by William Boyd
“Faye, I—”
She slapped my face. Once, very hard, jerking my head round.
“Foolish … stupid …” she said in a clenched trembling voice, and walked away.
I tasted the vomit in my throat. Game pie, cider cup. I actually retched once or twice. I threw away the towel and dressed, hauling my clothes over my damp body. I tried desperately to draw up from my numb shocked brain something that would stand as a plausible explanation. I walked over, toweling my hair to hide my face. The cheek she had slapped felt pulsing and scorched. I was shivering, but not from the cold.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I … I just wasn’t thinking. It was a terrible mistake. You see, at school we … It just fell from my fingers. I was cold. It was a mistake, Aunt Faye. Honest, I swear.”
She would not look up from her book.
“Very well. Let us never talk about it again, John. It’s forgotten. Nothing.”
But it was not forgotten. How could it be? Thank God for the girls. They allowed us a formal passage of communication; we could busy ourselves with them and their demands. Faye very quickly seemed as normal as ever, and so did I, I suppose, in an attempt to sustain the credibility of the excuse. But the incident stood between us like a wall. What was worse, she contrived never to be alone with me again. I never had the opportunity to elaborate on that first feeble explanation. I could not apologize, could not explain.
Why did you do it? I hear you ask. What in heaven’s name did you think would happen? I know, I know. It makes no sense. I put the ghastly blunder down to that dangerous flaw in my nature and my naïveté. All I wanted, desperately, was to make love to her and my time was running out. But I cannot condemn myself utterly. I may have been a fool, but at least I was an honest one. I think I can safely say that this unhappy combination has held true for the rest of my life.
I think now I would have survived the shame and indignity if I had had enough time to reimpose the original basis of my relationship with her. After all, I was flesh and blood, her dead sister’s son, and she was genuinely fond of me. I am sure that if only for her own peace of mind she would have come to accept my explanation uncritically. People do make mistakes. And adolescents are notoriously and spontaneously fallible when it comes to affairs of the heart. Perhaps—even—she might have allowed herself a quiet smile of pleasure, of female pride, at her nephew’s evident infatuation. Perhaps she might even—in a private moment—have tried to recall the incident itself. My muscled, slim, glossy-haired body, dark glistening loins, the pale pendulous dripping genitals … But I needed time. I needed days at least to engineer such a rapprochement, but that was exactly what I did not have. Donald Verulam was coming.
* * *
That evening Peter Hobhouse talked to me again about enlisting (Peter was a genuine bore of the first water—a good-natured one, granted, but a bore for all that, with, astonishingly for a nineteen-year-old, all the cataleptic powers of a whiskered clubman). I must confess my enthusiasm for the idea was now firmly on the wane. I was instead formulating vague notions about returning to Edinburgh. What with my embarrassment vis-à-vis Faye, the revelations about Donald Verulam and his impending arrival, Charlbury suddenly seemed a less welcome haven. I had an unfamiliar desire to get back home—home to Oonagh. But I half-listened to what Peter had to say. He seemed to have a dogged urge to get out to France—it was not so much fervent as dutiful; and besides, all his friends were going too and it would be a shame to miss out. He said that, really, one had to have a commission, but that meant going to the Officer Training Corps if you were chosen. What he and his companions had done was to volunteer as private soldiers in one of the public school battalions. Basic training was shorter; you reached France more quickly and were almost guaranteed promotion to subaltern within months. The casualty rates being what they were, the public school battalions were constantly being drawn on to provide new officers for other regiments. His own case was typical. He had been promoted after two weeks and was now off to join the Loyal North Lancashire Regiment as a second lieutenant.
