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William Boyd was born in 1952 in Accra, Ghana, and grew up there and in Nigeria. His first novel, A Good Man in Africa (1981), won the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Somerset Maugham Prize. His other novels are An Ice-Cream War (1982, shortlisted for the 1982 Booker Prize and winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize), Stars and Bars (1984), The New Confessions (1987), Brazzaville Beach (1990, winner of the McVitie Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), The Blue Afternoon (1993, winner of the 1993 Sunday Express Book of the Year Award), Armadillo (1998) and Any Human Heart (2002, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet). His novel Restless (2006) won the Costa Novel of the Year Award, and his most recent book is Ordinary Thunderstorms . He is also the author of four collections of short stories: On the Yankee Station (1981), The Destiny of Nathalie ‘X’ (1995), Fascination (2004) and The Dream Lover (2008). He is married and divides his time between London and South West France.

ADULT VIDEO

PLAY

Springtime in Oxford is vulgar, anyway, but something about this particular spring in Oxford is having me on. Really, these cherry trees are absurd. One wonders if just quite so many flowers are necessary. It is almost as if the cherry trees on the Woodstock Road are trying to prove something – some sort of floral brag, swanking to the other less advanced vegetation. Very Oxford in a way. Could I work this observation into the novel? ‘Only in Oxford do the cherry trees try too hard.’ Good opening for the Oxford sequence?

REWIND

My meeting with my new supervisor was not a success. Dr Alexander Cardman. ‘Call me Alex,’ he invited almost immediately. He referred to me as Edward without permission.

‘How old are you?’ he asked.

‘Thirty-one. How old are you?’

‘Thirty-three. And you’ve been writing this thesis for …?’

‘ – For, oh, six years. Seven. Seven and a bit. I left Oxford for three to teach. Then came back.’

‘Teach? Where was that?’

‘Abbey Meade. It’s a prep school in Wiltshire.’

‘Ah.’ I could hear the sneer forming in his brain. ‘And you came back – ’

‘ – To finish my thesis.’

‘I see…’ I was disliking him quite intensely by now. He looked like he had gel on his hair. The small trimmed goatee was rebarbative and the faint West Country burr in his voice struck me as an affectation.

PLAY

Summertown. The Banbury Road. I push through the front gate of ‘See Breezes’ (sic) to meet my new student, Gianluca di something-or-other. He is blind, so the language school has told me, and he needs to be walked to my flat. Not every day, I hope.

A cheery plump woman opens the door and leads me through to a living room where Gianluca sits. He is a tall boy – eighteen or nineteen, I would say – with thick, blond hair and a weak-chinned, sad face. His eyes are open and as I introduce myself and shake his hand they seem to stare directly at me, disconcertingly, with only a faint glaucous, bloodshot hue to them.

We walk back to my flat on the Woodstock Road. His right hand rests gently in the crook of my left elbow, his left carries a briefcase and a folded, white cane. We don’t speak as he had said, in good English, that he needed to concentrate and count.

We stroll through Summertown’s shops and halt the traffic at the beeping pedestrian crossing. Along Moreton Road to Woodstock Road and then a hundred yards or so to the house.

‘Ring this doorbell,’ I say, guiding his hand to the gleaming brass knob, ‘and I’ll come down to get you.’

In the hall Gianluca stops and sniffs the air.

‘What is this place?’ he says.

‘A dentist’s,’ I say, as breezily as I can muster. ‘I live on the top floor.’

PAUSE

Felicia has gone to Malaysia for a week to try to sell Internet stocks in the Pacific Rim market, or something. Perhaps it’s bonds, or fluctuations in other stock markets, that she’s selling; or she might even be selling other people’s hunches about fluctuations in stock markets in the next decade. I don’t even try to understand. She has given me the key to her house so I can feed her tropical fish while she’s away. When she left at dawn she kissed me goodbye, told me she loved me and said, ominously, apropos of nothing, that she thought I would make a wonderful father. I suppose it’s as close as she’ll ever get to issuing an ultimatum.

PLAY

‘There is,’ I read, ‘as every schoolboy knows in this scientific age, a very close chemical relation between coal and diamonds – ’

‘ – Please,’ says Gianluca, ‘there is a preface by Conrad, no?’

