2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  I typed all this up and mailed it to the Dusenberry office in New York, There seems no point in cabling—I’d need some sort of a scoop to justify the expense. So far in a week I’ve made $300 from Dusenberry—the most lucrative journalism ever. At this rate I’m making $100 every two days, and I’m on expenses.

  Friday, 6 November

  To the railway station at first light to be told by the militia that our documentation is not in order. I suggested to Faustino that we go to Valencia and see if we have better luck with the Communist authorities there. It is the Republican seat of government after all, I reasoned, and it might be easier to reach Madrid from Valencia than Albacete from Barcelona. You may well be right, he said with his polite smile. ‘En el fondo no soy imbecil, Faustino,’ I said [In the end I’m not a fool]. He actually laughed at that and patted me on the shoulder. I think I’ve broken through.

  Saturday, 7 November

  We reached Valencia last night after a train journey of about ten hours. Faustino had changed out of his Anarchist overalls and wore the shabby black suit of a functionary. Valencia was thronged with people but it lacked the slightly crazed zeal of Barcelona. You see more soldiers than militia and armed civilians, and there is a regular traffic of army lorries up and down the streets. Many buildings are sandbagged: the front is only sixty miles away, after all. We are staying at the Hotel España and last night ate a huge meal of steak and fried potatoes at a restaurant called, bizarrely, the Ideal Room. The place was packed with well-dressed men and women. No shortages in this city, dearly. We went to the government offices and I was told I could go to Madrid with a party of other foreign journalists in ten or fifteen days. Which is no good to me. At luncheon we stuffed ourselves again—mussels and shrimps washed down with a pitcher of beer. Faustino caught an afternoon train back to Barcelona. He said he felt uncomfortable in Valencia and the realization seemed to disturb him: ‘And this is my own side,’ he said. We said goodbye with some affection and I told him I would be back in a month or so. I’m going to take a steamer from here to Marseilles and fly from there to Paris. I’ll file my Valencia story for Dusenberry and try to organize things better from London. I could be waiting here fruitlessly for weeks otherwise.

  Went to the Museo Provincial in the afternoon. Closed. I wanted to see the Velazquez self-portrait. Sums up my trip, rather.

  Friday, 27 November

  On the train heading for Norwich and Thorpe for the weekend. Heart like a stone. Very depressed to be back in London after the sheer passion and fervour of Barcelona. Those young men and women held sincere beliefs, had dear values and a cause and wanted to change the world they lived in for the better. To walk the streets of London after that and see our pinched, grey-faced, downtrodden populace makes me despair.

  It was exacerbated by meeting Angus for a drink in White’s.↓

  ≡ The dub in St James’s.

  He asked me if I wanted to join (he would put my name down, he said). I said no, instantly, then—to undermine his surprise—said I couldn’t afford it. Evelyn [Waugh] was in the bar with some people and, in conversation, I let him know I’d just been in Spain and told him how impressed I’d been with the Republican spirit. He looked at me pityingly, his pale blue eyes wide and bright. ‘Spain has nothing to do with you or me, Logan,’ he said. And then immediately contradicted himself by asking if I’d seen any burnt-out churches. I’d seen locked ones, I said, but no signs of anti-dericalism. Then he changed the subject and started asking me questions about Aelthred and the Edgefields. Sometimes I think I’m only of interest to Evelyn because I married an earl’s daughter.↓

  ≡ Waugh was currently engaged to Laura Herbert, whom he later married.

  All the conversation in the bar was about the King and his American girlfriend, and there was a lot of ribald and actually quite disgusting speculation about the King’s ‘sexual difficulty’ and Mrs Simpson’s skill in being able to resolve it. Why do I feel ashamed on his behalf? I feel some sort of absurd bond with him because of our brief meeting and my giving him my matches and his asking my name. I’d be no good as an Anarchist in Barcelona, evidently.

  Monday, 30 November

  I was cast down and depressed all weekend, and Lottie, unusually for her, asked me what was wrong. I told her I was out of sorts, hated England and wanted to live abroad, as far away from Britain as possible. I ran through the possibilities: Australia, Canada, Malaya, South Africa, Hong Kong…But we’re everywhere—there’s no escape.

