Any Human Heart (2 page)

We — the five Roman Catholics — were walking back from the bus stop up the drive to school, fresh from Mass, when Barrowsmith and four or five of his Neanderthals started chanting ‘Papist dogs’ and ‘Fenian traitors’ at us. Two of the junior sprats began weeping, so I stood up to Barrowsmith and said: ‘So tell us what religion you are, Barrowboy.’ ‘Church of England, of course, you dunce,’ he said. ‘Then count yourself very fortunate,’ said I, ‘that one religion at least will accept someone as physically repulsive as you are.’ Everyone laughed, even Barrowsmith’s simian crew, and I shepherded my little flock together and we regained the purlieus of school without further incident.

Scabius and Leeping
¹
declared I had done work of sub-magnificent standard and that the encounter and exchange were droll enough to deserve entry in our
Livre d
’O
r.
I argued that I should have a starred sub-magnificent because of the potential risk of physical injury from Barrowsmith and his lackeys, but Scabius and Leeping both voted against. The swine! Little Montague, one of the blubbers, was the witness, and Scabius and Leeping both handed over the honorarium (two cigarettes each for a sub-magnificent) with goodly cheer.

When we brewed up after second prep I hatched a plan for the Martinmas Term. It was no good, I said, just waiting for the various categories of magnificents to happen — we had to initiate them ourselves. I proposed that we should each be presented with a challenge: that two of us, in turn, should think up a task for the third and that the endeavour would be documented (and witnessed as far as possible) in the
Livre d’Or.
Only in this way, I averred, could the ghastly rigours of next term be survived, and, after that, we were on the home stretch: summer term was always more agreeable and could take care of itself. There were the School Certificate and scholarship exams and then we’d be free — and of course we hoped Oxford would be waiting (for me and Scabius, at least — Leeping said he had no intention of wasting three years — of what was bound to be a short life — at university). Scabius suggested the raising of a fund to privately print and publish a deluxe limited edition of the
Livre d’Or
if only to preserve the iniquities of Abbey for all time. ‘Or as a terrible warning for our offspring,’ added Leeping. This was unanimously agreed and we each deposited one penny into the new ‘publishing fund’, Leeping already pondering weight and weave of paper types, embossed leather binding and the like.
²

In the dormitory that night I pleasured myself with delectable visions of Lucy. No. 127 of the term.

To my intense and gratifying embarrassment Mr Holden-Dawes commended my essay on Dryden to the English upper sixth as a model of the form. ‘I’m sure that if any of you seek enlightenment Mountstuart will allow a private reading for a modest fee,’ he said. (Unkindly, I thought: H-D has a malicious streak. But perhaps he was simply sensing the blooming of my overweening pride?)

His benign streak was more evident at the end of the day, however, when he came up beside me in the cloisters and we walked to chapel together. ‘Have we managed to convert you yet?’ he asked at the door. I said I didn’t understand. ‘All this Anglicanism hasn’t undermined your faith?’ It was an odd question and I vaguely muttered something about not having given the matter much attention. ‘Not like you, Mountstuart,’ he said and wandered off. At supper I asked Leeping what he considered H-D was up to. ‘He wants you to be a fanatical atheist like him,’ Leeping said. We talked on about faith in an interesting and not too pretentious vein, I thought. Leeping has a good mind, I suspect, if only he could get over his amazing complacency. I asked him why, if he was a Jew, he didn’t go to the synagogue in the same way as we RCs went to Mass. I may be Jewish, he said, but I’m a third-generation, Church-of-England Jew. It was all a bit obscure to me and now I understand why I don’t give religion much thought. The awful boredom of uncritical faith. All great artists are doubters. Perhaps I might work this idea into my next essay for H-D. It would please him. Leeping confessed, as we filed out of the dining hall, that he has developed a bit of a passion for little Montague. I said little Montague was a corrupt brute in the making — a brutette. Leeping laughed loud. That’s why I like him.

Writing this on the train to Birmingham, a feeling of sour and persistent depression coursing through me. It was galling to see Scabius and Leeping and what looked like 90 per cent of the school boarding the train for London and the south. After the locals dispersed, about twenty of us were left standing around the station waiting for the various trains to our distant and unsavoury provincial towns (Norwich Station, it strikes me, represents the epitome of the dullness at the soul of provincial life). Eventually my train arrived and I managed to find myself a solitary compartment at the rear. I have picked up a few companions as we’ve travelled, however, but I sit here crouched over my notebook writing, and covertly watching, my heart growing ever more leaden as the miles between me and ‘home’ diminish. The burly sailor and his painted doxy, the commercial traveller with his cardboard suitcase, the fat woman eating sweets, taking two for every one she feeds her tiny, bright-eyed, quiescent child. Rather a good sentence.

Later. Mother’s interior decoration has continued apace in my absence. She has papered my room — without permission — in a dark caramel brown with a motif of blurry silvery grey shields or crests. Perfectly vile. The dining room has been converted into her ‘sewing room’, so we are now obliged to eat in the conservatory, which, it being the middle of winter, is infernally cold. My father appears to accept these and other transformations without complaint. Mother’s hair is as dark as a raven’s wing and I’m afraid she is beginning to look absurd. And we have a new car, an Armstrong-Siddeley, which sits resplendently undriven in the garage under a tarpaulin. Father prefers to take a tram to work.

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.

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.
³
Though I do miss her long hair. My mother said, contrariwise, that she thought Lucy’s bob was ‘très 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.

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.

ME: 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 how 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.

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 15-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.