Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  I am seventy years old today.

  Tuesday, 9 March

  Gloria back from hospital. She wouldn’t let me come and visit her, or pick her up, for some reason. I heard a taxi dropping her off and ran out to help her in. She’d been shopping and had bought champagne, some foie gras, a plum cake. She wouldn’t tell me what had happened at the hospital or what any of her doctors had said.

  So tonight we opened the champagne and ate foie gras on toast and she told me she had inoperable lung cancer. ‘Riddled with it, I suspect,’ she said. ‘But they couldn’t tell me why my back was aching so – at least not at the moment.’ She asked if she could stay on with me: she didn’t want to end up in a cancer ward or a hospice. I said of course she could but warned her I was very poor, and that what comfort I could offer her would be determined by that fact. She said she had £800 in the bank and I should think of it as mine. ‘Let’s have a high old time of it, Logan,’ she said with a grin, as if we were schoolchildren planning a midnight feast. I thought that even £800 wouldn’t go very far and she must have noticed the look in my eye. She nodded at the double portrait over the mantelpiece. ‘Perhaps it’s time to cash in Pablo’s legacy,’ she said.

  Wednesday, 10 March

  I called Ben in Paris this morning and asked him how he was. ‘Ailing but surviving,’ he said. I welcomed him to the club. Then I told him about the Picasso sketch and he offered me £3,000 there and then, sight unseen.

  I took the drawing out of the frame and cut it in two, scissoring off my portrait. On my half it only had my name written, ‘Logan – the rest of the dedicatory sentence and the crucial signature being on Gloria’s half, which reads ‘A mon ami et mon amie Gloria. Amitiés, Picasso’ and the date. Our respective portions are no bigger than postcards and, without a signature, of course my portrait is worthless, but it’s a memento all the same and I’m happy for poor Gloria to be the beneficiary of that lunch in Cannes all those long years ago.

  Friday, 19 March

  Could be a day in winter. Low slate-grey clouds and a gusty east wind bringing showers of sleet in from the North Sea. Gloria is well established in my bedroom – gramophone, gin, books and magazines. We eat and drink like exiled royalty. A private nurse comes by every day to help Gloria bathe and change (paid for by the Picasso bequest) and the health visitor comes in from time to time to check on her progress and top up her medicaments. Gloria is having no radiation-treatment or any of the new ‘blunderbuss’ drug therapies available. She feigns jollity and devil-may-care and says she doesn’t give a hoot as long as she feels no pain. ‘I won’t be a bore, darling,’ she said. ‘And I won’t have you slopping out for me or wiping my bottom and all the rest of it. As long as we can afford the nurses it’ll be just like having some cantankerous old friend to stay.’ So I follow my routine, go out to the library, continue my work and come back in the early evening. Gloria is quite happy to be on her own during the day and can more or less look after herself but she likes company at night, so I sit in with her, read her bits out of the newspaper, listen to music and drink. I am usually fairly drunk by 10 o’clock and Gloria begins to nod and doze. I take the glass from her hand, rearrange the blankets and quilt and tiptoe out of the room.

  I sleep badly on the sofa, imagining the cancer cells multiplying next door and trying not to think of the Gloria Ness-Smith I once knew. I wake up early in the mornings and shave and wash immediately so the bathroom’s clear. I pray that the nurse will come before she wakes – before I hear her terrified cry of ‘Logan!’ as consciousness returns and she realizes the state she’s in. The fear always strikes first thing in the morning, before she’s put her mask of hey-ho resignation on.

  When the nurse arrives I go out for the day’s provisions – often to Harrods Food Hall to find some exotic sweetmeat Gloria fancies (‘What about kumquats, today? Candied chestnuts?’). I have an account with an off-licence and they deliver all our booze. A case of gin seems to last a week. If I stay at home we start on the wine before lunch and hit the hard stuff as night falls and the soul buckles at the knees. I asked her if she wanted me to make contact with Peter but she said ‘no’ immediately, so I left it at that.

  I don’t think back; I don’t think forward. I’ve made no plans for Gloria’s death – which is what we’re both waiting for – in fact I don’t remotely know what the form is in these cases. No doubt I shall learn. In the meantime the here and now is enough to preoccupy me.