‘Yes.’

‘Could you please begin with that.’ He taps something into his little portable Braille typewriter and I go back to the beginning. You would think that to be paid fifteen pounds an hour to read Joseph Conrad’s Victory to a blind Italian boy is, well, money for old rope, but I find my heart is curiously heavy with prospective fatigue.

In our first two-hour session we manage five pages. Gianluca listens with almost painful concentration and asks many, many questions, the answers to which he painstakingly types into his braille notebook. I walk him down to the front door where he unfolds his white cane and sets off back to ‘See Breezes’ with an amazingly unfaltering step. As I turn back into the hall, Krissi, the actually-not-unattractive New Zealand dental nurse, leans out of the door of the surgery and says, ‘Mr Prentice would like a word at end of business today.’

As I plod back upstairs to my little flat beneath the eaves I think that ‘end-of-business’ is a classic Prentissian trope and that I must add it to my collection.

MEMORY

I think, perhaps, that I was at my happiest in Nice. Nineteen years old. At the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéan. No family. No friends. No money. Just freedom. My frowsty room in Madame D’Amico’s apartment. The young whores in the rue de France. The French girls. The Tunisian boys. Ulrike and Anneliese. All those years ago. Jesus Christ.

REWIND

Dr ‘Alex’ Cardman handed me back my chapter: ‘Social consequences of the 1842 Mines Act in South Yorkshire, 1843–50’

‘What do you think?’ I asked. This guy did not frighten me, I had decided.

‘There were fifteen errors of transcription in your first quoted passage,’ he said. ‘I didn’t read on.’

‘It’s only a draft, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Even a second-rate examiner will refer you for that kind of carelessness,’ he said, reasonably. ‘You don’t want get into bad habits. Bring it back when you’ve checked everything.’ He smiled. ‘What made you so interested in mid-nineteenth-century mining legislation? Pretty arcane subject – even for an Oxford doctorate.’

Its very arcanity, you fool, I wanted to reply, but instead I chose a lie, hoping it might cancel the Abbey Meade blunder. ‘My father was a miner,’ I said.

‘Good God, so was mine,’ he said. ‘Tin. Cornwall.’

‘Coal. Lanarkshire.’

FAST FORWARD

INTERVIEWER: You don’t seem embittered, even bothered, by the attack in The Times by Sir Alexander Cardman.

ME: It’s a matter of complete indifference. Wasn’t it Nabokov who said the best response to hostile criticism is to yawn and forget? I yawned. I forgot.

INTERVIEWER: It seems unduly personal, especially when your book has been so widely acclaimed –

ME: I think people on the outside never fully realize the role envy plays in literary and cultural debate in this country.

PLAY

Prentice is wearing his track suit and trainers: he likes to go jogging at the end of a day’s dentistry. I offer him a glass of wine which he, surprisingly, accepts.

‘South African Chardonnay,’ I tell him. ‘Your neck of the woods.’ Prentice actually comes from Zimbabwe. He has had his gingery-blond hair closely cut, I notice, which makes him look burlier, even fitter, if that were possible. He is always very specific about not being identified as South African, is Mr Prentist, the dentist.

‘I prefer Californian,’ he says.

‘What can I do for you, Mr Prentist?’

‘Prentice.’

‘Sorry.’

He smiles, showing his small immaculate teeth. ‘Bad news,’ he says. ‘I have to put the rent up. From next month.’ He mentions a preposterous figure.

‘That’s a – ’ I calculate, trying to keep the rage out of my voice, ‘ – a 120 per cent rise.’

‘The going rate for two-bedroom flats on the Woodstock Road, so an estate agent informs me.’

‘You cannot call that broom cupboard where I work a second bedroom.’

‘Market forces,’ he says, sipping, then nodding. ‘This is actually an excellent wine.’

FUNCTION

Felicia is unnaturally blonde, has a tendency to plumpness and is devoted to me. I taught her for a term when she was at Somerville. We had an affair, for some reason. She went to work for a bank in the City. She came back to Oxford three years ago. I think, now, that she came deliberately to seek me out. She makes twenty times more money a year than I do.

