Any Human Heart

by William Boyd

  Semi-recluse or not, LMS soon acquired a network of French friends and neighbours who were helpful and accommodating and contributed enormously to the quality of his thrifty life in rural France.

  The entries in the French Journal are very random, and undated, sometimes it appears that months had gone by without anything being recorded. The events concerning Mme Dupetit occurred largely between 1986 and 1988.

  Of all the wood I burn in my fire the logs from the cherry tree are the hardest. A solid cherry log seems almost as resistant to flame as concrete. Next, in order of difficult combustibility, come cedar, oak and elm. Bringing up the rear is pine – which burns too easily and leaves lots of ash. None of these woods spit, whereas acacia is deadly. Shortly after I had moved here I made the mistake of laying a fire with acacia logs. As the flames took hold the fire began to sound like downtown Beirut, snapping with sporadic gunshots. Then small hot coals would zip out of the fireplace like spent tracer. I eventually had to douse the whole thing with a bucket of water, thereby filling the room with a damp grey smoke. Never again.

  Reading Nabokov’s Ada: an intermittently brilliant but baffling book – an idée fixe on the rampage, leaving friendly readers stunned and exhausted behind. I have to say that as an admirer of style – a loaded word, but actually best thought of as a synonym for individuality – VN’s mannered artfulness, his refusal to let a sleeping word lie, becomes in this book more and more like a nervous tic than a natural, individual voice, however fruity and sonorous. The studied opulence, the ornament for the sake of ornament, grows wearing and one longs for a simple, elegant, discursive sentence. This is the key difference: in good prose precision must always triumph over decoration. Wilful elaboration is a sign that the stylist has entered a decadent phase. You cannot live on caviar and foie gras every day: sometimes a plain dish of lentils is all that the palate craves, even if one insists that the lentils come from Puy.

  Norbert drove me to VsL [Villeneuve-sur-Lot], where Francine received me with her usual glacial politesse in her bibelot-crammed apartment. We drank a glass of wine and proceeded to the bedroom. Alas, I came within seconds. She washed me off in the bidet –something I’ve always enjoyed – and then we lay around on the bed for half an hour, seeing if I would grow hard again. No luck, so a swift b.j. before I left. 500 francs – worth every brassy centime.

  [Norbert was Norbert Coin, Sainte-Sabine’s ambulance/taxi driver, LMS’s first local friend and ally. For the initial years of his stay LMS, on Norbert’s recommendation, visited this discreet forty-year-old housewife-prostitute every two to three months.]

  Strange late-afternoon sky – packed with clouds, all creased and gathered like grey linen or damask – and then, as the sun began to set, the light seemed to sluice through the folds, steeping the grey clouds in a fiery gold sunshine.

  The simple satisfactions of living in a republic. The plumber calls to fix the broken lavatory in the bothy. We shake hands, address each other as ‘monsieur’ and wish each other good day. He introduces me to his twelve-year-old son. Hands are shaken once more. At the end of the day he calls in to say everything is working. We share a glass of wine, talk about the weather, the prospects of a decent vintage this year, the proliferation of foxes in the neighbourhood. I shake his hand and his son’s and wish them good night and a ‘bon retour’.

  Lucy left yesterday – Norbert drove her to Toulouse to catch her plane. She asked if she might bring a friend next year and I said, of course. She’s heavy and florid but seems in pretty good health – good enough for her to take up smoking in her seventies. She insisted on paying me £200. Her friend is female, she assured me.

  General astonishment in the village at the unearthing of an old copy of Les Cosmopolites in Moncuq Public Library. Yes, that old geezer in Cinq Cyprès is a writer after all. The book is passed around amongst the people who know me like a holy relic.

  Mallowy red in the night sky tonight, just before dark, brilliantly offset by what can only be described as a stripe of pistachio green. I can think of any number of abstract painters who might have longed to re-create such a juxtaposition – it was gone within seconds. All the ‘shock’ effects of a century of abstract art have been quietly replicated somewhere or other in nature since time began. Walked out in the park among the trees with my glass of wine. Unusually, Bowser accompanied me, but always at a discreet distance, as if he wanted to keep an eye on me but not interrupt my thoughts.

