The Post-War Journal
The post-war journal is a strange and often disturbing document, not surprisingly, given the desperate circumstances that met Logan Mountstuart on his return to England in late January 1946.
The brutal facts are these.
When LMS did not check into the Hôtel du Commerce in February 1944 and was arrested the next day he effectively disappeared from the surface of the earth as far as NID was concerned. The last person who could testify to having seen him alive was Flight-Sergeant Chew – who had watched him step out into the night air through the hatch in the side of the Liberator bomber. The contact ‘Ludwig’ reported that LMS had never gone to the hotel as arranged. All attempts at discovering what had happened to him were fruitless. (This makes one wonder who the ‘Ludwig’ was that sent the message to the Hotel Cosmopolitan – giving some credence to LMS’s persistent accusation that he was betrayed).
In NID, after a few weeks of total silence, it was assumed that LMS had met with a fatal accident or been killed – a fate that befell many agents who parachuted into Europe. The parachute could have failed to open; he could have made a landing on a mountainside and broken a leg, fallen into a lake or been dropped in the wrong place – in occupied France rather than Switzerland. None of these could be discounted and as the days went by NID feared the worst.
In March, Freya Mountstuart was visited by Commander Vanderpoel, who informed her that her husband was missing, presumed dead. He told her only that LMS was an NID agent and had parachuted ‘somewhere in Europe’ on a secret mission. The effect on Freya can be imagined. The devastating news was confirmed when she was awarded a war-widow’s pension. To all intents and purposes Logan Mountstuart was dead. LMS’s mother was informed and so was Lionel. A mass was held in Brompton Oratory attended by a few friends (Peter Scabius, notably) and some colleagues from NID (Plomer, Fleming, Vanderpoel).
Freya and her young daughter now had to cope as best they could. Some months later, probably in August, she met Skuli Gunnarson, twenty-nine years old, a member of the Icelandic Liaison Committee based in London. They began to see each other socially and in October they became lovers. Freya’s letters home to her father and brother mention Skuli with increasing frequency. Stella also liked him a great deal, it was reported.
In December, Freya married Skuli Gunnarson and he moved into Melville Road. Mercedes Mountstuart was a witness to the wedding and toasts were drunk to LMS’s memory at the small party held afterwards in a room above the Lamb and Flag, Battersea.
In late January 1945 Freya discovered she was pregnant. Two days later she and Stella were killed by the blast from a v-2 rocket as they were walking home after infant school. Thirteen other people were killed in the explosion.
In October 1945 Gunnarson sold Melville Road and returned to Iceland.
LMS arrived from Milan at an RAF base in Wiltshire in January 1946. He cabled Freya and went straight to London, to Melville Road – where he discovered his house was now owned and occupied by a Mr and Mrs Keith Thomsett and their three children. It was Mrs Thomsett who inadvertently set the sequence of appalling discoveries in motion when she remarked to a frantic and worried LMS that it was ‘a terrible shame about that poor Mrs Gunnarson and her daughter’.
The post-war journal is the hardest of all in which to fix the month, let alone the day. LMS’s random and inaccurate datings are all that can be relied upon. Even the years may be suspect.
1946
Hodge is a cunt, soi disant and says he has every right to be one, having left a leg in Italy. I am a cunt for letting him rile me, poor pathetic bastard.
Walked the river, seeking beauty. Saw it but felt nothing. We drank a bottle and a half of whisky between us last night. Hodge stinks: I told him to have a bath. He says he hates the sight of his scarred stump.
FreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreya FreyaFreya
FreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreyaFreya
FreyaStellaStellaFreya
Freya
Stella
Freya
Stella
FREYAFREYAFREYAFREYA
Free
Right
Everloved
Young
Always adored
Stella, my daughter. Freya, my wife. Stella Mountstuart. Freya Mountstuart
[The journal is full of these anguished doodlings.]
Took Dick out on a drive up the tweed valley to Peebles. Cool blustery day, the first fatigued leaves ripped off the trees. All the way he talked about the mistake he had made in never getting married. ‘Look at me now,’ he said. ‘Who’d take me. A one-legged drunk.’ Tonight, sitting by the fire, I began to weep quietly – couldn’t help myself, came on with absolute spontaneity – thinking of Freya and Stella. ‘Stop blubbing,’ Dick said. ‘You’re only feeling sorry for yourself, it’s got nothing to do with Freya and Stella. They’re fine, they’re atomized dust blowing in the breeze. Free as air. They’re not thinking about you. I can’t abide self-pity, so shut up or get out.’ I almost hit him. I went to my bedroom. Can’t sleep.
