2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  1938

  Friday, 7 January

  Freya and I were married yesterday at the Chelsea Town Hall. Present: the bride and groom. Mother, Encarnarion, Freya’s father, George, her brother, Robin. Afterwards we went up the road to the Eight Bells and had a few drinks. It was a low-key affair, but our happiness was complete. Mother, however, was subdued; she says she likes Freya very much but added that ‘you cannot forget a person like Lottie in just one day’. I reminded her that Lottie and I had been separated for eight months by now. ‘It seem like one day to me,’ she insisted.

  Then they all went their separate ways and Freya and I went home to Draycott Avenue. We had lunch, we went for a chilly walk in Battersea Park, came back and read and listened to music on the gramophone, then ate our supper.

  ‘I’m so happy,’ I said to her as we held each other in bed, ‘that I think I might explode.’

  ‘Boom!’ she said. ‘Young marrieds disintegrate simultaneously in Chelsea flat.’

  Thursday, 17 March

  I pick up this journal again to note that (a) I have finished Chapter 3 of Summer at Saint-Jean and that (b) Freya announced this morning that she was pregnant. We had talked about trying for a child but I never expected it to be so suddenly successful. And of course the news made me think of Lionel, whom I’ve seen only once this year. He was brought to a hotel in Norwich (where I’d rented a room for the day) in the company of a nanny and I spent a few hours with him, trying to play with him, trying to entertain him. He was suspicious of me and kept going to his nurse. It was an embarrassing exercise. Poor Lionel—is he going to be the biggest casualty of our loveless marriage? Somehow I feel the child Freya and I will have will fare better. One thing is clear; we have to find a new place to live.

  [April]

  Can there have been a filthier spring than the one we have had this year? Cold and rain—rain and cold. Wallace has managed to contract me to the Sunday Referee: ten articles, £500. Since Spain my stock and my rate have gone up, gratifyingly.

  Freya is well, no morning sickness to speak of. Another day this last week in Norwich with Lionel. This is now establishing itself as the pattern. I rent a room for a day—on neutral ground—and Lionel is brought down from Thorpe in a taxi with the nanny. He stays until it’s obvious that he’s tired or bored—or both.

  Enjoyable supper with Turville Stevens last night. Turville said he knew war was inevitable as far back as 1936—before Spain. And the news is bad from Catalonia—Franco’s troops advancing fast, every day. My God, Spain. It seems like some crazy dream. And what am I to do with Faustino Peredes’s Miros? I shut my mind to Turville’s warnings of the coming war with Germany. I think we’ve found a house in Battersea that we can just afford.

  [July-August]

  ≡ Melville Road, Battersea. We moved in July and have spent the summer putting the place together. I was sorry to say farewell to Draycott Avenue but we both love Melville Road. ‘Do you think it’s named after Herman Melville?’ Freya said. ‘I’m sure it was,’ I said, ‘and what better place for a fellow scrivener to reside.’ Melville Road is a curved row of three-storey, red-brick, Victorian terraced houses. Each one has a small patch of lawn or gravel at the front and, behind, there’s a long thin garden that backs on to the fence demarcating of the gardens of Bridgewater Street, which runs parallel. We have a sitting room, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor; two bedrooms and a bathroom on the floor above and, under the eaves, an attic room with a dormer window. This I’ve transformed into a book-lined cell to act as my study. Through the window I can see the chimneys of Lots Road Power Station on the other side of the Thames.

  Yesterday we went for a walk in the park and watched machines digging lines of trenches. War is in the air and will come from the air, it seems, even to tranquil Battersea. Freya is fat and uncomfortable now: the baby is due in October.

  Wednesday, 31 August

  Hitler has a million men under arms, it says in the News Chronicle. Meanwhile, I write a review of a mediocre book on Keats for The Times Literary Supplement. A dry hot summer, one almost entirely of hard work and pleasurable domesticity. Freya’s nipples are the colour of Boumville chocolate. We papered the second bedroom in canary yellow for ‘Baby’ as we call it—it, not he or she. We are superstitiously vague: we say we don’t care, but after Lionel I long for a little girl. I think Freya wants a boy.

