Sweet Caress

1. LIFE IS SWEET

I RAISED MY CAMERA — my little Ensignette — and took a photograph of Lockwood Mower lying on the bed, sleeping, naked. He was hot, he’d thrown the sheet and blankets off and his pale long flaccid penis, lying over his upper thigh, was both pliant and semi-engorged. The pinched bud of his thick foreskin made his penis look tuberous, vegetal, somehow — not like his sex, his member, at all. It was a great photograph — so I say, my ‘Sleeping Male Nude’ — and I kept a print of it for years, secretly, in a seldom-consulted English — Portuguese dictionary, where I could easily look at it and think back, remembering him and those many months of our affair. And then I lost it, annoyingly, when I moved house after the war.

I put my camera away in my bag, slipped on my coat and left quickly without waking him. I had a job that afternoon and had to make my way to West Sussex for a garden fete hosted by Miss Veronica Presser — daughter of Lord Presser the iron-ore millionaire — at the village of North Boxhurst, which the Presser family owned, every brick and hanging tile, part of their vast Boxhurst estate which lay between Chichester and Bognor Regis.

I took the Tube from Kensington High Street to Walham Green, trying to concentrate on the job ahead and stop thinking about the last few hours I’d spent with Lockwood. Greville had passed on the Presser commission to me — it was for Beau Monde — and I knew it could prove to be a significant moment in my erratic career as a professional photographer. ‘Do this Presser job well,’ Greville had said, ‘and all my Beau Monde work will come your way. Guaranteed.’

I now lived in a shabby one-bedroom flat in a converted house on Eel Brook Common. No bathroom, just a small kitchen and a lavatory off the long, thin bed-sitting room. I still used the Falkland Court mews as my darkroom; Greville had given me my own set of keys, an arrangement that suited me as I was able to see Lockwood as often and as discreetly as I wanted. Which was quite often, so it turned out.

I packed up my two cameras in my leather grip (the ‘Excelda’ quarter-plate and the Goerz), stuffed a dozen business cards in my handbag, hoping for further commissions, and headed for Victoria station. Change at Hayward’s Heath for Amberley and then a taxi to North Boxhurst. It was going to be a long day.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I suppose we all — men and women — remember our first lover, like it or not; good, bad or indifferent. However, I’ve a feeling that women remember more, remember better. I can still bring to mind that first night I spent with Lockwood, after we’d kissed in the darkroom, with near-absolute recall. Lockwood had been both kind and controlling. Once the future course of the encounter was clear — that this was to be no simple kiss — and as soon as we were naked in his narrow, pungent bed upstairs, all lights switched off, he asked me if this was my ‘first time around the houses’. Yes, I said. Then he asked me if I used sanitary towels or ‘them tampon things’. Sanitary towels, I said. But why? Then I felt his finger inside me, pressing, and a sudden sharp pain that made me yelp. ‘That’s that sorted,’ he said. He spread my legs and positioned himself. ‘Wait a second,’ he said, and left the bed. I heard him go into the little kitchen at the top of the stairs, then he returned and slid back in beside me. I felt him rubbing something on me. And then he entered me with a small wheeze and grunt of effort but I didn’t feel much. ‘I won’t go mad, Miss Clay,’ he whispered in my ear as he began to push rhythmically at me, ‘seeing as it’s the first time.’ Right, I said, clenching my fists on his back. ‘I can’t rightly believe this is happening, Miss Clay. Happening to me, Lockwood Mower. Like I’m dreaming a dream.’ He was as good as his word. He exhaled noisily and rolled off me after about five seconds and we lay in each other’s arms.

I was expecting to feel more pain — all the speculative talk at Amberfield had been of blood-boltered sheets and agony. Carefully I reached down and touched myself — some sort of clotted waxy substance was there. Lockwood’s emission? ‘What’s this, Lockwood?’ I said, holding up my gleaming coated fingers. ‘Just lubrication,’ he said. ‘It’s an old trick. I remembered I had some soft lard in the kitchen. That’s why you never felt a thing.’ Have you done this before, I asked? ‘Well, you know, once or twice,’ he said. I could sense his grin widening. He kissed my cheek, gently, and whispered, ‘My chum slid in like a greased piston, Miss Clay. Feel it. Go on.’ He took my hand and placed it on his ‘chum’. Now it was my turn to smile to myself in the darkness, feeling not sensual pleasure — that had never really arisen — but relief, enormous happy relief. It was over; it was done; everything had changed, now. ‘You can call me Amory,’ I said, kissing him back. The bed smelled rank and I felt my back itching. Lockwood had a reek of sweat and his cheap pomade about him. I breathed in, filling my lungs, telling myself to remember everything. I’ve never forgotten — and I’ve never cooked with lard since.

*

Miss Veronica Presser was entirely happy to be guided by me. She was a big enthusiastic girl with a gummy smile. I met her by the lawn tennis courts at Boxhurst Park where there was a one-game, knockout charity tennis tournament going on. I said that something casual and sporty would look so much more interesting than the usual bland portrait shots we’d all seen a thousand times before.

‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘Whatever you say.’ For someone already reputedly worth several million pounds she was very easy-going.

‘Make it as natural as possible,’ I said, focussing the Goerz. ‘Be yourself. Pick up another racquet. Yes, that’s it! Perfect.’ Click. I had her.

‘What fun!’ she said and gave a loud neighing laugh.

The next day, in the darkroom of the Falkland Court mews, I printed my portrait of Veronica with her two tennis racquets. I liked it a lot. It was high time, I thought to myself, that we moved away from the standard images of these society girls — the beauties and the fiancées, the debs and the heiresses. Let’s make my first Beau Monde commission a photograph to remember, not just so much forgettable social wallpaper. However, I decided to lie when I sent it in to Beau Monde, such was my enthusiasm: I told them it was Miss Presser’s personal choice, her favourite — and it was duly published, the following week, as a full-page lead to the society gallery.

‘Good Lord,’ Greville said, when he saw the magazine. ‘Are you sure this was her choice? She looks like she’s got wheels. Not really Beau Monde at all.’

Miss Veronica Presser at the North Boxhurst fete, © Beau Monde Publications Ltd, 1928.

‘She did say “What fun!” when I took the picture.’

‘And you chose to interpret “What fun!” as “That’s my favourite.”’

‘It seemed implicit. You know: the message she was trying to convey.’

‘You can be very impetuous, Amory. I warned you.’

‘True. Still—’

‘Still, it’s the best photograph I’ve seen in Beau Monde for a year. Very natural-looking. Better than mine.’

‘Thank you, Greville. I’ve learned everything from you. Everything.’

We were in the drawing room of his flat. The evening sun was blazing obliquely in and a misty amber light seemed to fuzz and blur the windows overlooking the gardens, casting everything in the room in a golden fantastical hue.

‘Still seeing young Lockwood?’ Greville asked.

‘From time to time.’

‘He seems much — I don’t know — neater, cleaner. Altogether more presentable.’

I had made Lockwood bathe — I supervised the first bath, I scrubbed him down — bought him some decent brilliantine (Del Rosa’s ‘English Musk’) and several changes of shirts and, Greville was not to know this, thrown out his grey greasy sheets and provided him with freshly laundered ones that I brought with me when I stayed and took away to re-launder when I left.

‘I never liked that blue flannel shirt of his,’ I said. ‘I think he’d wear it a week at a time.’

Greville laughed — his rare baritone boom that erupted when he found something genuinely funny.

‘Amory Clay, what have I done to you?’

Beau Monde sacked me a week later, the result of a vehement litigious complaint from Lord Presser himself. His daughter was a laughing stock, he claimed, she was mortified, humiliated. The entire print run of the June 1928 issue was recalled and pulped at the cost of several hundred pounds. I was sacrificed instantly, in the hope Lord Presser would be mollified. Furthermore the editor of Beau Monde, one Augustin Brownlee, made it clear that they would spread the word amongst Beau Monde’s competitors. My perfidy would be made plain, my abject unprofessionalism everywhere advertised. I would never work for a society magazine again.

‘I think it’s a good photo, like a real person, not some stuffed doll,’ Lockwood said, loyal to the end. I had sought solace with him for a night above the darkroom. He was sitting on the narrow bed, naked, watching me dress.

‘I’m unemployable,’ I said. ‘All because some stupid fucking heiress lost her sense of humour.’ I was picking up Greville’s bad habits.

‘Surely Mr Reade-Hill can—’

‘He got me the Beau Monde job. I was his special recommendation. They’re not exactly wildly happy with him, either.’

I buttoned on my brassiere and, as I reached for my slip, I felt Lockwood come up behind me, take me in his arms, his hands cupping my breasts, squeezing.

‘I love your bobbies, Amory, so round and—’

‘They’re my breasts, Lockwood! Don’t use these expressions. You know I don’t like them.’ He favoured strange slang words for body parts and types of lovemaking: bobbies, chum, the path, butter-churning, Jack and the beanstalk. . He was from St Albans and I wondered if it was some arcane Hertfordshire patois that he used.

He returned to the bed, unperturbed. Very little ruffled the even, placid surface of his nature. He loved me with unusual intensity, that I did know.

‘I’m out of a job, Lockwood. I’m jobless.’

‘You’ll get a job. Nothing’s going to stop you, Amory. Nothing.’

My mother looked at me blankly, unpityingly. From the barn I could hear Peggy playing endless scales on her piano. It was beginning to give me a headache.

‘Why don’t you meet a nice young man?’ my mother said. ‘Then you wouldn’t need to be a photographer. Meet a lawyer or a soldier or a — I don’t know — even a journalist. Or. .’ she thought, ‘or a vicar. An alderman, a brewer—’

‘No thank you, Mother. No more professions.’

I wandered out into the garden, thinking. Greville had said I could always come back to work as his assistant, but, when I had left to set up on my own, he had hired a replacement, a young Frenchman called Bruno Desjardins (whom I think Greville rather lusted after) and there really wouldn’t have been much for me to do. Apart from Beau Monde all my work was for other society magazines — the Young Woman’s Companion, Modern Messenger, the London Gazette, and so on — and all those doors would be closed to me now. There were newspapers — but I could hardly present myself as a photo-journalist. And there was portrait work — but you needed a studio for that and clients didn’t exactly rush to your door if you had no reputation at all.

I saw three guinea pigs scurry under a laurel bush. Yes, I could always take photos of people’s pets. I felt sick: I would never stoop so low. And anyway, there were no good photographs of animals. Photography wasn’t about taking pictures of animals, it was about—

‘Oh. It’s you.’

‘Hello, Xan.’

Xan came round the edge of the shrubbery with a guinea pig in each hand. He was tall for his age, twelve, and had a distinctly watchful air about him as if he didn’t trust you, or was expecting you to make some kind of violent movement towards him. He looked grubby, needing a long soak in a bath.

‘What’re you doing?’ I asked.

‘Freeing some guinea pigs. I’ve got too many.’

‘How many?’

‘Over a hundred. But they don’t seem to want to leave the garden.’ He walked to the boundary hedge and set down his two newly liberated rodents. They sat there, noses twitching. Then he kicked earth at them and they ran into hiding.

‘Why don’t you sell them to a pet shop?’ I said. ‘Make some money.’

‘That would be immoral.’

‘Oh. Right.’

He looked at me with hostility.

‘Why are you here?’ he said.

‘Aren’t I allowed to come and see my family?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘How very gracious of you, Marjorie.’

‘Don’t call me Marjorie.’

He wandered off back to the garden shed.

I crossed the lawn to the barn. Peggy had stopped playing scales and the door was ajar. When the door was shut no one was allowed to disturb her. I knocked and went in. Peggy was sitting at the piano doing exercises with her hands, making fists and shooting her fingers out.

‘Hello, Peggoty.’