  The depth of shade around the house is so dense and cool that to step into it from the sun on the hottest days is like entering a dark cellar. I remember Monsieur Polle advising me to take half the mature trees down. Thank God there are no conifers (I don’t count the cypresses) – conifers remind me of crematoria – grim associations with Putney Vale and Gloria’s funeral.

  Monsieur and Madame Mazeau’s silver wedding anniversary [they ran the Superette]. I was invited to the ‘cocktail’ in the Café de France – something of an honour, I think – perhaps Norbert’s doing (Lucette Mazeau is his sister). As we toasted the diffident couple I realized that here amongst their family, relations and neighbours was my new circle of friends – my new tertulia. Norbert, of course, and Claudine [his wife]; Jean-Robert [Stefanelli – who helped LMS with his garden]; Henri and Marie-Thérèse [Grossoleil – owners of the Café de France]; Lucien and Pierrette [Gorce – a farmer. LMS’s nearest neighbour]. Who else? I suppose Yannick Lefrère-Brunot [the local dentist and Mayor of Sainte-Sabine] and Didier Roisanssac [the doctor] would make up the numbers. I’m humbled by the uncomplicated welcome I’ve received here and I wonder would an elderly Frenchman be the recipient of similar friendliness should he decide to retire to Wiltshire or Yorkshire or Morayshire? Perhaps. Perhaps people are kinder everywhere than maps of the world would lead you to believe. We drank whisky and ate little cheese biscuits. Everyone was toasted several times. The success of my novel was devoutly wished and I felt truly happy for the first time in years. Such moments should be logged and noted. I miss nothing of my English life – I can’t imagine how I survived there after Nigeria. What was it Larry Durrell called the place? ‘Pudding Island’. I feel no desire to return to Pudding Island ever again. Quod sit, esse velit, nihilque malit [Who would be what he is, desiring nothing extra?]. Important to know that, when it happens.

  *

  If I were the President of France I would:

  (a) Offer tax relief to café owners to replace their plastic chairs with cane or wooden ones.

  (b) Ban the piped playing of Anglo-American rock music in the streets during markets or fetes. There can be nothing more alienating than walking round an ancient French town listening to hit-parade records bellowed out in English banalities.

  (c) Restrict each household to only one conifer per garden. Those who cut down a conifer and replace it with a deciduous tree to receive a 1,000 franc bonus.

  ‘My bowels and I never fail to keep our rendezvous.’ I am I suppose in fairly good health for a man of my age. My leg aches on cold days and from time to time the brown mist fogs my vision. But I still have energy and I sleep well, though less and less each year. My teeth are giving up the struggle and Yannick L-B has made me a snug top plate (free) that replaces all but two ancient worn-down molars. The bottom row seems fine for the moment. My hair appears to have stopped falling out and I’m debating whether to grow a beard – depends how white it is, I don’t want to look like Santa Claus. I eat two meals a day, breakfast and lunch, and drink wine and eat potato crisps at night. I feel the lean muscle mass on my body beginning to diminish – everything about my naked body looking slack and swagged. I’m probably as thin now as I was in my thirties. I think about what might carry me off and I have this feeling that something happened to my head in the crash that is lying dormant. The curious foxing of my area of vision is a portent of the way I will go. The overtaxed brain bursting into blood. Fast, though. Sudden darkness and then nothing.

  Out in the woods today looking for mushrooms with Lucien. His fac
e is seamed and weather-lashed and his hands are all callous – wholly impervious to extreme heat or cold. He’s fifty-six, but he looks older than me, wheezing and coughing as he pokes about the undergrowth. His family have been here for generations but he says his son has no interest in farming – he lives and works in a garage in Agen. Lucien shrugs: Les jeunes… A common sigh, hereabouts. But no doubt young Lucien Gorce caused his papa a few anxious moments himself. I calculate how old Lucien would have been during the Occupation (something I unreflectingly do with all elderly French people I meet). Lucien was born in 1928, so he would have been in his early teens during the war. We managed a rich haul of ceps and girolles. I will break my habit and make a mushroom omelette tonight.

