Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  1927

  Monday, 7 February

  I’m beginning to wonder if I’m ill. I find it almost impossible to concentrate. I can manage one day of sustained work – which is when I produce my weekly essay for Le Mayne. I cut all lectures and spend most of my time at the cinema. It’s as if it’s a drug – am I having some kind of nervous collapse? The rot set in at the end of last year and I wonder if I have some sort of lassitude disease. I feel not so much fatigued – I don’t fall asleep in the cinema – as deeply unenthusiastic and apathetic. Yet I look well and my appetite is healthy. Thanks to Ash’s example I’ve developed a taste for beer and I can often be found, most evenings, in the Victoria Arms supping ale. I prefer the frowsty anonymity of the public house to the seedy cauldron of Les Invalides and have let my membership there lapse.

  Ash thinks it’s an intellectual malaise: I should never have read History, he says. True learning only occurs when you love the subject you are studying and then the acquiring of knowledge is effortless because it is also a pleasure. He talks a lot of sense, does Preston Ash. Le Mayne suspects nothing: the competent alpha standard essays roll off the production-line, but since I told him I wasn’t interested in All Souls I suspect he’s rather given up on me. Ash thinks my desire to please Le Mayne is also symptomatic. He’s probably right: why should I care about Le Mayne and his good opinion? To be honest, it’s because I have always rather feared Le Mayne.

  Friday, 4 March

  I calculated that this last week I’ve been to the cinema twenty-two times. I’ve seen Diana de Vere in Fatal Autumn three times – she has supplanted Laurette Taylor in my Pantheon. Of all the Oxford cinemas I like the Electra best but this week I cycled up to the New in Headington. Ash told me buses will drop you at the door so I can add it into my circuit. On Wednesday I sat through two shows of Fatal Autumn at the Electra, cycled up to the New to see It’s All Over and was back in time to catch Secrets at the Super.

  Tuesday, 8 March

  I was waiting in the queue after lunch at the George Street Cinema when I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was Tess –I almost keeled over in shock. She looked smart in a black suit and a hat. She said she was a buyer for the nursery now and travelled all over southern England. She held out her hands. ‘No dirt under my nails,’ she said, ‘look.’ I did, her nails were manicured and polished. Despite the change I felt exactly the same about her – I wanted to be in bed in Islip, drinking gin and fucking. I asked her, trying to seem calm, if she wanted to come for a coffee but she said she had to get back to Waterperry.

  ‘Why don’t you come and see us, Logan?’ she said. ‘Peter doesn’t know what happened – he’ll never know. There’s no reason we can’t see each other.’

  ‘I couldn’t see you,’ I said. ‘It would drive me mad, being there, not being able to touch you, to hold you.’

  My words made tears brim in her eyes. Clearly I’ve seen Fatal Autumn far too many times. So we said goodbye and I rejoined the queue. Throughout the film I felt a pure ache of longing for her, like an agonizing stitch in my side.

  Wednesday, 27 April

  Preston has a motor in a garage at Osney Meade – he never ceases to surprise me. We drove out to Buckingham and played eighteen holes. Preston is an ambitious and reckless golfer: every brilliant stroke exacts a price of three or four duff ones. I took our five bob bet off him easily.

  It was a fresh, breezy day, the sycamores and chestnuts almost fully out, the sense of greenness everywhere almost obscenely lush. Amidst all this abundance and new growth I was struck by a sense of waste, a profound feeling that I’d squandered my time at Oxford in some fundamental way. When I think of the final year at Abbey and how we – how I – dreamed of coming here… We stopped at a pub in Wendlebury and drank beer and ate pies. I saw a signpost to Islip and almost broke down. Preston, by contrast, and thanks to my company, is enjoying Oxford for the first time in three years.

  Friday, 10 June

  Well, it’s done. Exams are over, there’s no going back. I think I acquitted myself well: I’m pleased with most of the papers – no shocking surprises, no panic attacks, all questions were answered. English Political History to 1485 – particularly good – as was Charters and Early Constitutional. Economic History – fair. French Translation – surprisingly easy, I thought. Later Constitutional – very good. Political Science was the last exam this morning – I wrote good, concise, fact-heavy answers.

