2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  He never returned to Sainte-Sabine but on his release joined his family in Paris, where, over the next few years, he built up a successful business in the import-export trade. He died in 1971, a wealthy man.

  §

  The other man with Lucien Gorce that night was a nephew of Dr Belhomme. The two of them took me back to my house and explained something of the background to the Verdel story. I went to Bordeaux on Lutien’s advice and spent a day in the archives of the Sud-Ouest newspaper. I wrote up my account of the trial and gave a copy of it, with huge regret, to Gabrielle. I didn’t stay to witness her reaction.

  But the next day the plaque had been removed and, shortly after, when I passed the house I saw it had been closed up. The caretakers said they had no idea when Madame Dupetit planned to return. I wrote to Gabrielle in Paris, saying that I was sorry that I had to be the one to tell her the true story about her father’s life but that the truth about Benoit Verdel should have no bearing on her relationship with me and vice versa. She hasn’t replied, so far.

  I also went to see Yannick Lefrere-Brunot and apologized for my presumption and impulsiveness. He was very gracious and said that as far as he was concerned the matter was dosed. But as the days have gone by I feel a hot little shame myself- that I didn’t trust my instincts and presupposed a malice and venality in these people who had been so cordial and welcoming to me. Christ knows what myths Verdel had spun to his family about his war experience. His wife must have colluded in the mendacity, allowing him to turn his prison sentence into years of fortune-seeking abroad as for as his children were to be concerned. And Gabrielle too thought her father an unassuming hero, self-effacing and traumatized by his experiences. And yet he barely suffered for the murders he committed or for the reign of terror and extortion he instigated in Sainte-Sabine. I can understand the massive affront that Gabrielle’s memorial would have given to someone like Lurien Gorce. I apologized to him also. No fool like an old fool, I said. Lurien forgave me and poured me a small glass of eau-de-vie that he had made himself- it went down my throat like molten pumice. Then he said: there are things in life we don’t understand, and when we meet them, all we can do is let them alone. Sounds reasonable.

  §

  Milau-Plage. Hotel des Dunes. I’m later this year and the place is quieter, the beach virtually empty on weekdays, even when the sun is shining. I spend too much of my time, more often than not, musing on my folly over Gabrielle and her father’s memorial. I wrote again and still have received no reply. Reading Montaigne for solace. I think I can forgive myself and I think Gabrielle Dupetit was the last (unrequited) love of my life. I wanted to be the knight errant and expose evil and hypocrisy. At least it sounds like a young man’s dementia rather than a senile one’s.

  §

  Storms looming. Massive anvil clouds to the north: brilliant, gleaming white at their summit shading down through mouse-grey to vein-blue to a dark, bruised grey-purple.

  §

  The pleasures of my life here are simple—simple, inexpensive and democratic. A warm hill of Marmande tomatoes on a roadside vendor’s stall. A cold beer on a pavement table of the Cafe de France—Marie Therese inside making me a sandwich CM. CAMEMBERT. Munching the knob off a fresh baguette as I wander back from Sainte-Sabine. The farinaceous smell of the white dust raised by a breeze from the driveway. A cuckoo sounding in the perfectly silent woods beyond the meadow. The huge grey, cerise, pink, orange and washed-out blue of a sunset seen from my rear terrace. The drilling of the cicadas at noon—the soft dialling-tone of the crickets as dusk slowly gathers. A good book, a hammock and a cold, beaded bottle of blanc sec. A rough red wine and steak frites. The cool, dark, shuttered silence of my bedroom—and, as I go to sleep, the prospect that all this will be available to me again, unchanged, tomorrow.

