Any Human Heart (7 page)

Eventually we decided to go to a café for shelter and found one with a glass veranda where we drank interminable cups of coffee. Lucy wrote postcards while I struggled with my Rilke. I would like to speak German but it seems so fearfully complicated: if only there were a way of arriving at moderate fluency (it’s all I ask) with minimum effort. Perhaps I’m not a linguist… I developed a sudden longing for English food: veal and ham pie, shoulder of mutton with onions, jam pudding. We ate a cake and decided to go back early.

At the pension there was no sign of Mother. So Lucy and I walked over to the sanatorium to greet Father after his day of baths and scrubs and saltwater showers. When he emerges from these sessions he gives off the illusion of good health for a short while, almost glowing, red spots on his cheeks, his eyes bright. But I have to say he has become noticeably thinner since last vac and in the morning he looks gaunt and tired. He finds it almost impossible to sleep, he says, from the strange pressures in his lungs. He still has a healthy appetite, though, tucking into Frau Dielendorfer’s slabs of cheese, ham, and rye bread with what seems desperate hunger.

Then we saw a curious sight. As we approached the main portico of the sanatorium (it looks like the entrance to a provincial art gallery) we saw that Mother was there, waiting, but on the steps beside her stood a tall man, in a macintosh and a Homburg, and they were talking to each other with some urgency. He left as we drew near. Mother was obviously very surprised to see us back so early from Innsbruck. She cannot feign unconcern, Mother — anger, yes, indifference, no.

‘What’re you doing here?’ she said, cross, despite her best efforts. ‘You go to Innsbruck for two hours? What a wasting.’

‘Who was that man?’ I asked, somewhat audaciously, I admit. ‘A doctor?’

‘No. Yes. Of a sort, yes. A, ah, physician. Yes. I was asking him some advice. Very helpful.’

Her lying was so inept it was all we could do not to laugh. Later, comparing suspicions and intuitions, Lucy and I both agreed he was an admirer. Lucy’s mood, I’m glad to report, improved at the discovery of this subterfuge. We played dominoes in the lounge and she let me kiss her (cheek only) when she said goodnight.

Spent the morning effortfully pushing father in his bath chair through the streets of Bad Riegerbach. A bath chair can be an unconscionably difficult thing to steer if you only have one hand to provide the power. Father worked the wheels as best he could but I asked him to stop, as all his energies being expended in this way rather defeated the purpose of having him in the chair in the first place. So I parked him in the small square by the post office and I read him articles out of last Wednesday’s
Times.
He was well wrapped up and the day was not cold, but every time I glanced up at him he looked pinched and uncomfortable.

I asked him from time to time how he was feeling and his replies never varied: ‘Absolutely tip-top’, ‘Right as rain’. My mood kept surging from ineffable sadness to huge irritation. Sad that his son was obliged to push him about in
a fauteuil roulant,
irritated that I should be spending my precious time thus engaged. And yet I can’t remain angry with him for long. I was furious with him when we arrived for presenting Frau Dielendorfer with a gift package of Foley’s potted meats, corned beef, hams in aspic and such like. I said to him, Father, we are not travelling salesmen, there is no need to disperse Foley’s products around Europe. Don’t be so pretentious, Logan, was all he replied and I felt very ashamed. I apologized to him later — he has this effect on me.

Mother had told me to take Father out for a ‘good three hours’, but when we returned to the pension, Mother was away. ‘She’s been out all morning,’ Lucy said, ‘left immediately after you did.’ Father was served some soup and then hauled himself up the stairs for a nap. For the first time an awful foreboding strikes me that he may never be fully well again and I feel angry at myself for my chronic inability to think more often of others and how they may be feeling.

I am writing this in the pension’s drawing room, alone, listening to Brahms’s first piano concerto on the gramophone. The adagio is reliably calming and contemplating its serene beauty I find myself wondering why Lucy has turned not cold, exactly but lukewarm towards me. I tried to take her hand in the train back from Innsbruck but she snatched it away. And yet five minutes later she was chatting away (about her father’s new hobby: lepidoptery) as if we were the best and oldest of friends. But I don’t want to be her ‘friend’: I want to be her lover.

Father back to the sanatorium routine for baths of boiling mud and gallons of sulphurous water and God knows what else. Lucy came to my room after breakfast and said to my surprise that she had formulated a plan — which we duly carried out. We told Mother we were going to take the train to Lans, where there was a local festival (a festival of what, we did not specify: it could have been a festival of lederhosen for all Mother cared) — Mother thought it an excellent idea. So we had Franz, the head waiter and general factotum, drive us down to the station in the pony and trap, whereupon, as soon as he had left us, we took the funicular back up to the old town.