She turned and smiled — at least one member of my family was pleased to see me. We kissed and I noticed how pretty she was becoming — dark-haired and big-eyed with a perfectly straight thin nose. My father’s nose, the Clay nose, not the Reade-Hill nose that I had. She fitted a cut-down ruler between her thumb and little finger of her right hand, stretching them apart, painfully.

‘What’re you doing? That looks like torture.’

‘My hands are too small. I haven’t a full-octave spread. Madame Duplessis says I’ll never make a successful concert pianist if I can’t cover an octave.’

‘You’re only fourteen, darling. Still growing.’

‘I can’t wait for nature to take her course.’ She smiled. ‘Time waits for no woman.’ She was wearing a forest-green jumper, tight against her small pointed breasts, and fawn slacks. She looked more like eighteen than fourteen.

‘Have you got a cigarette?’ she asked, and removed the ruler with a wince. ‘Ouch.’

She shut the door and we both lit a cigarette and, clearing away piles of scores, sat down on the sofa at the end of the room.

‘Does Mother know you smoke?’

‘God, no. Xan steals her cigarettes for me. Madame Duplessis smokes so we’re safe in here.’ She looked shrewdly at me. ‘Everything all right, Ames?’

‘No.’ I told her about the Beau Monde fiasco.

‘Stay here for a few days. Do. Have a holiday.’

‘I’ve got to earn some money.’

‘Mother says we’re poor, now. Papa’s hospital is costing a fortune. We may have to sell Beckburrow, she says.’

I tried to take in these two pieces of news. Poor. Selling.

‘My God, how awful. . How is Papa?’

‘He seems fine, pretty much. When he’s awake, that is.’

‘What about my legacy from Aunt Audrey? Can’t we use it for Papa?’

‘It was only for your education, Mother says.’

‘I should have gone to Oxford. I knew it.’

Peggy pursed her lips, looking thoughtful. ‘Once I start doing concerts and recitals we’ll be fine. I can begin playing professionally next year, Peregrine says.’

‘Who’s Peregrine?’

‘Peregrine Moxon, the composer.’

‘Oh, yes.’ I’d heard of Moxon. ‘Does he really let you call him Peregrine?’

‘He insists on it.’

‘How do you know him?’

‘He’s a visiting professor at the Royal Academy. I’ve rather become his protégée. .’ She stood, went to the stove, lifted the lid and dropped in her cigarette butt. Fourteen going on twenty-four, I decided.

‘Staying for tea?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Then I’d better get back to London. Try and resuscitate the corpse that is my career.’

We walked across the lawn to the house, arm in arm. I felt a kind of panic sluice through me, knowing that Beckburrow might have to be sold, feeling — illogically — that it was somehow my fault, that I was in some way enmeshed and inculpated in my father’s illness and the price we would all have to pay.

‘We’ll be all right, won’t we, Pegs?’

‘Oh, yes. We just have to get through this year. Before I start earning.’

Ridiculous, I thought as we entered the house, to put your trust in your fourteen-year-old sister, musical prodigy or not. I had to do something.

Greville took me out to dinner at Antonio’s, an Italian restaurant on the Brompton Road that we both liked. We ordered vitello al limone and a bottle of Valpolicella.

‘I threw my weight around,’ Greville reported. ‘The Illustrated and the Modern Messenger will give you work, but it has to be strictly anonymous.’

‘That’s hardly going to help my reputation.’

‘At least it’s money. Bruno’s going back to Paris for a week. You could work for me while he’s away.’

‘Dribs and drabs,’ I said. ‘My rent’s going up. And we may have to sell Beckburrow.’

‘You can always move in with me, my dear, as long as you don’t try to seduce me again.’

‘Ha-ha. Well, thank you. I may have to. But I’m going backwards, don’t you see? How am I meant to make my way like this? How can I even make the most modest living? It’s impossible.’

Greville topped up our glasses to the brim, nodding to himself, as he thought.

‘What you need to do is change the way the world sees you.’

‘Oh, yes. Of course,’ I said with perhaps too heavy sarcasm. ‘Easy.’

He was still thinking and hadn’t noticed. ‘You need to become. . notorious. Disgraceful — even better.’

‘Take more photos like Veronica Presser.’

‘No, no. Something far more outrageous. You need a scandal.’

‘A scandal? How do I create a scandal?’

He smiled. He was pleased with his idea, I could tell.

‘If I were you, darling, I’d go to Berlin.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I stood and looked at the boxes that I’d lugged down from the attic. Five cardboard cartons filled with other boxes and old manila envelopes, dozens and dozens of them. Prints, negatives, Kodachrome slides — the photographic record of my life, all that I’d managed to hold on to. Some of the boxes were damp and mildewed, others wore layers of ancient dust. Was it worth it, I asked myself? Was it worth trying to sort this lot out in the time I had left, however long that might be? I picked a few boxes up at random and saw one that had a scribbled address on the front: 32b Jäger-Strasse, Berlin 2. I lifted the lid. It was empty.

2. BERLIN

‘IT SEEMS EXTREMELY RESPECTABLE,’ I remarked to Rainer. ‘Very sophisticated.’

Rainer looked at his watch.

‘We have to wait until midnight.’ He smiled, showing his small, perfectly white teeth. ‘Then the fun is starting.’

We were sitting in a booth at the rear of the Iguana-Club somewhere in North Berlin. We had crossed Oranienburger-Strasse and I had seen a sign for the Stettiner station but otherwise I had yet to get my proper bearings in this city, the third largest in the world, so Berliners kept reminding me. I sipped at my drink and waited for midnight to arrive. In the meantime there was a small jazz band on a semicircular stage playing ‘It Happened in Monterey’. South of the border, I thought, that’s where I want to be, somewhere louche and very, very indiscreet. A few couples danced but without real enthusiasm, it seemed to me, as if the clientele were waiting for some signal to be given so they could really begin to enjoy themselves. Almost all the men were in evening dress with white ties.

Rainer offered me a cigarette and lit it for me. Rainer Nagel was his full name and he was an old friend of Greville. I wondered how they had come to know each other — and how well — but Rainer gave nothing away. He was a small stocky man, with a square face — handsome in a fit, muscular way — but he had an agitated fussy manner as if he were constantly trying to keep his energy levels under control, always patting his pockets, tapping ash off his cigarette, checking the knot of his tie. I had asked him what he did and he said, ‘Oh, a bit of this, a bit of that. A bit of buying, a bit of selling.’ He spoke excellent English and was almost over-polite.

Now he snapped his fingers to attract a waiter’s attention and, when the man came over, he whispered in his ear, for a good minute, it seemed. I was wearing a black crêpe dress with a velvet collar and a fur stole, also black. I had pinned up my hair under a felt cloche hat with a small ultramarine feather, the aim being to look both smart and unobtrusive. When Rainer had collected me at my hotel — the Silesia Hospiz, on Prenzel-Strasse, near Alexanderplatz — he had said, ‘You look very à la mode, Amory,’ with a kind of charming insincerity that almost made me laugh. I wondered if Rainer was a ‘queen’ like Greville, one of the many Schwulen that you could see all over the city, if you looked hard. I didn’t think so, somehow, but I could hardly trust my intuition given how badly it had failed me with Greville.

At midnight, the band took a short break and I noticed a crowd of men and women heading for the lavatories that were reached by a corridor leading off the main club-room by the bar, indicated by an electric sign saying ‘Klosett’. Rainer glanced around the room as it slowly emptied — this was odd, I thought, as I knew that clubs in Berlin stayed open until three in the morning. Then the band returned and began playing again, though it was apparent that no one was much interested in dancing any more. Waiters began to clear the unoccupied tables.

‘Are they closing?’ I asked.

‘No. We are opening.’ Rainer stood up and I did so too, taking the opportunity to quickly snatch a photograph or two of the room with my little Ensignette. So much for the celebrated decadence of Berlin, I thought. Where was I going to find my scandal?

The Iguana-Club, Berlin.

Rainer guided me through the tables and we made for the corridor that led to the lavatories.

‘Welcome to the Klosett-Club,’ he said.

There was a door — it looked like the door to a broom cupboard — between the Damen and Herren toilets, and a tall moustachioed man in a gold-frogged greatcoat that came down to his ankles stood there guarding it. Rainer gave him first a card, then some money and the door was opened for us revealing a steep flight of stairs that led down to a thick leather curtain. As we descended I could hear the excited chatter of conversation and could smell cigar and cigarette smoke. Rainer held the leather curtain open for me and I stepped into the Klosett-Club. Now, this was more like it, I thought.

It was a dark, narrow, low-ceilinged room — I wondered if it had been an underground garage in a previous life. Clustered tables and chipped gilt chairs faced a tiny stage with a backdrop of shimmering sequinned curtains. All the tables had small stubby lamps on them like mushrooms, with domed crimson shades that gave forth the dimmest glow. I could hear American, French and Dutch voices amongst the chatter. A few waiters squeezed through the tables, trays of drinks held aloft. It was warm and there was a curious underlying smell in the room — below the perfume and smoke. Oil and grease? Maybe it had indeed been a garage, once.

I turned to find Rainer in conversation with a skinny man in a pistachio-green satin jacket and a yellow bow tie. Rainer beckoned me over.

‘This is Benno, the manager,’ he said. ‘This is Fräulein Clay, the famous English photographer.’

We shook hands. I saw that Benno had painted eyebrows as he leant forward, confidentially.

‘You may take any photos you like — but just of the show. You must only mention the Klosett-Club when you publish them, please.’ He pointed. ‘See — we have another photographer here tonight. We are making good publicity.’ He laughed and gestured across the room at a young man in a dark suit lounging against the far wall. His collar seemed too large for his thin neck — almost affectedly large — and his straight blond hair fell down in a lock in front of his right ear. He turned to look at us, almost as if he knew he was being discussed, and I saw a thin, big-eyed, starveling’s face. A beautiful waif. I noticed he had a Rolleiflex over his shoulder. Damn, I said to myself, feeling my disappointment weigh on me like a heavy rucksack. Another photographer — another fucking photographer, as Greville would have said. It was like a tourist trail.

‘Thank you very much,’ I said to Benno, who kissed my hand and sped off towards the stage. ‘We can go,’ I added, turning to Rainer, ‘this place is obviously too well known.’ I inclined my head at the other photographer. ‘Hardly exclusive.’

Rainer shrugged. ‘We might as well see the show,’ he said, undauntedly cheerful. ‘Have a few more drinks. Benno’s getting us a good table at the front.’

I saw Benno beckoning us over so we went to join him and he sat us down at a table one row back from the little stage where a man was setting up a microphone on a stand. We took our seats and I asked for a gin and orange, leaving my camera in my handbag under the table. I glanced over at my rival who was now talking to Benno, himself, and I saw Benno point us out — Fräulein Clay, the famous English photographer. Then the lights dimmed and a couple of spots hit the stage. A Negro with a trumpet in his hand emerged through the sequinned curtains wearing a white suit dotted with black discs like a Dalmatian dog. The crowd roared their approval.

‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ he said into the microphone in English with an American accent. ‘Ingeborg Hammer will dance “Cocaine Shipwreck”!’

Whoops and cheers greeted this news. Rainer leant over.

‘Sometimes she is dancing with a man but tonight she dances alone. We are very lucky.’

‘What’s her name again?’

‘Ingeborg Hammer. Very famous here in Berlin.’

The Negro began to play his trumpet — an improvised jazzy wail — and, slipping out from the curtains, a tall wraith of a woman in a filmy black dress appeared, its neckline slashed to the waist. Her face was a white death-mask of face powder, her eyes smoky with kohl and her lipstick was a purple gash. She stood for a moment as the applause died down, arms spread, hands fluttering, as the trumpet solo continued its free-form extemporisation. She was indeed very tall, I saw, almost six feet — and then she started to move in a series of jerky, impressionistic dance steps and, inevitably, her décolletage gaped to reveal her hanging flat breasts, the prominent nipples purpled like her lips. She lurched and swayed, stooped and staggered, her white arms flailing, looming over tables and recoiling dramatically. Sometimes she would stand immobile for ten or twenty seconds while the trumpet riff continued. It was, I thought, at once ridiculous and completely mesmerising.

