Any Human Heart (15 page)

Anna-mania, interestingly enough, has retreated since seeing Land. Suddenly I’m content to stay in London a while longer.

Met up with Dick at Norwich Station (what a rush of memories!) and we travelled on together to Swaffham. Heavy frost on the fields but the low sun was shining strongly, so strongly we pulled down the blinds in the compartment. Angus [Cassell] was at the station to meet us in a rather smart Darracq. Dick had refused to lend me his second gun (‘Why not?’ — ‘Get your own.’) and so I was obliged to ask Angus for the loan of one (I said mine was being repaired). Angus said the house was full of guns — there would be no problem.

The house is ugly with a vast stable block. It was built in the middle of the last century by his grandfather (the first Earl of Edgefield) but the park is nicely mature, the groupings of trees (rather too many conifers for my taste), the rides and the vistas exactly as they were designed to be seen. The great advantage about a new house is that everything functions properly: hot water, central heating, electric light. I had a bath, changed and went down. The Earl seems harmless enough — hugely bellied, jolly, always humming and wheezing away to himself. He told me to call him Aelthred; something that’s beyond me, I’m afraid, though I noticed Dick was very free with the invitation. The Countess, Lady Enid, looks like she’s swallowed poison: thin, sour, seamed face, black dyed hair. There were a dozen of us in the party, the young — Angus, his sister, me and Dick — and various elderly locals. At dinner I was placed between Lady Enid and Angus’s sister, Lady Laeticia (‘Lottie, please’). Lottie is petite, dressed in the latest London styles, but there’s something about the set of her features — a broadness of the nose, a thinness of the lips (inherited from her mother), the too wide gap between her eyes — that conspires to keep her the plain side of fairly pretty. She was chatty and vivacious, however, and couldn’t hear enough about Paris. ‘Did you go to a
bal nègre?
Did you meet any lesbians? Are the women too, too beautiful?’). Lady Enid, by contrast, interrogated me like an immigration official. Where were you born? Montevideo. Where’s that? Uruguay. Still blank. South America. Oh? What were your people doing out there? My father was in business (somehow I did not want to utter the words ‘corned beef’ in this company). Where is your mother from? Montevideo. I could hear her brain working. She’s Uruguayan, I said. How wonderfully exotic for you, she said, and turned to the person on her right.

After dinner, Angus apologized, said his mother quizzed everyone like a prosecuting lawyer. I said I thought she was a little disconcerted to find herself sitting beside a half-breed. Angus found this very comical. ‘Well, if it’s any consolation,’ he said, ‘Lottie thought you were the bee’s knees.’

The next day — bone-achingly cold — we shot at birds driven through woods by beaters. Then we had a picnic lunch in a wooden hut and shot some more. I couldn’t hit a thing but blasted away energetically to keep up appearances. Dick is a crackshot — birds falling out of the sky. On Sunday I cried off, saying I thought I had a cold coming on, and stayed in the library all morning playing sevens with Lottie (who, I have to say, grows prettier with more acquaintance — she looks better without heavy make-up). But, O! — the brain-numbing tedium of country life. Every now and then Lady Enid would wander in to make sure I wasn’t ravishing her daughter on the Chesterfield. Just before lunch the butler announced that there was a telephone call for Mr Mountstuart. It was Mother: Roderick Poole had rung. ‘He tell me to say you he like you book.’

I could survive anything after that telephone call — the worst that the English pseudo-gentry could hurl at me. I felt I had risen above this bunch of stupid, charmless people (friends excepted, it goes without saying) with their talk about their dogs and their hunting and their boring families. At dinner I sat between a doctor’s wife and some cousin of Lady Enid and chatted away to them like an old friend (I have no recollection of a word I said). All I was thinking of was my book. MY BOOK! I was going to have my book published and these stupid people sat around me ignorant of this fact: they could stew in their Philistine juices for millennia as far as I was concerned.

In the morning when we were about to leave Lady Enid drew me aside. She actually smiled at me: she said her cousin had found me charming company, and she added that they were giving a dance for Lottie in the spring — in London — and she would count it a special, personal favour if I would consent to be Lottie’s escort for the evening. What could I say? But I made a silent vow to stop accepting these invitations, these importunings: these are not my people, this is not a world I want to inhabit. It’s fine for Dick: this is home from home for him — an Anglo version of his Caledonian social whirl — but not for me. Angus is agreeable enough but why should I list him among my true friends just because we were at Abbey together? These are sad English compromises: Paris has made my eyes keener. It will all be behind me soon.

