Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  Wednesday, 3 June

  Le Mayne gave a dinner last night in a private room at the Mitre for Esmé Clay7 and her husband. It was a rather grand affair and must have set Le Mayne back a fair amount. I think Le Mayne’s ambition is to have his circle seen as more worldly and sophisticated than Bowra’s or Urquhart’s, that its reach extends beyond Oxford and academe and need not be composed either of bitchy homosexuals or teetotal intellectuals. Other friends of his had driven down from London and I suppose I should feel flattered to have been asked. Esmé Clay is in rehearsals for Antony and Cleopatra at the Palace (‘God, how I detest that play,’ Dick said when I told him about the invitation).

  Land Fothergill was there too – wearing sheer black, flashing with diamanté and some sort of little feathered headdress in her hair. She looked entirely different with her make-up on. She introduced me to Esmé Clay herself (she’s a friend of the family) and I had a longish chat with her. I was trembling like a child, I was so excited to be talking to this beautiful and famous actress – it was despicable. I wore my new dinner jacket and the white double-breasted waistcoat and felt both very smart and very hot. I hardly noticed what we ate – 1 couldn’t take my eyes off Land – who was sitting beside Le Mayne, I noticed darkly.

  Later over coffee I asked her if she wanted to come on with me to Les Invalides for cocktails or champagne but she reminded me she was obliged to be back in college.

  ‘We girls mustn’t be corrupted by Oxford – unlike you boys,’ she said, looking at me directly. ‘Nothing untoward is ever going to happen to us in Oxford.’ She plumed her cigarette smoke at the ceiling. ‘It’s all right for you,’ she went on, ‘but they watch us like hawks.’ I said something feeble like, what a shame, or how absurd. Then she said, ‘So why don’t you come and see me in London?’ She gave me her parents’ address in Hampstead.

  She’s a strange young woman, Land, but I feel a powerful sexual urge towards her – and I think she knows it.

  Thursday, 4 June

  My life of Shelley goes well – over a hundred pages written now – but I have rather been neglecting my history. Le Mayne said my last essay was inadequate and sub-average and reminded me that the college had awarded me an exhibition for a purpose, not as a gift of money. I think I’ll call my book The Mind’s Imaginings.8 Quennell told me he’d abandoned his life of Blake.

  Mother writes to say that she’s going to New York – with Mr Prendergast – to ‘consolidate her US holdings’, whatever that may mean.

  I slept…

  Within dim bowers of green and purple moss,

  Our young Ione’s soft and milky arms

  Locked then, as now, behind my dark, moist hair…

  [Shelley, Prometheus Unbound]

  I can only think of Land, these lines reverberating in my head. ‘Soft and milky arms… ‘Madness of sexual longing, dark fantasies about her naked body. All thoughts of cousin Lucy just ancient history now.

  Friday, 19 June

  Bacchanalian night at Les Invalides. Dick and I had dined at the Spread Eagle in Thame – an end-of-term celebration and farewell. On the way back we stopped the taxi on the Iffley Road and went into Les Invalides for a nightcap. As I signed Dick in, I could hear a tremendous row of piano music and laughter and shouting. I asked Mrs Anderson what was going on. She was completely soused, the strap of her dress slipping off her shoulders, showing some terrible undergarment.

  ‘Some young gentlemen dressed as ladies,’ she said.

  In fact there were only two ‘ladies’ we saw as we went up and I recognized one of them as Udo von Schiller, a German friend of Cassell. Cassell was there too, dressed as a Master of Foxhounds, and explained that they’d been at a fancy-dress ball at a place near Burford but had been thrown out for decadence by their host’s father. He asked Dick and me to join their party and for some reason we did. Dick took over the piano playing (he’s remarkably good), more drink was ordered and things went from bad to worse.

  Udo – who looked remarkably pretty in his wig and cocktail dress, I have to say – led me into the library, where there was a game of strip-poker underway. I didn’t linger. There was a naked man walking around with an erect cock replenishing drinks. As I turned to go back to the sing-song round the piano a small blond man, completely drunk, grabbed my arm and said, ‘Give me a kiss: you remind me of a friend of mine who’s gone away.’ So I kissed him and he stuck his tongue in my mouth, like Lucy had, and grabbed my tool. I pushed him away quite hard and he banged up against the panelling, looking a bit stunned and sickly. ‘You’ve had your kiss,’ I said. ‘And that’s your lot.’ Udo had witnessed all this and started to applaud as I left.

