by William Boyd
I walked along the beach on my little bay thinking of Xan. He was only twenty-seven. Almost 100,000 RAF airmen died during the Second World War, I read somewhere. The fact that Xan was one unit in that huge number makes it all the more terrible. One butcher’s bill for one family amongst the myriad served up by that conflict.
*
But it was Xan’s death that sent me to Paris. I felt I had to leave London, do something, and after the liberation of Paris in August I sent a teleprint to Cleve saying that we should set up a GPW office in Paris. ‘New York Times and Chicago Tribune have reopened their Paris offices,’ I wrote. ‘We will be left trailing behind.’ A week later the go-ahead came with one caveat: I was to be joined as co-bureau chief by one R. J. Fielding, a seasoned journalist and foreign correspondent who had just been let go by the Washington Post, for some obscure reason, and promptly hired by Cleve. I didn’t mind – I didn’t care – I only had this overwhelming desire to go to France and find out where Xan had died.
R. J. Fielding – ‘Jay’ – was a lean, tall fifty-year-old who had covered the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. He had his grey hair shaved in a severe crew cut and wore rimless spectacles that made him look like a sporty professor. He was a widower and had a wry, unperturbed view of the human predicament. I became very fond of him and I’m sure, following on the death of my father, I saw him as a handy paternal substitute.
Paris in 1944 was a beautiful illusion. If you kept your eyes half open the city seemed unchanged and as perfect as ever, even after four years of war. If you opened your eyes wider the changes forced on it became apparent. Little things: the clatter of wooden-soled shoes, not leather; a very erratic electricity supply; no hot water; a main course of tinned peas and nothing else served without apology at a fancy restaurant. But the mood, despite these privations, was buoyant and intoxicating – liberation was liberating – somehow these minor inconveniences were not going to be allowed to undermine Paris’s spirit of place.
The new GPW office was in the deuxiéme arrondissement – a top-floor flat in an apartment block in the rue Louis-le-Grand, just a couple of blocks away from the Hotel Scribe, the journalistic headquarters for all newspapers, radio stations and press agencies covering the Allies’ push towards the German border. In rue Louis-le-Grand we had converted the sitting room into our office (we had no telephones) with desks for Jay Fielding and myself. One bedroom was for our rather grand secretary, Corisande de Villerville, a pale moon-faced young woman, almost terminally polite, who spoke perfect English and was happy to work all hours for our limited wages. I had a room in the Scribe but I often slept in the apartment’s spare bedroom – something about the crazed bustle of the Scribe put me off – rather too many people playing at being war correspondents, intoxicated and self-important at being in liberated Paris. All communications were at the Scribe and the military censors, also, vetting copy and photographs, and so I was obliged to spend much of the day there. It was a relief to leave and go back to the calm and solitude of the apartment. Jay Fielding had a room at the Lancaster – I suspected he was independently wealthy – and of course I had Charbonneau.
Charbonneau’s small apartment was on boulevard Saint-Germain though he was rarely in it. He gave me a set of keys but I spent only one night there alone as I found the Charbonneau atmosphere – his possessions, his clutter, his smells, his personal spoor, as it were – too unsettling, sans Charbonneau, himself. He was busy travelling through liberated France on Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur business, seeming permanently exhausted, always complaining – but he was glad, nonetheless, to have me in his city and was very keen on me in uniform.
‘You know, American uniforms are so much better than British or French,’ he would say, looking me up and down. ‘More chic. More rugged. Even the shape of the American tin helmet is better. Soigné.’
‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He was driving me mad with this analysis. Like many French intellectuals of the time Charbonneau had a sophisticated contempt for the USA – crass, vulgar, philistine, no cuisine, money-obsessed, and so on – but was simultaneously passionately Americanophile when it came to cultural matters – films, jazz, literature.
