by William Boyd
‘So, they took the negatives as well,’ I said, soberly, upset.
‘What could I do? I had to give them something. They’d have turned the place upside down.’ He closed his eyes and smoothed his smooth hair down and said, still with his eyes closed, ‘There’s only so much scandal a career can take, Amory. I’m associated with you. I can’t let it go on. People will—’
‘It’s all right,’ I interrupted, flatly. ‘I understand.’
‘I did keep the contact sheets. At least there’s a record of sorts.’
He felt guilty, I knew, as he looked them out and handed them to me in a stiff-backed brown envelope. Then he wrote me out a cheque for the fine – he insisted. I was still in his debt, however angry and frustrated I was.
‘Well, it sort of worked,’ he said with an apologetic half-smile. ‘At least everyone knows your name, now.’
‘Oh, yes. The vile, depraved, immoral Amory Clay . . . It was your idea, Greville, not mine,’ I added, a little petulantly, I admit.
‘Well, the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley, as the poet said. Could have worked a treat.’
Then Bruno returned with Greville’s briefcase and so I made my farewells. We kissed at the door and Greville mentioned that there was some grand ball coming up in Yorkshire that he’d need extra help for, if I were interested. He’d telephone with the details – might be amusing. Lively crowd. It was a gesture, a pretence that life would continue as it had before, but we both knew, I think, that the old feeling, the old camaraderie, had gone. I made the mistake, as I walked away down the mews, of turning and waving goodbye with the envelope containing my contact sheets – the only extant record of Berlin bei Nacht in the world. I’m sure he thought it was my parting shot.
Three nights later at a dull restaurant in Kensington (the Huntsman’s Halt), over brandies and coffee, Arthur Lowther took my hand and asked me, a catch in his voice, to become his wife. After I had succeeded in masking my total shock I said no, as politely as I was able to manage: no I’m afraid it wouldn’t be possible, I’m terribly sorry, no, and left as swiftly as I could.
Back in my flat in Fulham I sat staring at the three contact sheets of my Berlin photographs, my mind veering erratically between the first proposal of marriage I’d received and the technical problems arising from the use of a rostrum camera with sufficient magnification to take a good photograph of a tiny ungraded photograph, when the telephone rang. I had an awful feeling it would be Arthur encouraging me to take my time, not to rush to a decision. Bracing myself, I picked up the receiver.
‘Oh. Hello, Mr Finzi.’
‘I read about your trial in The Times. Commiserations.’
‘Thank you. But it was hardly a trial. I pleaded guilty.’
‘That was the right thing to do. But, you know, I think you should look on it as a sign.’
‘A sign of what?’ I reached for a box of cigarettes, opened it, selected one of the two cigarettes remaining and lit it. I was enjoying hearing Cleveland Finzi’s calm American accent – he sounded even more sure of himself, if such a thing were possible.
‘A sign of my stupidity?’ I asked, exhaling.
‘It’s a sign that you had done something significant. Your photographs shocked people. They had an effect. How often can any photographer say that in today’s modern world?’
‘I’ll try to console myself with that thought.’
‘What’re you going to do now, Miss Clay?’
‘You mean before I commit suicide?’
‘There’s no hurry. You can do that any time. Ever been to New York?’
‘No.’
‘Would you like to go?’
‘One day, perhaps. Yes.’
‘Before you commit suicide.’
‘Obviously. Ha-ha.’
There was a silence, then he said: ‘What if I offer you a job? Would that lure you over?’
I felt that heart-lurch, throat-closure. I drew deep on my cigarette.
‘Well . . . Maybe,’ I said, carefully, sensing implications, expectations – a future – suddenly crowding round me.
‘Two hundred a month. What do you say?’
‘Two hundred what?’
‘Dollars.’
Images from Berlin bei Nacht (now lost). Girls from the Xanadu-Club, Berlin, 1931.
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
Today is Xan’s birthday. He would have been sixty-one. Poor Xan. I searched for his book of poems and found it and read the poem he’d dedicated to me. It made me cry and I hate crying, now.
