they will be old men and women looking at the new generation of bright boys and girls and wishing that time had not fled by –
One of the girls has just asked me the time (‘cinq heures vingt’), which has rather jolted me. I think – I feel – I am invisible here. I should be heading home soon.
The girl who asked me the time lights yet another cigarette. I’m sure it’s not so much the pleasure of the nicotine that makes these girls smoke so much – they hardly puff at their cigarettes – it’s having the thing in their hand to complete the pose. They all smoke with practised ease and naturalism, yet this girl has the gestures off more perfectly than most. How to define it? Some equation of extended fingers and wrist bend, lip-pout and head-tilted exhalation. She smokes with great sexual grace: her body is brown and lean and she’s pretty with long milk-chocolate brown hair. And somehow she knows that her perfect manipulation of that perfect white cylinder of packed tobacco sends a subliminal signal to the boys – all their eyes are flicking like lizards’ – that she is ready.
And for some reason this makes me contemplate my own life, all my sporadic highs and appalling lows, my brief triumphs and terrible losses and I say, no, no, I don’t envy you – you slim, brown, confident boys and girls and whatever futures await you. I will gather up my belongings and wander back to the Hotel des Dunes and look forward to my supper – the fish of the day and my bottle of wine. I feel, as I sit here – and I should record this as I experience it – looking over the beach and the ocean as the sun begins to drop down in the west, a strange sense of pride: pride in all I’ve done and lived through, proud to think of the thousands of people I’ve met and known and the few I’ve loved. Play on, boys and girls, I say, smoke and flirt, work on your tans, figure out your evening’s entertainment. I wonder if any of you will live as well as I have done.
Sultry, fuggy day. No leaf stir. Butterflies lurch and skitter through the delphiniums I planted around the sundial.
Cinq Cyprès. Sainte-Sabine. Our Indian summer continues here –the leaves are just on the turn but the breeze from the east is warm and the sun shines each day with benign force.
Through a gap in the trees of the park I can see the blond grass of the meadow – turned quite yellow under the sun like the waters of the old River Plate – and the dark green of the oak woods, offset beyond, the trees so densely leafed that they seem to billow out over the sun-bleached yellow grass like smoke or waves. And, closer to, the sharp clarity of the sunlight on the bushes and the creeper around the house is perfect: the perfect balance of leaf-shadow, leaf-shine and leaf-translucence – absolutely correct, as if worked out by mathematical formulae to provide the ideal visual stimulus. Down by the barn a thick patch of thistle is in seed and the wandering breeze snatches the thistle-down and lifts it skyward in small urgent flurries – backlit by the sun so that the down seems to sparkle and gleam like mica or sequins – so much so that it looks like photons of light are taking to the air, flying upwards – rising upwards, blowing away across the meadow – like what? – like glow worms, like lucent moths.
Too nice a day to stay inside. I shall choose an old familiar book and go and read in a deckchair in the cool blue shade of the big chestnut tree. I woke this morning with a transient old man’s erection. I was dreaming, I think, of that naked girl who walked by me on the beach. My dreams are so vivid these nights that I wake in the morning blinking, dazed and exhausted from my encounters with my unconscious life, wondering who and where I am. So this morning I took hold of myself, pleased to be so stiff, so virile, if only for half a minute or so. Life in the old dog. Life – still living, pleased to have managed to live in every decade of this long benighted century. What a time I’ve had – quel parcours, as the French say. I think a drink is called for. Yes, absolutely – I will open a chill bottle of white wine and take it out and sit under the big chestnut and drink a toast to Logan Mountstuart. Every decade. All my ups and downs. My personal rollercoaster. Not so much a rollercoaster – a rollercoaster’s too smooth – a yo-yo, rather – a jerking, spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child, more like, trying too hard, too impatiently eager to learn how to operate his new yo-yo
1This places the entry in the summer of 1987. LMS had a telephone installed in March.
2Dried shoots from vines that are pruned in the winter and gathered into faggots. Excellent for starting fires and for summer barbecues.
3September?
