by William Boyd
Wednesday, 24 July
On the way to Boca do Inferno Ecdes warned me not to sign the Duke’s visitors’ book if I were asked. Also he said not to breathe a word about the NID. Apparently German agents have been putting about the rumour that the British secret service are plotting to have the Duke assassinated.↓
≡ This was a plot by the Germans to lure the Duke to Spain and ‘safety’.
Ecdes said he was paranoid and very jumpy.
But in fact he was the soul of good humour and fun—laughing, chatting non-stop, pouring people’s drinks. I had a sense of him as he must have been as a young man and the charisma he wielded so effortlessly. And the Duchess herself was suddenly far more attentive to me—Ecdes quite abandoned. When she talks to you she puts her face about two inches doser than is normal. As a result even the most banal statement has a quality of intimacy and when she speaks you feel her breath on your face. It is a fantastically effective trick. She is no beauty but somehow this special proximity makes you feel chosen—she has eyes only for you. I saw her at dose range and I must say her teeth are immaculate. Impossible to get any idea of her figure under the haute couture. She’s very skinny but is she flat-chested? She called me Logan.
It was a big party full of Espirito Santo’s Portuguese friends. The Duke and Duchess feel they have been cold shouldered by the embassy, and Ecdes and I were the only British there. It was a warm night and we took brandy and coffee out on the terrace. There was a great booming and crashing of surf in the darkness. The Duke, smoking a dgar, led me on to the lawn to the edge of the cirde of light cast by the house. I said how enjoyable the evening had been and what a pleasure it was to see the lights of Estoril blazing along the coast after the blackout in London. I didn’t add this, but, standing there in the warm night, it seemed to me as if we were in a never-never land for ridi and beautiful people where war was unknown. But the Duke wasn’t listening.
‘I had a telegram from Winston↓ today,’ he said.
≡ Churchill had cabled: ‘I have now succeeded in overcoming War Office objections to the departure of Fletcher.’
‘We’ve got Fletdier—he’s coming to join us.’
‘Excellent news, sir.’
‘All thanks to you, Mountstuart.’
‘No, really, I—’
‘You’re too modest. I know you must have pulled a few strings. We’re really grateful.’
‘Don’t mention it.’
‘Trouble is we still can’t get those trunks of clothes and linen from Antibes. We desperately need them for the Bahamas. If there was anything you could do…’
‘I’ll try, sir.’
As we strolled back to the terrace the Duchess called me over. She put her face very dose to mine and for one mad instant I thought she was going to kiss me on the lips. But she said, ‘Would you sign the visitors’ book, Logan,’ and showed me where it was on the side table in the hall. ‘Thank you for everything you did for David,’ she added in a quiet voice, and touched my arm. I picked up the pen, pretended to write my name, but she had drifted away.
§
Bade at the London Pension. Vanderpoel has left me a note. I’m to take a flying boat bade to London tomorrow while he stays on. Miserable jealous little bastard.
§
[The Duke and Duchess of Windsor left Lisbon on 1 August on board an American liner to take up the Duke’s appointment as Governor of the Bahamas. In London LMS wrote up his account of the Lisbon trip and his meeting with, and impressions of, the couple (in more circumspect terms than he employed in this journal). This long confidential memorandum↓ (some sixty pages) was circulated in NID.
≡ PRO FO 93133⁄180 in the Public Record Office.
It was highly regarded.
When the bombing of London and other British cities began in September of that year (the Blitz), Freya and Stella once again decamped to the Deverells in Cheshire until the summer of 1941. LMS’s mother remained in Sumner Place, now home to some eighteen paying guests, Mercedes Mountstuart and Encarnation occupying one large room on the ground floor. LMS’s work continued routinely in NID and he wrote regular bulletins for the Spanish language service of the BBC.]
1941
Wednesday, 31 December
Summary of the year. Freya and Stella are asleep. I sit in my little study under the roof with the blackout curtains drawn, whisky bottle in front of me.
