by William Boyd
Friends. Ben (as always); Peter (more distant); Ian (can’t really make him out); Dick (lost to view). But I don’t really need friends because I have Freya.
General reflections. I am in uniform, I am making a tiny contribution to the ending of this interminable war. My profession – writer – is in temporary abeyance. I am solvent, thanks to the RNVR and Joan Miró (and Faustino), but my French royalties are unobtainable. I must read more. I finally got round to Hemingway’s Spanish book [For Whom the Bell Tolls] – an embarrassing disaster. What could have possessed him to write so badly?
Resolutions: to drink less. I fear this war is driving me to alcoholism. To find a book I truly want to write (in other words abandon Summer at Saint-Jean, you fool).
Favourite place: Melville Road.
Vice: procrastination.
Faith: love for Freya and Stella.
Ambition: to come through this war and write something of value.
Fantasy: driving south from Paris to Biarritz and the Atlantic with Freya by my side and a suite booked at the Palais.
1942
Friday, 20 February
Lunch with Peter [Scabius]. He looks gaunt and ill. He says his children are living with his parents. He can’t stay in the house at Marlow – haunted by Tess. He had a terrible row with her father, Clough, who shouted and screamed at him and they almost came to blows. I commiserated: awful business, ghastly tragedy. Then he told me he was taking instruction to join the Roman Catholic Church.
ME: Why on earth would you want to do that?
PETER: Guilt. I think I drove Tess to her death in some way.
ME: Don’t be absurd. She didn’t commit suicide, did she?
PETER: I can never be sure. But even if it was an accident, once she was in the water I’m sure she welcomed her death.
I said that what he needed was a psychiatrist, not a priest, but he wouldn’t be told. He said he wanted God back in his life. I said, well what’s wrong with the God you grew up with, your Anglican God? He’s too soft, he said, too reasonable and understanding, doesn’t really want to interfere – more like the ideal next-door neighbour than a deity. I need to feel God’s terrible wrath, his retribution waiting for me, he said. My Anglican God will just look sad and give me a ticking off.
‘Look at us,’ I said, growing exasperated. ‘Here we are, two highly educated, worldly writers talking about God in heaven. It’s all complete mumbo-jumbo, Peter, all of it. If you want to feel better you might as well sacrifice a goat to the sun-god Ra. It makes just as much sense as what you’re saying.’
He said I didn’t understand: if a person had no faith it was like talking to a brick wall. I recognize that his ‘conversion’ is a form of penance – some punishment he needs. Then he told me he was writing a book about Tess and their life together.
‘A book? A biography?’
‘A novel.’
Friday, 27 February
I’m thirty-six years old today. Does that make me middle aged? Perhaps I can hold off the designation until I’m forty. Freya baked me a cake, a sponge (she found some real eggs somewhere) and stuck three red candles and six blue ones in it. Stella insisted on blowing them out. ‘How old are you, Daddy?’ she said. I counted the candles for her: ‘I’m nine,’ I said. Freya looked at me: ‘Who’s a big boy, then?’
Take away this war and I suppose you could say I was as happy as a man could be. Only two worms in my particular bud – Lionel and my work. I see Lionel less and less – partly because of my job and also because Lottie remarried.12 Lionel is almost nine now and nearly a complete stranger to me. And my other concern: I sense my métier slipping away. No urge to write beyond occasional commissioned journalism. Perhaps I need this war to be over before I can start again.
Wednesday, 15 April
Today Peter is received into the Roman Catholic Church. He asked if I would be his godfather but I declined on the grounds that it would be insincere. I think he was a little hurt, but too bad. He asked me if he could send me the manuscript of the Tess novel ‘to verify the facts’. It seems nearly finished by all accounts. The prospect of reading it makes me feel sick, to be honest.
