Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  I had exultant letters from my mother and Dido. At last, at last! What took you so long? From my point of view – however happy I was at the change in the military balance of power – the major effect of Japan’s surprise attack on the American fleet in Hawaii was that it brought Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau back into my life.

  I was in my apartment, one Saturday afternoon in January 1942, when the telephone rang.

  ‘Amory Clay?’

  ‘Yes, speaking.’

  ‘I don’t believe it! Putain!’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘Who do you think? Charbonneau!’

  In honour of our first dinner together we agreed to meet again at the Savoy-Plaza the following evening. I was deliberately early and sat in the lobby waiting for him, in a good mood, anticipating. Perhaps Charbonneau was what I really needed, now – a true friend.

  A tall thin man with a moustache and an unusual military uniform came in through the revolving doors and looked around. Was it? Yes! Charbonneau, a soldier – impossible. He saw me and strode over, arms wide. We embraced then he took my hand and ducked his head over it, not kissing it, in that formal, symbolic French manner. Then he embraced me again and I felt him press himself against me in an overfamiliar way.

  I pushed him off.

  ‘Steady on!’

  ‘You look beautiful.’

  ‘You look bizarre.’

  ‘I’m a captain in the Free French forces. You should salute me.’ He stepped back and assessed me, up and down, like a farmer inspecting livestock.

  ‘Yes. Your hair is shorter,’ he said. ‘And you’ve lost weight.’

  ‘So have you.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve been ill – for quite a long time. But now I’m better.’

  ‘And I’ve been running away from Nazis.’

  We walked into the dining room. Charbonneau didn’t like the table we had been given so we tried another two until he was finally happy. He then ordered a bottle of champagne and a bottle of Château Duhart-Milon 1934 to be decanted, ready for the main course.

  He raised his goblet of champagne to me and smiled.

  ‘I feel I’m alive again, Amory. As if nothing has happened since the last time we were sitting here.’

  We both savoured the irony. The century was galloping away without us.

  Then he told me about the fall of France, the flight from Paris to Bordeaux where the interim government had established its temporary capital for a couple of weeks. After the Armistice, he had thought about staying on in France but had decided it was better to trust his luck abroad, so he headed for Spain and then Portugal.

  ‘It’s an interesting city, Lisbon,’ he said, musingly. ‘I’ll take you there one day.’

  In early 1941 he had made his way to London – by seaplane – to join de Gaulle’s government in exile, the Forces Françaises Libres.

  ‘Yes, and when I was in London I came looking for you,’ he said. ‘I went to your little flat. All closed. No Amory.’

  ‘I was already over here, in New York.’

  He leant back. ‘And here we both are in New York. Now. Isn’t life very strange?’

  ‘Your uniform doesn’t fit you very well.’

  ‘We are a very poor army, the Free French. But they think that if I wear a uniform I will be taken more seriously. I borrowed this uniform. Even these medals are borrowed.’ He pointed at the row of medal ribbons over his left breast-pocket. Then he looked rueful and downed his champagne in one gulp. ‘They don’t like us Frenchies in Washington. Roosevelt hates de Gaulle. Churchill hates de Gaulle. My compatriots don’t understand it. Aren’t we allies? But no.’ He poured more champagne. ‘This American civil servant in the State Department said to me: de Gaulle is just a brigadier in the French army, why should we give him all this money, all this support?’ He frowned. ‘It’s a real problem, I tell you, Amory, ma puce.’

  Our meal arrived, another repeat: rare steaks with a tomato salad. Charbonneau poured the Duhart-Milon.

  ‘American meat, French wine, beautiful English girl. The world is at war but life is good.’

  We clinked glasses and drank a mouthful. Then he took my hand. I knew what was coming next.

  ‘I feel it is our fate, our destiny,’ he said, lowering his voice and looking me in the eyes, ‘to meet like this. I want to spend the rest of the night with you. I don’t want to tell you stupid romantic things, talking for hours in this kind of rubbish talk. I respect you too much, I tell you straight, Amory, en toute franchise.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’ He seemed genuinely annoyed. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Nothing. But I’m in love with somebody else.’

