2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  The Lufthansa Boeing 737 that had been hijacked in Palma on October 13th had made its way from Dubai to Aden. There the captain had been shot dead by the leader of the hijackers (they suspected him of clandestinely passing information to the authorities). The co-pilot had flown the plane from Aden on to Mogadishu in Somalia, always intended to be its final destination. A new deadline was set for the ransom demands. At the last moment a message was received from the control tower-saying that the eleven Baader-Meinhof gang members had been released and were now on board a plane bound for Mogadishu. A German air force transport plane landed at Mogadishu Airport in the small hours of Tuesday morning, but there were no Baader-Meinhof members on board. Instead there was a detachment of German commandos from the GSG-9 unit (Grenzschutz Gruppe Neuri) and two members of the British SAS. Stun grenades were thrown, the Lufthansa jet was stormed, and in the swift and sudden firefight that followed three of the terrorists were killed and one was wounded. The passengers were all released, unharmed.

  In Germany, in the gaol in Stammheim where the Baader-Meinhof members were imprisoned, the news quickly broke that the hostages had been rescued. Andreas Baader and Jan-Carl Raspe shot themselves in the head (with guns that had been smuggled into their cells); Gudrun Ensslin, like Ulrike Meinhof,↓ hanged herself.

  ≡ Ulrike Meinhof had committed suicide in 1976.

  The failure of the hijacking had always been considered a possibility and the three original members of the B-M gang had alerted their supporters that, if indeed it failed, they might be killed. Their suicides were meant to look like murders and were to be a last act of revenge against the fascist state. When the news of their deaths broke, there were riots in Rome, Athens, the Hague and Paris. On the next day Dr Schleyer’s body was found in a green Audi in Mulhouse. He had been shot in the head as soon as the news of the rescue at Mogadishu had been broadcast.

  So what did John Vivian and the Napier Street Mob have to do with Mogadishu? Why had I been sent across Europe to be a courier for forty sticks of dynamite? My own hunch is that they were intended to be part of the reaction to the potential failure of the hijacking. I suspect they planned to attack specific German targets in England—the embassy, Mercedes-Benz dealerships, perhaps a Goethe Institut or two—to show solidarity and outrage. All that presupposing they could have made the bombs (lan Halliday’s role, I suspect) and that Anna, Tina and John Vivian himself could have planted the devices without blowing themselves up. As I crossed the Channel towards Dover, I was pleased that I had buried those sticks of explosive in my orchard in France. They could decompose quietly there, not cause any harm.

  And I wasn’t apprehensive about confronting Vivian. I was going to say that Jtirgen had sold me a case full of old newspapers. By the time I’d grown suspicious and picked the locks and looked inside he was long gone. What else was I meant to do but come home? I was ready to feign further innocence: what was meant to be in that case, John? Drugs? I was actually curious to see what his reply might be but in the event it never came about: as I stepped off the ferry at Dover I was arrested by two Special Branch officers and taken to the Royal Army Medical Hospital, beside the Tate Gallery, where I was questioned for two hours by a young and pushily aggressive detective called Deakin.

  I told Deakin why I had joined the SPK and what I did for them. I said I was returning from a short holiday in Europe, looking at a piece of property I owned there. Did you meet anyone on your travels, Deakin asked? You meet all sorts of people when you travel alone, I said. I mentioned, for good measure, that I had been a commander in the RNVR during the war and a member of the Naval Intelligence Division and I demanded to know what was going on. He didn’t believe me. When some underling checked—and reported that it was true—his manner changed dramatically. He said that they had raided Napier Street on the basis of intelligence ‘received from abroad’. My name was discovered on documents seized. Anna Roth and Tina Brownwell had been arrested. Ian Halliday was in Amsterdam. John Vivian had disappeared. I was released at 11.00 that evening. Turpentine Lane was a convenient ten-minutes’ walk away. I strolled home through the chilly night. My days with the Socialist Patients’ Kollective, and my paper round, were no more, clearly: the dog-food years were about to begin again.

  §

  POSTSCRIPT TO THE MEMORANDUM

  I saw John Vivian about two weeks after my return. I was in the Cornwallis, sipping my lager with its sweet sherry chaser, when he came in and sidled over. His hair was cut short and dyed grey, he wore a sports jacket with a shirt and tie.

