2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  §

  I telephoned Lucy from the post office [LMS only had a telephone installed in his house in 1987] to find out her flight details and arrange her collection from the airport. She said, ‘Wasn’t Peter Scabius a friend of yours?’ I confessed I was proud to consider Sir Peter as one of my oldest. ‘Not any more you’re not,’ she said, ‘he died last week.’

  I felt that instant empty feeling, an absence: like a brick removed from an already shaky wall and you wonder if the new weights and stresses on the other bricks will accommodate this sudden hole, if that redistribution will leave it standing or bring it down. The moment passed, but I felt somehow weaker, more ramshackle myself. I sensed that my life, my world, without Peter Scabius in it was a tottering, more jerry-built edifice all of a sudden.

  How did he die? I asked. ‘Pneumonia. He was in the Falklands.’ Don’t tell me, I said, he was researching a new novel. ‘How did you guess?’ Lucy said, incredulous and admiring. Researching a novel: how very Peter to want to write a novel about the Falklands War. So, Ben and Peter nous ont quittes as they say here, leaving me alone. Lucy said the newspapers were full of long obituaries and respectful assessments and I asked her to send them on. ‘Nobody mentions you,’ she said.

  §

  Bowser is an undemonstrative dog, not requiring much affection day to day. However, every week or so, he will come and seek me out and, if I am sitting, he will place his jaw on my knee, or, if I am standing, he will butt me gently on the calves with his head. I know this means he wants some loving and so I scratch his ears, pat his sides and say to him all the silly nonsense that dog owners have regaled their dogs with through the ages: ‘Who’s a good old boy, then?’, ‘What a good dog!’, ‘Who’s the best dog in the world?’ After about a couple of minutes of this he will shake himself as if he’s just swum across a stream and wander off.

  §

  The Olafsons are here for their third year running, taking the bothy for a month this time. The sun was hammering down when they arrived, and we sat on the lawn at the back of my house in the shade of the big chestnut and drank cold white wine. They couldn’t hide their excitement and pleasure at being here in the warm south, saying there had been a ground frost in Reykjavik the night they’d left. I told them I had visited their home town once (I don’t know why I had never mentioned it before, I said). Then they asked me what had taken me to Reykjavik and, as I began to explain, the reason for my reticence became all too obvious. I was telling them about Freya and Gunnarson and the war and how Freya had thought I was dead when the tears started to creep down my cheeks unprompted. I wasn’t feeling grief: that hellish chest-crammed agony you feel—but some portion of my brain activated by the memory decided to trigger the tear ducts. They were looking at me, shocked. I said it had all been very sad and tried to change the subject, talking about some new restaurant that had opened in the neighbourhood. But I wept again when they left and I felt the better for it—weakened and purged. I went inside and looked at Freya’s and Stella’s photographs. Freya and Stella. That was my good luck; those were my lucky years and I can’t complain. Some people never have any luck in their lives and during the years I loved Freya and she loved me I was awash in it. And then the bad luck came back.

  That’s all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up—look at the respective piles. There’s nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man’s condition, as Montaigne says.

  §

  Spent half an hour staring mesmerized at the shape of water pouring out of the overflowing pond by the big oak at the meadow’s edge. Somehow a large stone had become wedged in the outlet and the water ran over it, smooth and glazed like an inverted bowl or the boss of some great wheel. I dipped a stick in the water and allowed the drops to fall from its end on to this globey running flow, sowing the smooth shoulder of water with seeds of dry quicksilver drops—which instantly disappeared, making no impression on the burnished surface.

  §

  Major building work going on at La Sapiniere and Sainte-Sabine is abuzz with speculation. The house has been empty—apart from the caretakers—for fifteen years since the last tenants left. La Sapiniere is an elegant chartreuse about two miles away from me, hidden behind stone walls higher than a man’s head. I hope the new owners aren’t British—most of the Brits seem congregated around Montaigu de Quercy way. There’s a sculptor on the other side of Sainte-Sabine, an Englishman called Carlyle, who makes sculptures out of old farm machinery—but he’s even more of a recluse than me. When our paths cross in the market or the pharmacy we feign convincing ignorance of each other.

