2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  ≡ India and Pakistan were formally separated on 15 August 1947.

  I envy him. Sudden desire for travel. Buxom girl behind the bar in the George. Tight blouse flattening her fat breasts. The sap may be rising at last.

  Friday, 10 October

  Dinner at Ben’s. About a dozen of us crowded round two pushed-together tables in his dining room. Five of my Miros hanging on the wall. A mixture of friends, potential buyers, artists and family. Ben uses these dinners as a kind of informal private view, changing the pictures on the wall according to who is coming and how deep their pockets are. As he welcomes each guest he says, ‘Don’t be shy. If you like something, speak up. Everything on the walls is for sale.’

  Sandrine never stirs from her seat: Ben does all the clearing and serving, aided on this occasion by Marius. He’s twenty now—a handsome boy in a sulky, brooding way. Clothilde [Leeping—Ben and Sandrine’s daughter] is away at boarding school. I sat beside Sandrine and she indicated a dark, delicate-featured, good-looking man. She whispered, ‘Ben thinks he’s the only real talent in English painting. The only one he wants to buy.’ I asked her what his name was. Southman,↓ she said.

  ≡ Probably Graham Sutherland (1903-80).

  I should keep a note. Ben tells me he thinks he’ll sell the Miros soon but not until he’s back in Paris—he’s asking huge sums. They move back to Paris at the end of the year. Ben has found new premises for a gallery. ‘The Americans are coming back,’ he says. ‘I’m going to make you a lot of money.’

  [December]

  Baldwin↓ dead.

  ≡ Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister at the time of the Abdication Crisis.

  Makes me think of the Duke and Duchess—how they hated him. I’m laid up with a bad flu that has gone bronchial—cough like a sea lion’s, throat-tearing. As I lie here shivering, despite the two bar-radiators pointing at me on either side of the bed, I have a vision about my future life. It’s a question, it seems to me, of’who travels lightest, travels furthest’. Huge desire to be as free of ‘things’ and possessions as possible. All that stuff I have packed up in boxes…What bliss it would be not to have to think about it all any more.

  1948

  [January]

  I have bought a basement flat in Pimlico. 10 B,Turpentine Lane. It has a bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bathroom. You descend steepish steps to the front door. From the back bedroom there is a view of a small garden to which I have no access. The sitting-room window looks out on to the deep basement well. All the essentials seem in good running order and there are new gas fires in the bedroom and sitting room. I am having it painted white distemper and the floor will be lined throughout in rubberized cork tiles. I need only the most essential furniture: two armchairs, a bed and bedside table, a long table and chair for me to work at. I sold (almost) all my books to Gaston’s in the Strand and will sell my paintings to Ben.

  It strikes me now that I may have picked up a faqon devivre at the villa on Lake Lucerne. Less is more. We shall see.

  Wednesday, 11 February

  Paris. Ben took me as his guest to a grand dinner at the house of a man called Thorvald Hugo, a great collector of modern art. Picasso was there and his new muse, Françoise [Gilot]. Very pretty girl—mindyou, so was Dora Maar (more my type). Picasso is quite bald now and the hair on the side of his head is grey. Face seamed and belligerent. He was full of energy and humour: the more he appeared to be enjoying himself the more Françoise became moody and on edge. He had no memory of meeting me before (why should he?), but when Ben told him I had been in Madrid in 1937 he became very curious and moved round the table to sit beside me. I said I’d been there with Hemingway, whom he knew a bit. He had seen Hemingway in Paris after the Liberation and told me how Hemingway claimed to have killed an SS officer. ‘That man killed a lot of animals,’ he said, ‘but animals don’t shoot back.’ He wants to take me to dinner, he says, and talk some more.

  §

  Ben thinks I’m mad to sell my paintings. I said, just because I’m selling these doesn’t mean I won’t be buying some more. He’ll give me a fair price. His new gallery is on the rue du Bac but from the way he talks it seems to me he sees Paris purely as a springboard to propel him into New York. He’s planning to rent space there for a show next year. That’s where the real money is, he says. That’s where he’ll sell the Miros.