DISPLAY

My as yet unfinished novel. Five years in the writing. Which today I have decided to re-title: Morbid Anatomy.

FAST FORWARD

INTERVIEWER: Why did you resign the Trevelyan Chair of Modern History?

ME: I did not approve of the new syllabus.

INTERVIEWER: It had nothing to do with internecine strife within the History Faculty, professional jealousies?

ME: As far as I was concerned it was purely a matter of principle. It was my duty.

PLAY

Gianluca looks at me – his sightless eyes are directed at me. I read on, hastily: ‘ “Meanwhile Shomberg watched Heyst out of the corner of his eye” – ah, notice that glorious Conradian cliché – ’

‘Why is Heyst so passive?’ Gianluca asks. ‘He’s like he’s stagnante…’

‘Same word,’ I say, wondering why, indeed. ‘Well, he’s a bit of a drifter, isn’t he, Heyst?’

Gianluca types – I suppose – ‘Heyst = drifter’ into his Braille notebook.

‘Going with the flow,’ I improvise. We have reached page 67. I don’t think I have ever paid so much attention to a text, and yet I can remember almost nothing. Each day it’s as if I’m starting on page 1 again.

REPEAT

‘He meant to drift altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf drifting in the wind currents.’

PLAY

Mrs Warmleigh has left her Hoover on the stairs. I go to look for her and ask her to move it, as Gianluca is due.

‘The blind boy? He’s amazing that one, the way he comes and goes. Fantastic, it is, bless him.’

I concur, wearily. Mrs Warmleigh has a warty, smiley face and, oddly for the cleaning lady in a dentist’s, many pronounced gaps in her famous smile. ‘Warmleigh by name, warmly by nature,’ she says, at least two or three times a week.

‘You’d look at him,’ she goes on, ‘and you could swear he could see. Amazing.’

A nasty little sliver of suspicion enters my mind.

REWIND

Felicia started talking about children on the day of her twenty-eighth birthday. We had been ‘going out’ for two years by then. I asked her why she chose to live in Oxford with its tiresome, lengthy commute to London when, on her salary, she could have lived in town, conveniently and comfortably. ‘I was always happy in Oxford,’ she said. ‘And besides, you’re here.’ The logic doesn’t hold up. She came back to Oxford, bought her little house in Osney Meade and then we met up again and, as these things will, resumed our affair. There is a character in Morbid Anatomy loosely, very loosely, based on Felicia. I think she dies in a plane crash.

PLAY

This is vaguely shaming but I know I have to do it. Gianluca leaves and thirty seconds later I am out the door following him. I watch him for a while and, as he waits at the pedestrian crossing, I use a gap in the traffic to overtake him. I jog ahead up through the Summertown shops until I have a hundred yard start on him and, hidden in a doorway, I watch his progress, steady and sure, towards me. It is true, as Mrs Warmleigh had observed, without the white stick there would be nothing in Gianluca’s stride or progress to tell you he was blind. Is it a sad subterfuge, some mental problem, I find myself wondering – wondering with slowly stirring anger, rather than commiseration, as I’m a significant victim of this subterfuge? Or is he merely partially sighted and playing it up for more sympathy?

I let him go by. ‘Oi, mate,’ I disguise my voice with a bit of Oxford demotic. ‘You drop vis money.’

He turns. ‘Excuse me?’

My empty palm proffers an invisible ten-pound note.

He steps towards me his eyes moving. ‘Some money?’ he digs in his pocket, producing a wallet. He is blind, all right, blind as a stone, stone-blind, bat-blind, and a small pelt of self-loathing covers me for an instant. ‘I dropped money?’ he says, fumbling with his wallet’s zip.

‘Gianluca?’ a girl’s voice calls. We both turn.

‘Gianluca,’ I say. ‘Is everything all right?’

‘Edward,’ he says with relief, ‘I thought someone talking to me.’

The girl is up to us now and she takes his arm. She’s small with wiry brown hair and a mischievous look to her face, half laughing, half smirking. She wears black and she’s smoking.

‘Is my sister, Claudia,’ Gianluca introduces us. ‘This is Edward. Claudia is coming to stay for a few days. She take me back home.’

