Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  I drained my glass of milk and was rummaging in my bag for my cigarette case when I heard a voice say, ‘Amory? Amory Clay?’

  I turned in my seat to see God standing there. Miss Ashe, immaculate in black silk and velvet with a fur collar and a buckled sailor hat set cockily to one side.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, seemingly genuinely pleased to see me. ‘I was thinking of you just last night. How uncanny.’ She pointed at the scrap of veil folded up on her hat’s brim. ‘I’m off to a funeral at St Bride’s. Always gives me a terrible hunger, a funeral – I’ve just had two pork pies and a bottle of ginger beer.’

  I walked out with her on to Fleet Street, telling myself that she was simply an elegant elderly woman and one, moreover, who wielded no power over me any more. Relax – I was allowed to smoke a cigarette if I wanted to – and I paused and pointedly lit up.

  ‘What’re you up to these days?’ she asked, as I put my lighter and cigarette case away. ‘Married? Children?’

  ‘No to both,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t leave it too late,’ she said.

  ‘Like you?’ I saw the old cold gaze come into her eyes for a moment and I said, quickly, ‘Actually, I’m almost engaged.’

  ‘Almost congratulations, then. Are you in town shopping?’

  ‘I’m running an office here.’ I pointed to Shoe Lane. ‘Just up there. Global-Photo-Watch. It’s an American magazine. I’m the London manager.’

  ‘Really?’ Miss Ashe paused and looked at me anew.

  ‘I’m a professional photographer,’ I said with some pride, letting the information sink in.

  ‘Goodness me.’

  ‘I make five hundred pounds a year,’ I lied.

  ‘You must come down and talk to the school. But don’t tell them how much money you make or they’ll all want to be photographers.’ She smiled her thin smile. ‘And that would never do.’

  I felt a fool, now, having blurted out a sum of money like that, but I wanted her to know that she had been wrong, that she was fallible, that she didn’t know her girls as well as she thought she did.

  ‘I’d love to come,’ I said.

  ‘Have you a card?’

  I searched my bag and found one and handed it over. She studied it intently, as if it might be forged.

  ‘Well, well, Amory Clay,’ she said. ‘Global-Photo-Watch. I’ll write with a formal invitation. How is your dear father?’

  ‘Not much improved, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Casualties of war . . .’ She turned and pointed to a middle-aged man selling matches in a doorway. ‘Some brave soldier, no doubt, reduced to that.’ She looked moved, for a second, then briskly said, ‘Goodbye, Amory, my dear, I’m very proud of you.’

  With that she touched my cheek with her gloved hand and darted away across Fleet Street towards St Bride’s.

  I stood there for a while feeling oddly shaken by the encounter and irritated with myself. God still had the power to destabilise me, I was annoyed to realise. I walked slowly back to the office wondering how I could have handled the meeting better but coming up with no good or coherent ideas.

  Faith was back and showed me her membership card of the British Union of Fascists.

  ‘Well done,’ I said. ‘Any news?’

  ‘Turns out there’s lots of marches planned,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘Big ones – to celebrate the fourth anniversary.’

  ‘Fourth anniversary of what?’

  ‘The founding of the party. October ’32.’

  ‘Right. Of course. But the teleprinter said something soon.’

  Faith consulted her notebook.

  ‘There’s a small march next week. Wednesday, 11 a.m. Sort of testing the water – a trial run for the big ones in October.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Tower of London to St Dunstan’s Church Hall in Maroon Street. William Joyce is speaking. Not Mosley, unfortunately. There’ll be one hundred blackshirts, they say.’

  ‘Where’s Maroon Street?’

  ‘Stepney.’

  I almost said, where’s Stepney? – but stopped myself. I looked fixedly at her.

  ‘I’d like you to be on that march, Faith. But only if you want to.’

  ‘If you want me there, I’ll be there, Miss Clay,’ she said, loyally. ‘But I don’t think it’ll be much of a show.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. No one else will be covering it. This might just be our scoop. Blackshirts marching into the East End . . .’ I felt excitement building. ‘You’ll be marching, I’ll be taking photographs – and then we’ve got our Mosley interview. Send a teleprint to New York.’