  He muttered to himself in French, then sighed and looked at me.

  ‘I will get you one day, Amory. You wait and see.’

  I had to laugh.

  ‘Eat your steak, mon capitaine,’ I said. ‘It’s getting cold.’

  I remember exactly when I heard the news about Pearl Harbor. I was in a small deli on 6th Avenue having a late lunch, eating a meat-loaf sandwich with a Dr Pepper to wash it down. I was acquiring American tastes. It was Sunday morning in Hawaii and the first baffled news reports were coming in over the radio to the East Coast. The whole delicatessen fell silent and we looked at the radio on the counter as if it were some demonic instrument of propaganda.

  ‘John Jack Anthony!’ somebody shouted at the back of the room – an oath I’d never heard uttered before or since. ‘What the heck’s gonna happen now?’

  I remember Dido coming to New York towards the end of 1941 to play in a recital at Carnegie Hall – part of a big pro-British, join-our-war push. There was a programme of English music: Elgar, Delius, Moxon, Vaughan Williams.

  Dido and I went to the 21 Club after her recital. The room stood and applauded as she entered – twenty-seven years old, my little sister, plucky, pale, beautiful, radiating self-assurance as she blew kisses and bowed gently as the acclaim washed over her. A new Britannia. I took a few steps back from the limelight.

  We ate eggs Benedict and drank cold Chablis.

  ‘I feel I’m in another world, another universe,’ she said. ‘The voyage over was completely terrifying. And you should see London. Blackout, impenetrable darkness. Then as the sun rises, smoking ruins everywhere. People frightened, miserable. Try to buy a box of matches – impossible. People saying to you, “Better dead than defeated.” It’s appalling.’ She looked around the bright, raucous room. ‘We’re losing, Amory. We’re not going to win on our own, not even with the Russians – and they’ll be done for any day now. That’s what’s terrifying us.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Why won’t the Yanks join in? What’s stopping them? Can’t they see the awful danger?’

  ‘It’s very complicated,’ I said. ‘When you’ve been here, even a day or two, you’ll begin to understand. What’s going on in Europe seems a million miles away. Nothing to do with us.’

  ‘I’m going to order another eggs Benedict,’ she said. ‘Is that too, too greedy? Eggs, eggs, eggs. What wonderful things.’

  I summoned a waiter over and ordered another round of eggs Benedict and another bottle of Chablis.

  Dido lit a cigarette. ‘By the way,’ she said. ‘hold on to your hat. Xan has joined the Royal Air Force.’

  I remember being sent out by Mode on a fashion shoot to Taos, New Mexico, in January 1942, just before I met Charbonneau again. This wasn’t for ‘As You Were Leaving’, this shoot was to be used as backdrop for the summer fashion issue and we needed sunshine. I assumed Priscilla couldn’t find a photographer of any repute so she had decided to entrust me with the assignment. It rained the entire week we were there and all my photographs were rejected. I offered my resignation. It was accepted and then promptly rescinded twenty-four hours later. Cleveland Finzi running my life again.

  What the incident showed me was that I had to stop taking photographs of pretty girls in expensive frocks and I began to search through my small archive trying to assemble a coll
ection of my own work, work that I was proud of. It was not substantial. So I began to take new photographs – a sequence that I called ‘Absences’. Clean plates on a kitchen table. Empty chairs on the gravelled path of a garden square. A hat and a scarf hanging on a coat stand. The human presence was absent but its traces remained. I told myself that the impetus for these pictures arose because I was lonely in America, far from home, but a little further thought made me realise that these photographs of empty or recently vacated places might have had something to do with my infertility. The absence looming in my life.

  I remember going into Saks Fifth Avenue and buying a grey suit with green check for $35. I wore it out of the store and went straight to the Algonquin Hotel to meet Cleve. We drank cocktails then went upstairs to the room he had booked to make love. That evening we saw a movie called Dark November and ate at Sardi’s before returning to the Algonquin. As we walked back the streets were full of soldiers and sailors – America at war! – and I recall feeling particularly happy, as if I had won a prize. But as I acknowledged that happiness the thought came that life couldn’t continue like this. Change was in the air for everyone; the world was changing, me included.

