2002 - Any human heart

by William Boyd

  Went for a walk through Edgbaston, already consumed with boredom, and looked in vain at the big houses and villas for any sign of individual spirit. The Christmas tree must surely be the saddest and most vulgar object invented by mankind. Needless to say we have a giant one in the conservatory, its tip bent over by the glass ceiling. Popped into a cinema and saw thirty minutes of Bride Fever. Left overwhelmed with lust for Rosemary Chance. Thank God Lucy arrives the day after tomorrow. I shall kiss her this holiday or else become a monk.

  24 December 1923

  Xmas eve. Lucy says she wants to go to Edinburgh University to read archaeology. I asked, are there any women archaeologists? And she said, well, at least there’ll be one. She is beautiful—to my eyes, anyway—tall and strong, and I love her accent.↓

  ≡ Lucy Sansom, LMS’s first cousin, was one year older than he. Her mother, Jennifer Mountstuart, had married Horace Sansom, an engineer from Perth, Scotland. Horace Sansom was currently working for the Bengal Railway Services, hence Lucy’s presence at her uncle and aunt’s at Christmas 1923.

  Though I do miss her long hair. My mother said, contrariwise, that she thought Lucy’s bob was ‘tres mignonne’.

  §

  Wrote to Scabius and Leeping suggesting possible challenges. I also declared that we should call each other by our Christian names next term and make a point, publicly, of doing so. I signed off ‘Logan’, with a small thrill of revolutionary pleasure: who can know where these gestures of independent spirit may lead? I’m sure they’ll both agree. Mother has just put her head around the door (without knocking) to remind me that father’s colleagues are due shortly for the ritual Xmas eve cocktail party: tense, ill-at ease managers and under-managers who possess a sole topic of conversation, namely, the canning and conservation of beef products. And so the long hell of Christ’s Mass begins. Thank God for Lucy, once again. Delectable, adorable, difficult Lucy.

  1924

  1 January 1924

  It is 2.30 a.m. and I am tight. As a tick, as a lord, as a newt. Must write this down before the sublime memories fade and blur.

  We went to the golf club for the New Year’s Eve dance. Mother, Father, Lucy and me. A bad meal (lamb) followed by dancing to a surprisingly good band. I drank copious amounts of wine and fruit cup. Lucy and I danced a kind of quick-step (all those embarrassing and costly lessons from Leeping paid off: I was fine). I had forgotten how tall she was in her high heels—our eyes were level. We left when the band struck up a tango and my mother led my father to the floor to general applause.

  Outside on the terrace overlooking the first tee and the eighteenth green we each smoked a cigarette, commented briefly on the drabness of the venue, the gratifying expertise of the band, the unseasonal warmth of the night. Then Lucy tossed her cigarette into the dark and turned to face me. Our conversation went something like this, as far as I can remember:

  §

  LUCY: I suppose you’ll be wanting to kiss me now.

  ME: Ah…Yes. Please.

  LUCY: I’ll kiss you but I won’t marry you.

  MB: Lucy, I’m not even eighteen yet.

  LUCY: That doesn’t matter. I know that’s what you’re thinking.

  But I just want to let you know that I’m never going to marry anyone. Never. Not you, not anyone.

  §

  I said nothing, wondering hpw she knew my most secret fantasies, most private dreams. And so I kissed her, Lucy Sansom, the first girl I’ve ever kissed. Her lips were soft, my lips were soft, the sensation was…a kind of fleshy softness, not at all unlike the practice kisses I have bestowed on the inner portion of my upper arm or the crook of my elbow. It was pleasant—and the sense of otherness was nice, that there were two people involved in this process, that we were each giving something to the other (this is a bad sentence and is not making much sense, I’m afraid).

  And then she stuck her tongue in my mouth and I thought I would explode. Our tongues touching, my tongue on her teeth. Suddenly I understood what all the fuss over kissing a girl was about.