  And I had another odd trying day with Lionel. He was fractious and whingeing, ‘alive with prickly heat’ the nurse said. So I took his clothes off and let him play in the room naked, much to the nurse’s shock. ‘I shall have to tell Lady Laetiria, Mr Mountstuart.’

  ‘Please do,’ I said. I haven’t seen Lottie since the divorce—it’s curious how your old life, or a life you abandon, can just fall away so quickly. Lionel is our only connection, now. From time to time I would soak a flannel in cold water, wring it out and lay it over the worst of his rashes on his thighs and under his arms and for a minute or two he would calm and seemed to look at me with gratitude. ‘Thank you, Daddy,’ he said. ‘That feels nice.’ My guilt grows as our baby approaches. I wept on the train back to London—a rare event for me—but nothing brings tears to my eyes like Lionel. How can I do any more for him? And what will it be like when ‘Baby’ arrives? Hitler has a million men under arms, according to the News Chronicle—I see I’ve already written that.

  [Saturday, 1 October

  If I’m honest with myself I completely understand the relief people feel over Munich.↓

  ≡ Europe came dose to war in the autumn of 1938 as Hitler threatened to march into German-speaking Czechoslovakia, the Sudetenland. Neville Chamberlain, the British prime minister, flew to Munich and there, in a four-power meeting (Germany, Italy, France, Britain), it was agreed that the Sudetenland be ceded to Germany. The Czechs were not invited to be present. Chamberlain returned triumphant from Munich bearing a piece of paper signed by Hitler expressing the desire ‘of our two peoples never to go to war together’.

  Our child is due any day now and, although—politically, intellectually—I condemn our cowardly concessions, and I feel a desperate sorrow for the Czechs, I say to myself that surely it’s better that we have peace than go to war over an insignificant disputed part of a distant small country? Remember I have seen war at first hand in Spain, all its absurdity and malevolent chaos, and I know that war has to be the absolute, final, last resort. The brutal truth is that the Sudetenland issue would never be sufficient reason to set the countries of Europ? at each other’s throats. So, are you an appeaser, then? No: I see the threats these madmen pose, but I know also that all I want to do is live my life in peace like the rest of the world. Hider doesn’t want war—what he wants are die spoils of war, which is why he’s so clever and which is why he keeps on seeming to succeed. The spoils of war widiout war. Perhaps this is what Chamberlain understands and is why he has given this final concession but cleverly extracted peace as its price. As I wander about Battersea I sense a real palpable lightening of mood—laughter from a pub, women chatting on corners, a postman whisding as he does his round. These cliches tell us something: we came to die brink and we pulled back. The trenches can be filled in, die gasmasks returned to die government warehouses. I’m sure my German equivalent—me writer in his thirties, widi a wife and a child on die way—can’t feel any different from me, can’t want to see his cities bombed, his continent ravaged by war. Surely it’s a matter of common sense? But dien I say to myself: how much common sense was on display in Spain?

  Turville rings,—almost in tears, talking about die shame and betrayal, of how Chamberlain and Daladier [die French prime minister] gave away too much and Hider will be back for more. Is he right? I sit here in my litde house, a sudden summer rainstorm beating down outside, and pray that he is wrong.

  Oliver Lee on die wireless this evening, predicting death and destruction unless we stop Hider now. ‘But we have stopped him, haven’t we? Hearing Lee, I find myself thinking of Land and, in die
way one automatically does, imagining die alternative life I might have led if she had agreed to marry me. Futile, poindess speculation. I’d have never met Freya. Perhaps Land did me die greatest favour she ever could.

