Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  He was escorted to my room by a guard of honour of two nurses and Dr Wellfleet, the director of Persimmon Hall. The great man had deigned to visit the provinces; the obeisance was almost grotesque.

  He examined me thoroughly, internally and externally, he looked at my X-rays, he consulted the records from the London Hospital, Whitechapel, and the daily reports from Persimmon Hall. However sizeable the reimbursement Sir Victor was receiving from Cleve, I still sensed in him an urge to be gone as soon as decently possible, gamely resisting the temptation to look at his pocket watch, hanging from its gold chain and tucked in his waistcoat. Persimmon Hall was not his natural habitat.

  Eventually Sir Victor did look at his watch and exhaled.

  ‘You’re going to be disappointed, Miss Clay,’ he said.

  ‘Disappoint me, Sir Victor.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Why you’re bleeding like this.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘The trauma you suffered was the cause – but you know that as well as I do. Better.’ He seemed uncomfortable, for a moment. ‘Modern medicine . . . Its triumphs . . . We think we understand all about the human body, have solved its mysteries. But actually I think we know very little.’ He reached into his pocket for a small battered silver case and selected one of the five cigarettes it contained and lit it.

  ‘Last week,’ he went on, ‘I was present at the delivery of a perfectly healthy, bouncing baby boy. Eight pounds. He died yesterday. I haven’t a clue why.’

  ‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—’

  ‘Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Exactly.’

  He stood up and placed his palm on my forehead and smoothed my hair back. It was a spontaneous, unreflecting gesture, perhaps prompted by his recollection of that baby’s unaccountable death – and here he was confronted by another mystery. As soon as he realised what he was doing he took his hand away, quickly.

  ‘Time, Miss Clay. Time. You will be well but your own body will have to do all the work. We doctors and our medications can’t help you. I’ve no idea how long it’ll take but, in some months, I surmise, you’ll start to feel truly better. You’ll know it yourself. You’re a young woman in her prime. Nature will effect her cure.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t thank me. That’s the good news. Now for the bad.’

  ‘Bad?’ I felt a spasm of alarm.

  ‘In my judgement, as a result of the severe internal injuries you received in the attack, I believe you will never be able to bear children.’

  I looked at him in astonishment. I’d never considered this, not for one moment.

  ‘Really? Are you sure?’ I said vaguely, feeling hot, all of a sudden.

  ‘The continual bleeding. The clotting that was observed in the blood in the initial weeks. Everything points at permanent infertility.’

  ‘Right.’ Now I felt tears prickle at the corners of my eyes. ‘I’ll have to think about that. Take it on board.’

  ‘Yes, of course. And now I really must go for my train.’

  He shook my hand formally and left.

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  Today was one of those weird Mediterranean moments you are sometimes blessed with on the west coast of Scotland. A sky of unobstructed azure, no breeze, a constant, steadily warming sun, razor-edged shadows. If only we had cicadas . . . Flam and I walked down from the cottage to the little bay and I had a picnic lunch there – a cheese sandwich, an apple, a square of chocolate and iced gin and tonic from a Thermos flask.

  When I think back to my encounter with Sir Victor Purslane and his pronouncement I can still remember the sense of shock I felt, but the strangest consequence of his visit was that the bleeding stopped, almost immediately. Two days, four days, six days went by – no blood. He was correct in another matter: I sensed the change in myself – something had happened, some corner had been turned, I knew, and I began to feel better, slowly and surely. I felt less tired, felt my natural energy returning, I wanted to eat food that had colours in it. My weight loss arrested itself and my pale face began to recover its usual healthy mien.

  Dido made one of her rare visits bearing her weekly bouquet herself.

  ‘My God,’ she said. ‘What’s happened? Health – picture of. You’ve got to leave this ghastly place.’

  And so I returned home, to Beckburrow, and reclaimed my old bedroom. A nurse was hired to look after me but she left before two weeks were up as she had nothing to do. I began to eat food that the family ate – steak pies, roast chicken, broccoli, raspberry crumble – and I went for walks, progressively longer, with my genial, ever-beaming father.