At one moment in the dance she passed near our table, walking on tiptoe with tiny bird-steps, and I became aware, at the edge of my vision, of my rival photographer, head bowed over his Rolleiflex, snapping away. Ingeborg Hammer struck her pose by our table and a waft of a curious perfume came off her — of camphor, I thought, or formaldehyde — the smell of a mortuary or dissection laboratory. I looked up into her white face, completely expressionless, her body trembling as the trumpet’s screeching began to crescendo, telling you that the ‘Cocaine Shipwreck’ was about to reach its fatal encounter with the rocks. Ingeborg took three steps back, ripped off her dress and fell to the floor, naked, her pudenda shaved clean, one hand twitching for a few seconds before there was a final demonic scream from the trumpet and the lights went out. When they came back on seconds later she had gone. She took no bow; the trumpeter mopped his glossy face with a handkerchief and accepted the plaudits on her behalf.

‘Das ist fantastisch, nein?’

I turned. I hadn’t heard anyone approach but here was the rival photographer, crouching by my chair.

‘Ich spreche kein Deutsch,’ I said, realising instantly that the thin-faced waif with the flopping lock of hair was a woman.

‘I’m Hannelore Hahn,’ she said in near-accentless English. ‘Benno told me you were a famous English photographer. Where’s your camera? You missed a real—’

Rainer stood up, interrupting her. ‘I’ll leave you to talk about lenses and exposures and all that stuff,’ he said. ‘Give me a telephone call tomorrow, Amory. I take you somewhere else.’

He kissed me goodbye, shook Hannelore Hahn’s hand and sauntered off. Hannelore slipped into his seat. She was wearing a black and red striped tie with her big-collared shirt and I could see, now that she was opposite and lit by the glow of the mushroom lamp, that she was lightly made-up — and eerily beautiful in a vague manly way. Which was the point of the outfit, I supposed.

‘It’s better when she dances with her partner, Otto Deodat,’ she continued. ‘It’s more. . More sexual. He’s very handsome, Otto, with head shaved, you know, and often naked with his body painted. Very tall like her.’ She smiled showing her uneven teeth, overlapping at the front as if too crowded for her narrow jaw. ‘I’ve many photos of them both. I can show you if you like.’ She took out her cigarette case and selected a black one from the multicoloured row that was lined up inside. ‘Is that gin? Could I ask you to buy me one? I’ve no money left.’ She smiled, holding up her camera. ‘I spent everything on my Rollei.’

I recognised that I was fairly drunk by the time we left the Klosett-Club and I decided I should head back to my hotel. Hannelore seemed none the worse for all the gins she’d consumed and offered to share a taxi with me. The sky was like grey flannel — early summer dawn heralded — and the air was cool. I shivered as we headed out on to Arkonaplatz looking for a taxi.

But the streets we wandered through were empty, as the light gathered and the darkness began to thin. We cast about us here and there — I was completely lost — vainly waving and shouting at any passing vehicle in the hope it would miraculously transform itself into a cab. After half an hour I was sober again. Hannelore checked her watch.

‘We might as well walk,’ she said. ‘Your hotel is only twenty minutes or so from here.’

And so we set off through the monochrome streets, the sound of our heels echoing off the facades of the apartment blocks, a few neon signs glowing in the clearing gloom, street sweepers and night workers returning home were our only companions. We walked past a small hotel — there was a waiter standing outside with a grubby tailcoat. Thick yellow light shone from the half-open door behind him. Should we go there, I asked Hannelore? No, no, she said: that place isn’t for us.

We saw the young men before they saw us, as we turned on to Oranienburger-Strasse, heading for Alexanderplatz. There were five of them in their brown uniforms, drunk and dishevelled, four of them helping the fifth climb a lamp post to tear down a poster. Hannelore led me across the street away from them but they had heard the clip-clop of our heels and turned to see us, eager for diversion. They shouted something at us — something lewd that I couldn’t understand. I glanced back and saw the climber slither heavily to the ground, swearing at us, as if his fall was our fault.

‘Don’t look at them,’ Hannelore said as more catcalls came our way. I heard their hobnails crunching on the cobbles as they followed us, shouting angrily at us, calling on us to stop. A stone skipped across the road in front of us and clattered into a parked van.

‘We have to pretend, all right?’

‘What? Yes, whatever you say.’

She put her arm round my shoulders and bumped me into a shop doorway. She rounded angrily on the men following us and shouted at them, lowering and harshening her voice. Great bellows of laughter ensued and I saw them stop and talk amongst each other.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I’d spent the whole night trying to get you into bed and I wasn’t going to let them prevent me.’ She glanced back. ‘Or something like that. Pretend to kiss. They’re still looking.’

So we kissed, mouths slightly askew, and I was transported back to Amberfield and my practice sessions with Millicent. I heard vulpine whoops and yelps from the young men. We set off, Hannelore looking back and making an obscene gesture at them before we turned the corner and broke into a panicky run.

We reached my shabby little hotel, the Silesia Hospiz, in five minutes and rang the bell for the night clerk, both out of breath.

‘My God,’ Hannelore said. ‘A real Berlin night — Ingeborg Hammer, Nazis and you even get a kiss from me.’

The night clerk opened the door and we stepped into the lobby.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Lucky you were dressed like a man.’

‘I dress like this all the time.’

‘Oh. . Still lucky, though.’

I picked up my key and turned to find Hannelore looking round the dark lobby.

‘Is it expensive, here?’

‘They gave me a good price for one month. Forty marks a week.’

‘If you give me half of that you can have a room in my apartment.’ She smiled. ‘And you can use my darkroom.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Think of their names. Hannelore Hahn, Marianne Breslauer, Dora Kallmuss, Jutta Gottschalk, Friedl Dicker — not forgetting Edith Suchitsky, Edeltraud Hartman and Annie Schulz and many more I’ve forgotten. If, in London, I had thought I was something of a rare beast as a woman photographer, I had to think again as my stay with Hannelore progressed and I came to learn that I was joining a sorority of women photographers, all working and making a living in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna and Paris. It was empowering, not disappointing — like becoming a member of a secret society. We were everywhere, the women, cameras in hand.

When we conceived our Berlin plan, Greville lent me £50 — and it was a loan, he insisted, not a gift, and he expected to be paid back — he wasn’t funding a pleasant holiday in Berlin for me. He also gave me the contact with Rainer, assuring me that Rainer knew ‘all the best places’. I had the feeling, though, that Rainer was treating me rather as a tourist. Ingeborg Hammer had been photographed thousands of times for magazines all over Europe — there was a ready market for them, Hannelore said, which was why she was at the Klosett-Club. She showed me half a dozen magazine articles. Photographers made a reliable living from Ingeborg — as did Benno — but it was clear to me I had to descend deeper into Berlin’s dark underbelly.

In the event I took up Hannelore’s offer — the money-saving and the offer of a darkroom were too hard to resist — and I checked out of the Hospiz and moved into her surprisingly roomy flat on Jäger-Strasse near Gendarmenmarkt. There were two bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen and a third bedroom converted into a darkroom. The lavatory was on the landing below and if we wanted to bathe we went to the Admirals-Bad baths near the Friedrichs-Strasse station, just a few blocks away. Hannelore, however, didn’t give up her pursuit. My first night in the apartment she came into my room and slipped naked into my bed. I recognised the ploy and gently pushed her away when she tried to kiss me. She was unperturbed and resigned and we lay in bed for an hour together chatting about sex and smoking. I remember she asked me if I’d ever been with a man. I confessed I had. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Was it good?’ It was, actually, I said, thinking of Lockwood, fondly. ‘How many times?’ she pressed on, hopefully. I’d lost count, I said. ‘Too bad,’ she said, ‘you don’t know what you’re missing.’ I asked her when she’d known she was a lesbian. ‘I’m not a lesbian,’ she said with manifest pride, ‘I’m a pansexualist.’

Just as it had with Greville, the abortive pass made us closer, oddly, and she seemed to relax now she knew I was unlikely to succumb. I told her about my plans for Berlin — Greville’s idea about what I had to do to secure my future as a photographer — and she offered to help. We worked together in her darkroom and she showed me how to master the techniques of ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’, how to overexpose and underexpose parts of the photograph when you were printing — shining more light on some areas or filtering light into shadow with a variety of implements. Hannelore had her own technique of dodging that employed a very fine-meshed flat sieve. I liked the effects and felt my competence expand. Greville retouched his photographs — everyone did — but he was only interested in removing blemishes and wrinkles from his subjects’ faces to make them look better. The manipulation of light and shade when you dodged or burned was something he’d never tried as far as I was aware — perhaps he felt he didn’t need it, or didn’t even know about it. I began to feel I’d already moved on by coming to Berlin — the ‘Amory Clay Society Photographer’ era was over. I was changing.

3. EIN WENIG ORGIE

HANNELORE CAME OVER TO the table with a bottle of schnapps and three glasses. We were in a danse-cabaret club called the Monokel. There were a lot of lesbians dressed in sailor suits and a good number of strange-looking men who seemed to be acting out a fantasy as Spanish hidalgos in wide-brimmed hats with long sideburns — and obvious prostitutes here and there waiting to be asked to step on to the small dance floor. Hannelore was dressed like a working-class boy in a collarless shirt, drill trousers and a leather jacket. She had a flat tweed cap on her short hair. She sat down, poured two drinks and we lit cigarettes.

‘I feel a bit odd in here,’ I said.

‘They’ll think you’re my friend,’ she said, giving the last word lascivious emphasis.

‘Why this place?’

She explained. ‘There’s a girl I know who comes in here. She works in a brothel. If you pay her money — and the madame, of course — she might invite you there.’

‘How would I take photographs?’ I felt a shiver of excitement. A Berlin brothel — that might cause a bit of a fuss. .

Hannelore looked at her watch.

‘If she’s coming she’ll be here any minute — et voilà!’

Hannelore stood and weaved her way through the throng to the bar, returning, moments later, hand in hand with a short tubby girl with her hair dyed a carroty orange. Hannelore introduced her.

‘This is Trudi.’

She sat down opposite me. She had a pretty round face beneath her lurid hair and a tired baggy-eyed look that was strangely endearing. She had a woollen shawl knotted round her shoulders covering her décolletage and happily accepted the glass of schnapps that Hannelore poured for her. She sipped at it, looking at me curiously over the rim.

‘You just want photo?’ she said in faltering English. ‘Or you want ficky?’

‘Just photo.’

She spoke quickly to Hannelore and Hannelore translated for me. There was a big club-room in this particular house that operated, semi-covertly, as a brothel. But it was a room where everyone gathered, like a bar, and where the girls met their clients. The bedrooms were on the floor above. When it was busy, at the weekend, people came just to watch — couples, husbands and wives, tourists — so it would be easy to explain my presence there, but the camera would have to be hidden, somehow. If Trudi was caught she’d be thrown out and maybe punished in other ways — so she would need a lot of money to be persuaded to help.

‘How much?’

She turned to Hannelore who whispered something in her ear.

‘Five hundred marks,’ Trudi said.

I stayed calm. About £25. Maybe a month’s earnings for a working girl like Trudi if she were busy — and just about all I had left from Greville’s loan, more to the point. I pretended to waver — frowning, thinking — but I knew this was the best chance I’d have. Maybe if I’d been a man it would have been easier and I tried not to think what kind of risks a single woman in a brothel might run. But there was another risk — what if there was nothing shocking or depraved to photograph? A ‘big bar room’ didn’t sound very debauched. But the chance was worth it, I thought to myself — it would be authentic, real, if nothing else — feeling the flush of excitement spread. I searched my handbag for my purse.

‘Half now,’ Hannelore intervened, ‘half on the night.’

Trudi accepted, with a show of reluctance, but I could see how pleased she was to have the money in her hands.