  I walked out of Schools with – if not a spring in my step – a feeling of joyful relief. Perhaps I should have worked harder these last months but I felt all the old confidence in my natural ability return after the first couple of papers. Le Mayne asked me how I thought everything had gone and I said, ‘As well as could be expected.’ He just smiled and said, ‘And we both expect great things.’ He shook my hand. I intend to get riotously drunk tonight.

  1Peter Quennell (1906-88), writer and historian.

  2Stevens, LMS’s college servant, known as his ‘scout’.

  3A drinking and dining club, formerly a debating society founded in 1914.

  4Richard Hodge, a new Oxford friend of LMS.

  5Maurice Bowra (1898-1971), scholar and critic. His hospitality at Wadham College (where he was later warden) was legendary.

  6Alfred Duggan, stepson of Lord Curzon, a contemporary at Balliol 1923-6, notorious for driving up to London most nights during term time to ‘have a woman’.

  7Esmé Clay (1898-1947), actress. Drowned in a boating accident offMinehead, Dorset. Her days of greatest fame were the 1920s.

  8From Shelley’s poem ‘Mont Blanc’: ‘And what were thou, and earth and stars and sea, If to the human mind’s imaginings/Silence and solitude were vacancy?’

  9This seems unlikely. Waugh’s diaries do not cover the exact date in question but he was occasionally in Oxford during this year.

  10Henry Lamb (1883-1960), artist.

  11Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), hostess and patron of the arts. Her country house was at Garsington, a village not far from Oxford, where she entertained writers and artists.

  12Anthony Powell (1905-2000), novelist. His friend was Henry Yorke, better known as the novelist Henry Green (1905-1973).

  13Nevill Coghill (1899-1980), influential young English don at Exeter College. Amongst his other proteges was W. H. Auden.

  14Siegfried Clay (1895-1946). Painter. Briefly married to the actress Pamela Lawrence. Died in Tangier after a short illness.

  15See The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Volume III:1925–30.

  The First London Journal

  Logan Mountstuart went down from Oxford University with a third-class degree in History. He was unable to explain how he had performed so badly, and how misconceived his confidence in the result had been. He consoled himself by saying that at least he would have no use for a degree in History for his future life, therefore the result was an irrelevance. He moved back to London, to his mother’s house in Sumner Place, where, thanks to the allowance he received from her, he was free to continue with work on his biography of Shelley. However, he began to travel abroad more frequently, spending more and more time with Ben Leeping in Paris. Unlike the first two journals, the First London Journal is extremely cavalier with its dating. All dates within square brackets are educated guesses. The journal begins again some time towards the end of 1928.

  1928

  [October]

  SUMNER PLACE

  London rain pecking against the window provokes dreams of Paris. I lie here on a sofa, imagining that Ben’s new apartment is mine and how I would redecorate it.

  Favourite colour: taupe/green.

  Favourite piece of furniture: a Louis XIV escritoire.

  Favourite painting: Ben’s Vlaminck.

  Favourite time: cocktails at dusk.

  Je chante l’Europe, ses chemins de fer et ses théâtres

  Et ses constellations de ciéts…

  [Valéry Larbaud]

  Mother is driving me mad, fussing about my meals and wha
t I eat. ‘I’ve been away for six weeks,’ I say, ‘you have no idea what I eat.’ ‘Exactamente,’ she says. ‘I don’t care: in my house you eat like a proper person.’ This morning at breakfast she makes Henry serve me a huge plate of bacon, eggs and mushrooms. I’m entirely nauseated. I tell her a coffee and a cigarette is as much as I can manage before luncheon.

  Anna.1 Anna-mania setting in well and truly and I’ve only been back a day. The last time was so good and so sad. Liebesträume – dreams of love? Love-dreams? Love-dreams of Anna. When she was washing herself in the bidet, I went and stood by the window to look down on the street and there was the Colonel, standing patiently waiting: the little orange glow of his cigarette flaring as he inhaled.