  My parents had been informed, by handwritten letter from Sir Victor, of my now infertile state. There was little emotion expressed. In fact my mother – mother of three – said quietly to me one day when we were alone, ‘You may find it’s a blessing in disguise, my dear.’

  Xan was at the house a great deal as I convalesced, I remember. He was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, of all astonishing eventualities. After years of dullard mediocrity, he had experienced a sudden spurt of intellectual energy, as if a dam had been broken. His Higher School Certificate results were excellent. When he went for his interview at Balliol he wore a canary-yellow suit and a matching bow tie. Asked his ambitions, he said he wanted to be a poet. He was awarded a £100 exhibition.

  I started to become interested in the world again and what was going on in it. I listened to the wireless, I read newspapers and learned that Germany had annexed Austria, that a 500-ton meteorite had landed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that something called ‘instant’ coffee had been invented and that Orson Welles had broadcast The War of the Worlds and caused widespread panic.

  My father, however, lived in the immediate, proximate here and now. His lobotomy – that was the operation he had undergone – seemed to have left him pretty much unchanged, on casual examination. His mood was uniformly good but he had lost all interest in his old profession, the world of letters: he didn’t write a word, he didn’t read a word. His entire intellectual life, it seemed, was concentrated around the business of two-move chess problems – composing, plotting, testing and then sending them in to newspapers and chess magazines. And he was extravagantly unpunctual, showing up for lunch at 5.30 in the afternoon, or going to a dentist’s appointment in Brighton three days late. I once waited for him at Lewes station for two hours (he had arranged to pick me up in the car). I telephoned the house and was told that he’d set out to collect me just after breakfast. We had no idea what he’d been doing or where he’d been when he returned home shortly before midnight. He smilingly said he’d gone to pick me up but I wasn’t there. He gardened diligently and went for long walks on the Downs, a small travelling chessboard bulking out his jacket pocket. His world had become very circumscribed but he was entirely happy within it.

  Towards the end of the year Cleve sent me a lengthy apologetic letter (I had written telling him of the transformation in my health, but not Sir Victor’s diagnosis). The London office would not be reopening, he said, offering up the usual excuses – money, the world crisis, the state of US publishing, retrenchment in the magazine business, other areas of expansion taking precedence – but he wanted me to meet a friend, a certain Priscilla Lucerne, who was coming to London early in the new year. He would set everything up – he thought it would be worth my while.

  In February 1939 Priscilla Lucerne’s letter arrived. She would be in London for a week, staying at Claridge’s before moving on to Paris. She would love to invite me for tea. So I went up to London to meet her in the Palm Court. She was a petite, slim, elegantly dressed woman in her forties with her hair dyed Bible-black with a short fringe to mid-forehead. Her lips were painted the deepest scarlet. She smoked cigarettes from a ten-inch holder. She failed to hide her disappointment when it became apparent that I had never heard of her, apart from her connection with Cleve. She wasted no time in enlight
ening me: she was the editor of American Mode – and she wanted to offer me a job as a staff photographer.

  I saw the hand of Cleve Finzi everywhere – Cleve’s sense of guilt in action, trying to make life good for me again after the disaster of Global-Photo-Watch.

  ‘But I’m not a fashion photographer,’ I said to Priscilla.

  ‘Cleve Finzi says you’re an excellent photographer and that’s all I’m interested in,’ she said, fixing another cigarette into its holder. She looked at me, openly. ‘Let’s be honest, dear Amory, taking a photograph of a fashion model is well within your capabilities. You know how to light an interior shot, I assume.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘We choose the model, the outfit, the location – even, sometimes, the pose. I’m sure you’ll cope admirably.’

  I wondered what she owed Cleve Finzi, what debt to him had been cancelled by her offering me this opportunity. She didn’t seem particularly enthused; she didn’t even ask to see my portfolio. I requested some time to think about it. I explained I was convalescing after a long illness.

