by William Boyd
‘So?’
‘The answer is yes.’
I lay in the dark of my bedroom beside Charbonneau – who was sleeping the sleep of a satiated man – thinking about Cleve. Had I done this because of what I’d discovered about the other woman, whoever she was? Perhaps. Then I thought: maybe it’s more complicated, like everything, as Charbonneau said; maybe it was a way of showing myself that I was free.
In the morning I brought Charbonneau a cup of coffee as he lay in bed.
‘Is this “light” coffee or “dark” coffee?’ he asked.
‘I think it’s light. Lots of hot milk.’
‘Only in America.’
I sat down beside him.
‘I want you to know something,’ I said. ‘I told you I’d been very ill. One of the consequences is that I can’t have any children.’
He shrugged, put his coffee down and took my hand.
‘Well, you know, it could be worse. I have a child. I never see her.’
‘You have a daughter?’
‘From my first marriage. She’s called Séverine. She’s ten years old.’
‘I don’t know very much about you,’ I said.
‘And I don’t know very much about you,’ he countered and flipped back the sheet. ‘Shall we get to know each other better?’
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I suppose I should add, in the spirit of fair comparison with the other men whom I have made love with, that Charbonneau’s penis was quite small and stubby, though he had a surprisingly and disproportionately large and heavy scrotum. What shook me first, though, when he was naked, was his hairiness. He had a great pelt of black hair over his chest and belly and loins. Out of this thicket his small, darkly pigmented penis protruded. He had hair on his back also and of course on his arms and legs. I was initially in a state of some alarm – I’d never seen such a shaggy monster of a man – but as soon as he embraced me I realised that the hairs on his body were soft and yielding, like a fine expensive fur, and after a while I found his hirsute presence quite stimulating.
Today, I took out my old Leica and went down to the end of the bay where the rock pools are. It was sunny, with just a few speeding clouds going by and I wanted to take pictures of the rock pools with the sun bright and glaring overhead – spangling, dazzling. I intended, in other words, to take pictures of light in such a way that you would never know it was light reflected in rock pools. This was my new plan, my new obsession. Snapshots of light-effects were what I wanted to capture – luminescent starburst abstract moments that no painter could reproduce. Windows reflecting street lamps; close-ups of chrome bodywork in full sunshine; shallow puddles clustering dappled sunspots. Light stopped – light static. Only the automatic eye could do this. I had a new book in mind.
*
It seemed to me that, after my intermittent affair with Charbonneau had been going on for a few weeks, Cleve was beginning to sense something. He sensed a change in me – but it would be wrong to say that he was suspicious.
About two days after Charbonneau’s latest visit from Washington and his ‘projet inutile’ I received a telephone call from Cleve late at night. I was alarmed as he never called the apartment.
‘What’s happened?’
‘I want us to meet. But at the office. A proper meeting.’
‘What if Frances hears about it?’
‘It doesn’t matter any more.’
‘What’s changed?’
‘Come and see me. I’ll explain.’
We met the following day at GPW’s offices in Midtown. I passed Phil Adler in the corridor on the way to Cleve’s office. He had a wax paper cup of water in his hand and he stopped so abruptly on seeing me that it slopped over the rim and splattered on to the floor.
‘Amory! You’re back. My God! Call me, we have to get together.’ He kissed me on the cheek. ‘This is great.’
‘Back after a fashion,’ I said. ‘But I’ll call you.’
Cleve sat me down across from his desk and we both lit cigarettes. I was still in Charbonneau mood and found that I could look at Cleve objectively with no miasma of emotion blurring the view. He was wearing mauve braces – suspenders – over his pale blue shirt and his cerise tie was loosened at the neck. He looked every square inch the handsome magazine editor in his corner office but I wasn’t quite so beguiled by it in the way I used to be. It struck me that this was what pleased and satisfied Cleve about his life and it explained why he would never leave Frances. It would be too inconvenient, too hard and awkward to maintain the image, otherwise. And of course I was part of that perfect big glossy picture, also. Thank you, Jean-Baptiste. I was seeing Cleveland Finzi plain.