Is this worth recording? I experienced what can only be described as a spasm of happiness – the first since I heard the news – when I managed to work out (with a toothpick) a shred of mutton that had been stuck in a crevice between two back teeth. It had been resistant to everything it was so firmly wedged. I grinned spontaneously. Must have been real pleasure. My mind forgetting. Am I healing?
Hodge lectured me again on Freya and Stella. Thirteen other people died when that explosion happened, he said. Thousands of Londoners died from bombs or rockets, many of them women and children. Millions of people died in the war. You could have been a German Jew – lost your entire family in the gas chambers – wife, children, brothers, sisters, nieces and nephews, parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents. It’s an awful bloody terrible tragic thing but you have to see them as victims of a global armed conflict, like the millions of other victims. Innocent people die in a war. And now we’re casualties too. I said, you can’t equate my wife and child with your fucking leg. Yes I fucking well can, he bellowed at me. To me – to me – my lost leg is more important than your lost wife and child.
Couldn’t sleep so I pulled on a coat over my pyjamas, put on a pair of gumboots and walked around the gardens. One of those light, star-filled, northern nights. An owl hooted and I walked through a cloud of perfume from some scented shrub, almost palpable, it seemed to flow round me carried by the breeze. I urinated, hearing the patter of my urine on the gravel clearly, like a fire crackling. I mooched around, not thinking, just taking in the information my senses provided, not cold, until the first birds began to sing and the dawn-light began to restore the colours to the old house and its unkempt garden.
Lucy [Sansom]1 took me to an old café she knew in Leith while we waited for the boat. She’s much stouter and her hair is greying but, beneath the accumulation of flesh, you can still see the pretty girl I used to fantasize about. She was very sweet to me: the perfect antidote to Dick’s brusque rationalizations. We drank tea and ate toast and jam. Outside Edinburgh rain turned the grey sooty stone black, like velvet. Lucy has a cottage at Elie in Fife, which she offered to lend me if I ‘needed some peace and quiet to work’. What work? I said. You’re a writer, for God’s sake, she said. You’ve got to keep on writing. She asked me if I was sure I was doing the right thing. I said I had to. I said that it was the only chance of a purging – a sense of it finally being over.
September 1st
We should dock at Reykjavik tomorrow. It’s been good being at sea these last few days. The voyage calming and restful. I stand at the rail for hours and look at the sea and the sky. Why does the sea induce these feelings of transcendence in us? Is it because an unobstructed view of overarching sky meeting endlessly stirring water is as close as we can come on this earth to a visual symbol of the infinite? I feel more at peace than I have for months.
Reykjavik. Impressions of a town of painted concrete and corrugated iron and of various-sized, tarpaulin-covered things. When in doubt the Icelanders seem to cover anything with a tarpaulin. It was raining heavily when we docked and in the hour it took me to disembark, find a taxi rank, wait in the queue and be driven to the hotel, the rain stopped, the sun shone fiercely, it rained, hailed and the sun shone again. If this is the norm it will drive me mad. I’m staying at the Borg. I had a lunch of German sausage, pickled cucumber and smoked salmon and a plate of small sweet cakes as a dessert. Now I begin my search for Gunnarson.
It has taken me two days to find Gunnarson; everyone has been politely helpful in answering my inquiries. There’s a pretty girl on reception who has translated when required (her name is Katrin Annasdottir). Gunnarson turns out to be a civil servant in the Icelandic equivalent of the Ministry of Agriculture. I wrote him a letter and handed it in at the door, telling him who I was and that I was staying at the Borg. Tonight comes a message saying that he, Gunnarson, has no reason or need to meet me.
The price of alcohol in this hotel beggars belief.
I went down to the ministry early in the morning before the staff arrived and waited. I stopped a young man who seemed to be about the right age and asked him if he was Gunnarson. No, he said, you couldn’t mistake Gunnarson, he was exceptionally tall. Look, he pointed, here he comes. I watched Gunnarson go into the building: he glanced at me, half curiously. He was tall and athletic-looking, his blond hair so fair it was almost white. I thought: this is the man Freya wanted after me… I felt quite sick.