The war. The war, the war. My mind can’t take it in. Depressed by the news in the East.↓
≡ The British battleships Repulse and the Prince of Wales had been sunk by the Japanese in December. Hong Kong was occupied. The Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor occurred on 7 December 1941.
Elated-by Pearl Harbor. This will finally bring the Americans in and for the first time I allow myself to think this war will end—with victory. Thank you, Hirohito.
Mrs Woolf committed suicide in March—drowned herself in the River Ouse, a la Tess. Death by water. And Joyce died this year in Zurich, a sick, blind, prematurely old man, by all accounts. Talking of which:
Health: good in the main. Two teeth removed, flu in September. Drinking too much.
Family: Freya and Stella both startlingly well. I’ve seen Lionel three times this year—shame on me.
Work: Vanderpoel a grade 1 CAUC. Many hours expended on the Spanish bulletins. Freya has taken over my reading duties at S&D for £20 a week. I pointed out that this was the same work I did for 30 per cent less money. Roderick wouldn’t budge—he’s punishing me for the non-delivery of Summer. I wrote a long article on Verlaine for Horizon (Cyril very complimentary but it has yet to run). Some reviewing for newspapers, but with £55 a month from NID, plus Stella’s salary, plus my Miro windfall we are better off than ever.
Home: solid new doors and windows on Melville Road↓—we sleep more securely.
≡ Melville Road had been damaged by a near-miss in April. Before repairs could be effected the house was burgled.
Dreams of Spain. Who drinks at the Chicote now? I try to imagine Paris full of Nazi soldiers.
§
A wasted year, in the end. I asked Fleming for a move to another section, but he said I was too valuable to the Iberian peninsula.
§
Friends. Ben (as always); Peter (more distant); Ian (can’t really make him out); Dick (lost to view). But I don’t really need friends because I have Freya.
§
General reflections. I am in uniform, I am making a tiny contribution to the ending of this interminable war. My profession—writer—is in temporary abeyance. I am solvent, thanks to the RNVR and Joan Miro (and Faustino), but my French royalties are unobtainable. I must read more. I finally got round to Hemingway’s Spanish book [For Whomthe Bell Tolls]—an embarrassing disaster. What could have possessed him to write so badly?
§
Resolutions: to drink less. I fear this war is driving me to alcoholism. To find a book I truly want to write (in other words abandon Summer at Saint-Jean, you fool).
§
Favourite place: Melville Road.
Vice: procrastination.
Faith: love for Freya and Stella.
Ambition: to come through this war and write something of value.
Fantasy: driving south from Paris to Biarritz and the Atlantic with Freya by my side and a suite booked at the Palais.
1942
Friday, 20 February
Lunch with Peter [Scabius]. He looks gaunt and ill. He says his children are living with his parents. He can’t stay in the house at Marlow—haunted by Tess. He had a terrible row with her father, Cloughj who shouted and screamed at him and they almost came to blows. I commiserated: awful business, ghastly tragedy. Then he told me he was taking instruction to join the Roman Catholic Church.
§
ME: Why on earth would you want to do that? PETER: Guilt. I think I drove Tess to her death in some way. ME:Don’t be absurd. She didn’t commit suicide, did she? PETER: I can never be sure. But even if it was an accident, she was
in the water I’m sure she welcomed her death.
§
I said that what he needed was a psychiatrist, not a priest, but he wouldn’t be told. He said he wanted God back in his life. I said, well what’s wrong with the God you grew up with, your Anglican God? He’s too soft, he said, too reasonable and understanding, doesn’t really want to interfere—more like the ideal next-door neighbour than a deity. I need to feel God’s terrible wrath, his retribution waiting for me, he said. My Anglican God will just look sad and give me a ticking off.
‘Look at us,’ I said, growing exasperated. ‘Here we are, two highly educated, worldly writers talking about God in heaven. It’s all complete mumbo-jumbo, Peter, all of it. If you want to feel better you might as well sacrifice a goat to the sun-god Ra. It makes just as much sense as what you’re saying.’
