by William Boyd
Wednesday, 7 May
To the Travellers’ Club for lunch with Peter [Scabius]. I buy a new shirt from a market stall (price 80 pence) and with my dark blue suit and my RNVR tie I think I pass muster. Put some oil on my hair and comb it flat. My shoes still look suspect—a little busted—even after a vigorous polish, but I think I look pretty smart.
Peter has become portly, flushed, with many tedious complaints: his blood pressure, his ghastly children, the unmitigated boredom of life in the Channel Islands. I say: what’s the point of having all this money if the money forces you to live somewhere you dislike? He rebukes me: I don’t understand—his accountants are immovable. I take the opportunity to eat heartily—three bread rolls with my mulligatawny soup, three veg. with my roast lamb, then apple crumble and cream and a wedge of Wensleydale from the cheese board. Peter is currently banned from drinking (incipient diabetes, he thinks) so I enjoy a half bottle of claret and a large port on my own. He sees me to the door and I notice he’s limping. For the first time in our encounter he asks me a question about myself: what’re you up to, Logan? Working on a novel, I say. Marvellous, marvellous, he replies vaguely, then asks me if I still read novels. He confesses he can’t get on with novels, these days, he only reads newspapers and magazines. I tell him I’m re-reading Smollett, just to make him feel bad, then step out into Pall Mall and flag down a taxi. We shake hands, promise to stay in touch. I climb into the taxi and as soon as it’s turned the corner into the Mall I order it to stop and get out. 65 pence for three hundred yards, but worth every penny not to let the side down.
Sunday, 8 June
Walked to Battersea Park yesterday and sat in the sun reading a newspaper. I see inflation is running at 25 per cent in Britain, so I shall have to do a quarter more work just to maintain my feeble status quo. Napier Forsyth dropped me a line to say he was now working for the Economist. Perhaps there’ll be something for me there.
Then I wandered the streets to Melville Road—which was a huge mistake—but I was thinking about Freya and Stella and our walks in the park. Whatever happened to our dog? What was its name?↓
≡ Tommy.
It shocked me that I couldn’t remember its name. Perhaps it was killed in the v-2 blast also. Now I come to think of it, Freya would probably have taken the dog to meet Stella from school.
When I came home I sat for an hour staring at their photographs. Couldn’t stop crying. Those were the years when I was truly happy. Knowing that is both a blessing and a curse. It’s good to acknowledge that you found true happiness in your life—in that sense your life has not been wasted. But to admit that you will never be happy like that again is hard. Stella would be thirty-seven by now, married perhaps, with her own children. Grandchildren for me. Or not. Who knows how anyone’s life will go? So, fond speculation is fruitless.
I drank a bottle of cider, wanting to be drunk and succeeding. Headache this morning. Mouth rank from my foul roll-ups. Silly old fool.
Friday, 1 August
One of those intolerable hot London summer days when the tar under your feet seems to soften and melt. Even I was forced to abandon my usual jacket and tie and found a lurid tie-die shirt from Ikiri days. I went down to the Cornwallis for a gin and tonic at lunch time, having typed up my review for the Economist (Napier’s done me proud—1 review any type of art book for them: £30 a go). The pub was quiet and clean, every surface freshly wiped, waiting for the lunch-time rush. I sat by the open doorway to catch the breeze, the glass clinking cold in my hand, and heard the following conversation that took place between a middle-aged man and woman sitting on a bench outside.
§
WOMAN: How are you?
MAN: Not very well.
WOMAN: What’s wrong?
MAN: My health. I’ve got a dodgy heart. And cancer. What you might call both barrels.
WOMAN: Oh, poor you.
MAN: How’s John?
WOMAN: He’s dead.
MAN: Cancer?
WOMAN: No, he committed suicide.
MAN: Jesus Christ.
WOMAN: Excuse me, it’s just too depressing.
§
She stands up and comes into the pub, goes to sit in a corner on her own.