‘When do we go?’ I asked.

Saturday night was always best, she said — it was always busy, sometimes fifty people in the room. And sometimes it became like a party, Trudi said, with a laugh. ‘Ein wenig Orgie.’ Hannelore translated: a little orgy.

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said, pouring us all another glass of schnapps. We clinked glasses to the success of our enterprise.

I was running low on funds so Hannelore offered to waive the next month’s rent that I owed her. ‘I will invest in your talent, my dear,’ she said. However, I spent the equivalent of about £2 on a solid patent-leather clutch bag with a flower-shaped diamanté clasp. I removed the facetted stone at the centre of the paste flower, cut a small hole in the leather beneath and stitched in two thin canvas straps in the bag’s interior that would firmly hold my little Zeiss Contax, the lens positioned securely and invisibly at the centre of the diamanté flower. I attached a remote release cable that I rigged up, with some glittery ribbon wrapped around it, as a small handle. There was a faintly audible click when I pressed the button but I assumed that in a busy bar no one would notice. Trial photographs that I took at a café came out very well: the key aspect was the positioning of the bag, a matter of estimating with your eyes. Sometimes the framing was askew — but you could always crop, Hannelore reminded me, and maybe it’s even better if it looks like it’s from a concealed camera. I could sense her own excitement building as Saturday approached.

Hannelore suggested I dress like a garçonne — one of the many subtypes of Berlin lesbian — reasoning that I didn’t want to be bothered by the clients. If I looked like a garçonne then, moreover, any confusion about my role in the brothel would be more easily comprehended — just another strange Berlin night-animal on the prowl. Trudi said the madame should be kept ignorant. Pay your entrance fee, she said, buy a couple of bottles of champagne and she’ll let you sit all night.

I allowed Hanna — as I was now calling her — to organise my ‘look’. First, I had my hair cut in an Eton crop, then she found me a pair of clear-lensed round-frame tortoiseshell spectacles. I wore a long olive-green worsted jacket, a shirt and tie and tucked my trousers into soft knee-length boots.

‘You look good,’ Hanna said, inspecting me. ‘Masculine-feminine. A pretty garçonne with a Bubikopf. Keep your spectacles on. Attractive but a little frightening.’

We met Trudi in the smoking room of a confectioner’s in Tauentzien-Strasse. She asked for more money — I thought that was a bad sign — but Hanna said I should give her another hundred marks; the rest when I’d checked how the photos came out. I might need to go back a few times, after all. I handed over the money, said goodbye to Hanna, who kissed my cheek and wished me luck, and I followed Trudi into the street and then down an alleyway into a courtyard. We went through an arched gateway into another courtyard. She pressed a bell set into a brass plate that had ‘Xanadu-Club’ stamped on it. I thought suddenly of Xan, my moody little brother, and took the name of the club as a good omen. I was a bit nervous in my garçonne persona but also excited. Amory Clay, photographer, was about to be reborn.

The door of the Xanadu-Club was opened by a weedy-looking man in a commissionaire’s greatcoat and he had a few words with Trudi.

‘You pay him twenty marks,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

I paid and we went upstairs to the club-rooms.

The Xanadu-Club, like everything in Berlin it seemed to me, was a strange mixture, both humdrum and exotic. This floor of the house — the social club — was a random collection of rooms. There was a bar in two of them, and a piano on a low stage in another. The furniture was an assortment of sofas, armchairs and standard restaurant tables and chairs grouped here and there. The lighting was low and, while we waited for the band, jazz music was played through loudspeakers. It was already busy and filled with men and women of all ages and sizes. I thought I could have been in the waiting room at a railway station but a second glance picked out the anomalies. Stout middle-aged men in grey business suits chatted to boys in striped sailor jerseys. Eight thin women dressed as men sat round a table. A man in a Pierrot costume danced with a girl in a satin negligee. Trudi led me to a table in the corner on the other side of the small dance floor and I ordered a bottle of Sekt from a boy dressed only in white linen shorts. Trudi went in search of the Kupplerin, the house madame.

I sipped my glass of warm Sekt and took in the room in more detail. Clearly, there were people here who came only to watch — like curious visitors at a human zoo — and there were others who intended to participate. Once again I felt the pulse of excitement at my audacity, pleased with my disguise. Two other garçonnes took to the dance floor as if to reassure me I was part of the weird crowd. Nobody was staring at me; I was left alone with my champagne and my clutch bag, carefully positioned on the table in front of me. I turned it slightly, aiming at two men in shiny suits and short wide ties who were eyeing up the girls in their satin shifts and clicked the remote release button. Got you. They approached two girls, conferred briefly and then disappeared through a leather-curtained exit at the side of the bar. I assumed that led upstairs to where the sexual shenanigans took place. I wondered if there was any way Trudi could contrive to let me visit backstage.

‘Amory?’

Trudi stood there beside a smiling middle-aged woman with an enormous shelf of bosom. She was introduced as Frau Amoureux and we shook hands.

‘I wait here for Trudi,’ I said in my rudimentary German.

‘Oui, oui, ma chérie, je vous en prie.’

Trudi whispered in her ear and turned back to me.

‘I think you should offer Frau Amoureux a bottle of Sekt.’

I handed over the money.

I left the Xanadu-Club at two in the morning thinking that I’d never get rid of the taste of cheap Sekt in my mouth, no matter how many cigarettes I smoked. As the night had worn on the mood in the club had slowly changed. The gawping couples left and the brothel-atmosphere steadily enhanced itself. Clients and girls — or clients and boys — came down from the upstairs rooms and lingered around the bars, drinking and flirting, chatting and playing cards. Clothes were shed and more visits upstairs took place. The place was very crowded on either side of midnight but as the small hours advanced the spirit calmed and the carnality seemed to disappear from the banter and the laughter and the mood in the club became almost domestic. The weedy commissionaire came up from below and had a beer with Frau Amoureux. Men in vests played cards with semi-naked girls who had finished work for the night. The girls chatted and gossiped, smoking and drinking. Trudi joined me at the end of her shift and I ordered yet more Sekt.

‘How much do you cost?’ I asked, Sekt-emboldened.

‘For ficky I am ten marks.’ She glanced balefully at Frau Amoureux. ‘But I am giving half to her.’

I could see how earning 500 marks for bringing me here was the most enormous windfall and, as if she were reading my mind, Trudi took my hand and said thank you with obvious sincerity. She chatted on in a low voice but at a speed I couldn’t really understand. She was grateful, that much I gathered, and it seemed that if I stayed late even more things could happen in this room. Then, as she drank more, she started telling me about her life and how the Xanadu-Club was much better than being a common Kontroll-girl in the Tiergarten, which was what she used to do, outside in all weathers with all manner of perverts asking you to do unpleasant things. She even, at one stage, leant over and kissed me on the cheek. Then she spotted one of her regulars and sashayed off to greet him. I turned my bag. Click.

The next day Hanna and I developed the negative and printed out and examined the contact sheet. It hadn’t worked — somehow the camera had moved slightly in the bag, slipping in its canvas straps, and one half of the images were a blur, like a finger held over the lens.

‘You’ll just have to go again,’ Hanna said. ‘It’s a shame — some of these would have been really good.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Hugo Torrance called round today. I heard a car come to a halt outside the cottage — a most unusual event, unannounced, as I have signs on the single-track road leading down to the house saying ‘No turning point’, ‘No vehicular access’, precisely to deter the curious tourist to the island, thinking they can rove where they will. I ran quickly to a front window and saw that it was Hugo and I watched him swing his stiff leg out of his old Jaguar, stamp on it to restore circulation and limp towards the front door. I had it open before he could knock.

‘My, my,’ I said. ‘What an honour.’

He kissed me on the cheek and I smelt his aftershave — Old Spice.

‘I’m having a party tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Spontaneous. My daughter and her husband are flying up from London.’

‘Alas, I’m too old for parties,’ I said.

‘Not as old as me. If I can have one you should do the honourable thing and show up — if only for half an hour.’

‘Actually, I’m rather busy—’

‘It’s my birthday, Amory. The big seven-o.’

‘Ah.’

He gave me that fierce look of his — an audible inhalation of breath, eyes narrowing, eyebrows buckling.

‘See you at the hotel tomorrow evening,’ he said, bluntly. ‘Eight o’clock. Lots to drink.’

‘I’ll be there. Can’t wait.’

‘I’m just off to Greer and Calder’s now. You’ll be amongst friends.’

I watched him reverse, turn and drive away. Interesting that he’s delivering the invitations in person, I thought, instead of just telephoning. Harder to say no, that way — so he must want a good quorum of friends. Hugo Torrance is tall, slim and bald, his white hair, what remains of it, is startlingly set off by ink-black eyebrows. A handsome septuagenarian and an ex-soldier who had his left leg shattered by machine-gun bullets at Monte Cassino in 1944. He owns and runs the Glenlarig Hotel in Achnalorn, Barrandale’s solitary licensed premises, so he’s an important man and it’s hard not to see him on a regular basis, if you fancy a drink in the bar from time to time or a meal in the dining room. I have been avoiding him, however, as I know he has designs on me. Last Hogmanay at the hotel he kissed me as I was about to leave, the bells an hour past. Kissed me seriously as we stood alone in an alcove where the coats are hung and I nearly gave in to him. I kissed him back for a second or two and broke away. ‘Stay the night, Lady Amory,’ he said, his voice husky with drink. He touched my face then swayed back. ‘Don’t ever call me that,’ I said in shock. How did he know? And now he’s asked me to his seventieth birthday party. Not asked, but effectively demanded I be there. Well, I can handle Hugo Torrance — I know his type, these old soldiers, all too well.

*

Berlin. Just as I’d gained exclusive access to the Xanadu-Club, Trudi went missing. We telephoned the number she had given us — no reply. Hanna managed to find out where she was living but there was nobody there. Then a messenger boy came one day with a note saying that she was ill and needed the 150 marks I still owed her. ‘She’ll be back,’ Hanna said. ‘You just have to wait.’ So I waited. It was summer in Berlin — there were worst places to be and I knew that one way or another the Xanadu-Club contained everything I needed. What do I remember of that summer as we waited for Trudi to reappear? I was happy living in Hanna’s apartment on Jäger-Strasse. I had a roof over my head but my money was running out fast.

BERLIN SNAPSHOTS 1930–1

I remember going to Lehrter station to the telegraph office there, open twenty-four hours, and sending a telegram to Greville. I asked him if I could borrow another £20 — a further loan, I stressed — and added ‘SCANDAL FORTHCOMING’. I remember I felt a curious exhilaration on leaving, excited by my own prediction and, instead of boarding the tram back to Hanna’s flat, I hired a Cyklonette cab (three wheels, cheaper) and had it take me to the Mercedes-Palast on Unter den Linden where I drank a dry martini in the bar and toasted my future.

I remember that for two weeks I taught English to a photographer friend of Hanna called Arno Hartmann. He was in his forties, married with two children, and nurtured this fantasy of going to America to make his name as a landscape photographer. ‘Every landscape in Europe is old, tired, overfamiliar,’ he used to say. ‘I need a new land.’ I charged him five marks an hour, about five shillings, slave labour but that was the going rate in Berlin. An hour with Arno was what Trudi made for a single ‘ficky’, I realised, that probably lasted a few minutes. After two weeks there had been no improvement in Arno’s faltering English so I did him a favour and resigned. Greville’s £20 had come through and I was rich again.

I remember sitting in a grubby Nachtlokal with Hanna one evening just off the Kurfürstendamm — that stretch at the end where it rises towards the Halensee. We were talking about the slump of ’29, for some reason, and how, even in Berlin, there were signs of life becoming better and more stable. I lit her cigarette for her and she exhaled a jet of smoke strongly out of the side of her mouth — in that garçonne-ish way she had — while she looked at me, fixedly, tossing her lock of hair off her brow with a flick of her head.

