by William Boyd
She shut the door and we both lit a cigarette and, clearing away piles of scores, sat down on the sofa at the end of the room.
‘Does Mother know you smoke?’
‘God, no. Xan steals her cigarettes for me. Madame Duplessis smokes so we’re safe in here.’ She looked shrewdly at me. ‘Everything all right, Ames?’
‘No.’ I told her about the Beau Monde fiasco.
‘Stay here for a few days. Do. Have a holiday.’
‘I’ve got to earn some money.’
‘Mother says we’re poor, now. Papa’s hospital is costing a fortune. We may have to sell Beckburrow, she says.’
I tried to take in these two pieces of news. Poor. Selling.
‘My God, how awful . . . How is Papa?’
‘He seems fine, pretty much. When he’s awake, that is.’
‘What about my legacy from Aunt Audrey? Can’t we use it for Papa?’
‘It was only for your education, Mother says.’
‘I should have gone to Oxford. I knew it.’
Peggy pursed her lips, looking thoughtful. ‘Once I start doing concerts and recitals we’ll be fine. I can begin playing professionally next year, Peregrine says.’
‘Who’s Peregrine?’
‘Peregrine Moxon, the composer.’
‘Oh, yes.’ I’d heard of Moxon. ‘Does he really let you call him Peregrine?’
‘He insists on it.’
‘How do you know him?’
‘He’s a visiting professor at the Royal Academy. I’ve rather become his protégée . . .’ She stood, went to the stove, lifted the lid and dropped in her cigarette butt. Fourteen going on twenty-four, I decided.
‘Staying for tea?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Then I’d better get back to London. Try and resuscitate the corpse that is my career.’
We walked across the lawn to the house, arm in arm. I felt a kind of panic sluice through me, knowing that Beckburrow might have to be sold, feeling – illogically – that it was somehow my fault, that I was in some way enmeshed and inculpated in my father’s illness and the price we would all have to pay.
‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Pegs?’
‘Oh, yes. We just have to get through this year. Before I start earning.’
Ridiculous, I thought as we entered the house, to put your trust in your fourteen-year-old sister, musical prodigy or not. I had to do something.
Greville took me out to dinner at Antonio’s, an Italian restaurant on the Brompton Road that we both liked. We ordered vitello al limone and a bottle of Valpolicella.
‘I threw my weight around,’ Greville reported. ‘The Illustrated and the Modern Messenger will give you work, but it has to be strictly anonymous.’
‘That’s hardly going to help my reputation.’
‘At least it’s money. Bruno’s going back to Paris for a week. You could work for me while he’s away.’
‘Dribs and drabs,’ I said. ‘My rent’s going up. And we may have to sell Beckburrow.’
‘You can always move in with me, my dear, as long as you don’t try to seduce me again.’
‘Ha-ha. Well, thank you. I may have to. But I’m going backwards, don’t you see? How am I meant to make my way like this? How can I even make the most modest living? It’s impossible.’
Greville topped up our glasses to the brim, nodding to himself, as he thought.
‘What you need to do is change the way the world sees you.’
‘Oh, yes. Of course,’ I said with perhaps too heavy sarcasm. ‘Easy.’
He was still thinking and hadn’t noticed. ‘You need to become . . . notorious. Disgraceful – even better.’
‘Take more photos like Veronica Presser.’
‘No, no. Something far more outrageous. You need a scandal.’
‘A scandal? How do I create a scandal?’
He smiled. He was pleased with his idea, I could tell.
‘If I were you, darling, I’d go to Berlin.’
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I stood and looked at the boxes that I’d lugged down from the attic. Five cardboard cartons filled with other boxes and old manila envelopes, dozens and dozens of them. Prints, negatives, Kodachrome slides – the photographic record of my life, all that I’d managed to hold on to. Some of the boxes were damp and mildewed, others wore layers of ancient dust. Was it worth it, I asked myself? Was it worth trying to sort this lot out in the time I had left, however long that might be? I picked a few boxes up at random and saw one that had a scribbled address on the front: 32b Jäger-Strasse, Berlin 2. I lifted the lid. It was empty.