  [NOTE IN RETROSPECT. 1955. Anna worked in a high-class maison de tolérance called Chez Chantal on the rue d’ Assas off the Boulevard Montparnasse. It was a clean and well-run house with usually half a dozen girls available. Anna worked Fridays, Saturdays and Mondays. She must have been in her late thirties when I first started going there in the summer of’ 28. I remember very fine brown hair, which I always asked her to loosen, and which she did, reluctantly. Her skin was very white and beginning to lose its firmness and elasticity. She was unnecessarily bashful about her small plump tummy. She had a high forehead and a long thin nose. She spoke good French and passable English. Her husband, the Colonel, would turn up at the end of her shift and wait for her on the street regardless of the weather. They had lost everything in the Russian Revolution and the civil war. When she emerged he would offer her his arm and the two would wander off towards the Métro station at Montparnasse, a middle-aged bourgeois couple out for a stroll. I often wonder whether these early sexual experiences with Tess and Anna warped me irrevocably.]

  [November]

  When I give Roderick the typescript of The Mind’s Imaginings he riffles through it as one would a telephone directory and reads out phrases at random. ‘I’ve a feeling this is going to make my name,’ he says. I say: ‘Isn’t it my name you should be concerned about?’ He laughs, a little edgily, and apologizes that his ambition should be so transparent. We talk a little about Maurois,2 whether it would be a problem. Roderick thinks Maurois has done us a favour – prepared the way, the ideal pathfinder.

  I walk home after our lunch (the Ivy) feeling both exalted and strangely bereft. I am twenty-two years old and I have just delivered my first book to my publisher. But I wonder vaguely what I will do with the rest of my life. Write another, of course, you fool.

  Once when I came into Anna’s room I found a comb left behind on the side of the basin. She was all untypical consternation, blushing like an ingénue and at the same time angry and unsettled. She threw it away in the waste-paper basket. It disturbed her far more than it did me, this evidence of her preceding client. Another day I asked her how old she was and she said with a laugh, ‘Oh, très, très vieille.’ I wondered what she and the Colonel had lived through since 1917. ‘Are you old enough to be my mother?’ I asked. She gave it a moment’s serious thought, frowning. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘if I’d been a very bad girl.’ She refuses to meet me outside Chez Chantal, saying it would not be fair to the Colonel. What she does at Chantal’s is closed off, discreet, extending as far as the front door. Chez Chantal merely represents a source of funds for her life with her husband, however modest that may be (why doesn’t the Colonel work, I wonder? Or maybe he does, for all I know). I am a true regular – I don’t want any of the other girls – and when I visit I will wait in the salon until Anna’s available. I pay Madame Chantal 50 francs, which at the current rate of exchange is less than £2. I give Anna 20 francs extra. She folds the note away carefully and slips it in a little leather purse she has with one of those zippers. I like to think I am doing something for their life together. I feel I care for them both, Anna and her melancholy Colonel.

  Tuesday, 25 December

  As my Christmas present Mother has increased my allowance to £500 a year. I think we must be very rich: Mr Prendergast has certainly worked his magic in the United States. I can live in Paris (visits to Anna excepted) on a pound a day. Still waiting for news from Roderick.

  Wednesday, 26 December

  Write to Ben asking if I can come and stay in the New Year. Thinking about starting a novel inspired by what I know of Anna’s life. Caution dictates that I should wait to hear the fate of TMI [The Mind’s Imaginings] first.

  1929

  [Tuesday, 1 January]

  LMS resolves:

  To leave home, find his own flat, preferably in Paris.

  To see more of Land.

  To be more ruthless, less compliant.

  To work, to write, to live.

  Thursday, 24 January

  Meet Land for cocktails in the Café Royal. I’m early but I’m happy to sit with my drink and my book covertly watching the show. I feel my time in Paris has given me a wonderful distance on what passes for intellectual circles here in London. It seems to me we have a choice between beery, Little-England journalists (Bennett, Wells) or snobbish aesthetes in their charmed circle (Bloomsbury). I watch the scribouillards circle and move from table to table: they take no notice of the slim young man in the corner with his copy of Proust.