One of his favourite authors, Brandon Ritt, was in Paris working for Time magazine and Charbonneau had contrived to meet him and they had struck up a sort of friendship and he often asked him to dine with us. I’d vaguely heard of Ritt during my New York years. He had written one hugely successful, 600-page novel, The Beautiful Lie, that had been an enormous prewar bestseller and was made into a movie (that flopped), and he had been living off its success now for nearly a decade while working on its long-awaited, much-heralded sequel, The Ugly Truth. He was in his mid-forties and good-looking in a ravaged, dissipated way – he was the heaviest drinker I’d ever met, up until then – and was a strange mixture of occasionally disarming and funny self-deprecation at war with an off-putting, overweening egotism. ‘I may be a shit writer,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but I’m richer than any of the good ones.’ Charbonneau was oblivious to this polarity, always ready to exalt Ritt as a genius – something Ritt was happy to hear as often as Charbonneau cared to mention it.
After my trip to Normandy to find Xan’s crash site I tried to concentrate on my work. We were busy, Jay and I: Allied armies were in Italy, and advancing up from the Mediterranean and racing on through France and Belgium on a front that now stretched from the Channel to Switzerland, all readying themselves for the final push into Germany. Apart from GPW business we were still accrediting journalists and photographers from other magazines and newspapers so our days were filled.
I went one day to the Scribe to introduce a young woman journalist, who’d just flown in from the States, to the chief press relations officer of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force – that had superseded ETOUSA). She was called Lily Perette and was twelve years younger than me. As we sat in the lobby waiting for our appointment she began speculating about what unit she’d be assigned to – ‘Anything in Patton’s Third Army,’ she said – and I found myself envying her. Lily Perette was duly assigned to the 3rd Army and was absurdly grateful to me – as if I had been responsible, somehow. I realised, as we had a drink in the Scribe’s bar to celebrate her posting, that I was still restless, still troubled by Xan’s death, and I wanted to be up and doing things not buried under bureaucratic documentation in Paris. I was a photographer, I reminded myself, not an administrator – so why shouldn’t I be assigned to a unit as well, just like Lily Perette?
I cabled Cleve seeking permission and he refused. I threatened to resign and he reluctantly conceded. I sped myself through the accreditation procedure – I would still be working for GPW – and waited to see where I would be assigned. It turned out to be longer than I thought as there were so many journalists heading for the European front, now that the war seemed to be entering its final phase, that units in the field didn’t want any more – they were becoming a burden. I looked about me at the Scribe and saw dozens of men and women hanging around waiting for their posting. I asked Jay Fielding to use his old war-correspondent experience and pull some strings.
I remember Charbonneau telling me he had a week’s leave and that we were going on a trip. He had a car, he had a laissez-passer and, more importantly, he had six jerry cans of petrol. I told him that if I was assigned I’d have to leave and return immediately but, in all honesty, it didn’t seem likely, so I was keen to go.
We drove south down the routes nationales to Provence, to a village called Sainte-Innocence about ten miles east of Saint-Rémy. It took us two days to reach there, travelling through a provincial France that showed few signs of the occupation. We might have been driving south in the 1930s, I thought, in Charbonneau’s big black Citroën, staying at small hotels, eating surprisingly well, setting off in the morning sunshine with the windows open, the plane trees at the side of the road swishing monotonously by.
We arrived at Sainte-Innocence at dusk and Ch
arbonneau picked up the keys to a house from the local butcher. We drove out of the village and turned up a dirt road that climbed to a small wood of umbrella pines on a bluff that was a stepping stone, a threshold, to a bigger, rockier mountain behind.
He swung open iron gates and we drove into an overgrown garden – there was just enough light to see – of oleanders, rosemary bushes and a great stand of cypresses planted as a barrier to the mistral. The house itself was a classic pink crépis Provençal mas. Two storeys, long and thin, one room deep with a terrace running along the facade and an old stone barn set opposite so that a sort of courtyard was formed.
‘It’s called the Mas d’Epines,’ Charbonneau said, stepping out of the car and looking about him. ‘It was all thorn bushes here before they cleared it.’
‘It’s very beautiful,’ I said. ‘Wonderful. Whose is it?’
‘It belongs to me,’ Charbonneau said with a proprietorial smile. ‘I bought it with the royalties from my fourth novel – Cacapipitalisme. A little present to myself. I haven’t been here since 1939.’
‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘Lucky you.’ Somehow Charbonneau always managed to surprise me.
The house was filthy, full of blown leaves and years of accumulating dust. Birds had been roosting in some rooms. Spiders and their webs were everywhere and I didn’t want to think about the rodent population. We lit an oil lamp, swept out a bedroom, and on a horsehair mattress we laid fresh sheets that we had brought with us. Charbonneau had bought several bottles of local red wine and a large saucisson sec in Sainte-Innocence and we sat on the terrace wall as the night came on eating slices of saucisson and drinking as much wine as we reasonably could. At a nice pitch of inebriation we went to bed, chasing a bat out of the room before we settled down.
‘I love this house,’ I said, lying in his arms, stroking his soft pelt. ‘I don’t know why but I just love it.’
‘We could be happy here, I think,’ Charbonneau said. ‘Don’t you?’
‘Is that a proposition?’ I asked.
‘Let’s say it’s an invitation.’
‘But I have to get back to Paris. I’m going to be assigned.’
‘This war will be ending soon,’ Charbonneau said, rolling on top of me and looking down at my face. ‘Sooner than you think. What will you do then, Amory Clay?’
I remember one day, when we had come back from our week in Provence and I was still waiting for my assignment to arrive, Jay Fielding and I were hanging round the lobby of the Hotel Scribe wondering where we could go and eat when I saw Brandon Ritt step out of the lift. He sauntered over to us – he seemed a little unsteady.
‘Jay, Amory. Wanna go to a party at the Ritz?’ he said. ‘Lots to drink.’
‘Sure,’ Jay said. ‘And maybe I could take a shower.’ The Ritz was famously the only hotel in Paris with constant hot water in 1944. ‘Coming, Amory?’ he asked.
‘Why not?’ I said, and so we strolled the short distance from the Scribe to the place Vendôme. I had never been in the Ritz, and walking across the wide square with its tall monument towards the hotel entrance – Ritt involved in some harsh denunciation of an American writer I had never heard of – and then stepping into the huge lobby was another of those Paris ’44 time-travelling moments. I was in my uniform – dark brown khaki jacket, pearl-grey skirt, my forage cap in my handbag – but, as we rode up in the elevator to the suite of rooms on the third floor where the party was taking place – I could hear the volume of noise in the elevator by the second floor – I had the sensation of being some ingénue in a 1920s film, a young girl going to a decadent party where bad behaviour would occur.
Ritt led us down the corridor – a dozen people had already spilled out of the rooms as the party spread inexorably. We pushed our way in; the roar of noise was tremendous, as if everybody was shouting instead of talking. The windows on to the place Vendôme had been flung open to try and dispel the fug of cigarette and cigar smoke, most of it rising from two poker tables with eight-man games under way. On a large dresser under an ornate cut-glass mirror with crystal sconces were ranked bottles of bourbon, gin and rum, and ice buckets filled with bottles of champagne.
I lit a cigarette quickly – it’s curious how smoking in a smoky room clears the sting from your eyes. Ritt brought me a glass of champagne – Jay had disappeared, maybe in search of an unoccupied bathroom with a shower.
‘You’re a very attractive woman, Amory,’ he leered. ‘Tell me about you and Charbonneau. What exactly is the situation?’
‘We’re getting engaged,’ I lied.
‘That’s great. Congratulations. So maybe we could have some fun before you’re actually fiancés . . .’
‘I don’t think Jean-Baptiste would be very happy about that.’
Ritt put his arms around me.
‘Jean-Baptiste would let me fuck his—’
He never finished because from behind came a great bellow.
‘Get your dirty hands off that young woman, you talentless cunt!’
I turned to see a thickset man with a full beard. He embraced Ritt and then they shadow-boxed each other. Ritt introduced us, out of breath.
‘Amory Clay, the most beautiful photographer in the European theatre. Meet Waldo Fartface.’
More raucous laughter. I said hello, pleased to meet you.
‘Are you English?’ the man asked, looking me up and down. ‘But in an American uniform. I like that.’ He looked at my sleeve badge. ‘Ah, war correspondent, like me. Welcome to the club.’
‘I am indeed English.’