‘What’s going on, Cleve?’
‘We’re reopening the London office.’
‘Really?’
‘And of course I want you to run it again.’
‘Why?’
‘There are hundreds of thousands of American servicemen in England. Pouring in. Soldiers, sailors, airmen. We’re missing out – Collier’s, Life, Saturday Evening Post – everyone is running over there. I put it to the board – they agreed we should reopen. You’ve done the job before; you have all the contacts. We can steal a march.’
I sat there in silence for a few seconds then tapped the ash off my cigarette. I knew at once I was going to say yes but I wanted him to earn it.
‘I like it here,’ I said. ‘And I’ll miss you.’
‘I’ll be coming over all the time. And when I’m over it’ll be different – better. No ducking and diving, none of this secret-agent stuff.’
‘But my apartment, American Mode—’
‘I’ll take care of everything. Seventy-five pounds a month, plus expenses.’
I thought to myself: Diana Vreeland is on $500 a month and she’s the fashion editor of Bazaar.
‘Can I think about it?’
‘No. Absolutely no. It has to be you. I can’t send anybody else.’
‘When would I have to leave?’
‘Yesterday.’
Charbonneau poured himself another glass of wine, and then emptied the bottle at my invitation.
‘Let’s have another,’ he said. ‘I leave chiant DC and I come here to New York to see you – and life has some meaning, at last. It makes me want to get drunk. Like a fish.’
‘As drunk as a fish – I like that. But don’t get too drunk. We want to enjoy our last night together.’
He actually spluttered, then dabbed at his chin with his napkin and set his glass down carefully.
‘What are you saying to me, Amory?’
‘I’m going back to London. I’ve got a new job. Sorry to bring you the bad news on our lovely evening.’
‘Well, not so bad.’ He smiled, his big, tigerish, pleased-with-himself smile. ‘One reason I’m drinking so much is that I didn’t know how to tell you my own news.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’m going back to London, also.’
BOOK FIVE: 1943–1947
1. TYPHOON
‘FLIGHT LIEUTENANT CLAY, PLEASE,’ I said.
‘Ah, yes . . . Yes, Miss, we’re expecting you. And the name of the organisation again? If you don’t mind?’
‘Global-Photo-Watch. It’s an American magazine.’
I was in the adjutant’s office of RAF Cawston in Norfolk. A flight sergeant was checking the appointment diary and collating the entry with my identity papers and letters of introduction. All seemed well.
‘I’ll drive you out there, Miss,’ he said. ‘Can I give you a hand with the cameras?’
‘No, no. I’m fine thanks.’
We stepped outside and he showed me into an olive-green staff car and we sped off through the base, past low hangars, with grass growing on their roofs, and anti-aircraft gun emplacements dotted here and there, towards distant aeroplanes parked by a long thin runway.
‘Thought you’d be more interested in the Yanks next door,’ the flight sergeant said.
&n
bsp; ‘I’m going there tomorrow.’
‘You’ll eat well, that’s for sure. Oh, yes sirree.’ He went on in the same envious culinary vein comparing what was available in the sergeants’ mess in RAF Cawston with the gourmet feast of ‘amazing grub’ served up at USAF Gressenhall. ‘It’s a different world, Miss, I tell you.’
I let him chat on, not telling him of my familiarity with American ‘grub’, preoccupied with the prospect of seeing Xan after all this time. I felt I’d missed a whole chapter of his life. Two chapters. The diffident schoolboy and guinea-pig breeder I knew best had gone to Oxford, published a book of poetry and was now a fighter pilot. How did these drastic changes happen in life? Then a moment’s thought told me that it happens all the time. Time is a racehorse, eating up the furlongs as it gallops towards the finish line. Look away for a moment, be preoccupied for a moment, and then imagine what has passed you by.