He said I didn’t understand: if a person had no faith it was like talking to a brick wall. I recognize that his ‘conversion’ is a form of penance—some punishment he needs. Then he told me he was writing a book about Tess and their life together.
‘A book? A biography?’
‘A novel.’
Friday, 27 February
I’m thirty-six years old today. Does that make me middle aged? Perhaps I can hold off the designation until I’m forty. Freya baked me a cake, a sponge (she found some real eggs somewhere) and stuck three red candles and six blue ones in it. Stella insisted on blowing them out. ‘How old are you, Daddy?’ she said. I counted the candles for her: ‘I’m nine,’ I said. Freya looked at me: ‘Who’s a big boy, then?’
Take away this war and I suppose you could say I was as happy as a man could be. Only two worms in my particular bud—Lionel and my work. I see Lionel less and less—partly because of my job and also because Lottie remarried.↓
≡ Lady Laeticia had married Sir Hugh Leggatt (Bart.), a widower and neighbouring landowner twice her age, in 1941.
Lionel is almost nine now and nearly a complete stranger to me. And my other concern: I sense my metier slipping away. No urge to write beyond occasional commissioned journalism. Perhaps I need this war to be over before I can start again.
Wednesday, 15 April
Today Peter is received into the Roman Catholic Church. He asked if I would be his godfather but I declined on the grounds that it would be insincere. I think he was a little hurt, but too bad. He asked me if he could send me the manuscript of the Tess novel ‘to verify the facts’. It seems nearly finished by all accounts. The prospect of reading it makes me feel sick, to be honest.
Monday, 4 May
To the BBC for yet another broadcast to Spain—to pre-empt fears of a German invasion of the Canaries, apparently. On the way out I met Louis MacNeice,↓ whom I scarcely know, but who was embarrassingly complimentary about The Girl Factory.
≡ Louis MacNeice (1907-63), poet, then working as a talks producer at the BBC.
He asked me what I was doing and I said nothing—and blamed the war. He said he knew how I felt but we had to keep writing, that this war might last another five or even ten years and that we couldn’t just live in a kind of artistic deep-freeze. ‘What about our life to come? ‘What did you write in the war?’—we can’t just say nothing.’ He talked vaguely about adapting The Girl Factory for the radio, but worried that it might be a bit strong. Anyway, he inspired me—I’m always inspired after meeting another writer, and I realize we have our own secret brotherhood, even if it just comes down to sympathizing with others’ moans and complaints. I came home and read through my chapters of Summer. They were appalling. I went down to the bottom of the garden and burnt everything I’d written in the incinerator. I have no regrets—in fact I feel relieved. However, I worry a little about what Roderick might say about my advance, spent many years ago…
Thursday, 28 May
Ian [Fleming] wandered into our office today with a file in his hand and looked at me rather intently. Plomer was in the room and said, ‘Watch out, Logan, lan’s got his hey-I’ve-just-had-an-idea look on.’ I asked him what the file was and he said it was mine. ‘So ‘G’ is for Gonzago,’ he said. ‘So what?’ I said. ‘And you’re half Uruguayan, born in Montevideo—how fascinating. How good’s your Spanish?’ I said I could speak it all right, though indifferently. Ian looked at me and nodded. ‘I don’t think we’re exploiting you to the full, Logan,’ he said. I felt a little unsettled by this for a while but now don’t think it’s worth pondering further—just Ian with too much time on his hands, trying to come up with one of his mad ideas.
[July-August]
Movements. Freya and Stella to Cheshire. I joined them for a week. Then ten days in Devon with the Leepings. A dragging August. Sudden depression realizing that we’d been at war for three years, almost. I think back to our lives in the fretful, worried thirties and it seems a vanished, golden age.