  I walked out this evening to die bottom of die garden and smoked a cigarette. Last week I planted an acer in die furthest bed from die house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty years’ time, if we’re still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But die thought depresses me: in thirty years’ time I’D be in my mid sixties and I realize diat diese forward projections diat you make, so unreflectingly, in your life are beginning to run out. Suppose I’d said in forty years’ time? That would be pushing it. Fifty? I’ll probably be gone by then. Sixty? Dead and buried, for sure. Thank Christ I didn’t plant an oak. Is diat a good definition of marking die ageing watershed? That moment when you realize—quite rationally, quite unemotionally—diat die world in die not-so-far-distant future will not contain you: diat die trees you planted will continue growing but you will not be there to see diem.

  Friday, 14 October

  We have a little girl. Born at 8 o’clock this morning. I had a telephone call from die hospital and went round immediately. Freya was exhausted and dark-eyed. The baby was brought out for me and I held her in my arms, a little angry red thing, tiny hands beating the air as she screamed her lungs raw. We are going to call her Stella—our personal star. Welcome to the world, Stella Mountstuart.

  1939

  Saturday, 14 January

  Distressing letter from Tess Scabius, addressed to me alone and marked ‘Personal and Confidential’. In it she tells the story, as she sees it, of Peter’s constant infidelities and the appalling strain they put on the marriage. She asks for my help: ‘I never suspected this of Peter when I married him and I know you would never imagine him capable of this sort of behaviour. Quite apart from the harlots in London he is now seeing a woman in Marlow. He still regards you as his closest friend. He admires you and respects you. Logan, I cannot ask you to make Peter love me again as he used to, but for pity’s sake he has to be asked to stop these shameful affairs. I am at the end of my tether and I know everyone in the village is aware of what is going on. Can he not be a gentleman and spare me and our children this cruel humiliation?’ And more of the same. Poor Tess.

  Friday, 20 January

  I rang Peter and he asked me to luncheon at Luigi’s to celebrate the publication of his third thriller, Three Days in Manakesh. I should have said he left The Times last year. He is, by all surprising accounts, a far more successful writer than I am. I’m glad to say I do not possess a scintilla of envy for him.

  §

  Later. We lunched, and it was most enjoyable. He has changed, Peter—there is a worldlier, coarser streak in him. In mid sentence his eyes would follow a young waitress as she walked across the room and he endlessly passed remarks about the other women in the restaurant: ‘That’s not her husband’, ‘She could be a beauty if she dressed better’, ‘You can smell the sexual frustration coming offher’ and such like. Maybe this is the effect of constant adulteries. Though he confessed he felt more relaxed with prostitutes: he says he’s a regular with two or three. He recommended the practice to me—pleasure without responsibility, he said. I reminded him I was extremely happily married. ‘No such thing,’ he said. It was the perfect cue, so I told him about Tess’s letter. That shook him: he went very silent and I could see there was a fury’building in him. ‘Why would she write to you?’ he kept saying. I didn’t enlighten him. But at least I’ve done my duty by Tess. I wrote to her telling her what I’d done. Those days in Oxford seem centuries ago, now. Newspaper placards in Soho as I catch a bus home: FRANCO AT THE GATES OF BARCELONA.

  [March]

  Well, that’s it, I suppose, now Hitler’s in Prague.

  ≡ Hider’s troops entered Prague on 15 March ostensibly ‘to protect’ Bohemia and Moravia from the newly seceded Slovakian state.

  Oliver Lee was right, and now ‘Czechoslovakia has ceased to exist.’ My sentiments of last October look like foolish wistful desperate dreams. And Franco has all Spain now—which will please Mother. I write this at the kitchen table as Freya holds the baby to her breast. In the cupboard beside her the gasmasks sit in their cardboard boxes—never returned. War must come now and Danzig will be the next crisis. And what will you do in this coming conflict, Logan? What will Daddy do in this war?

  Roderick has offered me the job of reader at Sprymont & Drew at £30 a month. I asked for £40 and he told me Plomer↓ at Cape gets the same, so I could hardly argue.

  ≡ William Plomer (1903-73). South African writer and reader at Jonathan Cape Ltd for many years.

  I suspect Roderick is trying to tie me into the firm as I had told him Summer at Saint-Jean was almost finished. One has to wonder at his logic: journalism is so time consuming, and now that I have to read manuscripts all week and compile reports on them, it is going to make it virtually impossible to write anything else.

