by William Boyd
‘That’s really none of your business,’ John said. He was a genuinely handsome man, with dark heavy eyebrows over olive-green eyes. ‘Let’s put it this way,’ he said, what we’re interested in is “intervention”. When we see a state of affairs we disapprove of, we intervene in some way – supporting a strike, exposing fascist lies, donating money and aid to good causes. Intervention can take many forms. We demonstrate, we protest, we give support to the downtrodden and the put upon. And all this costs money, the money we earn selling our newspaper.’ He had a soft, educated voice and as he spoke these words to me he gestured for a cigarette and Roth immediately rummaged in her pockets looking for one. John put it in his mouth unlit and I wondered if it were Brownwell’s or Halliday’s job to step forward with a match, but he lit it himself after a minute or so.
I said I was interested and they asked me to wait outside.
I stood in the hall and heard footsteps and voices from the upstairs rooms and soon two men came down and passed me at the front door without a glance on their way out. One of them was an Arab. After ten minutes or so I was called back in. Brownwell looked sulky and unfriendly and I suspected she had voted against me.
‘Welcome to the SPK,’ John said and handed me a bundle of a hundred newspapers.
Wednesday, 2 March
This morning’s first post has brought the truly shocking news of Ben’s death. Sandrine wrote that it had been blessedly sudden, in the end. There is to be a small ceremony at a synagogue in Paris and she very much hopes that I can come. I’ll write back pleading ill-health.
Seeing the word ‘synagogue’ gave me pause, reminding me after all these years of indifference that Ben had been a Jew. An English Jew who had contrived to live almost all his adult life out of England. Was Ben the wisest of the three of us?
What can I say? Ben was three months younger than me – my oldest, truest friend, I suppose – though as time went by we saw less and less of each other. After the falling-out with Marius there grew up an awkwardness between us. And Sandrine, naturally, listened to her son’s version of events. Ben didn’t want to alienate his wife – so the easy solution was to keep Mountstuart at a distance. But Ben came to my rescue after Freya’s death and it was Ben who established me in New York. Impossible to imagine my life without that crucial help – but he persistently refused my gratitude. Always remember those paintings you brought back from Spain, he said. They were the key to both our futures. Who knows? The view back is always blessed with 20/20 vision and from that perspective it seems that – bizarrely, absurdly – it was thanks to a Spanish anarchist in Barcelona in 1937 that both Ben Leeping and Logan Mountstuart were able to make their way in the world. Is this the way it works? Is this the truth about the life-game?
Saturday, 26 March
I say it with some pride but in a remarkably short period of time I have established myself as the SPK’s prize newspaper-seller. Last week I sold 323 copies – £64.60. 10 per cent of this goes to me, in theory, but John was less than candid: the rate is 10 per cent up to a ceiling of £5. So there is no incentive for me to sell more. Perhaps if the entrepreneurial spirit burned brighter in him he’d let me sell as many as I could and take my profit. Not the SPK ethos, however.
At the end of each week the vendors foregather at Napier Street and hand over their takings. Some of us are invited to stay on for a drink at a truly horrible pub in Stockwell called the Prizefighter. There is a far nicer one across the street called the Duke of Cambridge, but John refuses to patronize pubs with royal or aristocratic appellations as a matter of principle. ‘It’s an act of deference on the part of the brewers,’ he argues, ‘and why should I be part of that? No drinkers ever choose the name of the pub they frequent and where they spend their money.’ He has a point, I suppose.
Yesterday was the second Friday that I was invited to the Prizefighter with the SPK Working Circle (Communications). The usual quartet was present: John, Roth, Brownwell and Halliday – but this time we were joined by a German who was introduced as Reinhard. Roth – whose Christian name is Anna – is open and friendly; Brownwell (Tina) is terser and more guarded; Halliday (Ian) keeps his counsel – he has an adulatory reverence for John. As a matter of interest ‘John’ is not a surname, it’s John’s Christian name. His full name is John Vivian and obviously he doesn’t want his co-workers to refer to him as Vivian. I am always Mountstuart – though yesterday Anna asked me my first name. It’s all very public-schooly, this use of surnames. I shall work on breaking them down.