  §

  On Monday I went into the barn to fetch more logs. I should have used the wheelbarrow but instead loaded myself up with a good armful. I was bending down to pick up just one more when I felt a spearing electric pain shaft through my left side, as if my armpit had been run through by a blunt, serrated-edged sword. The pain then ran down my arm, making my hand and fingers fizzle and numb with acute pins and needles. I dropped the logs and reeled back against the wall and I felt my vision darken and I heard a curious sound, a murmuring in my ears like a restless congregation. And then the pain receded and the feeling returned to my fingers. Dr Roisanssac said I had had a minor heart attack He had me off to hospital in Agen for checks and I spent two days there in a room of my own (free) being monitored and examined by a seemingly endless flow of doctors. All appeared more or less back to normal. The doctors said there was nothing more that a man of my age could do other than avoid any undue strain or physical exertion. I didn’t smoke any more, my diet was fine, I wasn’t obese but there was no viable operation they could offer—at my age, again—that would ameliorate my state of affairs. Prudence was to be my watchword. And so Norbert drove me back to Sainte-Sabine and my new watchful, softly-softly life began.

  §

  As he grew old, all Montaigne asked for was an old age free from dementia—he could cope with pain and suffering and general ill-health. And he did, experiencing terrible agonies in his final years from gallstones. Pain was no problem as long as his mind was lucid. I always thought it would be my brain that would carry me off, some morbid legacy of my encounter with that speeding post office van, but it appears more likely that it will be my heart.

  Didier Roisanssac said this to me at my last examination: look at your face in the mirror, he said, it’s not the same face you had at eighteen, or twenty-five, or thirty-two. Look at the lines and the creases. Look at the lack of elasticity. Your hair is falling out (‘And my teeth,’ I added). You still recognize that face—it’s still you—but it’s lived a long time and it’s showing the signs of that long life. Think of your old heart like your old face. Your heart doesn’t look the same organ as it did when it was eighteen. Imagine that everything that’s happened to your face over the years has happened to your heart. So go easy on it.

  §

  The springing, young green of the elms. Rooks (and magpies), the most nervily cautious of birds. I open my front door and, half a mile away, they take to the air in agitated fright—the rooks cawing alarm, alarm. ’

  §

  I came through this morning and I knew at once something was wrong. Hodge was sitting on the mantelpiece, immobile. She’s never climbed up there before but it was as if she wished to be as far from the ground as possible. Bowser was still sleeping in his basket. ‘Get up, you lazy old bugger,’ I said and went to shake him. But he was dead of course—I didn’t even need to touch him to know it.

  I experienced a form of grief so intense and pure I thought it would kill me. I howled like a baby with my dog in my arms. Then I put him in a wooden wine case and carried him into the garden and buried him under a cherry tree.

  He’s only an old dog, I tell myself, and he lived a full and happy dog’s life. But what makes me unutterably sad is that with him gone—so the love in my life has gone. It may sound stupid, but I loved him and I know he loved me. That meant there was an uncomplicated traffic of mutual love in my life and I find it hard to admit that it’s over. Listen to me babble, but it’s true—it’s true. And, at the same time, I know a part of my sorrow is just disguised self-pity. I needed that exchange and I worry how I’ll cope without it and whether I can replace it—if only it were as easy as buying a new dog. I feel very sorry for myself- that is what grief is.

  §

  HOTEL DBS DUNES. MILAU-PLAGE

  I lunched at the hotel today: half a dozen oysters, turbot, tarte au citron. I drank two thirds of a bottle of Sancerre, then I snoozed on my bed for an hour or so before I gathered up my notebook and stick and Panama hat and made my way slowly up the duckboard path through the dunes to the beach.

  It is busy—but not high-season busy. I plant myself at my table, order a beer (what’s the name of the girl who runs t
his bar?) and watch the people come and go. Later, when the sun’s heat has diminished somewhat, I go for a stroll.

  I walk among the holidaymakers and the families noting all the motley types Homo sapiens manages to produce. There are as many versions of the basic human body—head, torso, two arms, two legs—as there are versions of the basic human face—two eyes, two ears, nose, mouth. As I pick my way amongst the sunbathers I feel I am moving through a mass of incredibly unconcerned refugees. All the fritter of their individual lives is here—clothes, food, toys, reading matter—and they look, in their state of lounging undress, as if they were deprived in some vague way—that this was all they had in the world—and they were waiting for some refugee commissar or charity organization to tell them where to go next. And yet the mood on the beach contradicted this initial impression—the atmosphere is one of collective idleness rather than fear and unease. The people here participate unreflectingly in the beach’s genial democracy and for an hour or so, for a day or so, the fetes waiting for them all up ahead are forgotten. The beach is the great human panacea.