I waited outside until lunchtime and when Gunnarson emerged went up to him and introduced myself. He was a good half-head taller than me. He had a large hooked nose and looked fit and burly – which is not an adjective you usually associate with exceptionally tall men. He looked like someone who could climb mountains all day long. He seemed more irritated to meet me than anything else, though he perked up a bit when I offered to buy him lunch.
He took me to a nearby restaurant and ordered some kind of fish stew served with a creamy gravy with cooked radishes and sodden hot lettuce. I could eat nothing and sipped at a hilariously expensive beer while he shovelled food into his mouth as if he were stoking a boiler. I can only think it is his sheer height and bulky energy that attracted Freya. Physically he is the opposite of me in almost every detail. I’m tall and slim enough, but my posture is bad and nothing about my demeanour and comportment suggests urgency. I never walk fast, for example, if I can help it.
When he finished his stew he ordered the inevitable plate of sweet cakes. As he wolfed these down, he looked at me curiously.
‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘I feel I know you.’ He spoke good, almost accentless English.
‘You’ve probably heard a lot about me.’
‘I’ve seen so many photographs of you, yet I didn’t recognize you.’
‘I don’t take a flattering photograph.’
‘No. I think it was because for me you’ve always been dead. And now here you are in front of me alive. Strange.’
‘And Freya and Stella are dead.’
At this he clenched his jaw and took a few deep breaths.
‘She was very beautiful,’ he said. ‘I loved her very much.’
‘So did I.’
‘Stella was a lovely child.’
I asked him not to talk about Stella. It wasn’t so bad talking about Freya – because my time with Freya had been far longer than his – but I had missed the last two years of Stella’s short life and I couldn’t bear the fact that this stranger had known her when she was six and seven and I had not.
‘Why did you want to meet me?’ he asked. ‘It must be… painful.’
‘It is,’ I admitted, ‘but I had to see you, see what you were like. To try to understand. Fill in the gap.’
He scratched his head and frowned. Then he said, ‘You mustn’t blame her.’
‘I don’t.’
He ignored me. ‘She was convinced you were dead, you see, it was as simple as that. It was the absolute silence that convinced her. She said if you were alive there would have been something – a word, even. She was lonely. And then I came along.’
I knew what it was like to be lonely. ‘I don’t blame her,’ I said, almost stupidly, as if repeating the words were enough to convince myself. ‘How was she to know I was still alive?’
‘Exactly. She thought you were dead, you see. She had to get on with her life.’
‘Yes – I can see that.’
We talked on in a series of random questions and answers and I was able to piece together a picture of Freya’s life while I was away. I realized Gunnarson had his own problems too: he had his own grief; and he had to reconcile himself, now that I was alive and sitting opposite him, to the fact that he was and would always be Freya’s second choice, that her heart had really belonged to me. I was more like the cuckolded husband confronting the lover – and my mind kept forming pictures of Freya and Gunnarson, naked, making love in our bed. I had to curb my imagination violently. It was nobody’s fault, just too desperately, hopelessly sad.
He said he had to be back at work.
‘One more thing,’ I said. ‘You sold my house. I’d like the money.’
He paused. ‘It was my house. Freya left it to me in her will.’
‘I bought that house. That is my house, by natural law.’
‘Luckily we don’t live by natural law.’
‘You’re a thief,’ I said.
He stood up. ‘You’re upset. I won’t hold it against you.’
There is a small artificial lake at the centre of this ramshackle town called the Tjörn that is populated by many wild ducks. I bought a bottle of Spanish brandy at the hotel and went down to the lake to drink myself insensible. The brandy tasted like marzipan-flavoured cooking oil and I could only manage a few mouthfuls.
[October?]
NORTHWICH (CHESHIRE)
George Deverell seems crushed by his loss. His manner is polite but dazed, as if he’s just come round from being knocked unconscious. He seems unperturbed by his ex-son-in-law’s return from the dead. ‘Wonderful to see you, Logan,’ he will say from time to time and pat me lightly on the shoulder as if to confirm that I am indeed flesh and blood. Then you see him inwardly withdraw and shrivel up – I’ve come back and am alive but his daughter and granddaughter have gone for ever.
Robin has taken over the running of the timber yard completely and is worried by the quiet depth of his father’s misery. He, by contrast, was intensely curious about my experiences. Muttering oaths and expletives as I told him about my parachute jump, my arrest and long months in the villa, going, ‘Bloody hell’, ‘That’s barbaric!’, ‘Jesus Christ’ and the like.