2. BERLIN
‘IT SEEMS EXTREMELY RESPECTABLE,’ I remarked to Rainer. ‘Very sophisticated.’
Rainer looked at his watch.
‘We have to wait until midnight.’ He smiled, showing his small, perfectly white teeth. ‘Then the fun is starting.’
We were sitting in a booth at the rear of the Iguana-Club somewhere in North Berlin. We had crossed Oranienburger-Strasse and I had seen a sign for the Stettiner station but otherwise I had yet to get my proper bearings in this city, the third largest in the world, so Berliners kept reminding me. I sipped at my drink and waited for midnight to arrive. In the meantime there was a small jazz band on a semicircular stage playing ‘It Happened in Monterey’. South of the border, I thought, that’s where I want to be, somewhere louche and very, very indiscreet. A few couples danced but without real enthusiasm, it seemed to me, as if the clientele were waiting for some signal to be given so they could really begin to enjoy themselves. Almost all the men were in evening dress with white ties.
Rainer offered me a cigarette and lit it for me. Rainer Nagel was his full name and he was an old friend of Greville. I wondered how they had come to know each other – and how well – but Rainer gave nothing away. He was a small stocky man, with a square face – handsome in a fit, muscular way – but he had an agitated fussy manner as if he were constantly trying to keep his energy levels under control, always patting his pockets, tapping ash off his cigarette, checking the knot of his tie. I had asked him what he did and he said, ‘Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that. A bit of buying, a bit of selling.’ He spoke excellent English and was almost over-polite.
Now he snapped his fingers to attract a waiter’s attention and, when the man came over, he whispered in his ear, for a good minute, it seemed. I was wearing a black crêpe dress with a velvet collar and a fur stole, also black. I had pinned up my hair under a felt cloche hat with a small ultramarine feather, the aim being to look both smart and unobtrusive. When Rainer had collected me at my hotel – the Silesia Hospiz, on Prenzel-Strasse, near Alexanderplatz – he had said, ‘You look very à la mode, Amory,’ with a kind of charming insincerity that almost made me laugh. I wondered if Rainer was a ‘queen’ like Greville, one of the many Schwulen that you could see all over the city, if you looked hard. I didn’t think so, somehow, but I could hardly trust my intuition given how badly it had failed me with Greville.
At midnight, the band took a short break and I noticed a crowd of men and women heading for the lavatories that were reached by a corridor leading off the main club-room by the bar, indicated by an electric sign saying ‘Klosett’. Rainer glanced around the room as it slowly emptied – this was odd, I thought, as I knew that clubs in Berlin stayed open until three in the morning. Then the band returned and began playing again, though it was apparent that no one was much interested in dancing any more. Waiters began to clear the unoccupied tables.
‘Are they closing?’ I asked.
‘No. We are opening.’ Rainer stood up and I did so too, taking the opportunity to quickly snatch a photograph or two of the room with my little Ensignette. So much for the celebrated decadence of Berlin, I thought. Where was I going to find my scandal?
The Iguana-Club, Berlin.
Rainer guided me through the tables and we made for the corridor that led to the lavatories.
‘Welcome to the Klosett-Club,’ he sai
d.
There was a door – it looked like the door to a broom cupboard – between the Damen and Herren toilets, and a tall moustachioed man in a gold-frogged greatcoat that came down to his ankles stood there guarding it. Rainer gave him first a card, then some money and the door was opened for us revealing a steep flight of stairs that led down to a thick leather curtain. As we descended I could hear the excited chatter of conversation and could smell cigar and cigarette smoke. Rainer held the leather curtain open for me and I stepped into the Klosett-Club. Now, this was more like it, I thought.
It was a dark, narrow, low-ceilinged room – I wondered if it had been an underground garage in a previous life. Clustered tables and chipped gilt chairs faced a tiny stage with a backdrop of shimmering sequinned curtains. All the tables had small stubby lamps on them like mushrooms, with domed crimson shades that gave forth the dimmest glow. I could hear American, French and Dutch voices amongst the chatter. A few waiters squeezed through the tables, trays of drinks held aloft. It was warm and there was a curious underlying smell in the room – below the perfume and smoke. Oil and grease? Maybe it had indeed been a garage, once.