Sprymont & Drew will pay me a fifty-guinea advance against a 15 per cent royalty. I asked Roderick if this was standard for a first author (to be honest, I didn’t really care, all you want at times like these is for the finished book to be in your hand). He recommended that I acquire a literary agent and he suggested a man called Wallace Douglas who had just started up his own firm after some years at Curtis Brown. Roderick and I went to his club (the Savile) to drink champagne. They will publish in the autumn. The Savile is very civilized; I wonder if I should get Roderick to put me up for membership?

Wallace Douglas is a beefy young man (Thirty-two? Thirty-three?) who speaks slowly with a strong Scottish burr. ‘Logan Mountstuart?’ he said, curious. ‘Any Scottish blood?’ Some generations back on my father’s side, I said. Scots are very keen to establish this fact from the outset, I’ve noticed. He dresses like a banker: three-piece suit, white shirt, institutional tie, his hair oiled and neatly parted. He looks like a burly T. S. Eliot. He agreed to take me on as a client and relieved me of five of my fifty-guineas advance.

‘So,’ he said, ‘what next?’

I’m-going to Paris for a while.’

‘Well, what about a few articles? The
Mail?
The
Chronicled
American magazines want anything on Paris. Shall I try for you?’

I felt a sudden welling-up of warmth for this confident, over-weight pragmatist. I have a feeling we will become firm friends.

‘Yes, please,’ I said. ‘I’ll do anything.’

I sense my life as a writer — my writer’s life, my real life — has truly begun.

I ring Land and suggest lunch. We meet at the Napoletana in Soho and eat meatballs and spaghetti and drink a bottle of Chianti. I tell her my news and the expression of pleasure on her face is one of authentic joy. She is so genuinely pleased for me. I wonder if I could have been quite so generous if the positions had been reversed?… We order another bottle of Chianti and — the wine going to my head — I start talking about Paris and how she should come over when I’m established in my apartment and that my literary agent — how I love to say that: my literary agent — is going to find me work in newspapers and American magazines, and then when my book is published… I pause to draw breath and she smiles at me. All I want to do is kiss her.

Wallace — I call him Wallace, now — has contracted me to write three articles for
Time & Tide
and also, remarkably, for the
Herald Tribune
(on the ‘Parisian Literary Scene’); £30 for the first and £15 for the second. He says that if these are well received there should be plenty more. I can’t wait, and yet I find I am making excuses for putting off my trip. The Land-issue’s not resolved: I cannot go to Paris without something being understood, something established between us.

It is late, 11.00 p.m., and I am sitting alone in an empty compartment sipping whisky from my flask as the boat train rumbles out of Waterloo through London’s grimy ill-lit suburbs towards Tilbury. I will be in Paris by dawn.

Land and I dined at PrevitalI’s and then she came to the station to see me off. I kept trying to make her fix a date for her visit but all she would talk about was the election, Ramsay MacDonald, Oliver Lee, the constituency and so on. The train was about to leave when I drew her behind a trolley piled with mailbags and said, ‘Land, for Christ’s sake, I love you,’ and I kissed her. Well, she kissed me back all right: we only stopped when a couple of porters whistled at us. ‘Come to Paris,’ I said. ‘I’ll send for you as soon as I’m set up.’ ‘Logan, I’ve got a job.’ ‘Come for a weekend.’ ‘Let’s see,’ she said. ‘Write to me.’ Then she took my face between her hands and kissed the tip of my nose. ‘Logan,’ she said, ‘we have all the time in the world.’
Nunc scio quid sit Amor
[Now I know what love is].

I went to Anna last night at Chez Chantal but somehow it wasn’t the same and she sensed it. ‘Is everything all right?’ she asked. ‘Tout va bien?’ I assured her it was and pulled her close to me as if to prove it but it was obvious nothing more was going to happen. I left the bed and paced about the room. Then I poured myself a glass of wine. Anna sat up in the bed, her breasts exposed, looking at me patiently.

‘Is there somebody else you like?’ she asked. ‘Here in Paris?’

‘No. There’s a girl in London… ‘I decided to tell her everything. ‘I’ve known her for ages. We were at university together. She’s not particularly beautiful. She’s intelligent — of course. Her family is fascinating. I can’t seem to get her out of my mind.’