Two days ago a letter arrived from Iceland containing a banker’s draft for £400. Gunnarson, the honourable Icelander.
All my belongings are here, boxed and stored – my books, my manuscripts, all my paintings. Even pieces of furniture that the Thomsetts didn’t purchase. I have no home but all the ingredients of home.
1947
[March]
It was my forty-first birthday last week. I see I forgot to note the arrival of my fortieth last year – small wonder. For the record, then, I who once had a wife, a child and a perfect family home now, in my forty-first year, have none of these and live in a damp and fusty room in my mother’s decrepit house. I am rich enough, financially speaking: two years’ back pay screwed out of the Ministry of Defence (with the help of Noel Lange [LMS’s lawyer]), plus the money Gunnarson sent from the house sale. I gave my mother a hundred pounds and told her to spend it on Sumner Place – fresh paint, new carpets, etc. – but I think she’s lost the energy. The house is not exactly a rat-infested slum but hundreds of careless paying-guests have left it grimy and knocked-about. Mother and Encarnación, both arthritic and wheezy, bicker at each other in Spanish. I go for meandering strolls through Chelsea and South Kensington, wondering what to do with myself.
In Battersea I found the crater made by the v-2. The end of a terrace of houses gone, wooden hoardings round the huge hole. It would have been sudden. The rocket falling silently out of the sky as the two of them walked along, hand in hand, heading back home from school. Just the flash, the noise and then oblivion.
I can see nothing of myself in Lionel. Perhaps something around the eyes. My eyebrows. The boy has your eyebrows, sir. And he had my hairline: the sharp prow of a widow’s peak. Lottie was cool – I don’t think she can ever forgive me. And Leggatt seems a dotard, not long for this world, I would say. He asked me where I served in the war and I said the Bahamas and Switzerland. ‘I said where did you serve, not where did you go on holiday.’ I told him I had been in the navy and that seemed to shut him up.
Lionel and I managed to wander round the garden alone for half an hour. He is a quiet diffident boy, nearly fourteen now (Christ!), his eyes always cast down, stiff fingers pushing constantly at his forelock. I asked him if he was happy at Eton. ‘Yes, sir, pretty much… Sort of.’ Please don’t call me ‘sir’, I said. Call me Father or Daddy. He looked anguished. ‘But I call mummy’s husband “Father” now,’ he said.2 Call me Logan, then, I said. Never call me ‘sir’.
State of literary play. The Mind’s Imaginings – out of print. The Girl Factory – out of print. The Cosmopolitans – out of print (except in France). Income from journalism – nil.
Wallace says it takes two to tango. I have to help him find me work. I said I’d been silent too long, everyone thinks I’m dead. Then Wallace had a bright idea: what about your old friend Peter Scabius? What about him?
*
Peter [Scabius]’s piece on me in The Times (‘One Writer’s War’) seems to have done the trick: people know I am around once more and I’ve had a small flurry of congratulatory postcards, letters and telephone calls. Roderick has renewed my old job as reader on a piecework basis (£5 per report); Louis MacNeice has invited me to give a talk on ‘Post-War French Painting’ and the Swiss Ambassador has written a letter to the paper denying the existence of the villa by Lake Lucerne and effectively accusing me of being a dangerous fantasist. Many magazines have invited me to write about the Harry Oakes murder, but I’ve declined – I’m keeping my powder dry.
Peter was – what? – impressed, astonished, admiring? – when we met. Somewhat in awe by what I’d been through. His own war was uneventful: fire watching, then the Ministry of Information and another novel – Iniquity – to follow up the success of Guilt. ‘You’ve got to use all that stuff,’ he said to me. ‘It’s heaven sent. Money in the bank.’ I humoured him and said I was writing a memoir to be called ‘From Nassau to Lucerne’, although I remained resolutely uninspired. If I had no money it might be different, I realize, but I’ve more than enough for the next year or so. I spend almost nothing, living very quietly, though I’ve started to go to pubs again, the bigger and more crowded the better.
Mother says her varicose veins cause her continual pain. Encarnación is suffering from piles. I go to the optician to be fitted for reading glasses. The house of mirth.
