by William Boyd
In October 1945 Gunnarson sold Melville Road and returned to Iceland.
LMS arrived from Milan at an RAF base in Wiltshire in January 1946. He cabled Freya and went straight to London, to Melville Road—where he discovered his house was now owned and occupied by a Mr and Mrs Keith Thomsett and their three children. It was Mrs Thomsett who inadvertently set the sequence of appalling discoveries in motion when she remarked to a frantic and worried LMS that it was ‘a terrible shame about that poor Mrs Gunnarson and her daughter’.
The post-war journal is the hardest of all in which to fix the month, let alone the day. LMS’s random and inaccurate datings are all that can be relied upon. Even the years may be suspect.
1946
Hodge is a cunt, soi disant and says he has every right to be one, having left a leg in Italy. I am a cunt for letting him rile me, poor pathetic bastard.
§
Walked the river, seeking beauty. Saw it but felt nothing. We drank a bottle and a half of whisky between us last night. Hodge stinks: I told him to have a bath. He says he hates the sight of his scarred stump.
§
FreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreya
FreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreya
FreyaStellaStellaFreya
Freya
Stella
Freya
Stella
FREYAFREYAFREYAFREYA
Free
Right
Everloved
Young
Always adored
Stella, my daughter. Freya, my wife. Stella Mountstuart. Freya Mountstuart
[The journal is full of these anguished doodlings.]
§
Took Dick out on a drive up the tweed valley to Peebles. Cool blustery day, the first fatigued leaves ripped off the trees. All the way he talked about the mistake he had made in never getting married. ‘Look at me now,’ he said. ‘Who’d take me. A one-legged drunk.’ Tonight, sitting by the fire, I began to weep quietly—couldn’t help myself, came on with absolute spontaneity—thinking of Freya and Stella. ‘Stop blubbing,’ Dick said. ‘You’re only feeling sorry for yourself, it’s got nothing to do with Freya and Stella. They’re fine, they’re atomized dust blowing in the breeze. Free as air. They’re not thinking about you. I can’t abide self-pity, so shut up or get out.’ I almost hit him. I went to my bedroom. Can’t sleep.
§
Is this worth recording? I experienced what can only be described as a spasm of happiness—the first since I heard the news—when I managed to work out (with a toothpick) a shred of mutton that had been stuck in a crevice between two back teeth. It had been resistant to everything it was so firmly wedged. I grinned spontaneously. Must have been real pleasure. My mind forgetting. Am I healing?
§
Hodge lectured me again on Freya and Stella. Thirteen other people died when that explosion happened, he said. Thousands of Londoners died from bombs or rockets, many of them women and children. Millions of people died in the war. You could have been a German Jew—lost your entire family in the gas chambers—wife, children, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents. It’s an awful bloody terrible tragic thing but you have to see them as victims of a global armed conflict, like the millions of other victims. Innocent people die in a war. And now we’re casualties too. I said, you can’t equate my wife and child with your fucking leg. Yes I fucking well can, he bellowed at me. To me—to me—my lost leg is more important than your lost wife and child.
§
Couldn’t sleep so I pulled on a coat over my pyjamas, put on a pair of gumboots and walked around the gardens. One of those light, star-filled, northern nights. An owl hooted and I walked through a cloud of perfume from some scented shrub, almost palpable, it seemed to flow round me carried by the breeze. I urinated, hearing the patter of my urine on the gravel clearly, like a fire crackling. I mooched around, not thinking, just taking in the information my senses provided, not cold, until the first birds began to sing and the dawn-light began to restore the colours to the old house and its unkempt garden.
§
Lucy [Sansom]↓ took me to an old café she knew in Leith while we waited for the boat.
≡ She was now a lecturer in Medieval History at Edinburgh University.
She’s much stouter and her hair is greying but, beneath the accumulation of flesh, you can still see the pretty girl I used to fantasize about. She was very sweet to me: the perfect antidote to Dick’s brusque rationalizations. We drank tea and ate toast and jam. Outside Edinburgh rain turned the grey sooty stone black, like velvet. Lucy has a cottage at Elie in Fife, which she offered to lend me if I ‘needed some peace and quiet to work’. What work? I said. You’re a writer, for God’s sake, she said. You’ve got to keep on writing. She asked me if I was sure I was doing the right thing. I said I had to. I said that it was the only chance of a purging—a sense of it finally being over.