I turned to find Rainer in conversation with a skinny man in a pistachio-green satin jacket and a yellow bow tie. Rainer beckoned me over.
‘This is Benno, the manager,’ he said. ‘This is Fräulein Clay, the famous English photographer.’
We shook hands. I saw that Benno had painted eyebrows as he leant forward, confidentially.
‘You may take any photos you like – but just of the show. You must only mention the Klosett-Club when you publish them, please.’ He pointed. ‘See – we have another photographer here tonight. We are making good publicity.’ He laughed and gestured across the room at a young man in a dark suit lounging against the far wall. His collar seemed too large for his thin neck – almost affectedly large – and his straight blond hair fell down in a lock in front of his right ear. He turned to look at us, almost as if he knew he was being discussed, and I saw a thin, big-eyed, starveling’s face. A beautiful waif. I noticed he had a Rolleiflex over his shoulder. Damn, I said to myself, feeling my disappointment weigh on me like a heavy rucksack. Another photographer – another fucking photographer, as Greville would have said. It was like a tourist trail.
‘Thank you very much,’ I said to Benno, who kissed my hand and sped off towards the stage. ‘We can go,’ I added, turning to Rainer, ‘this place is obviously too well known.’ I inclined my head at the other photographer. ‘Hardly exclusive.’
Rainer shrugged. ‘We might as well see the show,’ he said, undauntedly cheerful. ‘Have a few more drinks. Benno’s getting us a good table at the front.’
I saw Benno beckoning us over so we went to join him and he sat us down at a table one row back from the little stage where a man was setting up a microphone on a stand. We took our seats and I asked for a gin and orange, leaving my camera in my handbag under the table. I glanced over at my rival who was now talking to Benno, himself, and I saw Benno point us out – Fräulein Clay, the famous English photographer. Then the lights dimmed and a couple of spots hit the stage. A Negro with a trumpet in his hand emerged through the sequinned curtains wearing a white suit dotted with black discs like a Dalmatian dog. The crowd roared their approval.
‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ he said into the microphone in English with an American accent. ‘Ingeborg Hammer will dance “Cocaine Shipwreck”!’
Whoops and cheers greeted this news. Rainer leant over.
‘Sometimes she is dancing with a man but tonight she dances alone. We are very lucky.’
‘What’s her name again?’
‘Ingeborg Hammer. Very famous here in Berlin.’
The Negro began to play his trumpet – an improvised jazzy wail – and, slipping out from the curtains, a tall wraith of a woman in a filmy black dress appeared, its neckline slashed to the waist. Her face was a white death-mask of face powder, her eyes smoky with kohl and her lipstick was a purple gash. She stood for a moment as the applause died down, arms spread, hands fluttering, as the trumpet solo continued its free-form extemporisation. She was indeed very tall, I saw, almost six feet – and then she started to move in a series of jerky, impressionistic dance steps and, inevitably, her décolletage gaped to reveal her hanging flat breasts, the prominent nipples purpled like her lips. She lurched and swayed, stooped and staggered, her white arms flailing, looming over tables and recoiling dramatically. Sometimes she would stand immobile for ten or twenty seconds while the trumpet riff continued. It was, I thought, at once ridiculous and completely mesmerising.
At one moment in the dance she passed near our table, walking on tiptoe with tiny bird-steps, and I became aware, at the edge of my vision, of my rival photographer, head bowed over his Rolleiflex, snapping away. Ingeborg Hammer struck her pose by our table and a waft of a curious perfume came off her – of camphor, I thought, or formaldehyde – the smell of a mortuary or dissection laboratory. I looked up into her white face, completely expressionless, her body trembling as the trumpet’s screeching began to crescendo, telling you that the ‘Cocaine Shipwreck’ was about to reach its fatal encounter with the rocks. Ingeborg took three steps back, ripped off her dress and fell to the floor, naked, her pudenda shaved clean, one hand twitching for a few seconds before there was a final demonic scream from the trumpet and the lights went out. When they came back on seconds later she had gone. She took no bow; the trumpeter mopped his glossy face with a handkerchief and accepted the plaudits on her behalf.
‘Das ist fantastisch, nein?’