I have had no sexual contact, no intimacy of any kind, since February 1944 (my last days and Freya). Only sporadic bouts of masturbation testify to the fact that the libidinous side of my brain has not shut down entirely. What sick Victorian cleric dubbed the practice self-abuse? Self-help, more like, self-support, self-solace. Auto-eroticism keeps you sane. I should record this for curiosity’s sake; the image in my mind as I pleasure myself these days is not Freya (too achingly sad) but Katrin Annasdottir, the receptionist at the Borg Hotel in Reykjavik. Obviously something more must have registered in me during our few encounters apart from her helpfulness and efficiency. Funny, these sensual fingerprints left on your imagination, only revealing themselves much later. Like invisible ink emerging when warmed by a light bulb or candleflame. What was it about Katrin that sneaked its way into my sexual archive?
[July-August]
In the George with MacNeice and Johnnie Stallybrass from the BBC. MacNeice banging on at me to write a radio play about my months in the villa. Make it a monologue, make it mythic, make it a dream, he says, you can do anything on radio. Good money too: with one radio play – broadcast three times – he says I can make as much as a schoolteacher does in a year. MacNeice is off to India to report on the Partition.3 I envy him. Sudden desire for travel. Buxom girl behind the bar in the George. Tight blouse flattening her fat breasts. The sap may be rising at last.
Friday, 10 October
Dinner at Ben’s. About a dozen of us crowded round two pushed-together tables in his dining room. Five of my Mirós hanging on the wall. A mixture of friends, potential buyers, artists and family. Ben uses these dinners as a kind of informal private view, changing the pictures on the wall according to who is coming and how deep their pockets are. As he welcomes each guest he says, ‘Don’t be shy. If you like something, speak up. Everything on the walls is for sale.’
Sandrine never stirs from her seat: Ben does all the clearing and serving, aided on this occasion by Marius. He’s twenty now – a handsome boy in a sulky, brooding way. Clothilde [Leeping – Ben and Sandrine’s daughter] is away at boarding school. I sat beside Sandrine and she indicated a dark, delicate-featured, good-looking man. She whispered, ‘Ben thinks he’s the only real talent in English painting. The only one he wants to buy.’ I asked her what his name was. Southman,4 she said. I should keep a note. Ben tells me he thinks he’ll sell the Mirós soon but not until he’s back in Paris – he’s asking huge sums. They move back to Paris at the end of the year. Ben has found new premises for a gallery. ‘The Americans are coming back,’ he says. ‘I’m going to make you a lot of money.’
[December]
Baldwin5 dead. Makes me think of the Duke and Duchess – how they hated him. I’m laid up with a bad flu that has gone bronchial – cough like a sea lion’s, throat-tearing. As I lie here shivering, despite the two bar-radiators pointing at me on either side of the bed, I have a vision about my future life. It’s a question, it seems to me, of who travels lightest, travels furthest’. Huge desire to be as free of ‘things’ and possessions as possible. All that stuff I have packed up in boxes… What bliss it would be not to have to think about it all any more.
1948
[January]
I have bought a basement flat in Pimlico. 10 B, Turpentine Lane. It has a bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bathroom. You descend steepish steps to the front door. From the back bedroom there is a view of a small garden to which I have no access. The sitting-room window looks out on to the deep basement well. All the essentials seem in good running order and there are new gas fires in the bedroom and sitting room. I am having it painted white distemper and the floor will be lined throughout in rubberized cork tiles. I need only the most essential furniture: two armchairs, a bed and bedside table, a long table and chair for me to work at. I sold (almost) all my books to Gaston’s in the Strand and will sell my paintings to Ben.
It strikes me now that I may have picked up a façon de vivre at the villa on Lake Lucerne. Less is more. We shall see.
Wednesday, 11 February
Paris. Ben took me as his guest to a grand dinner at the house of a man called Thorvald Hugo, a great collector of modern art. Picasso was there and his new muse, Françoise [Gilot]. Very pretty girl – mind you, so was Dora Maar (more my type). Picasso is quite bald now and the hair on the side of his head is grey. Face seamed and belligerent. He was full of energy and humour: the more he appeared to be enjoying himself the more Françoise became moody and on edge. He had no memory of meeting me before (why should he?), but when Ben told him I had been in Madrid in 1937 he became very curious and moved round the table to sit beside me. I said I’d been there with Hemingway, whom he knew a bit. He had seen Hemingway in Paris after the Liberation and told me how Hemingway claimed to have killed an SS officer. ‘That man killed a lot of animals,’ he said, ‘but animals don’t shoot back.’ He wants to take me to dinner, he says, and talk some more.
