2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  I believe my generation was cursed by the war, that ‘great adventure’ (for those of us who survived unmaimed) right bang slap in the middle of our lives—our prime. It lasted so long and it split our lives in two—irrevocably ‘Before’ or ‘After’. When I think of myself in 1939 and then think of the man I had become in 1946, shattered by my awful tragedy…How could I carry on as if nothing had happened? Perhaps, under these circumstances, I haven’t done so badly after all. I’ve kept the LMS show on the road—and there is still time for Octet.

  §

  Lionel is dead. There, I can write the words down. A stupid meaningless accident. No one to blame but himself. It happened like this.

  Monday called me at about 6.00 one morning, wailing, sobbing, screaming down the phone: Leo’s been sick and he won’t wake up, he’s not moving. I told her to call a doctor and jumped in a cab and raced downtown. The doctor was already there when I arrived and he told me Lionel was dead. He had drowned, in his own vomit.↓

  12. Lionel Leggatt died on 28 May 1964.

  Monday and he had had a fight and she’d gone out to see the band play at a dub somewhere in Brooklyn. Lionel had taken speed and been drinking before she left and there was an empty bottle of gin and several empty cans of beer in the kitchen. Completely drunk, he had passed out on one of the mattresses on the floor, his head wedged awkwardly—effectively in a booze and amphetamine coma. And when his body rebelled and he had vomited, his unconscious state and the fixed angle of his head had—well he drowned. His lungs filled up with the expelled fluid from his stomach, and he drowned. Poor stupid boy. Poor sad Lionel.

  I called Lottie. She screamed. Then she said in a tight grating voice—and I’ll never, never, forgive her for this—she said, Tou bastard. It’s all your fault.’

  There was a crowd of forty or so at the funeral, nearly all people I didn’t know, and it was touching to see, gathered together, Lionel’s small world. Lottie sent a wreath. I gravitated towards Monday and we had a good weep together. She said it was her birthday—she was nineteen—and that was what they had been fighting about. She wanted to go to Lake Tahoe to celebrate—he wanted to go to New Orleans. She said she couldn’t stay in the apartment any more so I said she could use my spare room. She’s been here ever since and I think it’s helped us both. She takes Lionel’s copy of The Villa by tlie Lake everywhere (‘He loved that book, Logan’) like a talisman.

  [July]

  I’ve decided not to go back to London and Italy this summer. I’m deliberately engrossing myself in my work: buying wisely, I think—a few Pop Art pieces but mainly picking up a lot of good second-generation Abstract Expressionism as the fashion changes and the patrons and the collectors go racing after Warhol, Dine, Tazzi, Oldenburg and the rest.

  Monday has a job in a café in the Village and we both set out for work simultaneously. She has her own keys, comes and goes as she likes. She’s home most nights, I have to say. I like her presence in the house—a warm uncomplicated girl. We watch TV, we send out for Chinese or a pizza, we talk about Leo—she was surprised to learn he was Sir Lionel (‘So if we’d gotten married I’d have been, like, a Lady?’). She’s introduced me to the subtle pleasures of marijuana and I’ve practically abandoned barbiturates and sleeping pills. John Francis Byrne approves. When I go out myself in the evening—to a show opening or a dinner party—Monday waits up for me. I rather wish I’d kept on Mystic House but we’re happy enough in the hot city. I receive many invitations for the weekends but I don’t think I could really turn up at the Heubers or Ann Ginsberg with Monday in tow—1 just tell them I’m busy writing.

  [August]

  Problems. I woke at 6.00 this morning and went into the kitchen to make some coffee. Monday was standing by the open fridge, hair tousled, bleary with sleep, naked. She picked out a carton of orange juice and wandered past me back to the room, saying, ‘Hi, Logan,’ completely unconcerned.