[NOTE IN RETROSPECT. The name SPK was taken as direct hommage to a radical left-wing group in Germany founded in 1970 at Heidelberg University by Dr Wolfgang Huber. Huber had aligned the SPK to the Baader-Meinhof terrrorist group in 1971. John Vivian had known Huber and had established the English chapter of the SPK as an act of solidarity when Huber was arrested and imprisoned (the concept of ‘working circles’ was pure Huber). Vivian maintained close links with German radicals – there were often Germans staying at Napier Street – but I was never able to identify them properly.
Vivian had read philosophy at Cambridge in the late sixties and had been arrested by the police at the notorious Garden House Hotel protest in Cambridge in 1968, spending two days in police cells before being released with a caution. The trauma of this episode had driven him to the far revolutionary left (he always claimed close links with the Angry Brigade, Britain’s short-lived urban terrorist cell of the early seventies). Vivian had left Cambridge without completing his degree and had travelled first to Paris and thence to Heidelberg, where he came under Huber’s messianic sway. He was thirty-one years old when I met him.]
Friday, 8 April
Delivered my takings to Napier Street. The mood was frosty, tense – even by Napier Street standards. Brownwell and John very cold – and I’d sold almost 300 copies. I handed over the money and received not a word of thanks as a five-pound note was thrust at me. I needed to go to the toilet and asked if there was one I could use. Ian Halliday showed me up to the first floor and pointed to a doorway. I entered what was obviously some sort of communal bedroom, one where the walls of the adjacent bathroom had been ripped down to expose the sink, bath and WC. Anna Roth was sitting on the toilet when I went in. ‘Sorry!’ I called and turned about to leave. ‘Don’t worry, Logan,’ she said. ‘Just having a crap. Nearly finished.’ I turned again to see her stand up and wipe her bottom and wheeled round to the window to stare at the waste-land garden below. I heard the lavatory flush. She was keen to talk and wouldn’t leave the room so I had to pee with her standing behind me chatting as she rolled a cigarette. I am irreducibly bourgeois, I’m afraid. She said John was in a filthy mood: something that had happened in Karlsruhe, in Germany,3 she said. He kept making cryptic phone calls.
For some reason I thought up a title for my autobiography, if I ever write it. It was something I remembered remarking on in New York. I went to the theatre (what did I see?) and I noticed on the ground floor a door with an exit sign above it and, written just below the sign, the words: THIS IS NOT AN EXIT. It all depends on the book cover, I suppose (always a bad sign to be planning the cover before you’ve written the book), but you could have a photograph of an exit sign and then underneath: ‘This is not an Exit – an autobiography by Logan Mountstuart’. I’m pleased with this idea.
Monday, 9 May
I picked up my new batch of one hundred newspapers this morning. Anna (we’re on first-name terms now) made me a cup of coffee. She whispered to me that John Vivian hadn’t left his room for a week. ‘Very depressed,’ she said. By what? ‘By the Stammheim4 verdict.’ Reinhard, the German, wandered into the kitchen. He seems an innocuous fellow, fair-haired, bearded, not much to say for himself.
[NOTE IN RETROSPECT. I now wonder if ‘Reinhard’ might actually have been Dr Wolfgang Huber himself. He was released from prison in 1977 and ‘went underground’. Perhaps he’d come to England to check on his SPK foundling. Just a hunch.]
While he was making h
imself some sort of herbal tea, Anna – without a trace of embarrassment – asked me what I had done in the war. Well, I said, since you ask, I was in the Naval Intelligence Division, I said. Does that mean you were a spy? I suppose so, I admitted. She was very impressed and even Reinhard seemed interested. He asked if I’d known Kim Philby.5 I said, no – and then John Vivian himself appeared, looking grumpy. Guess what, John? Anna said, Logan was a spy in the war. Vivian looked at me keenly and without warmth: well, well, well, he said, who’s a dark horse, then?