  I bought a gazetteer of London with detailed fold-out maps. As I studied them I realised that the East End might easily have been in Siam or Tanganyika or Siberia as far as I was concerned. It seemed that London stopped at Aldgate and the City and all those streets of low houses and docks and wharves and the meandering river were part of a terra incognita that only its denizens penetrated. In the gazetteer, I read:

  ‘To the east of the City lies Whitechapel, a district largely inhabited by Jews (tailors, dressmakers, furriers, bootmakers, cigar-makers, etc.). Their presence here, and in Mile End and Stepney, is chiefly due to the Russian persecutions of the nineteenth century.’

  I unfolded my delicate beautiful map and saw the districts east of the City, traversed by the great thoroughfares heading towards the Thames Estuary – Whitechapel Road, Commercial Road, Cable Street – carving their way through Stepney, Limehouse, Bromley, Poplar, Bow and Stratford . . . I felt that strange frisson of anticipation that an explorer in Africa must experience, about to set off into the unknown. Except in this case the map wasn’t blank – every little street, lane and alleyway had its appointed name. This land was densely populated – it had its churches and schools, its police stations, hospitals, post offices and civic buildings. I would be entering Olde England and the names I read were redolent of the country’s long and complex history: Shadwell, Robin Hood Lane, Regent’s Canal, Lochnagar Street, Ropemaker’s Field, Wapping Wall . . . But nobody I knew ever went there.

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  In anyone’s house at any given time there will, I suppose, be half a dozen appliances or components not functioning properly. A light fused, a door-handle loose, a floorboard creaking, an electric iron inexplicably giving no heat. In the cottage’s case, for example, there is a permanently dripping cold tap in my bathroom, a drawer in the kitchen that will not fully shut, and an armchair that has mysteriously lost one castor. Also, the Hillman Imp seems to be leaking oil from somewhere, judging from the dark stains on the gravel, and my wireless reception will switch off completely for ten minutes or so, offering up muffled voices obscured by crackling gunfire, before it bizarrely resumes normal service.

  As with your house, so with your body. I’ve a bruise on my shin, the remains of a splinter in my palm that seems to be turning septic, an ingrowing big toenail and my left knee cartilage twinges with a spasm of pain when I rise from a seat. We make do – favour the right leg, use the left hand, slip a paperback under the armchair where the castor should be. It amazes me what compromises we happily live with. We limp along, patching up, improvising.

  Talking of compromises in my life, I see now that Cleve Finzi was my knight in slightly tarnished armour. The fact that he was handsome and successful, selfish and self-absorbed – not to say a little vapid, from time to time – doesn’t reflect badly on me, I believe. At certain periods of our lives we – men and women – need exactly this type of person. Their easiness on the eye is all you require – handsome men, beautiful women, it’s a pleasure just to be close to them. Then growing maturity tells you that this type of person simply will not do any more and we sense instinctively that we need someone, something, altogether more intriguing.

  So I ran away from Cleve and New York and his terrifying wife and took off, heading south with Hanna and Constanze. A mistake, another mistake.


  I remember Cleve calling the office that week before the march. The teleprinter informed us of the time of the call; the phone rang; the operator connected us and we spoke across, or rather, under the Atlantic. There was a lot of hissing and interference on the line but I could hear his voice distinctly. I waved Faith out of the office, stuck a fingertip in my free ear and listened to my one-time lover’s voice crossing the thousands of miles between us.

  ‘Everything’s ready,’ I said, all brisk professionalism. ‘We’ve the whole march covered. And I’m going to hire another photographer. I’ll be taking pictures as well. Between the two of us we should get something good.’

  ‘It’s wonderful to hear your voice, Amory.’

  ‘I know the other photographer. He’s very competent.’

  ‘I miss you.’

  Why do the simplest most timeworn declarations affect us so?

  ‘I miss you too,’ I said, clearing my throat, glad he wasn’t in the room with me. ‘But it’s much better this way.’

