by William Boyd
I was passing a little bistro du coin, looking for a bus stop, when I glanced inside and saw the Colonel sitting there, reading a newspaper, a glass of pastis in front of him. Spontaneously, I went in and ordered a beer and sat down casually at the table beside him. Close to, he looked considerably older than Anna—in his fifties I would guess. His clothes were shabby but clean and he wore a yellow bow tie with a matching handkerchief overflowing from his breast pocket. Something of a dandy, then. His little moustache, upswept at the ends, was more grey than black, as was his hair, sleekly oiled back without a part. As he rose to return his newspaper to the rack, I went to claim it. The headlines were all about Poincare’s↓ ill-health.
≡ Prime Minister of France at the time.
‘Sad to be ill on such a beautiful day,’ I said in French.
He looked at me and smiled—there was no recognition of course. I felt awkward, realizing I had made love to—had nicked—his wife several dozen times: I wanted to blurt it out—how we both cared for Anna in our own way, how we shared her, about all the tips I gave her that were as much to help him—as if it would make us better acquaintances, somehow.
He made some remark about Poincare being decrepit, anyway, but I couldn’t understand because his French was so rapid-fire and colloquial—impeccable, in feet.
We went back to our seats and struck up a desultory conversation. He could tell I was English, he said, from my accent—adding, in the polite way all French people do, that I spoke their language remarkably well. I fished a bit, said I thought I could detect a slight accent inflecting his own speech. I surprised him: he was a Parisian born and bred, he declared. I steered the conversation round to a report in the paper of Communist riots in Germany and said they should call the army out, asking him, by the way, about his own military experience. He said he had enlisted in 1914 but had been rejected because of his bad lungs. I bought him another drink and learned a little more: he had been a travelling salesman but his firm had gone bankrupt, and since then…He looked at his watch, said he had to go, shook my hand and left. Clearly no colonel in the White Russian Army, then.
Monday, 24 June
SUMNER PLACE
In my absence mother has redecorated my rooms (what strange compulsion is this?) and in the process seems to have mislaid half my books. ‘Oh, I never touch your books, my darling,’ she says. ‘Maybe the painter, he steal them.’ I find them in a box room—and she has hung my Marie Laurencin in the downstairs lavatory. I retrieve it. We have a new motor also, a Ford.
In the morning I go to Sprymont & Drew and, over lunch in a chophouse, Roderick breaks the news to me that they are obliged to delay publication of The Mind’s Imaginings until the spring of 1930. Publishing programmes too crowded, too many authors taken on—lame excuses of that order. This is vexing: I feel in a kind of limbo—an author but not truly an author, true authorship being conferred by having a book physically published—a thing you can hold in your hand, purchase in a bookshop. Roderick says he has enjoyed my pieces from Paris—perhaps if I wrote a few more they could be collected between hard covers.
‘What about a novel?’ I say impetuously.
‘Well, we’d, ah, of course love a novel…’ His caution was eloquent. ‘Though I have to say I never really had you down as a novelist.’
‘What do you have me down as, Roderick?’
‘An extremely talented writer who could turn his hand to novel-writing in an instant.’ His suavity was back to full strength.
I think it is his scepticism that really inspires me. I will write my novel while I wait for TMJ to be published. It will be about a young English writer living in Paris, his relationship with a beautiful but older Russian prostitute and the mysterious ‘Colonel’ she claims is her husband. But what title?
I come out of the underground at South Kensington and who should be on the beat but Joseph Darker. We are both pleased to see each other, shake hands warmly and reminisce about the great days of the General Strike. He tells me he now has two children and invites me for tea—still at the same address in Battersea.
[June]
Darker is relaxed in my company, but his wife, Tilda, is very ill at ease, or so it seems to me. It was the same the first time we met. She keeps apologizing: for the quality of the tea, the noise the children make, the state of the back garden. The little boy is called Edward—‘After the Prince of Wales’—and the little girl is called Ethel. We sit in the garden on deckchairs in our shirtsleeves and watch the toddlers potter about. The sun is warm, my stomach is full of fruit cake, and I feel a kind of suburban peace descend on me. Maybe this is how life should be lived? A modest home, a secure job, a wife and family. All these pointless strivings and ambitions—
‘Sorry about the cake, Mr Mountstuart, it’s a bit dry.’