1976
Thursday, 1 January
Saw in the New Year with a quart of whisky (‘Clan McScot’) and two tins of Carlsberg Special Brew. I don’t think I’ve been so drunk since university. I feel bad today, my old body trying to cope with the toxins I’ve poured into it. I face the year ahead in a spirit of-what?—stubborn indifference. It seems to me extraordinary and incredible that, just a short while ago, I had a household of four servants. Simeon sent me a Christmas card wishing me good health, joy and prosperity, and hoped I was writing many fine books. Joy and prosperity seem out of reach so perhaps I should concentrate on maintaining such health as I have, that way I might just finish the one book I have left in me.
I have a piece to write for the Spectator on Paul Klee. (To think I used to own a Paul Klee. What life was that?) For some reason the Spectator’s rate has dropped to a measly £10.
One of the things I miss most about Africa is my golf on the scrubby Ikiri course with Dr Kwaku. I miss the golf and our beer on the clubhouse stoop watching the sun sink. What is it I like about golf? It’s not strenuous, which is an advantage. I think its great benefit as a sport is that, however much of a hacker you are, it is still possible to play a golf shot that is the equal of the best golfer in the world. I remember one day I had taken a scrappy seven at the par four eighth hole at Ikiri and lined up for the short ninth, a par three, with a six-iron. Feeling hot, sweaty and out of sorts, I swung, struck, the ball soared, bounced once on the brown and dropped in the hole. A hole in one. It was the perfect shot—couldn’t be bettered, even by the world’s champion golfer. I can’t think of any other ball game that allows the amateur duffer a chance at perfection. It made me happy for a year, that shot, every time I recalled it. Makes me happy now.
Sunday, 15 February
Strange and plaintive telephone call from Gloria, asking if she can come and stay for a few days. I said, of course—adding the usual warnings: lack of comfort, no TV, dark basement flat in insalubrious area, etc. I said, why do you want to come to London in February? She said, ominously, that she needed to see a doctor.
As far as I know Gloria has a brother who lives in Toronto, a niece in Scarborough and that’s it. Well, what are old friends for?
I forgot to say that I woke last Friday with a foreign object in my mouth and spat it out on to the pillow—it was one of my teeth. Possibly one of the most unpleasant waking experiences of my life. At the local dentist, however, the man gave me the all clear. Everything else looks more or less fine, he said, and commented on the impressive crowning and bridgework my mouth boasted. Must have cost a fortune, he said wistfully. Thank you, excellent American dentists of New York. I have an irrational fear of losing my teeth—actually it’s not irrational, it’s highly rational. But assuming I live long enough it’s probably inevitable. Somebody told me (who?) that both Waugh and T.S. Eliot lost the will to live when they had their teeth extracted and were presented with a set of snappers. Is this a writer’s problem? A feeling that when we lose our bite we might as well throw in the towel?
Friday, 27 February
Gloria arrived yesterday and I have given her my room—though I have to say I’m too old to sleep comfortably on a sofa. She looks awful: gaunt and yellow, her face shrunken, her hands trembling. I asked her what was wrong and she said she didn’t know but was sure it was something major. Her hair is dry and thin, her skin mottled and slack like an ancient lizard’s. She thinks it may be a problem with her liver (‘Why else would I be this peculiar colour?’) but she complains of aches in her spine and hips as well. She’s also very short of breath.
None the less, we were pleased to see each other and drank the best part of the bottle of gin she’d brought as a present. I cooked up some spaghetti with sauce out of a can
. She hardly touched her food, though, wanting to drink and smoke and talk. I told her about my last encounter with Peter and we laughed and coughed at each other. She has sold La Fucina and is having the funds transferred. ‘I got nothing for it,’ she said. ‘Pennies—after I paid the tax and the debts.’ I asked her where she was planning to stay and she said, ‘I was rather planning to stay with you, Logan, darling. Just until the doctor’s had a look and we know the prognosis.’ I’m going to take her to my clinic on Lupus Street. I am seventy years old today.
