Any Human Heart (11 page)

The plan is to walk through the Pyrenees through one of the passes and either walk or bus on to Segovia. From there we will take the train to Madrid and then on south, stopping off where we want, to the Mediterranean. I bought a wineskin and some tough fatty sausage that, I’m assured, will keep for days. From the window of our hotel, through a gap in the roofscape, I can see the creamy breakers rolling in on to the
grande plage.
This is the liberation of travel — the sense of cleansing, of purification, of sloughing off. Oxford is a distant memory, London almost forgotten. And Land — who is this Land Fothergill mouldering somewhere in banal Cornwall?

I’m exhausted, a husk. I must have lost half a stone and am burnt to teak by the sun. Segovia — Madrid — Seville — now Algeciras. I shall have to reflect on this trip in tranquillity and solitude. Christ knows where Dick is.

It all started happily. I met him at the station in Biarritz, we dined at a bistro by the
vieux port,
then wandered round the casino, not daring to gamble. Very early the next morning we caught a bus up into the foothills of the Pyrenees and commenced our walk through the pass. At midday we paused to eat our bread and cheese and were chatting about this and that, exhilarated to be up in the mountains, and I said, apropos of nothing in particular — no, actually, we were talking about Johnson’s
Lives of the Poets
(which Dick had brought with him) — and I said, ‘Did you know Dr Johnson’s cat was called “Hodge”?’

He looked at me most oddly. ‘What’re you trying to say? Go on, spit it out.’

I laughed. ‘Just idle conversation, for heaven’s sake.’

He looked around, then swatted a fly on his forearm and held it out for me to see.

‘And that fly’s name is Logan.’

‘Grow up,’ I said.

‘If I look like a cat then you look like a squashed fly.’

‘I didn’t say you looked like a cat, you pathetic child.’

‘Right!’ he bellowed. Standing up. He was completely enraged. ‘See you in Avignon on the 28th.’

And with that he strode off up the hill. I waited for half an hour, convinced he’d come to his senses, but there was no sign of him, he seemed well and truly gone. There was no question of my setting off after him — he was the one who knew the route — so I retraced my steps and caught a bus back to Biarritz.

Since then I’ve travelled by train — third class, Dick would approve — following the vague route we had planned across Spain to the south. I’ve looked around me, visited churches and mosques, palaces and art galleries, always half expecting to see him, his big grinning face under its beret, but no sign. And I’ve travelled more as an automaton than a curious tourist — this is not the spirit in which this journey was meant to take place and I feel the whole experience is spoiled somehow. But I will be in Avignon on the 28th, at the Hotel de Londres, come what may. Tomorrow I leave for Barcelona and then on to Perpignan, Narbonne, Aries and finally Avignon. I find my thoughts focusing pleasurably on France. Spain was Dick’s idea. I’ll come back here again, when I wish it, when it suits me. Ben was right — I was too much in thrall to Dick’s eccentric demands and itinerary. From now on I travel only at my own instigation.

Avignon. I lunched in the square opposite the Palais des Papes, then wandered down a little canal to the hotel. And there was Dick, signing in at the reception desk. He looked like he’d been in an accident: his face was livid red, all blisters and peeling skin. He greeted me with a firm handshake and a wide smile and made no reference to our row. He told me that three days ago, one afternoon, he’d dozed off on a beach in what he thought was a deep patch of shade. And of course he slept longer than he had planned, the sun moved round and slowly the shade was dragged off him. His face and knees took the brunt but, he said, the pain was beginning to subside. We head for home tomorrow. I forgive him his childish outburst — he has been punished enough.

SUMNER PLACE

I kissed Land today in a cinema (the film was called
The Merry-Go-Round).
Our lips touched for a second before she immediately pushed me away and hissed, ‘Never do that again!’ At Kettners we ate our first course in almost total silence. Eventually, I said, ‘Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I like you and I thought you liked me.’

‘I did,’ she said, I do. But…’

There’s somebody else.’ I felt suddenly very mature, as if we were in a Noel Coward play.

‘Who told you?’

I guessed. Who is it? Someone you met in Cornwall?’

‘Yes. It’s very irritating, you leading the conversation in this way.’