  §

  Back to days and nights of walking through my favourite Paris quartiers—a flaneur and a noctambuk once again. On the surface Paris looks unchanged, as beautiful and as transporting as it always has been, untouched by whatever went on during the war. But there are food shortages and darker currents flow beneath the surface. Everyone not a Communist seems terrified by the Communists. A jangly, hysterical atmosphere.

  I was sitting in the Flore watching the tourists trying to spot Sartre (he doesn’t come here any more because of the tourists trying to spot him) when I had the glimmerings of an idea for a novel. A man goes to his doctor and is told he has a week left to live. The novel is about the last seven days of Me he has left to him and what he does in them: an attempt to encapsulate all forms of human experience in one week. Everything from impregnating a woman to committing a murder…To be pondered. For the first time in ages a quiver of literary excitement. There is something in this.

  §

  To the Brasserie Lipp. Me, Ben, Sandrine, Marius, Picasso, Françoise. Picasso talks a great deal about Dora [Maar], which doesn’t seem to bother Françoise. I asked how she was and Picasso said she was going mad. We talked about my visits to Spain in the Civil War, and Picasso was very intrigued by my story of the machine gun, to the extent of making me act it out. Did you hit the armoured car, he asked? Yes. Did you kill them? I doubt it, I said. But you saw the bullets strike the car? Indubitably.

  Picasso seems to me one of these wild, stupid geniuses—more Yeats, Strindberg, Rimbaud, Mozart, than Matisse, Brahms, Braque. It’s quite tiring being with him.

  We parted at midnight and walked homeward, Ben, Sandrine, Marius and I—relieved to be out of the Picassian pressure-cooker. Ben cock-a-hoop: Picasso has agreed to sell him directly (not through Kahnweiler [his usual dealer]) two pictures for his New York show. He put his arm round my shoulder: just keep talking about Spain, he said. Marius was unable to understand how someone as young and pretty as Françoise wanted to be with a man forty years older than her. We all laughed. As we gently teased Marius for his naivety, I felt simultaneously the ineffable sadness of my loss and also a growing comfort, a warmth—a realization that these old friends of mine, the Leepings, were in a way my true family, that my life was and would always be bound up with theirs, whatever happened.

  §

  Turpentine Lane. Back from Paris. All the work in the flat is finished and the place looks like a cross between a laboratory and a stage set for some experimental play. There is nothing ‘modern’ about it at all—no glass or chrome or leather, no curved wood or abstract wall hangings. It is about the absence of adornment, the non-existence of clutter. The light struggles to reach the sitting room and I leave the lamps on all day. This is my bunker and I will be happy enough here, I think.

  [September]

  I ran into Peter [Scabius] at the London Library and he invited me to join him for a drink. He was meeting a ‘friend’, he said. In the pub the friend was already there: a young woman, in her early thirties, I would say, sitting on a stool at the bar with a gin and tonic in front of her and smoking a cigarette in a holder. ‘This is Gloria Nesmith,’ he said. ‘Ness-Smith, Petey,’ she corrected him, then to me: ‘Pleased to meet you,’ though it was immediately dear she wasn’t. I could tell that I was a deliberate gooseberry—Peter had brought me along to pre-empt some row. She was a small, pretty woman with prominent cheekbones. Her voice was curious, almost stagey, and she was wearing very high heels to give herself a few more inches. She smoked her cigarette, finished her drink and then said she had to leave. As she kissed Peter goodbye I saw her dig her nails into the ba
ck of his hand. After she’d left he held it out: three little crescents welling blood. ‘She’s incredibly dangerous,’ he said. ‘I should give her up but she fucks like a stoat.’ I said I wasn’t familiar with the simile. ‘You wouldn’t be,’ he said, pleased with himself. ‘I made it up, just for Gloria. You’d have to fuck her yourself to know what I mean.’ He looked at me slyly. ‘Maybe you should,’ he said. ‘Get her off my hands.’

  ‘How’s Penny?’ I asked. ‘You bastard,’ he said, laughing.