  [NOTE IN RETROSPECT. 1966. More and more I’m convinced that this blond young man was in fact Evelyn Waugh.9]

  Tuesday, 21 July

  Up to Hampstead today to meet Land and her family. I feel a little apprehensive, never having met a famous painter before (her father is Vernon Fothergill RA, celebrated for his vivid English landscapes painted in the style of Les Fauves). I’m also worried about what to wear. Mother suggested my ‘beautiful tweed’, but it’s too hot for tweeds. I wish I had a cotton drill suit – but I can’t possibly go out and buy one now. Could I send Baker out to Harrods or the Army & Navy and see what he could pick up? Ridiculous. I bought so many clothes last year surely I can find something suitable.

  Later. As it turned out I wore a blazer with some fawn bags, a striped shirt and a bow tie (Abbey First XV). Land opened the door and laughed: she said I looked like a travelling salesman on his day off. Very comical, I said, managing a sardonic chuckle, but I did feel overdressed. She was wearing a smock-blouse thing and knickerbockers. Her feet were bare. She led me through the house to the rear terrace with a big fig tree that overlooked sloping lawns, the heath and, beyond, the vast and blurry city, hazed by the noon light. A table was set under the fig and the whole scene looked entrancing. Three or four dogs of indeterminate breed lolled about.

  Her father was in his studio with a friend, she said, as she poured me a cider cup. Her mother and her brother, Hugh, would be joining us, and possibly some others. ‘It’s always open house at luncheon here,’ she said, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. The house was large and rambling, not very old, Arts and Crafts, I would say, with faux Tudor affectations – tall spiralled brick chimneys, leaded lights, and inside exposed beams and a minstrel’s gallery in the big drawing room. The place was full of pictures and odd pieces of well-worn furniture. Very lived-in. I loved it, of course. The antithesis of Sumner Place.

  Hugh Fothergill, brother, arrived wearing a brilliant scarlet shirt and no tie. He’s rangy, thin, with wild hair and a jutting jaw. He’s just finished medical school so must be twenty-five or twenty-six. Within minutes of our being introduced he told me he was a socialist. Mrs Fothergill (‘Call me Ursula’) was also tall – and faintly aloof, as if lost in her thoughts, only giving the present company 75 per cent of her attention. Then old Vernon appeared – stout and florid – looking more like a publican than a painter. With him was the friend called Henry Lamb,10 I think, a fellow artist. At lunch Lamb asked me if I knew Lady Ottoline Morrell and whether I’d been out to Garsington.11 Land said, ‘I don’t think Logan would approve of Garsington.’ I couldn’t think why she made this judgement and remained silent. Lamb looked at me a bit askance after that, as if I were some sort of stuffed-shirt. She can be infuriating, Land. We ate cold roast beef, horseradish, salads, with a choice of wine or beer. To show how unstuffed-shirt I was, I drank beer.

  After lunch Land and I took two of the dogs and went for a walk on the heath. We sat on the grass in the shade of a tree and smoked a cigarette. At one stage she lay back and spread her arms and I think she was expecting me to kiss her – but somehow I had lost my nerve. The day had proved too overwhelming; I was too disconcerted by her family.

  So I said, ‘Why wouldn’t I like Garsington? I should think I’d love it.’

  ‘Oh no you wouldn�
��t. Whatever else you may be, Logan, you’re not a snob.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not a snob?’

  She looked at me in her familiar fixed way. ‘I can tell. I abominate snobbery. I would never have asked you to lunch if I’d suspected for one second.’

  ‘I think I might be an intellectual snob,’ I said.

  ‘Well, that’s forgivable. That’s about brains, not class. It’s social snobbery that corrupts this country. That’s what Hugh says, anyway.’

  We wandered back home for tea. We agreed we’d go to the cinema together. Perhaps I’ll kiss her there, now I think about it, in the dark of the theatre, when I won’t be able to see that look in her eyes.