I asked some polite questions. Where should one go to enlist? Marlborough, he said, or Windsor. Ask for the 13th (PS) Service Battalion of the South Oxfordshire Light Infantry, and mention Colonel O’Dell. He had been Peter’s headmaster. Fine, I said, perhaps next year. In truth I had little desire to go to war. In 1914 it had seemed much more attractive; I thought it might be “fun” or “exciting,” but I was no zealot. Several senior boys I had known vaguely at the Academy had been killed; Minto’s melancholy skepticism too had got through to me and moreover nothing or no one in my upbringing had fostered an active sense of patriotism or selfless duty. To be honest, I wanted to live for myself, not die for my country. If I could go to war and subject myself to powerful new experiences and survive, unmaimed, then I was all for it. But I had no desire to risk my neck or any other part of my anatomy.
After dinner Faye left Peter and me with the port. Peter offered me a cigar, which I accepted. We puffed away, Peter’s weak eyes watering rather, and talked in a rather self-consciously manly fashion. Peter told a bad joke about an English curate who went to Paris and tried to shit standing up in a pissoir.
“I’m thinking about growing a moustache,” Peter said. “What do you think?”
“Sounds like rather a good idea.”
“Makes you look years older, you know. You should grow one, for the recruiting officer. How old are you, anyway?”
“Seventeen.… I was thinking of waiting till next year.”
“Wouldn’t wait too long. Might miss out.”
“Good point.”
“Say you’re nineteen. With a moustache you should have no trouble.”
He wittered on. Suddenly I wished I had grown a moustache at school. Imagine if I had arrived at Faye’s door mustachioed! What an impression of maturity that would have conveyed … I resolved to start growing one the next day.
Donald Verulam arrived before luncheon. He wore a tweed suit. Somehow, I had expected to see him in uniform. When I asked what he did at the War Office, he said he was just a “glorified civil servant.” He seemed glad to see me, and gently reprimanded me for running away from school. He advised me to go back home and promised to intercede with my father on my behalf. Instinctively, I was pleased to see him, but my own edginess, and the new information that my mother’s letters seemed to contain, made me rather cool at first. I think he sensed this and was puzzled. Several times he asked me if I was all right. I reassured him.
I was in turmoil. Mettlesome theories and hypotheses kept thrusting themselves on me. I looked closely at his behavior with Faye, but I saw no evidence for anything more passionate than a friendship. He spent most of Saturday afternoon in town with the Hobhouse family solicitor, sorting out Vincent Hobhouse’s affairs. That evening there was a small dinner party with two dull couples, one of which brought a tall myopic daughter—Nellie or Flossie—who, one sensed, was rather keen on Peter. To my relief, Faye was as good as her word. All aftereffects of the picnic incident seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps she believed it really had been a mistake. She reverted to being nice Aunt Faye. So I turned my attention to the next relationship that concerned me. What was I to do about Donald Verulam?
Sunday. Church. At one point during an incomprehensible sermon (the vicar had a speech defect: his mouth sounded as if it were full of water—all I could hear was lapping and slurping, as of a subterranean stream) I turned my head and found Donald looking at me. He rolled his eyes, and I grinned back. It was like the old days at Barnton or Drumlarish. After luncheon (soup, fish, game, joint, sweet, savory—war or no war, one ate well chez Hobhouse) he asked me if I felt like going for a walk. I agreed.
We each took a stick from the umbrella stand in the hall and set out briskly along the Oxford road. We cut off it, climbed over a stile and walked along the edge of a field of green corn that led up to a small beech wood that crowned a hill. There we could see the modest valleys and ridges of Oxfordshi
re unfolding sedately to the horizon. It was a sullen coldish afternoon, the cloudy sky mouse-gray with only hints of yellow. We walked on briskly for a couple of miles. Normally on a jaunt like this we would each have had a camera; today, being without them, we amused ourselves by pointing out scenes we would have taken. I felt all my reservations and suspicions of Donald slip away, and as we walked on, talking occasionally, I sensed a growing in me a sort of love that I could only describe as filial. A mixture of strong affection, respect and a happy subordination. The love that exists between a father and son is peculiar, possessing a clear hierarchical structure, the son always, as it were, looking up. And the father, for his part, then voluntarily elevating his son to a position of equality. I never felt this with Innes Todd. But that day as we strode the hills above the Windrush Valley, I sensed unspoken in the air around us that fine, reciprocal interplay of feeling. Donald felt it too, I know, felt the intimacy between us that made him want to talk to me about Faye. We stopped at a gate and looked at the view.