  I telephoned Lucy from the post office [LMS only had a telephone installed in his house in 1987] to find out her flight details and arrange her collection from the airport. She said, ‘Wasn’t Peter Scabius a friend of yours?’ I confessed I was proud to consider Sir Peter as one of my oldest. ‘Not any more you’re not,’ she said, ‘he died last week.’

  I felt that instant empty feeling, an absence: like a brick removed from an already shaky wall and you wonder if the new weights and stresses on the other bricks will accommodate this sudden hole, if that redistribution will leave it standing or bring it down. The moment passed, but I felt somehow weaker, more ramshackle myself. I sensed that my life, my world, without Peter Scabius in it was a tottering, more jerry-built edifice all of a sudden.

  How did he die? I asked. ‘Pneumonia. He was in the Falklands.’ Don’t tell me, I said, he was researching a new novel. ‘How did you guess?’ Lucy said, incredulous and admiring. Researching a novel: how very Peter to want to write a novel about the Falklands War. So, Ben and Peter nous ont quittés as they say here, leaving me alone. Lucy said the newspapers were full of long obituaries and respectful assessments and I asked her to send them on. ‘Nobody mentions you,’ she said.

  Bowser is an undemonstrative dog, not requiring much affection day to day. However, every week or so, he will come and seek me out and, if I am sitting, he will place his jaw on my knee, or, if I am standing, he will butt me gently on the calves with his head. I know this means he wants some loving and so I scratch his ears, pat his sides and say to him all the silly nonsense that dog owners have regaled their dogs with through the ages: ‘Who’s a good old boy, then?’, ‘What a good dog!’, ‘Who’s the best dog in the world?’ After about a couple of minutes of this he will shake himself as if he’s just swum across a stream and wander off.

  The Olafsons are here for their third year running, taking the bothy for a month this time. The sun was hammering down when they arrived, and we sat on the lawn at the back of my house in the shade of the big chestnut and drank cold white wine. They couldn’t hide their excitement and pleasure at being here in the warm south, saying there had been a ground frost in Reykjavik the night they’d left. I told them I had visited their home town once (I don’t know why I had never mentioned it before, I said). Then they asked me what had taken me to Reykjavik and, as I began to explain, the reason for my reticence became all too obvious. I was telling them about Freya and Gunnarson and the war and how Freya had thought I was dead when the tears started to creep down my cheeks unprompted. I wasn’t feeling grief: that hellish chest-crammed agony you feel – but some portion of my brain activated by the memory decided to trigger the tear ducts. They were looking at me, shocked. I said it had all been very sad and tried to change the subject, talking about some new restaurant that had opened in the neighbourhood. But I wept again when they left and I felt the better for it – weakened and purged. I went inside and looked at Freya’s and Stella’s photographs. Freya and Stella. That was my good luck; those were my lucky years and I can’t complain. Some people never have any luck in their lives and during the years I loved Freya and she loved me I was awash in it. And then the bad luck came back.

  That’s all your life amounts to in the end: the aggregate of all the good luck and the bad luck you experience. Everything is explained by that simple formula. Tot it up – look at the respective piles. There’s nothing you can do about it: nobody shares it out, allocates it to this one or that, it just happens. We must quietly suffer the laws of man’s condition, as Montaigne says.

  Spent half an hour staring mesmerized at the shape of water pouring out of the overflowing pond by the big oak at the meadow’s edge. Somehow a large stone had become wedged in the outlet and the water ran over it, smooth and glazed like an inverted bowl or the boss of some great wheel. I dipped a stick in the water and allowed the drops to fall from its end on to this globey running flow, sowing the smooth shoulder of water with seeds of dry quicksilver drops –which instantly disappeared, making no impression on the burnished surface.

