Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  ‘The thing is, darling, I’m pretty much broke, these days,’ Greville said, looking across the square at the barrage balloon, not wanting to meet my eye. ‘I’m afraid young Bruno rather cost me a fortune, one way and another.’ I sensed Greville’s old pride and confidence had turned to bitterness. I remembered the handsome, dashing figure he used to cut in his dinner suit, hobnobbing with royalty, aristocrats and millionaires.

  By now the balloon had been pulled down on to the grass and the WAAFs were fussing about its rear end, looking for the leak, I supposed. The balloon was huge, fifty feet long, and as it was half deflated it pulsed and billowed as if it were alive, somehow, gasping for breath, a fantastical sea monster washed up in this small square in central London.

  ‘I was talking to your mother,’ Greville said, his voice heavy with shamefaced apology, ‘and she mentioned, just in passing, that – ah – you were hiring half the photographers in London.’

  ‘Not true. We tend to deal only with Americans. We’re an American magazine.’

  ‘Yes. Of course – silly of me. Thought she’d got it wrong. Anyway, it was a chance to catch up, at least.’ Now he turned to me. ‘I always regret our . . . Our little falling-out over your lost photographs. Your Berlin ones.’

  ‘We didn’t fall out, Greville. The whole thing was a nightmare.’

  ‘I wish I’d been a bit braver, though. I think it was having all those policemen in the drawing room. And then the word “obscene” being mentioned all the time. Very disturbing word, “obscene”, especially when it’s repeated every five seconds, very destabilising. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘It was all a long, long time ago,’ I said, consolingly, and unreflectingly put my hand on his knee, feeling it bony and fleshless, like a thin log beneath the worn worsted of his trousers. I took my hand away.

  ‘And then this bloody war finished me off,’ he said with some vehemence, and went on to relate that since 1939 his work as a society photographer had virtually ceased.

  ‘And I’m someone who took a portrait photograph of the Prince of Wales,’ he said. ‘And do you know what my last job was? Three months ago. Some fucking woman wanted me to take a picture of her cockatoo.’

  ‘Ah. Pet photography.’

  ‘Exactly. The graveyard.’

  I thought a bit. I couldn’t bear to think of Greville Reade-Hill photographing people’s pets.

  ‘There is one job I might be able to swing your way,’ I said. ‘But it would mean going abroad. Italy.’

  ‘I love Italy.’

  ‘Greville, the war’s on there, also. It’s not a holiday.’ I had remembered that one of our GPW photographers had been invalided home, injured by shrapnel.

  ‘Yes, of course. You’re not sending me to Monte Cassino, I hope. That doesn’t sound much fun at all.’

  ‘No. But I could get you accredited as one of the photographers we have with the Second Army Corps.’

  ‘British Army?’

  ‘American.’

  ‘I love Americans.’

  ‘On one condition – that you don’t go near the front line.’

  ‘No fucking fear!’

  We stood up and I suggested he return to the office with me and give all his details to Faith, and we wandered slowly back to High Holborn. I sensed Greville’s confidence returning: an almost physical change seemed to be taking place; he stood taller, his stride lengthened, as if he’d had some sort of mystical transfusion.

  ‘Where do you live these days?’ I asked.

  He looked a little embarrassed. ‘Actually, I’m living in a sort of hotel in Sandgate, on the south coast. Your mother’s very kindly helping me out. What does this job pay, out of curiosity?’

  ‘A hundred dollars a week.’

  ‘What’s that in real money?’

  ‘About twenty pounds.’

  ‘Marvellous. Bloody hell. Saved my life, Amory, darling.’ He nodded, squared his shoulders and turned to me again. Smiled at me. ‘Darling Amory – resourceful, helpful, sympathetic, lovely – you couldn’t give me a small advance on my salary, could you?’

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  This morning I brought Flam back from his overnight stay at the vet’s in Oban and carried him into the cottage and laid him in his basket by the fire. He seemed a little livelier, trying to lick my face, patently glad to be home. I set him down and then placed a bowl of ‘high protein’ dog food in front of him. He sniffed at it but otherwise wasn’t interested.

