William Boyd - The New Confessions

It was October 1915, I think. The Saturday match had been canceled due to heavy frost. It was a fissile, sharp day. A blue, washed-out sky and hard clear views of the Tweed up as far as Thornielee and downriver to the smoke from the mill chimneys in Galashiels. We sat huddled in our usual spot, smoking Turkish cigarettes and taking sips from a flask of rum that Hamish had smuggled into school.

“Do you remember that time,” he asked, apropos of nothing, “when you said, did prime numbers exist before anyone had thought of them?”

“Did I say that?”

“Yes.… Well, I was thinking. Is maths something we invented or something we discovered? And I thought, we couldn’t have invented something as complicated as maths. The history of maths is a history of exploration. As we go we find out more. It is all there”—he waved at the general scene—“waiting to be found.”

“I suppose so.”

“And what does that tell you about the world?”

I said nothing.

“If maths in some way is already there … who created it?”

“I don’t know.… God?”

“Yes. Maybe. Maybe maths proves God exists.” He looked at me. The cold air was having its usual unfortunate effect on his face, but his eyes were wide with the intensity of his thought. To my astonishment, I suddenly felt a little frightened.

“What I think,” he began slowly, “is that maths is the key to everything.” He paused. “If you go far enough, perhaps you’ll discover the meaning of life.”

I was going to scoff, but I saw that he was caught in a strange fervent mood. He drank from the flask. He was intoxicated, but not as a result of any spiritous liquor. That afternoon he went on to tell me about a mathematician called Georg Cantor, a man, he said, who had organized the infinite. He talked about set theory, transfinite and irrational numbers, and the square root of 2, and the mysteriously potent designation aleph-null that Cantor had devised. He told me many things, most of which I understood not at all, or which promptly slipped my mind, but I will never forget the passion of his monologue. It had a quality that was rare, and, although it may be bizarre to talk about it in association with an abstract academic subject, I can find no better word to describe it than “faith.”

It was shortly after that day on Paulton Law that my uncle Vincent Hobhouse died, not from apoplexy or heart failure as we might reasonably have supposed, but from being run over by a motor bus in Charlbury High Street. I wrote a clumsy but sincere letter of condolence to Aunt Faye. She replied at once, saying how “touched” and “moved” she had been by my sympathy and concern. Perhaps her own bereavement reminded her of mine, but whatever the reason she began to write to me regularly once a week. At first I thought this a little strange, but gradually I grew to look forward to her letters with impatience. I started writing back too, and our correspondence was soon in full spate.

You will understand that, the average seventeen-year-old boy has little or no power over his affections. In my case this impotence was singular. I lived under the sway of my emotions. Even as an adult I find the struggle to resist exhausting. I possessed no resilience then. This sort of nature is both a curse and a blessing. Try to understand me as I was and do not judge too harshly when you hear what happened next.

I have always felt vividly and instantly with no mediating influence of reflection or logic. My nature gives to all my work an impulse and a motive that, however the critics may have carped, they have never denied is my prime and most valuable asset. It is a propensity that has brought me the happiest moments of my life and wreaked terrible devastation. Oonagh was the first to receive my love, and my aunt Faye was the next. She initiated my first adult, equal discourse. I fell in love with her through print. I had not seen her since that day in Waverley Station when she kissed my cheek. Now, those seconds of contact returned — and with what transforming force. I saw her dark, bruised eyes, humid and alive; smelled the odor of her perfume; felt the soft contact of her cheek with mine. I realized, with thrilling hindsight, that I had in fact loved her, unknowingly, since that moment. When the post arrived and was distributed, I held the letter unopened for minutes, my heart clubbing my ribs, my breath painfully constricted. “All my love, Faye.” I derived a hundred nuances from those four bland monosyllables. This was my first blind passion and I celebrated it nightly with physical release.

I began to take more care over the composition of my letters, expanding them from tedious itemization of the school news into what I hoped were stylish intimations of my own character and personality. I told her of Minto’s deepening gloom about the war, of Hamish’s speculations about mathematics as the key to all nature; I whimsically embellished and exaggerated our own roles in the rugby team, as if we were a couple of knowing aesthetes pretending to be bloods for a dare. I presented her with myself stripped of any secondary defining role — child, pupil, nephew. It was a test, in its way, and I took the increasing candor and intimacy of Faye’s replies as a sign that I had passed.

In the spring of 1916 I asked her for a photograph. It required some courage, and until it arrived, I was in a constant sweat of trepidation that I had gone too far. But it came, a snapshot. Faye, in the country, leaning on a five-barred gate, her curly hair in a loose bun, her smudged, debauched eyes narrowed by her smile. One hand held the top of a dog’s leash and the other the knuckly end of a blackthorn walking stick. On the back she had scribbled, “Shipton-Under-Wychwood. March ’16.” Who had taken it? I wondered. Probably Peter, her son. It was too well composed to be little Gilda’s or Alceste’s work. I opened the accompanying letter and began to read.

Dear John,

Photograph duly enclosed; I hope you like it. Donald took it for me. He comes down most weekends from London. I cannot tell you what a support and kindness he has been since Vincent died. He is sorting out all the dreary problems to do with the will and estate. He sends his best wishes.

There was more stuff about Donald, sweet Donald, but I could not read on. I felt as if I were about to burst into tears. I experienced a sense of such towering injustice that I could hardly speak. What gave Donald Verulam the right, I demanded, to occupy a place in my aunt Faye’s good favor? For what possible reason could he have taken on these responsibilities? On what conceivable grounds did he ingratiate himself with a member of my family, whom he hardly knew? I was outraged, brimming with hurt and disappointment. I, who could only write to her, had to accept that Faye’s life was not centered on my weekly letters as mine was on hers. I was in the grip of an irrational jealously so intense it made me want to vomit.

We like to laugh, do we not, at the baroque passions of high adolescence, but we cannot deny that they control and guide us during those few hot palpitating years. It is an unsettling, overwhelming power and one that most people will never feel so vehemently again, indeed, will never want to be so ruthlessly led by. Adult life, if it is to function at all, demands a moderation of these extremes. From time to time, however, they break out — lava cracking the pumice — and dominate with the same rampaging potency. What is lust, adult lust, after all, but the desire to recapture the heady sensations of adolescent sexuality?

Personally, I have never lost that youthful capacity to feel , in its raw vital state. Thank God. This is what sets me apart from the many, hamstrung by decorum and convention, stifled by notions of respect and status. Even today, I can reexperience my seventeen-year-old jealousy, feel its grip at my throat, its claw in my guts. It was unfocused and indiscriminate. I did not see Donald Verulam as a rival, more as an interloper, destroying an ideal duality. But it would not let me go. I could not forget my love for Faye, could think only that he was there with her, and I was apart. One idea came to dominate my thoughts: I had to see her, if only for a few hours. I had to run away.