  Unfortunately it’s not an unconcern I can pretend to. Maybe living communally as she did, with Lionel and the band and their girlfriends, casual nudity was the order of the day. But as far as I’m concerned it’s as if a switch has been thrown and I’m suddenly very aware I’m sharing my apartment with a pretty nineteen-year-old girl. Images of her body fill my head. I find the whole atmosphere in the apartment completely changed—it’s charged, now, sexually electric. Sweet suffering Christ, Mountstuart, she could be your granddaughter. Yes, but I’m flesh and blood, blood and flesh. This evening I sat watching her covertly as she moved about the living room, picking up a magazine, sipping at her iced-tea. It was hot and she wandered over to the air conditioner to be closer to the flow of cool air. She was talking to me about some obnoxious customer she’d had that day—1 wasn’t listening, I was looking. As she talked, she gathered her tresses of hair in both hands behind her head, twisted it into a thick hank and spiralled it on to her crown, exposing her moist nape, the better to let the chill reach her. As she collected up her hair I could see her breasts rise beneath her t-shirt. I felt thick-tongued, dry-throated, unbalanced by a desire that was so straightforward and unequivocal it took my breath away. I wanted her, wanted her strong young body beneath me—or on top of me, or next to me.

  So at supper this evening I took pre-emptive action. I said I had to go to London and Paris on business and that I’d be away for six weeks or so and that, perhaps, she might find it more congenial to move in with friends while I was away. ‘What about the apartment?’ she said, surprised. ‘Your things? The plants?’

  ‘I’ll get the agency back in,’ I said. (I had cancelled my contract with the cleaning agency after’ Monday moved in. Why?) ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’ll look after the place for you. I’d like to.’ She licked a spot of ketchup off her thumb. These natural gestures are intolerably hard to bear now. Fine, I said. Great. As long as you won’t feel lonely. As long as you’re happy.

  Friday, 21 August

  It happened last night. It had to. It was inevitable and wonderful. We’d both drunk a lot. I was standing in the kitchen and she came up behind me, put her arms around me and laid her head on my back. I thought my spine would snap. She put on a ‘hurt’ voice: ‘I’m gonna miss, you, Logan.’ I turned round. You’d have to have been made of stone. You’d have to have been a eunuch to have restrained yourself in that situation. We kissed. We went into my bedroom and took our clothes off and made love. We smoked some of her pot. We made love again. We woke in the morning, made love, had breakfast. Now she’s gone to work and I’m writing this down. She said she’s been wanting to do it virtually since she’d arrived. She thought it would make her closer to Leo, in some way. Jesus. But she could see I wasn’t interested, and she respected that, happy to be friends. Then everything changed, she said, suddenly she was aware that I wanted her too and that it was only a matter of time. It was that switch-throwing moment in the kitchen. When it’s mutual, a man and a woman know, instinctively, wordlessly. They may do nothing about it, but the knowledge of that shared desire is out there in the world—as obvious as neon, saying: I want you, I want you, I want you.

  Tuesday, 25 August

  Crossing Park Avenue, on my way to work, my head full of Monday, I looked to my left and saw the hypodermic syringe of the Chrysler Building flare, hit by the morning sun—a silver art-deco spaceship about to blast off. Is this my favourite view in Manhattan?

  Thursday, 27 August

  6.30 p.m. I am coming home from work, walking down my street with my briefcase, when I see a man in a seersucker suit, hands on hips, staring up at my building. Can I help you? I ask. He has a saggy, folded face with a heavy blue beard needing a shave. Yeah, he says. Is there a Laura Schmidt in this building? I shake my head and say there’s no one of that name here—and I know all my neighbours. Thanks, he says, and wanders away. Now I know Monday’s real name. ‘Monday Smith’ is Laura Schmidt. I decide to save the information for later.

  Saturday, 29 August

  And this is how it has developed. I was a fool t
o be so unconcerned. Yesterday, Monday and I leave for work together as usual. Seersucker is across the road waiting with another man in a straw hat. Monday sees them and starts to run, like a hare, heading for Lexington Avenue. Straw-hat shouts:—‘Laura, honey! Wait!’ and they take off after her. I intercept, arms spread, hemming them in. Hey! What the hell’s going on here? By now Laura⁄Monday is round the corner, they’ll never catch her. Straw-hat yells at me: ‘You scum! You obscene filth! You pervert! That’s my daughter.’ So what? I say. ‘She’s sixteen years old, that’s so what, you disgusting piece of shit.’ I step back. No no no, I say, she told me she was nineteen. We celebrated her nineteenth birthday. ‘We’re calling the cops,’ Seersucker hisses at me. ‘You English loser.’ LOSER! He shouts once more, and then the two of them walk away.