  Sunday, 4 April

  Gloria has reached that stage of wastage and emaciation where her features look borrowed: eyes too big for their sockets, teeth too large for her mouth, someone else’s enormous nose and ears. Her lips are always wet and shiny and she’s now lost her appetite. She can manage half a poached egg or a soft-centred chocolate but her world is hushed and blurry from the morphine cocktail she sips and it’s all she can do to focus on me for a minute or two. She makes a huge effort – I sense she doesn’t want to feel she’s drifting away. I read her the newspaper in the mornings now and she concentrates massively: ‘Why is Ted Heath such a dog-in-the-manger? What is a “punk”, exactly?’

  We have about £1,200 left from our legacy – enough for another month or so, I calculate – at any rate our drinks bill has plummeted and I am more or less sober again.

  A doctor visits regularly from the Lupus Street clinic, a different one each day – there must be dozens of them – and I asked the latest for a prognosis. It could be tomorrow, it could be next year, he said, citing some astonishing examples of people who should have died clinging on instead to this half-life for months. Thank God for opium, I say. The nurses deal with Gloria’s bodily functions – I have no idea what transpires.

  I sit and read to her, my eyes glancing at the pulsing, cursive vein that bulges on her temple, unconsciously timing my own inhalations and exhalations to its awkward, thready beat. Gloria’s clock winding down.

  Tuesday, 6 April

  4.35 p.m. Gloria has gone. I went into her room two minutes ago and she was dead. Still lying in exactly the same position she had adopted half an hour previously, her head back, her nostrils flared, lips tightly parted to show her teeth. Her eyes were closed, but, half an hour ago she seemed to squeeze my hand gently when I took hers.

  But now her knees were somewhat drawn up, as if the effort of that last search for the last breath had required the whole frail body to do the work. I reached under the sheet and took hold of her ankles and pulled them towards me. Her legs straightened as supplely as if she were alive. Why was I so solicitous towards Gloria, I ask myself? Because I liked her; because we had been lovers and had shared part of our lives. Because she was my friend. Also because, having done this for Gloria, I see it as a due gladly paid and I think – wishfully – that therefore someone will be there for me too. Absurd, delusional musings, I know. You can’t make these deals with life, there is no quid pro quo.

  Saturday, 10 April

  Putney Vale Crematorium on a cold April day must be one of the most lugubrious and depressing places in the country. An absurd Victorian chapel doubles ingeniously as a crematorium set in the middle of a huge, rambling, untidy necropolis. Around the chapel loom dark yew trees, like giant hooded monks, conferring more gloom on an already gloomy scene.

  Peter came and a surprising number of strangers also – old colleagues of Gloria, obscure relatives. Peter asked me where she had died. At my flat, I said. Your flat? All his old suspicious antagonism reddened his face. Then he collected himself: very good of you, old chap, he said.

  He became more voluble and questioning back at his hotel, curious to discover why his ex-wife had died in his oldest friend’s basement flat. He asked me if I had really liked Gloria. Of course, I said: she was marvellous company – very funny, very blunt, wonderfully rude.

  ‘You see, I think I never really knew her,’ he said in a puzzled voice.

  ‘You married her, for God’s sake.’

  ‘Yes. But I think that was more of a sort of sex-intoxic
ation thing. Never known anyone like Gloria for, you know, getting me going.’

  We ordered some sandwiches from room service and continued our attack on the whisky bottle. I noticed the waiter called him ‘Mr Portman’. What’s wrong with Scabius, I asked?

  ‘I’m not meant to be here – my accountant would have a heart attack if he knew I was in London.’

  ‘Ah, tax. Very good of you to come back. Gloria would have been very touched. No, seriously.’

  ‘The very fucking devil, these taxes. I’m thinking about Ireland. Apparently you pay no income tax if you’re a writer. But then there’s the risk of the IRA.’

  ‘I don’t think you’d be an IRA target, Peter.’

  ‘You’re joking. Anyone with a profile like mine’s got to be at risk.’

  ‘Wonderful houses in Ireland,’ I said. It wasn’t worth it.

  ‘Why don’t you go?’ he said. ‘How can you live here with these taxes? You work two months for yourself, ten for the taxman.’

  ‘I live very simply, Peter. Very simply.’

  ‘So do I, dammit. I’m going to regret this whisky. If my doctor saw me drinking this he’d wash his hands of me… How’s Ben keeping?’