  §

  Hard frost today, then a slow foggy thaw, the trees in the park spectral, fuzzy constructions—almost artificial looking—as the enveloping fog hid the twigs and finer branches leaving only the massy ones visible to the eye. A child’s version of trees.

  §

  All day a song has been going round and round my head. An old song, pre-war. Something about the tune makes it naggingly hard to forget.

  Life is short Something, something, We’re all getting older So don’t be an also ran, Something, something, Dance little man, Dance whenever you can

  Dance little man. So I shall.

  A curdled, mealy sky this afternoon, slowly breaking up as the evening advanced to a brightening blue, but hazy.

  §

  The new chatelaine at La Sapiniere is one Madame Dupetit—from Paris, no less. Unmarried? Divorced? She is alone, it seems, with no children and a great deal of money. The old caretakers have been let go and a new couple installed from Agen while the renovation work goes on.

  §

  May. The first summer-feeling of the year. Verges pricked with primroses. Fat loafy clouds laze idly across the valley. My favourite month, the countryside fresh with the unreal new green of the leaves on the trees. Bees swarm in the roof of Cinq Cypres and die in their thousands in the upper rooms. I sweep up spadefuls, even though I leave the windows open. Bees appear to be very stupid insects at swarming time, ignoring the open window and battering futilely at the glass panes of the dosed ones, until they fall to the ground and die of exhaustion. They seem to regain their senses and calm down once the comb is built and the search for pollen begins.

  §

  Tremendous heat today, like August—canicidaire, as they describe them here: the dog-days. But there are no dog-days in May, everything is growing with all its might. But in August when the vegetation is on the turn and the nights begin to draw in, ever so slowly, then that heat weakens and depresses you, the sun seems baleful, crushing.

  But now even Bowser seeks out a patch of sunshine to sleep in.

  §

  He lies there sprawled, a leg twitching as he chases dream sheep or butterflies. Hodge steps lightly by and she looks at him with curiosity and a little disdain.

  §

  I was walking into Sainte-Sabine when a steel-blue Mercedes-Benz estate pulled , up beside me. There was a woman driving and she offered me a lift into the village. We introduced ourselves but I knew before she told me her name that she was Madame Dupetit from La Sapiniere. She has greyish-blonde hair and very pale skin, almost Nordic, and would be an attractive woman if there was not something tight-lipped and reserved about her features, as if determined to deny any sensual or frivolous nature she might have. She was well and expensively dressed, her hair up in a loose chignon, fingers and wrists discreetly but richly jewelled. She was down from Paris to inspect the work, hoping to move in before August—I must come over for an aperitif once she was properly installed. Gladly, I said. She plans to spend only the summers here—perhaps a visit at Easter. She was in the antiques trade, she told me, and had a small shop in the rue Bonaparte. Yes, of course she knew Leeping Freres. I explained my old connection with the firm. By the time I climbed o
ut of her car by the post office we were fairly well informed about each other. I was quizzed pretty thoroughly at the Cafe de France by Henri and Marie-Therese. There is much curiosity about the elegant Madame Dupetit. No one has quite got her number yet.

  §

  This year Lucy seems older, more tired. Her friend, Molly, confided her worries to me. She had a bad fall in the spring and knocked herself out for a few minutes. The fall seems to have mysteriously sapped her energy—shaken her up in some fundamental way. One day she was in my study looking through the bookshelves for something to read. She saw the cardboard boxes full of my papers and manuscripts and she asked me what was going to happen to them.

  ‘Happen?’

  ‘When you drop off the perch. You can’t just have all this thrown away. There must be fascinating material in there.’

  §

  ‘Fascinating to me, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Why don’t I find you some eager young lover of literature to catalogue it all, sort it out?’

  ‘No thank you. I don’t want a stranger reading my private papers.’

  But she inspired me: I have decided to set my house in order.