We pulled up at a parked Typhoon fighter plane, surrounded by a thick six-foot semicircular glacis of sandbags. The Typhoon was big and bulky for a single-seater aircraft, canted steeply back on its solid-looking undercarriage, and it had a gaping intake – like a mouth – under the three-bladed propeller. Xan stood beside it, one hand in a pocket, watching us arrive, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing his sheepskin jacket and his flying suit, as requested. He seemed taller and thinner since the last time we’d seen each other at Beckburrow. We embraced. I stepped back and looked him up and down.
‘Well, well, Marjorie – who would’ve thought.’
He laughed and just for a second I saw the little boy in him again.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said, wagging his finger at me. ‘When I saw the request, “Miss A. Clay of Global-Photo-something-or-other” wanting to take my photograph, I did smell a rat.’
‘I just wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to take pictures of all these American airmen and their bombers tomorrow so I thought I’d sneak in a visit to my little brother.’
I made him stand by his Typhoon, leaning on the wing by his open cockpit, as if he were about to climb into it and take off on a mission, and pretended to take photos of him – there was no film in my camera – for the benefit of the flight sergeant from the adjutant’s office who was standing looking on, approvingly.
I wandered round the aeroplane. A big solid machine – like a tank with wings, it had remarkable heft, not like the other fighters, the Spitfires or the Hurricanes. This was a beast.
‘What kind of plane is this?’ I asked.
‘A Typhoon.’
‘I know that, silly. What kind of Typhoon?’
‘A Hawker Typhoon Mark Ib. It can fire rockets.’
‘Why is it painted with these black and white stripes?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell.’
‘Something to do with the invasion?’
‘Shall we go to the mess? I’ve got a present for you.’
We were driven to the officers’ mess, an old rectory outside the base perimeter. The drawing room looked on to a wild garden with an unmown tennis court. Outside I could hear a cuckoo calling in the woods beyond the pink-brick boundary wall.
Xan brought me a gin and orange and he had a half-pint of beer. We lit our cigarettes and talked dutifully about the family: Father’s health (good, stable), Mother, Dido’s fame, cousins, aunts and uncles. Then he handed me a slim book in a brown paper bag.
I took the book out and stared at it in some wonder. A purple cover with dull gold lettering. Vertical Poems by Xan Clay, V. L. Lindon and Herbert Percy. I felt tears of absurd pride brim at my eyelids. I hastily flipped through a few pages to distract myself from my emotion. I understood the title immediately – all the poems were thin like ladders, one or two words per line.
‘Why like this, vertically?’
‘Read the afterword – not now, obviously, but when you have a moment.’ He smiled, leaning back, searching for an ashtray. ‘It’s a little poetic movement we’ve started – me and two friends from Oxford – trying to do something different with poetry, out of the ordinary, shake things up a bit, if we can. Maybe you could write about us in your Global-Photo-Thingamajig.’
‘You have to sign it for me.’
‘Oh, but I have.’
I looked at the title page: ‘For Amory with love from Marjorie Clay.’
I blew my nose, had a small coughing fit, all to cover up the tears that had now begun to flow.
‘You’re meant to be happy, not tearful,’ Xan said.
‘These are tears of happiness, Marjorie,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how proud I am of you.’
I grabbed his head with both hands, pulled him towards me and covered him with kisses. He had to beat me off.
Half an hour later he had the mess steward telephone for a taxi to take me to my hotel in Fakenham. As we stood waiting under the rectory’s porch he introduced me to his fellow pilots, fellow officers, as they came and went. They all looked as if they were playing truant from school. This was the curious effect my siblings had on me. I felt like Xan’s great-aunt – decades older than him – while Dido made me feel like a child.
He kissed me on the cheek and opened the door of the taxi for me.
‘It’s absolutely appalling,’ he said. ‘I haven’t asked you a single question about yourself. It’s all been me, me, me.’
‘That’s precisely why I came to see you,’ I said. ‘Now I’m completely au courant.’
