by William Boyd
Last week when I was in Cromer I took my pile of magazines into the Lionheart and flicked through them looking for pictures of my babies. I found a couple of them at a film festival in Dubrovnik. Tanned, lithe, sexy girls with black, black hair, like their mother. Identical twins, that’s the catch, you see – the songs they sing seem entirely ordinary, bouncy, rhythmic, heavy on percussion, thumping drums – but those girls, eighteen years old, impossible to tell them apart.
A man I vaguely know wondered if I’d like a drink and so I asked for a large vodka and tonic. I think he’s a novelist, very curious about my stint in the open prison. I tell him colourful anecdotes about ‘doing time’ – I suspect it’s all going into a book. After he’d gone I managed to procure a couple of half-pints and most of a large glass of red wine. I wandered out on to the front. I like Cromer, perched on the edge of England, on the edge of England’s plump, round bum. I think of continental Europe out there, across the North Sea, and I wonder where Lola y Bona might be: Majorca, Zagreb, Larnaca, Tel Aviv? It makes me feel I’m not that far away from them – not close, but not far away.
There’s a large bric-a-brac antique shop in a side street by the pier and I wandered in to kill some time. I was stunned to see, in a small display of badges and brooches pinned on a velvet cushion, a BOAC Speedbird lapel badge. I asked to have a look at it and enquired about the price. The owner – he has mutton-chop whiskers and wears loud checked suits and coloured waistcoats – told me it was £150. There was no price ticket, of course – what kind of fool did he take me for? ‘Very rare,’ he added, ‘extremely.’ I asked him his best price and he said he couldn’t go lower than £130. I laughed, I scoffed – I told him I’d had one of those BOAC Speedbird lapel badges when I was a boy. Should have hung on to it, mate, he said, smugly: very rare, much sought after by collectors of airline memorabilia. I said I’d think about it and then stuck the badge back on the cushion but was careful not to fully close the securing pin. I’ll come back next weekend.
The Diarists
Wednesday
PRUNELLA LAING
Everything seems fine, under control – I can’t believe I can write this but it is a tribute of sorts to my forward planning. The two marquees are up at the end of the garden. The catering team have installed their mobile kitchen. The champagne is already on ice. Fernando Benn is coming this afternoon to hang Brodie’s portrait. Fernando asked – sweetly, I thought – if he could bring his girlfriend, Gill John, to the party. Gill John, he repeated – I must have looked blank – the sculptress. Oh yes, I said, wonderful stuff. Brodie is happy, pleased, I think, that his sixtieth is being celebrated so grandly, in such conspicuous style – protesting that I fuss too much, but happy all the same to be fussed over. Two little flies in the clear gelid ointment remain, however. I told Brodie that I was a little puzzled: Tim Sundry had called to accept, very late. Yes, Brodie said, I invited him. I like Tim and his wife, whatshername, you know. I reminded him that Tim’s wife, Lizz, used to be the – what is the term? – common-law-wife, mistress, paramour? – of his oldest friend, Hugh Seeger, and that perhaps the presence of Hugh, Tim and Lizz at his birthday celebration might be a tiny teeny little bit combustible, no? Hugh is married now, he said (I’d forgotten – the Filipino girl, of course, Pamora, Sayonara? …) and, Brodie went on, they’re all grown-ups, as if that dealt with the matter. Doesn’t he realize that grown-ups often behave far, far worse than the littlest children? The other fly is Inigo – or ‘Joe’ as I must now learn to call him. I asked him if he was coming to the party and he said he would make an appearance, under duress, but his fee was £200 plus expenses. It’s your stepfather’s sixtieth birthday, darling, I protested, what do you mean your ‘fee’? He said he would have to miss an important lecture, the return trip from Bristol was expensive, general inconvenience engendered and so on. I sighed and moaned for form’s sake but inevitably agreed. I’ve decided to put two Portaloos behind the rhododendrons – his and hers (I shall style them carefully) – to ease traffic from the marquees to the house.