  Most of the people duster around the beach shacks and the flags marking the plage surveillee as if they are frightened to explore further, as if they need this mass proximity to truly relax. Yet wander a little further and you can have a hundred yards of sand to yourself. This is where the nudists come and as I walk slowly northwards (towards the Channel, towards Pudding Island) a girl rises to her feet from a group of sunbathers and saunters down towards the surf—a long way off now, as the tide is ebbing fast. She is quite naked and as our respective courses intersect she pauses, turns and shouts something (in Dutch) to her friends. She has small pointed breasts and a dense clump of pubic hair. Her tan is complete, opaque brown all over. She continues on without a glance at me, this old man in his cream suit. Two worlds collide at this moment, it seems to me—mine and the future. Who could have imagined that such an encounter would have been possible on a beach in my lifetime? I find it quite exhilarating: the old writer and the naked Dutch girl—perhaps we need a Rembrandt to do it full justice (remember the Hotel Rembrandt in Paris where I used to stay?). For some reason I find myself wondering what Cyril [Connolly] would have made of such a meeting had it happened to him: delighted incredulity? Or confusion? No, I think serene pleasure—which is what I feel as I plod onward, grateful to this unknown girl with her guileless nakedness. Grateful that the beach should offer me these possibilities, these modest epiphanies.

  Back at my beach shack, another beer in front of me, I resume my pose, notebook and pen in hand, but my eyes are flashing around me—there’s too much on offer today; the passing parade is profligate. In front of me, seated round a table, are eight French adolescents—four girls, four boys, about sixteen and seventeen, all—to my eye—tanned, slim and attractive. The girls are smoking and it’s clear from the group’s demeanour that they all know each other well—the talk is about where they should go tonight. The boys and girls are relaxed and at ease with each other in a manner that would have been unthinkable to schoolboys of my generation. Consider this: me, Peter, Ben and Dick—aged seventeen—sitting at a beach bar like this with four girls. I can’t—the imagination stalls.

  And suddenly I wonder: is it more of my bad luck to have been born when I was, at the beginning of this century and not be able to be young at its end? I look enviously at these kids and think about the lives they are living—and will live—and posit a kind of future for them. And then, almost immediately, I think what a futile regret that is. You must live the life you have been given. In sixty years’ time, if these boys and girls are lucky enough, they will be old men and women looking at the new generation of bright boys and girls and wishing that time had not fled by—

  One of the girls has just asked me the time (‘cinq heures vingt’), which has rather jolted me. I think—I feel—I am invisible here. I should be heading home soon.

  The girl who asked me the time lights yet another cigarette. I’m sure it’s not so much the pleasure of the nicotine that makes these girls smoke so much—they hardly puff at their cigarettes—it’s having the thing in their hand to complete the pose. They all smoke with practised ease and naturalism, yet this girl has the gestures off more perfectly than most. How to define it? Some equation of extended fingers and wrist bend, lip-pout and head-tilted exhalation. She smokes with great sexual grace: her body is brown and lean and she’s pretty with long milk-chocolate brown hair. And somehow she knows that her perfect manipulation of that perfect white cylinder of packed tobacco sends a subliminal signal to the boys—all their eyes are flicking like lizards’—that she is ready.

  And for some reason this makes me contemplate my own life, all my sporadic highs and appalling lows, my brief triumphs and terrible losses and I say, no, no, I don’t envy you—yon slim, brown, confident boys and girls and whatever futures await you. I will gather up my belongings and wander back to the Hotel des Dunes and look forward to my supper—the fish of the day and my bottle of wine. I feel, as I sit here—and I should record this as I experience it—looking over the beach and the ocean as the sun begins to drop down in the west, a strange sense of pride: pride in all I’ve done and lived through, proud to think of the thousands of people I’ve met and known and the few I’ve loved. Play on, boys and girls, I say, smoke and flirt, work on your tans, figure out your evening’s entertainment. I wonder if any of you will live as well as I have done.

  §

  Sultry, fuggy day. No leaf stir. Butterflies lurch and skitter through the delphiniums I planted around the sundial.