I turned. I hadn’t heard anyone approach but here was the rival photographer, crouching by my chair.
‘Ich spreche kein Deutsch,’ I said, realising instantly that the thin-faced waif with the flopping lock of hair was a woman.
‘I’m Hannelore Hahn,’ she said in near-accentless English. ‘Benno told me you were a famous English photographer. Where’s your camera? You missed a real—’
Rainer stood up, interrupting her. ‘I’ll leave you to talk about lenses and exposures and all that stuff,’ he said. ‘Give me a telephone call tomorrow, Amory. I take you somewhere else.’
He kissed me goodbye, shook Hannelore Hahn’s hand and sauntered off. Hannelore slipped into his seat. She was wearing a black and red striped tie with her big-collared shirt and I could see, now that she was opposite and lit by the glow of the mushroom lamp, that she was lightly made-up – and eerily beautiful in a vague manly way. Which was the point of the outfit, I supposed.
‘It’s better when she dances with her partner, Otto Deodat,’ she continued. ‘It’s more . . . More sexual. He’s very handsome, Otto, with head shaved, you know, and often naked with his body painted. Very tall like her.’ She smiled showing her uneven teeth, overlapping at the front as if too crowded for her narrow jaw. ‘I’ve many photos of them both. I can show you if you like.’ She took out her cigarette case and selected a black one from the multicoloured row that was lined up inside. ‘Is that gin? Could I ask you to buy me one? I’ve no money left.’ She smiled, holding up her camera. ‘I spent everything on my Rollei.’
I recognised that I was fairly drunk by the time we left the Klosett-Club and I decided I should head back to my hotel. Hannelore seemed none the worse for all the gins she’d consumed and offered to share a taxi with me. The sky was like grey flannel – early summer dawn heralded – and the air was cool. I shivered as we headed out on to Arkonaplatz looking for a taxi.
But the streets we wandered through were empty, as the light gathered and the darkness began to thin. We cast about us here and there – I was completely lost – vainly waving and shouting at any passing vehicle in the hope it would miraculously transform itself into a cab. After half an hour I was sober again. Hannelore checked her watch.
‘We might as well walk,’ she said. ‘Your hotel is only twenty minutes or so from here.’
And so we set off through the monochrome streets, the sound of our heels echoing off the fa
cades of the apartment blocks, a few neon signs glowing in the clearing gloom, street sweepers and night workers returning home were our only companions. We walked past a small hotel – there was a waiter standing outside with a grubby tailcoat. Thick yellow light shone from the half-open door behind him. Should we go there, I asked Hannelore? No, no, she said: that place isn’t for us.
We saw the young men before they saw us, as we turned on to Oranienburger-Strasse, heading for Alexanderplatz. There were five of them in their brown uniforms, drunk and dishevelled, four of them helping the fifth climb a lamp post to tear down a poster. Hannelore led me across the street away from them but they had heard the clip-clop of our heels and turned to see us, eager for diversion. They shouted something at us – something lewd that I couldn’t understand. I glanced back and saw the climber slither heavily to the ground, swearing at us, as if his fall was our fault.
‘Don’t look at them,’ Hannelore said as more catcalls came our way. I heard their hobnails crunching on the cobbles as they followed us, shouting angrily at us, calling on us to stop. A stone skipped across the road in front of us and clattered into a parked van.
‘We have to pretend, all right?’
‘What? Yes, whatever you say.’
She put her arm round my shoulders and bumped me into a shop doorway. She rounded angrily on the men following us and shouted at them, lowering and harshening her voice. Great bellows of laughter ensued and I saw them stop and talk amongst each other.
‘What did you say?’
‘I said I’d spent the whole night trying to get you into bed and I wasn’t going to let them prevent me.’ She glanced back. ‘Or something like that. Pretend to kiss. They’re still looking.’
So we kissed, mouths slightly askew, and I was transported back to Amberfield and my practice sessions with Millicent. I heard vulpine whoops and yelps from the young men. We set off, Hannelore looking back and making an obscene gesture at them before we turned the corner and broke into a panicky run.
We reached my shabby little hotel, the Silesia Hospiz, in five minutes and rang the bell for the night clerk, both out of breath.