Tuesday, 9 March
Gloria back from hospital. She wouldn’t let me come and visit her, or pick her up, for some reason. I heard a taxi dropping her off and ran out to help her in. She’d been shopping and had bought champagne, some foie gras, a plum cake. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened at the hospital or what any of her doctors had said.
So tonight we opened the champagne and ate foie gras on toast and she told me she had inoperable lung cancer. ‘Riddled with it, I suspect,’ she said. ‘But they couldn’t tell me why my back was aching so—at least not at the moment.’ She asked if she could stay on with me: she didn’t want to end up in a cancer ward or a hospice. I said of course she could but warned her I was very poor, and that what comfort I could offer her would be determined by that fact. She said she had £800 in the bank and I should think of it as mine. ‘Let’s have a high old time of it, Logan,’ she said with a grin, as if we were schoolchildren planning a midnight feast. I thought that even £800 wouldn’t go very far and she must have noticed the look in my eye. She nodded at the double portrait over the mantelpiece. ‘Perhaps it’s time to cash in Pablo’s legacy,’ she said.
Wednesday, 10 March
I called Ben in Paris this morning and asked him how he was. ‘Ailing but surviving,’ he said. I welcomed him to the dub. Then I told him about the Picasso sketch and he offered me £3,000 there and then, sight unseen.
I took the drawing out of the frame and cut it in two, scissoring off my portrait. On my half it only had my name written, ‘Logan’—the rest of the dedicatory sentence and the crucial signature being on Gloria’s half, which reads ‘A mon ami et mon amie Gloria. Amities, Picasso’ and the date. Our respective portions are no bigger than postcards and, without a signature, of course my portrait is worthless, but it’s a memento all the same and I’m happy for poor Gloria to be the beneficiary of that lunch in Cannes all those long years ago.
Friday, 19 March
Could be a day in winter. Low slate-grey clouds and a gusty east wind bringing showers of sleet in from the North Sea. Gloria is well established in my bedroom—gramophone, gin, books and magazines. We eat and drink like exiled royalty. A private nurse comes by every day to help Gloria bathe and change (paid for by the Picasso bequest) and the health visitor comes in from time to time to check on her progress and top up her medicaments. Gloria is having no radiation-treatment or any of the new ‘blunderbuss’ drug therapies available. She feigns jollity and devil-may-care and says she doesn’t give a hoot as long as she feels no pain. ‘I won’t be a bore, darling,’ she said. ‘And I won’t have you slopping out for me or wiping my bottom and all the rest of it. As long as we can afford the nurses it’ll be just like having some cantankerous old friend to stay.’ So I follow my routine, go out to the library, continue my work and come back in the early evening. Gloria is quite happy to be on her own during the day and can more or less look after herself but she likes company at night, so I sit in with her, read her bits out of the newspaper, listen to music and drink.
I am usually fairly drunk by 10 o’clock and Gloria begins to nod and doze. I take the glass from her hand, rearrange the blankets and quilt and tiptoe out of the room.
I sleep badly on the sofa, imagining the cancer cells multiplying next door and trying not to think of the Gloria Ness-Smith I once knew. I wake up early in the mornings and shave and wash immediately so the bathroom’s dear. I pray that the nurse will come before she wakes—before I hear her terrified cry of ‘Logan!’ as consciousness returns and she realizes the state she’s in. The fear always strikes first thing in the morning, before she’s put her mask of hey-ho resignation on.
When the nurse arrives I go out for the day’s provisions—often to Harrods Food Hall to find some exotic sweetmeat Gloria fandes (‘What about kumquats, today? Candied chestnuts?’). I have an account with an off-licence and they deliver all our booze. A case of gin seems to last a week. If I stay at home we start on the wine before lunch and hit the hard stuff as night falls and the soul buckles at the knees. I asked her if she wanted me to make contact with Peter but ‘she said ‘no’ immediately, so I left it at that. I don’t think back; I don’t think forward. I’ve made no plans for Gloria’s death—which is what we’re both waiting for—in fact I don’t remotely know what the form is in these cases. No doubt I shall learn. In the meantime the here and now is enough to preoccupy me.