  ‘Take all the time you wish, my dear,’ she said with a wide but empty smile. She had done her duty.

  I did think about it, for some weeks, as my strength returned and I began to feel like my old self again. Cleve wrote, prompting me further. Nothing else appealing was on the horizon and I had to earn a living so, eventually, I replied to Priscilla Lucerne saying I would like to accept her kind offer. Formalities ensued; there were the inevitable bureaucratic delays, but in the summer of 1939 I embarked once again for the United States of America, leaving Europe on the brink of war.

  4. LE CAPITAINE

  WE HAD SPENT THE morning in Central Park, west side, up in the 80s, shooting outdoors as if we were in the country, and now, in the afternoon, had moved back to a rented studio on 7th Avenue in the Garment District. I was taking photographs for a section of American Mode entitled ‘As You Were Leaving’. On the final two or three pages of the magazine there would be a spread of fashion shots of ‘affordable’ clothes by unnamed American designers, tacked on as an afterthought for readers who couldn’t afford French couture – not that there was much of that available now the war was well under way. This was my daily bread; I didn’t enjoy it particularly and I wasn’t very good at it, to be honest, but it paid my wages and my name was never credited.

  Similarly, the models we employed on ‘As You Were Leaving’ were not the best known, perhaps a little past their prime, happy to accept a reduction in their usual fee just to be in work. The model I had been photographing in Central Park was Kitty Angrec, in her thirties, like me, and, like me, relatively content to be a back-page girl.

  I took her photograph, setting her against a wide paper magenta roll lit with a 500-watt spotlight and a photo-flood number one with silver reflector. I knew it would look fine but my heart wasn’t in it and neither was hers – we were both growing tired; it had been a long day. I had an assistant, Todd – they were always changing, some kid or other – and I left him to remove the film from the camera, label it and send it round to the Mode labs and followed Kitty into the changing rooms for a drink and a cigarette.

  Kitty was a rangy girl who just missed out on being a true beauty. That strange geometry that a face has – eye versus nose versus lips – had managed only to make her ordinarily good-looking. Her top lip was a little too long, the brow-lash connection slightly skewed . . . I had tried to analyse it but couldn’t quite understand what was so slightly out of kilter. We both lit cigarettes and I took out a quart of rum and poured a couple of shots into paper cups. Kitty began to undress.

  ‘You want to meet up tonight, Amory? I’ve got a sitter.’

  Kitty had a three-year-old son whose father was in the US Navy.

  ‘Not a bad idea. What’ll we do?’

  We ran through the options as she removed her clothes. She slipped off her skirt to reveal fishnet stockings and high heels, and as she shimmied out of her slip she dropped her cigarette and stooped to pick it up.

  ‘Don’t move,’ I said and scampered off to find my camera. I snatched it from Todd – it was a Rolleiflex.

  ‘You haven’t unloaded.’

  ‘Not yet, Miss Clay.’

  I ran back into the dressing room and switched on all the lights.

  ‘Just do what you did before,’ I said to Kitty. ‘Stoop down as if you’re picking up your cigarette.’

  She stooped, bending her knees reaching for an imaginary cigarette. Click.

  The resulting image was my best ever fashion shot, in my opinion, of all the hundreds I took for American Mode. I shot it in ten seconds with the lighting available in the room. I had it printed up and took it to Priscilla the next day.

  ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘But I can’t run this in Mode.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘We’re not Bazaar, we’re not Vogue. We’re American Mode. It’s a big difference.’ She handed the print back to me. ‘Nice try, Amory. But it’s too . . . provocative. It would have been fine in your scandalous show but not in my magazine. Sorry.’

  I thought about this as I slipped the print back into its buff envelope.

  ‘How do you know about my show? It was years and years ago.’

  ‘Cleve Finzi told me.’

  The Cleve connection, once again.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It was worth a try.’

  ‘Just keep up the good work, Amory,’ Priscilla said, beginning to rummage through papers on her desk. ‘We’re all very pleased with you.’