  Tuesday, 8 December

  Nothing but the Royal Crisis in the newspapers. It makes me sick. Let him abdicate for her, I say—good for him. They would understand him in Spain: he’s dedded to be ruled by his heart, not his head, and our little bourgeois world is appalled.

  Very nice review of The Cosmopolitans (anonymous, of course) in The Times Literary Supplement, which has cheered me up. The reviewer seems to understand why Les Cosmopolites provoke such a strong feeling in me. They are all about romance, about life’s exdtement and adventure and its essential sadness and transience. They savour everything both fine and bittersweet that life has to offer us—stoical in their hedonism. An admirable code to live by, it seems to me. Sales stand at 375 copies. Talk about falling ‘stillborn from the press’. Roderick sidesteps around the book when we meet, as if it were a turd on the pavement, and talks only of Summer at Saint Jean—of which I have written only a few hurried pages. I feel I can forget it for the moment, financially buoyed as I am by all my dollars earned in Spain. I’m planning another trip in March. Life has commissioned a long piece on the International Brigade ($350). Sold one of my Barcelona articles to Nosh’s Magazine for £30.

  Monday, 14 December

  I thought the King’s broadcast↓ was very moving, very sober and pitched exactly at the right level of personal regret, mingled with a sense of duty and conscious sacrifice.

  ≡ The King, having abdicated, became Duke of Windsor. He broadcast his reasons for his decision to the nation on 11 December.

  You could hear the strain in his voice. The ex-King, I mean, now that we have George VI. What a year, 1936: at the very least it can go down in British history as a year when three kings reigned, however briefly. Freya’s opinion about the abdication is, without any prompting on my part, exactly the same as mine—Lottie’s is absolutely opposed. So what should he have done? I asked her on Sunday (we were lunching at Edgefield—the whole table turned on me). It was impossible that he should even think of marrying her, Lottie said. You can’t have a Queen of England who’s been divorced twice—what kind of example is that? No, no, Aelthred said: he should have shipped her back to America for a year, pretended it was all over, then everyone would have forgotten about her and then he could have quietly set her up in a discreet place in London—have her back in his life with no fuss at all. ‘Isn’t that a bit cynical?’ I said. ‘A bit ignoble, perhaps?’ Aelthred was genuinely puzzled. ‘What on earth do you mean?’ he said. ‘He’s the King. He can do what he damn well pleases.’ They make me sick—the lot of them.

  1937

  [Wednesday, 10 March]

  Toulouse airport. I’m waiting for the flight to Valencia—delayed one hour. Today is Wednesday—on Monday evening I left London. I think I’m still suffering from after shock I’ve no idea what I left behind. Wrong—you know exactly what you left behind. What you don’t know is what you’ll discover when you go back.

  It happened like this. I spent the weekend at Thorpe as usual. Came up to London on the early train and shopped at the Army & Navy Stores for a few items that would be useful in Spain (powerful torch, 500 cigarettes, extra warm clothing). I was back at Draycott Avenue after luncheon. I laid out my clothes on the bed and was about to start packing when there was a ring at the doorbell. I went down the stairs to open the door and found Lottie and Sally [Ross] standing there—gleeful to have surprised me like this. Lottie said something like: ‘You left your manuscript behind and we were bored so decided to have a day trip to London.�
�� She handed over the folder (twenty-four appalling pages of Summer at Saint-Jean—I had no desire to take it to Spain and had deliberately left it at Thorpe). Sally said: ‘Well, come on, Logan, aren’t you going to ask us up?’