Sunday, 4 April
Gloria has reached that stage of wastage and emaciation where her features look borrowed: eyes too big for their sockets, teeth too large for her mouth, someone else’s enormous nose and ears. Her lips are always wet and shiny and she’s now lost her appetite. She can manage half a poached egg or a soft-centred chocolate but her world is hushed and blurry from the morphine cocktail she sips and it’s all she can do to focus on me for a minute or two. She makes a huge effort—I sense she doesn’t want to feel she’s drifting away. I read her the newspaper in the mornings now and she concentrates massively: ‘Why is Ted Heath such a dog-in-the-manger? What is a ‘punk’, exactly?’
We have about £1,200 left from our legacy—enough for another month or so, I calculate—at any rate our drinks bill has plummeted and I am more or less sober again.
A doctor visits regularly from the Lupus Street clinic, a different one each day—there must be dozens of them—and I asked the latest for a prognosis. It could be tomorrow, it could be next year, he said, citing some astonishing examples of people who should have died clinging on instead to this half-life for months. Thank God for opium, I say. The nurses deal with Gloria’s bodily functions—1 have no idea what transpires.
I sit and read to her, my eyes glancing at the pulsing, cursive vein that bulges on her temple, unconsciously timing my own inhalations and exhalations to its awkward, thready beat. Gloria’s clock winding down.
Tuesday, 6 April
4.35 p.m. Gloria has gone. I went into her room two minutes ago! and she was dead. Still lying in exactly the same position she had ‘ adopted half an hour previously, her head back, her nostrils flared, lips tightly parted to show her teeth. Her eyes were closed, but, half an hour ago she seemed to squeeze my hand gently when I took hers.
But now her knees were somewhat drawn up, as if the effort of that last search for the last breath had required the whole frail body to do the work I reached under the sheet and took hold of her ankles and pulled them towards me. Her legs straightened as supplely as if she were alive. Why was I so solicitous towards Gloria, I ask myself? Because I liked her; because we had been lovers and had shared part of our lives. Because she was my friend. Also because, having done this for Gloria, I see it as a due gladly paid and I think—wishfully—that therefore someone will be there for me too. Absurd, delusional musings, I know. You can’t make these deals with life, there is no quid pro quo.
Saturday, 10 April
Putney Vale Crematorium on a cold April day must be one of the most lugubrious and depressing places in the country. An absurd Victorian chapel doubles ingeniously as a crematorium set in the middle of a huge, rambling, untidy necropolis. Around the chapel loom dark yew trees, like giant hooded monks, conferring more gloom on an already gloomy scene.
Peter came and a surprising number of strangers also—old colleagues of Gloria, obscure relatives. Peter asked me where she had died. At my flat, I said. Your flat? All his old suspicious antagonism reddened his face. Then he collected himself: very good of you, old chap, he said.
He b
ecame more voluble and questioning back at his hotel, curious to discover why his ex-wife had died in his oldest friend’s basement flat. He asked me if I had really liked Gloria. Of course, I said: she was marvellous company—very funny, very blunt, wonderfully rude.
‘You see, I think I never really knew her,’ he said in a puzzled voice.
‘You married her, for God’s sake.’
‘Yes. But I think that was more of a sort of sex-intoxication thing. Never known anyone like Gloria for, you know, getting me going.’
We ordered some sandwiches from room service and continued our attack on the whisky bottle. I noticed the waiter called him ‘Mr Portman’. What’s wrong with Scabius, I asked?
‘I’m not meant to be here—my accountant would have a heart attack if he knew I was in London.’
‘Ah, tax. Very good of you to come back. Gloria would have been very touched. No, seriously.’
‘The very nicking devil, these taxes. I’m thinking about Ireland. Apparently you pay no income tax if you’re a writer. But then there’s the risk of the IRA.’