by William Boyd
‘Berlin bei Nacht.’
‘Yes, keep it German. More decadent.’ Greville looked around and kicked vaguely at a mousetrap – sprung, no cheese. ‘Now all we have to do is give the place a lick of paint.’
I’m proud to say that, over the next few weeks, I single-handedly painted ninety-nine per cent of the Grösze and Greene Gallery (I had a little help from Bruno Desjardins). Meanwhile, Greville occupied himself with securing the lease, which wasn’t very expensive – Soho rents were cheap – but I was insistent that the lease was in my name, not his, and this necessitated several trips to a solicitor and even obliged my mother to step in as a guarantor.
I took her to lunch after she’d signed the necessary affidavits. We went to Primavera in Old Compton Street where we ate tough veal escalopes with tinned peas. Pushing her unfinished plate aside, my mother leant back in her chair, staring at me curiously, and simultaneously inserted a cigarette into her holder. I lit her cigarette for her.
‘Why do you want to open your own gallery?’ she asked, sceptically. ‘Surely if your photographs are any good a genuine gallery will show them.’
‘My photographs are a bit . . . shocking,’ I said, pouring myself a glass of Chianti from the bottle on our table.
‘Well, I certainly won’t be coming to see them.’
‘Well, I certainly won’t be sending you an invitation.’
She leant forward and I saw my face twice reflected in the lenses of her tortoiseshell spectacles.
‘What’s your game, Amory?’
‘It’s no “game”, Mother. I’m just trying to establish myself. Make my way in the world.’
‘When you say “shocking”, do you mean—’ She stopped herself. ‘No, no. I don’t want any more information.’ She sighed, dramatically, flipping her hand as if a fly were buzzing around, bothering her. ‘I don’t know what’s become of my children. Xan has just bought a motor bicycle – he’s obsessed with it.’
‘What type of motor bicycle?’
‘How would I know? Why do you always want to know the precise name of everything, Amory? It’s most peculiar.’
I shrugged and said, ‘So – no more guinea pigs.’
‘He set them all free. Into the countryside – hundreds of them. There’ll be a plague of guinea pigs all over Sussex.’ She looked at me intently again, puffing smoke as if to create a kind of screen between us, to make me blurry and more obscure.
‘Your father asks for you all the time.’
‘I sent him a photograph.’
‘Made it worse. I think he still feels guilty. Why don’t you go and see him again? It does cheer him up.’
‘I will,’ I said, as sincerely as I could manage. ‘As soon as my show is done.’
The lease issues, annoyingly, took some time to sort out but, finally, eventually, I was granted temporary possession – for six months – of number 42a Brewer Street and a painted sign went up signifying the place’s new incarnation: the Grösze and Greene Gallery. The exhibition was announced for the middle of January 1932 – a quiet month, we reasoned, therefore we might attract more of the press’s attention.
I occupied myself with the printing of some forty of my Berlin photographs, keeping the size uniform – ten inches by six – so I could order the frames and the mounts separately: I didn’t want to provide any framer with a privileged early view of my work. Berlin bei Nacht had to arrive in its gallery unseen and unannounced, like the explosion of a landmine, I declared.
‘Or a damp squib,’ Greville corrected. ‘Nothing’s guaranteed, darling. You never know if we’ll be noticed – even in January London’s full of exhibitions.’
‘You can invite your society friends,’ I said. ‘Think of all the magazines you’ve worked for.’
‘Good point,’ Greville said. ‘I’ll see what riff-raff I can round up.’
It took me two hard-working weeks to print and frame all my photographs. To my eye they had a professional, artistic air with their unvarnished pale oak frames and a big expanse of cream cardboard mount – a ‘museum mount’ I was told such a style was called, where the mount is significantly larger than the picture being mounted. As I wrote the titles and signed my name under the photographs, it struck me, not for the first time in my life, that proper presentation was half the battle if you wanted to be taken seriously.