I reach out to take her proffered hand, once she transfers her cigarette.

‘Gianluca has told me everything about you.’

‘Not everything, I hope,’ I say, looking into those thin, brown, sightful eyes. And I know.

PAUSE

It is a kind of watershed, I realize. When you know instantly. And when the other person knows you know. It is, in its own way, an infallible sign of adulthood – a threshold crossed. All your imagined, wistful, striven-for worldliness suddenly coalescing into a simple, blunt adult recognition. The last shreds of adolescent insecurity finally gone. From now on there will never be any doubt or ambiguity. You can look into a person’s eyes, and, wordlessly, the question can be asked – if you want to ask it – and you will know the answer: yes or no. End of story.

FAST FORWARD

INTERVIEWER: You didn’t find that the Nobel/Booker/Pulitzer/Goncourt inhibited your creativity in any way?

ME: On the contrary. I found it liberating. And the cheque was very welcome too (laughter).

REWIND

I left Cardman’s rooms and wandered out into the quad, holding my error-strewn chapter rolled up like a baton, like a truncheon, in my hand. The afternoon sun obliquely struck the venerable buildings, picking out the detailing of the stonework with admirable clarity. The razored lawn was immaculate, perfectly striped, unbadged by weed or daisy, almost indecently, absurdly green. I realized that I hated old buildings, hated honey-coloured crafted stone, hated scholarship, hated arrogant young dons with their superior ways. So much hate, I reflected, as I crossed Magdalen Bridge, can’t be good for one. The leaves of my chapter helixed gently down on to the turbid brown waters of the Cherwell.

PLAY

I walk through Felicia’s neat, bright house trying to imagine myself here. Where would my things go? Where would my desk be? Everything is neat, neat, neat, everything is tidy and neat. Even the cuddly toys on her bedcover are neatly arranged in descending order of size. Predictably, I search her laundry basket for a pair of soiled knickers to masturbate into but find only tights, cut-off jeans and a rugby shirt – and somehow the auto-erotic moment is gone. Dutifully, I feed her dazzling, frondy fish, trying to analyse what I felt for Felicia, with her decency, her baffling, uncritical devotion, her compartmentalized mind, at once cutesy and clever, our fundamental incompatability… I could just about fit in here, I suppose, but where would baby go?

REWIND

I was watching Blade Runner for about the thirtieth time when Felicia called.

‘Hi. What is it?’ I said.

‘Just to let you know I landed safely.’

‘Oh. Great. Where are you?’

‘Singapore. K.L. tomorrow.’

‘K.L.?’

‘Kuala Lumpur.’

‘Why don’t people refer to San Francisco as S.F.? Always wondered about that? “Hey, let’s go to S.F.” ’

‘Are you all right, Edward?’

‘What? Yeah. I think I’m going to abandon my thesis. Concentrate on the novel.’

‘That’s wonderful news. Look, I must dash, the car’s waiting. Love you.’

‘Bye.’ I put the phone down. ‘Love you.’

PLAY

Claudia lights my cigarette for me, a gesture that, for some reason, always generates in me a little gut-spasm of lust, a little intestinal writhe.

‘You must try some of our English beer,’ I say. ‘Old Fuddleston’s Triple-Brewed Dog-Piss.’

‘Oh yeah. I think I stay with vodka.’

‘Very wise, Claudia, very wise indeed.’

We are sitting in a dark booth in a low-beamed smoky pub off Broad Street and I wonder whether I should kiss her now but decide to wait a bit – I’m quite enjoying the sexual sparring.

‘So, Eduardo,’ She plumes smoke at the ceiling. Then leans forward far enough so I can see the swell of her small breasts in the scoop of her t-shirt. ‘You write novels. Can I read them?’

‘You bet, Claudia. One day.’

FAST FORWARD

INTERVIEWER: So why settle in BigSur/Sausalito/Arizona/Key West?

ME: Well, after the divorce, I needed to get out of Britain. I was with Cora-Lee by then and her father offered us the use of his villa/beach hut/ranch. I was in rough shape emotionally and needed peace. Peace of mind. The most valuable commodity on the planet.

INTERVIEWER: Cora-Lee is substantially younger than you?