  §

  Cinq Cypres. Sainte-Sabine. Our Indian summer continues here—the leaves are just on the turn but the breeze from the east is warm and the sun shines each day with benign force.

  Through a gap in the trees of the park I can see the blond grass of the meadow—turned quite yellow under the sun like the waters of the old River Plate—and the dark green of the oak woods, offset beyond, the trees so densely leafed that they seem to billow out over the sun-bleached yellow grass like smoke or Waves. And, closer to, the sharp clarity of the sunlight on the bushes and the creeper around the house is perfect: the perfect balance of leaf-shadow, leaf-shine and leaf-translucence—absolutely correct, as if worked out by mathematical formulae to provide the ideal visual stimulus. Down by the barn a thick patch of thistle is in seed and the wandering breeze snatches the thistle-down and lifts it skyward in small urgent flurries—backlit by the sun so that the down seems to sparkle and gleam like mica or sequins—so much so that it looks like photons of light are taking to the air, flying upwards—rising upwards, blowing away across the meadow—like what?—like glow worms, like lucent moths.

  Too nice a day to stay inside. I shall choose an old familiar book and go and read in a deckchair in the cool blue shade of the big chestnut tree. I woke this morning with a transient old man’s erection. I was dreaming, I think, of that naked girl who walked by me on the beach. My dreams are so vivid these nights that I wake in the morning blinking, dazed and exhausted from my encounters with my unconscious life, wondering who and where I am. So this morning I took hold of myself, pleased to be so stiff, so virile, if only for half a minute or so. Life in the old dog. Life—still living, pleased to have managed to live in every decade of this long benighted century. What a time I’ve had—quel parcours, as the French say. I think a drink is called for. Yes, absolutely—1 will open a chill bottle of white wine and take it out and sit under the big chestnut and drink a toast to Logan Mountstuart. Every decade. All my ups and downs. My personal rollercoaster. Not so much a rollercoaster—a rollercoaster’s too smooth—a yo-yo, rather—a jerking, spinning toy in the hands of a maladroit child, more like, trying too hard, too impatiently eager to learn how to operate his new yo-yo

  Afterword

  Logan Mountstuart died of a heart attack on 5 October 1991—he was eighty-five years old. His heart was not receiving enough oxygen because it was not being allowed its regular flow of blood, as o
ne or more of his coronary arteries had become blocked (they are called ‘coronary’ because these vessels encircle the top of the heart like a crown). Starved of blood, his heart muscle, and its rhythm, broke down and Logan Mountstuart’s life ended.

  He was discovered towards the end of the day by Jean-Robert Stefanelli, who had come to Cinq Cypres with the gift of a basket of apples. Receiving no answer at the door, Jean-Robert went around to the rear of the house. There he saw the deckchair under the chestnut tree and beside it a half-drunk bottle of white wine in an ice bucket and an open book, cover-side up (it was the Collected. Plays of Anton Chekhov). The ice in the ice bucket had melted, and Jean-Robert realized that something was amiss. Wandering around, he soon discovered LMS, dead, face down on the grass beside a corner of the bam where there was a large dump of thistles. He noticed that LMS’s cat was not far away, curled up on a stone, watching everything intently.

  Logan Mountstuart was buried in the graveyard of the village of Sainte-Sabine. His grave can be found in the north-east corner of the graveyard. He had made provision for a gravestone: a simple black granite rectangle set in the ground, it reads:

  LOGAN GONZAGO MOUNTSTUART

  1906—1991

  Escritor

  Writer

  Ecrivain

  In his will he left the house, Cinq Cypres, to Mrs Gail Sherwin. She, her husband and their two children spend some weeks there each summer. A search of the property was carried out after his death by his cousin Lucy Sansom (who had been willed LMS’s library and manuscripts). No trace of the novel Octet was found. Jean-Robert Stefanelli remembers helping LMS build a bonfire a week before he died. ‘He burnt many papers,’ Stefanelli recalls. ‘For an old man he seemed very well, and very happy.’ There were no obituaries.

  Works by Logon Mountstuart

  The Mind’s Imaginings