So I let her tell me the story, and as it unfolded, and as I began to feel more and more depressed, so I began to find her more and more beautiful. Why does life have to be so predictable? The man’s name is Bobbie (how revolting). Bobbie Jarrett. His father is Sir Lucas Jarrett, MP.

‘Sir? I suppose he’s a baronet,’ I said wearily.

‘Yes.’

‘Now I understand: “Lady Land Jarrett”. Yes, it has a certain ring. And is he handsome?’

‘I think you could say that.’

‘As handsome as Croesus?’

For a moment I thought she was going to throw the remains of her egg mayonnaise at me but, instead, she began to chuckle. I smiled back and the old affectionate mood was restored between us, but I felt sick: most girls would have walked out or sworn at me or created some kind of scene. But Land found it funny — and that is why I love her, I suppose. There — it is written. And I never thought I would write this either: I can’t wait to go back up to Oxford.

JESUS COLLEGE

I actually went down to the Catholic chaplaincy today to go to Mass and take confession but the mournful tolling of the bells on every side (why are there so many bloody bells in Oxford?) and the scrofulous blackness of the damp buildings (it was raining hard) drove me away. In fact I am content to remain unshriven, my sins all mine and mine alone.

I have, secretly, joined the college Golf Society and this afternoon I went out with a dull man called Parry-Jones and played nine holes at Kidlington. The rain had stopped and I beat Parry-Jones easily, three and two. He said he thought I could get into the university team. I might even get a blue — or is it a half-blue? It might be worth it, just to be able to announce the fact to Le Mayne.

Ben has invited me to Paris in January. Shelley and golf will help me to survive until then. To Balliol tonight to dine with Peter — he will be twenty-one in four months.

I keep thinking about Paris, wondering if, in fact, my future lies there. My visit was sublime, the weather cold and rainy and all the better for it. I slept on a sofa in Ben’s apartment on the rue de Grenelle — no more than a large room, really, with a stove in the corner for heat and a disgusting lavatory on the landing outside, shared by the other lodgers. He spends all his money on paintings, and the walls of his room are stacked four or five deep with canvases. Most of them are mediocre, he admits, but, as he says, you have to start somewhere. I’m afraid abstraction leaves me cold — there has to be something with a human connection in a painting, otherwise all we are talking about is form, pattern and tone — and it’s simply not enough for a work of art. I bought a tiny pencil sketch of a coffee pot by Marie Laurencin for 305. to prove my point. I said I wouldn’t swap all his stacked canvases for this scrap of paper. Ben was amused. ‘You wait and see,’ he said.

James Joyce is living just off the rue de Grenelle and Ben vaguely knows him, they pass often in the street. One night in a local restaurant Ben pointed him out to me. He was wearing an eye-patch and looked tired and strained — but very dapper. He has a very small head, I noticed, smaller than his wife’s, who was with him. The next day we went to Shakespeare & Co and I bought a copy of
Ulysses.
It begins well but I have to confess I’ve become a little bogged down and have only read about a third.

I suppose I should record this. We were leaving a restaurant in Saint-Germain — Chez Loick — when Joyce came in with three friends, one of whom knew Ben. We paused to chat and I was introduced. Ben, who was speaking French, described me as ‘Mon ami, Logan, un scribouillard’ — to Joyce’s puzzlement — he clearly didn’t know the French word. ‘A what?’ he said. I stepped forward: ‘A scrivener,’ I said. ‘A scribbler?’ he replied, turning his half-blind eyes upon me. ‘Sort of,’ I said, ‘let’s say a scribivelard.’ Joyce gave me a rare smile. ‘I like that,’ he said, ‘and I warn you that I might steal it.’ The smile transformed his pale thin-lipped face — and I was suddenly conscious of his Irish accent. ‘Moight,’ he said; ‘I moight steal it.’

Jesus College. Bitter cold. When I went to the lavatories this morning I put on a hat, my coat and a scarf to cross the quad and then I had to break the ice in the pan. These buildings are medieval.

Peter’s debts mount alarmingly. Tess had bronchitis over Xmas, it turns out, and was unable to go to work for three weeks — and of course she wasn’t paid. He asked his father for a loan but his father has refused and is in fact demanding an audit of Peter’s personal account. I lent him another fiver (so far Tess and Peter’s love nest has cost me £25).