  Small but sustained success of Les Cosmopolites in France. Cyprien writes to say he is being feted again as if it were 1912 and he was an eminent man of letters, ‘grace a toi’. I must go back to Paris before Armageddon arrives.

  §

  Aldeburgh. We’ve rented a small house in the town here for July and August—forever drawn back to Norfolk for some reason. I go up to London when business demands but I’ve relished our first two weeks here and am reluctant to move. The fresh silver light off the North Sea, the lure of vanishing horizons. I work all morning, writing journalism or, more than likely, reading manuscripts for S&D (which seems to be taking up more and more of my time). Then if the weather’s fair we have a picnic on the beach—take a travelling rug, a thermos and sandwiches, sit on the shore and watch the waves roll in on to the pebbly strand. Stella is a beautiful, round-faced, plump-cheeked, blue-eyed, golden-haired stereotype of a baby girl. Curious and jolly. We sit her down and put a pile of pebbles in front of her and we watch the baby pick up, examine and let fall pebble after pebble while we sit and chat. Freya’s started to help with the reading of some of the S&D manuscripts—1 think she rather misses the BBC.

  I managed to persuade Lottie to let us have Lionel for a weekend, given we were close at hand. It was not a success. Lionel seemed terrified of Freya and I began to wonder what nonsense Lottie had put in his head—or that bitch Enid more like. He seemed more relaxed with me and I tried to do the right sort of Daddish things. We kicked a football around the garden for an hour and eventually he said, ‘Daddy, how long do we have to play this game?’ To be blunt he seems an average child with nothing remarkable in any area as far as I can see—not bright, not charming, not funny, not cheeky, not handsome. And to make matters worse he has all the worst aspects of the Edgefield physiognomy. Once he asked me if I was married to Freya. Of course I am, I said. He frowned at this and said, ‘But I thought you were married to Mummy.’ I explained. ‘Does that mean you’re not really my Daddy?’ he asked. I’ll always be your Daddy, I said and, God help me, almost started to cry.

  [July]

  Fleming asked me to lunch at the Carlton Grill. It seems he’s still a stockbroker but now has some sort of clandestine role in the Admiralty. He said ‘a lot of people’ had been very impressed with my articles on the Spanish War. I told him that 90 per cent of what I’d written had been published in America. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘those are the ones that impressed us.’ He talked about the future war as if it were already taking place and asked me what my plans were. To survive,’ I said. He laughed and leant across the table and said—very cloak and daggery—that he would count it a personal favour if I ‘would hold myself in readiness for a special post’. He said the job would be based in London but would be a vital one for our war effort. Why me? I asked. Because you write well, you’ve seen war at first hand and you have no illusions about it. On the way out, and I’m sure this was arranged,
we bumped into an older man, in a grey suit of very old-fashioned cut, who was introduced as Admiral Godfrey. I was being quietly evaluated.

  Monday, 7 August

  Tess Scabius is dead. She drowned in the Thames, Peter told me—incoherently—over the phone. She hadn’t returned home at tea time after a walk and Peter wandered down to the river to look for her. He saw a crowd of people and police about half a mile downstream and strolled over to see what the fuss was all about—to find they had just dragged Tess out of the water. She’d been gathering flowers and slipped on the bank. And she couldn’t swim. ‘A terrible ghastly accident,’ he said.

  What a hellish awful shock. Dear Tess. I think back to our stolen Sundays in Islip and the intense storm of emotions that was generated in that hard damp bed in the little cottage. And I acknowledge what you did for me, Tess. Accident? I doubt it. I think she had had enough. Thank God, thank Christ, at least I bearded Peter about his rutting and fucking. I told Freya, who could see how upset I was, and I told her something of our shared history: the challenges at school; Tess’s audacious following of Peter to Oxford. I said I thought I’d been a bit in love with her at the time and jealous of Peter. I thought it best not to tell her of our affair.