ME: That’s true. But her wisdom is ageless.

SLOW MOTION

Claudia’s t-shirt comes off easily enough but I’m surprised to see her wearing a tough little sports bra thing with no clasp or hook I tug at a strap I am pretty fucking pissed we’re both pretty fucking pissed all that beer and vodka Jesus how much did we drink I kick off a shoe and hear the zip on Claudia’s jeans zing open she weaves away to the bathroom I haul the rest of my clothes off and slide under the duvet bollock naked I think bollock naked she comes in damn still in the bra thing blue panties not matching she whips the duvet back laughing and shouting at me in Italian preservativa preservativa.

PLAY

As luck would have it, as filthy pigging stinking luck would have it, Prentist the dentist comes through the front door just as Claudia and I are crossing the hall. What sort of dentist comes to work at 7.45 a.m.? And why should I feel guilty? I’m a grown man renting a flat off another grown man. I introduce Claudia. The fact that I’m only in this flat because Felicia knows Prentice from the squash club is something I prefer not to contemplate right now.

Claudia looks at me in that way she has. ‘Goodbye, Edward, I see you later.’ I imagine that we must reek of sex – a pongy, spermy, sweaty, tangled sheets sort of exudation – filling the hallway like tear gas.

Claudia leaves.

Prentice turns to me. ‘I don’t know what she sees in you,’ he says, his voice harsh.

‘Claudia?’

‘Felicia, you tragic bastard. I don’t know why she wants to marry you.’

‘Because she loves me, Prentist, that’s why.’

‘I want you out of here. End of the week.’

FAST FORWARD

INTERVIEWER: Do you ever think of the future? Of death?

ME: Wasn’t it Epicurus who said: ‘Death is not our business’?

PLAY

‘Davidson, thoughtful, seemed to weigh the matter in his mind, and then murmured with placid sadness: “Nothing!” ’ I close the book. ‘The end,’ I say to Gianluca.

I walk down to the hall with him and we make our farewells. Gianluca thanks me, with some sincerity. I find myself wondering if Claudia has described to him how I look? I will miss Gianluca, and endless, interminable Victory – or will I? I know one thing for sure: I will never read a book by Joseph Conrad again. The mood is one of… of placid sadness. Saddish, but not unsettling, not unpleasant.

‘Claudia say she will call you tonight.’

‘I won’t be here tonight,’ I say. ‘I’m moving out. I’ll be staying with a friend. Tell Claudia… Just say goodbye from me.’

PAUSE

‘Let’s get married,’ I said to Felicia when she called to tell me when her plane was landing. It was strange to hear her crying all those thousands of miles away, her little choking noises, the sniffs. ‘I mean, will you marry me?’ I’m so happy, Edward, she said, I’m so incredibly happy.

PLAY

I stand on the platform at Oxford station, a bunch of overpriced scarlet tulips in my hand, looking sympathetically across the rails at the commuters with their briefcases and newspapers. Felicia’s train appears and slows to a halt, doors swinging open. I stand there waiting, not moving, and I see Felicia step down in her smart suit, lugging her suitcase (which contains, I know, a silk shirt for me), tucking her hair behind her ears, looking around for me, her future husband. I raise my bunch of overpriced scarlet tulips and wave.

FREEZE FRAME

VARENGEVILLE

Oliver frowned darkly and pushed his spectacles back up to the bridge of his nose, taking in his mother’s suspiciously bright smile and trying to ignore Lucien’s almost sneering, almost leering, grimace of pride and self-satisfaction. Lucien was his mother’s ‘friend’: Oliver had decided he did not particularly like Lucien.

‘What exactly is it?’ Oliver said, playing for time.

‘I believe people call it a bicycle,’ Lucien said. Oliver noticed his mother thought this sally was amusing.

‘I know that,’ Oliver said, patiently, ‘but why are you giving me a bicycle?’

‘It’s a present,’ his mother said, ‘it’s a gift for you, you can go exploring. Say thank you to Uncle Lucien. Really, you’re intolerably spoilt.’

‘Thank you, Lucien,’ Oliver said. ‘You are most kind.’

