William Boyd - The New Confessions

“Sounds like rather a good idea.”

“Makes you look years older, you know. You should grow one, for the recruiting officer. How old are you, anyway?”

“Seventeen.… I was thinking of waiting till next year.”

“Wouldn’t wait too long. Might miss out.”

“Good point.”

“Say you’re nineteen. With a moustache you should have no trouble.”

He wittered on. Suddenly I wished I had grown a moustache at school. Imagine if I had arrived at Faye’s door mustachioed! What an impression of maturity that would have conveyed … I resolved to start growing one the next day.

Donald Verulam arrived before luncheon. He wore a tweed suit. Somehow, I had expected to see him in uniform. When I asked what he did at the War Office, he said he was just a “glorified civil servant.” He seemed glad to see me, and gently reprimanded me for running away from school. He advised me to go back home and promised to intercede with my father on my behalf. Instinctively, I was pleased to see him, but my own edginess, and the new information that my mother’s letters seemed to contain, made me rather cool at first. I think he sensed this and was puzzled. Several times he asked me if I was all right. I reassured him.

I was in turmoil. Mettlesome theories and hypotheses kept thrusting themselves on me. I looked closely at his behavior with Faye, but I saw no evidence for anything more passionate than a friendship. He spent most of Saturday afternoon in town with the Hobhouse family solicitor, sorting out Vincent Hobhouse’s affairs. That evening there was a small dinner party with two dull couples, one of which brought a tall myopic daughter — Nellie or Flossie — who, one sensed, was rather keen on Peter. To my relief, Faye was as good as her word. All aftereffects of the picnic incident seemed to have disappeared. Perhaps she believed it really had been a mistake. She reverted to being nice Aunt Faye. So I turned my attention to the next relationship that concerned me. What was I to do about Donald Verulam?

Sunday. Church. At one point during an incomprehensible sermon (the vicar had a speech defect: his mouth sounded as if it were full of water — all I could hear was lapping and slurping, as of a subterranean stream) I turned my head and found Donald looking at me. He rolled his eyes, and I grinned back. It was like the old days at Barnton or Drumlarish. After luncheon (soup, fish, game, joint, sweet, savory — war or no war, one ate well chez Hobhouse) he asked me if I felt like going for a walk. I agreed.

We each took a stick from the umbrella stand in the hall and set out briskly along the Oxford road. We cut off it, climbed over a stile and walked along the edge of a field of green corn that led up to a small beech wood that crowned a hill. There we could see the modest valleys and ridges of Oxfordshire unfolding sedately to the horizon. It was a sullen coldish afternoon, the cloudy sky mouse-gray with only hints of yellow. We walked on briskly for a couple of miles. Normally on a jaunt like this we would each have had a camera; today, being without them, we amused ourselves by pointing out scenes we would have taken. I felt all my reservations and suspicions of Donald slip away, and as we walked on, talking occasionally, I sensed a growing in me a sort of love that I could only describe as filial. A mixture of strong affection, respect and a happy subordination. The love that exists between a father and son is peculiar, possessing a clear hierarchical structure, the son always, as it were, looking up. And the father, for his part, then voluntarily elevating his son to a position of equality. I never felt this with Innes Todd. But that day as we strode the hills above the Windrush Valley, I sensed unspoken in the air around us that fine, reciprocal interplay of feeling. Donald felt it too, I know, felt the intimacy between us that made him want to talk to me about Faye. We stopped at a gate and looked at the view.

“I’m very fond of your aunt, you know, Johnny.”

“Yes. Well … I could sort of see that.”

“She’s a lovely person. Very like your mother.”

“Yes.” Now I could hardly speak.

He looked round at me and smiled.

“I’m going to ask her to marry me. What d’you think?”

I felt my tear ducts sting. I felt drowned in gratitude.

“I couldn’t be happier.” I paused. “Father.”

“What’s that?”

“Father.”

“Sorry?”

“Father.… You’re my father.”

Edgy laugh. “What do you mean?”

My eyes fogged with tears.

“I know about you and my mother,” I said slowly. “I know. All about the love affair.”

“Hang on a second, Johnny old chap. You’ve lost me.”

“Everything. I read her letters to Faye. I know that you and she …” I began to grow a little desperate. “You don’t know this, but she became pregnant, after that afternoon in the Trossachs, 1898.… That was me. She never told you. But it’s all there in the letter to Faye. You’re my real father.”

I could not hold it in. I bawled. I blubbed and bellowed in my happiness.

He grabbed my arms and shook me silent.

“John! John! What’re you saying? Where did you get this nonsense from?”

My head cleared. Miraculously. My tear-washed eyes dried. I wiped the snot from my nose and lips. I felt a nervous cold breeze: it seemed to blow only on my smarting eyeballs.

“I read it in the letter,” I repeated. “To Faye. You had a love affair with my mother.…”

Donald was twisting his body to and fro on the spot as if demented. He pressed his knuckles into his temples.

“John, listen. I did not. I never did.” He spoke calmly. “Your mother was the best friend I ever had, but I never had a love affair with her. Believe me, for God’s sake.” He paused. “It was Faye I loved. I always have. When she married Vincent Hobhouse I ran away to Edinburgh. If I hadn’t had your mother’s friendship and support, I know I would have killed myself.”

He spoke on, urgently, eloquently, explaining everything, all my blind idiotic misconceptions. I felt as though something had spilled inside me, like black ink. A gloom filled me as I looked at his kind, excellent face. I owed nothing to that noble nature. My fate was settled, all hope of escape denied me. I was indeed the son of Innes McNeil Todd.

VILLA LUXE, May 16, 1972

Good God, my heart goes out to my younger self. There’s an almost tragic dignity about my sheer guts and audacity. Imagine it: if you want to attract somebody of the opposite sex, expose your equipment. But I’m sure I never planned such a course of action precisely; I intended to do something that day, as or how the circumstances indicated. Perhaps I’d have touched her, or if she had joined in the tag, say, I might have caught her and held her against me for a moment. Anything to show her.… But at the time I chose swimming. It was not to be.

What a fellow I was then! I must have been crazy, the things I did. Never a pause for thought. A creature of pure impulse and instinct — like an animal. Nothing seemed impossible or ill advised. Sometimes I look back on the rawness of my youthful character with almost jealousy.

I can tell you now that those last days in Charlbury almost finished me off. I seriously contemplated suicide for a while. You may say I was being unduly sensitive, but to experience first such rejection and then to learn the truth about Donald combined radically to undermine my confidence. People like me with an excess of self-esteem suffer proportionally once it is threatened. The fiction that I had so fancifully allowed myself to construct and cherish had been exposed as exactly that, and the hard truths about myself I had to fall back on were not comforting.