  Friday, 24 July

  Mr Prendergast to dinner. I’m growing to like him – a lean, sober, ruminative man. He is incredibly polite to me, weighing every remark I make as if it were some profound philosophical aphorism. ‘Yes, it most definitely is unseasonably cool, Logan’, ‘Indeed, why do the English alone serve mint sauce with lamb?’ It is impossible to take offence, but for the life of me I cannot understand what he sees in Mother and vice versa.

  A surprise telegraph and then a phone call from Roderick Poole. We are to lunch next week. It must be ten years since I last saw him – in Montevideo, my lost home, my native land. And then a postcard from Land in Cornwall. What’s she doing there? Why didn’t she tell me? What about our cinema-going? And I’ll be off to Spain with Dick before she gets back. How tiresome.

  Wednesday, 29 July

  Roderick has become sleek. He’s plumper, his hair is thinning but he still sees the world filtered through his lazy air of cynicism. We went to the Étoile in Charlotte Street – very nice too. He works as an editor for a publishing firm called Sprymont & Drew, with school textbooks and children’s books as his special responsibility. ‘The egomania of the children’s book writer has to be experienced to be believed,’ he said.

  He had a good look at me, making me turn around on the pavement outside the restaurant before we went in. ‘Well, you’ve certainly improved,’ he said, ‘and very well turned out, to boot.’

  We started with oysters. ‘How’s your book going?’ he asked.

  ‘What book?’

  ‘You must be writing a book, surely?’

  ‘I am, as it happens. How’d you guess?’

  ‘Because you told me when you were ten you wanted to be a writer.’

  ‘Did I?’

  This knowledge made me obscurely pleased: as if something about my destiny had been confirmed. Or am I just being a young sentimental fool? Roderick was on good form. He said I had to submit The Mind’s Imaginings to Sprymont & Drew or he’d never speak to me again.

  Monday, 3 August

  The alloyed bliss of Paris in August: tourists and heat on the boulevards but the restaurant Ben and I dined in was virtually empty. Afterwards we walked along the quais of the Seine in a sultry, embracing night-warmth. Ben already seems about ten years older than I, but he appeared genuinely keen to hear about Oxford and the Peter/Tess imbroglio.

  He is working for a small but rather grand gallery, Auguste Dard, whose line is very modern: Gris, Léger, Pinsent, Brancusi, Dax etc. – and of course any Picasso or Braque they can lay their hands on. He thought I was mad to go to Spain in August and was unconvinced by the argument (Dick’s, admittedly) that foreign countries could only be fully known and experienced under the extremes of their weather conditions – the blazing heat of summer or the iron grip of winter.

  Tuesday, 4 August

  On the train from Paris to Biarritz. Before I left, Ben insisted that I buy a small unframed oil sketch by Derain. He advanced the £7 required and said he would have it packed and sent to Sumner Place (I telegraphed Mother and asked her to refund Ben the money). I said I couldn’t really afford it, what with all my debts in Oxford, but he insisted. Trust me, was all he kept saying, you’ll never regret it. This is our big chance, he said, to be here now in Paris with these artists and even modest access to money. Something about the way he spoke convinced me that Ben was going to make his fortune. I noticed on his business card he calls himself ‘Benedict’ Leeping – Benjamin no more, then. When he asked why I was so impoverished I explained that it was deliberate. I was travelling with only £10 – another of Dick’s strictures. Too much money, Dick feels, cuts you off from the country you are visiting. A little hardship, the need to economize, even a little suffering, brings you closer to it and its people’s soul. ‘I hope you’re not in thrall to this Dick Hodge,’ Ben said. No fear of that, I reassured him. Dick has been with his family at Ostend – I wonder why he wanted us to meet in Biarritz?

  Wednesday, 5 August

  Biarritz. Dick arrives later tonight. In the meantime I stroll around this delightful station balnéaire buying a few last-minute provisions. We are travelling very light – one rucksack each, which contains reading matter, a large bottle of eau de Cologne (we will not have much chance to bathe, Dick said, and we don’t want to smell like tinkers), brilliantine for our hair (for the same reason), two extra shirts, a couple of ties, a pair of ordinary shoes, extra socks and underwear, and, carefully folded, the linen trousers that will match the linen jackets that we will wear. I have a Panama hat against the sun, Dick prefers a beret. By day we travel in shorts and walking shoes but can transform ourselves into relatively well-dressed young gentlemen in the evenings.