  I go back to the apartment and try to calm down. Jesus fucking Christ. She looks twenty-five, not even nineteen—let alone sixteen. How could I at my age, at my distance, tell if a nineteen-year-old was really sixteen? Even Lionel couldn’t tell. These girls, these young women grow up so fast. Look at Gail—I’d say she was in her early twenties. But all this justification and special pleading is after the event. I call Jerry Schubert and explain the situation. He listens. It’s not looking good, Logan, he says soberly. The age of consent in New York State is seventeen. Consensual or not, they could get you on third-degree rape. Rape? What should I do, Jerry, I say. I swear to you she told me she was nineteen—she looks older than nineteen. He says nothing. What should I do? You never heard this from me, he says, but if I were you I’d get out of town—fast.

  And I do. I’m sitting here in sweltering air-conditioner-less London, England, in the front room of my flat in Turpentine Lane.

  I hung up the phone. I packed my essential bits and pieces in three suitcases. I threw out all the food in the fridge. I put the plants on the fire escape and called a taxi. I went by the gallery and dropped off my keys, saying I had to make a sudden trip to Europe.

  I was driven to Idlewild↓ and bought a ticket to London, TWA.

  ≡ Renamed John F. Kennedy Airport on 24 December 1963.

  I phoned Monday’s café to leave a message. Amazingly, she was there. They’ll come looking for you, I said: if they know where you live they’ll know where you work. I don’t care, she said. I told her what I was doing, gave her my address and telephone number in London and begged her to go back to her family until she was seventeen. Where are you from? I asked. Alameda, she said. Where’s that? Little place just outside San Francisco. Go home to Alameda, I said, write to me, tell me when you’re really seventeen. She was crying. I love you, Logan, she said. I love you too, I said, the lie slipping oh-so-easily off my tongue.

  The African Journal

  Logan Mountstuart spent the next few months in London trying to sort out, at a distance, the settling of his affairs in New York. Letters were written to friends; Helma packed up his apartment under his instructions, sold his furniture, crated up his possessions and had them shipped to London. Bank accounts were closed; bills paid and so on. No warrant was issued for his arrest, as far as he was aware, and there were no further rumblings of scandal or potential arraignment. Helma did say that, the Monday after he left, two gentlemen called round at the gallery looking for him but were told he had gone to Europe, He met Ben Leeping in Paris and recounted what had transpired. Ben was—typically—understanding, told him not to worry and swiftly set about trying to find a replacement to run the New York gallery. LMS sold Leeping Freres his private collection of paintings and drawings to provide some initial cash flow. He wrote to Naomi Mitchell and said he had suddenly been called back to London and received a reply of civilized regret. LMS’s heart was not broken and, dearly, neither was hers. All seemed to be more or less under control. But LMS was not relaxed or fully at ease, constantly expecting the long arm of US law to reach out across the Atlantic and pluck him thither. Thus it was, in the spring of 1965, that he applied for the post of lecturer in the Department of English Literature at the University College of Ikiri in Nigeria. He was interviewed in London and was duly offered the job. His friends thought he was crazy, but he said he needed a change in his life. Apart from Ben Leeping, Jerry Schubert and the Schmidt family no one ever knew the real reason for his precipitate flight from New York. He left for Nigeria on 30 July 1965. The African Journal begins in 1969.

  1969

  Sunday, 20 July

  David Gascoyne↓ once told me that the only point of keeping a journal was to concentrate on the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great and significant events in the world at large.

  ≡ David Gascoyne (1916-2001), poet and translator.

  The newspapers cover all that, anyway, he said. We don’t want to know that ‘Hitler invaded Poland’—we’re more curious about what you had for breakfast. Unless you happened to be there, of course, when Hitler invaded Poland and your breakfast was interrupted. It’s a point, I suppose, but I felt it would be worth picking up this journal again today if only because I’ve just walked out into my African garden and looked up at the moon. Looked up at the moon to marvel at the fact that there are two young American men walking around on its surface. Even Gascoyne would grant me that.