The Anti-cliché (for Amory)
We were
tropical
opposites,
Capricorn and
Cancer,
diametrically aligned.
But
life is a
vertiginous
elevated railroad.
Timor mortis
has us both
in its
pincer-like
grip.
We cling on
for dear
existence,
fearful of the
undignified isolation
of death,
the long
hello.
BOOK THREE: 1932–1934
1. AMERICANA
1 JANUARY 1934. I woke very early, for some reason, as if I wanted to kick-start the beginning of this particular year, set it off and running with due energy as soon as possible. I slipped out of bed and dressed. The morning light was dull and tarnished – that hint of jaundice in the air that presages snow. I pulled on my heavy tweed coat and stepped out. My apartment – ground floor at the rear – was on Washington Square South in Greenwich Village. Consisting of a long corridor that linked sitting room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, the place was dark, apart from the bedroom that overlooked a small yard containing a tall slim ailanthus tree – all for $15 a month.
I headed over to ‘365’ on West 8th Street to buy cigarettes. ‘365’ was not the number of the store’s address but a signal that it opened every day, even on New Year’s Day. When I arrived there, Achilles, the owner, was sliding back the concertina grille on the street door. Across the road a Chinese boy was sweeping the steps of a chop-suey house. The Village was stirring, the year was under way.
Achilles was a stocky, bow-legged man with a permanent white corpse-stubble on his chin and jaw.
‘A happy new year, Miss Amory,’ he said, leading me into the store, effectively a wide long corridor off the street, shelved on both sides with a counter at the end. Flypaper spiralled from the moulded tin ceiling. There was a sign above the counter that said ‘We sell everything apart from liquor’.
I asked for a pack of Pall Malls for me – a little gesture to London in New York – and a pack of Camels for Cleveland. As I was Achilles’ first customer of 1934 I decided to be a good augury and bought some more items at random: a box of Rinso, some Wheat Krumbles and a bag of cinnamon buns.
‘And I’ll take some Alka-Seltzer,’ I said.
‘Partying last night?’
‘No, no. Early to bed. I’ve got a friend coming round for some lunch.’
‘A friend who smokes Camels, I’m guessing. A true hostess. I know you likes the Pall Malls, Miss Amory.’
We chatted on. I took strange pleasure in being known in my neighbourhood, as if I was settled here for a while, as if it gave my life a semblance of normality – that being here in this city was something I had planned, not simply something that had happened to me.
‘Let’s hope ’34 is better than ’33,’ Achilles said, as he bagged my groceries.
‘At least you can have a drink without getting arrested,’ I said. We laughed. In the last three weeks six liquor stores had opened within a two-block radius of Washington Square. America’s drinking was out in the open again.
‘Yeah, ain’t that something new,’ Achilles said, nodding, ‘though I have to say I kinda miss the speakeasies.’
I wandered home
with my groceries and sat in my apartment with the wireless on, listening to jazz, reading a book – God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell – while I waited. I had painted the walls in the sitting room a pale ivory to maximise the light that came in through the small solitary window. I had hung some of my photographs here and there and had smartened up the rented sofa and two armchairs with quilted throws I’d bought in a junk shop on Bleecker. The tiled corridor led on past the tiny kitchen and bathroom to the back bedroom that gave on to the yard with its stark spindly tree. The room had a big, twelve-paned sash window and at midday in the summer when the sun shone directly down it was so blazingly luminous you felt you were in the tropics, not Manhattan.
Cleve was running late, clearly, so at 1.30 I made myself a gin and Italian and toasted in the new year, recognising as I did so that I’d been in New York for nearly eighteen months, now – though I still felt a transient, passing through, and that this apartment, this address, my job and my salary were very temporary aspects of my autobiography and whatever significance this sojourn would have in any retrospective view was impossible to discern. Why was I thinking in this mean-spirited, uncharitable way, I asked myself? I was so much better off here than in London, in every sense: solvent, housed, gainfully employed, my notoriety unheard-of. But I was unsettled in some way, I knew, and I knew it was all to do with the love affair—
On cue Cleveland Finzi pressed the buzzer at the main door and I let him in.