  After about five minutes of more or less uninterrupted kissing Lucy said we should stop and we went back in, separately, Lucy first, then me after a gap long enough to take a few puffs at a nervous, exulting, trembling cigarette. The golf club crowd were gathered round the bandstand, as there were three or four minutes left until midnight. I was in a kind of daze and couldn’t see Lucy anywhere. My mother beckoned me over (actually, Mother was looking her best, I now think, the red dress suited her new, lustrous hair). As I reached her, she took my hand, drawing me to her and whispering in my ear, ‘Querido, have you been making love to your cousin?’ How does she know these things? How can women tell?

  And now to bed and the first pleasuring of 1924—and dreams of sweet Lucy.

  3 January [1924]

  Curiously, annoyingly, Lucy has not let me kiss her again. I asked her why and she said, ‘Too much, too soon.’ Mystifying. Leeping and Scabius have replied to my letters and the respective spring term challenges begin to take shape. Scabius wrote that he and Leeping had come up with a ‘particularly taxing’ challenge for me and I should ‘prepare for an interesting and strenuous term’.

  This afternoon I played golf with Father, reluctantly, but he was unusually insistent that we go out and get some fresh air. The day was cold and blustery and we were practically alone on the second course. The greens were mossy and hairy—‘The particular stringencies of winter greens,’ Father said, as I missed a is-inch putt—and we were obliged to place all fairway balls. I hacked around erratically while father played his usual cautious and precise game, ‘playing for par’, and won comfortably, eight up and six to play. We walked in the last six holes, chatting inconsequentially—about the weather, about the possibility of a return trip to Uruguay, what colleges at Oxford I was thinking of applying for and so on. As we strolled up the side of the eighteenth fairway towards the clubhouse (I could see the small terrace on which Lucy and I had kissed), he stopped and touched my arm.

  ‘Logan,’ he said, ‘there’s something you must know.’

  I said nothing but I thought at once, for some reason, of financial ruin. I could see Oxford evanesce and melt as if it had been an ice-sculpture left outside in the blazing sun. But my father made, no move to continue the conversation, merely stroked his moustache and looked solemn, and I realized he was waiting for the symbolic and rhetorical reply.

  So I dutifully said, ‘What is it, Father?’

  ‘I’m not well,’ he said. ‘It seems…It seems I may not live very long.’

  I was useless. What is one to say in these circumstances? I muttered something vaguely negative: surely not; how can you be; there must be some other—but I felt more shocked by my absence of shock: it was as if he had said we must get someone in to help with the gardening. As I think about it now I still can’t really believe it: that stark announcement of a future fact has a tenuous hold on the present moment—its potential reality seems virtually ungraspable. It’s as if someone had said to me, equally soberly, your hair will fall out before you’re thirty, or, you’ll never earn more than a thousand pounds a year. However alarming these prognostications are, they have no real impact as you stand there hearing them, they remain for ever, ineffably hypothetical. And this is how I felt, how I feel, about Father’s announcement of his impending death: it has no meaning. It has no meaning for me at all despite the fact that he went on at some length about his will, his small fortune, how Mother and I would be well provided for, all necessary provisions made. And, moreover, now I should be a support and a calming presence for my mother. I hung my head and nodded, but it was more dutiful than sincere. When he finished speaking, he offered his hand and I shook it. His hand was dry and smooth, his grip surprisingly strong. We walked back to the clubhouse in silence.

  §

  This evening before dinner I kissed Lucy on the landing outside the airing cupboard. She did not resist. We used tongues and this time I put my arms around her and held her
body against mine in a hug. She’s a big, solid girl. When I tried to touch her breasts she pushed me away easily, but I saw she was flushed and excited and her chest moved with the intensity of her breathing. I told her I was in love with her and she laughed. We’re first cousins, she said, it’s illegal, we’re committing incest. She goes back up north tomorrow—how will I live without her?

  §

  At dinner tonight I looked across the table at my father as he sawed lumps of mutton off the slices of joint on his plate and popped them in his mouth, chewing vigorously—at least there seemed nothing wrong with his appetite. Perhaps it is too gloomy a prognosis? He’s a sober and cautious man, Father, and it would be entirely in his nature to read too much into a doctor’s professional circumlocutions. My mother, I noticed, seemed oblivious, chatting away to Lucy, showing her some new nacreous paint with which she had decorated her fingernails. But perhaps she didn’t know? But if she was meant to be in the dark, wouldn’t Father have said something to me about keeping the matter between ourselves?