Ben thinks I’m mad to sell my paintings. I said, just because I’m selling these doesn’t mean I won’t be buying some more. He’ll give me a fair price. His new gallery is on the rue du Bac but from the way he talks it seems to me he sees Paris purely as a springboard to propel him into New York. He’s planning to rent space there for a show next year. That’s where the real money is, he says. That’s where he’ll sell the Mirós.
Back to days and nights of walking through my favourite Paris quartiers – a flâneur and a noctambule once again. On the surface Paris looks unchanged, as beautiful and as transporting as it always has been, untouched by whatever went on during the war. But there are food shortages and darker currents flow beneath the surface. Everyone not a Communist seems terrified by the Communists. A jangly, hysterical atmosphere.
I was sitting in the Flore watching the tourists trying to spot Sartre (he doesn’t come here any more because of the tourists trying to spot him) when I had the glimmerings of an idea for a novel. A man goes to his doctor and is told he has a week left to live. The novel is about the last seven days of life he has left to him and what he does in them: an attempt to encapsulate all forms of human experience in one week. Everything from impregnating a woman to committing a murder… To be pondered. For the first time in ages a quiver of literary excitement. There is something in this.
To the Brasserie Lipp. Me, Ben, Sandrine, Marius, Picasso, Françoise. Picasso talks a great deal about Dora [Maar], which doesn’t seem to bother Françoise. I asked how she was and Picasso said she was going mad. We talked about my visits to Spain in the Civil War, and Picasso was very intrigued by my story of the machine gun, to the extent of making me act it out. Did you hit the armoured car, he asked? Yes. Did you kill them? I doubt it, I said. But you saw the bullets strike the car? Indubitably.
Picasso seems to me one of these wild, stupid geniuses – more Yeats, Strindberg, Rimbaud, Mozart, than Matisse, Brahms, Braque. It’s quite tiring being with him.
We parted at midnight and walked homeward, Ben, Sandrine, Marius and I – relieved to be out of the Picassian pressure-cooker. Ben cock-a-hoop: Picasso has agreed to sell him directly (not through Kahnweiler [his usual dealer]) two pictures for his New York show. He put his arm round my shoulder: just keep talking about Spain, he said. Marius was unable to understand how someone as young and pretty as Françoise wanted to be with a man forty years older than her. We all laughed. As we gently teased Marius for his naivety, I felt simultaneously the ineffable sadness of my loss and also a growing comfort, a warmth – a realization that these old friends of mine, the Leepings, were in a way my true family, that my life was and would always be bound up with theirs, whatever happened.
Turpentine Lane. Back from Paris. All the work in the flat is finished and the place looks like a cross between a laboratory and a stage set for some experimental play. There is nothing ‘modern’ about it at all – no glass or chrome or leather, no curved wood or abstract wall hangings. It is about the absence of adornment, the nonexistence of clutter. The light struggles to reach the sitting room and I leave the lamps on all day. This is my bunker and I will be happy enough here, I think.
[September]
I ran into Peter [Scabius] at the London Library and he invited me to join him for a drink. He was meeting a ‘friend’, he said. In the pub the friend was already there: a young woman, in her early thirties, I would say, sitting on a stool at the bar with a gin and tonic in front of her and smoking a cigarette in a holder. ‘This is Gloria Nesmith,’ he said. ‘Ness-Smith, Petey,’ she corrected him, then to me: ‘Pleased to meet you,’ though it was immediately clear she wasn’t. I could tell that I was a deliberate gooseberry – Peter had brought me along to pre-empt some row. She was a small, pretty woman with prominent cheekbones. Her voice was curious, almost stagey, and she was wearing very high heels to give herself a few more inches. She smoked her cigarette, finished her drink and then said she had to leave. As she kissed Peter goodbye I saw her dig her nails into the back of his hand. After she’d left he held it out: three little crescents welling blood. ‘She’s incredibly dangerous,’ he said. ‘I should give her up but she fucks like a stoat.’ I said I wasn’t familiar with the simile. ‘You wouldn’t be,’ he said, pleased with himself. ‘I made it up, just for Gloria. You’d have to fuck her yourself to know what I mean.’ He looked at me slyly. ‘Maybe you should,’ he said. ‘Get her off my hands.’ ‘How’s Penny?’ I asked. ‘You bastard,’ he said, laughing.