‘Amory. Look at me.’

‘I am looking at you.’

‘Are you sure you’re not in love with me?’

‘I’m sure. I’m not.’

‘Not even a little? A tiny bit?’

‘I’m very fond of you, Hanna. You’re a true friend.’

‘Fond. How I hate that word.’

I remember a hot afternoon at Lake Motzen. Hanna worked for various magazines whose claim to celebrate an innocent naturism and good, healthy living barely concealed the real motive of their publication, namely that their pages contained many photographs of naked young men and boys — Das Freibad, Nur Natur, Extra Post des Eigenen, for example. These naked men and boys often preferred a woman photographer, so she was told, and she was regularly in demand during the summer months while people could sunbathe glorying in the Licht, Luft and Leben that the lakes and open spaces in and around Berlin offered. We travelled out to Lake Motzen to attend a meeting of the ‘League of Air Bathing’, Hanna having arranged for me to be paid as her assistant, something she happily did whenever she thought the magazine could afford it.

It was a day of clear unobstructed sunshine and what struck me most during these excursions was not the casual nudity, so much, as the extraordinary depth and hue of the suntans that these fair-haired Berliners sported. Their skins were so burned by the sun they looked Asiatic, basted and burnished with oil to help fry their bodies better. Hanna took her pictures as the men posed naked with discus or javelin, or dived into the lake, and the boys did callisthenic exercises. Meanwhile I reloaded Hanna’s cameras, marvelling at the unreal texture of these men’s coppery hides, as if they were some alien species or lost Amazonian tribe. There wasn’t the least frisson of eroticism, as far as I was concerned, contemplating these naked male bodies cavorting about the lakeside. It was the Berlin effect — it became ever harder to be shocked or affronted. However, I’ve never really enjoyed sunbathing since, I have to say.

I remember meeting Hanna’s mother and father. They came to the apartment for tea and cakes, a concerned, wealthy, bourgeois, faultlessly polite couple in their soft expensive clothes. Hanna was provocatively at her most garçonne-like, wearing co-respondent lace-up brogues, Oxford bags, a white short-sleeved shirt with a cerise bow tie, her hair oiled back from her forehead. When she strode out of the living room to make tea I saw her parents’ anguished, uncomprehending glance at each other. What had happened to little Hanna?

I remember going to Trudi’s flat, a bedsit in an old apartment block near Alexanderplatz. There had been a big street fight outside the synagogue on Kaiser-Strasse and workmen were wearily sweeping up the debris — placards, sticks, lumps of paving, broken glass. On Trudi’s door was her name, a handwritten scrap of paper pinned above the knocker: G. Fenstermacher. ‘Windowmaker’. Hanna found this very funny. Shamefully, I’d never thought of Trudi as having a surname — she was always a simple ‘Trudi’ to me. Hanna and I sat on her bed while Trudi took the only chair the room had to offer. She was much thinner and she confirmed she’d been away to have an abortion and there had been complications and a spell in hospital. Her mother was already caring for two of her children and had categorically refused to take on a third. ‘What choice did she give me?’ Trudi said, sulkily, resentfully. I handed over the 150 marks I had promised her and arranged to meet the following Saturday night at the Xanadu-Club for another session. She asked me for an extra hundred, saying she could take me to a very private place, very secret. I had Greville’s money by then so I paid up, very curious.

4. A VERY PRIVATE PLACE, VERY SECRET

I SAT IN MY corner of the Xanadu-Club drinking Sekt and smoking, feeling very happy as I covertly clicked away with my handbag camera. It was late and some of the girls — who had also been drinking all night — did an impromptu striptease for the regulars who had lingered on. The men and the women — it had gone very heterosexual by this stage — chatted, kissed and fondled each other like lovers rather than prostitutes and paying customers, as if pleased to see each other and relishing this moment, snug and separated from the sexual commerce of the place for a few minutes, in a warm and friendly atmosphere. I was happy because I had nudity. I had half-naked Berlin prostitutes talking to each other, with their clients sitting alongside, looking on. All was well.

Trudi appeared in her hat and coat and signed off with Frau Amoureux.

‘We get a taxi,’ Trudi said.

We headed east, towards Lichtenberg, into long dark streets of old apartment buildings. I spotted a theatre and a sign that said Blumen-Strasse and then we turned down a narrow shadowy lane. I saw three other taxis ahead of us dropping off their passengers. We followed them through the usual damp, ill-lit courtyard and found a small queue of men filing in the door of an apartment, their hats pulled down, collars up. Trudi led me round to another door to the side where she rang a bell and a man looked out suspiciously. He had a pouchy, flushed face and a wide moustache. Trudi whispered a few words to him then turned to me.

‘You must give him fifty marks.’

‘But I just gave you a hundred.’

‘And I bring you to this place.’

I paid the man with the big moustache and we climbed a back stairway up one floor to a kitchen. There was a blackened tin range, a cold-water stone sink and a few shelves with pots and pans on them. There was another man standing there, reading a newspaper, naked apart from a towel tied around his waist. He looked up as we came in and I saw that he had a harelip, badly joined. He hugged and kissed Trudi and she introduced him.

‘This is Volker, my brother.’

We shook hands.

‘If you could give him some money that would be nice.’

I duly gave Volker fifty marks. Thank you, Greville.

‘What’s happening here?’ I asked.

Trudi led me cautiously to another door off the kitchen, opening it an inch or two. Peering through I could see a larger room, a sitting room, perhaps, transformed into a kind of crude theatre. Almost twenty men were already there, scattered about on the rows of chairs. Other men were arriving — prosperous men, so they looked to me as they removed their hats and coats and the place filled up. I saw silver hip flasks being passed around, cigarettes were lit, conversations were low and terse. The audience was facing a simple wooden bed with a headboard, made up with a pillow and sheets, lit by a standard lamp at each end. I began to understand why Trudi had called this a very private place, very secret.

I turned as I heard steps coming up the kitchen stairway. A young woman came in, bespectacled, wearing a tan camel coat and a velour hat with a bow on one side. She had a bony, angled face, her tiredness visible, and she looked as if she was returning from a day’s work at an office somewhere. She kissed Volker with familiarity and fished in her handbag, handing him what looked like a tube of toothpaste.

We were introduced — this was Franziska — and I gave her the obligatory fifty marks. I thought I recognised her as one of the girls from the Xanadu-Club. A whispered exchange with Trudi confirmed that this was true. So far I had spent 250 marks on this evening but I didn’t begrudge it — I had a feeling that whatever I was about to witness was going to be worthwhile. What I was more worried about was how much film remained in my camera — I had taken many photographs in the Xanadu-Club.

Big Moustache stuck his head round the door and asked if everyone was ready.

‘We’re ready,’ Franziska said and she slipped past me into the sitting room. There was no applause — just the sound of two dozen men shifting in their seats.

Trudi tapped me on the shoulder.

‘I go now. Volker will find you a taxi.’

‘See you next Saturday.’

She left and I turned back to see what Franziska was up to in the room. She had taken off her hat and coat and was beginning to undress in a matter-of-fact way, exactly as if she was in her own bedroom, humming to herself, sighing with exasperation at a stubborn button. Soon she was down to her underclothes. She took off her spectacles and tucked them under the pillow.

I looked back at Volker. He was naked now — his body was very white with well-defined musculature, only his forearms tanned brown. He had a thin line of dark hair on his chest running down to his navel. He was squeezing toothpaste into his palm, then he rubbed his hands vigorously together to make a softer paste — then he began to massage this cream on to his penis.

‘What’re you doing?’ I said spontaneously, raising my bag. Click.

He was wholly unselfconscious as he pulled and tugged at himself with both hands, easing the toothpaste into his skin.

‘Ow. It’s burning,’ he said. ‘The toothpaste makes me hot. Stechend.’ Stinging. His harelip made him lisp strangely. ‘And when it’s hot like this it makes me bigger, you see.’

He took his hands away. I could see it was working. No erection but very impressive size, nonetheless.

‘Goodness!’ I raised my bag and coughed as I pressed the remote release button.

‘It’s just a trick,’ he said, and shrugged, almost apologetically.

I turned to peer through the crack in the door again. Franziska was now naked and she walked round the bed, folding and tidying away her discarded clothes, before climbing in between the sheets. Volker loomed up beside me. All I could smell was toothpaste.

‘Ten seconds,’ he said.

Franziska was feigning sleep, making deep breathing sounds, tossing and turning as if she was dreaming.

Then Volker walked in — the dream made flesh — and the toothpaste trick provoked a gasp of envy-admiration from the male audience.

And then Volker and Franziska duly made love. Orthodox straightforward sex, the sheet thrown back, lit by the two standard lamps. When it was over Volker strode back into the kitchen. I could hear him getting dressed behind me but my eyes were on Franziska as she awoke from her dream, looked around, saw no naked man, smiled to herself, stretched luxuriously, then stepped out of bed and began to put on her clothes, ending with her spectacles, retrieved from under the pillow, then her coat and velour hat and, the working girl fully attired ready for the day ahead, she left the room without a glance.

Now there was applause — a brief clapping of hands — and I heard a surge of low-voiced conversation as Big Moustache made his way through the crowd collecting money.

Franziska stood beside me watching, expressionless. She had a sharp pointed face, almost pretty, but her lips were thin and turned down at the corner as if she were permanently disapproving or bitter.

‘You see him put the money in his pocket?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘These are tips for us — me and Volker — but he keeps them. The men have already paid to get in.’ She gave a thin smile. ‘But tonight you pay me,’ adding in English, ‘thank you very much, Miss.’

‘Who had the idea for this show?’ I asked. ‘Him?’ I pointed through the door at Big Moustache. The room was emptying fast. ‘Or Volker?’

‘No. It’s my idea. Have you a cigarette?’

I offered her a cigarette and took one myself. We both lit up. Volker had gone to the lavatory on the landing outside the kitchen.

‘It’s a very clever idea, your show,’ I said, marvelling at its potent and absolute simplicity. Franziska’s dream. All these men were paying to enjoy Franziska’s fantasy, not theirs. ‘Bravo.’

Trudi (on top) and Franziska outside the Xanadu-Club, before work. Berlin, 1931.

I returned to the club a few more times and managed to arrange some further photographic sessions with the girls — they had come to know me by now and were actually quite pleased to have their pictures taken. When I left Berlin some two weeks later I decided to fly back to London. It was extravagant, almost £10, and it took up the remains of Greville’s second loan, but I’d never been in an airliner before and I felt that a symbolic act of some sort was required at the end of my Berlin adventure.

Hanna came with me to the aerodrome at Staaken. We said our sad goodbyes — we had become real friends, I considered — and yet she managed to snatch a full kiss on my lips, hugging me to her and promising to come and see my show of Berlin photographs when it opened in London.

I was flying Deutsche Luft Hansa and as I walked across the concrete apron with the other twenty or so passengers towards the vast aeroplane — four engines, a kind of enormous flying wing — I turned to wave back at the departure building but I couldn’t see Hanna. I wondered if she’d gone.

I had a seat in the actual wing itself — you could stand upright in it easily — with a view forward through a square window, just like the pilots who were sitting in their cockpit a few feet to my right. The doors were closed, the engines started, and we trundled down the runway and, in no time, it seemed, the aeroplane heaved itself into the air, climbing very slowly, heading for Amsterdam, our refuelling stop before Croydon airport. I felt an extraordinary exhilaration, as if I might swoon, to be lifted above the earth in this way, the drumming of the engines in my ears, to be floating and yet feel so secure with a metal floor and carpet beneath my feet.

It was a cloudy day and as soon as the earth below was lost to view I wandered back through the fuselage — the airliner was perfectly steady — to the smoking parlour and had a cigarette and a gin and vermouth, served by a steward in a white jacket.

I asked the steward what kind of airliner I was in — I always liked to be specific, to retain this knowledge for the future.