‘Well, listen, my English beauty, if you’re a photographer there’s one man here you have to meet.’ He started shouting in Spanish. ‘Dónde está Montsicard?’
A shout in reply came from one of the poker tables and ‘Waldo’ led me over to the table – he was reeling drunk, it was clear by now – where a thin young man in a cheap suit stood up. He had very olive skin and the white of his open-necked shirt seemed to glow against it.
‘Felip Montsicard, meet a beautiful English photographer.’ We shook hands and Waldo turned to me. ‘Felip was the best fucking photographer in the Spanish war.’
Waldo lurched off leaving me with Felip Montsicard himself. I felt I was in some sort of weird parlour game. Who would I meet next? Marlene Dietrich? Maurice Chevalier? Oscar Wilde?
Montsicard offered to refill my glass and off he went leaving me alone again. I lit another cigarette and moved to the window, feeling the density and weight of the heavy gold brocade curtains hanging there, held back in a swag by plaited black velvet bands. Across the room, surrounded by cheering onlookers, Brandon Ritt was breaking up a chair, stamping it to tinder, as if it had attacked him in some way.
Montsicard returned with my champagne.
‘You are photographer? With who?’
‘Global-Photo.’
‘Is good.’ He had a thick Spanish accent. ‘I am with Life.’
‘I know.’
‘So you know who I am. Montsicard, the photographer.’
‘Yes, it’s a pleasure to meet you.’
‘You know Capa? He’s here also.’ He pointed at a poker table, at a small-dark haired man studying his hand.
‘No I don’t know him.’
‘That’s Capa.’
Ritt was now throwing the remains of the chair out of the window on to the place Vendôme.
‘He means well,’ Montsicard said, diplomatically. ‘But Ritt is very unhappy. In love matters, you know.’
I saw Jay Fielding pushing his way across the room towards me, his cropped hair gleaming with water droplets.
‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked.
‘Taking a shower, I told you.’
I looked round and saw Capa sliding out of his seat at the poker table, heading for the drinks. Jay scanned the room.
‘They’re all here tonight. Look, there’s Irwin Shaw. George Stevens, John Steinbeck . . .’ he smiled at me. ‘All we need now is Marlene Dietrich.’
And th
en Marlene Dietrich walked in.
Charbonneau was actually very annoyed when I told him where I’d been. Extremely annoyed.
‘Brandon took you there? To the Ritz?’
‘He just said come to a party. How was I to know?’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why no telephone call?’
‘I thought you were in Bordeaux. Ritt asked and I said you were out of town.’
His exasperation made his voice uncharacteristically shrill. He was growing even more annoyed.
‘But I was here – here in my apartment, doing nothing.’
‘How was I to know?’
‘Irwin Shaw was there?’
‘Everyone was there, yes, and Irwin Shaw. Everyone. Even Marlene Dietrich.’
‘Putain!’
He paced about his little sitting room, sulking, cross. Just as in his New York apartment the walls were lined with ascending columns of books, heading for the ceiling.
‘I saw Robert Capa and met Felip Montsicard.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Photographers. Famous photographers.’
‘I don’t give one shit for photographers.’
‘Thank you very much.’
‘Did you speak to Shaw?’
‘Yes, for quite a long time.’
‘What about?’
‘I can’t remember. I was shockingly drunk by then.’
‘Ce n’est pas vrai. Ce. N’est. Pas. Vrai.’
He calmed down after a while and we went to the Café de Flore across the street and had a plate of carrots and a bottle of very bad Burgundy.
‘I have news,’ I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage, as we finished the wine.
‘You’re going to marry Ernest Hemingway.’
‘I’ve been assigned. Finally. I’m going to the US Seventh Army in the Vosges mountains.’
5. THE SUPER-TANK
ALL OF US, the four journalists and two photographers, sat in our folding canvas chairs waiting for Colonel Richard ‘Dick’ Bovelander to arrive. We were sitting in the chilly entrance hall of the small chateau near Villeforte in the foothills of the Vosges mountains, west of Strasbourg, some miles behind the notional front line that the US 7th Army was holding, now in November 1944.