JOE REED
Mother acceded quickly to my demand for 200 quid. Perhaps I should have asked for three? Why should I pay homage at the court of King Brodie, unremunerated? He doesn’t like me – he tolerates me. I never forget when I told him I had got grade ‘A’ at German A level, he said in all seriousness: Why do you want to learn German? It’s a dead language. Subconsciously I now realize that remark must have made me want to read German at Bristol. I want to become a Professor of German Literature to remind Brodie Laing of his ineffable, small-minded foolishness. I want to be a little bit of Germany in his placid neo-modernist English landscape. I shall marry a German girl and have monoglot children called Wolfgang, Edeltraud and Anneliese. I wonder if Lizz Sundry will be at the party – funnily enough, of all my parents’ hundreds of friends, the only one I’d like to fuck is Lizz Sundry. Maybe because she spells her name with two zeds … Talking of names, I must remind Mummy to tell everyone that I’m to be addressed as ‘Joe’ – not Inigo, not any more, never again.
GILL JOHN
I drove past Brodie Laing’s new building on the Embankment some sort of office block it’s disgusting made me laugh when I remembered what Fernando called it – a smoked-glass food processor – it’s exactly what it looks like so I called Fernando when I got home and said where are you? At Brodie Laing’s he said hanging the bloody portrait where do you think. Has he seen it yet I asked no way said Fernando still the cheque’s in the bank though fifty grand. 50K. I hate the portrait it stinks terrible. Fernando says it’s ‘faux-faux naïf’. ‘Naïf’ painting is crap but charming he says ‘faux naïf’ is good painters trying to paint in a crap but charming way and ‘faux-faux naïf’ is just crap but everyone will think it’s amazing. I said you can’t sell that for fifty grand but he said you’re wrong baby the whole point is that it’s SO bad it’s good – it’s the way ahead – bad art. Not looking forward to the party tomorrow I think I’ll just get shit-faced. I hate it when he calls me baby.
HUGH SEEGER
Memories of important men avoid the specific. The specific is for the quotidian hero. Memories of great men flash, irradiate, blind, overwhelm. Describe a sunset in five words – impossible. The great inflict their own vagaries, their genius, upon the world. A moth flits through the garden at dusk, hither, thither, all eyes upon it. A moth has passed, yet its trace is immutable, uncancellable (is there such a word?). The Flight of a Moth – good title for the next novel? Prunella Laing called to ask if we were indeed coming to Brodie’s party. Did you not receive my RSVP, I enquired? Samsuna and I are looking forward to it immensely. Just triple checking, she simpered, you know me. How could Brodie have married such a nul (should that be nulle?). Then the real purpose of her call emerged. Tim Sundry’s coming, she said, grotesquely disingenuous. How lovely, I said, I look forward to seeing him again. And Lizz too, she added. Lizz too, I said, I’m immensely fond of them both.
TIM SUNDRY
Who was it who said: ‘Mediocrity is the one true daemonic force’? I detest London in summer. When the temperature rises above 20 degrees the city becomes insupportable. English houses are designed to combat cold, not heat: the hot air rises through the house to become trapped beneath the layers of fibreglass insulation in the loft and so we slowly bake. Last night in bed I lay in warm rivulets of sweat, unsleeping, cursing my perennial failure to buy a simple electric fan. Must go to John Lewis tomorrow. Lizz relishes the heat. From my study now I can see her sunbathing topless on the terrace below, overlooked, if my calculations are right, by three potential voyeurs’ windows. I pointed this out to her: I said a man in the back bedroom of no. 42 Woodland Street could spend all day, with a pair of powerful binoculars, looking at your breasts, wanking. She said, with some justification I admit, that I hadn’t objected when she had gone topless on various Mediterranean beaches over the years, nor did I remonstrate, she further reminded me, when she’d eaten lunch topless at Dino’s villa last summer
, nor when we’d all gone skinny-dipping in Barbuda at Xmas – so what, suddenly, was the problem with a bit of discreet nudity in the privacy of our own home? I surrendered. Still there’s something about a sooty terrace in North London that isn’t quite right: it seems brazen here, sleazily decadent. Rather dreading Brodie’s party tomorrow. Apparently that fraud Fernando Benn has painted his portrait. Maybe I can get a piece out of it. I sit here sweating in my boxer shorts looking at my half-naked wife wondering where it’s all heading. For the moment the end of episode five of Accident & Emergency should be preoccupying me. I said to Sam, the producer, what if the proctologist got bowel cancer, and then the cardiologist had a heart attack and so on – every specialist getting their own special disease – we’d have two years’ worth of gripping telly. He wasn’t amused. Too dark for Channel Ten, I suppose – our universe is not malign.
