Any Human Heart by William Boyd

you — nor Leeping and Scabius. I would have to sack all three of you. I can’t sack two and not the third.’
    ‘Yes, sir.’ I wanted to say something audacious, something devil-may-care, something haughtily indifferent — but I couldn’t think of anything.
    ‘The bad news I have to tell you prevents me from sacking you, you see.’
    I knew before he uttered the words.
    He turned. ‘I’m sorry to say that your father died this morning.’
    And then the stinking FUCKING bastard flogged me. Twelve strokes of the cane. He told me I was gated for the rest of the term and I would be charged with the cost of replacing the missing rifle. Then he opened the door of his study and showed me out. He never uttered one further word of sympathy. I hope he dies in pain and rots in hell.
     
    1 Peter Scabius, LMS’s closest friend from his schooldays, along with Benjamin Leeping.
    2 As far as is known, the Livre d ‘Or was never printed. No trace of the manuscript survives.
    3 Lucy Sansom, LMS’s first cousin, was one year older than he. Her mother, Jennifer Mountstuart, had married Horace Sansom, an engineer from Perth, Scotland. Horace Sansom was currently working for the Bengal Railway Services, hence Lucy’s presence at her uncle and aunt’s at Christmas 1923.
    4 Henry Soutar, LMS’s housemaster, a sexagenarian, not much liked by LMS and his set and dubbed The Lizard’ because of his exceptionally seamed and wattled face.
    5 The village where St James’s Roman Catholic church was located and where Abbeyhurst sent its Catholic boys for Mass. About three miles away from the school.
     
     
The Oxford Journal
     
    Logan Mountstuart went up to Jesus College, Oxford, in the Michaelmas term of 1924. The journal commences in the following term, 24 February 1925. In the meantime, following the death of Francis Mountstuart, his wife, Mercedes, had sold the house in Birmingham and moved to London, to South Kensington, where she bought a five-storey, white-stucco terraced house in Sumner Place and fitted it out in some style. Peter Scabius was also up at Oxford, at Balliol College, and Ben Leeping, as he had always promised he would, was established in Paris working for an art gallery and learning his trade as a dealer.
     
1925
     
     
     
Tuesday, 24 February
     
    To Balliol for lunch with Peter. Balliors commons are so much better than Jesus’s: three types of cheese, bread and oatmeal biscuits and a jug of beer. I felt strangely depressed, for some reason. I think it’s because Peter so unreservedly and uncritically loves Oxford and all it holds for him and I find the place stifling and disappointing. He had also received a letter from Ben — and I thought, jealously, why is Ben writing to Peter and not to me?
    I went on to King’s lecture on Constitutional Reform — inaudible and therefore a waste of time. On the way out of Balliol I met Quennell, 1 who told me he was writing a book on Blake. I did not tell him about mine on Shelley. Why? Was I afraid it would make me look presumptuous or pretentious? Just because Quennell has already published a book of poems doesn’t make his ambitions superior to mine. I really must make more effort to — at least —
appear
confident: all this hiding my light under a bushel is pathetic.
     
     
Thursday, 26 February
     
    Le Mayne was very complimentary about my essay on Cavour and the Risorgimento and has invited me to one of his celebrated lunches on Saturday. Stevens 2 kindly reminded me that I needed to go to roll-call tomorrow or risk a gating. This place is so like school: a school where one can smoke and drink, but an extension of school none the less.
     
     
Friday, 27 February
     
    Les Invalides 3 was quiet for a Friday night and Mrs Anderson was not yet drunk and consequently recognized me. She made me a plate of foie gras sandwiches and I drank a bottle of claret as I read the newspaper. Cassell came in with a couple of friends and asked me to make up a four at bridge,