  Yesterday morning I had come downstairs and he was standing awkwardly by his basket, neck and head held low, coughing every five seconds or so. I looked at his face and saw there was a little mucous discharge from his nostrils. He rallied a bit when he saw me but he was moving sluggishly. So I picked him up, dumped him in the front seat of the Imp and drove in to see the new vet in Oban. The vet, oddly enough, was a young Dutchwoman (married to a Scot) called Famke Vogels. ‘Big made’, as my mother used to euphemistically say, but I liked Famke because she didn’t bother much with niceties, just made her point. She told me to leave Flam in overnight and come back tomorrow for the diagnosis.

  ‘Just a bacterial pneumonia,’ she said when I returned. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

  She had given him an antimicrobial vaccination and supplied me with a course of antibiotic pills to be administered twice a day.

  ‘Do you know how to do this?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes. He’s not my first dog.’

  My first dog, also a black Labrador, was called Flim. He was run over by a farm tractor and his spine was broken. When the anguished farm labourer brought me to him – he was lying in the verge, all twisted, whining – I knew there was nothing I could do. Or rather, there was only one thing to be done.

  The vet in Oban, Famke’s predecessor, a Mr McTurk, took one look and said to me, ‘There’s no option, you know that, don’t you?’ I agreed, and Flim was taken away, after I’d given him a farewell kiss, and he was put out of his significant misery, poor dog. I buried him – weeping uncontrollably – at the edge of the beach looking over the bay. I was thinking: poor dog – lucky dog, that his pain ended and his departure from this world was achieved so speedily and with no further suffering than that he’d already endured. You lucky dog – we should be so lucky, as lucky as sick dogs.

  As Flam made himself comfortable I went and fetched the pill bottle and crouched down by him.

  ‘Time to take your medicine, laddie,’ I said.

  I try not to talk to my dog as if he’s a sentient human being but it’s impossible, as any dog-owner will tell you.

  I opened Flam’s mouth and placed the pill at the back of his tongue to the side. Then I held his jaws closed with one hand, holding them upwards – he was perfectly compliant – and waited a second or two. He didn’t seem to have swallowed so I blew on his nose and massaged his throat, gently. I felt the reflex in his gorge and let him go. He licked his teeth; the pill had gone down.

  I gave him a kiss on his forehead and scratched behind his ears and saw his tail give a beat or two of pleasure.

  ‘What would you do without me, eh, Flam?’ I said.

  He was trying to climb up me to lick my face but I pushed him back, the unwelcome thought entering my head: who will feed me my pill when the time comes?

  *

  I remember, now, that Charbonneau had been far too overconfident about his destination. I travelled back to London from New York in early 1943 – on the Queen Mary, no less – while Charbonneau was sent to North Africa in the aftermath of the Operation Torch invasions and was plunged into the internecine mayhem of who was to take control of the Free French. I assume that the Free French governmental authorities, whoever they were, thought that his American experience and know-how would serve them well with Eisenhower and his staff.

  I remember walking into the wide lobby of the Savoy to meet Cleve on his first visit over and seeing him standing there, waiting for me, in his dark suit and brilliant w
hite shirt, and feeling I was taking part in some absurd dream or fantasy. We ate in the downstairs Grill and then went up to his suite and made love. Everything about his demeanour had changed in London; it was like the old days in the Village. He was perfectly relaxed, his usual enthusiastic, funny, dry self and we wandered about London without him glancing once over his shoulder.

  Cleve had been right, to that extent – the move away from New York and its attendant paranoias reinvigorated our encounters as they newly occurred, every six weeks or so. But I had changed in the interim – there was the Charbonneau quotient to consider now, unbeknownst to Cleve. I had one short, frustrated letter from Charbonneau – from Algiers, sent to me at the office. The line I recall was ‘I thought Washington was bad. I would cut off my right hand to be back there, now.’ Poor Charbonneau.