We had ordered plain canvas blinds for the big window that faced Brewer Street so we could be completely shut off from prying eyes. One cold evening early in the year Greville and I hung the photographs, spacing them out evenly on the stark white walls. We had torn up the old oil-cloth floor covering and had painted the floorboards with a dark wood stain. The Grösze and Greene Gallery looked remarkably authentic, we had to admit. More proper presentation.
Greville wandered along the row of photographs before we covered them all with brown paper, pausing at my picture of Volker, naked, apart from the towel hanging from his hand, covering his groin area.
‘“Artist’s Model”,’ he said, reading my title. ‘My, he looks like a big fellow.’
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I let Hugo Torrance kiss me at his party in the Glenlarig Hotel. I’d been enjoying myself, chatting to Greer and Calder, reminiscing with Hugo’s daughter, Sandra, about the bits of London we both knew, and I’d drunk just a little bit too much whisky.
I’d gone to the ladies’ room and on emerging had found Hugo waiting for me in the half-dark of the landing on the first floor. He blocked my passage down the stairs, put his arms round me and kissed me on the lips.
‘Stay the night, Amory,’ he suggested and, just for a second, I was tempted – but said ‘No,’ quietly but firmly.
‘I’ll keep trying,’ he said as he let me pass.
‘I should hope so.’
I drove home carefully, knowing I was tipsy, and poured myself another whisky and stirred up the fire, thinking. I wondered if Hugo Torrance was the last man I would ever kiss. The thought made me sad.
*
On the evening of the opening of Berlin bei Nacht I decided to wear something demure, suddenly thinking that I didn’t want to be noticed or to be identified as the ‘photographer’, the ‘artist’.
‘Very discreet,’ Greville said, as I arrived. ‘You look like you should be taking their coats.’
I was wearing a navy crepe-knit frock with a high silk cross-over collar and a swathed cap.
‘I don’t want to draw any attention,’ I said, feeling nervous, all of a sudden. ‘I just want to observe, be in the background.’
‘One advantage of being called Amory, I suppose,’ Greville said. ‘They’ll all be looking for a man.’ He indicated the cardboard sign propped in the window on a small easel advertising the show and my name. BERLIN BEI NACHT – Photographs by Amory Clay.
‘Ah.’ He raised one finger. ‘But what if someone wants to interview you?’
‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’
Greville had hired a catering company to serve glasses of hock in green-stemmed glasses – ideally Teutonic, he thought – and various canapés: cheese straws, sausage rolls, vol-au-vents. At the door there was a small stack of my thin catalogue with the prices of the photographs listed. On the invitation we’d sent out it was clear that the exhibition was being ‘hosted’ by Greville Reade-Hill so he made it his business to greet everyone as they arrived while I stayed at the back of the gallery pretending to look at my own photographs as if I were seeing them for the first time.
There was a good crowd, as it turned out, sixty or seventy people, we calculated, and there was a constant supply of hock so the noise-level in the gallery steadily increased, the atmosphere becoming more like that of a cocktail party than a serious vernissage. When everyone seemed to have arrived, Greville and I stood in one corner scrutinising our guests.
‘Well they seem quite rich and bourgeois,’ I said. ‘The right sort of person, I suppose. Are there any journalists?’
&nb
sp; ‘No one was prepared to admit to it.’
‘But we need the publicity, don’t we?’
‘Word of mouth, darling. There’s nothing better. Good God, look at that.’
I turned slightly to see a young balding man in a grey coat with a musquash collar.
‘Look at the spats,’ Greville said, trying not to laugh, then added, ‘Insecure, wealthy, ugly, vain.’
I responded. ‘Talentless, self-conscious, myopic, stupid.’
Greville had this theory that it only took four adjectives to describe absolutely anyone, anyone in the entire world. The notion had evolved into a private parlour-game that we would play at parties to while away the hours of boredom as we waited for people to come and be photographed.
‘There’s a good one,’ I said, pointing with my chin at a stout older man peering at a picture of half-naked Berlin prostitutes. ‘Overweight, rich, lecherous, hypocritical.’
‘Sex-starved, boring, pompous, frightened.’
‘Let’s go for a wander,’ I said, beginning to relax and enjoy myself. I picked up another glass of hock from a passing waiter as we strolled around the gallery trying to establish who might be a member of the press. Greville was constantly stopped by people he knew but pointedly didn’t introduce me.