The bicycle was solid, a little too big for him, black, with three gears and lights and possessed – Oliver admitted he was pleased by this gadget – a small folding-down support that allowed the bike to stand free when it was parked.

However, it did not take long for the real purpose of the gift to become evident. Oliver wondered if his mother thought he was really that stupid. Every time Lucien motored over from Deauville, always after lunch (always leaving before six), his mother would turn to Oliver and say, ‘Oliver, darling, why don’t you cycle into Varengeville and post this letter for me?’ She would give him a hundred francs and tell him to have a diabolo menthe at the café in the square. ‘Explore,’ she would further enjoin, vaguely, waving her arms about. ‘Wander here and there. Wonderful countryside, beaches, trees. The freedom of the open road. Fill your lungs, my darling, fill your lungs.’

And Oliver would wearily mount the big black bicycle and pedal off down the road to Varengeville, the letter tucked into his belt. He had a good idea what his mother and Lucien would be doing in his absence – he knew, in fact he was absolutely convinced, that it would involve a lot of kissing – and he was sure his father would not be pleased. He had discovered his mother and Lucien in a kiss on one occasion and had watched them silently, slightly disturbed at the violence, the audible suction with which their mouths fed on each other. Then they had broken apart and his mother had seen him watching. She took him at once into the next room and explained that Maman had been unhappy and Uncle Lucien was simply being kind and had been trying to cheer her up but that it would be best if he didn’t tell Papa. They were both instantly aware – Oliver’s eyes narrowing – that this explanation was laughably inept, that it did not even begin to undermine the blatant deceit. So she changed tactics and instead made him promise to her: she extracted one of her most severe and terrifying and implacable promises from him. Oliver knew he would never dare tell Papa.

Lucien came two or three times a week, always in the afternoon. Once he came with some other friends on a Sunday for lunch accompanied by a nervy, febrile woman with strange coppery hair who was introduced as his wife. It was early August and Oliver was beginning doggedly to count the days before he would go back to school in England, to count the days before he would see his father again, conscious all the while that the summer was only half done and that there would be many more cycle trips into Varengeville.

It was on his sixth or seventh journey into the village that he spotted the old painter. Oliver always took the same route: up the sloping drive to the gates, turning down the farm lane to the road; then there was an exhilarating swift downhill freewheel along the hedgerow to the D.75, then right along the cliff road towards Varengeville, with the brilliant ocean, restless and refulgent, on his left, his eyes screwed up behind his spectacle lenses, half-blinded by the glare of the afternoon sun.

It was the odd shape of the canvas that attracted his attention first: it was long and thin, almost like a short plank, screwed into a small easel. The old painter sat absolutely still on a collapsible canvas stool, his arms folded across his breast, staring out to sea, his brushes and paints resting on his knees. Oliver noticed his shock of completely white hair, neatly combed and, even though the man was sitting, he knew he must be tall and thin.

In Varengeville he posted his mother’s letter and then went to the café for his diabolo. The café was always quiet in mid-afternoon and the surly young waiter, with a new downy moustache on his top lip, listened to his order, served him his drink, accepted his payment, tossed down the change, tore a corner off the receipt and wandered off, loudly straightening already straight chairs, without a word.

Oliver looked out at the little square and thought about things: his mother and Lucien, for a start, then the scab that was hardening nicely on his elbow; his desire to have a pet of some sort, mammal or reptile, he couldn’t decide; the film that his father was making in London… Then he would observe, covertly but closely, the rare customers that came and went, and from time to time admire the perfect stolidity of his parked bicycle – canted over somewhat, but resolutely firm on its stand – and note how the slightly elliptical shadow version of it, angled flat on the pavement, shadow wheels touching real rubber wheels, was both absolutely exact and yet undeniably distorted. The phrase ‘as faithful as a shadow’ came into his head and he thought how true it was, but then wondered, where did your shadow go when the sun wasn’t shining?… How could be something be faithful if you couldn’t see it?… And then he found his thoughts were returning to his mother and Lucien and he decided he would cycle back as slowly as possible, hoping Lucien would be gone by the time he arrived home and he would not have to encounter him, mysteriously washed and perfumed, a permanent smile on his lips and full of an unfamiliar and repugnant affection for Oliver.