  I remember accompanying Greville to Victoria station to see him off to Italy. He was going to join a convoy sailing from Portsmouth. He looked smart and raffish, wearing his dark war-correspondent’s uniform with its designated shoulder patches, and he had a fore-and-aft forage cap set on his head at a suitably rakish angle. He carried a musette bag slung over his shoulder with his camera equipment and other essentials in it. I was touched to see that his moustache was trimmed and dyed a hazelnut brown. He looked almost like his old self and I complimented him.

  ‘Actually, I had the uniform altered at my tailor’s,’ he said. ‘It was very ill-fitting.’

  ‘Well, you look very pukkah, Captain Reade-Hill, very much the dashing war correspondent. Just don’t do anything dashing.’

  ‘Cowardice is my middle name,’ he said, kissed me and whispered, ‘Bless you, darling.’

  I remember that the most irritating consequence of my precipitate departure from New York was that I had to miss the publication of my first book, Absences (Frankel & Silverman, 1943). It appeared, to deafening press silence, two months after I returned to London. My publisher, Lewis Silverman, said he was sending me six copies. They never arrived, victim, I suppose, of erratic wartime postal services or of some U-boat attack. I asked Cleve to bring me over some copies on his trips to England but he always – typically – forgot. I finally managed to see a copy of Absences after the war, in 1946, three years late, by which time it was already long out of print. I wonder if this experience is unique in the history of publishing. It was a collector’s item, very rare, booksellers told me when I tried to track one down.

  Images from Absences by Amory Clay (Frankel & Silverman, 1943).

  3. D-DAY

  CLEVE CAME OVER AT the end of May for a week. We spent two nights together at the Savoy in his suite with its splendid view of the brown, ever-changing river. On the morning of 4 June, after our second night together, we stayed in bed until noon, calling up room service to order toast and jam and a pot of tea that we spiked with bourbon. We made love again before we sauntered downstairs to the Grill for lunch.

  The Grill was full of senior military and naval types along with a smattering of old regulars. If it hadn’t been for the uniforms – and the somewhat reduced menu – you would never have believed we were in our fifth year of the war. We amused ourselves listening to the conversation of two elderly, heavily made-up ladies of a certain age who were sitting behind us and whose patrician voices were ideally clear and carrying.

  One said, ‘I’m going to live in Ireland after this war.’

  The other, ‘I worry that Ireland will become over-smart.’

  ‘It’ll never be Kenya-type smart.’

  ‘I suppose not . . . There are some nice houses.’

  ‘Nice houses and cheap and plentiful staff.’

  ‘Always an advantage. Why won’t you stay in London?’

  ‘London will be drab and dreary. I need change. I need heavenly dullness.’

  Cleve leant over and whispered.

  ‘And these are the people our boys are dying for?’

  ‘Well, they’re not really representative of—’

  Then I saw Charbonneau come into the Grill and stopped talking in mid-sentence. He was in his khaki uniform and was wearing his round gendarme-style hat that he swiftly removed. He was led to a table some distance away against the far wall. My mouth was dry and I felt suddenly faint. Cleve signalled to a waiter for more coffee.

  ‘Let’s just pay our bill, shall we?’ I said.

  ‘No, no,’ Cleve said. ‘I don’t want to miss the next chapter. Not for the world.’

  On cue, the first old lady said, ‘Do you know, I think Gloria lacks feminine charm.’

  Her companion said, ‘She doesn’t have a developed social instinct, that’s the problem.’

  I heard no more because at that moment Charbonneau spotted me and our eyes met. For an awful moment I thought I was going to vomit as I saw him rise to his feet and cross the dining room towards us.

  ‘Hello,’ I managed to say, hoping there was sufficient surprise in my voice. ‘How are you?’

  Cleve had switched his attention now. So I made the introduction.

  ‘Cleveland Finzi, this is – I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

  ‘Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau.’ He shook my hand, giving it a surreptitious squeeze, then Cleve’s.

  ‘I met Miss Clay in New York, she took my photograph.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Cleve said. ‘We ran a story on you, I remember. You wrote a novel, a bestseller.’

  ‘For a week or so,’ Charbonneau said, with appealing but untypical modesty. I could see he was enjoying himself, now.