  Major building work going on at La Sapinière and Sainte-Sabine is abuzz with speculation. The house has been empty – apart from the caretakers – for fifteen years since the last tenants left. La Sapinière is an elegant chartreuse about two miles away from me, hidden behind stone walls higher than a man’s head. I hope the new owners aren’t British – most of the Brits seem congregated around Montaigu de Quercy way. There’s a sculptor on the other side of Sainte-Sabine, an Englishman called Carlyle, who makes sculptures out of old farm machinery – but he’s even more of a recluse than me. When our paths cross in the market or the pharmacy we feign convincing ignorance of each other.

  Hard frost today, then a slow foggy thaw, the trees in the park spectral, fuzzy constructions – almost artificial looking – as the enveloping fog hid the twigs and finer branches leaving only the massy ones visible to the eye. A child’s version of trees.

  All day a song has been going round and round my head. An old song, pre-war. Something about the tune makes it naggingly hard to forget.

  Life is short

  Something, something,

  We’re all getting older

  So don’t be an also ran,

  Something, something,

  Dance little man,

  Dance whenever you can

  Dance little man. So I shall.

  A curdled, mealy sky this afternoon, slowly breaking up as the evening advanced to a brightening blue, but hazy.

  The new chatelaine at La Sapinière is one Madame Dupetit – from Paris, no less. Unmarried? Divorced? She is alone, it seems, with no children and a great deal of money. The old caretakers have been let go and a new couple installed from Agen while the renovation work goes on.

  May. The first summer-feeling of the year. Verges pricked with primroses. Fat loafy clouds laze idly across the valley. My favourite month, the countryside fresh with the unreal new green of the leaves on the trees. Bees swarm in the roof of Cinq Cyprès and die in their thousands in the upper rooms. I sweep up spadefuls, even though I leave the windows open. Bees appear to be very stupid insects at swarming time, ignoring the open window and battering futilely at the glass panes of the closed ones, until they fall to the ground and die of exhaustion. They seem to regain their senses and calm down once the comb is built and the search for pollen begins.

  Tremendous heat today, like August – caniculaire, as they describe them here: the dog-days. But there are no dog-days in May, everything is growing with all its might. But in August when the vegetation is on the turn and the nights begin to draw in, ever so slowly, then that heat weakens and depresses you, the sun seems baleful, crushing.

  But now even Bowser seeks out a patch of sunshine to sleep in. He lies there sprawled, a leg twitching as he chases dream sheep or butterflies. Hodge steps lightly by and she looks at him with curiosity and a little disdain.

  I was walking into Sainte-Sabine when a steel-blue Mercedes-Benz estate pulled up beside me. There was a woman driving and she offered me a lift into the village. We introduced ourselves but I knew before she told me her name that she was Madame Dupetit from La Sapinière. She has greyish-blonde hair and very pale skin, almost Nordic, and would be an attractive woman if there was not something tight-
lipped and reserved about her features, as if determined to deny any sensual or frivolous nature she might have. She was well and expensively dressed, her hair up in a loose chignon, fingers and wrists discreetly but richly jewelled. She was down from Paris to inspect the work, hoping to move in before August – I must come over for an aperitif once she was properly installed. Gladly, I said. She plans to spend only the summers here – perhaps a visit at Easter. She was in the antiques trade, she told me, and had a small shop in the rue Bonaparte. Yes, of course she knew Leeping Frères. I explained my old connection with the firm. By the time I climbed out of her car by the post office we were fairly well informed about each other. I was quizzed pretty thoroughly at the Café de France by Henri and Marie-Thérèse. There is much curiosity about the elegant Madame Dupetit. No one has quite got her number yet.

  This year Lucy seems older, more tired. Her friend, Molly, confided her worries to me. She had a bad fall in the spring and knocked herself out for a few minutes. The fall seems to have mysteriously sapped her energy – shaken her up in some fundamental way. One day she was in my study looking through the bookshelves for something to read. She saw the cardboard boxes full of my papers and manuscripts and she asked me what was going to happen to them.