Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

It turned out to be the longest sustained period that Charbonneau and I had spent together, as a couple living under the same roof, and the time passed agreeably smoothly. The house and its setting helped – even in winter the place was beautiful – but the key factor in our mutual pleasure was that we enjoyed each other’s company, which, banal though it may seem, is the fundamental explanation of any successful and enduring union. Charbonneau was an interesting, amusing and provocative man and I like to think he brought out the best in me, also. Even two minutes in his company provided some comment or observation that would make me laugh or make me violently disagree with him and so those two minutes of my day were well spent as a consequence.

  I remember he said he was going to write a memoir of his time in the glittering literary circles in Paris before the war and call it Lettres et le néon. He found this extremely funny and chuckled away to himself. I didn’t understand at all until he said it would make Jean-Paul Sartre very angry – then I got the pun. I asked him if he’d ever read L’Être et le néant and he said he’d tried. What did you think of it, I asked? ‘Ça ne vaut pas tripette,’ he said. What’s ‘tripette’, I asked? ‘It’s tripe,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth little bits of tripe.’ Oh, yes, I replied – in English when something’s really bad we call it tripe, as well. Well, he said, L’Être et le néant is tripe. Then he smiled. ‘Tripe à la mode de con,’ he said – and found this even funnier, laughing out loud at his sally. He chortled away for days. I had no idea what he was talking about.

  I made the mistake once of telling him how clever and funny I found him (we were in bed and I was feeling indulgent) and he replied, with annoying self-satisfaction, ‘Now you understand why beautiful women enjoy the company of clever ugly men. On s’amuse.’ Then he corrected himself. ‘Clever ugly poor men. We all know why beautiful women like ugly rich men.’ Then he smiled at me. ‘And if we’re not amused by life we might as well take our cyanide pill now – no?’

  My new assignment arrived in February 1945. It was to General Bill Simpson’s 9th US Army, poised in the Rhineland waiting to cross the great symbolic fluvial barrier that would lead the Allied armies into the heart of Germany and bring about its cardiac arrest. I made my way to join the 9th, and was flown up to Geldern, about five miles west of the river.

  We journalists and photographers, the radio reporters and the newsreel cameramen attached to the 9th Army – there were a dozen of us – were billeted in a semi-ruined town hall in a village north of Rheinberg. There were three PROs looking after us – a measure of how the army and the mass media were now coexisting and being mutually supportive. Everybody was learning fast.

  Bill Simpson’s Army Corps was at the southern end of the massive British and Canadian thrust across the Rhine, Operation Plunder. We heard the artillery barrage begin on 23 March and waited until our time came to be ferried up to the front to see what had happened. To be honest, I was beginning to tire of being herded and controlled by the PROs. At some briefing I met Mary Poundstone again and asked her what unit she was attached to. ‘I’m not attached to a unit, my dear, I’m attached to a general. It makes all the difference.’ She was having an affair with Lieutenant General Edson Carnegie. If she needed a plane to return to Paris a plane was provided. If she wanted to rove the Allied front unchecked she did so. If she found herself in trouble she simply called Carnegie so she could be extricated without fuss or demanded transport back to his headquarters. It wasn’t an option open to me.

  My crossing of the Rhine in the aftermath of Operation Plunder, March 1945.

  Thirty-six hours after Plunder had begun we were driven up to the Rhine. It was at least 500 yards wide where we crossed on a Bailey bridge – already constructed – and we were duly impressed.

  Once over, the mood was jubilant amongst the troops we encountered. The war, it seemed, was nearly at an end. Thousands of German prisoners were being shepherded back to holding pens and it was both striking and disturbing to see how young they were – teenagers in the main, wispy adolescent fuzz on their chins and cheeks, all in uniforms that seemed far too large for them, borrowed from men.

  German POWs, March 1945.

  We were shown to our billets in an intact farmhouse a mile or so from the town of Wesel. Wesel had been bombed flat on the night of 23 March before it was taken and secured by the British 1st Commando Brigade. Our PRO told us that we were on no account to go near the town as it was still being searched for snipers and crazed last-stand defenders. It sounded exactly the sort of place I should visit.