‘It’s delicious. And please call me Logan.’
‘Would you rather have some sandwiches. Only fish paste, I’m afraid.’
When she takes the children inside Darker in his turn apologizes for her, which makes matters worse. ‘She’s a good mother,’ he says. ‘Works hard, keeps the house clean.’ Then he turns to me. ‘And I love her dearly, Logan. Meeting Tilda was the making of me.’ I can’t think how to respond to this declaration. ‘You’re a lucky man, Joseph,’ I say, in the end. ‘I hope I have half your luck.’ He puts his hand on my shoulder, gives it a squeeze. ‘I hope so,’ he says, visibly pleased.
He’s a sincere man, Joseph Darker, but I question my own attitudes, not through any doubt about them, but to put them to the test. I’m not patronizing him, not trying to prove what a good egalitarian fellow I am, here, having tea with a humble policeman. I wouldn’t brag about this visit—as I know someone like Hugh Fothergill would, wearing such a friendship like a badge. So, why are you here? He invited me and I accepted. I assume I did so because we both derive something from each other’s company.
[September]
Summer travels. July—Berlin with Ben, gallery haunting. On his advice I bought a small jewel-like watercolour by an artist new to me called Klee. Furious street battle between political gangs one night. On by train to, finally, Vienna—travels in the Tyrol—Kufstein, Hall, Kitzbuhel. Then Salzburg—Bad Ischl—Gmunden—Graz. August—Scotland, as usual, to Kildonnan by Galashiels. Dick’s shooting party larger than ever. I abandoned all pretence and declared myself non-combatant and passed the time walking and fishing or taking bus journeys up the Tweed Valley to the little solid mill towns set in their gentle hills. Much drinking and merriment in the evening. Angus [Cassefl] and Lottie were there. Lottie clearly smitten with me. One evening we were left alone in the drawing room and I—a little drunk—kissed her. I apologized discreetly the next morning but she would hear none of it.
§
Memory: a day of intense but fresh heat. I walk up the bank of a shallow, rushing, tea-brown river, a tributary of the Tweed, a rod in my hand looking for a pool. Seen from the glare of the sunshine, the shade beneath the riverine trees looks as ink-dark as a cave mouth. I find my pool and stog my beer bottle in an eddy at the water’s edge and fish for an hour, catching three little trout, which I throw back. Eat bread and cheese, drink my icy beer and walk home across the fields to Kildonnan with the sun on my back. A day of total solitude, of tranquil and perfect beauty by the river. A form of happiness I must try to recapture more often.
Tuesday, 22 October’
Goodish progress on the novel: it won’t be long but it should be very intense and moving. Still no idea how it will end, no notion of a title. Proofs of TMI arrive. Soon I’ll be there—soon.
I go to Hampstead for dinner at the Fothergills’. Land looks tired, says she is working too hard;—Lee is very busy in the new government.↓
≡ Ramsay MacDonald had formed the second Labour government in June. 128
She introduces me to a man called Geddes Brown—thirtyish—a painter. Alarm bells ring: he’s lithe and muscled like a prizefighter with blond curly hair. Something about his demeanour pr
oclaims huge self-confidence.
I feel very relaxed with the Fothergills—my ideal alter-family. How different would I have been if I had been brought up in this environment? I talk to Vemon about my trip to Berlin and tell him of my purchase of a Paul Klee (Paul who? he asks—the blessed insularity of England’s culture). Geddes Brown knows who Paul Klee is, all right, and we get an impromptu ten-minute lecture. He congratulates me on my taste: suddenly I’m all right in his eyes. Then Hugh talks politics at me and I nod and agree that Mussolini is a monster, reaching across the table to light Ursula’s umpteenth cigarette. But where are Land and Geddes Brown? Out on the terrace looking at the stars. Ah-ha.
Wednesday, 30 October
Mother seemed a little alarmed by a telegram from Mr Prendergast in New York. She read it out: ‘Financial chaos on stock market. Urgent need for cash.’