  §

  Rereading my old journals is both a source of revelation and shock. I can see no connection between that schoolboy and the man I am now. What a morose, melancholy, troubled soul I was. That wasn’t me, was it?

  §

  The idea of a priori moral judgements (‘It is morally wrong to inflict gratuitous pain’) is completely acceptable to the vast majority of human beings. Only a few philosophers would disagree.

  §

  Three bad days of the brown mist so I went to Dr Roisanssac. He’s a good-looking, clean-cut 35-year-old with prematurely grey hair. He checked me out, blood pressure, palpations, blood and urine samples. I told him about my smash-up and he said he could send me to Bordeaux for a brain scan if I wanted. I told him I couldn’t possibly afford it. No, no, he said, it’s free—Monsieur Coin will drive you there and bring you back. You don’t have to pay a penny. It was tempting but I said no: strangely reluctant to have my brain scanned, whatever that may involve. I worry what else they might find.

  §

  Drinks at La Sapiniere. It’s a beautiful house—eighteenth century, with a dusty yellow crept on the walls and steeply angled mansard roofs with fish-scale tiles. Two small wings extend forward to enclose a gravelled forecourt with a fountain. At the back there is a balustraded terrace overlooking a newly planted parterre that will be superb in a couple of years. Inside it is still a little empty-looking, but such pieces as Madame Dupetit has placed here and there are commensurate with the age and style of the building. All very sophisticated but, to my eye, a little soulless, museum-like: Aubusson rugs on glossy old parquet, a pair of precisely angled armchairs, dust-free tables and cabinets. Only the pictures appear commonplace: standard portraits, sub-Watteau fetes champetres, over-varnished, idealized landscapes. One can’t criticize the taste but one misses the absence of life about the house. I wanted a big carnal nude above the fireplace, or a glass and chrome coffee table stacked with books and magazines—something to clash, to jar, to draw the eye—something that says there is a human being living here.

  But Madame Dupetit seems more relaxed in her own domain and consequently looked more pretty. Her hair was down, she wore linen slacks and a white blouse. She has a bosom. We drank gin-tonics in my honour and she smoked a cigarette in a careful way that suggested this was a rare, illicit pleasure. When she leaned forward to stub it out, the collar of her blouse briefly parted and I saw the swell and crease of her breasts, held by the embroidered border of her brassiere. I felt that old sensation of weakness bloom at the base of my spine and I was duly grateful. If I had been twenty years younger I might have wished our neighbourly courtesies would lead further.

  She was very friendly—perhaps too friendly—laying her hand on my arm, asking if she might call me Logan and that I was to call her Gabrielle. We would be two allies here in Sainte-Sabine, she said, and added that if I ever needed anything I had only to summon her gardiens. It was all very civilized, sitting on her rear terrace, watching the sun lengthening the shadows, the swifts dodging and dipping above our heads, talking about Paris. She was born there, she said, after the war. La Sapiniere had been an old family property and she had bought it from her brother. I sensed that Monsieur Dupetit, whoever he might have been, had been gone a long time.

  §

  Francine has announced that she doesn’t want any more visits to her apartment—the neighbours are talking about the men who come and go. She would be very happy to meet me in a hotel, however, and recommended one on the outskirts of town, where she obviously has an understanding with the management. This is unaffordable as far as I am concerned, so the news appears to put an end to my sexual life. I shall miss Frantine and her utter lack of! curiosity about me. I, by contrast, have always been very curious 1 about her and wonder how this middle-aged housewife embarked 1 on her career as a part-time prostitute. I ask questions but shef sidesteps them all.

