by William Boyd
‘Who told you?’
I guessed. Who is it? Someone you met in Cornwall?’
‘Yes. It’s very irritating, you leading the conversation in this way.’
So I let her tell me the story, and as it unfolded, and as I began to feel more and more depressed, so I began to find her more and more beautiful. Why does life have to be so predictable? The man’s name is Bobbie (how revolting). Bobbie Jarrett. His father is Sir Lucas Jarrett, MP.
‘Sir? I suppose he’s a baronet,’ I said wearily.
‘Yes.’
‘Now I understand: “Lady Land Jarrett”. Yes, it has a certain ring. And is he handsome?’
‘I think you could say that.’
‘As handsome as Croesus?’
For a moment I thought she was going to throw the remains of her egg mayonnaise at me but, instead, she began to chuckle. I smiled back and the old affectionate mood was restored between us, but I felt sick: most girls would have walked out or sworn at me or created some kind of scene. But Land found it funny – and that is why I love her, I suppose. There – it is written. And I never thought I would write this either: I can’t wait to go back up to Oxford.
Sunday, 10 October
JESUS COLLEGE
I actually went down to the Catholic chaplaincy today to go to Mass and take confession but the mournful tolling of the bells on every side (why are there so many bloody bells in Oxford?) and the scrofulous blackness of the damp buildings (it was raining hard) drove me away. In fact I am content to remain unshriven, my sins all mine and mine alone.
I have, secretly, joined the college Golf Society and this afternoon I went out with a dull man called Parry-Jones and played nine holes at Kidlington. The rain had stopped and I beat Parry-Jones easily, three and two. He said he thought I could get into the university team. I might even get a blue – or is it a half-blue? It might be worth it, just to be able to announce the fact to Le Mayne.
Ben has invited me to Paris in January. Shelley and golf will help me to survive until then. To Balliol tonight to dine with Peter – he will be twenty-one in four months.
1926
Tuesday, 26 January
I keep thinking about Paris, wondering if, in fact, my future lies there. My visit was sublime, the weather cold and rainy and all the better for it. I slept on a sofa in Ben’s apartment on the rue de Grenelle – no more than a large room, really, with a stove in the corner for heat and a disgusting lavatory on the landing outside, shared by the other lodgers. He spends all his money on paintings, and the walls of his room are stacked four or five deep with canvases. Most of them are mediocre, he admits, but, as he says, you have to start somewhere. I’m afraid abstraction leaves me cold – there has to be something with a human connection in a painting, otherwise all we are talking about is form, pattern and tone – and it’s simply not enough for a work of art. I bought a tiny pencil sketch of a coffee pot by Marie Laurencin for 305. to prove my point. I said I wouldn’t swap all his stacked canvases for this scrap of paper. Ben was amused. ‘You wait and see,’ he said.
James Joyce is living just off the rue de Grenelle and Ben vaguely knows him, they pass often in the street. One night in a local restaurant Ben pointed him out to me. He was wearing an eye-patch and looked tired and strained – but very dapper. He has a very small head, I noticed, smaller than his wife’s, who was with him. The next day we went to Shakespeare & Co and I bought a copy of Ulysses. It begins well but I have to confess I’ve become a little bogged down and have only read about a third.
Wednesday, 27 January
I suppose I should record this. We were leaving a restaurant in Saint-Germain – Chez Loick – when Joyce came in with three friends, one of whom knew Ben. We paused to chat and I was introduced. Ben, who was speaking French, described me as ‘Mon ami, Logan, un scribouillard’ – to Joyce’s puzzlement – he clearly didn’t know the French word. ‘A what?’ he said. I stepped forward: ‘A scrivener,’ I said. ‘A scribbler?’ he replied, turning his half-blind eyes upon me. ‘Sort of,’ I said, ‘let’s say a scribivelard.’ Joyce gave me a rare smile. ‘I like that,’ he said, ‘and I warn you that I might steal it.’ The smile transformed his pale thin-lipped face – and I was suddenly conscious of his Irish accent. ‘Moight,’ he said; ‘I moight steal it.’
Thursday, 28 January
Jesus College. Bitter cold. When I went to the lavatories this morning I put on a hat, my coat and a scarf to cross the quad and then I had to break the ice in the pan. These buildings are medieval.