  It didn’t take long to make me realise that I was no fashion photographer – time and again I looked at my photographs for American Mode and I saw only stiffness, fakery, self-consciousness – mediocrity. The few snapshots that I managed to take of the models as they changed or grabbed a cup of coffee or chatted at the end of a session seemed a thousand times more full of life. However, nobody wanted those images.

  The American Mode years. The best and the worst.

  But I dutifully fulfilled my assignments when I was called upon and I lived the good life that the USA effortlessly provided. I was earning $300 a month and was living on the Upper East Side (I didn’t want to go back to the Village). I was well, weight regained, hair glossy. No bleeding at all, apart from the odd smear or speckle on my knickers, and my menses had never restarted – stopped altogether, just as Sir Victor had predicted. Some months I would get the familiar cramps, the sensations, the scratchiness, the mood change – but nothing happened. Snub-Nose Lenny’s boot had done its damage.

  As time went by I sometimes asked myself why I had come back to New York. The main reason, so I rationalised, was that it was a symbol of my return to health. My old life had resumed, Amory Clay was taking photographs again and being paid to do so even if it was strange to be in America as the war in Europe unfolded. I read about it in newspapers, heard bulletins on the radio; I had letters from home; I started sending parcels of food to Beckburrow – it was undeniably there, undeniably taking place, but somehow far in the background.

  In the morning I would leave my apartment on 3rd Avenue and 65th and walk to the subway, picking up a newspaper in which I read about the Blitz, that Japan had invaded Singapore, that the Afrika Korps had retaken Tobruk, that the US Navy had triumphed in the Battle of the Coral Sea, but it was as if I were studying something in a dusty historical tome. Here in Manhattan all the lights were turned on, America’s profligacy was on tap and there was fun to be had.

  Of course, the real reason I came back was Cleveland Finzi. Our affair restarted within two weeks of my landfall, though it was not like the old carefree days. I was worried, also, that first time we made love – it was the first time since my accident, however, to my relief, all seemed well – no pain, just pleasure. My libido was working as normal.

  I may have felt the same but Cleve was different – so watchful he seemed almost terrified. We had to meet under conditions of secrecy that an expert spy would have been proud of.

>   ‘Frances doesn’t even know you’re in the country,’ he explained to me when I moaned about the preposterous lengths we went to in order our tracks should be covered. ‘If she did, it would finish her.’

  ‘That would be a start,’ I said. ‘Sorry, not funny.’

  We were lying in my bed drinking Scotch and soda. We had made love. It was lunchtime.

  ‘She can never know you’re in the city,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine the consequences.’

  ‘All right,’ I said, reaching for a cigarette. ‘Got the message.’ I didn’t want to talk about Frances Moss Finzi.

  Cleve found a lighter and lit my cigarette and then lit his own.

  ‘We just have to be very careful, Amory. Very.’

  ‘Of course. I don’t want to jeopardise your happy marriage.’

  He seemed to relax when I said this, as if I were being serious.

  ‘But you’re here and you’re well and we’re together, that’s the main thing.’

  He held me and kissed me and I felt the familiar lung-inflation, the headspin. He had that effect on me, Cleve. He still moved and disturbed me, whatever guilt he was experiencing, or trying to assuage, or fooling himself, or however irritated or dissatisfied I was at his self-regarding complacency. I could see him for what he was but couldn’t resist him. Or at least I couldn’t be bothered resisting him, to be more precise. I didn’t care: I was in that one-day-at-a-time mode. I owed it to myself, I thought, as recompense for all I’d suffered since that awful day at the Maroon Street Riot. If I wasn’t entirely happy, I was at least not entirely unhappy, and that state of affairs wasn’t to be disparaged.

  The Pearl Harbor cataclysm had altered everything, instantly, like a vast weather system sweeping across the country. Pressure changed, social barometers went crazily awry. In New York I felt it was as if we were suddenly instructed to become serious and responsible; the long endless vacation was over, duty was calling, the conflicted world had come knocking at our door. It was as if the nation collectively grew up and assumed adulthood overnight.