4Compiled from newspaper reports and the transcript of Benoit Verdel’s trial. [LMS’s note]
Afterword
Logan Mountstuart died of a heart attack on 5 October 1991 – he was eighty-five years old. His heart was not receiving enough oxygen because it was not being allowed its regular flow of blood, as one or more of his coronary arteries had become blocked (they are called ‘coronary’ because these vessels encircle the top of the heart like a crown). Starved of blood, his heart muscle, and its rhythm, broke down and Logan Mountstuart’s life ended.
He was discovered towards the end of the day by Jean-Robert Stefanelli, who had come to Cinq Cyprès with the gift of a basket of apples. Receiving no answer at the door, Jean-Robert went around to the rear of the house. There he saw the deckchair under the chestnut tree and beside it a half-drunk bottle of white wine in an ice bucket and an open book, cover-side up (it was the Collected Plays of Anton Chekhov). The ice in the ice bucket had melted, and Jean-Robert realized that something was amiss. Wandering around, he soon discovered LMS, dead, face down on the grass beside a corner of the barn where there was a large clump of thistles. He noticed that LMS’s cat was not far away, curled up on a stone, watching everything intently.
Logan Mountstuart was buried in the graveyard of the village of Sainte-Sabine. His grave can be found in the north-east corner of the graveyard. He had made provision for a gravestone: a simple black granite rectangle set in the ground, it reads:
LOGAN GONZAGO MOUNTSTUART
1906-1991
Escritor
Writer
Écrivain
In his will he left the house, Cinq Cyprès, to Mrs Gail Sherwin. She, her husband and their two children spend some weeks there each summer. A search of the property was carried out after his death by his cousin Lucy Sansom (who had been willed LMS’s library and manuscripts). No trace of the novel Octet was found. Jean-Robert Stefanelli remembers helping LMS build a bonfire a week before he died. ‘He burnt many papers,’ Stefanelli recalls. ‘For an old man he seemed very well, and very happy.’ There were no obituaries.
Works by Logan Mountstuart
The Mind’s Imaginings
The Girl Factory
The Cosmopolitans
The Villa by the Lake
Any Human Heart: The Intimate Journals of Logan Mountstuart
This is not an Exit: Essays on Art and Literatu
re (in preparation)
Index
Abaco, 239
Abbeyhurst College (Abbey), 10; 13–61,
passim; reminiscing about, 213; its appalling food, 412
Abstract Expressionism, 301; 367
Ada, by Vladimir Nabokov, LMS reads, 455
Adrar, Sheila, takes over agency from Wallace Douglas, 378; sacked by LMS, 397
age of consent (New York State),370
Alberti, Caspar, and art-collection fraud, 328–9
Aldeburgh, Norfolk, LMS’s summer rental at, 206
Algeria, background to Peter Scabius’s novel, 324
Andros, 239
Anglophobia, 309; 316
Angry Brigade, the, John Vivian’s links with, 426
Annasdottir, Katrin, 282; as sexual fantasy, 287
Arlen, Michael, 53
artrevue (magazine), LMS becomes chief book reviewer, 163
Ash, Preston, shares Oxford lodgings with LMS, 100; talks about Oxford with LMS, 103–4; golfs with LMS, 105
Atkinson Morley neuro-psychiatric hospital, Wimbledon, 301
Auden, W. H.,308
autobiography, LMS plans his, 427
auto-eroticism, 287
Baader, Andreas, found guilty of terrorism, 428 ' n.; suicide, 448
Baader-Meinhof Gang, links with SPK, 426; verdict on at Stammheim, 428 ' n.; and Mogadishu raid, 447
Bad Riegerbach, Austria, 31; Easter vacation at, 47-52
Bahamas, Duke of Windsor appointed Governor, 217
Baldwin, Stanley, death of, 289 ' n.