  §

  Consternation at the Superette: frowns, head shaking, dark mutter-ings. Didier Mazeau asked me if I had seen what had gone up on the wall at La Sapiniere. No, I said, what is it? You’d better take a look, Didier advised—me, I’m saying nothing. So I detoured on my mobylette and passed by. And there to the right of the gateposts, set in the wall, was a stone plaque with carved letters that read (in French): ‘To the memory of Benoit Verdel (1916-1971), known as ‘Raoul’, commandant of the Resistance group ‘Renard’ that liberated Sainte-Sabine from the German yoke on the 6th June 1944’. So, more becomes dear: a family property; her father a Resistance fighter, perhaps a local hero. How come no one in Sainte-Sabine knew of the connection and why was Didier Mazeau so frowningly circumspect?

  §

  ‘As sound as a bell of brass.’ This is a phrase my father used to describe perfectly frozen meat. Can’t think why it should suddenly pop up in my head. I haven’t thought of him for years and as I bring him to mind, and recall his tolerant sad smile, I feel my tear ducts smart, automatically.

  §

  Gabrielle to drinks here. I must say I miss the company of women. Nothing is going to occur between us, but to smell her perfume, to watch her sit back in the armchair and cross her legs, to lean forward and hold a match to her cigarette, to feel the guiding pressure of her fingers on the back of my hand, provide an intense feeling of sensual pleasure. I infuse her presence here in my house with as much suppressed and tender eroticism as I dare without being impolite. I showed her around and she- spotted the little Picasso sketch on my study wall. I told her how it had come about and she was, I think, quite amazed to learn that I’d met him. She looked at the piles of books and the boxes of papers and asked me what I was working on, so I told her a little about Octet.

  Then I said I had seen the plaque on the wall and she explained its significance to me. Her father had been in the Resistance during the war but she had only learned this after his death. Her mother had told her the few facts that were available: his code name, that he had run a group known as ‘Renard’ in the Lot, and that his orders on the day of the invasion were to liberate Sainte-Sabine and establish strong points on key roads and bridges in the area. From what she had read of histories of the Resistance she knew also that their other tasks were to round up and arrest Nazi sympathizers and collaborators. After the war he had bought La Sapiniere but shortly after his business had taken him abroad and the family moved to Paris, where she was born and then her brother, some six years later. ‘It’s entirely possible that I was conceived in La Sapiniere,’ she said with a laugh. ‘And after my father died, when we discovered we owned the property, the family decided the easiest solution was to rent it out.’ Then she hinted at her own marital difficulties and, after they were ‘solved’, she decided she needed to make a significant change in her life and thought it would be a fitting gesture to her father’s memory to restore the house
and celebrate what he had done for Sainte-Sabine. He never spoke about the war, I asked? Never, she said. Even her mother knew very little—she had met her father in 1946 and a year later they were in Paris. You have to understand, she said, that for men of her father’s generation the liberation, however longed for, also provoked enormous trauma: in order to fight the Germans you often had to fight Frenchmen too—and when the war was over there was the matter, of justice and retribution. It wasn’t easy to live with the knowledge of what he had seen and what, perhaps, he had been obliged to do. Mieux de se taire.

  §

  Huge storm in the night. Stepping out in the morning to find the ground drenched and sodden but the air seeming fresh, newly rinsed, newly decanted.

  Milau-Plage. Hotel des Dunes. A sudden desire to be by the ocean has brought me here, south of Mimizan on the Atlantic coast. This small hotel backs into the dunes and faces a tidal salt-water inlet-cum-lake, the Etang de Milau. There are six rooms on the first floor and down below there is a restaurant, Chez Yvette, where they push back the sliding doors in summer and place tables on a rectangle of wooden decking beneath a thick and shady vine.

  Milau-Plage is a little resort town that is just far enough away from major centres of population to remain essentially unspoilt and unpretentious. On the etong side there is the old quartier des pecheurs with its bright wooden fishermen’s cabins and around that a couple of streets with shops and bars, the whole town dominated by its lofty red-and-white striped lighthouse. You leave the sheltered streets of the town and climb up through the dunes to find the huge sandy beaches on this west coast of France. Here and there surviving concrete bunkers and gun emplacements of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall topple and slide slowly down the eroding dunes to the ocean beyond. Beach life centres around an ecoiede surfand a couple of beach shacks selling drinks and sandwiches.