  I bribed a motorcycle courier (sixty cigarettes) to take me to Wesel as his pillion passenger. He dropped me off at a lorry park and I hitched another ride in a four-ton, six-wheeled flat-nosed truck delivering various types of ammunition to the forces in the town. I jumped out when we stopped in the centre and slipped on my ‘PRESS’ armband. The air was full of the choking smell of masonry dust and only Wesel’s cathedral seemed to have partially survived the carpet-bombing – insofar as it could still just be recognised as a church of some sort. Every other building was a shell, a few walls standing, teetering, roofless, girdled with banks of broken bricks and shattered stonework.

  There were soldiers everywhere, clean, recently arrived soldiers, curious, poking about the ruins, evidently there to occupy rather than fight. I took some photographs around the cathedral and wandered down a bomb-cratered road to what must have been a park with a boating pond. All the trees were splintered stumps and the shallow pond was filled with floating objects, some of them once human beings, I thought. I wondered if I might find better images in the park – the world had seen too many ghost cities, grey lunar ruins – tortured nature might deliver something more striking. I walked round the boating pond, keeping my distance, not wanting to look too closely at what was floating there and then came upon a group of men, a hundred or so, sitting around the twisted remains of a bandstand.

  They were soldiers, British soldiers – I recognised the shape of the tin helmet – though they might have been troglodytes or some race of miners allowed up from underground, after weeks of toil, so filthy were they, almost black with dirt and sweat and mud. They were sitting quietly, smoking, eating rations, swigging from canteens, but their conversations, such as they were, were muttered, hushed, almost inaudible. I moved closer, carefully. They looked as if they had suffered some collective trauma, survivors of an earthquake or some other natural catastrophe. Their blackened faces were drawn and gaunt from awful shared experience, it seemed to me.

  A tall man rose to his feet and intercepted me as I drew near. He was wearing an old darned V-neck sweater, moss green, a civilian sweater, over his battledress shirt. His trousers were tucked into heavy, caramel-coloured brogue ankle boots of the sort you go deer-stalking in, and he had a revolver in a canvas holster hanging from his right hip. He was bareheaded and a lock of his greasy black hair hung over one eye. He had deep creases in his cheeks and had a lit cigarette in his hand.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said. His voice was ragged and patrician. I might have been a housemaid who’d barged in on a bridge game.

  ‘I’d like to take some photographs,’ I said, pointing to my armband. ‘If I may.’

  ‘Go away, young lady,’ he said. ‘You’re not welcome here.’

  Now I was close to him I could see the lean contours of his face and the colour of his eyes, a pale grey-blue, stark against the grime of his skin. There was a muscle twitching on his cheek and matted blood on his hairline.

  ‘What unit are you?’ I asked. ‘I work for an American magazine,’ I added, vaguely hoping the old magic formula would work, and I held up my camera. ‘People at home would really like to—’

  ‘If you try to take any photographs of these men I’ll kill you, here and now,’ he said, entirely reasonably, but not smiling.

  ‘All right, I’m going,’ I said, suddenly frightened of this tall thin man with his pale eyes. I turned and walked briskly out of the park not looking round, feeling his gaze on my
back, and unsettled by the absolute seriousness of his calmly delivered threat.

  I made my way back to the farmhouse – my absence unnoticed by anyone – and asked the PRO on duty to provide me with a movement order back to Paris. I’d suddenly had enough of war-reporting and I wanted my old life to be returned to me. Seeing those exhausted, filthy British soldiers sitting resting by the bandstand in the smashed and obliterated park had been disturbing in some profound way. Or was it the tall thin man? Their commanding officer, perhaps, who had so mildly and casually threatened to kill me. What had these men done or undergone in Wesel, I wondered? What death and destruction had they witnessed or effected in the ruined town that had left them so debilitated and quiet? What terrifying bleak tales would they have to tell their children, if they dared? I wanted to be back in Paris – back in Paris with Charbonneau.

  My movement order took two days to arrive – the headlong breakout from the Rhine crossings was in full urgent flow and requests such as mine were the lowest priority. The other journalists were shipped forward to Frankfurt while I went in the other direction. A jeep deposited me at a surprisingly undamaged station in Holland in a small town called Nettwaard. I had a piece of paper authorising me to take my place on a troop train heading for Brussels. Once there I had to make my own way home to Paris.