I went down with my clubs to Port Meadow and I hit a few dozen old golf balls out towards Osney. The water meadows are all frozen and as the balls landed I could hear ice shatter. My drive still has a tendency to draw but my long irons are incredibly reliable. I was alone — a few shivering ponies aside — and at first the nutty crack of my stroke and the distant smash and tinkle of ice as the ball landed was wonderfully exhilarating. But golf always reminds me of Father and I found myself thinking about his last few months and how the Lizard flogged me the day he died and I grew more and more depressed. So what was meant to be an afternoon’s distraction turned into a mood of sour gloom. I sit here drinking whisky wondering whether to go round to Dick, just a few hundred yards away in Wadham. He always cheers me up, Dick, but our disastrous summer has caused a certain coolness between us and he seems to spend most of his time these days with a group of Harrovians in New College.

Mr Scabius has come to Oxford to see the Master and the Dean of Balliol. Peter is beside himself because Tess is ill again with flu and he dare not go near the cottage. He’s asked me to go up to the village and explain what’s going on and to say that he doesn’t know when he will be able to see her again. He’s right: the college authorities will be watching him very closely after his father’s visit. I told him I’d pack up a few treats and cycle out tomorrow.

This is not easy to write but it must be done. My hand is shaking.

It was a slog up to Islip, cold and in the teeth of a brisk wind — and the rain came on just about a mile short of the village. Tess didn’t seem that ill at all — thought she had a cold coming, she said — and the cottage was snug and warm enough with the fire banked up and the curtains drawn. She busied about: taking my damp coat and spreading it over a chair, brewing up a fresh pot of tea, offering me biscuits from a tin. It was strange being alone with her for the first time, and having her fussing over me was pleasing, as if I were being offered a tiny glimpse of what it might be like to have a wife — someone to come home to, someone who took your coat off your back and spread it on a chair before a fire and who offered you tea. This fantasy grew more exciting — sexually exciting, I mean — as we talked on in complete honesty about Peter and his father and his father’s suspicions. Tess was very grateful to me, she said, for being so frank and so helpful — she knew all about my financial contributions to their menage. She said I was everything a ‘true friend’ should be.

She was untypically talkative, glad of the company and of the chance to unburden herself. She completely dropped that tone of polite guardedness that usually coloured her discourse with me. At one moment she leant forward to refill my teacup and her shawl ends fell apart and I found myself eyeing her figure, the fullness of her curves — for God’s sake, why am I writing like some romantic novelist? This journal is for ultimate frankness, total honesty. I stared covertly at her breasts and her haunches and tried to imagine her naked. She was a ‘nice’ girl, Tess, well spoken and demure. But she didn’t know that I had seen the other side of her with Peter, seen her unbutton his trousers and take his cock in her hand. There was another Tess that I was more interested in.

Then she asked me when Peter was coming up next and I said I didn’t know, perhaps in a couple of weeks, maybe longer — a month? — just to let everyone’s suspicions ease off. This took her aback and she turned away to face the fire and began to weep gently, saying, ‘A month? A whole month?’ I felt truly sorry for her. She was alone, without friends or family, she was the one who had run away, after all, had made the sacrifice, who lived with the daily pressures of maintaining the pretence of being ‘Miss Scabius’ with her ‘brother’ at Oxford.

I knelt beside her and put an arm around her — at which point her quiet weeping degenerated into great heaving sobs and she hugged me to her, burying her head in the angle of my neck and shoulder.

I’m sorry, but I have to say that for me the contact with her body was powerfully stimulating. This warm, bonny, sobbing girl in my arms — and I couldn’t help myself. I held her to me and my lips were on her neck, and before I could think or act further we were kissing with an abandon that was almost animal.

Thinking about it now (I’ve just poured myself another whisky) I feel sure that what I was expressing with Tess was all my frustrations with Land — and I think she was giving vent to all her frustrations with Peter. There we were, close, intimate, sharers of a secret… We had to have some sort of physical correlation for our respective moods. Need and opportunity — the ingredients of all betrayals.