  Land comes in and as usual is greeted by every third person she passes. She looks tired and tells me almost immediately that she has broken with Bobbie Jarrett. I commiserate – genuinely. She touches my hand and says: you are sweet, Logan. I suggest to her that her job (working as unpaid secretary to a Labour MP)3 might have posed something of a problem to Bobbie, son of a baronet and a Tory grandee. She admits I may have a point but she thought that Bobbie was ‘bigger than that’. Nothing disappoints like a lover’s failings, I remind her, thinking that the observation would sound better in French. I also said that wasn’t it a bit of a waste of her degree (she got a first, of course) sticking stamps on circulars or typing letters? On the contrary: she predicts a Labour government at the next election. I see her on to her underground train for Hampstead and when we kiss goodbye I give her a little hug.

  Later. Mother and Mr Prendergast are having a small dinner party and I can hear laughter from below. Any minute now Mother will be putting some rumba music on the gramophone – yes, there it is. Seeing Land again took me back to Oxford and the still fretful business of my bad degree. I can’t explain how I managed to misinterpret my performance so. It really seemed to me that I had done good work; and I insisted as much to Le Mayne when I was summoned to see him – he was wholly unable to keep the disappointment off his face. H-D wrote me a sweet letter saying that anyone’s degree result was only an important factor in their life for a maximum of two weeks: thereafter, as was true of all aspects of the human condition, it was up to the individual. Dick Hodge took a second, so did Peter. Cassell didn’t even sit the papers. Preston took a first and has decided to stay on at Oxford and do a doctorate. Mother has never once asked me what degree I got: I wonder what she thinks I was doing at Oxford all those three years?

  Anna-mania, interestingly enough, has retreated since seeing Land. Suddenly I’m content to stay in London a while longer.

  Friday, 15 February

  Met up with Dick at Norwich Station (what a rush of memories!) and we travelled on together to Swaffham. Heavy frost on the fields but the low sun was shining strongly, so strongly we pulled down the blinds in the compartment. Angus [Cassell] was at the station to meet us in a rather smart Darracq. Dick had refused to lend me his second gun (‘Why not?’ – ‘Get your own.’) and so I was obliged to ask Angus for the loan of one (I said mine was being repaired). Angus said the house was full of guns – there would be no problem.

  The house is ugly with a vast stable block. It was built in the middle of the last century by his grandfather (the first Earl of Edgefield) but the park is nicely mature, the groupings of trees (rather too many conifers for my taste), the rides and the vistas exactly as they were designed to be seen. The great advantage about a new house is that everything functions
properly: hot water, central heating, electric light. I had a bath, changed and went down. The Earl seems harmless enough – hugely bellied, jolly, always humming and wheezing away to himself. He told me to call him Aelthred; something that’s beyond me, I’m afraid, though I noticed Dick was very free with the invitation. The Countess, Lady Enid, looks like she’s swallowed poison: thin, sour, seamed face, black dyed hair. There were a dozen of us in the party, the young – Angus, his sister, me and Dick – and various elderly locals. At dinner I was placed between Lady Enid and Angus’s sister, Lady Laeticia (‘Lottie, please’). Lottie is petite, dressed in the latest London styles, but there’s something about the set of her features – a broadness of the nose, a thinness of the lips (inherited from her mother), the too wide gap between her eyes – that conspires to keep her the plain side of fairly pretty. She was chatty and vivacious, however, and couldn’t hear enough about Paris. ‘Did you go to a bal nègre? Did you meet any lesbians? Are the women too, too beautiful?’). Lady Enid, by contrast, interrogated me like an immigration official. Where were you born? Montevideo. Where’s that? Uruguay. Still blank. South America. Oh? What were your people doing out there? My father was in business (somehow I did not want to utter the words ‘corned beef’ in this company). Where is your mother from? Montevideo. I could hear her brain working. She’s Uruguayan, I said. How wonderfully exotic for you, she said, and turned to the person on her right.