Monday, 4 May
To the BBC for yet another broadcast to Spain – to pre-empt fears of a German invasion of the Canaries, apparently. On the way out I met Louis MacNeice,13 whom I scarcely know, but who was embarrassingly complimentary about The Girl Factory. He asked me what I was doing and I said nothing – and blamed the war. He said he knew how I felt but we had to keep writing, that this war might last another five or even ten years and that we couldn’t just live in a kind of artistic deep-freeze. ‘What about our life to come? “What did you write in the war?” – we can’t just say nothing.’ He talked vaguely about adapting The Girl Factory for the radio, but worried that it might be a bit strong. Anyway, he inspired me – I’m always inspired after meeting another writer, and I realize we have our own secret brotherhood, even if it just comes down to sympathizing with others’ moans and complaints. I came home and read through my chapters of Summer. They were appalling. I went down to the bottom of the garden and burnt everything I’d written in the incinerator. I have no regrets – in fact I feel relieved. However, I worry a little about what Roderick might say about my advance, spent many years ago…
Thursday, 28 May
Ian [Fleming] wandered into our office today with a file in his hand and looked at me rather intently. Plomer was in the room and said, ‘Watch out, Logan, Ian’s got his hey-I’ve-just-had-an-idea look on.’ I asked him what the file was and he said it was mine. ‘So “G” is for Gonzago,’ he said. ‘So what?’ I said. ‘And you’re half Uruguayan, born in Montevideo – how fascinating. How good’s your Spanish?’ I said I could speak it all right, though indifferently. Ian looked at me and nodded. ‘I don’t think we’re exploiting you to the full, Logan,’ he said. I felt a little unsettled by this for a while but now don’t think it’s worth pondering further – just Ian with too much time on his hands, trying to come up with one of his mad ideas.
[July-August]
Movements. Freya and Stella to Cheshire. I joined them for a week. Then ten days in Devon with the Leepings. A dragging August. Sudden depression realizing that we’d been at war for three years, almost. I think back to our lives in the fretful, worried thirties and it seems a vanished, golden age.
[August]
Back from Devon. I took Stella to see Mother – who suddenly looked a lot older. She is sixty-two, after all. She started to reminisce about Montevideo, which is not like her: she was always thrilled to come to Europe, even Birmingham seemed exotic. But today she moaned on at me as we sat in their cluttered room, Encarnación washing up the tea dishes in the single sink. Logan, she said, I have become una patróna [a landlady] – is not dignity for me. I wanted to point out that if she hadn’t let Prendergast squander the small fortune that Father had saved both our lives would have been a great deal more comfortable – but I hadn’t the heart. I realize she’d lost weight and that was what had aged her – she was always ‘ample’. Not any more. She loves Stella and this has reconciled her to the loss of Lionel and her aristocratic daughter-in-law. Both she and Encarnación revel in Stella’s fair skin, blonde hair and blue eyes, as if she is some kind of genetic joke. They stare at her, fascinated, and point out the most ordinary things: ‘Look how she opened the cupboard’; ‘See, she sneeze again’ ‘Watch her playing with her doll’. It is as if no child in history has ever mastered these challenges. When they pick her up, they kiss her repeatedly: kiss her hands, her knees, her ears. Stella is composed and tolerant, permitting this licence. When we leave and I close the door I hear wails and sobbing.
Thursday, 17 September
A letter from Roderick, hinting at a law suit, demanding the repayment of my advance on Summer. Simultaneously, the arrival of Peter Scabius’s novel in typescript, ominously entitled Guilt. The first line reads: ‘Simon Trumpington never thought he would associate shire-horses with a beau
tiful girl.’ I can’t bear to read on: there will be something truly disgusting and upsetting, I know, in this exploitation of Tess’s short, unhappy life.
Friday, 18 September
I wrote to Peter – lying – saying I had read the novel in one sitting and that I thought it ‘masterly’ (very useful word) and that it was a ‘fine tribute’ to Tess and praising him for the courage it must have taken to write such a harrowing etc., etc. I made one suggestion: that he change the hero’s surname – it sounded too P. G. Wodehouse. I said I would read it again in a calmer mood – I hope I may have bought myself some time.
Monday, 12 October
Fleming and Godfrey came in today looking very pleased with themselves and told me to pack my tropical kit. ‘You’re off to the sunny Caribbean,’ they said, ‘lucky so-and-so.’ Most amusing, I said, save your jokes for the new boys. But they weren’t joking: the Duke of Windsor is about to re-enter my life.