  I remember the moment when I knew it was over. Cleve and I were staying at a small hotel – the Sawtucket Inn – on Cape Cod Bay. I hadn’t seen him in over a month but somehow he’d managed to secure this two-night break for us. Frances suspected nothing. Cleve had told her he was at a colleague’s funeral and would be away for a couple of days.

  We were lying in bed in the morning in that fuzzy self-indulgent mood of bliss you experience when you’ve made love on waking and know you don’t have to get up and go to work, or anywhere, if you don’t feel like it, and are vaguely contemplating the possibilities of one more fuck before a big breakfast. Shall we? When will we be together like this again? I don’t know if I can. Oh, you’ll be fine, leave it to me . . .

  Somehow the idle conversation turned to a movie. Cleve leant over me and brushed the hair from my brow. I felt his cock thickening against my thigh. He kissed my throat.

  ‘It’s just like that moment,’ he said, ‘you know, in the movie we saw – when Haden Frost looks at – what’s her name? – Lucille Villars. What was it called? And you just know. You know they’re going to jump into bed.’

  I frowned, thinking. ‘What movie?’

  Cleve ran his hands over my breasts. Kissed my nipples, kissed my right ear.

  ‘Come on. You said it yourself. The sexiest look between actors in the cinema. Ever.’

  ‘I said that?’

  ‘The sexiest look ever.’

  ‘Haden Frost wasn’t in Dark November.’

  ‘I know. It was I Want Tomorrow.’

  ‘I haven’t seen that film.’

  He wasn’t really listening, that was his mistake.

  ‘We talked about it for half an hour, honey. Remember? How in movies these looks – if they work – can do more than ten pages of dialogue. That’s the acting skill . . .’ He stopped, realising suddenly.

  I sat up slowly, my brain working fast. He rolled back off me, reached for his cigarettes.

  ‘I haven’t seen that movie,’ I repeated. ‘We never had that conversation.’

  He was good, Cleve, didn’t give anything away. He took his time lighting his cigarette and smiled at me, shrugged.

  ‘Sorry. Must have been talking to Frances about it, then.’

  ‘Probably.’

  I snuggled back down next to him, not wanting him to see my face and the shock registering on it. That’s when I knew he was seeing somebody else. Frances never went to the movies because of her wheelchair. There was another woman in Cleve Finzi’s life. Now we were three.

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  Lunch today at the Glenlarig Hotel with Alisdair McLennan, Greer and Calder’s son. He was up on a visit with his two children, parking them with his parents as much as he could. He wanted to meet me, he said, wanted to talk about Vietnam, hence the lunch. He was in his thirties, with fine reddish-blond hair, and a blunt ordinary-looking face – pale-lashed, pale blue eyes – but he was attractive in a vital, super-intelligent way that was all to do with his brain. He had one of those restless, opinionated minds, always seizing on something to say or comment on; some sharp observation was made whether it was about the daily amount of seaweed washed up on a beach, or trade-union manipulation of the Labour Party, or ferry monopolies in the Western Isles, or that Anthony Eden was the best prime minister we’d ever had – but never realised. Everything was potential grist to his brain power.

  Within about two minutes I knew I didn’t like him – not because of his manifest intelligence but because he was one of those men who cannot conceal their sexual interest – their sexual curiosity – about any and every woman they encounter.

  I was aware of him eyeing me up, looking at my breasts, my face, my hair, my clothes – stripping me naked, mentally – as we sat drinking our gin and tonics in the hotel bar. Here I was, sixty-nine years old, chatting away, as this young man’s querying lust, his snouty evaluation, first assessed and then casually rejected me. Maybe all men do this – instinctively consider the sexual potential of every woman they meet. I can’t say – but all the men I’ve known have taken care to conceal it from you, if you’re a woman, unless that encounter is taking place expressly with some sexual end in mind, of course.