Thursday Night
PRUNELLA LAING
The only thing that went wrong in the entire evening was when Hugh Seeger fell in the rose garden and cut his lip. He said the stone path was wet but I know he was drunk. He was very peculiar, very hostile, when I said did he want me to put some Dettol or ointment on the cut. He just said – ‘Get me Samsuna, we’re leaving’ as if I were some kind of flunky. I felt quite upset for a moment, almost tearful he was so abrupt, but went and found his wife (a tiny person, sitting alone, abandoned, small as a nine-year-old girl, hardly spoke English) and delivered her up to Hugh. Something will always go wrong, however hard you try: you cannot legislate for the selfishness and irresponsibility of your guests. Inigo/Joe was strangely quiet, kept himself to himself. Everyone spread out into the garden after the supper and the presentation. Lovely sunset.
TIM SUNDRY
I have to admit, as fights go, it was rather inept. Still, I landed one full-on blow, right in Hugh Seeger’s complacent mush. I gashed a knuckle on one of his teeth and jarred my hand. His head snapped back – satisfyingly – and he went down at once, his lip bleeding. I stood over him and said, ‘You’ve never forgiven me, have you, you sad fuck? Never forgiven me for taking Lizz from you. Keep your hands off her or I’ll kill you.’ He started to mumble some sort of protest but I turned and marched off, fizzing with adrenaline. I don’t think I’ve hit anyone in the face since I was fourteen. The fact that it was now Hugh Seeger makes it all the more satisfying, yet the odd thought struck me, as I stood above him as he sat struggling on the ground: his grey hair had fallen over his forehead in two bangs and his lip was fat with blood – so that he looked uncannily like Virginia Woolf in the Man Ray portrait that graces volume four of her collected essays (slightly portlier than VW, of course, and far more agitated and disturbed) that I’ve just taken down from my shelf to verify. I can hear Lizz crying in the bedroom. When I saw her stumbling out from behind the rhododendron shrubbery, her clothes awry, her face shiny with tears, I felt some awful news was about to be announced – everyone you love has died, or something similarly apocalyptic. I was terrified. I said: what is it, what’s happened, what’s wrong? And she blurted out – ‘Hugh’ and then pushed me aside and ran off into the dark. I went looking for Seeger, couldn’t see him in the marquee and headed for the house. I found him wandering back from the house, drink in hand. Can I have a word, Hugh, I said, and led him into the rose garden. Then I punched him. Lizz was waiting for me in the car, still crying (she’s actually been crying for three hours steady by my calculations). I didn’t tell her what happened. I’ll tell her in the morning. My hand is throbbing. I might have fractured a knuckle. Who was it who said: ‘Only intelligent people are stupid enough to fall in love’?
GILL JOHN
It was so embarrassing some partner from Brodie Laing Partnership made a speech saying what a great man Brodie was and pulled back the curtains on the portrait there was silence though I thought I heard someone’s snorting laugh then Brodie shouted ‘Bravo!’ and began to clap and then everyone went mad laughing and cheering. I hadn’t seen the portrait for weeks and went up and had a proper close stare. If you had taken a really bad right-handed painter and asked him to paint a portrait with his left hand he would have done a better job. Faux-faux naïf works I said to Fernando: well done, mate. It’s so bad it’s good he said that funny knowing smile on his face I tell you it’s the next big thing the new wave just you watch and wait baby you read it here first. I said nothing went out into the garden lovely soft light on the horizon dark warm duskiness thought I might smoke my joint now just to keep me calm. I wandered round behind the rhododendrons and came upon the Portaloos then a girl no a woman burst out of one and practically knocked me over. I found some kind of shrubbery and stayed there quite happy thank you smoking until I heard Fernando drunk as a skunk stumbling around shouting for me to go home.
JOE REED
I should note this down, this is what I saw. I was standing by the bar and I had ordered a Campari and soda. The barman went back to the store area to see if they had any Campari and as he flipped back the flap of the tent I saw Brodie kissing Lizz Sundry – really kissing her, and she was really kissing him. The painting had been revealed in all its inverted glory and people were milling around, the party in its endgame. I slipped round the side of the tent and I saw them again, kissing, touching and talking. What in God’s name does a woman like Lizz see in my stepfather? He pointed to the rhododendrons and they split up, walking ‘unconcernedly’ away from each other. Brodie looked suddenly in my direction but I had ducked back behind the side of the marquee. This was my moment to run up to Lizz and tell her what a horrible human being Brodie Laing is, what a verkolning aschloch he happened to be. But she had slipped away, heading for the Portaloos. You go your own way and you make your own mistakes. I went back and picked up my Campari. I seem able to drink as much as I like of the stuff, it has no effect on me at all. Lizz Sundry – I must have been mad.