‘People will assume you’re my secretary,’ he said, in an aside, as we moved on.
‘Perfect. Now, look at him, I think I’ve seen him before . . .’
We contemplated a lanky young man with a hooked nose and long hair over the back of his collar. He was wearing a well-cut charcoal-grey suit with dull scarlet shoes and an oriental silk scarf draped loosely round his neck.
‘Ah. Sir Max Gartside. I think he writes for a newspaper – sometimes.’
‘Narcissistic, elegant, moneyed, pretentious,’ I said.
‘Shall I sound him out?’
Greville sauntered over and I watched the two of them chat for a while, laughing at some joke as Gartside pointed at one of my photographs and I thought: I hope they’re not making fun of me. Greville returned, making a moue of disappointment.
‘He loves them. And he does write for the Gazette, but he’s not been assigned.’
‘Loves them? Damn.’
‘He wants to buy Volker but I told him Volker was mine – not for sale.’
‘Isn’t he even a little bit shocked?’ I asked, hopefully.
‘Nothing shocks our Max, I’m afraid.’ He looked around. ‘Now, here’s an interesting candidate.’
I turned to see a smart-looking slim man coming into the gallery and picking up a catalogue. He was wearing a tawny cashmere coat that was almost the colour of his hair. Wet sand, I thought, or sandstone – not blond, not brown. His hair was thick and was swept back from his forehead. I could see the fine grooves set in its oiled density from the teeth of his comb. A big nose, very straight, light blue eyes, I saw as he passed near us. I felt that shiver go through me, that split-second weakening of the spinal column.
‘Bland, rich, bored, arrogant,’ Greville said out of the side of his mouth.
‘Handsome, assured, clever, foreign.’
‘Listen to you, Miss Smitten. He’s a journalist, I bet you. I have a sixth sense.’
I watched the man – he was in his thirties, I guessed – move carefully along the line of photographs, peering at them, then checking the reference in the catalogue. He looked more like a dealer or a collector, I thought, as I saw him really studying some of the photographs, stepping back and moving in again. At one stage he put on a pair of spectacles, rimless, and moved very close to a photo as if looking for signs of retouching or verifying the grain of the paper. French, I thought, or Middle European: a Hungarian aristocrat, an Esterházy or a Cseszneky – certainly not English.
Greville tapped me on the shoulder. ‘I think that might be the Daily Express.’
Another thin man, middle-aged, was moving quickly round the room, bald, with a prominent Adam’s apple held in the cleft of his wing collar like a bud between two sepals.
‘Humourless, religiose, hate-filled, necrophiliac.’
‘Sexless, ulcerated, embittered, dying.’
We helped ourselves to two more glasses of hock and toasted each other.
‘I suppose I should be careful about what I’m wishing for,’ I said, ‘But I wouldn’t mind just a little furore.’
‘We just want your name mentioned in the newspapers. Perhaps even a photograph or two in some magazine. That’s not much to ask.’ Greville looked round the room again. ‘I thought your German girlfriend was coming.’
‘She is, but she couldn’t make the opening night.’
‘Longing to meet her.’
He wandered off and I went into the back room to chase up the final trays of canapés, feeling a sudden exhaustion overcome me and with it a new apprehension about our great schemes for notoriety. I sat down on a wooden chair and gulped at my hock. It was my work, after all, I was the only begetter and I would be in the line of fire, not Greville. I smoked a cigarette trying not to think further and heard the chatter of conversation diminish as the guests drifted off into the Soho night. I told myself to buck up, stood, stubbed out my cigarette, smoothed the skirt of my sensible frock and headed back into the gallery. There were about half a dozen people left, still chatting to each other, enjoying the occasion. Greville and Bruno Desjardins were saying goodbye to departing invitees. Someone cleared his throat close behind me and I turned. It was my Hungarian aristocrat.
‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘These are very interesting photographs.’
American, I realised, a little disappointed, for some reason.
‘How do you know I’m the photographer?’