We waited in a souvenir shop with a view of the pension, pretending to choose postcards for a good half-hour before Mother emerged, splendidly got up in her sable coat (‘See!’ hissed Lucy) and wearing a hat with a veil. She hurried past the sanatorium and went into the Goldener Hirsch Hotel. Lucy and I gave her five minutes before we wandered casually into the lobby. We spotted her almost immediately in the residents’ lounge, at the far end, half obscured by a potted palm. She was leaning forward in her armchair talking to the tall, lanky man we’d seen outside the sanatorium.

Lucy called a bellboy over and discreetly indicated the man. ‘Would you tell Mr Johnson that I’m here to see him,’ she said. The bellboy immediately corrected her: that’s not Mr Johnson, he said. That’s Mr Prendergast. From America. Lucy apologized for her error and we left.

I have to say I feel strangely neutral about Mother’s behaviour — I was more impressed by the guileful way Lucy discovered Prendergast’s name. But I have to accept the fact — Lucy refuses to admit any other interpretation — that in the midst of my father’s illness his wife seems to have taken up with an admirer.

Sitting at lunch today I watched my father slowly masticating a chunk of Frau Dielendorfer’s roast veal. He caught me looking at him and automatically gave his faint apologetic smile, as if he’d been doing something wrong. I felt a spasm of hurt on his behalf and also felt tears warm my eyes. Mother was in rampant, unstoppable form, in loud debate with Lucy. They were arguing about polka-dots for some reason, Mother claiming that no one over the age of ten should be allowed to wear them. ‘Otherwise for servants or dancers,’ she said. This was harsh, as Lucy was actually wearing a yellow polka-dotted blouse (in which she looked very fetching, I thought). Mother declaimed on, allowing that polka-dots were suitable for circus clowns as well. Father looked over at me again and winked. Suddenly, I knew he was going to die soon.

ABBEY

I thought H-D was more than usually patronizing today when he complimented me on my history exhibition to Jesus College. You would have thought from his self-congratulatory attitude that he’d purchased the place for me himself as one used to purchase a commission in the army. I told you Jesus was the college for you, didn’t I? And so on, as if he’d done me some great seigneurial favour. I said, without the slightest hint of a smile, ‘I couldn’t have done it without you, sir. Thank you so much, sir.’ I think he got the message. By way of apologizing he invited me for tea at his cottage next Sunday, promising to tell me more of Le Mayne.

Peter has his place at Balliol confirmed so at least there will be one fellow spirit at Oxford. We went into the woods during sports for a calming cigarette. We both think it strange and something of a shame that Ben is so dead set against varsity. Mind you, I said, given the choice between Paris and Oxford I don’t think I’d hesitate long. We decided that Ben must have some form of private income, though we couldn’t calculate how much. Clearly it wasn’t a fortune or he wouldn’t need to get a job. ‘Just enough not to worry,’ Peter said ruefully. The thought of having to earn a living one day does seem somewhat alien just now, but we both agreed we couldn’t wait to leave Abbey. I said I’ll probably end up a schoolteacher and asked Peter what he dreamed of becoming. ‘A famous novelist,’ he said. ‘Like Michael Arlen or Arnold Bennett with his yacht.’ This took me back somewhat. Peter a writer? The mind does boggle.

The summer term seems to stretch ahead interminably. I realize, with hindsight, how invigorating the ‘challenges’ had been, how they had transformed the boredom and banality of our life at school. H-D lent me a poem called
Waste Land
by Eliot, advising me to read it. There were some rather beautiful lines but the rest was incomprehensible. If I want music in verse I’ll stick to Verlaine, thank you very much.

At corps Sergeant Tozer was in a fearful bate. He looked like he was about to explode as he shouted and screamed at us on the parade ground. We are intrigued by Tozer — we find him droll — so we take every opportunity to ask him about the war and how many Germans he had killed. He’s always very vague about the exact figure but gives the impression it was many dozen. Obviously he was nowhere near the front line. Today I told him I’d been in Austria for the vac and that Karl, the major-domo at the pension, had been in the war too — ‘Opposite British troops’.

‘What’s that got to do with the price of beer, Mountstuart?’

‘I mean it’s funny to think you might have faced each other, sir, across no man’s land.’