Friday, 30 October
New York City. I have been temporarily promoted to commander and sit here in my downtown hotel waiting to go and take up my new command. I suppose – not to put too fine a point on it – that I have become a spy and I have been set to spy on the Duke and Duchess. Feel a little ill-at-ease.
Fleming and Godfrey explained the background. The Duke has settled reluctantly but diligently into his new role as Governor of the Bahamas. He became friendly with a Swedish multi-millionaire who lived out there called Axel Wenner-Gren (the founder of Electrolux), a man who has made a vast fortune from vacuum cleaners and refrigerators and who, like most of the wealthy denizens of Nassau, does not want to pay any taxes on his fortune. Not only does the tax-free status of the Bahamas suit Wenner-Gren, but its location also places him close to his burgeoning business interests in South America. He and the Duke had become close – they dined together, Wenner-Gren leant him his yacht – but then in July of last year Wenner-Gren was blacklisted by the United States and declared a Nazi sympathizer. The British followed suit and the Duke was obliged to inform his friend that he could not re-enter the Bahamas.
Word had reached NID from an agent in Mexico City that Wenner-Gren was involved in massive currency speculation and was making huge profits. The fear is – the worry is – that the Duke is in some way involved in this speculation also. The Duke’s private income, including his salary as governor, is estimated as being between £25,000 and £30,000 a year. His assets are tied up in England and France, so where, if he is indeed speculating with Wenner-Gren, is the money coming from? This is what I have to try to find out. The unspoken fact behind all this is that if the Duke is guilty, then his actions are treasonous.
These are high stakes and I feel somewhat uneasy about the job. I have nothing against the Duke and Duchess – on the contrary, they have been kind and friendly to me. I think my long memorandum after Lisbon has made me the departmental Duke-expert. So the plan is that I turn up in the Bahamas as the commander of an MTB [Motor Torpedo Boat] posted there on submarine-hunting duties. I must try to reingratiate myself with the ducal couple and find out what I can.
Saturday, 31 October
Not an MTB as it turns out but a Harbour Defence Motor Launch – HDML 1122. We are heading south at steady speed, the New Jersey coast on our starboard side. Now doubly worried. I met my ship and crew, who had come over from Bermuda, in Brooklyn harbour. The 1122 is commanded by a taciturn young Scot called Sub-Lieutenant Crawford McStay. I handed him over my orders (signed by the Admiral of the Atlantic Fleet) and he made no attempt to conceal his reactions – incredulity and then disgusted resignation – as he read them. He asked me what my last command had been and I told him something of the ‘honorary’ nature of my rank in the RNVR. The Bahamas?’ he said. ‘And just what the hell’re we meant to do there?’ ‘You’ll follow my orders,’ I said, very coolly. He practically spat on the deck. No love lost there, I’m afraid. The 1122 is a big new wooden boat – armed with depth charges and a couple of Lewis machine guns – with a crew of ten. I share a small cabin with McStay (bunk beds, I’m on top) which is also where we eat. We are to make our way down to Florida and thence to the Bahamas. I think what really disgusted McStay was the amount of luggage I had loaded on board (I know there will be formal receptions and I’11 have to dress accordingly) and the fact that I had my golf clubs with me.
Wednesday, 4 November
Nassau, New Providence Island, the Bahamas. McStay and the crew are billeted at Fort Montagu, about a mile east of the town, while I have a room in the British Colonial Hotel – which seems full of American engineers and contractors apparently here to build the new airfields. Went for a walk through the town – throngs of American GIs and RAF trainees. If you don’t look too closely Nassau appears pretty rather than shabby. It’s a small colonial town, population 20,000 or thereabouts. Wooden buildings painted pink, plenty of shade trees. The centre of town is a neat little square with a statue of Queen Victoria flanked by the government offices and the law courts. From the harbour front the ground rises to a ridge on whose crest sits Government House (colonnaded front, also pink). The main street is called Bay Street, about five blocks long with a shaded boardwalk and lined with souvenir shops selling fancy goods and tat for tourists. There is a yacht club to the east and, west of the Colonial Hotel, a golf course and country club. Wenner-Gren owns an island, Hog Island, forming the seaward edge of the harbour lagoon.