‘Are you happy, Amory? You seem happy.’
‘Happy to see you, darling,’ I said, ducking the question.
We drove off down the lane to Fakenham and I looked back through the rear window and saw him wave at me. Then someone asked him for a light and he turned, fishing in his pocket for his lighter.
I wiped away residual tears. Why was he making me so lachrymose? The transformation in him, I suspected – while I wasn’t looking he had become someone entirely different. A competent Xan, a young man who could take his strapping plane, armed with its rockets, power it into the air and go into battle. It shook you up, that kind of realisation.
‘So, Miss,’ the taxi driver said, over his shoulder, ‘what’s your bet for the invasion? July or August?’
The Vertical Poets, Oxford, 1942. Left to right, Herbert Percy, V. L. Lindon and Xan Clay.
‘Premonitions’ by Xan Clay
Stars
foretell
the fall
of
czars.
Strummed
guitars
lead to
hidden
bars.
Huzzahs
greet
news
of life
on
Mars.
Time
stands
still
in
Shangri-las.
2. HIGH HOLBORN
THE NEW GPW (London) offices were at the west end of High Holborn. We had three rooms on the top floor of a building with an oblique view of the dirt-mantled roofs of the British Museum. There was my office, Faith’s annexe and a kind of waiting room where journalists and photographers would gather and that swiftly came to be an informal club. We had a cupboard with a decent supply of liquor (gin, whisky, bourbon, sherry) and cigarettes – courtesy of our New York parent office – a couple of shabby, soft sofas and walls covered with framed photographs and past issues of Global-Photo-Watch. In the time between the pubs closing after lunch and reopening in the evening it was an even more popular venue to gather and while away the dead hours of the afternoon. Free booze, free cigarettes and kindred spirits.
We had opened the offices in the early summer of ’43 and had become something of a holding pen for various American newspapers, magazines and the smaller wire services. Apparently our ability to supply swift accreditation via ETOUSA (European Theatre of Operations US Army) had become well known. It was nothing to do with me – Faith Postings did all the liaising and paperwork and she was clearly very good at it. So, as it turned out, we were also
acting as proxies – and charging a fee – for around a dozen other American publications and press agencies, including Mademoiselle and the Louisiana Post-Dispatch. Once the journalist or the photographer had the accreditation from ETOUSA they would be assigned to a particular unit in the services – the air force was the most popular – where they would be handled and supervised by that unit’s press officer and department.
By this stage of the war the process was running fairly smoothly. The journalists – including several women – once accredited, were issued with uniforms and granted the honorary rank of captain. There was always a considerable amount of paperwork involved but, once assigned, the working atmosphere depended on each unit’s particular disposition towards the press – ranging from lax and friendly to hostile and authoritarian – an attitude usually determined by the personality and character of the commanding officer.
One day at the end of May ’44, Faith popped her head around my door and screwed up her face apologetically.
‘There’s a strange gentleman here asking for you. Insisting. Says he knows you.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Mr Reade-Hill, he says.’
Greville was standing in our club-room peering at the photographs on the walls through spectacles so cloudy they seemed opaque.
‘Greville?’
He turned, snatching off his glasses, and strode across the room to embrace me, kissing me on the cheek. I smelled the odour of poverty coming off him, that sour reek of the unbathed, of unwashed clothes. He looked pale and considerably older and his moustache was untrimmed and grey. His suit was shiny with wear and the obvious repairs had been crudely stitched – by Greville himself, no doubt.
We went for a stroll, had a cup of tea and a sandwich in a café and ended up sitting in the watery May sunshine on a bench in Bloomsbury Square. The talk had been banal – all about family matters and a lot of disingenuous quizzing of me about my job at GPW. I was waiting for the real reason for our encounter to arrive.
At the Great Russell Street end of the square, a silver, deflating, three-finned barrage balloon was being winched down on to its lorry. About half a dozen young WAAFs were fussing around and their excited girls’ voices carried across the grass to us.