  ‘John,’ I said. ‘My God, you look smart.’

  ‘I’ve gone underground,’ he said. ‘At least I’m trying to go underground. You can go underground in Germany, no bother, but try doing it in this fucking country.’

  ‘The disguise is good, though.’

  ‘Thanks. You got the suitcase?’

  ‘I dumped it in France.’

  His jaw muscles clenched. ‘Just as well. Listen, you got any of the money left?’

  ‘I gave it all to Jürgen.’

  ‘Jürgen?’

  ‘The guy in Zurich. I was going to tell you. After he’d given me the suitcase and gone I got suspicious. Picked the lock—it was full of old newspapers.’

  John Vivian’s face seemed to go into spasm. ‘Cunt!’ he said, several times. Then he sat there for a while massaging his temples.

  ‘What should have been in the suitcase, John?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Not now. You couldn’t lend me ten quid, could you? I’m broke.’

  ‘Not as broke as I am. I’ve got £1.75 that has to last me until Friday. I’m poor, John. Poorer than you.’

  He looked at me. ‘Flower of the nation, eh? Jesus College, Oxford.’

  ‘Gonville and Caius, Cambridge.’

  We had to laugh. I gave him a pound and he went away!↓ without a backward glance.

  ≡ John Vivian was arrested six weeks later after an abortive raid on a sub-post office in Llangyfellach near Swansea. The postmaster, an ex-soldier, recognizing that the gun Vivian was pointing at him was fake, punched him in the face and broke his nose. Vivian was sentenced to seven years in prison for attempted robbery.

  The French Journal

  On 4 May 1979 Logan Mountstuart went to the designated polling station for his Pimlico ward, voted Labour and left the country. By the time Margaret Thatcher was declared the new prime minister he was on French soil. When he learned the result of the general election he was even more convinced that his move to Sainte-Sabine had been the wisest and most judicious course of action.

  Turpentine Lane was sold to LMS’s upstairs neighbour, ‘Subadar’ Singh, for £28,000—cash. Of which approximately £5,000 was designated for the renovation of Cinq Cypres. Most of the work was to be done on the ground floor—which LMS decided to make his living quarters, not fancying having to negotiate a steep staircase as his age advanced, contenting himself with merely making good the upper floors, staunching leaks, replacing rotten timbers and the like. He created a fairly commodious apartment on the ground floor, consisting of a sitting room with a large fireplace, a study, a large kitchen-dining room and a bedroom with a bathroom next door. His furniture from Turpentine Lane was easily installed, and two walls in his study were lined with bookshelves to accommodate his library and archive. More work was done to the ‘labourer’s bothy’ attached to the barn, which was transformed into a small two-bedroom house, somewhat cramped but neat and clean. This he intended to rent out to holiday-makers in the summer to supplement the income he would receive from the remainder of the Singh cash, now safely banked in a high-interest account at the Societe Generate in Puy 1’Eveque.

  LMS calculated he could live relatively comfortably at Cinq Cypres on £2,000 a year—in any event it would be a better life than anything he could have managed at Turpentine Lane. And, as it turned out, he was able to rent the bothy without difficulty in July and August, tenants returning regularly, year after year.

  He acquir
ed a cat (female—to deal with the rodent problem in the house), which he called ‘Hodge’, and a dog, for security and companionship (male, three quarters beagle, one quarter spaniel), which he named, for obvious reasons, ‘Bowser’.

  He settled into Cinq Cypres with little fuss and soon became well known in the commune of Sainte-Sabine. The proximity of the village meant that it was easy for him to walk there, which he often did, maintaining that walking was the best exercise for those of advancing years. On market day, Wednesday, he would ride in on his mobylette and load its saddlebags with provisions for the following week.

  He discreetly let it be known that he was embarked on a major work of fiction (Octet), assuming that this would discourage casual visitors and avert questions about what he was up to. His cousin Lucy Sansom would come for a fortnight’s holiday each year at the end of May. She always stayed in the bothy and often the day would go by without them seeing each other until they met for an aperitif before supper: both found the situation ideal.