  After dinner Lucy and I played Splash while Mother and Father listened to music on the gramophone and Father smoked his quotidian cigar. When Mother left the room I followed her and asked her if Father was all right.

  ‘Of course he is. As fit as ten fiddles. Why you asking, Logan, querido?’

  ‘I thought he seemed a bit tired at golf today.’

  ‘Listen, he’s no more such a young man. Did you beat him?’

  ‘No, actually, he won easily.’

  ‘The day he lose to you at golf, my darling, is the day I start to worrying.’

  §

  So that was that, and now I sit in my hideous brown and silver bedroom reassured by the famous ‘golf test’ for determining your state of health. Down the corridor Lucy lies in her bed—is she thinking of me, I wonder, as I think of her? I think I truly love her, not for her beauty so much as for her honesty, her strength of character, so much stronger than mine. Perhaps that’s why I’m drawn to her so: I sense my own flaws and failings so acutely and I feel I need Lucy’s strength to compensate—to help me thrive and flourish, to achieve everything I know I am capable of achieving.

  [late January 1924]

  Filthy school and filthy weather. I have consulted separately with Scabius and Leeping—sorry, Peter and Ben—and we will announce the challenges to each other at brew after second prep.

  Holden-Dawes summoned me to him at the end of History this afternoon and asked what colleges I was thinking of applying to at Oxford. I told him it was a toss up between Balliol and Christ Church and he gave me one of his sardonic smiles and counselled against both. But Scabius is trying for a Balliol scholarship, I reminded him. And you are, of course, the chummiest of chums, H-D said, adding that this was not a tactically sound reason for applying for an Oxford scholarship. He looked at me silently for a while and then prodded his pen in my direction several times as if he’d come to an earth-shattering decision.

  ‘I see you in the Turl,’ he said, ‘not the Broad or the High.’

  ‘And where are these places situated, sir?’ I queried.

  ‘They are streets in Oxford, Mpuntstuatt. Yes, I see you nicely ensconced in one of those charming smaller colleges on the Turl—Exeter or Lincoln. No, even Jesus. I’ve an old acquaintance at Jesus who could be helpful—yes, one of those will be ideal. Not Balliol or the House for you, Mountstuart, no, no, no. Trust me.’

  He went on in this annoying, slightly patronizing vein for a while, saying he would have a word with the Lizard↓ about it, adding that there were some very ‘gettable’ scholarships and exhibitions at Lincoln, Exeter and Jesus that he thought were well within my capabilities.

  ≡ Henry Soutar, LMS’s housemaster, a sexagenarian, not much liked by LMS and his set and dubbed ‘The Lizard’ because of his exceptionally seamed and wattled race.

  I had no idea what he was talking about, unable to identify any Oxford colleges apart from the famous ones, as I’d only been to Oxford ‘once when I was about twelve. However, I’m now not sure whether to be pleased or irritated by H-D’s interest in me—it’s most unusual that he concerns himself with any individual’s future. Have I, perhaps, become a favourite?

  §

  Later. The challenges. They are cads and villains, Scabius and Leeping—they do not deserve the intimacies of a Christian name after what they have done to me. Mind you, we were all pretty taken aback at what we’d thought up for each other. The term will certainly be an interesting one and not without humour. And one more thing is dear—we know each other very well. So, the challenges—I’ll save mine till the end. First Ben Leeping. Scabius had this idea that I endorsed enthusiastically and immediately. Leeping—the Jew—has to become a Roman Catholic but, better still, has to be considered as fit for the priesthood. Leeping was, to put it mildly, somewhat shocked when we told him. ‘Bastards,’ he said several times, ‘absolute bastards.’