‘It’s a Junkers, Fräulein,’ he said. ‘A Junkers G-38.’

I ordered another gin, enjoying this unique sensation, flying across Europe in a Junkers G-38 with a drink and a cigarette in my hand. I was experiencing my usual simultaneously contrasting Berlin moods — sadness at leaving and excited anticipation at what the future might hold. I had printed no photographs — just contact sheets of what I’d taken at the Xanadu-Club and Franziska’s show — all that was to come, with a bit of judicious dodging and burning. Greville would be pleased, I thought — I’d cabled him: ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED’. And I had the premonition, with a little justified self-satisfaction, also, I admit, that my pictures would cause something of a stir.

5. SCANDAL!

I TURNED TO CONFRONT Greville and held up a rusty tin of mulligatawny soup that I’d found behind a pile of old brown paper bags.

‘It’s a greengrocer’s,’ I said. ‘Was a greengrocer’s.’

‘Then we’ll call it the Green and Grocer Gallery.’

Greville paced about, thinking. He was wearing a fawn light tweed suit, cream shirt and a mustard-coloured silk tie — everything toning perfectly. I rummaged in another cupboard and found a damp box of nut rissoles and five tins of baking powder. Suddenly I had an idea. I tore a bit of peeling wallpaper off the wall, searched my handbag for my pen and, when I’d found it, I wrote the words down and showed them to Greville.

‘Yes. I like it,’ he said, ‘somehow managing to be both exotic and sensible at the same time.’

‘Grösze and Greene.’

‘I like the umlaut and the “e” at the end of Greene.’ He tested it out loud several times: the Grösze and Greene Gallery. Then he kissed me on the cheek. ‘Clever girl. What’re you going to call the show?’

‘Berlin bei Nacht.’

‘Yes, keep it German. More decadent.’ Greville looked around and kicked vaguely at a mousetrap — sprung, no cheese. ‘Now all we have to do is give the place a lick of paint.’

I’m proud to say that, over the next few weeks, I single-handedly painted ninety-nine per cent of the Grösze and Greene Gallery (I had a little help from Bruno Desjardins). Meanwhile, Greville occupied himself with securing the lease, which wasn’t very expensive — Soho rents were cheap — but I was insistent that the lease was in my name, not his, and this necessitated several trips to a solicitor and even obliged my mother to step in as a guarantor.

I took her to lunch after she’d signed the necessary affidavits. We went to Primavera in Old Compton Street where we ate tough veal escalopes with tinned peas. Pushing her unfinished plate aside, my mother leant back in her chair, staring at me curiously, and simultaneously inserted a cigarette into her holder. I lit her cigarette for her.

‘Why do you want to open your own gallery?’ she asked, sceptically. ‘Surely if your photographs are any good a genuine gallery will show them.’

‘My photographs are a bit. . shocking,’ I said, pouring myself a glass of Chianti from the bottle on our table.

‘Well, I certainly won’t be coming to see them.’

‘Well, I certainly won’t be sending you an invitation.’

She leant forward and I saw my face twice reflected in the lenses of her tortoiseshell spectacles.

‘What’s your game, Amory?’

‘It’s no “game”, Mother. I’m just trying to establish myself. Make my way in the world.’

‘When you say “shocking”, do you mean—’ She stopped herself. ‘No, no. I don’t want any more information.’ She sighed, dramatically, flipping her hand as if a fly were buzzing around, bothering her. ‘I don’t know what’s become of my children. Xan has just bought a motor bicycle — he’s obsessed with it.’

‘What type of motor bicycle?’

‘How would I know? Why do you always want to know the precise name of everything, Amory? It’s most peculiar.’

I shrugged and said, ‘So — no more guinea pigs.’

‘He set them all free. Into the countryside — hundreds of them. There’ll be a plague of guinea pigs all over Sussex.’ She looked at me intently again, puffing smoke as if to create a kind of screen between us, to make me blurry and more obscure.

‘Your father asks for you all the time.’

‘I sent him a photograph.’

‘Made it worse. I think he still feels guilty. Why don’t you go and see him again? It does cheer him up.’

‘I will,’ I said, as sincerely as I could manage. ‘As soon as my show is done.’

The lease issues, annoyingly, took some time to sort out but, finally, eventually, I was granted temporary possession — for six months — of number 42a Brewer Street and a painted sign went up signifying the place’s new incarnation: the Grösze and Greene Gallery. The exhibition was announced for the middle of January 1932 — a quiet month, we reasoned, therefore we might attract more of the press’s attention.

I occupied myself with the printing of some forty of my Berlin photographs, keeping the size uniform — ten inches by six — so I could order the frames and the mounts separately: I didn’t want to provide any framer with a privileged early view of my work. Berlin bei Nacht had to arrive in its gallery unseen and unannounced, like the explosion of a landmine, I declared.

‘Or a damp squib,’ Greville corrected. ‘Nothing’s guaranteed, darling. You never know if we’ll be noticed — even in January London’s full of exhibitions.’

‘You can invite your society friends,’ I said. ‘Think of all the magazines you’ve worked for.’

‘Good point,’ Greville said. ‘I’ll see what riff-raff I can round up.’

It took me two hard-working weeks to print and frame all my photographs. To my eye they had a professional, artistic air with their unvarnished pale oak frames and a big expanse of cream cardboard mount — a ‘museum mount’ I was told such a style was called, where the mount is significantly larger than the picture being mounted. As I wrote the titles and signed my name under the photographs, it struck me, not for the first time in my life, that proper presentation was half the battle if you wanted to be taken seriously.

We had ordered plain canvas blinds for the big window that faced Brewer Street so we could be completely shut off from prying eyes. One cold evening early in the year Greville and I hung the photographs, spacing them out evenly on the stark white walls. We had torn up the old oil-cloth floor covering and had painted the floorboards with a dark wood stain. The Grösze and Greene Gallery looked remarkably authentic, we had to admit. More proper presentation.

Greville wandered along the row of photographs before we covered them all with brown paper, pausing at my picture of Volker, naked, apart from the towel hanging from his hand, covering his groin area.

‘“Artist’s Model”,’ he said, reading my title. ‘My, he looks like a big fellow.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I let Hugo Torrance kiss me at his party in the Glenlarig Hotel. I’d been enjoying myself, chatting to Greer and Calder, reminiscing with Hugo’s daughter, Sandra, about the bits of London we both knew, and I’d drunk just a little bit too much whisky.

I’d gone to the ladies’ room and on emerging had found Hugo waiting for me in the half-dark of the landing on the first floor. He blocked my passage down the stairs, put his arms round me and kissed me on the lips.

‘Stay the night, Amory,’ he suggested and, just for a second, I was tempted — but said ‘No,’ quietly but firmly.

‘I’ll keep trying,’ he said as he let me pass.

‘I should hope so.’

I drove home carefully, knowing I was tipsy, and poured myself another whisky and stirred up the fire, thinking. I wondered if Hugo Torrance was the last man I would ever kiss. The thought made me sad.

*

On the evening of the opening of Berlin bei Nacht I decided to wear something demure, suddenly thinking that I didn’t want to be noticed or to be identified as the ‘photographer’, the ‘artist’.

‘Very discreet,’ Greville said, as I arrived. ‘You look like you should be taking their coats.’

I was wearing a navy crepe-knit frock with a high silk cross-over collar and a swathed cap.

‘I don’t want to draw any attention,’ I said, feeling nervous, all of a sudden. ‘I just want to observe, be in the background.’

‘One advantage of being called Amory, I suppose,’ Greville said. ‘They’ll all be looking for a man.’ He indicated the cardboard sign propped in the window on a small easel advertising the show and my name. BERLIN BEI NACHT — Photographs by Amory Clay.

‘Ah.’ He raised one finger. ‘But what if someone wants to interview you?’

‘We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

Greville had hired a catering company to serve glasses of hock in green-stemmed glasses — ideally Teutonic, he thought — and various canapés: cheese straws, sausage rolls, vol-au-vents. At the door there was a small stack of my thin catalogue with the prices of the photographs listed. On the invitation we’d sent out it was clear that the exhibition was being ‘hosted’ by Greville Reade-Hill so he made it his business to greet everyone as they arrived while I stayed at the back of the gallery pretending to look at my own photographs as if I were seeing them for the first time.

There was a good crowd, as it turned out, sixty or seventy people, we calculated, and there was a constant supply of hock so the noise-level in the gallery steadily increased, the atmosphere becoming more like that of a cocktail party than a serious vernissage. When everyone seemed to have arrived, Greville and I stood in one corner scrutinising our guests.

‘Well they seem quite rich and bourgeois,’ I said. ‘The right sort of person, I suppose. Are there any journalists?’

‘No one was prepared to admit to it.’

‘But we need the publicity, don’t we?’

‘Word of mouth, darling. There’s nothing better. Good God, look at that.’

I turned slightly to see a young balding man in a grey coat with a musquash collar.

‘Look at the spats,’ Greville said, trying not to laugh, then added, ‘Insecure, wealthy, ugly, vain.’

I responded. ‘Talentless, self-conscious, myopic, stupid.’

Greville had this theory that it only took four adjectives to describe absolutely anyone, anyone in the entire world. The notion had evolved into a private parlour-game that we would play at parties to while away the hours of boredom as we waited for people to come and be photographed.

‘There’s a good one,’ I said, pointing with my chin at a stout older man peering at a picture of half-naked Berlin prostitutes. ‘Overweight, rich, lecherous, hypocritical.’

‘Sex-starved, boring, pompous, frightened.’

‘Let’s go for a wander,’ I said, beginning to relax and enjoy myself. I picked up another glass of hock from a passing waiter as we strolled around the gallery trying to establish who might be a member of the press. Greville was constantly stopped by people he knew but pointedly didn’t introduce me.

‘People will assume you’re my secretary,’ he said, in an aside, as we moved on.

‘Perfect. Now, look at him, I think I’ve seen him before. .’

We contemplated a lanky young man with a hooked nose and long hair over the back of his collar. He was wearing a well-cut charcoal-grey suit with dull scarlet shoes and an oriental silk scarf draped loosely round his neck.

‘Ah. Sir Max Gartside. I think he writes for a newspaper — sometimes.’

‘Narcissistic, elegant, moneyed, pretentious,’ I said.

‘Shall I sound him out?’

Greville sauntered over and I watched the two of them chat for a while, laughing at some joke as Gartside pointed at one of my photographs and I thought: I hope they’re not making fun of me. Greville returned, making a moue of disappointment.

‘He loves them. And he does write for the Gazette, but he’s not been assigned.’

‘Loves them? Damn.’

‘He wants to buy Volker but I told him Volker was mine — not for sale.’

‘Isn’t he even a little bit shocked?’ I asked, hopefully.

‘Nothing shocks our Max, I’m afraid.’ He looked around. ‘Now, here’s an interesting candidate.’

I turned to see a smart-looking slim man coming into the gallery and picking up a catalogue. He was wearing a tawny cashmere coat that was almost the colour of his hair. Wet sand, I thought, or sandstone — not blond, not brown. His hair was thick and was swept back from his forehead. I could see the fine grooves set in its oiled density from the teeth of his comb. A big nose, very straight, light blue eyes, I saw as he passed near us. I felt that shiver go through me, that split-second weakening of the spinal column.

‘Bland, rich, bored, arrogant,’ Greville said out of the side of his mouth.

‘Handsome, assured, clever, foreign.’

‘Listen to you, Miss Smitten. He’s a journalist, I bet you. I have a sixth sense.’

I watched the man — he was in his thirties, I guessed — move carefully along the line of photographs, peering at them, then checking the reference in the catalogue. He looked more like a dealer or a collector, I thought, as I saw him really studying some of the photographs, stepping back and moving in again. At one stage he put on a pair of spectacles, rimless, and moved very close to a photo as if looking for signs of retouching or verifying the grain of the paper. French, I thought, or Middle European: a Hungarian aristocrat, an Esterházy or a Cseszneky — certainly not English.