  [November]

  Vanderpoel is no longer in the navy—he’s the headmaster of a girls’ boarding school near Shrewsbury. I took the train down to meet him and we had an edgy uncomfortable lunch together in his ugly new house. He’s removed his gingery matelot’s beard—which is a mistake aesthetically—but maybe it’s required that the headmaster be clean-shaven. Lunch was served by his young wife (Jennifer, I think) who promptly disappeared and I could hear a baby crying somewhere. Perhaps a wife and a child are also necessary elements for headmastering. Who knows? Who cares? Vanderpoel was not particularly pleased to see me, but he had read Peter’s article in The Times when it had appeared, so was at least familiar with the abrupt failure of ‘Operation Shipbroker’ and the consequences that had befallen me. He was hardly curious, I have to say. But I had plenty of questions, the first being: whose idea was the whole thing?

  ‘That chap Marion’s,’ he said. ‘He was seconded to us for a few months.’

  Who was he? Where had he come from?

  ‘Not sure. Could have been from Supreme Headquarters, now I come to think of it. Maybe the Foreign Office. I think he was a diplomat before the war. He was very well connected anyway.’ He looked at me patiently. ‘It was a long time ago, Mountstuart. I can’t remember all the details. And, anyway,’ he went on, ‘even with a little bit of hindsight you have to admit ‘Shipbroker’ was a first-class idea. Who knows how many Nazis we might have caught.’

  ‘First class or not,’ I said, ‘I was betrayed. I was set up like a sitting duck. The police were waiting for me at the hotel. Only NID had all the details on me. You, Rushbrooke and Marion.’

  ‘I resent that.’

  I showed my exasperation. ‘I’m not accusing you. But somebody sent me on that mission knowing I’d be arrested almost immediately. You must see that.’

  ‘It wasn’t me and it certainly wasn’t Rushbrooke.’

  ‘Where’s Marion now?’

  §

  He said he had no idea. He, Vanderpoel, was a member of a dining dub of ex-NID staff and he promised he would ask around, discreetly. I had one further question.

  ‘Do you know if Marion had any connection to the Duke of Windsor?’

  Vanderpoel actually laughed at this, a strange wheezy sound, and he covered his mouth with his hand.

  ‘Really, Mountstuart,’ he said, ‘you are priceless.’

  1949

  [Saturday, 1 January]

  Saw in the New Year at Peter’s home in Wandsworth. Quite a large party, forty or so, most of whom I’d never met. Peter’s wife Penny is sweet and jolly, plumper since her two children. I was surprised to see Gloria Ness-Smith there and told her so. I think she liked my bluntness, liked the implication. There was no need for any pussyfooting between us. ‘He wouldn’t dare not invite me,’ she said. ‘I’d kill him.’ She used to be a nurse, she said, and now worked as a secretary in Peter’s publishers. ‘But not for long,’ she added. I suspect Penny’s role as Mrs Scabius hasn’t much longer to run.

  Gloria was drinking gin and had her drink topped up twice as we chatted. At one stage she leant into me, her pushed-up breasts flattening against my arm. ‘Peter envies you,’ she said. I asked what on earth for? Peter was the paradigm of the successful novelist—why should he envy me? ‘He envies you your glamorous war,’ she said. ‘He can’t buy that. He can buy everything else, but he can’t buy that, and he envies you.’ There was pure glee in her chuckle. Jesus Christ, I thought. Then she leant into me once more, before wandering off to look for Peter, leaving me with an unequivocal erection. At midnight, I told myself that, even if I wasn’t happy, my load of unhappiness was maybe beginning to diminish, ever so slightly.

  [February]

  Letter from Vanderpoel. Colonel Marion died in April 1945, in a ‘motor vehicle’ accident in Brussels. According to Vanderpoel there were two other fatalities. He had asked his old NID contacts, but as far as he could establish there was nothing suspicious in Marion’s death and he had no apparent connections to the Duke of Windsor.