HUGH SEEGER
The feeling is not so much one of humiliation, too strong a word, nor of disgust – disgust is wasted on someone like Sundry. I feel I have been watching an ape in a circus performing elementary tricks – throwing a ball in the air and catching it – and yet people are cheering and at the same time throwing rubbish, rotten fruit, small sharp stones. The ape turns towards the cheers, flinches from the stinging gravel. I feel something like that, I feel the ape’s confusion. ‘Bring me poppies brimmed with sleepy death’. Samsuna asked me, please what is wrong (I was very brusque). How to begin to explain to her? I can’t explain it to myself. The green-eyed monster, of course – sad Tim Sundry. Poor Lizz with that moron and his ‘Doc show’.
Friday
GILL JOHN
I went into Fernando’s studio this afternoon and found him painting a still life – three oranges and a pineapple. I said Neville what the fuck’s going on? – he hates being called Neville even though it’s his real name but I couldn’t help myself I was so shocked. It was even more shocking that he was painting it with the brush held between his teeth as if he was some kind of quadriplegic. What do you think? he asked me be honest – I said it’s brilliant keep it up fabulous. He said I’ve got two commissions as a result of that Brodie Laing portrait. Brush in the teeth it’s the way ahead baby. So bad it’s good you read it here first.
JOE REED
I was just leaving the house to catch the bus back to Bristol when Brodie asked me to come into his study. He said he wanted to thank me for coming to his party: he was very touched and grateful that I had taken time off, appreciated the inconvenience and so on – all very avuncular and friendly. I said: don’t mention it. Then he handed me a cheque for £1,000. What’s this for, I asked? It’s for doing so well in your finals, he said. My finals are next year, I reminded him. Well consider it a vote of confidence, then, he said, smiling, completely unfazed, completely unperturbed, have yourself a good time, my pleasure. I realize he must have seen me last night, that’s what’s happened – perhaps when I came round the side of the marquee as he was giving Lizz his instructions and he sensed that I had s
een something. He couldn’t be sure what, though – but some important silence would have to be bought, all the same. I folded up the cheque and pocketed it, thanking him and saying I had to run to catch the bus. We shook hands in a firm, manly, confidential way. I felt the burden of my financial anxieties – present and future – fall from my shoulders like a cloak. That’s what I call a good party.
HUGH SEEGER
I find it hard to explain Sundry’s hatred of me, his banal paranoia. Yes, I have written many successful novels to his solitary unsuccessful one. Yes, I have an OBE and other honours from Italy and Greece. Yes, I am married to a young and beautiful Filipino woman and he has married my former research assistant. Can that explain his violence and his incoherent rage? I think his blow loosened a crown. I shall invoice him once Mr Tennyson of Harley Street has worked his expensive dental magic. Was it Brodie’s fiftieth where we first encountered each other? Full circle, then, a decade on. I was kind to him, Tim Sundry, I recall (though I did ask him how his name was pronounced – to rhyme with ‘wry’? or as in ‘all and’?): he was very much the young tyro, keen to learn about the weird and demanding world of letters. That’s where he would have met Lizz for the first time too, of course. Lizz was cooling on me, I could tell, that look of envie de voyager in her eyes should have alerted me. (Though, I remember, Brodie rather colonized her that day, funnily enough, very taken with her.) Who was Tim Sundry a friend of? Brodie? Prunella? Some publisher? Why was he there? Why is he here in this world, sad little man? Too much reading has played him false and still he cannot write. What does it matter? A wind has blown and stirred the trees and prompted untimed manoeuvres of clouds that vanish and melt and touch without concussion. Tim Sundry struck Hugh Seeger and yet the rain falls, the earth spins, all is chop and change and bright and breezy motion – space lies between us tranquil as a deep sea never to be ruffled by further acquaintance. Some sort of blessing from a truly unforgettably ghastly evening. Samsuna is calling: supper is ready.