My newspaper-selling technique is thoroughly tried and tested now. I wear a suit and tie and, unlike my fellow vendors, I never frequent the working-class pubs where they make their modest sales. I go to London University colleges, art schools and polytechnics. Gower Street, around University College and its student union, is my best patch. I try to prowl the cafeterias and refectories at lunchtime. This is the only newspaper in the country that will tell you the whole truth,’ is my sales pitch. And in actual fact The Situation is not a bad newspaper, of its type. Tina Brownwell writes about 90 per cent of it; John Vivian chooses the headlines and sets the tone of the editorials. The most amusing and interesting section is Tina’s analysis of other newspapers’ reporting, pointing out the pro-Zionist bias or the crypto-American line as she finds them. There is a long editorial, usually, heavy on political theory (which I find unreadable), with strident headlines of the ‘Capitalism Must Finance its Own Overthrow’ or ‘Criminal Action is Political Action’ variety.
My fiver a week has become something of a welfare lifeline to me and I probably don’t need to rely on my dog-food stews for sustenance any more – though I must say I’ve developed a real taste for Bowser’s rabbit chunklets with – a new refinement – a pinch of curry powder judiciously stirred in.
Tuesday, 31 May
I’ve just had lunch with Gail. We ate in the restaurant of her hotel off Oxford Street; her husband did not join us. She had written to me and said she was coming to London and could we meet, giving me her dates and urging me to telephone: ‘Please, Logan, please.’
So I did, and went to meet little Gail, whom I loved so, and found that she has turned into a brisk, unsmiling woman with dyed blonde hair and a bad smoking habit. I would say that she was not happy in her marriage – but what do I know, the marriage-expert? Just occasionally the old Gail would flash from her – a rare smile, and once when she pointed her fork at me and said, ‘You know, Mom was such an asshole.’ I said I was fine, no really, life was OK, I was coping, writing a new novel, no, fine, fine, really fine. When we parted she held on to me tight and said, ‘I love you, Logan. Don’t let’s lose touch.’ I couldn’t stop the tears and neither could she, so she lit a cigarette and I said it looked like rain wasn’t far off, and somehow we managed to part.
As I write this I feel that draining, hollowing helplessness that genuine love for another person produces in you. It’s at these moments that we know we are going to die. Only with Freya, Stella and Gail. Only three. Better than none.
Saturday, 4 June
I was sitting in the Park Café today having a cup of tea and a Penguin biscuit, reading someone’s discarded Guardian, when I came across the news of Peter Scabius’s knighthood for ‘services to literature’. To be candid, I felt a pang of envy before indifference and reality closed in again. It was not so much envy, in fact (I’ve never envied Peter’s success – he’s too much of a fraud and an egomaniac to provoke real envy), it was more an impromptu insight into my condition vis-à-vis his. I suddenly saw myself – in this threadbare shiny suit, with my unironed nylon shirt and greasy tie, with my thinning grey hair needing a wash – as a truly pathetic figure. Here I was, well into my seventies, sitting in this undistinguished, overlit caff, sipping my tea and dunking my Penguin biscuit, wondering if I can afford a pint at the Cornwallis this evening. This was not the image of my elderly self that I had conceived when I was younger; this was not the kind of old age I had imagined I would be living. But then I never saw myself as a Peter Scabius-type either: Sir Logan Mountstuart talked to us today from his lovely home in the Cayman Islands… That was never for me, never. What was for you, then, Mountstuart? What fond vision of the future warmed your soul?
I haven’t worked on Octet for months. I’ve been distracted by the SPK and my paper round. But, in the end, the work – the oeuvre – is everything: that’s my reply. The books are there in the copyright libraries, if nowhere else. I must press on with Octet, I now see – surprise them all.
Monday, 6 June
When I went to pick up my hundred Situations today John Vivian asked me to come upstairs – wanted a little chat. Tina was there and Ian Halliday too. We sat in a room with two television sets; the mood was solemn but not unfriendly. ‘We want to thank you for your work, Mountstuart,’ Vivian said. ‘You’ve been most useful.’ Then all three of them stepped forward and shook my hand. Not for the first time I wondered where all the cash I made for them went. Anyway, Vivian said that, because of my staunch efforts, he thought the time had come to inaugurate me into ‘Working Circle – Direct Action’ and was I prepared to accept the extra duties (I’d still be flogging newspapers). He explained that in ‘Working Circle – Direct Action’ I would be going on demonstrations, joining picket lines and attending all forms of protest. I would carry an SPK placard mounted on a pole and would hand out SPK flysheets, try to recruit members and sell subscriptions for The Situation. There was a bus drivers’ strike in Oldham currently going on, Vivian said, and there was a demonstration planned for next week outside the town hall. Was I ready to go? I can’t afford to travel to Oldham, I said. ‘We’ll pay for you to be there,’ Vivian said with a tolerant smile, ‘all reasonable expenses provided. And if there’s a press photographer in sight make sure you get that SPK sign in the frame.’