  So much for my great vendetta, so much for the tireless hunt for my betrayer. Isn’t this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs—the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth. I wanted to hunt down Marion, wanted to confront him, but instead am left with the banal conclusion that, more than likely, there was no conspiracy, and that the Duke and Duchess had not plotted with their powerful friends to have done with me. Hard to live with, this: hard to come to terms with the fact that it was just another botched operation, another baffling run of bad luck…Feelings of depression; feelings of frustration; feelings of emptiness in the face of all this randomness—done down by the haphazard, yet again.

  [April]

  Hotel Rembrandt. Paris. I’ve come here to work on my novella, The Villa by the Lake. Jt can only be a novella, I’ve decided, a cryptic, Kafkaesque, Camusian, sub-Rex Warnerish parable of my bizarre incarceration. I’ve no idea how to end it, however. Perhaps Paris will inspire me. Wallace said he could obtain a large advance if I wanted, but I persuaded him not to. It’s one of those works that will have to find its own voice and conclusion—and even then I won’t know if it has succeeded. It seems to be going relatively well. All I do is try to recapture the routines and atmosphere of the villa with maximum fidelity, but I’m aware that the reality was so strange that readers will think it all profoundly symbolic and metaphorical. That’s my fond hope, anyway. Also I realize that any hint of pretension, any effort to turn up the significance, will be fatal. The more I make it resolutely true to life, the more all metaphorical interpretation will be unconsciously supplied by the reader.

  There is a pretty girl called Odile who works in Ben’s gallery. In her mid twenties, dark, with short untidy hair and big eyes. She wears black all the time and gold strappy sandals on her unabashedly grimy feet. Ben told her I was writing a book about my time in prison during the war and I could tell she was intrigued. If I can’t have Gloria Ness-Smith, perhaps Odile will consent to be my passport back to the world of human sexual relations.

  My routine is straightforward. I wake up, take two aspirin for my hangover headache, and go out for a breakfast of coffee and croissant at a café. I buy a newspaper and my lunch—a baguette, some cheese, some saucisson and a bottle of wine. By the time I come back my room has been cleaned and I sit down at my work table and try to write. I eat out in the evenings, usually at the Leepings—it’s open house, Ben says—but I like to give them some time without me so I take myself off to Balzar or chez Lipp, or other brasseries for a solitary meal. I don’t mind a day spent entirely in my own company but I do drink a lot in compensation: a bottle at lunch, a bottle in the evening, plus aperitifs and digestifs.

  §

  I asked Odile if I could take her to dinner and she said yes, immediately. We went to Chez Fernand, a little place I’ve found on the rue de I’Universite. Odile dreams only of going to New York when Ben opens his gallery there, so we speak English to each other to help her practise. It strikes me that this may be the real nature of my appeal: her own pet anglophone. She has brown, long-lashed eyes; downy olive skin.

  I walk Odile back to her Metro station. I lean forward to kiss her on the cheeks and she moves her face so that our lips meet. We kiss gently, the tips of our tongues touching and I feel that old familiar weakness spread at the base of my spine. We agree to see each other later in the week.

  Friday, 15 April
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br />   Odile was here last night. We ate at the Flore and came back to the hotel. She has a lithe, girl’s body. I was useless, incapable of maintaining a semi-erection for more than a few seconds. My mind was swarming with images of Freya—she might as well have been in the room watching us. Odile patiently masturbated me and, when that had no prolonged effect either, generously bent her head to take my cock in her mouth, but I told her not to bother.

  She sat up and lit a cigarette as I tried to explain how my wife had died in the war and how I still couldn’t get over it. In the war? she said. But the war was a long time ago. I agreed it was and apologized. She said, ‘Maybe I better go,’ and dressed and left me. I slept a few hours of a sound and dreamless sleep.

  But when I woke—an hour ago now—I felt a quality of despair and darkness grip me that was entirely new. Three years on I am living as vividly with the loss of Freya as I have ever done. And the rain is falling outside. The melancholy drip, drip, drip.

  §

  I have taken my two aspirin for my morning headache and have taken two more and two more and two more and two more and two more and two more. I fetched my bottle of whisky out of the cupboard and put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign. I have begun to drink my whisky, slowly washing down the remaining aspirin in my pill bottle.