The old painter was still sitting motionless in his field, still staring out at the sea and the coastline. The afternoon had turned hazy, the sky full of spilt-milk clouds, but still glarey and dazzling. Coming from the other direction Oliver could now see what was on the canvas, and as he approached he was surprised to note that it seemed almost black, full of murky blues and dark greys. For an absurd second, as he glanced at the silvered sea with its vast backdrop of sunlit cloud, he wondered if the painter might be blind. And then he wondered if he might be dead. People could die like that suddenly, sitting up, just stiffen into a posture like that – they could, he’d read about it.

‘Are you all right, Monsieur?’ Oliver asked softly.

The painter turned slowly round. He had a big rectangular face, its features powerfully present – the nose, the eyes, the thin, wide mouth, the absolutely white hair – yet in no way distinctive or handsome, just a strong simple oblong face, Oliver thought, but somehow oddly memorable.

‘But of course, young man,’ the painter said. ‘Many thanks for asking.’

Oliver had parked his bicycle and had climbed over the fence and approached the painter without seeing any movement in him, aware now that he wasn’t in fact dead, of course, but curious about his impressive immobility.

‘I thought,’ Oliver began, ‘because you weren’t painting that – ’

‘No, I was just refreshing my memory,’ the painter said. ‘I just needed to come out here again, in case I had got something wrong.’

Oliver looked at the murky canvas, which showed, as far as he could tell, a ship washed up on a shore in the night. He looked up at the bleached, blinding sky and back at the dark, thin canvas.

‘This happened a long time ago,’ the painter said in explanation, pointing at his painting.

He began to ask Oliver polite questions: what is your name? – Oliver Feverall – how old are you? – almost twelve – where do you live? – Château Les Pruniers, but just for the summer.

‘You speak very good French, but you have an English name,’ the painter observed. Oliver told him that his mother was French and his father was English. His mother was an actress, she had appeared in half a dozen films, perhaps he knew of her – Fabienne Farde? – the painter confessed he did not.

‘Perhaps you’ve heard of my father, he’s a famous film director, Denton Feverall?’

‘I rarely go to the cinema,’ the painter said, beginning to pack away his brushes and tubes. As far as Oliver could tell, he hadn’t added a stroke of colour to his grimy canvas, just come outside and stared at it for a couple of hours.

They walked back to the gate that led to the coast road. The painter admired Oliver’s bicycle, admired the efficacy of its folding-down stand. Oliver tried once more.

‘It was given to me by a singer, a famous singer, he’s in Deauville for the summer, at the Casino – Lucien Navarro.’

‘Lucien Navarro, Lucien Navarro…’ the painter repeated, holding his forefinger erect on his right hand as if calling for silence. Oliver waited. Then, after a while: ‘No, never heard of him.’ Oliver shrugged, wondering what kind of reclusive life this man led who had never heard of Fabienne Farde, Denton Feverall or Lucien Navarro.

They shook hands, formally, and the painter wished Oliver a good end to the afternoon and thanked him again for his solicitude. Oliver looked back as he cycled away and saw the old man striding down the road, his canvas and easel under one arm, the afternoon sun striking his silver hair, making it flame with light.

Lucien had a new car – a Lancia, whose roof came down. ‘Lucien and his Lancia,’ Oliver thought, a note of disgust colouring his reflections as he cycled off to Varengeville with his mother’s letter, ‘Lucien and his Lancia.’

Lucien had not visited for some six days and Oliver had noted his mother’s moods steadily deteriorating. One morning she had not descended from her bedroom at all, only the maid was allowed access, bringing up all manner of curious drinks. Even Oliver’s soft knock on her door in the afternoon produced only the moaned response ‘Darling, Maman has one of her migraines’ and he did not see her at all, he calculated, for a further thirty-seven hours.

And then Lucien was coming and she was alert and agitated, changing her clothes, shifting vases of flowers about the drawing room, her perfumes more noticeably pungent, her affection for Oliver overt, falling upon him suddenly, with brusque, sore hugs and alarming cannonades of kisses and caresses. Oliver looked impassively out of the library windows as Lucien’s midnight blue Lancia crunched dustily to a halt and, for the first time, felt relieved he had to go to Varengeville and post a letter.