Greville tapped me on the shoulder. ‘I think that might be the Daily Express.’

Another thin man, middle-aged, was moving quickly round the room, bald, with a prominent Adam’s apple held in the cleft of his wing collar like a bud between two sepals.

‘Humourless, religiose, hate-filled, necrophiliac.’

‘Sexless, ulcerated, embittered, dying.’

We helped ourselves to two more glasses of hock and toasted each other.

‘I suppose I should be careful about what I’m wishing for,’ I said, ‘But I wouldn’t mind just a little furore.’

‘We just want your name mentioned in the newspapers. Perhaps even a photograph or two in some magazine. That’s not much to ask.’ Greville looked round the room again. ‘I thought your German girlfriend was coming.’

‘She is, but she couldn’t make the opening night.’

‘Longing to meet her.’

He wandered off and I went into the back room to chase up the final trays of canapés, feeling a sudden exhaustion overcome me and with it a new apprehension about our great schemes for notoriety. I sat down on a wooden chair and gulped at my hock. It was my work, after all, I was the only begetter and I would be in the line of fire, not Greville. I smoked a cigarette trying not to think further and heard the chatter of conversation diminish as the guests drifted off into the Soho night. I told myself to buck up, stood, stubbed out my cigarette, smoothed the skirt of my sensible frock and headed back into the gallery. There were about half a dozen people left, still chatting to each other, enjoying the occasion. Greville and Bruno Desjardins were saying goodbye to departing invitees. Someone cleared his throat close behind me and I turned. It was my Hungarian aristocrat.

‘Congratulations,’ he said. ‘These are very interesting photographs.’

American, I realised, a little disappointed, for some reason.

‘How do you know I’m the photographer?’

‘I have my ways and means, Miss Clay. I needed to find out, so I did.’ He smiled, one of those strange broad smiles where the teeth don’t show. He was holding his hand out to shake mine. His grip was light, just a formality, a clench of fingers.

‘I’m Cleveland Finzi.’

‘Well, you know who I am.’

‘I’d like to buy you a drink, if I may.’

‘I’m terribly busy—’

‘Oh, not now. I’m in London for a couple of weeks. Do you have a telephone?’

‘What? Yes.’

‘May I call you?’

I went off in a state of silly confusion to find my handbag where I’d left it in the back room. I searched — no cards. Idiot! I scribbled my number down on a sheet of paper torn from my unfilled appointments diary of 1931 and brought it back to him. Very impressive. He tucked the scrap of paper away in an inside pocket and handed me his card. I glanced at it: CLEVELAND FINZI. GLOBAL-PHOTO-WATCH.

‘Oh. You’re a journalist.’

‘Was. I’m an editor, now.’ He smiled politely. ‘It’s a magazine in America. You may have heard of it.’

I hadn’t, but said, as one does, ‘Yes, now you come to mention it. Definitely.’

‘I’ll call you in a couple of days,’ he said. ‘I’ll look forward to talking to you.’

‘I’ll look forward to talking to you,’ I repeated like a simpleton. I manned the admissions desk at the Grösze and Greene Gallery for the next three days. It was never busy, I’m sorry to say. Greville had decided, prudently, to impose an admission charge of one shilling, a sum that made you a member of the Grösze and Greene Photographic Club for twenty-four hours. It was a pre-emptive attempt to evade any prosecution for obscenity — he’d become worried about the graphic nature of some of the photographs — as the exhibition would open only to ‘club members’ not the general public. I happily went along with the ploy, having no idea of whether it would work or not. Its manifest disadvantage was that it put off passers-by from dropping in out of curiosity or on the off-chance. During the three days I was there our takings only broke £1 once. One day we took in a meagre five shillings.

I sat there surrounded by my Berlin photographs feeling I was in a kind of limbo. I should have been exhilarated — this was my first exhibition as an independent photographer and in London’s West End, no less — but I found my mind turning again and again to the enigmatic Cleveland Finzi of Global-Photo-Watch and his invitation. Was he being sincere or simply polite?

On the third day I was sitting at the desk in my squirrel coat — the weather had turned freezing — and the gallery had been empty for a good hour, when I heard the telephone ring in what had been the back storeroom. I ran for it, knowing somehow that it was Cleveland Finzi at last.

‘Oh. Hello, Greville,’ I said, unable to keep the disappointment out of my voice.

‘You’ve a very good review in the Scotsman.’

‘Have I?’

He quoted. ‘Listen: “Miss Clay has a horror of ‘cliché’ and so has searched Berlin for examples of real lives. She has eschewed the commonplace and sees things entirely for herself with great clarity and honesty.” Isn’t that wonderful?’

‘I suppose I should be pleased,’ I said. ‘My first review.’

‘We might get a few more newspapers, now,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can circulate this.’

I put the phone down and it rang again immediately.

‘What is it, Greville?’

‘Miss Clay? This is Cleveland Finzi.’

‘Yes.’

‘Hello? Are you there?’

‘Yes, it’s me. Miss Clay.’

‘I tried your apartment but there was no reply. Luckily I thought I might find you at the gallery.’

‘Luckily, yes.’

‘I’d like to invite you for a cocktail. I’m staying at the Earlham, on the Strand. How does six o’clock suit you this evening?’

‘Yes, yes. It suits.’ I seemed to have lost the ability to speak sophisticated English.

‘I’ll see you in the Palm Court at six.’

I managed to persuade Bruno to stand in for me after lunch and went to a hairdresser’s in Charing Cross Road to have my hair washed and set. I decided that I didn’t have time to go back to Fulham and change but I could at least look entirely different from the anonymous creature Finzi had encountered at the vernissage. Out of my swathed cap, with my hair down and shiny and some slightly extravagant make-up, plus my squirrel coat. . If I kept my coat on I might pass for reasonably glamorous, I thought.

I was walking down Charing Cross Road towards Trafalgar Square, feeling good, a silk scarf protecting my new hair-do, when I passed the entrance to the Bardmont Concert Hall. I don’t know why I stopped, perhaps because I was early for my six o’clock appointment, but I did and idly scanned the poster for that evening’s concert. I read: ‘The New London Symphony Orchestra. Soloist Miss Dido Clay.’

Dido Clay?

I looked again at the programme: Chopin, Debussy and a symphonic tone poem, ‘Aeneas in Carthage’, by Peregrine Moxon. Dido Clay had to be my sister, Peggy.

The new name worked. I’m here to meet my sister Miss Dido Clay, I said, and I was led by a uniformed porter through the passageways to the rehearsal rooms at the rear, hearing, as I approached, piano music in an atonal modern style that I didn’t recognise.

The door was held open for me and there was Peggy at the piano, head down, pounding out some crescendo, eyes closed, a cigarette dangling from her lips. Bash! A final dissonant chord. She slowly lifted her hands from the keys, leaning back, cigarette vertical.

‘Peggy?’

She turned abruptly, saw me, gave a little squeal of pleasure, removed her cigarette from her lips and raced over to me. She kissed me.

‘Never, ever, call me Peggy again,’ she whispered sharply.

‘Sorry. Dido.’

‘I’m Dido, now. Forever.’

‘Dido, Dido, Dido.’

Her hair was pulled back from her face in a tight bun making her look stern, worldly. I felt that strange sensation again that she was older than me, though she was just seventeen, I realised. Then she hugged me tightly again, my little sister.

‘Darling Amory! You look ravishing. What’re you doing? Off to some party?’

‘I’m going to meet a man. An American.’

‘Too exciting! Is he rich?’

‘Possibly. But I’m late, I must dash. I saw your name on the poster outside and had to check it was you.’ I smiled. ‘Dido, dearest.’

‘I’ll tell you everything. It was Peregrine’s idea. I’ll telephone you — I’ve a concert and two recitals this week.’ She smiled mischievously and I saw the old Peggy for a second or two. ‘I can’t wait to hear all about your American lover.’

We kissed goodbye and I walked back out to the street feeling the beginnings of a headache. I pushed all thoughts of Peggy/Dido to one side and turned up the Strand, heading for the Earlham Hotel. At reception I told the clerk I was meeting Mr Finzi in the Palm Court and was led along a corridor towards the sound of a harp and piano and on into the wide over-furnished room, filled with tight groupings of chairs and sofas, its famous huge chandelier glowing brightly. My throat was a little dry and I suspected my pulse was beating faster than normal but I told myself, resolutely, to anticipate nothing.

Finzi saw me enter and stood and waved. He was wearing a dark charcoal suit, very well cut, and his Americanness was advertised only by a strange silver device that shaped his collar round the knot of his tie. And he also wore a tiepin.

‘I assume you’re not interested in a cup of tea,’ he said.

‘I’ll have a brandy and soda, thank you.’

He ordered our drinks from a waiter — he had a Scotch and water — and we began to talk at once about the exhibition. He was full of praise and as he talked I rather marvelled at the astonishing calm self-assurance he exhibited. In fact he was so self-assured I began to wonder if it was an act. I’ve known certain people where the most adamantine confidence is just a mask for terrified insecurity but I quickly realised there was nothing bogus about Cleveland Finzi. I thought that perhaps it was his American accent that contributed to the overall savoir faire, so—

‘You’re not listening to me, Miss Clay,’ he said, reasonably.

‘Yes, I am.’

‘I just asked you a question.’

‘And I answered it.’

‘No, you didn’t.’

I sipped at my brandy, playing for time.

‘I’m so sorry if I seem distracted but I’ve just had a perplexing meeting with my sister. She’s changed her name.’

‘I can see how that might throw you.’

‘She’s always been Peggy but now she insists on being called Dido.’

He thought about this. ‘Dido. . I prefer it to Peggy. Nice name, Dido.’

‘Talking of names,’ I said, ‘is your family Italian?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Finzi.’

‘Oh. Finzi is a Jewish name,’ he said.

‘Is it?’

‘Sephardi Jewish name. I think we were from Italy, originally. Then originally from Spain, of course.’

‘Of course, yes. . How interesting.’

He carried on asking me precise questions about my photographs — how had I managed to gain access to these places in Berlin? Had I been obliged to pay money to take the photographs? Were they posed or candid? — and so on. He was very impressed with my secret handbag-camera when I explained it to him and when he asked me about printing I was glad to be able to throw in a few authoritative remarks about dodging and burning.

We ordered a second round of drinks and smoked a cigarette. I think I managed to stay relatively composed as we talked and tried not to stare at him too intently. However, had Cleveland Finzi invited me up to his room to dance naked round his bed I would have said yes in a second.

He walked me back through to the lobby, apologising for cutting our conversation short as he had another appointment. We shook hands at the main entrance. He wasn’t a tall man — taller than me, of course — but there was something spry and limber about him, as if the body beneath the smart tailoring was muscled, fit.

‘What happens next, Miss Clay?’

‘What? Sorry, what do you mean?’

‘Your work. Your photographs.’

‘Oh. I’m not thinking beyond the exhibition,’ I said, then lied. ‘I’ve already had some intriguing job offers.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, smiling. ‘Your photographs are very. . intriguing. You have a real eye for capturing people. Please do let me know if you ever come to New York. I can promise you an excellent dinner.’

Out on the Strand the night had turned wet and squally with sharp bursts of rain stinging like hail. The street lamps shone with a watery nimbus as I made my way to the Underground in something of a brandy-and-soda daze.

6. THE WAGES OF SIN

THE TELEPHONE RINGING IN my sitting room woke me at seven. I stumbled through in my nightdress and snatched it up.

‘It’s happened,’ Greville said. ‘The Daily Express. I think we might be in a spot of trouble.’