[August]
Back from Devon. I took Stella to see Mother—who suddenly looked a lot older. She is sixty-two, after all. She started to reminisce about Montevideo, which is not like her: she was always thrilled to come to Europe, even Birmingham seemed exotic. But today she moaned on at me as we sat in their cluttered room, Encarnarion washing up the tea dishes in the single sink. Logan, she said, I have become unapatrona [a landlady]—is not dignity for me. I wanted to point out that if she hadn’t let Prendergast squander the small fortune that Father had saved both our lives would have been a great deal more comfortable—but I hadn’t the heart. I realize she’d lost weight and that was what had aged her—she was always ‘ample’. Not any more. She loves Stella and this has reconciled her to the loss of Lionel and her aristocratic daughter-in-law. Both she and Encarnation revel in Stella’s fair skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, as if she is some kind of genetic joke. They stare at her, fascinated, and point out the most ordinary things: ‘Look how she opened the cupboard’; ‘See, she sneeze again’; ‘Watch her playing with her doll’. It is as if no child in history has ever mastered these challenges. When they pick her up, they kiss her repeatedly: kiss her hands, her knees, her ears. Stella is composed and tolerant, permitting this licence. When we leave and I close the door I hear, wails and sobbing.
Thursday, 17 September
A letter from Roderick, hinting at a law suit, demanding the repayment of my advance on Summer. Simultaneously, the arrival of Peter Scabius’s novel in typescript, ominously entitled Guilt. The first line reads: ‘Simon Trumpington never thought he would associate shire-horses with a beautiful girl.’ I can’t bear to read on: there will be something truly disgusting and upsetting, I know, in this exploitation of Tess’s short, unhappy life.
Friday, 18 September
I wrote to Peter—lying—saying I had read the novel in one sitting and that I thought it ‘masterly’ (very useful word) and that it was a ‘fine tribute’ to Tess and praising him for the courage it must have taken to write such a harrowing etc., etc. I made one suggestion: that he change the hero’s surname—it sounded too P.G. Wodehouse. I said I would read it again in a calmer mood—I hope I may have bought myself some time.
Monday, 12 October
Fleming and Godfrey came in today looking very pleased with themselves and told me to pack my tropical kit. ‘You’re off to the sunny Caribbean,’ they said, ‘lucky so-and-so.’ Most amusing, I said, save your jokes for the new boys. But they weren’t joking: the Duke of Windsor is about to re-enter my life.
Friday, 30 October
New York City. I have been temporarily promoted to commander and sit here in my downtown hotel waiting to go and take up my new command. I suppose—not to put too fine a point on it—that I have become a spy and I have been set to spy on the Duke and Duchess. Feel a little ill-at-ease.
Fleming and Godfrey explained the background. The Duke has settled reluctantly but diligently into his new role as Governor of the Bahamas. He became friendly with a Swedish multi-millionaire who lived out there called Axel Wenner-Gren (the founder of Electrolux), a man who has made a vast fortune from vacuum cleaners and r
efrigerators and who, like most of the wealthy denizens of Nassau, does not want to pay any taxes on his fortune. Not only does the tax-free status of the Bahamas suit Wenner-Gren, but its location also places him close to his burgeoning business interests in South America. He and the Duke had become close—they dined together, Wenner-Gren leant him his yacht—but then in July of last year Wenner-Gren was blacklisted by the United States and declared a Nazi sympathizer. The British followed suit and the Duke was obliged to inform his friend that he could not re-enter the Bahamas.
Word had reached NID from an agent in Mexico City that Wenner-Gren was involved in massive currency speculation and was making huge profits. The fear is—the worry is—that the Duke is in some way involved in this speculation also. The Duke’s private income, including his salary as governor, is estimated as being between £25,000 and £30,000 a year. His assets are tied up in England and France, so where, if he is indeed speculating with Wenner-Gren, is the money coming from? This is what I have to try to find out. The unspoken fact behind all this is that if the Duke is guilty, then his actions are treasonous.
These are high stakes and I feel somewhat uneasy about the job. I have nothing against the Duke and Duchess—on the contrary, they have been kind and friendly to me. I think my long memorandum after Lisbon has made me the departmental Duke-expert. So the plan is that I turn up in the Bahamas as the commander of an MTB [Motor Torpedo Boat] posted there on submarine-hunting duties. I must try to reingratiate myself with the ducal couple and find out what I can.