Balliol College, Oxford, its superior food, 65
Barcelona, LMS visits (1936), described, 179; second visit (1937), LMS notes changes, 187
Barkasian, Peter, Nat Tate’s stepfather, LMS meets, 320; reaction to Nat Tate’s suicide, 348–9
Barker, John, Miami detective, 244; his incompetence, 248
Barrowsmith (school contemporary), 13; congratulates LMS, 46
‘Bay Street Boys’, 232
BBC, employer of Freya Deverell, 158; LMS gives talk at, 212; Spanish language service of, 222; in Nigeria, 385
Bel Air Hotel, Los Angeles, described, 350
Bennett, Arnold, 53
Biarritz, LMS meets Dick Hodge there, 81; holiday with Freya Deverell, 165; fantasy about, 223
Birmingham, 9–10; return, 251
Boca do Inferno, villa where Duke of Windsor stayed, 215; 220
Bookbinder, Lulu, makes pass at LMS, 234
Borg Hotel, Reykjavik, 282
Bowra, Maurice, 67 & n.
‘Bowser’, LMS’s dog, acquired, 454; his death and LMS’s grief, 480
Boyd, William, his book on Nat Tate, 337n.
Brasserie Lipp, 291
Braque, Georges, 337
British Colonial Hotel, Nassau, 230
Brown, Geddes, meets LMS at the Fothergills’, 128; in Paris, 135; in Biarritz, 165
Brownwell, Tina, LMS meets, 422; contribution to The Situation, 429
Brugosova, Anna Nickolaevna (prostitute), LMS’s obsession with, 110–12; LMS confides in, 118; followed
home by LMS, 123; her mysterious disappearance, 133–4
Buback, Siegfried, assassinated by Red Army Faction, 427 n.
Bucknell, Dunn & Weiss, LMS’s US publishers, 306
Byrne, Dr John Francis, LMS’s New York psychiatrist, 330–32; analyses LMS’s sexual fantasies, 338; 368
Campo 33, Certosa, Italy, 273
Café Flore, 291
Camus, Albert, 389
Canthaler, Marcio and Martin, option The Villa by the Lake, 350; meeting with LMS, 351; dissatisfied with LMS’s script, 354
Cassell, Lord Angus, at Abbey, 56; at Oxford, 66; at drunken party, 76; invites LMS shooting, 114; staying with Dick Hodge in Scotland, 127; best man at LMS’s wedding, 145; source of royal gossip, 167; asks LMS if he wants to join White’s Club, 182; anger at LMS, fights with LΜS, 197
Cedar Tavern, New York, atmosphere, 311; 320
Chekhov, Anton, 321; 489
Chew, Flight-Sergeant (LMS’s dropping officer), 259; his loquacity, 260; 277
Christie, Harold, described, 242
Churchill, Winston, 221 & n.; 237; 242
Cinq Cyprès, Sainte-Sabine, LMS’s house, described, 445; renovation of, 453; left to Gail Rule, 490
Clampitt, Paul, 322
Clay, Esmé (actress), 64 & n.
Clay, Siegfried, at Garsington, 98–9 & n.
Clough, Tess, 23; Peter Scabius’s description of, 28; banned from seeing Scabius, 46; meets Scabius at Ringford, 59–60; arrives in Oxford (Islip), 69–70; kisses LMS, 88; begins affair with LMS, 92–3; affair ends, 94; meets LMS in Oxford, 105; marries Scabius, 121; writes to LMS about Scabius’s infidelities, 204; death by drowning, 207
Coghill, Nevill, at Oxford, possible tutor for LMS, 91 & n.
Coin, Norbert, 455
Connolly, Cyril, as LMS’s Chelsea neighbour, 129; 130 & n.; dines with LΜS, 131; meets LΜS in Café Royal, 171; object of Virginia Woolf’s disdain, 171; in Barcelona, 180; 482
Cordato, Cesare di, Gloria Ness-Smith’s second husband, 361; death, 379 & n.