Peter’s debts mount alarmingly. Tess had bronchitis over Xmas, it turns out, and was unable to go to work for three weeks – and of course she wasn’t paid. He asked his father for a loan but his father has refused and is in fact demanding an audit of Peter’s personal account. I lent him another fiver (so far Tess and Peter’s love nest has cost me £25).
I went down with my clubs to Port Meadow and I hit a few dozen old golf balls out towards Osney. The water meadows are all frozen and as the balls landed I could hear ice shatter. My drive still has a tendency to draw but my long irons are incredibly reliable. I was alone – a few shivering ponies aside – and at first the nutty crack of my stroke and the distant smash and tinkle of ice as the ball landed was wonderfully exhilarating. But golf always reminds me of Father and I found myself thinking about his last few months and how the Lizard flogged me the day he died and I grew more and more depressed. So what was meant to be an afternoon’s distraction turned into a mood of sour gloom. I sit here drinking whisky wondering whether to go round to Dick, just a few hundred yards away in Wadham. He always cheers me up, Dick, but our disastrous summer has caused a certain coolness between us and he seems to spend most of his time these days with a group of Harrovians in New College.
Saturday, 30 January
Mr Scabius has come to Oxford to see the Master and the Dean of Balliol. Peter is beside himself because Tess is ill again with flu and he dare not go near the cottage. He’s asked me to go up to the village and explain what’s going on and to say that he doesn’t know when he will be able to see her again. He’s right: the college authorities will be watching him very closely after his father’s visit. I told him I’d pack up a few treats and cycle out tomorrow.
Sunday, 31 January
This is not easy to write but it must be done. My hand is shaking.
It was a slog up to Islip, cold and in the teeth of a brisk wind – and the rain came on just about a mile short of the village. Tess didn’t seem that ill at all – thought she had a cold coming, she said – and the cottage was snug and warm enough with the fire banked up and the curtains drawn. She busied about: taking my damp coat and spreading it over a chair, brewing up a fresh pot of tea, offering me biscuits from a tin. It was strange being alone with her for the first time, and having her fussing over me was pleasing, as if I were being offered a tiny glimpse of what it might be like to have a wife – someone to come home to, someone who took your coat off your back and spread it on a chair before a fire and who offered you tea. This fantasy grew more exciting – sexually exciting, I mean – as we talked on in complete honesty about Peter and his father and his father’s suspicions. Tess was very grateful to me, she said, for being so frank and so helpful – she knew all about my financial contributions to their menage. She said I was everything a ‘true friend’ should be.
She was untypically talkative, glad of the company and of the chance to unburden herself. She completely dropped that tone of polite guardedness that usually coloured her discourse with me. At one moment she leant forward to refill my teacup and her shawl ends fell apart and I found myself eyeing her figure, the fullness of her curves – for God’s sake, why am I writing like some romantic novelist? This journal is for ultimate frankness, total honesty. I stared covertly at her breasts and her haunches and tried to imagine her naked. She was a ‘nice’ girl, Tess, well spoken and demure. But she didn’t know that I had seen the other side of her with Peter, seen her unbutton his trou
sers and take his cock in her hand. There was another Tess that I was more interested in.
Then she asked me when Peter was coming up next and I said I didn’t know, perhaps in a couple of weeks, maybe longer – a month? – just to let everyone’s suspicions ease off. This took her aback and she turned away to face the fire and began to weep gently, saying, ‘A month? A whole month?’ I felt truly sorry for her. She was alone, without friends or family, she was the one who had run away, after all, had made the sacrifice, who lived with the daily pressures of maintaining the pretence of being ‘Miss Scabius’ with her ‘brother’ at Oxford.
I knelt beside her and put an arm around her – at which point her quiet weeping degenerated into great heaving sobs and she hugged me to her, burying her head in the angle of my neck and shoulder.
I’m sorry, but I have to say that for me the contact with her body was powerfully stimulating. This warm, bonny, sobbing girl in my arms – and I couldn’t help myself. I held her to me and my lips were on her neck, and before I could think or act further we were kissing with an abandon that was almost animal.
Thinking about it now (I’ve just poured myself another whisky) I feel sure that what I was expressing with Tess was all my frustrations with Land – and I think she was giving vent to all her frustrations with Peter. There we were, close, intimate, sharers of a secret… We had to have some sort of physical correlation for our respective moods. Need and opportunity – the ingredients of all betrayals.