But in the village, standing in front of the pale yellow post box he felt a sudden flow of anger at his ritual banishment. He tore open the letter – always to his mother’s sister in Paris – and, as he knew he would, discovered three perfectly blank sheets of paper. He folded them up, deliberately, slowly, and dropped them in a litter bin by a set of traffic lights. He cycled south out of Varengeville, towards the plateau, heading for Longeuil, not wanting a diabolo menthe, wondering how he was going to survive the two and a half weeks of August that were left, wondering how he could go through this pretence, this silly game, each time Lucien arrived. Why didn’t she just say she wanted to be alone. He didn’t care how long they kissed each other, or whatever else they got up to. He simply wanted summer to be over, he wanted to get back to school, he wanted his father to finish filming Daughters of Dracula.

The painter was walking along the road with his usual light burden of easel, folding stool and long, thin canvas. Oliver slowed to a halt and they greeted each other, Oliver noticing that, although the day was hot, the painter was wearing a tweed jacket with a shirt and tie and a curious knitted waistcoat. Old men felt the cold, Oliver remembered, even on the warmest days.

‘Where are you going?’ the painter asked. He gestured at the flat, baking landscape inland. In the enormous sky a fleet of huge, burly white clouds moved slowly along, northwards, pushed by a warm southern breeze. A heavy flight of crows crossed the stubble field beside them. ‘It’s hot out there,’ the painter said.

‘I’m not going anywhere in particular,’ Oliver said, feeling unfamiliar tears sting his eyes.

‘Is everything all right?’

‘Yes, absolutely.’

‘Come home with me,’ the painter said. ‘Have a cold drink.’

The painter showed Oliver into his studio: it was a large, tidy room with a Persian rug hanging on the wall. On an easel was a sizeable painting of a blue bird shape against a slate-grey sky. On tables and on the floor were rows of cleaned brushes laid on palettes, and others stuffed into ceramic pots. Small tables held neat rows of tubes of oil paint and on these tables were jars of flowers, many of them dried. Oliver was impressed.

‘You must have hundreds of brushes,’ he said. ‘Thousands.’

‘You may be right,’ said the painter, smiling, placing his small canvas on an empty easel and stepping back to contemplate it. Oliver circled round to stare at it, glancing at the picture of the bird and thinking that he, Oliver Feverall, could paint a better-looking bird than that.

The small canvas looked like a sodden field beneath winter skies, three uneven stripes of brown, green and grey, the paint thickly smeared, but quite dry.

‘I’m having real problems,’ the painter said. ‘I don’t know what to do. I did one like this before and put a plough in it, and it seemed to work.’

‘What about a man?’

‘No. I don’t want people in these pictures.’

‘What about some crows?’

‘It’s an idea.’

As they were going outside to the terrace to have their cold drinks, Oliver heard a woman’s voice call out ‘Georges? Are you back?’ The painter excused himself and went upstairs, returning a minute later.

‘It’s my wife,’ he said. ‘She thinks she’s getting flu.’

It was the wet fields painting, Oliver was not too surprised to discover – and just what was he supposed to do with it, he wondered? It wasn’t particularly well painted, Oliver thought, and also the painter himself had seemed dissatisfied with it. He felt a slight surge of irritation that the painter had given him a picture that even he had been unable to finish properly. What it needed was something else in it, not just fields and sky. Maybe, Oliver thought, he should paint his bike in one of the corners, have it leaning over on its stand…

The sunbathing girl in the bikini turned over suddenly and rolled on to her small dog, which gave an anguished yelp of pain and surprise. No, Oliver thought, inspired, if he painted the sky blue then the field would look like a beach. Then he could paint the girl lying on the beach with her yellow bikini and her little dog. And then the painting would at least be finished – at least it would be about something. Oliver stared at the plump girl as she fussed and petted her discomfited dog. He found himself grinning, felt the laugh brim in his throat, and quickly covered his mouth with his hand in case she should see.

THE BEGINNING

PENGUIN BOOKS

FASCINATION

William Boyd

FASCINATION

Contents

By the Same Author

ADULT VIDEO

VARENGEVILLE