  ‘Cancer. Prostate – but he seems to be winning.’

  This news depressed him and he started to list his own complaints – hardening arteries, angina, increasing deafness. We’re falling apart, Logan, he kept saying, we’re pathetic old wrecks.

  I let him rant on. I don’t feel old, although I must confess the signs of ageing are everywhere. My legs have grown thinner as the muscles shrink – and they’re practically hairless; my buttocks are disappearing, the seat of my pants loose and empty. One funny thing: my cock and balls seem slacker, lower-slung, hanging freer between my legs. And they look bigger too, as they do when you’ve just stepped out of a hot bath. Is this normal or is it just me?

  I forgot to say in the midst of all this Gloria sadness that I had a letter from Noel Lange’s office saying that I had been left a property in France in the will of a Monsieur Cyprien Dieudonné.2 For one mad moment I thought it might have been Cyprien’s own chartreuse in Quercy but looking more closely at the address and after consulting my atlas I see the house is in the Lot, a maison de maître outside a village called Sainte-Sabine. So I’ve written back saying, sell it. Gloria too has left me everything she owns, which amounts to £900 in her current account (thank you, Pablo), two suitcases of clothes and the contents of a storage container in a warehouse in Sienna. What am I meant to do with that? What I need is a benefactor of real substance.

  [On Monday, 7 June, at 11.30 a.m. as LMS was crossing Lupus Street, SWI, he was hit by a speeding post office van and badly injured. He was rushed by ambulance to St Thomas’s Hospital for emergency surgery. His spleen had ruptured, his skull was fractured and his left leg was completely broken in three places, not to mention serious bruising and abrasions on his body.

  After his operation (he had metal pins inserted in his leg) he was moved to St Botolph’s Hospital in Peckham and installed in Ward C. The journal resumes some four weeks after the accident.]

  Monday, 5 July

  One of the old ladies who comes round the ward with puzzle-books and sewing-kits has procured me a biro and writing pad and so finally I am able to log my impressions of this infernal place. Swiss roll and lumpy custard for the third time this week. I’m sorry, but Swiss roll is not a pudding; Swiss roll is a cake. Someone in the catering department is raking off money that should be going to provide proper puddings. Completely typical of this place – built in the nineteenth century and still redolent of that century’s values and practices. For example Ward C is vast, a huge high-ceilinged room like a village hall or a school chapel, and was purpose-built as a ward with tall thin windows on three sides to let in as much ‘healing’ sunlight as possible. There are thirty beds in here, twice as many as ever intended, and the nursing staff is overstretched, harassed and very short-tempered. I spent two weeks marooned in a middle aisle before Paula – the only nurse I like – managed to have me moved to a corner. So now I only have one neighbour – though the current occupant, an old wino, leaves much to be desired. These warm sunny July days make the ward cook up like a greenhouse. At mid afternoon we are lying gasping on our beds, running with sweat, those with the energy or power fling back the bedclothes and fan ourselves with magazines and newspapers. I won’t dwell on the noxious marshy odours that rise up from the exposed sheets. It has provided a small glimpse into the physical conditions of the Victorian age: when you come to think of it everyone must have been intolerably hot in summer – clothes were thicker, people wore many more layers of them, it was considered impolite to remove a jacket. The stench of body odour from both men and women must have been overpowering. Then factor-in all the horse manure on the street… Nineteenth-century London must have stunk like a cesspit.

  My left leg is enclosed up to the hip in plaster, rendering me more or less immobile. I piss in a bottle and if I want to shit I have to summon a nurse. I refuse to use a bedpan so they have to wheelchair me to the lavatory. There I park myself on the pan and do my business. There are no doors on the stalls. The nurses hate me for not using a bedpan.

  The only vaguely pleasurable consequence of my plastered leg is that I have to have a sponge bath. This is done brusquely and efficiently but for two minutes I return to infancy again – arms are lifted and armpits laved, a cool sponge ducks around my genitals, I lean forward and my back is swabbed. A no-nonsense towelling and a dusting of talcum powder finish off the procedure. If that milkcow Sister Frost heaved out a breast for me to suckle, then the picture would be complete.