  ‘Send me everything you have as soon as possible. You choose and crop the photos. We’re going to do this big piece on fascism in England. Italy, Germany, now England . . .’ He paused. ‘When’s the march, again?’

  ‘Wednesday.’

  ‘Perfect. We’re going to beat everyone on this. They sound as unpleasant as the Nazis, your blackshirts.’

  Well, we shall see on Wednesday, I said, and in close-up. We talked a little more about the practicalities of sending the photographs to the USA and he told me to spare no expense. Motorcycle courier to Southampton, the fastest liner available, and so forth. I assured him I would make every expensive effort and he hung up with a breezy ‘Good luck. Don’t let me down, sweetheart.’

  I remember at the weekend going to Sussex, to Beckburrow and finding that Xan was there and, to my surprise, my father. He looked well, though slimmer, and he wore a beret. It was clear that beneath it his head was shaved. Before lunch we went for a stroll around the garden.

  ‘I’m better now,’ he said, with a wide smile. ‘Cured. I’m home for good.’

  ‘What happened?’ I said. I still felt odd with him, couldn’t judge his mood and consequently was a little tense. Was this cheery humour genuine or feigned?

  ‘It’s a wonderful new operation.’

  He took off his beret and I saw two round pink scars, like small coins, set just above both his temples, his hair short stubble growing back.

  ‘They just bore into the skull, you see, from both sides and then cut the fibres, you see, the connections, to the frontal lobes of your brain. It’s amazing. I’ve stopped worrying about everything. Everything. I’m back.’

  He opened his arms to me and I stepped into his embrace. He held me tight.

  ‘Have you forgiven me, my darling?’ he whispered in my ear.

  ‘Of course, Papa. Of course.’

  I remember meeting Lockwood in a pub on Fleet Street, the Dreadnaught. We shook hands, formally, smiling nervously at each other. He had grown a small moustache – it didn’t suit him – and he told me almost instantly that he was engaged to be married. I congratulated him, showing real pleasure, I hoped, and he began to relax.

  He said he was working part-time for the Daily Sketch but was hoping for full employment there, soon. I asked him if he’d do some freelance work for Global-Photo-Watch and he said yes, immediately.

  ‘I love that magazine,’ he said. ‘Better than Time. Better than the Illustrated.’

  ‘Wednesday morning, eleven o’clock, Tower of London.’

  ‘What is it?’

  I explained – and added I’d be working as well.

  ‘But we won’t be seen together,’ I said. ‘And be discreet, keep the camera hidden as much as possible. I’ve heard that the blackshirts don’t like photographers.’

  Lockwood thought for a few seconds, smoothing his small moustache with his fingertips.

  ‘What’re you paying?’

  ‘Five pounds for the day. Plus ten shillings for every photo we use.’

  ‘Sounds good to me.’

  I went on to tell him the kind of photograph that GPW liked to run but I could see he wasn’t really listening and stopped.

  ‘I think about you a lot, Amory,’ he said, a little awkwardly. ‘Can’t get you out of my mind, sometimes. Wondering where you are, what you’re up to . . .’

  ‘I’ve been away for a good while,’ I said. ‘After Berlin I went to New York and was even in Mexico.’

  ‘Ah. The glamorous life.’

  ‘It wasn’t that glamorous, to be honest.’

  He went to the bar to buy another round of drinks and I looked at him standing there – slim, tall, broad-shouldered – and I thought about the times we’d had in his small garret above Greville’s darkroom. And I didn’t feel anything. It’s strange how strong emotions can be so easily diminished as your life continues; how deepest intimacies become commonplace half-recalled memories – such as an exotic holiday you once went on, or a cocktail party where you drank far too much, or winning a race at the school sports day. Nothing stirs any more. My affair with Lockwood had happened and had ended and had become part of the texture and detail of my personal history. I was fond of Lockwood and I knew he was a good photographer – that was what mattered, now.