We kissed, gently, held each other and wished ourselves a happy 1934.
‘Do you want to eat?’ I asked. ‘Or . . . ?’
‘I’d like some “or”, please.’
I smiled, turned and walked through to the bedroom, unbuttoning my blouse, hearing the metalled half-moons on the heels of Cleve’s loafers clicking sharply, confidently, on the terracotta tiles of the corridor behind me.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I drove to Glasgow yesterday to see my doctor, Jock Edie. I was up early as my Hillman Imp took a good three hours to make the journey south. Dr Edie’s consulting rooms are on the ground floor of his vast grimy sandstone house on Great Western Road, a renaissance-style villa that would please a pontiff with its own campanile and two-acre garden.
Jock Edie is a large, portly man in his sixties who won three international rugby caps for Scotland when he was a medical student before a spinal injury ended his playing career. Something in the scrum, I’m told – I know nothing more: I loathe rugby. He has magnificent dense untrimmed eyebrows, like greying mini-moustaches lowering above his moist brown eyes. I’m very fond of him and I know he’s fond of me – but we both take special care not to demonstrate this by adopting an amiable but clipped no-nonsense manner with each other.
‘How’re you keeping, lassie?’
‘Very good. Very fit.’
‘Nothing new to worry us?’
‘Absolutely not.’
He opened a drawer in his desk with a key and took out a paper bag with multicoloured balloons printed on it and handed it over.
‘These are for you. They’re not sweeties.’
‘Thank you, Jock. Much obliged.’
‘Keep them in an airtight jar or tin, just to be on the safe side. Or in the refrigerator, even better.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
He picked up a book from a side table and I saw that it was called Marching on Germany by one Brigadier Muir McCarty.
‘There’s a fair bit about Sholto in here,’ he said, flicking through the pages.
‘I don’t want to read about Sholto.’ Jock and Sholto had known each other as schoolboys.
‘All very complimentary,’ he said.
‘People were always complimentary about Sholto.’
He walked me through the wide hall towards a door glowing with painted glass – St Michael slaying a writhing dragon. Jock hung his good paintings in the hall and there was a small immaculate Cadell by the mirrored coat and hatstand that I always paused by. A meal-white Hebridean beach in sunshine, blue-silvered islands beyond.
‘Maybe I’ll drive out to Barrandale and see you,’ he said, adjusting the painting’s hang by a micro-inch. ‘I miss the islands.’
‘Mi casa es su casa.’
‘Gracias, señora. Heading back?’
‘I’ve a lunch appointment in town.’
‘Are you still smoking?’ Jock asked. ‘By the by.’
‘Yes. Are you?’
‘I am. Probably the only doctor in the West of Scotland who does.’
‘Should I stop? Try to stop?’
‘Perhaps. No. Stop when I stop.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘True.’
We kissed goodbye. I left the car in his wide driveway and caught a bus into the city. I stepped off it at Queen Street and walked past a strange-looking pub called the Muscular Arms as I headed for Rogano’s on Royal Exchange Square.
The bar was busy. I eased through noisy young men in dark suits swigging gin and tonics – Glasgow lawyers and businessmen – and turned right into the restaurant, into its pale-walled art-deco splendour, an area altogether more hushed, with a soothing susurrus of muttered conversations and the chime of silverware on crockery.
‘Good afternoon, I’m meeting Madame Pontecorvo,’ I said to the maître d’.
Dido was sitting at a corner in the back reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. She was growing plump, much plumper than when I’d last seen her. Her mass of ink-black hair was swept back from her forehead and coiffed into a great smooth shellacked wave, like some dark calabash settled above her brow. Her dress was silk, a shining tea-rose pink, and she had three ropes of pearls round her soft creased neck. She was giving a recital that evening at the City Halls, still making lots of money.