  There was a train standing in the station and it had a number painted on it that corresponded with my docket, but it was locked and so hundreds of soldiers, American and English, waited patiently with their kitbags and knapsacks for someone to come and unlock it and give us all permission to board. I wandered up to the furthest end of the platform, away from the soldiers, and found a bench, lit by watery sunshine, settled myself down and smoked a cigarette. It was a cold frosty March day with an intermittent sun piercing the hazy cloud cover. I was glad I was wearing my mackinaw overcoat and turned the collar up.

  ‘Hello again.’

  I turned. It was the tall thin man from the park at Wesel. He looked much better – clean, shaved, his uniform pressed and unmuddied. He was even smiling.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I assume you’ve not followed me here to execute me.’

  He winced, as if my remark had caused him pain.

  ‘No, no. Just waiting for a train, like you. May I?’

  He lowered himself on to the bench beside me with undue care, as if he might break into a thousand pieces.

  ‘It seems I’ve fractured half a dozen ribs,’ he explained. ‘I’m all strapped up but if I cough, or laugh . . .’ He looked at me. ‘Please don’t make me laugh.’

  He was wearing a baggy green beret and a camouflaged smock beneath a leather jerkin. His shoulder ribbon read ‘15 Commando’. He was obviously an officer but I couldn’t see his rank because his jerkin covered his epaulettes. However, as I looked more closely I could see that his jerkin was lined with sheepskin and his smock was closed with horn toggle-buttons. It was a uniform, yes, but a uniform run through the hands of an expert tailor.

  ‘I want to apologise for the other day,’ he said. ‘It’s been bothering me – my rudeness, my threat – and then I couldn’t believe it when I saw you sitting up here at this end of the platform.’ He took his beret off and ran his hand through his very black hair. ‘We weren’t in the best of shape when you found us in that park.’

  ‘Don’t bother to apologise,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it was very tough in Wesel, whatever went on.’

  He cocked his head and screwed up his eyes as if trying to remember.

  ‘It was very . . . Yes. Severe.’ He smiled, vaguely. ‘You were just doing your job. I had no right to be so offensive. So – apologies.’ He offered his hand. ‘Sholto Farr.’

  ‘Amory Clay.’

  We shook hands.

  I was hugely, instantly attracted to this man – drawn to him in a way that alarmed me. I had noted this effect before – with Cleve, with Charbonneau, with any number of men I’d fleetingly encountered. It just arrives, this cognisance – though that word gives it too much logical weight. It’s uncalled-upon. Your body notes it first, as a pure instinct, then transmits the information to your brain where it’s acted upon with more reason, with a bit of luck. I was sitting waiting for a train at a railway station, a bit cold, a bit bored, and then this man appeared and sat beside me and everything changed.

  ‘You’re English,’ he said. ‘But you told me you worked for an American magazine, if I recall.’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ I said and then quickly ran through the basic details of my strange professional journey: London to Berlin to New York to Paris.

  ‘And now I run the office in Paris,’ I said. ‘Global-Photo-Watch. It’s a big magazine, lots of work, but I decided I wanted to get out from behind my desk.’ I paused. ‘So I did that and now I want to get back behind my desk again.’

  He was staring at me intently as I spoke as if I were saying something of profound importance instead of chit-chat. I suddenly found myself incapable of coming up with a coherent sentence so spread my hands and lapsed into silence. He was meant to speak now, so I thought, but he said nothing, and the silence between us built until it became unignorable. Finally, he broke it.

  ‘Paris,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

  He reached into his smock and pulled out a burnished silver hip flask and offered it to me.

  ‘Would you like a drink? Malt whisky. The best.’

  ‘Yes, please.’

  I unscrewed the top and had a swig, savouring the peaty burn of the malt as it went down, my nostrils and sinuses warming with the finish.

  He took a large gulp himself when I handed the flask back.

  ‘Medicinal,’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  Then we were distracted by the arrival of another train chuffing into the platform opposite, halting with the usual tortured scream of metal on metal. A soldier appeared and saluted Sholto Farr.