September 1st
We should dock at Reykjavik tomorrow. It’s been good being at sea these last few days. The voyage calming and restful. I stand at the rail for hours and look at the sea and the sky. Why does the sea induce these feelings of transcendence in us? Is it because an unobstructed view of overarching sky meeting endlessly stirring water is as close as we can come on this earth to a visual symbol of the infinite? I feel more at peace than I have for months.
§
Reykjavik. Impressions of a town of painted concrete and corrugated iron and of various-sized, tarpaulin-covered things. When in doubt the Icelanders seem to cover anything with a tarpaulin. It was raining heavily when we docked and in the hour it took me to disembark, find a taxi rank, wait in the queue and be driven to the hotel, the rain stopped, the sun shone fiercely, it rained, hailed and the sun shone again. If this is the norm it will drive me mad. I’m staying at the Borg. I had a lunch of German sausage, pickled cucumber and smoked salmon and a plate of small sweet cakes as a dessert. Now I begin my search for Gunnarson.
§
It has taken me two days to find Gunnarson; everyone has been politely helpful in answering my inquiries. There’s a pretty girl on reception who has translated when required (her name is Katrin Annasdottir). Gunnarson turns out to be a civil servant in the Icelandic equivalent of the Ministry of Agriculture. I wrote him a letter and handed it in at the door, telling him who I was and that I was staying at the Borg. Tonight comes a message saying that he, Gunnarson, has no reason or need to meet me.
§
The price of alcohol in this hotel beggars belief.
§
I went down to the ministry early in the morning before the staff arrived and waited. I stopped a young man who seemed to be about the right age and asked him if he was Gunnarson. No, he said, you couldn’t mistake Gunnarson, he was exceptionally tall. Look, he pointed, here he comes. I watched Gunnarson go into the building: he glanced at me, half curiously. He was tall and athletic-looking, his blond hair so fair it was almost white. I thought: this is the man Freya wanted after me…I felt quite sick.
I waited outside until lunchtime and when Gunnarson emerged went up to him and introduced myself. He was a good half-head taller than me. He had a large hooked nose and looked fit and burly—which is not an adjective you usually associate with exceptionally tall men. He looked like someone who could climb mountains all day long. He seemed more irritated to meet me than anything else, though he perked up a bit when I offered to buy him lunch.
He took me to a nearby restaurant and ordered some kind of fish stew served with a creamy gravy with cooked radishes and sodden hot lettuce. I could eat nothing and sipped at a hilariously expensive beer while he shovelled food into his mouth as if he were stoking a boiler. I can only think it is his sheer height and bulky energy that attracted Freya. Physically he is the opposite of me in almost every detail. I’m tall and slim enough, but my posture is bad and nothing about my demeanour and comportment suggests urgency. I never walk fast, for example,
if I can help it.
When he finished his stew he ordered the inevitable plate of sweet cakes. As he wolfed these down, he looked at me curiously.
‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘I feel I know you.’ He spoke good, almost accentless English.
‘You’ve probably heard a lot about me.’
‘I’ve seen so many photographs of you, yet I didn’t recognize you.’
‘I don’t take a flattering photograph.’
‘No. I think it was because for me you’ve always been dead. And now here you are in front of me alive. Strange.’
‘And Freya and Stella are dead.’
At this he clenched his jaw and took a few deep breaths.
‘She was very beautiful,’ he said. ‘I loved her very much.’
‘So did I.’
‘Stella was a lovely child.’
I asked him not to talk about Stella. It wasn’t so bad talking about Freya—because my time with Freya had been far longer than his—but I had missed the last two years of Stella’s short life and I couldn’t bear the fact that this stranger had known her when she was six and seven and I had not.
‘Why did you want to meet me?’ he asked. ‘It must be…painful.’