‘Funny?’

‘You could have been shooting at him and he at you.’

‘Or,’ Ben chipped in, ‘when you attacked the German lines you might have come face to face.’

‘I’d have given him short shrift, I tell you. Bloody Huns.’

‘You’d have had his guts for garters, wouldn’t you, sir?’

‘Damn right.’

‘You’d have had your bayonet in his tripes soon as look at him, eh, sir?’

‘I’d do whatever I had to do, Leeping.’

‘Kill or be killed, sir.’

We can and do keep this sort of banter going for ages and as a result Tozer likes us and gives us soft jobs. But he was in a state today because the night exercise was looming and he saw what a feckless bunch we were (Abbey is taking on St Edmunds). Ben says ragging is not enough: we have to come up with a memorable act of sabotage.

I cycled out to Glympton. Still hot — a summery heat but with, somewhere, a layer of spring freshness lingering. We sat in deck-chairs in the sun in Holden-Dawes’s back garden and ate sponge cake and drank tea. I complimented H-D on the cake and asked him where he’d bought it. He said he’d baked it himself and somehow I don’t think he was lying. He asked me what I thought of
The Waste Land
poem and I said I thought it was somewhat pretentious. He found that very amusing. When he asked me what poetry I preferred I told him I’d been reading Rilke — in German. ‘And you think that’s not pretentious?’ he said — then he apologized. ‘I look forward to reading your own work,’ he said. I asked him how he knew I wanted to write and he said that it was just a wise guess — and then admitted that Le Mayne had told him what I’d said at my interview.

‘Show anything you do to Le Mayne,’ he said. ‘He’ll be honest with you. And that’s what you need when you’re beginning more than anything — honesty.’

‘What about you, sir?’ I said suddenly, spontaneously. ‘Could I show you something?’

‘Oh, I’m just a humble schoolmaster,’ he said. ‘Once you go up to Oxford you’ll forget all about us.’

‘You’re probably right,’ I said. I didn’t mean this but H-D brings this sort of thing out in me. He leads you on and then abruptly rebuffs you; seems to admit you into the circle of his affections and then slams the door in your face. It’s happened too many times to me now and I see it coming — so I say something hard and callous just to let him know. All it did was make him laugh again.

Then the doorbell rang and he came back out into the garden with the woman I’d seen him with before, last term, at the bus stop. She was pretty and dark with very arched, pronounced eyebrows. He introduced her as Cynthia Goldberg.

‘And this is Logan Mountstuart,’ he said. ‘We expect great things of him.’

She looked at me keenly and then turned to H-D.

‘James! What a terrible burden to place on anyone,’ she said. I shall be scanning the newspapers for the rest of my life.’

‘Mountstuart needs burdens,’ H-D said.

‘He said, as the camel’s back snapped,’ I added.

They both laughed at this and for an instant I felt ridiculously pleased and sophisticated, making these adults laugh, as if I were an equal with them, and I sensed a sudden warmth for H-D and his ironic, distanced interest in me. Maybe he was right: this was the only way a master could develop a relationship with one of his charges — goading, provocative, testing, but genuine for all that.

And I was impressed with Cynthia Goldberg, my God. H-D went to fetch some sherry and she offered me a cigarette. I almost dared to accept it but declined, explaining the school rule.

‘Don’t you let your boys smoke?’ she asked when H-D reappeared. ‘Poor Logan says he’s not allowed.’

‘Poor Logan smokes enough, as it is. Here—’ He handed me a glass of pale sherry. He raised his own in congratulation and explained about my exhibition to Jesus. We clinked glasses. Cynthia said, eyes mockingly narrow, ‘And clever with it, I see.’

It was a rather magical time that afternoon. H-D lit a pipe, Cynthia smoked her cigarette and I drank three glasses of sherry as we talked about this and that. The late sun lit the new leaves on the apple trees from behind, turning them a glowing lime green, and the swifts began to swoop and swerve above our heads. Cynthia Goldberg is a concert pianist — ‘a poor and striving one’, she said. I find her profoundly, stirringly beautiful — intelligent, worldly, gifted. Oh for a world that contains Cynthia Goldbergs! I feel a growing jealousy for H-D — that he knows her, that she’s a part of his life (Are they lovers? Can they be?). And what will she remember of our encounter? Nothing, probably. Who? Mount-what? Oh, the
schoolboy.
A schoolboy. Jesus Christ, I have to start my real life soon, before I die of boredom and frustration.