‘Cash?’ she said. ‘I have no cash.’ Borrow some from a bank, I said, then went upstairs to work on my novel. And suddenly the title came to me: The Girl Factory.
1930
Wednesday, 1 January
With a mild hangover I greet the new decade and the new year. (Last night: cocktails at the Fothergills’, dinner with Roderick at the Savoy, midnight at the 500 Club. Bed by 3.00 a.m.).
§
Review of 1929. Love affair with Paris. The bliss of my rooms in the Hotel Rembrandt. Anna-mania and the Anna⁄Colonel enigma. Concentration of feelings for Land. ‘Concentration of feelings’. Pshaw! Growing love for Land. Acceptance of TMI. Beginning of TGF. The frustrations of delay. Serious, fairly lucrative journalism.
Friends made: Alice Farino, Joseph Darker, Lottie Edgefield (?)
Friends in limbo: Peter, Tess, Hugh Fothergill.
Friends lost: none.
Conclusion: a year of promise—achievement still frustratingly out of reach. The real start of my career as a writer. Money earned. 1929 proves I can live by the pen.
Sunday, 5 January
Mother announces dramatically at dinner that we have lost the apartment in New York.
§
ME: What apartment, pray?
MOTHER: My apartment on 62nd Street. Mr Prendergast say it is lost.
ME: You’ve mislaid your apartment?
MOTHER: We cannot pay the loan. The bank has taken it.
ME: Shame. How I would have liked to have seen it one day. Why don’t you get Mr P. to sell some of your shares?
MOTHER: This I don’t understand. We have all these shares but he say they are worth nothing. Nothing at all.
ME: Shall I mix you a cocktail?
[March]
85A, Glebe Place, Chelsea. My new address. I’ve rented a furnished garden flat just off the King’s Road. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, dining room and a spare bedroom that will be my study. I shipped my books and paintings round and now all I need is a few rugs and throws to make the place my own. A Mrs Fuller comes in three times a week to ‘do’ for me and she says her husband will look after the garden—and all this for £6 a month. I draw the curtains, light the fire and open a bottle of wine. Apparently Cyril Connolly and his wife are near neighbours.↓
≡ Cyril Connolly (1903-1974), critic and writer. He and his wife, Jean, were currently living at 312A, King’s Road.
Good progress on The Girl Factory.
Thursday, 27 March
The Mind’s Imaginings is published today. As a symbolic gesture I went into town and bought a copy at Hatchard’s. A handsome little book with faded purple covers and a small idealized portrait of Shelley by Vernon Fothergill as a frontispiece. Luncheon at L’Etoile with Roderick and Tony Powell—who is working at Duckworth’s. On the tube home I kept taking the book out and looking at it, feeling its weight in my hand, opening it at random and reading a sentence or two. I kept going back to the author’s notice: ‘Mr Mountstuart is a graduate of Oxford University and is currently writing a novel.’ Why, though, do publishers have to advertise other books on the back cover? I think it sullies the integrity of my own. I don’t want to know that Cuthbert Wolfe has written an ‘arresting and important’ new biography of Disraeli. What are you doing on my lovely new book, Cuthbert Wolfe?
This is typical of my current mood: both flat—not a single review so for—and elated—I have the book in my hand; I bought it in a bookshop. But suddenly I want to be with Land, or Anna—or even Lucy. Instead I go round to Mother, who, although she said she would be inconsolable if I left, is already planning to transform my rooms into her studio.
‘Studio? To do what?’
‘I don’t know, my darling. To paint, to sculpture, to dance.’
Sunday, 13 April
Nice review in last week’s Times Literary Supplement—‘Engaging and spirited.’
‘Shelley as we can believe he truly was’—the Herald. ‘Knocks Maurois into a cocked hat. At last we have an English Shelley’—the Mail I ring Roderick to discover that sales are disappointing—so far only 323 copies sold. ‘But these reviews,’ I say. ‘Can’t you take some advertisements?’ He mutters something incomprehensible about seasonal budgets and a spring deficit. Letters of congratulation from H-D and, amazingly, Le Mayne. The only problem is that I seem to have lost interest in my novel. I’ve written around 200 pages. I think I might just kill off the Anna-figure with tuberculosis or some other lugubrious disease.