‘Come and tell me all about her.’

So I sat on the bed, we drank some wine, smoked a cigarette and I talked about Land for half an hour. My time was up and when I kissed her goodbye and pressed myself up against her I knew that my sexual energies had returned and regretted that I hadn’t made the most of my two hours with her. I said I would see her again in a couple of days (she was working a five-day week now). But the Land-spell had been broken.

Move into the Hotel Rembrandt on the rue des Beaux-Arts. For 50 francs a day I get a small bedroom and a sitting room under the eaves and I can have a tin bath of hot water whenever I want for an extra 5 francs. It’s almost as good as an apartment of my own. Ben has quit his place on the rue de Grenelle and now lives in a single room above his new gallery — there is simply no space for me. The gallery is on the rue Jacob and he’s called it ‘Leeping Frères’ — he claims the ‘Fréres’ conveys a sense of longevity, the notion of a family business. He does have a brother — Maurice — considerably older than him, a lawyer or an accountant in London, I believe. Wallace has managed to get me a monthly piece in the
Mercury
at ten guineas a time. Not wild about the
Mercury —
the scent of pipe smoke, beer and wet tweed lingers about it — but beggars mustn’t be choosers.

The Leeping Frères vernissage. I go at 7.00 p.m. — no one there. Ben is very nervous, worried about the quality of the show. He has a Derain, a couple of small Légers, a lot of lurid Russian stuff and a small Modigliani drawing. During the next couple of hours perhaps a dozen people wander in and out but nothing is sold. I buy the Modigliani for £5 and refuse to take a reduction. Ben is cast down and I mutter the usual platitudes, Rome not having been built in a day, and so on.

Anyway, I take him to the Flore for some champagne.

‘Look what you’ve achieved, Ben.’

‘Look what you’ve achieved: you’ve written a book.’

‘You’ve got your own gallery in Paris, for Christ’s sake. And we’re only babies.’

‘I need cash,’ he says darkly. ‘I have to buy now. Now.’

‘Patience, patience.’ I sound like a maiden aunt.

A couple — who know Ben — stop by our table and are introduced as Tim and Alice Farino, Americans both. He is tanned and handsome, losing his hair fast. She is small and pretty with a frowning intense face, as if running on too much energy.

‘You didn’t come to my opening,’ Ben complains — he obviously knows them well.

‘God, I thought it was next week,’ Farino says, lying easily.

‘We forgot,’ Alice says. ‘We had a fight. A bad one — we had to make up. You wouldn’t have wanted us in your nice new gallery.’

Farino reddens immediately, clearly not as languid as he affects to be. We all laugh, the moment defused.

They are here to meet some other Americans and we are asked to join their group at the rear of the café. In the confusion of arrival and because I’ve drunk too much I don’t catch any of the dozen names that are thrown at me. I sit beside a burly square-faced fellow with a moustache. He’s very drunk and keeps shouting down the table at a smaller pointy-faced man, ‘You are full of shit! You are so full of shit!’ It seems some sort of infantile joke between them: they both guffaw helplessly. Ben leaves because he sees a girl he knows sitting alone. I drink on in silence, quite happily, nobody taking much notice of me, fresh bottles of wine arriving by magic at the table. Then Alice Farino slides in beside me and asks me how I know Ben and what I’m doing here in Paris. When I tell her I’m waiting for my book to be published she reaches over me and tugs at the sleeve of the square-faced fellow and introduces us. Logan Mountstuart — Ernest Hemingway. I know who he is but I keep it to myself. He can hardly string two words together by this stage and becomes offensively mock English, all ‘old chap’, ‘Old bean’, ‘old sport’. Alice says: ‘Don’t be a fucking bore, Hem. You’re giving us a bad name.’ I decide I quite like Alice Farino. I slip away to join Ben, who’s with a pale long-faced young French woman with a demure and serious air called Sandrine — I don’t catch her last name. I suspect — with the clarity of vision that heavy drinking sometimes produces in me — that Ben has a serious interest in her. He confirms this as I steer him back to rue Jacob. He is infatuated with her, he says, and it’s causing him anguish because her father has absolutely no money and she is divorced with a young child, a boy. ‘I can’t marry for love,’ he says. ‘It’s not part of the plan.’