‘It is,’ I admitted, ‘but I had to see you, see what you were like. To try to understand. Fill in the gap.’
He scratched his head and frowned. Then he said, ‘You mustn’t blame her.’
‘I don’t.’
He ignored me. ‘She was convinced you were dead, you see, it was as simple as that. It was the absolute silence that convinced her. She said if you were alive there would have been something—a word, even. She was lonely. And then I came along.’
§
I knew what it was like to be lonely. ‘I don’t blame her,’ I said, almost stupidly, as if repeating the words were enough to convince myself. ‘How was she to know I was still alive?’
‘Exactly. She thought you were dead, you see. She had to get on with her life.’
‘Yes—I can see that.’
We talked on in a series of random questions and answers and I was able to piece together a picture of Freya’s life while I was away. I realized Gunnarson had his own problems too: he had his own grief; and he had to reconcile himself, now that I was alive and sitting opposite him, to the fact that he was and would always be Freya’s second choice, that her heart had really belonged to me. I was more like the cuckolded husband confronting the lover—and my mind kept forming pictures of Freya and Gunnarson, naked, making love in our bed. I had to curb my imagination violently. It was nobody’s fault, just too desperately, hopelessly sad.
He said he had to be back at work.
‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘You sold my house. I’d like the money.’
He paused. ‘It was my house. Freya left it to me in her will.’
‘I bought that house. That is my house, by natural law.’
‘Luckily we don’t live by natural law.’
‘You’re a thief,’ I said.
He stood up. ‘You’re upset. I won’t hold it against you.’
§
There is a small artificial lake at the centre of this ramshackle town called the Tjorn that is populated by many wild ducks. I bought a bottle of Spanish brandy at the hotel and went down to the lake to drink myself insensible. The brandy tasted like marzipan-flavoured cooking oil and I could only manage a few mouthfuls.
[October?]
NORTHWICH (CHESHIRE)
George Deverell seems crushed by his loss. His manner is polite but dazed, as if he’s just come round from being knocked unconscious. He seems unperturbed by his ex-son-in-law’s return from the dead. ‘Wonderful to see you, Logan,’ he will say from time to time and pat me lightly on the shoulder as if to confirm that I am indeed flesh and blood. Then you see him inwardly withdraw and shrivel up—I’ve come back and am alive but his daughter and granddaughter have gone for ever.
Robin has taken over the running of the timber yard completely and is worried by the quiet depth of his father’s misery. He, by contrast, was intensely curious about my experiences. Muttering oaths and expletives as I told him about my parachute jump, my arrest and long months in the villa, going, ‘Bloody hell’, ‘That’s barbaric!’, ‘Jesus Christ’ and the like.
Two days ago a letter arrived from Iceland containing a banker’s draft for £400. Gunnarson, the honourable Icelander.
All my belongings are here, boxed and stored—my books, my manuscripts, all my paintings. Even pieces of furniture that the Thomsetts didn’t purchase. I have no home but all the ingredients of home.
1947
[March]
It was my forty-first birthday last week. I see I forgot to note the arrival of my fortieth last year—small wonder. For the record, then, I who once had a wife, a child and a perfect family home now, in my forty-first year, have none of these and live in a damp and fusty room in my mother’s decrepit house. I am rich enough, financially speaking: two years’ back pay screwed out of the Ministry of Defence (with the help of Noel Lange [LMS’s lawyer]), plus the money Gunnarson sent from the house sale. I gave my mother a hundred pounds and told her to spend it on Sumner Place—fresh paint, new carpets, etc.—but I think she’s lost the energy. The house is not exactly a rat-infested slum but hundreds of careless paying-guests have left it grimy and knocked about. Mother and Encarnation, both arthritic and wheezy, bicker at each other in Spanish. I go for meandering strolls through Chelsea and South Kensington, wondering what to do with myself.
§
In Battersea I found the crater made by the v-2. The end of a terrace of houses gone, wooden hoardings round the huge hole. It would have been sudden. The rocket falling silently out of the sky as the two of them walked along, hand in hand, heading back home from school. Just the flash, the noise and then oblivion.