Cornelia Street, Greenwich Village, LMS’s apartment, 304
Cornwallis, the, LMS’s local pub, 402
Cosmopolitans, The, LMS’s third book, LMS chooses title, 136; researches, 142; difficulties in writing, 152; finished and delivered, 172; published, 177; reviewed, 183; continued success in France, 206; 456
Cosmopolites, Les, 134n.; LMS’s growing interest in, 136; decision to write book about, 136–7
Crane, Hart, his poem The Bridge, 317 & n.; significance of his suicide and Nat Tate’s, 349
Cunard, Lady Emerald, invites LMS to party, 132 & n.
Danfodio Road, no. 3, LMS’s house in Nigeria, described, 381; LMS’s unhappiness at leaving, 393
Darker, Constable Joseph, meets LMS during General Strike, 95; invites LMS to tea, 125–6; tells LMS of his wife’s death, 165
Darwin, Ned, LMS’s dislike of, 414; leaves hospital, 417
Dead Souls, Gogol’s novel, LMS’s son’s band, 354
de Kooning, Willem, 301; LMS admires, 306 de Marigny, Alfred, 236; prime suspect in Oakes’s murder, 243; arrested for murder, 246; acquitted, 253
Deverell, Freya, LMS’s second wife, first meeting, 156–7; dinner with LMS in Lisbon, 158; courted by LMS, 160; sexual relations with LMS, 161; affair with LMS under way, 164; with LMS in Biarritz, 165–8; moves into Draycott Avenue, 168; holidays in Greece with LMS, 173; reaction to discovery of affair by LMS’s wife, 186; helps LMS in divorce proceedings, 198; marriage to LMS, 199; becomes pregnant, 199; birth of daughter, Stella, 204; takes up reading duties at Sprymont & Drew, 223; visited by Vanderpoel, 277; believes LMS is dead, 277; meets Gunnarson, 278; pregnant by Gunnarson, 278; her death, 278; LMS inconsolable over, 297; LMS’s continued sense of loss, 401; lasting grief over, 460
Deverell, George, Freya’s father, 285–6
Deverell, Robin, Freya’s brother, 285
Diebenkorn, Richard, 351
Dielendorfer, Frau, 47; cuisine of, 49
Dieudonné, Cyprien, poet, LMS meets in Paris, 134 & n.; dines with LMS, 136; visited by LMS in Quercy, 142; in Biarritz with LMS, 165; grateful for the success of The Cosmopolitans, 206; awarded Légion d’honneur, 323; leaves house to LMS, 410 & n.
dog food, LMS’s taste for, 419
Doig, Father, RC priest, 26; disappointment at Ben Leeping’s appearance, 31; confronts LMS about Leeping’s sincerity, 42
Douglas, Wallace, LMS’s agent, first meeting, 117; does deal on The Girl Factory, 132; LMS stays with, 152; arranges journalism assignment in Spain, 153; encourages writing of second novel, 170; sells The Villa by the Lake, 306; retires from agency, 378; 397
Draycott Avenue, Chelsea, site for LMS’s second London flat, 159
Duggan, Alfred, 70 & n.
Dulles, Allan, head of OSS, 266; 271
Dupetit, Gabrielle, moves into La Sapinière, 462; invites LMS
to drinks, 463; LMS visits La Sapinière, 465; LMS’s sexual attraction towards, 466; plots with LMS to catch vandals, 474; shame and departure, 477–8
Edgbaston, Birmingham, LMS’s dislike of, 16; return during war, 254
Edgefield, Aelthred, Earl of, LMS’s first father-in-law, 114; allowance paid to LMS, 159; his opinion on the abdication crisis, 184
Edgefield, Enid, Countess of, LMS’s first mother-in-law, description, 114
Edgefield, Lady Laeticia (Lottie), Angus Cassell’s sister, LMS’s first wife, first meeting, 115; staying with Dick Hodge in Scotland, 127; meets LMS in Scotland again, 143; accepts LMS’s proposal of marriage, 143; on honeymoon with LMS, 145; informs LMS she is pregnant, 148; birth of son, Lionel, 150; her spendthriftiness, 162; arranges thirtieth birthday dance for LMS, 176; discovers LMS’s affair with Freya Deverell, 185–6; divorce from LMS, 198
Edward VIII, see Duke of Windsor