  The plan is to walk through the Pyrenees through one of the passes and either walk or bus on to Segovia. From there we will take the train to Madrid and then on south, stopping off where we want, to the Mediterranean. I bought a wineskin and some tough fatty sausage that, I’m assured, will keep for days. From the window of our hotel, through a gap in the roofscape, I can see the creamy breakers rolling in on to the grande plage. This is the liberation of travel – the sense of cleansing, of purification, of sloughing off. Oxford is a distant memory, London almost forgotten. And Land – who is this Land Fothergill mouldering somewhere in banal Cornwall?

  Thursday, 13 August

  I’m exhausted, a husk. I must have lost half a stone and am burnt to teak by the sun. Segovia – Madrid – Seville – now Algeciras. I shall have to reflect on this trip in tranquillity and solitude. Christ knows where Dick is.

  It all started happily. I met him at the station in Biarritz, we dined at a bistro by the vieux port, then wandered round the casino, not daring to gamble. Very early the next morning we caught a bus up into the foothills of the Pyrenees and commenced our walk through the pass. At midday we paused to eat our bread and cheese and were chatting about this and that, exhilarated to be up in the mountains, and I said, apropos of nothing in particular – no, actually, we were talking about Johnson’s Lives of the Poets (which Dick had brought with him) – and I said, ‘Did you know Dr Johnson’s cat was called “Hodge”?’

  He looked at me most oddly. ‘What’re you trying to say? Go on, spit it out.’

  I laughed. ‘Just idle conversation, for heaven’s sake.’

  He looked around, then swatted a fly on his forearm and held it out for me to see.

  ‘And that fly’s name is Logan.’

  ‘Grow up,’ I said.

  ‘If I look like a cat then you look like a squashed fly.’

  ‘I didn’t say you looked like a cat, you pathetic child.’

  ‘Right!’ he bellowed. Standing up. He was completely enraged. ‘See you in Avignon on the 28th.’

  And with that he strode off up the hill. I waited for half an hour, convinced he’d come to his senses, but there was no sign of him, he seemed well and truly gone. There was no question of my setting off after him – he was the one who knew the route – so I retraced my steps and caught a bus back to Biarritz.

  Since then I’ve travelled by train – third class, Dick would approve – following the vague route we had planned across Spain to the south. I’ve looked around me, visited churches and mosques, palaces and art galleries, always half expecting to see him, his big grinning face un
der its beret, but no sign. And I’ve travelled more as an automaton than a curious tourist – this is not the spirit in which this journey was meant to take place and I feel the whole experience is spoiled somehow. But I will be in Avignon on the 28th, at the Hotel de Londres, come what may. Tomorrow I leave for Barcelona and then on to Perpignan, Narbonne, Aries and finally Avignon. I find my thoughts focusing pleasurably on France. Spain was Dick’s idea. Γ11 come back here again, when I wish it, when it suits me. Ben was right – 1 was too much in thrall to Dick’s eccentric demands and itinerary. From now on I travel only at my own instigation.

  Friday, 28 August

  Avignon. I lunched in the square opposite the Palais des Papes, then wandered down a little canal to the hotel. And there was Dick, signing in at the reception desk. He looked like he’d been in an accident: his face was livid red, all blisters and peeling skin. He greeted me with a firm handshake and a wide smile and made no reference to our row. He told me that three days ago, one afternoon, he’d dozed off on a beach in what he thought was a deep patch of shade. And of course he slept longer than he had planned, the sun moved round and slowly the shade was dragged off him. His face and knees took the brunt but, he said, the pain was beginning to subside. We head for home tomorrow. I forgive him his childish outburst – he has been punished enough.

  Tuesday, 8 September

  SUMNER PLACE

  I kissed Land today in a cinema (the film was called The Merry-Go-Round). Our lips touched for a second before she immediately pushed me away and hissed, ‘Never do that again!’ At Kettners we ate our first course in almost total silence. Eventually, I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I like you and I thought you liked me.’

  ‘I did,’ she said, I do. But…’

  There’s somebody else.’ I felt suddenly very mature, as if we were in a Noel Coward play.