I hired a taxi and was driven around: here and there are large houses set in tropical gardens and, inland, two big airforce bases where they train pilots. We passed Government House and I saw the Union Jack flying. I tried to imagine the Duke and Duchess in this curious, dead-end, tropical nowhere. ‘Small town’ takes on a new meaning out here. He’s been quartered in Nassau, out of harm’s way, for as long as is possible, that much is obvious. To have been King – and have come to this – is as close to a blatant insult imaginable. Three invitations to dine already. I go up to GH tomorrow to pay my respects.
Thursday, 5 November
The reception at Government House was for some visiting American general. The rooms were prettily decorated, chintzy, full of plants and flowers, photographs on polished tables. I was served a gin and tonic and mingled with the other guests – military types in the main with a few local dignitaries sweating in their suits. I felt bizarrely presumptuous in my smart white uniform with my commander’s stripes. The Duke’s aide-de-camp14 introduced me: ‘You’ll remember Commander Mountstuart, sir.’ The Duke, very tanned, in a fawn suit, wearing a pink and yellow checked tie, looked blankly at me. ‘Lisbon, 1940, sir,’ I said. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said vaguely and then darted off. He went straight to the Duchess: they spoke quietly together and the Duchess looked over at me, she said something to him and he came straight back, smiling now, and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Mountstuart,’ he said. ‘Of course! Brought your golf clubs?’
Later I spoke to the Duchess. Her hair and make-up were as immaculate as they had been in Lisbon. She looked thinner, however, though perhaps it was simply the short sleeves on her dress exposing her bony, meagrely muscled arms. She was very friendly and lowered her voice to say, ‘What brings you to this moron paradise? Watch out or you’ll die of boredom before you know it.’ I smiled. ‘Hunting submarines,’ I said. ‘We must have you to dinner,’ she said, ‘right away. Where are you staying?’ I sense I am back in the swim again.
Tuesday, 15 December
I’ve been to three dinners at Government House, the last occasion actually sitting beside the Duchess. I’ve golfed with the Duke too, played half a dozen rounds, but always as part of a four-ball. I’ve visited every bar and club and, it seems, most of the private houses and have met enough RAF personnel to last me a lifetime.
This small town, like any small town, is rife with rumour and gossip, intrigue, resentments, vendettas, slights, alliances and misalliances, cliques and sets, both amongst the so-called establishment and the parvenus. As far as I can tell Nassau society is divided roughly along these lines. At
the top the governor and his entourage. Second, the politicians – the ‘Bay Street Boys (or Bandits)’ – local merchants, bigwigs and wealthy men who sit in and control the House of Assembly. Then there are, somewhat apart, the military transients and visitors. Then there are the elderly tax-exiles – British and Canadian in the main – stuffy and conservative who look with disdain on a younger, more raffish crowd: dubious entrepreneurs, divorcées, relatively rich talentless young men and their girlfriends. They sail, they have parties, they drink too much, they swap partners easily. In the tourist season, December to March, they are enhanced by their American equivalents looking for winter sunshine and la dolce vita. Another subgroup, which may overlap with any of the above, are the few wealthy and powerful men who wield a publicly unacknowledged influence because of their fiscal clout. Wenner-Gren was in this category and I have to say it’s hard to find anyone with a bad word for him. Rumours do swirl around the mention of his name: that he was a personal friend of Goering; that he was building a Nazi U-boat pen on Hog Island; that he owns a bank in Mexico City. I pass it all on, duly tagged as speculation, to NID. Finally there is another world – one that is the most populous and, in a paradoxical way, the most invisible: the native Bahamians themselves. Most of them are poor labourers or fishermen who live in a sprawling shanty over the ridge from Government House called Grant’s Town. The colour bar is almost absolute in the Bahamas – certainly in social terms (even the Duchess’s ‘canteen for the troops’ is segregated). I’m told the code is as rigid as in the southern states of America. Any softening of attitudes here in the Bahamas, it is argued, would discourage the American tourists. Even in Government House no black is allowed through the front door.