  Semi-recluse or not, LMS soon acquired a network of French friends and neighbours who were helpful and accommodating and contributed enormously to the quality of his thrifty life in rural France.

  The entries in the French Journal are very random, and undated, sometimes it appears that months had gone by without anything being recorded. The events concerning Mme Dupetit occurred largely between 1986 and 1988.

  §

  Of all the wood I burn in my fire the logs from the cherry tree are the hardest. A solid cherry log seems almost as resistant to flame as concrete. Next, in order of difficult combustibility, come cedar, oak and elm. Bringing up the rear is pine—which burns too easily and leaves lots of ash. None of these woods spit, whereas acacia is deadly. Shortly after I had moved here I made the mistake of laying a fire with acacia logs. As the flames took hold the fire began to sound like downtown Beirut, snapping with sporadic gunshots. Then small hot coals would zip out of the fireplace like spent tracer. I eventually had to douse the whole thing with a bucket of water, thereby filling the room with a damp grey smoke. Never again.

  §

  Reading Nabokov’s Ada: an intermittently brilliant but baffling book—an idee fixe on the rampage, leaving friendly readers stunned and exhausted behind. I have to say that as an admirer of style—a loaded word, but actually best thought of as a synonym for individuality—VN’s mannered artfulness, his refusal to let a sleeping word lie, becomes in this book more and more like a nervous tic than a natural, individual voice, however fruity and sonorous. The studied opulence, the ornament for the sake of ornament, grows wearing and one longs for a simple, elegant, discursive sentence. This is the key difference: in good prose precision must always triumph over decoration. Wilful elaboration is a sign that the stylist has entered a decadent phase. You cannot live on caviar and foie gras every day: sometimes a plain dish of lentils is all that the palate craves, even if one insists that the lentils come from Puy.

  §

  Norbert drove me to VsL [Villeneuve-sur-Lot], where Francine received me with her usual glacial politesse in her bibelot-crammed apartment. We drank a glass of wine and proceeded to the bedroom. Alas, I came within seconds. She washed me off in the bidet—something I’ve always enjoyed—and then we lay around on the bed for half an hour, seeing if I would grow hard again. No luck, so a swift b.j. before I left. 500 francs—worth every brassy centime.

  §

  [Norbert was Norbert Coin, Sainte-Sabine’s ambulance⁄taxi driver, LMS’s first local friend and ally. For the initial years of his stay LMS, on Norbert’s recommendation, visited this discreet forty-year-old housewife-prostitute every two to three months.]

  Strange late-afternoon sky—packed with clouds, all creased and gathered like grey linen or damask—and then, as the sun began to set, the light seemed to sluice through the folds, steeping the grey clouds in a fiery gold sunshine.

  §

  The simple satisfactions of living in a republic. The plumber calls to fix the broken lavatory in the bothy. We shake hands, address each other as ‘monsieur’ and wish each other good day. He introduces me to his twelve-year-old son. Hands are shaken once more. At the end of the day he calls in to say everything is working. We share a glass of wine, talk about the weather, the prospects of a decent vintage this year, the proliferation of foxes in the neighbourhood. I shake his hand and his son’s and wish them good night and a ‘bon retour’.

  §

  Lucy left yesterday—Norbert drove her to Toulouse to catch her plane. She asked if she might bring a friend next year and I said, of course. She’s heavy and florid but seems in pretty good health—good enough for her to take up smoking in her seventies. She insisted on paying me £200. Her friend is female, she assured me.

  §

  General astonishment in the village at the unearthing of an old copy of Les Cosmopolites in Moncuq Public Library. Yes, that old geezer in Cinq Cypres is a writer after all. The book is passed around amongst the people who know me like a holy relic.

  §

  Mallowy red in the night sky tonight, just before dark, brilliantly offset by what can only be described as a stripe of pistachio green. I can think of any number of abstract painters who might have longed to re-create such a juxtaposition—it was gone within seconds. All the ‘shock’ effects of a century of abstract art have been quietly replicated somewhere or other in nature since time began. Walked out in the park among the trees with my glass of wine. Unusually, Bowser accompanied me, but always at a discreet distance, as if he wanted to keep an eye on me but not interrupt my thoughts.