[November]
Vanderpoel is no longer in the navy – he’s the headmaster of a girls’ boarding school near Shrewsbury. I took the train down to meet him and we had an edgy uncomfortable lunch together in his ugly new house. He’s removed his gingery matelot’s beard – which is a mistake aesthetically – but maybe it’s required that the headmaster be clean-shaven. Lunch was served by his young wife (Jennifer, I think) who promptly disappeared and I could hear a baby crying somewhere. Perhaps a wife and a child are also necessary elements for headmastering. Who knows? Who cares? Vanderpoel was not particularly pleased to see me, but he had read Peter’s article in The Times when it had appeared, so was at least familiar with the abrupt failure of ‘Operation Shipbroker’ and the consequences that had befallen me. He was hardly curious, I have to say. But I had plenty of questions, the first being: whose idea was the whole thing?
‘That chap Marion’s,’ he said. ‘He was seconded to us for a few months.’
Who was he? Where had he come from?
‘Not sure. Could have been from Supreme Headquarters, now I come to think of it. Maybe the Foreign Office. I think he was a diplomat before the war. He was very well connected anyway.’ He looked at me patiently. ‘It was a long time ago, Mountstuart. I can’t remember all the details. And, anyway,’ he went on, ‘even with a little bit of hindsight you have to admit “Shipbroker” was a first-class idea. Who knows how many Nazis we might have caught.’
‘First class or not,’ I said, ‘I was betrayed. I was set up like a sitting duck. The police were waiting for me at the hotel. Only NID had all the details on me. You, Rushbrooke and Marion.’
‘I resent that.’
I showed my exasperation. ‘I’m not accusing you. But somebody sent me on that mission knowing I’d be arrested almost immediately. You must see that.’
‘It wasn’t me and it certainly wasn’t Rushbrooke.’
‘Where’s Marion now?’
He said he had no idea. He, Vanderpoel, was a member of a dining club of ex-NID staff and he promised he would ask around, discreetly. I had one further question.
‘Do you know if Marion had any connection to the Duke of Windsor?’
Vanderpoel actually laughed at this, a strange wheezy sound, and he covered his mouth with his hand.
‘Really, Mountstuart,’ he said, ‘you are priceless.’
1949
[Saturday, 1 January]
Saw in the New Year at Peter’s home in Wandsworth. Quite a large party, forty or so, most of whom I’d never met. Peter’s wife Penny is sweet and jolly, plumper since her two children. I was surprised to see Gloria Ness-Smith there and told her so. I think she liked my bluntness, liked the implication. There was no need for any pussyfooting between us. ‘He wouldn’t dare not invite me,’ she said. ‘I’d kill him.’ She used to be a nurse, she said, and now worked as a secretary in Peter’s publishers. ‘But not for long,’ she added. I suspect Penny’s role as Mrs Scabius hasn’t much longer to run.
Gloria was drinking gin and had her drink topped up twice as we chatted. At one stage she leant into me, her pushed-up breasts flattening against my arm. ‘Peter envies you,’ she said. I asked what on earth for? Peter was the paradigm of the successful novelist – why should he envy me? ‘He envies you your glamorous war,’ she said. ‘He can’t buy that. He can buy everything else, but he can’t buy that, and he envies you.’ There was pure glee in her chuckle. Jesus Christ, I thought. Then she leant into me once more, before wandering off to look for Peter, leaving me with an unequivocal erection. At midnight, I told myself that, even if I wasn’t happy, my load of unhappiness was maybe beginning to diminish, ever so slightly.
[February]
Letter from Vanderpoel. Colonel Marion died in April 1945, in a ‘motor vehicle’ accident in Brussels. According to Vanderpoel there were two other fatalities. He had asked his old NID contacts, but as far as he could establish there was nothing suspicious in Marion’s death and he had no apparent connections to the Duke of Windsor.
So much for my great vendetta, so much for the tireless hunt for my betrayer. Isn’t this how life turns out, more often than not? It refuses to conform to your needs – the narrative needs that you feel are essential to give rough shape to your time on this earth. I wanted to hunt down Marion, wanted to confront him, but instead am left with the banal conclusion that, more than likely, there was no conspiracy, and that the Duke and Duchess had not plotted with their powerful friends to have done with me. Hard to live with, this: hard to come to terms with the fact that it was just another botched operation, another baffling run of bad luck… Feelings of depression; feelings of frustration; feelings of emptiness in the face of all this randomness – done down by the haphazard, yet again.