  ‘What a coincidence,’ I said, more faintly than I meant. ‘And here we all are in the Savoy Grill.’

  ‘Very good to see you again,’ he said, giving me a little bow. ‘Nice to meet you, Mr Finzi,’ he said to Cleve and strolled back to his table.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Cleve asked.

  ‘Actually, I feel a bit sick,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better get back to the room.’

  Back in the suite I kept up the charade. I went into the bathroom and retched and spat, ran water. It must have been something I ate, I said, better get home, see you tomorrow.

  Cleve wanted to call a doctor – I said no, I’d be fine, I insisted. He made me sit down and drink a glass of fizzing Bromo-Seltzer that he had in his bag and I composed myself.

  ‘Is this good for nausea?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s good for anything.’

  Half an hour later I walked out of Savoy Court on to the Strand to find Charbonneau waiting for me in a shop doorway, smoking a cigarette.

  Back in Chelsea – in my new flat on the corner of Oakley Street and the King’s Road – I poured each of us a whisky and water while Charbonneau did his usual prospective-tenant act, opening drawers at random, peering into my small bedroom, flushing the WC.

  ‘That was him, wasn’t it?’ he said as I handed him his whisky.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your American boyfriend. He’s the one.’

  ‘Boyfriend is the wrong word. He’s the man I’m in love with, yes.’

  ‘You don’t love him, it’s obvious.’

  ‘Wrong, Charbonneau, I do.’

  ‘I thought you loved me.’

  ‘Ha-ha. I’m very attached to you. I love Cleve.’

  ‘Nonsense. Deep down, au fond, you really love me.’

  I closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to continue this conversation.

  I had never thought of myself as promiscuous, or a ‘loose woman’, as my mother would have put it. I was thirty-six years old and had only made love with three men. It was hardly evidence of nymphomania, but, as I lay awake in bed beside the gently snoring Charbonneau, I found it hard to come to terms with the fact that I had slept with both my lovers in the last twenty-four hours – well under twenty-four hours, in fact. It didn’t feel like me, somehow – and yet it incontrovertibly was the case. What was happening? It hadn’t been planned, so that was some reassurance.

  I slipped out of bed and padded through to the kitchen. It was five past f
ive in the morning according to the clock on the shelf by the cooker and a faint citrus light – grapefruit and orange – was beginning to seep into the sky above Chelsea and I could see it was a cloudy blustery day if the darkly tossing crowns of the plane trees in Carlyle Square were any indicator. Where was summer? – it was June, for heaven’s sake. I put the kettle on the gas hob and fetched out the teapot. I’d let Charbonneau sleep on and see if my mind cleared a bit. I had never expected him to re-enter my life with such embarrassing surprise.

  He emerged looking for coffee at around nine o’clock, wearing his khaki trousers and my too-small dressing gown, his hairy wrists protruding from the tartan sleeves. I was dressed by this time and had been going over GPW paperwork. I had telephoned into the office saying I still felt ill – I was due to meet Cleve for lunch – impossible with Charbonneau around. He took me in his arms and kissed my neck.

  ‘You’re the best thing for me, Amory. When I’m not with you, I find I’m thinking about you – not all the time, but enough.’ He smiled. ‘It’s not normal for me.’

  ‘What is normal for you?’

  He ignored me. ‘Have you some coffee? I can’t drink your English tea.’

  ‘What made you go to the Savoy?’ I asked. ‘It was an incredible coincidence that you should just walk in like that.’

  ‘No, no. I knew that you were there. I went to your office and your charming secretary said you were in a meeting at the Savoy. So I go to the Savoy, I ask for you at the front desk. No – no Miss Clay. Then I see you – with this man – going into the Grill. I went away, I had a drink in a pub and I thought – no, I must see my Amory, I don’t care who she’s with.’ He spread his hands. ‘And here we are. Aren’t you pleased?’

  ‘I have some coffee essence.’

  ‘No, don’t worry. I smoke a cigarette.’

  He went to the window and lit up and stood there looking down on the King’s Road. I heard a sudden patter of rain on the glass.