“I’m very fond of your aunt, you know, Johnny.”
“Yes. Well … I could sort of see that.”
“She’s a lovely person. Very like your mother.”
“Yes.” Now I could hardly speak.
He looked round at me and smiled.
“I’m going to ask her to marry me. What d’you think?”
I felt my tear ducts sting. I felt drowned in gratitude.
“I couldn’t be happier.” I paused. “Father.”
“What’s that?”
“Father.”
“Sorry?”
“Father.… You’re my father.”
Edgy laugh. “What do you mean?”
My eyes fogged with tears.
“I know about you and my mother,” I said slowly. “I know. All about the love affair.”
“Hang on a second, Johnny old chap. You’ve lost me.”
“Everything. I read her letters to Faye. I know that you and she …” I began to grow a little desperate. “You don’t know this, but she became pregnant, after that afternoon in the Trossachs, 1898.… That was me. She never told you. But it’s all there in the letter to Faye. You’re my real father.”
I could not hold it in. I bawled. I blubbed and bellowed in my happiness.
He grabbed my arms and shook me silent.
“John! John! What’re you saying? Where did you get this nonsense from?”
My head cleared. Miraculously. My tear-washed eyes dried. I wiped the snot from my nose and lips. I felt a nervous cold breeze: it seemed to blow only on my smarting eyeballs.
“I read it in the letter,” I repeated. “To Faye. You had a love affair with my mother.…”
Donald was twisting his body to and fro on the spot as if demented. He pressed his knuckles into his temples.
“John, listen. I did not. I never did.” He spoke calmly. “Your mother was the best friend I ever had, but I never had a love affair with her. Believe me, for God’s sake.” He paused. “It was Faye I loved. I always have. When she married Vincent Hobhouse I ran away to Edinburgh. If I hadn’t had your mother’s friendship and support, I know I would have killed myself.”
He spoke on, urgently, eloquently, explaining everything, all my blind idiotic misconceptions. I felt as though something had spilled inside me, like black ink. A gloom filled me as I looked at his kind, excellent face. I owed nothing to that noble nature. My fate was settled, all hope of escape denied me. I was indeed the son of Innes McNeil Todd.
VILLA LUXE, May 16, 1972
Good God, my heart goes out to my younger self. There’s an almost tragic dignity about my sheer guts and audacity. Imagine it: if you want to attract somebody of the opposite sex, expose your equipment. But I’m sure I never planned such a course of action precisely; I intended to do something that day, as or how the circumstances indicated. Perhaps I’d have touched her, or if she had joined in the tag, say, I might have caught her and held her against me for a moment. Anything to show her.… But at the time I chose swimming. It was not to be.
What a fellow I was then! I must have been crazy, the things I did. Never a pause for thought. A creature of pure impulse and instinct—like an animal. Nothing seemed impossible or ill advised. Sometimes I look back on the rawness of my youthful character with almost jealousy.
I can tell you now that those last days in Charlbury almost finished me off. I seriously contemplated suicide for a while. You may say I was being unduly sensitive, but to experience first such rejection and then to learn the truth about Donald combined radically to undermine my confidence. People like me with an excess of self-esteem suffer proportionally once it is threatened. The fiction that I had so fancifully allowed myself to construct and cherish had been exposed as exactly that, and the hard truths about myself I had to fall back on were not comforting.
Everything changed for me that weekend when my delusions were exploded. A deep unhappiness settled on me. I felt an alien in that house, felt like a monoglot foreigner in that countryside. Another world, another identity waited for me, to which I was condemned to belong forever. But my fantasies about Faye, and about Donald Verulam and my mother, only indicated how urgently I had longed to escape from them. I couldn’t go home to our dark empty flat and my dour father, at least not in my current state of mind. I was reduced to a Cartesian proposition: I couldn’t be sure of anything and so chose to rely entirely on myself.