[April]
Hôtel Rembrandt. Paris. I’ve come here to work on my novella, The Villa by the Lake. It can only be a novella, I’ve decided, a cryptic, Kafkaesque, Camusian, sub-Rex Warnerish parable of my bizarre incarceration. I’ve no idea how to end it, however. Perhaps Paris will inspire me. Wallace said he could obtain a large advance if I wanted, but I persuaded him not to. It’s one of those works that will have to find its own voice and conclusion – and even then I won’t know if it has succeeded. It seems to be going relatively well. All I do is try to recapture the routines and atmosphere of the villa with maximum fidelity, but I’m aware that the reality was so strange that readers will think it all profoundly symbolic and metaphorical. That’s my fond hope, anyway. Also I realize that any hint of pretension, any effort to turn up the significance, will be fatal. The more I make it resolutely true to life, the more all metaphorical interpretation will be unconsciously supplied by the reader.
There is a pretty girl called Odile who works in Ben’s gallery. In her mid twenties, dark, with short untidy hair and big eyes. She wears black all the time and gold strappy sandals on her unabashedly grimy feet. Ben told her I was writing a book about my time in prison during the war and I could tell she was intrigued. If I can’t have Gloria Ness-Smith, perhaps Odile will consent to be my passport back to the world of human sexual relations.
My routine is straightforward. I wake up, take two aspirin for my hangover headache, and go out for a breakfast of coffee and croissant at a café. I buy a newspaper and my lunch – a baguette, some cheese, some saucisson and a bottle of wine. By the time I come back my room has been cleaned and I sit down at my work table and try to write. I eat out in the evenings, usually at the Leepings – it’s open house, Ben says – but I like to give them some time without me so I take myself off to Balzar or chez Lipp, or other brasseries for a solitary meal. I don’t mind a day spent entirely in my own company but I do drink a lot in compensation: a bottle at lunch, a bottle in the evening, plus apéritifs and digestifs.
I asked Odile if I could take her to dinner and she said yes, immediately. We went to Chez Fernand, a little place I’ve found on the rue de I’Université. Odile dreams only of going to New York when Ben opens his gallery there, so we speak English to each other to help her practise. It strikes me that this may be the real nature of my appeal: her own pet anglophone. She has brown, long-lashed eyes; downy olive skin.
I walk Odile back to her Métro station. I lean forward to kiss her on the cheeks and she moves her face so that our lips meet. We kiss gently, the tips of our tongues touching and I feel that old familiar weakness spread at the base of my spine. We agree to see each other later in the week.
Friday, 15 April
Odile was here last night. We ate at the Flore and came back to the hotel. She has a lithe, girl’s body. I was useless, incapable of maintaining a semi-erection for more than a few seconds. My mind was swarming with images of Freya – she might as well have been in the room watching us. Odile patiently masturbated me and, when that had no prolonged effect either, generously bent her head to take my cock in her mouth, but I told her not to bother.
She sat up and lit a cigarette as I tried to explain how my wife had died in the war and how I still couldn’t get over it. In the war? she said. But the war was a long time ago. I agreed it was and apologized. She said, ‘Maybe I better go,’ and dressed and left me. I slept a few hours of a sound and dreamless sleep.
But when I woke – an hour ago now – I felt a quality of despair and darkness grip me that was entirely new. Three years on I am living as vividly with the loss of Freya as I have ever done. And the rain is falling outside. The melancholy drip, drip, drip.
I have taken my two aspirin for my morning headache and have taken two more and two more and two more and two more and two more and two more. I fetched my bottle of whisky out of the cupboard and put out the DO NOT DISTURB sign. I have begun to drink my whisky, slowly washing down the remaining aspirin in my pill bottle.
I know what I am doing but somehow the situation seems quite unreal – as if I’m on stage acting in a play. I just feel – I don’t know what I feel. The decision came to me this morning and I don’t think it has much to do with the humiliation of last night. I know it must be done. It’s a rainy, grey morning in Paris. All over the city there must be other people dying, on the point of death or dead. I’m another to add to their number. I don’t fear death, I simply think for me here, now, it’s the best and only solution. The decision came to me, quite matter-of-factly. I drink more whisky. I will keep on writing. People will say: did you hear about Logan Mountstuart? He killed himself in Paris. I drink more whisky. There are no more pills. I begin to feel drunk – or is this the beginning? I am committing suicide. It seems absurd. Forty-three years was long enough for me. I wasn’t a complete failure. There is some of my work that will
[At this point the words become an illegible scribble and stop.]