  It was a clear night and we had copious moonshine. The familiar old moon hung up there with a fuzzy corona around it, albescent 1 in the soft black sky. I walked out into the garden away from the ring of light cast by my house and headed for the stand of casuarina pines at the end of the drive where the ground sloped up. A wind blew through the branches and set the huge trees whispering. I stamped my feet, suddenly remembering the risk of snakes and scorpions, and looked up, marvelling.

  I had been listening to the news on the BBC World Service, crackly with the usual interference, and for the first time in my life wished I had a television set. Perhaps I should have gone next door to Kwaku’s.↓

  ≡ Dr Kwaku Okafor, LMS’s next-door neighbour.

  But in the end I prefer my imagination.

  It was strange—vertiginous—staring upwards and thinking about those men on the moon. I felt sad and oddly humbled. Sad, because if there was ever an example, to someone of my age, of life’s galloping headlong progress, then this must be it. When I was born the first home-made wood and canvas flying machines had only been taking to the air for four years. And now I was standing in this African garden sixty-seven years after the Wright Brothers, looking up at our moon and wondering what it must be like to be up there looking back. Humbling also to think that we poor, forked creatures could manage such a feat. These observations are banal, I know—but are no less true for that. Still, they probably exemplify Gascoyne’s law about journal-keeping. Momentous events do lose something in the telling. Tonight I had a cheese omelette and a bottle of beer for supper.

  I came back into the house and locked the door and have written this down sitting at my desk in the main room. Through the mosquito netting in the window I can see the glow of Samson’s cigarette in the garage entry [Samson Ike, LMS’s nightwatchman]. All’s quiet, all’s well with the world. Back to London at the end of next week, my first visit home in two and a half years. I suppose all legal worries can safely recede now. The Laura Schmidt affair must be over and done with, finally. I must be safe.

  Friday, 25 July

  Turpentine Lane. A garage has opened at the end of the road since I was last here and music blasts from its forecourt as the young mechanics panel-beat and poke around inside their dapped-out motor cars. I have to keep the front windows dosed against the noise even though this is proving to be a hot and irritable summer. A Sikh family has moved in above me—charming and helpful people—but they have three young children who appear to do nothing but run to and fro through the rooms above my head. I long for my big African house with its shady veranda and its two-acre garden-.

  I’m having Turpentine Lane painted and am laying carpet over my rubberized-cork floor tiles. Apart from my Picasso above the fireplace the place still maintains its b
are and functional atmosphere. But despite the hazards of city noise and city disturbance I do feel at home here. Was the purchase of this mean little flat the smartest thing I’ve done in my ramshackle life? At night I read in my armchair and listen to music. Over the weeks of my leave I’ll visit the few old friends I have left—Ben, Roderick, Noel, Wallace—settle bits of unfinished business. I’m relatively well off at the moment—I manage to save a fair bit of my U.C. Ikiri salary—but I am conscious, all of a sudden, of my dwindling supply of assets. Wallace has set up a meeting with the editor of a new current affairs⁄economics weekly called Polity (unfortunate name, but sententious enough). They need someone to write about Biafra and the war.↓

  ≡ The Nigerian Civil War—the Biafran war—had begun in 1967 when the eastern states of Nigeria unilaterally seceded from the republic, taking most of Nigeria’s oil reserves with them.

  Monday, 4 August

  Wallace tells me he is retiring at the end of the year—he’ll be sixty-five. Good God. The agency will continue to bear his name—and he’s going to remain loosely attached as some sort of consultant figure—but it’s going to be run by a young woman called Sheila Adrar. I met her: she’s in her mid thirties with a slightly fake, busy, bustly manner. And an unnecessarily firm handshake, I thought. Thin, skull-like face. Wallace did his best to booster me—‘old, old friend’, ‘part of that great generation’ and so on—but it was obvious she hadn’t a clue who I was and hardly rated me as an asset to the firm. I related my suspicions about all this to Wallace at lunch and he wriggled and squirmed a bit but had to concede I was right. ‘It’s all changed, Logan,’ he said. ‘All they’re interested in is sales and advances.’ In that case nothing’s changed, I said: it’s always been about sales and advances. Ah, said Wallace, but in the past publishers pretended it wasn’t. Anyway, Wallace brokered a good deal for me at Polity: £250 retainer and £50 per 2,000 word article, rates to be adjusted proportionally.