God knows how far it might have gone but I came to my senses and gently broke it off. I stood up, and at once abandon was replaced by awkwardness and embarrassment. We were both out of breath. She pulled her shawl about her and smoothed the rumpled bodice of her dress beneath it. But for one brief second, before she turned her head away, I saw the other Tess. She looked at me, I would say, with a pure and stirring carnality.
I apologized. She apologized. I said we’d both become upset, become a bit carried away. She agreed. I said I’d better be going and pulled on my warm, damp coat.
‘Will you come again, Logan?’ she asked. ‘I mean, now that Peter’s –’
‘I can pop up from time to time,’ I said carefully. ‘But only if you’d like me to.’
‘I get back from work after six,’ she said, ‘but I always have Sundays off.’
‘Well, Sunday’s a possibility. Look I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’
‘Don’t give it a thought,’ she said. ‘It’s something just between the two of us. No one else need know.’
‘I’ll come up next Sunday, then,’ I said, my voice suddenly mysteriously dry and husky.
I cycled back to college in a dream of lust.
Of course now, as I write, the doubts have set in – and the shame. How would I know what a look of pure carnality is? And what am I doing, thinking these hot and feverish thoughts about the young woman my oldest friend Peter is in love with? For all I know everything I read as enticing might have been no more than sympathy and concern.
Tuesday, 2 February
Le Mayne was very hostile about my last essay on Pitt the Younger. ‘Beta-gamma, gamma-double-plush he said. ‘Most unimpressive. What do you mean he died of gout? You don’t die of gout and, anyway, what’s that got to do with his career? Keep this up and I can guarantee you a third. What’s going on?’
I muttered something false about family problems. He knew I was lying.
‘But you’re not making the least effort,’ Le Mayne said. ‘I can see that a mile off. You can be wrong – or wrongheaded – that’s allowable. But I refuse to tolerate anyone who won’t even try.’
I made the usual abashed promises. He both frightens and irritates me, does Le Mayne: I find myself simultaneously wanting to please him and wanting to tell him I don’t give two figs for his approval. Is this the definition of a good teacher? Reminds me of H-D.
I had tea with Peter in Balliol and gave him an edited version of my visit to Tess. His father thought he was in some gambling syndicate, he said, or was a hopeless drunk: not for a second did he suspect there was a whole other side to his life. But he would have to go very, very carefully. I volunteered to keep the lines of communication open between him and Tess. We were interrupted by a man called Powell,12 another historian, as it turned out, whom I vaguely knew. His tutor was Kenneth Bell. Peter seems to be very thick with the Etonians at Balliol – there seem to be dozens of them. I started moaning about Le Mayne and the stultifying dullness of the History course and Powell suggested I change to English Literature. He said he had a friend reading English who raves about a young don called Coghill at Exeter.13 ‘Just across the road from you,’ he said. He invited me for drinks: his friend could fill me in.
It’s not a bad idea, this possible move. I long to junk history, though I’d lose my exhibition, I suppose. Wonder if it’s too late?
Wednesday, 3 February
Postcard from Tess: ‘Dear Logan, please try to come before lunch on Sunday. I shall be busy in the afternoon. Yours sincerely, Tess Scabius.’ She doesn’t want me there as the light begins to fade. I can read the signs. So much for the ‘pure carnality’ of her look.
Drinks with Powell and his friend Henry Yorke at their lodgings in King Edward Street. Powell is affable; Yorke has that slightly clipped reserve you often find in Etonians. I can never tell whether it’s as a result of chronic shyness or majestic self-assurance. Yorke said he was writing a novel – ‘Like the rest of Oxford,’ I said – which brought a glare from him. He thought Coghill was wonderful. I think I’d better sound out Le Mayne about changing before I meet this Coghill fellow.
Thursday, 4 February
A day in the Bodleian writing my essay on Henry VIII for Le Mayne – going for alpha. I want him to understand that this move to English Literature is not because I can’t do History. I met up with Dick in the King’s Head – the old friendship re-established. He had a plaster cast on his foot and needed a walking stick to get about. He said he’d broken two toes in his foot. When I asked him how he said ‘fishing’.