§
I can see nothing of myself in Lionel. Perhaps something around the eyes. My eyebrows. The boy has your eyebrows, sir. And he had my hairline: the sharp prow of a widow’s peak. Lottie was cool—1 don’t think she can ever forgive me. And Leggatt seems a dotard, not long for this world, I would say. He asked me where I served in the war and I said the Bahamas and Switzerland. ‘I said where did you serve, not where did you go on holiday.’ I told him I had been in the navy and that seemed to shut him up.
Lionel and I managed to wander round the garden alone for half an hour. He is a quiet diffident boy, nearly fourteen now (Christ!), his eyes always cast down, stiff fingers pushing constantly at his forelock. I asked him if he was happy at Eton. ‘Yes, sir, pretty much…Sort of.’ Please don’t call me ‘sir’, I said. Call me Father or Daddy. He looked anguished. ‘But I call mummy’s husband ‘Father’ now,’ he said.↓
≡ During the years of LMS’s disappearance and presumed death, Lionel had been formally adopted by Leggatt as his son and heir. LMS made no recorded objection to this state of affairs.
Call me Logan, then, I said. Never call me ‘sir’.
§
State of literary play. The Mind’s Imaginings—out of print. The Girl Factory—out of print. The Cosmopolitans—out of print (except in France). Income from journalism—nil.
Wallace says it takes two to tango. I have to help him find me work. I said I’d been silent too long, everyone thinks I’m dead. Then Wallace had a bright idea: what about your old friend Peter Scabius? What about him?
Peter [Scabius]’s piece on me in The Times (‘One Writer’s War’) seems to have done the trick: people know I am around once more and I’ve had a small flurry of congratulatory postcards, letters and telephone calls. Roderick has renewed my old job as reader on a piecework basis (£5 per report); Louis MacNeice has invited me to give a talk on ‘Post-War French Painting’ and the Swiss Ambassador has written a letter to the paper denying the existence of the villa by Lake Lucerne and effectively accusing me of being a dangerous fantasist. Many magazines have invited me to write about the Harry Oakes murder, but I’ve declined—I’m k
eeping my powder dry.
Peter was—what?—impressed, astonished, admiring?—when we met. Somewhat in awe by what I’d been through. His own war was uneventful: fire watching, then the Ministry of Information and another novel—Iniquity—to follow up the success of Guilt. ‘You’ve got to use all that stuff,’ he said to me. ‘It’s heaven sent. Money in the bank.’ I humoured him and said I was writing a memoir to be called ‘From Nassau to Lucerne’, although I remained resolutely uninspired. If I had no money it might be different, I realize, but I’ve more than enough for the next year or so. I spend almost nothing, living very quietly, though I’ve started to go to pubs again, the bigger and more crowded the better.
§
Mother says her varicose veins cause her continual pain. Encar-narion is suffering from piles. I go to the optician to be fitted for reading glasses. The house of mirth.
I have had no sexual contact, no intimacy of any kind, since February 1944 (my last days and Freya). Only sporadic bouts of masturbation testify to the fact that the libidinous side of my brain has not shut down entirely. What sick Victorian cleric dubbed the practice self-abuse? Self-help, more like, self-support, self-solace. Auto-eroticism keeps you sane. I should record this for curiosity’s sake; the image in my mind as I pleasure myself these days is not Freya (too achingly sad) but Katrin Annasdottir, the receptionist at the Borg Hotel in Reykjavik Obviously something more must have registered in me during our few encounters apart from her helpfulness and efficiency. Funny, these sensual fingerprints left on your imagination, only revealing themselves much later. Like invisible ink emerging when warmed by a light bulb or candleflame. What was it about Katrin that sneaked its way into my sexual archive?
[July-August]
In the George with MacNeice and Johnnie Stallybrass from the BBC. MacNeice banging on at me to write a radio play about my months in the villa. Make it a monologue, make it mythic, make it a dream, he says, you can do anything on radio. Good money too: with one radio play—broadcast three times—he says I can make as much as a schoolteacher does in a year. MacNeice is off to India to report on the Partition.↓