  §

  The depth of shade around the house is so dense and cool that to step into it from the sun on the hottest days is like entering a dark cellar. I remember Monsieur Polle advising me to take half the mature trees down. Thank God there are no conifers (I don’t count the cypresses)—conifers remind me of crematoria—grim associations with Putney Vale and Gloria’s funeral.

  §

  Monsieur and Madame Mazeau’s silver wedding anniversary [they ran the Superette]. I was invited to the ‘cocktail’ in the Cafe de France—something of an honour, I think- perhaps Norbert’s doing (Lucette Mazeau is his sister). As we toasted the diffident couple I realized that here amongst their family, relations and neighbours was my new circle of friends—my new tertulia. Norbert, of course, and Claudine [his wife]; Jean-Robert [Stefanelli—who helped LMS with his garden]; Henri and Marie-Therese [Grossoleil—owners of the Cafe de France]; Lucien and Kerrette [Gorce—a farmer. LMS’s nearest neighbour]. Who else? I suppose Yannick Lefrere-Brunot [the local dentist and Mayor of Sainte-Sabine] and Didier Roisanssac [the doctor] would make up the numbers. I’m humbled by the uncomplicated welcome I’ve received here and I wonder would an elderly Frenchman be the recipient of similar friendliness should he decide to retire to Wiltshire or Yorkshire or Morayshire? Perhaps. Perhaps people are kinder everywhere than maps of the world would lead you to believe. We drank whisky and ate little cheese biscuits. Everyone was toasted several times. The success of my novel was devoutly wished and I felt truly happy for the first time in years. Such moments should be logged and noted. I miss nothing of my English life—I can’t imagine how I survived there after Nigeria. What was it Larry Durrell called the place? ‘Pudding Island’. I feel no desire to return to Pudding Island ever again. Quod sit, esse velit, nihilque malit [Who would be what he is, desiring nothing extra?]. Important to know that, when it happens.

  §

  If I were the President of France I would:

  (a) Offer tax relief to café owners to replace their plastic chairs with cane or wooden ones.

  (b) Ban the piped playing of Anglo-American rock music in the streets during markets or fetes. There can be nothing more alienating than walking round an ancient French town listening to hit-parade records bellowed out in English banalities.

  (c) Restrict each household to only one conifer per garden. Those who cut down a conifer and replace it with a deciduous tree to receiv
e a 1,000 franc bonus.

  §

  ‘My bowels and I never fail to keep our rendezvous.’ I am I suppose in fairly good health for a man of my age. My leg aches on cold days and from time to time the brown mist fogs my vision. But I still have energy and I sleep well, though less and less each year. My teeth are giving up the struggle and Yannick L-B has made me a snug top plate (free) that replaces all but two ancient worn-down molars. The bottom row seems fine for the moment. My hair appears to have stopped falling out and I’m debating whether to grow a beard—depends how white it is, I don’t want to look like Santa Claus. I eat two meals a day, breakfast and lunch, and drink wine and eat potato crisps at night. I feel the lean muscle mass on my body beginning to diminish—everything about my naked body looking slack and swagged. I’m probably as thin now as I was in my thirties. I think about what might carry me off and I have this feeling that something happened to my head in the crash that is lying dormant. The curious foxing of my area of vision is a portent of the way I will go. The overtaxed brain bursting into blood. Fast, though. Sudden darkness and then nothing.

  §

  Out in the woods today looking for mushrooms with Lucien. His face is seamed and weather-lashed and his hands are all callous—wholly impervious to extreme heat or cold. He’s fifty-six, but he looks older than me, wheezing and coughing as he pokes about the undergrowth. His family have been here for generations but he says his son has no interest in farming—he lives and works in a garage in Agen. Lucien shrugs: Les james…A common sigh, hereabouts. But no doubt young Lucien Gorce caused his papa a few anxious moments himself. I calculate how old Lucien would have been during the Occupation (something I unreflectingly do with all elderly French people I meet). Lucien was born in 1928, so he would have been in his early teens during the war. We managed a rich haul of ceps and girolles. I will break my habit and make a mushroom omelette tonight.