‘I have my ways and means, Miss Clay. I needed to find out, so I did.’ He smiled, one of those strange broad smiles where the teeth don’t show. He was holding his hand out to shake mine. His grip was light, just a formality, a clench of fingers.
‘I’m Cleveland Finzi.’
‘Well, you know who I am.’
‘I’d like to buy you a drink, if I may.’
‘I’m terribly busy—’
‘Oh, not now. I’m in London for a couple of weeks. Do you have a telephone?’
‘What? Yes.’
‘May I call you?’
I went off in a state of silly confusion to find my handbag where I’d left it in the back room. I searched – no cards. Idiot! I scribbled my number down on a sheet of paper torn from my unfilled appointments diary of 1931 and brought it back to him. Very impressive. He tucked the scrap of paper away in an inside pocket and handed me his card. I glanced at it: CLEVELAND FINZI. GLOBAL-PHOTO-WATCH.
‘Oh. You’re a journalist.’
‘Was. I’m an editor, now.’ He smiled politely. ‘It’s a magazine in America. You may have heard of it.’
I hadn’t, but said, as one does, ‘Yes, now you come to mention it. Definitely.’
‘I’ll call you in a couple of days,’ he said. ‘I’ll look forward to talking to you.’
‘I’ll look forward to talking to you,’ I repeated like a simpleton. I manned the admissions desk at the Grösze and Greene Gallery for the next three days. It was never busy, I’m sorry to say. Greville had decided, prudently, to impose an admission charge of one shilling, a sum that made you a member of the Grösze and Greene Photographic Club for twenty-four hours. It was a pre-emptive attempt to evade any prosecution for obscenity – he’d become worried about the graphic nature of some of the photographs – as the exhibition would open only to ‘club members’ not the general public. I happily went along with the ploy, having no idea of whether it would work or not. Its manifest disadvantage was that it put off passers-by from dropping in out of curiosity or on the off-chance. During the three days I was there our takings only broke £1 once. One day we took in a meagre five shillings.
I sat there surrounded by my Berlin photographs feeling I was in a kind of limbo. I should have been exhilarated – this was my first exhibition as an
independent photographer and in London’s West End, no less – but I found my mind turning again and again to the enigmatic Cleveland Finzi of Global-Photo-Watch and his invitation. Was he being sincere or simply polite?
On the third day I was sitting at the desk in my squirrel coat – the weather had turned freezing – and the gallery had been empty for a good hour, when I heard the telephone ring in what had been the back storeroom. I ran for it, knowing somehow that it was Cleveland Finzi at last.
‘Oh. Hello, Greville,’ I said, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice.
‘You’ve a very good review in the Scotsman.’
‘Have I?’
He quoted. ‘Listen: “Miss Clay has a horror of ‘cliché’ and so has searched Berlin for examples of real lives. She has eschewed the commonplace and sees things entirely for herself with great clarity and honesty.” Isn’t that wonderful?’
‘I suppose I should be pleased,’ I said. ‘My first review.’
‘We might get a few more newspapers, now,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can circulate this.’
I put the phone down and it rang again immediately.
‘What is it, Greville?’
‘Miss Clay? This is Cleveland Finzi.’
‘Yes.’
‘Hello? Are you there?’
‘Yes, it’s me. Miss Clay.’
‘I tried your apartment but there was no reply. Luckily I thought I might find you at the gallery.’
‘Luckily, yes.’
‘I’d like to invite you for a cocktail. I’m staying at the Earlham, on the Strand. How does six o’clock suit you this evening?’
‘Yes, yes. It suits.’ I seemed to have lost the ability to speak sophisticated English.
‘I’ll see you in the Palm Court at six.’
I managed to persuade Bruno to stand in for me after lunch and went to a hairdresser’s in Charing Cross Road to have my hair washed and set. I decided that I didn’t have time to go back to Fulham and change but I could at least look entirely different from the anonymous creature Finzi had encountered at the vernissage. Out of my swathed cap, with my hair down and shiny and some slightly extravagant make-up, plus my squirrel coat . . . If I kept my coat on I might pass for reasonably glamorous, I thought.