  What could I say? What could I do? In the flat Sally realized instantly and started talking like a machine gun. It took Lottie a few seconds longer and I saw her stiffen and her ‘Isn’t this a nice…’ die in her throat as she looked around her. They didn’t go into the bedroom, kitchen or bathroom—there was no need. They had recognized the effect a woman has on a dwelling place. Whether a palace or a mud hut, it is palpable and unmistakable—a presence, a kind of order quite different from something that even the tidiest man living alone produces. They had been expecting something basic and functional—which is how I described Draycott Avenue to anyone who was curious—one level above a monk’s cell. Our dark, warm, cherished, lived-in few rooms were eloquent testimony to the kind of secret life I lived in London—my books, my paintings, the odd, interesting bits of furniture. Lottie became very quiet while Sally’s camouflaging prattle intensified, with her finally blurting out, ‘Do you know, darling, if we run we’ll make the 5 o’clock.’ It was the perfect exit line and allowed us all to bustle downstairs. Lottie rallied and managed to say, ‘Do take care in Spain,’ and I was able to kiss them both goodbye and wave them off up Draycott Avenue.

  I sat in a chair for half an hour letting the clamour in my head settle down: the warring suppositions, courses of action, ways of escape, excuses, lies…Freya came home and I told her what happened. It really startled her and then she gave me her look and said, ‘Good. I’m glad. It’s time we stopped hiding.’

  And now I sit here in Toulouse thinking of potential consequences and I see that, in general, Freya is wise and right. But I feel—what?—that it has been forced upon me, that it should never have happened this way. I could have lied my way out of my sham marriage to Lottie in a manner that would have spared her feelings better and hurt her pride less. Not to be. They have just announced a three-hour delay for our ‘plane.

  Monday, ij March

  Valencia. Hotel Oriente. Things have changed here even in a few months. The Communists (the PSUC) seem to have consolidated their hold and consequently things are being run better: at the Foreign Press Bureau I was presented with my passes to the Aragon and Madrid fronts. British journalists protested vainly at this favouritism: they go to the back of the queue—the Republican government is incensed by our non-intervention policy. One of them told me that Hemingway was here, staying in a vast suite at the Reina Victoria. I shall go and pay my respects.

  §

  Later. Hemingway was very cordial—he said he was on his way to Madrid to make a documentary film. He’d never heard of the Dusenberry Press Service. ‘Are they paying you? That’s the only criterion.’ Like clockwork, I said. He’s also on a contract for something called the Newspaper Alliance. He’s paid $500 for each cabled story and $1,000 for each mailed one—up to 1,200 words. Jesus: almost a dollar a word. Rather puts Dusenberry in perspective. ‘Rack up the expenses,’ Hem advised. He was at his most likeable, in expansive, genial mood, and we drank a lot of brandy. The Hotel Florida in Madrid, he told me, was the only show in town. I said I’d see him there later in the month. I head back to Barcelona tomorrow to meet up with Faustino. I realize I’m happy to be back in Spain and not just because it has its own excitement. It stops me thinking—and caring—about what Lottie may be doing or saying. Wrote a loving letter to my Freya, saying all would be well—but specifying no particular course of action.

  Thursday, 18 March

  Faustino and I caught a troop train this morning and chugged slowly up on to the Aragon plateau. It’s damn cold and I’m wearing my Army & Navy long Johns. We’ve billeted for the night in a little village called San Vicente about a mile from the front. My supply of cigarettes makes me a very popular man. We had a big tortilla each and as much wine as we wanted in exchange for a pack. Faustino warned me to ration them: ‘All Spanish tobacco comes from the Islas Canarias.’ I realized: Franco holds them—soon there’ll be no cigarettes for the Republicans.