[NOTE IN RETROSPECT. Thus it was that in the summer of 1977 I travelled surprisingly widely (by bus) throughout the British Isles in my capacity as member of the SPK’s Working Circle – Direct Action. After Oldham I went to Clydeside, after Clydeside I was on the pavement opposite Downing Street for five days. Striking dye-stampers in Swansea, fishermen in Stonehaven, sweatshops in Brick Lane – I was there. You may even have seen glimpses of me on the television news or in the background of newspaper photographs: the tall elderly man in the dark suit and tie, wielding the SPK placard, being jostled by policemen, shouting abuse at Margaret Thatcher, jeering at scabs in buses. In between times I sold The Situation and lived my simple but now committed life, shuttling between Turpentine Lane, the public library, the Corn-wallis and the Park Café. I no longer complained about my lot – I felt I was doing something at last.]
Thursday, 8 September
I’m in the Cornwallis this evening enjoying a half pint of Extra Strength lager and a small schooner of Bristol Cream sherry (for any impoverished, committed boozer this combination will work wonders, I guarantee – you don’t want to drink another drop of alcohol and you sleep like a baby) when, to my genuine astonishment, John Vivian comes in.
He sits down opposite me, looking dark-eyed and agitated. I have to say the mood of the Napier Street Mob has changed these last few weeks. Ian Halliday has gone away, Tina hardly speaks and Anna seems close to tears all the time. I think Vivian may have started an affair with Anna – anyway, I believe ‘strung out’ is the correct term to describe their demeanour. The last issue of The Situation had shrunk to four pages – more of a pamphlet than a newspaper – and half of it was an incoherent editorial by Vivian about ‘Isolation Torture in West Germany’. Most of the rest was a badly translated article written by Ulrike Meinhof in 1969. I made the point that this issue was going to be almost impossible to sell on the streets of London and Tina Brownwell screamed at me, calling me a fifth-columnist and a scab. Luckily for everyone some German industrialist was kidnapped on Monday6 and the event managed to raise enough interest for me to sell over a hundred copies.
Now Vivian leans towards me and offers me a cigarette (no th
anks) and another drink (no thanks) and asks me if he can have my newspaper money now. It’s back at my flat, I say. I was going to bring it along tomorrow as usual. I need it now, he says.
So Vivian comes back to Turpentine Lane with me but won’t follow me inside. I fetch the money and hand it over, asking for a receipt. ‘Still that shopkeeper mentality, eh, Mountstuart?’ he says, with a thin smile. But he signs my docket all the same and strides off into the night. It must be drugs: I think they use the newspaper money to buy drugs.
Monday, 12 September
Maybe I’m wrong. Vivian was his usual cool sardonic self when I picked up the new issue today (which was still on the thin side, still largely devoted to the doings of the radical left in West Germany). There was no sign of Anna or Tina. Unusually, Vivian offered me a drink, a whisky, which I decided to accept this time. We had a peculiar conversation.
ME: So – what was your college at Cambridge?
VIVIAN: Gonville and Caius. Why?
ME: I was at Oxford. Jesus College.
VIVIAN: Look at us, Mountstuart, the flower of the nation. You were reading English, no doubt.
ME: History, actually.
VIVIAN: What do you think about what’s going on in Germany?
ME: I think it’s complete madness. Delusion. Violence isn’t going to change a thing.
VIVIAN: Wrong. Anyway, it’s not violence. It’s counter-violence. Big difference.
ME: If you say so.
VIVIAN: You ever been in prison, Mountstuart?