  I remember a letter arriving from Hanna, from Berlin, on the day before the march. She was back from her travels, she said, but she was really writing to me to convey the sad news that Constanze had taken her own life some two months earlier in São Paulo. I was initially shocked and then the shock became surprise and then a kind of understanding. I didn’t know Constanze well but I could see how febrile and overwrought she was and how she clashed with the world. It turned out that the two had quarrelled – ‘it was very bitter’, Hanna wrote – and had split up after almost a year living in Costa Rica. Hanna went east and roved the Caribbean while Constanze headed south for Brazil. The letter accompanied a copy of the book they had somehow managed to compile together before the eruption: Winter in Mexico und Costa Rica: Tagebuch einer Reise. It contained three of my photographs, uncredited. It was my first appearance between hard covers.

  Hannelore Hahn, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1934.

  2. THE MAROON STREET RIOT

  ON THE WEDNESDAY MORNING I met Lockwood at Fenchurch Street station, as pre-arranged, at ten o’clock. He showed me the small camera he was using, a Foth Derby. I had my Zeiss Contax that fitted neatly into my handbag. It had rained in the night and the streets were still damp, giving the morning air a raw grey light. I was glad I was wearing my mackintosh and a green felt bowler.

  We found a coffee stall and each had a mug of tea.

  ‘You hungry?’ he said. ‘I fancy one of them cream buns.’

  ‘Help yourself, Lockwood, please. You’re on unlimited expenses.’

  ‘Looking forward to this,’ he said, munching away.

  ‘I think we just have to be extra careful,’ I said. ‘This march hasn’t been announced. The police know, but the details have only been circulated to BUF members. They don’t want any press attention otherwise there’d be posters everywhere.’

  ‘Why so secretive?’

  ‘They’ve got bigger marches in October. This is a trial run. If someone spots you taking photos just pocket the camera and move on.’

  ‘You’re the boss, Amory.’

  We made arrangements to keep as separate from each other as possible so as not to reproduce the same photographs and to meet back at the office at the end of the day. We’d then go straight to a darkroom, develop, print and select the images we liked and send them straight off to America.

  We wandered down to Trinity Square, opposite the Tower, where we could see a crowd had gathered – about 200 marchers, I calculated and, also, some thirty blackshirts, young burly men in their pseudo-uniforms, peaked caps and jackboots, giving off an air of pre-emptive menace and self-importance as they organised the marchers (BUF members, I assumed) into a column. I spotted Fai
th amongst them, wearing no hat, just a violet scarf tied over her hair.

  At eleven o’clock a large banner was unfurled that read ‘BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS AND NATIONAL SOCIALISTS’ and four mounted policemen appeared on their magnificent chargers.

  There was a series of blasts on a whistle and the march moved off sedately, led by the blackshirts, heading north up Minories then turning right into Whitechapel High Street, and then everyone was diverted once more on to Commercial Road. Traffic was stopped by the police on their horses and passers-by looked on in mildly amused curiosity, it seemed to me. There was no sense of a fascist threat overwhelming the nation’s capital.

  I walked briskly ahead and overtook the front of the march and then, hiding in doorways and lurking behind parked cars and vans, started taking photographs. I looked around but could see no sign of Lockwood.

  As the march moved on in orderly fashion down Commercial Road I became aware of small groups of young men standing watching on street corners, but watching in a nervy, fidgety way, chatting amongst themselves in lowered voices. Then the odd unlocatable shout could be heard – ‘Fascists!’ and ‘Fascists go home!’ These shouts were answered in turn by the blackshirts, raising their hands in a Roman ‘hail’ salute and shouting back in unison, ‘Aliens! Aliens! Aliens!’ As soon as any of the blackshirt stewards approached the groups of spectators, the young men split up and drifted away. However, it was evident that the mood had intensified. The march was evidently no surprise; intelligence had been leaked. The marchers closed ranks and the blackshirt stewards spread out to cover the column’s flanks.

  I felt a premonition that this was going to turn nasty and I noticed that, mysteriously, the number of blackshirt stewards was increasing as more young, uniformed men joined the march, inconspicuously. I managed to take a photograph of twenty or so blackshirts coming out of Stepney station in a kind of phalanx as the whole march now veered left up White Horse Street, heading for the meeting hall at St Dunstan’s.