  As for Scabius’s challenge, this was my idea, not Leeping’s, though Leeping was quick to see its merits. Near the school is the Home Farm, a place we often walk by and occasionally visit (it forms part of our curricular activities, particularly biology). The farm manager’s name is Clough and he has a daughter (as well as a couple of strapping sons). We had spotted this girl a few times working around the farm buildings—carrying pails, driving cattle—and established her as the child of the Cloughs. She looks to be about nineteen or twenty, a sturdy small girl with a mass of crinkly brown hair that she tries vainly to keep hidden under a succession of head scarves. Our challenge to Scabius—lanky, shy, introverted Peter Scabius—is to seduce her: a witnessed kiss will be the ultimate test. Peter laughed out loud when we told him—actually, his laugh sounded like a terrified neigh, like a donkey being tortured—and he refused to accept the challenge on the grounds that it was a sick joke, impossible, dangerous, potentially illegal. But we were implacable and, reluctantly, he agreed.

  And then they told me what my challenge was, and I felt the same cry of ‘No!’

  ‘Impossible!’

  ‘Unfair!’ rising up within me. My task was to win my school colours for rugby before the term had ended. I not only had to become a member of the First XV, I also had to flourish and shine within it.

  The point is, and this is where I feel I have been hard done by, that we in our set have a loathing for organized school sports—it is one of the key factors that binds and draws us together. For Scabius sport presents no problems as he is wholly and utterly unsuited to it—he is uncoordinated, weak, inept—he could not kick a ball against a barn, let alone a bam door. Both Leeping and I have avoided the worst of this sports-mad school by carefully nurturing feigned illnesses: Leeping has migraines, I have a bad back. In this way, as far as rugby is concerned, the most and the worst I have to do is turn out once a week for the House XV in the school leagues. I play on the right wing: if I’m lucky an entire game can go by without my touching a ball or dirtying my knees.

  But as I sit here now—and I imagine Peter and Ben contemplating their own tasks—a small, acute thrill of excitement runs through me. This is, in effect, exactly what the challenges were designed to do: we had to manipulate our penultimate, dreariest term of our school life into something more exciting and edifying. And who knows what gems we will provide for our Livre d’Orl

  Wednesday [23 January 1924]

  The Lizard summoned me into his study tonight. He was drinking sherry from a tumbler and spent about ten minutes trying to light one of his biggest pipes—he must have had a couple of fistfuls of tobacco crammed into that bowl. Once he’d got the thing going (the air blue with smoke, sparks rising as he tamped down, with some sort of penknife device, his fuming shag), he said that H-D had spoken to him about Oxford and he—the Lizard—thought it an excellent idea that I try for the Griffud Rhys Bowen history scholarship at Jesus College, to which end he asked me if I had any Welsh blood in my veins. I said not as far as I knew, but there was Scottish family on my father’s side. ‘Ah,
well,’ he said, ‘you Celts seem to stick together. You’ll probably be fine.’ He really is a loathsome old bigot.

  25 January [1924]

  Preliminary moves. The three of us went down to the Home Farm at afternoon break Boys were encouraged to visit and ‘lend a hand’, as and when Clough (a solemn, dour man with half a mouthful of brown teeth) deemed it necessary. He met us in the farmyard and said bluntly that there wasn’t much call for help in January but, now we were asking, we could muck out the stables of his plough horses, seeing as his Tess was at the dentist in Norwich.

  Tess! We could hardly keep our faces straight when, armed with shovels and pitchforks, we were led round to the stables, where half a dozen massive shire-horses stamped and chewed and swished their tails. As soon as Clough left so did Ben and I, leaving lovelorn Peter to await the return of the beautiful and mysterious Tess.

  28 January [1924]

  After Greek this morning I approached Younger, who is in the First XV, and, as casually as I could manage, asked him how the school team was doing and what its weaknesses were. He was a little surprised at this line of questioning coming from a notorious Bolshevik like me but was forthright enough in his replies. ‘Our pack’s the problem,’ he said gloomily. ‘Our scrum’s not what it was, particularly the front row. All last year’s men have gone, you see.’ I nodded sympathetically. What about the backs, I asked? ‘Oh, spoilt for choice,’ he said. ‘Oozing with talent.’