Growth and decay. Something had decayed in me and I had to grow again. Hamish said later that I should have applied the calculus to my problems. He was only half-joking. “The calculus,” he said, “is the study of continual change.” But I wasn’t quite ready for his theories in those days. The beautiful mysteries of mathematics and physics—their profound secrets—indicated no particular direction I should follow at that time. Hamish, I knew, sensed he was heading towards some illumination, but I was still a novitiate, untutored. I could feel that something was there, instinctively; I could sense the scope and potential, acknowledge the power of numbers, but as yet was blind to their truths. The next stage of my life was to educate me better to perceive them.
Had I thought about it, I might have rebuked Hamish thus: the calculus deals with growth and decay, but it follows their elegant parabolic curves, exponentially rising or falling. It cannot deal with discontinuity, the sudden random change, which is the real currency of our lives. In due time Hamish supplied me with an answer to that. As for myself, I was about to experience discontinuity in all its strict brutal force.
My villa is quite secluded, backed into the hill that separates me from the small nearby village. If I take a few paces up this hill and advance cautiously onto a large rock ledge that overhangs the sea, I can get a good oblique view down onto my neighbor’s house. He has a large terrace with a swimming pool (filled).
The owner is a German—Herr Günther. The villa had been empty for years. Then eighteen months ago he bought it and built a swimming pool. He has a sizable grown-up family that visits him for several weeks during the summer. Two unmarried daughters, two married sons, daughters-in-law, boyfriends and four or five grandchildren.
From my rock ledge I can see them all quite clearly as they disport themselves around the pool—loud, fit young people. The girls are attractive (the very word “girl” is attractive to me these days) but, being German, they stir old uneasy memories. I managed to avoid them almost entirely last summer. They are curious about me. They have tried to talk to me when we met in the village, but I find the past seems to crowd round, jostling at our backs, like a hostile crowd or a pack of pye-dogs.… It’s all a bit of a strain. I mutter abrupt pleasantries and leave.
Around this villa there are many lizards. They are slim snakelike creatures, a dun olive-green with a chalkstripe. Some months ago, when my swimming pool had water in it, one of these lizards—a small one, four inches long—fell into the deep end. I saw it on the bottom and fished it out with the long-handled net I use for cleaning leaves and insects from th
e surface. To my surprise it was still alive, its mouth making tiny gaping movements. I put it on the pool surround and positioned a large leaf over it to provide some shade. It recovered fully in about half an hour and scurried off into the rocks.
In the lizard world, in the saurian scheme of things, that rescue and survival must have seemed like divine intervention of the most miraculous and inexplicable sort. Such fantastical things happen in our world too, I know. But at that stage of my life, in May 1916, I felt like that lizard. I had fallen in and was sinking to the bottom. I had some time to wait until my deliverance.
It’s still insufferably hot. Yesterday Herr Günther arrived with his family. I think I’ll take my binoculars and go and watch them turning their strong white bodies brown.
3
“L’homme de l’extrême gauche”
I was the first man on the Western Front. Literally. By the time I arrived in France—August 1916—the line of trenches stretched from the English Channel to the Swiss border. The Western Front began at Nieuport-Bains in Belgium on the coast. There was the sea, the beach with its minefield and wire, and then in the dunes the trench line started.
I was standing leaning against the revetted end of the Allied line, looking east towards the Germans. On my left was the beach and the sea, and on my right a trench system six hundred miles long. I was at the very tip of an attenuated snake uncoiled limply across Europe. It provoked a curious sensation in me standing there, almost physical in its effects. The left side of my body, for example, felt unusually light—airy and untethered. But my right side felt burdened by the immense weight of this chain I started. All the armies of Belgium, France and Britain spread like the tail of a comet from my right side. The Belgians called this position l’homme de l’extrême gauche. It was more than mere description: it was like participating in a metaphor. I often found myself unconsciously massaging my right shoulder. And, strangely, my left side always felt cold, as if I stood in a strong draft blowing off the sea.