  I saw Alisdair’s sexual radar switch from me to Isla, the young waitress who brought us our menus. Isla was a big plain girl with strange caramel-brown eyes and I sensed Alisdair McLennan’s idle carnal interest now play over her as she stood there, taking our orders, like an invisible torch beam, probing, considering, and then being switched off. Nothing doing.

  As a consequence, I became a bit dry with him, a bit clipped and cynical, as if to say: I’ve got your number, my friend – and it doesn’t appeal. But I don’t think he picked up the nuances – these kind of men don’t. It’s a variant version of pure ego – they’re never aware how others are judging them.

  In any event, we did talk about Vietnam, vaguely. I said it had been so long since I was there that I didn’t think any observations I might make would be valid any more.

  ‘You got into a bit of trouble when you were out there, didn’t you?’ he said, casually, pouring us both another glass of wine.

  ‘How do you know that?’ I said, at my driest.

  ‘You know, that whole SAS thing.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question: how do you know that?’

  ‘I read your file.’

  ‘What file?’

  ‘Everyone has a file somewhere – especially if they’ve led a life as interesting as yours.’ He smiled, and couldn’t keep his patronising manner concealed. ‘I’m in the diplomatic service, I get to see files.’

  I took my time, drank a mouthful of the Bordeaux, and put my glass down, turning it on the tablecloth for a moment. Then I looked at him squarely.

  ‘It was a very difficult time, back in the late Sixties. Everybody was lying. Everything was falling apart.’

  ‘Well – all ancient history.’ And he smiled again and changed the subject.

  I knew then at once that although he may ostensibly have been going to Saigon as a diplomat he was in fact working for the security services – a spy, or a handler of spies. That was why he wanted to meet me.

  ‘Do you still keep in touch with anyone out there, by the way?’ he asked, later, pouring the rest of the wine.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re all dead, now.’

  5. OPERATION TORCH

  THE STRANGE ASPECT ABOUT the affair I embarked on with Charbonneau was that it seemed almost immediately normal – as if we’d been lovers for years – the question in my mind being why had it taken us so long?

  We had dined together two or three times, whenever Charbonneau could slip away from Washington and come to New York. I remember towards the end of the year he called me in a foul mood, saying he ha
d to escape from the hell of DC and his ‘foutue mission’. What about dinner? Choose a new French restaurant – it had to be French – let’s test it, as we used to. I need some fun, he said. Come to the apartment and have a drink, first, I said. I’ll find somewhere interesting.

  My new place was on 65th Street between 3rd Avenue and Park. I had the top floor of an old crumbling brownstone with my own entrance at the side. An ancient lady and her maid lived in the rest of the building but I rarely saw them. Once a whole two months went by without a glimpse.

  Charbonneau arrived, took off his ill-fitting captain’s jacket and explored my rooms as I mixed two manhattans. I heard him opening cupboards and drawers, running taps in the bathroom as if he were a prospective tenant.

  He wandered back into the sitting room and I handed him his drink.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘You seem a bit depressed.’

  ‘We are invading French Africa tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Morocco. Or rather you are. Americans and British fighting the French. C’est bien déprimant.’

  ‘Fighting the bad French – you’re good French.’

  ‘It’s very complicated.’

  ‘Everything’s very complicated, Charbonneau. Life is complicated. It’s what you always tell me.’

  ‘It’s top secret. Don’t tell anyone.’

  I raised my glass. ‘Bon courage aux alliés.’

  ‘Your accent is terrible but the sentiments I approve.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Approve of.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘At least we have twelve million Russians soldiers on our side. How can we lose, in the long run?’ He seemed uncomfortable, all of a sudden. ‘What is it, Amory? Why are you looking at me like this?’

  ‘I’m just looking at you. A cat may look at a king.’

  ‘Have you found us a restaurant?’

  ‘No.’

  His exasperation was obvious.

  ‘All right. So we don’t eat. We call for a Chinese meal.’

  ‘Afterwards.’

  He looked at me, understanding now what was going on. He closed his eyes and did a little shimmy on the spot, shuffling his feet, rolling his shoulders. He looked at me.