Sunday, 7 February
I cycled up to Islip. I had with me presents from Peter – one hundred cigarettes, a bottle of gin, five tins of stew, a jar of plum jam and a five-pound note. Tess asked me if I could split some logs for the fire, so I spent an hour in the back garden chopping a load of greenish oak logs that a neighbour had given her. Another neighbour stuck his head over the garden wall and asked if I was Mr Scabius.
‘I’m a friend of Mr Scabius. Mr Scabius is indisposed.’
‘Sorry to hear that,’ he said, then dropping his voice, added, ‘Miss Scabius is a charming young lady. We’re all very fond of her in the lane. Terrible shock to lose your parents that way – so young too.’
I agreed, mystified, and went back to my log-splitting.
When my back and shoulders were sore and I could feel incipient blisters swelling on my palms I decided to stop.
As I was washing my hands in the little scullery-kitchen, I shouted over my shoulder, ‘I’d bring those logs in if I were you, Tess, they’ll need some drying before they burn well.’
I heard Tess’s voice in my ear, very close. ‘No need to shout, Logan. I’m right behind you.’ And I felt the soft weight of her body press against my back and her arms come round to embrace me. I turned the tap off – the noise of the running water had covered the sound of her approach. I felt her lips touch my neck. ‘Come to bed, Logan, ‘she whispered.
The first time was terrible. We slid naked into bed and took each other in our arms and I squirted all over the sheets almost immediately. Then she went and got Peter’s gin and we had a glass and smoked a cigarette. I could only marvel at her nudity. It seems to me that first time of mutual nakedness is almost a more lasting memory than the sexual act. To have Tess’s ripe warm soft body pressed against mine – her breasts, her thighs, her belly – is the sensuous imprint that I take away from our encounter. The second time was better: fast (I seemed only to be inside her for seconds and co
uldn’t hold myself back) but it was achieved; it was genuine. ‘I get so lonely,’ was all she said by way of explanation. I asked no questions at all: I had switched off the rationalizing, analytical, moralizing side of my brain. We rolled around under the blankets and the quilt as we kissed and nuzzled and I explored the tactile possibilities of her body. Then she pushed me out of bed with little ceremony: ‘Can’t spend all day in here,’ she said. We heated up a tin of stew, she buttered some thick slices of bread and we drank neat gin. The most delicious Sunday lunch of my life. I was drunk as I cycled back to Oxford, in every sense of the word, but I remember thinking: clever girl – the chopping of logs, a Sunday lunch, an early afternoon departure – no neighbour would question her unsullied reputation.
So I sit in my room and I hear the clatter of boots on my staircase and all the bells of Oxford seem to be tolling this winter evening. I say to myself: Logan Mountstuart, you are no longer a virgin. I feel the ache in my balls – my ‘eggs’, as Dick Hodge calls them – and I try to ignore the nagging, irritating voice in my ear that is saying, she is the girl your oldest friend loves, the girl he says he wants to marry… And I say in return, it won’t happen again, it was one of those insane moments between two people that will remain entirely private and well both go back to our previous selves, unaffected. Perhaps if I repeat it often enough I might end up believing it. 7 February 1926. The date is burned, carved, stamped on the story of my life.
Sunday, 14 February
To Islip. Tess again. Two times. We never mention Peter. When we talk it is about things of no consequence: the woman who runs the post office, the people at the nursery.
Last week Le Mayne described my essay as ‘a return to form’.
Sunday, 21 March
The ‘Tess Sundays’ are over: my sex-Sundays consigned to the memory-store. Peter has gone up there today. He feels enough time has elapsed. I had five Sundays with Tess… Christ, I almost feel like weeping. But I knew it would end: I don’t love Tess and she doesn’t love me. But, bizarrely, I find I resent the fact that Peter is there, in my place. Will he be eating stew and drinking gin? It had become a ritual with us: first fucking, then gin, then lunch. I always left between 2.00 and 3.00 in the afternoon. My God, Tess – with your square impassive face, your thick brown hair, your callused gardener’s hands with the bitten nails, the clumsy way you smoked your cigarettes. You liked to masturbate me, almost as if you were conducting some fascinating new experiment with my cock, always giving a little yell of pleasure when my sperm shot out – ‘Here it comes,’ you would say, ‘I know it’s coming, any moment now!’ What am I going to do without you?