[April]
First dinner party at Glebe Place. The Connollys, Land, H-D and Cynthia, Roderick and a young poet he’s infatuated with called Donald Coonan. Quite a success, I think soup, leg of lamb, a trifle, cheese. Plenty to drink. And a deal of flattering talk about TMI, as the reviews continue to be good. Connolly says he’ll try and review it for the New Statesman. He’s prickly at first, but mellows soon enough. We were amused to discover we had both left Oxford with a third-class History degree. ‘Fail early,’ I said, ‘then the only way is up.’
Land was the last to leave and we kissed at the front dopr. A gentle kiss—a potential lover’s kiss? I walked her up to the King’s Road and we hailed a taxi. She said she would be in Paris for the month of August, trying to improve her French. What a coincidence, I said, so will I.
Thursday, 22 May
Collected The Girl Factory from the typists and took it to Roderick at S & D. He seemed surprised to see it completed. ‘I do like the title,’ he said, then, his craven caution returning, ‘but it’s not too racy, is it? We can’t afford to risk having a book banned.’ I said it was exceptionally racy but deliberately placed within the bounds of propriety. He suggested I do a life of Keats next—‘Shelley’s going very nicely,’ he said.
Wednesday, 28 May
I should have said that Wallace was actually irritated that I’d personally delivered the typescript. ‘It’s like taking away my sword and replacing it with a dagger.’ I said I didn’t understand. ‘I can still draw blood but it’s not as easy.’ Anyway, Sprymont & Drew offered £100 but Wallace managed to bump them up to £150 by saying both Duckworth and Chapman & Hall were desperate to read it. On the strength of this we lunched at Quaglino’s. Wallace has found me more work with the Weekend Review and the Graphic. We jotted down a list of subjects that I felt qualified to write about: the English Romantic poets, golf, South America, Paris, Spain, Oxford, sex, British History from the Norman Conquest to Cromwell’s Protectorate, modern art and corned beef. ‘What a multifaceted fellow you are,’ Wallace said, with more than a hint of his usual dryness. The more I know him the more I come to like him. He treats his job, it seems to me, as a kind of amusing challenge, a source of entertainment. His tone is very deadpan, very Buster Keaton. Sales of Imaginings beginning to climb—over a thousand now. I have the impression it’s being talked about. Cyril [Connolly] introduced me the other evening and said, ‘You must know Logan’s Shelley book.’
Monday, 21 July
Very large party at Lady Cunard’s.↓
≡ Lady Maud ‘Emerald’ Cunard (1872-1945), society hostess, mother of Nancy. 132
I felt a little overwhelmed: m
y first true social outing. Waugh was there, Harold Nicolson, Dulcie Vaughan-Targett, Oswald Mosley, Imogen Grenfell…Waugh congratulated me on the Shelley. I congratulated him on Vile Bodies. He pointed out William Gerhardi to me and said he was the most brilliant writer alive. He told me at some length that he was taking instruction with a view to becoming a Roman Catholic and started banging on about infallibility and Purgatory. I had to cut him short, said I knew all about it. He seemed startled to discover I was RC. I assured him I was well and truly lapsed and he scurried off looking sheepish. Why on earth should a man like that want to change his faith at his age?↓
≡ Waugh was twenty-seven and had recently been divorced from his first wife.
Friday, 8 August
Paris. Back in the good old, familiar old Hotel Rembrandt. Unseasonal rain darkens the pavements and a nagging wind makes the shutters bang. Land arrives next week. Tune me chercherais pas si tune m’avais trouve [You would not be looking for me if you did not possess me. Pascal] I went out at 6, had a drink at Lipp and then strolled down to Montparnasse to meet Ben at the Closerie des Lilas. I was early and hadn’t thought of going in to Chez Chantal—thoughts of Land were uppermost in my mind—but, seeing as I was in the neighbourhood, I ducked in none the less. Madame Chantal greeted me warmly and offered me a choice of the three girls lounging around in their satin lingerie. ‘You know I only like Anna,’ I said. ‘But Anna has gone,’ she replied, explaining that Anna had said she was leaving and didn’t need to ‘work’ any more. She had no idea where she was.