  The food is disgusting, condemnable – the worst I’ve eaten since my schooldays at Abbey. We are provided with every institutional horror imaginable – mince with watery mash and tinned veg.; a fish pie with no fish; curried eggs; jammy, doughy dumplings with lumpy custard. You have to eat it – especially me, stuck here in my bed. Once a day someone pushes round a trolley and you can buy biscuits and chocolate bars for extra sustenance. It is a truly terrible diet – everyone complains of constipation.

  Paula is the only nurse I like because she calls me Mr Mountstuart. I thanked her and asked her for her surname. ‘Premoli,’ she said. Right, Miss Premoli it shall be, I said but she asked me to call her Paula in case the other nurses thought it odd. Interesting surname, I observed, and she told me she was from Malta. But you’ve red hair, I said, unthinkingly. And you’ve got grey hair, she replied: how funny is that?

  [NOTE IN RETROSPECT. My memories of the accident itself were very incomplete and disjointed. I had always noted, since my return to London, that post office vans were invariably driven helter-skelter as if the drivers were in danger of missing some crucial deadline or appointment. The one that hit me must have been doing 60 or 70 mph. But it was entirely my fault: my mind was on something else – I simply didn’t look – and I stepped out into the road with as much pre-emptive caution as if I were crossing my kitchen floor. Apparently I was flung some fifteen yards by the impact. I remember nothing of the actual crash itself and experienced no pain. I woke up some two days later in St Thomas’s, wondering where the hell I was and what I was doing. I was very lucky to be alive, I was told. Someone from the post office’s customer relations department sent me a bunch of wilting gladioli ‘wishing me a speedy recovery’. Unfortunate choice of adjective, I remember thinking at the time.]

  [August-September]

  OBSERVATIONS FROM WARD C

  Massive bowel evacuation today after what I realize was effectively two months of constipation. Feel better but become simultaneously conscious of just how much weight I’ve lost. I’m now a skinny old buzzard whose hair needs cutting.

  This is a geriatric ward though no one will actually admit it. No one here is younger than sixty. It’s a geriatric ward in the same sense as a cancer ward. We are all old men with old men’s problems. Many of us die. The ward is too big for me to do an accurate count a
nd patients are always being moved around (to disguise the fatalities?). I would say around thirty of us have died since I arrived here.

  Paula went on her summer holiday yesterday. Where are you going? I asked. Malta, silly. She wears a gold cross around her neck – good Catholic girl. Her replacement is a male nurse called Gary – he has many lurid tattoos.

  The man I hate most is four beds along from me. His name is Ned Darwin but I refer to him as Mr No-Fuss. The nurses love him: he never complains, he always has a bright observation and a cheery smile for everyone, he seems to relish the food. He has had a stroke but can limp about fairly well with an arm-crutch. He knows all the nurses’ names. He came up to me on one particularly hot day and tapped my plaster leg. ‘Must be itching like crazy under there, I’11 warrant.’ He’s the type of man who uses phrases like I’ll warrant’, ‘yea or nay’ and ‘much obliged’. I told him to fuck off.

  I demanded to see some sort of managerial/administrative figure to protest about the absence of doors in the lavatories (a significant factor in our collective constipation problem, in my opinion). This was rocking the boat in a very unequivocal way and drew darker looks than usual from the nurses. A young, suited man eventually appeared and listened to what I had to tell him. ‘This measure is in place for your own safety, Logan,’ he said. I asked him to call me Mr Mountstuart, which he neglected to do, not employing any name thereafter. Nothing is going to happen: I have merely enhanced my reputation as a troublemaker.

  The description of the Pecksniff family’s trip to London in Martin Chuzzlewit (Chapters 8 and 9) is the greatest passage of comic writing in English Literature. Discuss.

  The drain has been removed from the area of my spleen. The ache in my leg seems reduced. No side effects so far from my fractured skull. I must have seen ten doctors since arriving here, each one taking up my case with no evidence of foreknowledge: ‘So, you were in some kind of a car crash?’, ‘Oh, I see you ruptured your spleen.’ I don’t blame them and I don’t blame the nurses. I hate living in this ghastly place – God knows what it must be like working here. The thought remains, however: there must be a better, more humane, more civilized way of looking after our sick and infirm. If the state is going to take the job on, then it has to be done in a wholehearted way: everyone is demeaned by this petty, vindictive, penny-pinching, care-less world.