  ‘This in fact is our train, sir,’ he said, pointing at the new arrival.

  ‘Are you coming with us?’ he asked me.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m on this one.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  ‘Trains that pass in the night,’ I said, smiling. And he laughed and clutched his ribs.

  ‘I specially asked you not to do that,’ he said, rising carefully to his feet, one hand on his injured side, the other replacing the beret on his head.

  ‘I hope we meet again one day.’

  15 Commando, Western Desert, Tunisia, 1943. Sholto Farr on the right. Aldous King-Marley on the left; David Farquhar in the middle.

  ‘Yes, so do I,’ I said, sincerely, knowing full well that would never happen, that this was one of those encounters to be celebrated in song or story by someone else, in due course. What might have been. He gave a small wave of his hand, turned and walked away with his soldier to join the shuffling files of men crossing the tracks to board the troop train. I had a camera in my kitbag, I realised, why hadn’t I thought of taking a photograph of Sholto Farr?

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  I had the McLennans for lunch yesterday. I’m not a good cook, I know that. I can cook – I can place hot food on the table – but not very well. I started off with macaroni and tomatoes and added a pinch of curry powder as the recipe suggested. Then I served up poulet au paprika but I think I stirred too much flour into the gravy and my braised rice was also on the dry side. The key factor when you’re not a particularly accomplished cook is to compensate by overdoing the wine. I poured and poured the Valpolicella – two bottles – and I think that by the end of the meal I could have served up banana sandwiches and Greer and Calder wouldn’t have complained. I was happy enough myself as I presented my orange pudding with orange sauce – infallible – and relinquished my role as chef. Coffee, whisky and cigarettes saw us through to the late afternoon.

  The McLennans were planning a trip to Paris and I found myself, in my brief euphoria, giving them all kinds of detailed advice about where to go and what to do.

/>   Greer looked at me questioningly.

  ‘Anyone would think you were a Parisienne,’ she said.

  ‘Well, I did live there for a good while.’ I regretted saying that as soon as I had spoken.

  ‘Oh, yes? When?’ Calder said. He was quite tipsy by now. ‘You lived in Paris? I never knew.’

  ‘A while ago,’ I said. ‘You know. End of the war. And 1946.’

  Greer sat back and looked at me squarely.

  ‘Any more secrets, Amory?’

  *

  We continued to run the GPW office – Corisande and I – for some months beyond VE Day, in May 1945 – though, inevitably, we had less and less to report; our newsworthiness, as far as GPW was concerned, diminished fairly rapidly. Months went by without a ‘Dateline Paris’ story. I tried to cut costs by moving us out of rue Louis le Grand and into a single-room apartment (with WC) in the rue Monsieur. I did make savings but, inevitably, the call came. We had a functioning telephone by now and Cleve gently suggested, one afternoon in February 1946, that I return to London and resume my responsibilities in High Holborn once more. I offered my resignation – Cleve refused to accept it and backtracked. Paris could remain open as long as more economies could be made. I realised that Cleve would agree to almost anything I asked – a situation that was both pleasing and troubling. I suggested a fifty per cent cut in my salary – Cleve said that would be helpful and so the Paris office stayed open, for a while. I hadn’t seen Cleve for over a year and in the way that certain love affairs just fizzle out or die a quiet, almost unacknowledged peaceful death, so did my relationship with Cleve pass away. Charbonneau was the man in my life now.

  Or, occasionally in my life, let’s say. Post-war French politics meant that he was away from Paris a great deal, mainly in Algeria and Tunisia and other outposts of the French Empire, doing what he could to support the Quatrième République. I had moved into his Saint-Germain apartment and made it as homely as possible. The climbing columns of books were now in bookshelves; rooms had been repainted in my usual choice of vivid colours (our bedroom was Lincoln green, the kitchen terracotta); the parquet had been sanded and revarnished and I had added some bright cotton rugs. When he came home Charbonneau professed himself pleased once I’d pointed out the changes. We had an insomniac above us who paced the floor all night and a cellist below who practised four hours a day, but, as was the case with most Parisians, your apartment was merely a place where you bathed, changed and slept (sometimes). Real life, the rest of life, was lived outside on the streets. I never complained.