We kissed and she ordered champagne.
‘I like your hair short like that,’ she said. ‘Very modern.’
‘Thank you, darling.’ I opened the menu.
‘Mind you, you do look a bit like a lesbian, though. And you should wear more make-up.’
‘It’s convenient. Practical,’ I said. ‘And anyway I don’t really care how I look to other people, these days.’
‘No! I won’t hear that. That’s fatal. Don’t neglect yourself, Amory – it’s a slippery slope.’ She drew on her cigarette, studying me, checking out my clothes, my fingernails.
‘Talking of lesbians . . .’ she said, her old wicked smile flashing.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you ever been with one?’
‘I’ve been kissed by one but that’s as far as I went.’
‘No! Really?’ She was interested, now. ‘She must have thought you’d respond. Sensed something in you, you know, a fellow sister, as it were. When did this happen?’
‘Berlin, before the war.’
‘I remember. All your filthy pictures.’
‘Maybe we’ve all got a bit of lesbian in us.’
‘Not me, darling.’ She sipped at her champagne. ‘I’m a hundred and ten per cent hetero.’ She tilted her head, thinking, and lowered her voice, leaning forward. ‘Now we’re talking about sex – the other night, when I couldn’t sleep, I started counting all the men I’d known.’
‘Known?’
‘In the biblical sense, I mean. All the men I’d had a fling with, including husbands. Do you know how many I came up with? What the total was? Guess.’
‘A couple of dozen?’
‘Fifty-three.’
I looked at my little sister. There was no answer to that.
‘I’ll start with the whitebait,’ I said. ‘Then the turbot.’
That evening, back at the cottage, I took Flam down to the small bay and sat on a rock, smoking a cigarette as he ran around the beach sniffing at stranded jellyfish and chasing gulls, and I looked out at the scatter of rocky islets in the bay and the Atlantic beyond. Fifty-three men, I thought to myself. My God. I counted up the men I had ‘known’, in the biblical sense. One, two, three, fou
r, five. The fingers of one hand. Dido would have been very underwhelmed.
Flam ran up to me and I grabbed his muzzle and gave his head a shake, setting his tail beating.
‘Silly old dog,’ I said out loud and stood and stretched. I felt well, as I always did after a visit to Jock Edie. Surely there was nothing wrong with me – just age, time passing, the body winding down, creaking and groaning a bit . . . I watched the evening sunlight drain into silty orange out on the horizon to the west as the night gathered. Next stop America, I thought. New day dawning there.
I wandered homewards thinking back to Cleveland Finzi and how excited I’d been by his job offer, completely unexpected. New York City; $200 a month; $2,400 a year – almost £500. I’d said yes, virtually instantly, without further thought. However, it took me much longer to sort out the necessary documentation and settle my affairs as I wound down my London life. But in the early autumn of 1932 I booked passage on the SS Arandora Star leaving Liverpool, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York.
Initially, I stayed in a ‘Women Only’ hotel on 3rd Avenue and 66th Street until I’d settled into my job and come to terms with this extraordinary new city I found myself in. I was a rookie staff photographer of Global-Photo-Watch and I took photographs of anything that the picture editor, Phil Adler, told me to. Global-Photo-Watch was one of those heavily illustrated monthly magazines that began to proliferate then: Life, Click, Look, Pic, Photoplay and many more. GPW, as everyone called it, accentuated its internationalism. ‘Our Watch on the World!’ was its stentorious slogan.
From time to time, in the course of working in the East 44th Street offices, I’d bump into Cleveland Finzi – or Cleve, as he was familiarly known – and we’d exchange a few words. He was pleased to see me, had I found a place to stay? Was the work interesting enough? We would chat and separate and I would wonder how long it would take him, when and how.
One evening three months after I’d arrived he was waiting in the marbled lobby as I left a meeting. He had promised me a dinner when I came to New York, hadn’t he? Was I free tonight, by any chance?