  Barcelona has changed too: that exhilarating revolutionary fervour seems to have vanished and in its place the city seems merely to have reverted to its pre-war state. The poor are everywhere and the rich are correspondingly obvious. The big expensive restaurants are busy, yet there were huge queues for bread and the beggars and the urchins were back outside the shops of the Ramblas. At night you could see the prostitutes lounging in the doorways and on street corners and the nude cabarets were being advertised again. All that had gone last year. I asked Faustino what had happened and he said the Communists were slowly taking control from the Anarchists. ‘They’re more interested in governing,’ he said, ‘they’re better organized. They put their principles to one side in order to win this war. While all that we have are our principles. That’s our trouble: we Anarchists only want liberty for the people—we crave that—and we hate privilege and injustice. We just don’t know how to achieve this.’ He laughed softly and repeated his words like a private incantation: ‘Love of life, love of humanity. Hatred of injustice, hatred of privilege.’ It was actually strangely moving to hear the heartfelt way he said these words. ‘Who could disagree with that?’ I said. I quoted him Chekhov’s two freedoms: that all he asked for was freedom from violence, freedom from lies. He said he preferred his formula of two loves, two hatreds. ‘But you left one out,’ I said. ‘Love of beauty.’ He smiled. ‘Ah, yes; love of beauty. You’re absolutely right. You see how romantic we are, Logan—deep down.’ I grinned at him: ‘En el fondo no soy anarquis-ta.’ He gave a genuine joyful laugh at that and to my surprise he held out his hand. I shook it.

  Friday, 19 March

  We are led up to the front. In the misty early morning light we can see that San Vicente is a huddle of stone and mud buildings, somewhat knocked about, the narrow lanes between the buildings churned into a quagmire by the passage of vehicles, men and animals. It’s freezing cold. We plod up a path between small mean fields showing the first acid-green shoots of winter barley rimed with frost. We are making for the ridge ahead. The countryside is bleak and virtually treeless—a wind-battered scrub (I can identify rosemary bushes) covers the sierra and the escarpments beyond.

  The trenches are on the ridge of the hill—scrapes behind piled rocks and sandbags—or else more substantial caves dug into the lee side of the hill. Beyond the trenches (which only extend a hundred yards) there is a line of barbed wire and then the hillside falls steeply away to the valley bed beneath. On the crest of the hill rising up on the opposite side of the valley I can see some emplacements and an orange and yellow flag flying—the Fascist position, over half a mile away, and I can even spot the ant-figures of soldiers moving about. The absence of threat is very present—nobody is bothering to keep his head down. Faustino introduces me to the teniente, who turns out to be English—a sullen, suspicious man who says his name is Terence, pointedly not giving me his surname. He used to work at Chatham Docks, he says. He takes me on a cursory tour of the position: the men huddle around little smudge fires, unshaven, filthy and demoralized, their weapons muddy and ancient. Terence explains that this area of the front is manned by the POUM militia—the Trotskyites. Only the Communist forces receive new Russian weapons. ‘The Russians won’t supply us because we’re anti-Stalin,’ he says with real vehemence. ‘Make sure you write that in your newspaper. I’m sure Franco’s most grateful.’ He spoke of the government in Valencia with more disdain than he expended on his enemy opposite.

  We clamber over the trench and advance as far as we can to the wire. Peering down the slope, I can make out what I’ take to be a dead body lying there. ‘A Moroccan,’ Terence says. ‘They attacked us in January. We beat them off.’ Then I hear a few dry reports, almost like two stones being hit together. ‘Are we being shot at?’ I ask. ‘Yes,’ Terence says, ‘but don’t worry, they’re too far away.’


  When I leave I give him two packs of cigarettes and he manages to produce his first smile.

  [Saturday, 20 March

  I realize I’ve seen everything I’m likely to on the Aragon front so we arrange to leave. Faustino and I spend the morning waiting for a truck to take us back to the railhead. We are both dispirited by what we’ve seen—but, as Faustino points out, it’s worse for him: I’ll be going away in a matter of days—this is his war and he has to stay. These are the images of the struggle against Fascism that he has to subsist on.

  We squelch along the main street and wander into the church. It is empty of all furniture (all burnt as firewood) and is now used as a stable for mules and shelter for chicken coops. I take out my Baedecker and read out loud: ‘San Vicente has a small Romanesque church that is worth a detour.’ We sit on the floor and smoke and sip whisky from my flask. How long will you be in Madrid? Faustino asks. A week, ten days—I don’t know, I confess, I really should return home as soon as possible. I smile at him: my marriage is in difficulties, I say. I tell him about Freya, our double life, my London⁄Norfolk set-up. My wife found out, I say, just before I came to Spain.