I quickly pulled on some clothes, grabbed my coat, jammed a hat on my head and ran to the newsagent at Walham Green Tube station and bought a copy of the Daily Express. There was a tea room near the entrance of the Underground so I went in, ordered a pot of tea and a currant bun (lightly toasted) and, slowly collecting myself, sipping and munching, began to leaf carefully through the newspaper. I found the article on page 11. The headline ran: ‘A Vile and Obscene Display of Photographs’. The secondary headline below it was: ‘Outrageous exhibitionism masquerading as art’. I read on in a curious numbed way as if I were reading about a war in a distant country. ‘Miss Clay dips her camera in the most putrid and decadent slime she could find. . Leering men consort with barely clothed women. . It is hard to imagine visions of a more bestial and degrading nature.’ My numbness deepened. However, it became clear to me as I read of my utter viciousness that what had really offended this man — the man with the prominent Adam’s apple — or, more to the point, excited him, were the photos of half-naked women unconcerned to be in the presence of other half-naked women. He went on and on about it and yet there were only three photographs in the entire exhibition that showed this juxtaposition. Not a word of Volker and his candid nudity or the girls fooling around in bed or sunbathing on the balcony in their underwear. There was a shrillness in his condemnation that in its near-hysteria was too revealing — as if, having mounted this exhibition, I should be stoned to death or taken to the ducking stool and be tried as a witch. ‘This repulsive display of photographs in the heart of our great city, in the heart of our great empire, is an affront to every God-loving, decent-thinking British citizen.’

I sipped at my cooling tea, coming out of my daze, feeling a corresponding new chill beginning to overwhelm me, as I realised what trouble I might be in. I had my notoriety now, all right.

Back in my flat I telephoned Greville — no reply. I telephoned the gallery. He answered with a discernible tremor in his voice, keeping it low as if he might be overheard.

‘The police are here. The photographs have all been seized. They’re being taken away in a van—’

‘Seized? Taken away?’

‘And there are three hundred people queuing to get in.’

‘Should I come?’

‘You might as well. But there’s nothing we can do.’

He sounded frightened — and that wasn’t like the Greville I knew. I took a taxi to Brewer Street and when I arrived I found the queue of photography-lovers had dispersed and there was a solitary, smiling police constable standing on guard outside the gallery. Greville opened the door to me and, as I stepped in, I experienced a visceral shock — seeing the walls now rudely bare.

‘Where have they been taken to?’ I asked, beginning to understand Greville’s untypical fear. The ‘authorities’, the guardians of public decency, the state, having been affronted, had acted, and had had their decree fulfilled.

‘Savile Row police station.’

‘What next?’

‘The unpleasant-looking but perfectly civil police inspector informed me that the gallery is going to be prosecuted for obscenity.’

‘The gallery? You mean me.’

‘Well, you are the leaseholder, darling.’

In a new and more unpleasant form of daze I wandered back into the rear room and made us both a cup of strong tea. When you’ve got a problem to solve always do something practical, my mother used to say. Suddenly I was seeing the sense in the bland adage. We sipped our tea and discussed our predicament.

‘I thought that because we were a club we were more or less safe,’ I said.

‘So did I,’ Greville said. ‘Or so I’d been advised.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘The problem was, it seems, that the photos were for sale. If they hadn’t been for sale we might have been fine. Possibly. But now they can prosecute you for exhibiting obscene pictures for “sale or gain”. That’s the issue.’

I felt my fear mounting — and I wasn’t being helped by the evident funk that Greville was in. I’d never seen him so abjectly insecure and jittery.

‘What do I do now?’ I asked, feebly.

‘I think you should find yourself a lawyer.’

The lawyer I found — a solicitor — was the brother of my best friend at school, Millicent Lowther. Millicent’s eldest brother, Arthur — in his early thirties, I calculated — was more than happy to take up my case, so he said when we met at his offices in Chancery Lane. He was a gaunt, solemn young man, almost bald. I thought he might have been quite attractive if only he’d allow himself to smile, now and then. Although he was very thin his features were even and his eyes were kind. But he had armoured himself in this persona, all serious intent and rigid efficiency.

‘Yes, they’re sticking with the obscenity charge, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘As the leaseholder of the gallery, you’re to appear at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday week.’

‘What do you advise?’ I asked, weakly. Following the assault by the Daily Express there had been other pieces written by journalists quick to condemn me even though they had never seen the exhibition, so swiftly had the pictures been confiscated. It didn’t matter — the epithets mounted: depraved, sordid, shameful, mentally unbalanced, scandalous, degenerate, vile, disgusting, and so on, were the words whirling around my name. Easy defamations produced by total strangers — it was a perfect vilification.

Arthur Lowther asked if I minded if he smoked his pipe. I had no objection, I said, and lit a cigarette to keep him company. A good two minutes later he managed to produce a thin curl of smoke from his small briar. It made him look foolish rather than grown-up but I knew he was doing it for my benefit, to add weight to his deliberations.

‘I suggest you plead guilty,’ he said.

‘No! Categorically, no!’

He closed his eyes. Waited. Opened them again. They were a nice shade of greyish-brown.

‘In that case, we could try and present a defence showing that the photographs were works of art.’

‘Yes, good idea.’

‘But we would need eminent people to vouch for them. In that light.’ He took out a penknife device from his waistcoat pocket and tamped the glowing tobacco in the bowl of his pipe. It seemed to go out at this point. He put it down, irritated. He looked back at me.

‘Do you know any famous artists? Politicians, people of standing in society?’

‘Ah. . No.’

‘Then plead guilty, Miss Clay. Pay the fine. Promise never to exhibit these photographs again in England.’

‘What’ll happen to my photographs?’

‘They’ll be destroyed.’

‘But that’s so unfair, Mr Lowther!’

‘Do call me Arthur. Millicent talked about you all the time. I feel I’ve known you for years.’

‘It’s so unfair, Arthur. . These are photographs of. . of documentary evidence. This is how people live — in Berlin. All I’ve done is show the world the truth about people’s lives.’

‘I believe you, Amory — if I may,’ he said with manifest sincerity. ‘But you managed to cause mighty offence to the Daily Express, which is why we’re in this stew. You’ll save much time and money — not to mention stress and strain — if you do what I suggest.’ He went on to outline the case he’d make to the magistrate: my youth, my zeal, the fact that the gallery was a club — all this would help when it came to the fine — that would be somewhere between £20 and £50, he estimated.

I sat there thinking about the options ahead of me and realised that there was nothing I could do, realistically. The Grösze and Greene adventure was over.

On Tuesday week I sat behind Arthur Lowther in the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court as he informed the magistrate, Sir Pellman Dulverton, that his client, Miss Amory Clay, wished to plead guilty to the charge of obscenity and apologised unreservedly to the court. I was fined £30 and ordered never to show my ‘disgusting images’ to the British public ever again. Sir Pellman Dulverton — a pale, impassive, bespectacled man with a small bristling moustache — called me a foolish and misguided young woman and he hoped I had learned a valuable lesson. I kept my head down and nodded — demure, chastened.

Arthur Lowther and I stood outside the court on Bow Street and each smoked a cigarette — no pipe, I was glad to see.

‘It seems like an awful defeat, I know,’ Arthur said, ‘but in a week you’ll have practically forgotten about it and in a month it’ll have vanished from your life entirely. You don’t want something like this dragging on forever, casting a cloud over every waking moment of your existence.’

‘You’re absolutely right,’ I said. ‘I just have to think of it that way, I suppose. Try not to be bitter.’ I was looking around for Greville, who had promised to come and lend moral support, but there was no sign of him.

‘Might I ask you to dinner one evening, Amory?’ Arthur Lowther asked, a blush rougeing his sunken cheeks. ‘We can commiserate and celebrate. And I’d like to get to know you better. Not have to talk about “obscenity” all the time.’ He managed one of his rare transforming smiles.

I said, yes, by all means, not having a ready excuse available, and gave him my card. I was grateful to him, after all, and his fee had been surprisingly modest. I was going to have to borrow more money from Greville to pay my fine. Arthur hailed a passing cab.

‘Heading back to the office. Can I drop you anywhere?’

I said no thanks, I had an appointment, so we shook hands and I strode off to the Underground. I had suddenly realised, now my photographs had been destroyed by the court, that I had to make sure my negatives were safe.

I found Greville in the Falkland Court mews darkroom with Bruno, both wearing white coats over their suits as they were about to start developing. Greville apologised for missing the court case — some earl’s daughter had announced her engagement and wanted her photograph taken immediately.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘You didn’t miss anything — it was all over in minutes. I just want to pick up my negatives.’

‘What negatives?’

‘Of my Berlin photographs.’

‘Bruno, dear, could you just pop back to the flat and fetch my briefcase?’

When Bruno left on his errand, Greville turned to me and I could see instantly that his fretful, twitchy mood had returned in full force.

‘Darling,’ he said. ‘The negatives were seized. I told you.’

‘Seized? No you didn’t tell me anything about that.’

‘I’m sure I did. That evening after the gallery was closed. I’m convinced I told you. That same police inspector who raided the gallery called round and demanded them.’

I felt a kind of draining inside me, as if my blood was being sucked out of my body.

‘But, Greville, why did you tell him you had them? You could have — I don’t know — made up any old story. You could have said I had them.’

‘Very easy for you to say, Amory, dear one. But you weren’t standing facing an inspector and two ghastly enormous police constables in your own drawing room.’ He took off his white coat and threw it in a corner. ‘They said they were going to search everywhere. Most aggressive.’

I looked at Greville as he fished in his pockets for a cigarette and felt a sudden heaviness of heart. The old expression was absolutely correct — I felt as if my heart suddenly hung heavier in its cavity in my chest, and I knew that something had ended between the two of us and I suspected that we were both instantly aware of the fact. Nothing would be the same ever again. I exhaled.

‘So, they took the negatives as well,’ I said, soberly, upset.

‘What could I do? I had to give them something. They’d have turned the place upside down.’ He closed his eyes and smoothed his smooth hair down and said, still with his eyes closed, ‘There’s only so much scandal a career can take, Amory. I’m associated with you. I can’t let it go on. People will—’

‘It’s all right,’ I interrupted, flatly. ‘I understand.’

‘I did keep the contact sheets. At least there’s a record of sorts.’

He felt guilty, I knew, as he looked them out and handed them to me in a stiff-backed brown envelope. Then he wrote me out a cheque for the fine — he insisted. I was still in his debt, however angry and frustrated I was.

‘Well, it sort of worked,’ he said with an apologetic half-smile. ‘At least everyone knows your name, now.’

‘Oh, yes. The vile, depraved, immoral Amory Clay. . It was your idea, Greville, not mine,’ I added, a little petulantly, I admit.

‘Well, the best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley, as the poet said. Could have worked a treat.’

Then Bruno returned with Greville’s briefcase and so I made my farewells. We kissed at the door and Greville mentioned that there was some grand ball coming up in Yorkshire that he’d need extra help for, if I were interested. He’d telephone with the details — might be amusing. Lively crowd. It was a gesture, a pretence that life would continue as it had before, but we both knew, I think, that the old feeling, the old camaraderie, had gone. I made the mistake, as I walked away down the mews, of turning and waving goodbye with the envelope containing my contact sheets — the only extant record of Berlin bei Nacht in the world. I’m sure he thought it was my parting shot.

Three nights later at a dull restaurant in Kensington (the Huntsman’s Halt), over brandies and coffee, Arthur Lowther took my hand and asked me, a catch in his voice, to become his wife. After I had succeeded in masking my total shock I said no, as politely as I was able to manage: no I’m afraid it wouldn’t be possible, I’m terribly sorry, no, and left as swiftly as I could.

Back in my flat in Fulham I sat staring at the three contact sheets of my Berlin photographs, my mind veering erratically between the first proposal of marriage I’d received and the technical problems arising from the use of a rostrum camera with sufficient magnification to take a good photograph of a tiny ungraded photograph, when the telephone rang. I had an awful feeling it would be Arthur encouraging me to take my time, not to rush to a decision. Bracing myself, I picked up the receiver.

‘Oh. Hello, Mr Finzi.’

‘I read about your trial in The Times. Commiserations.’

‘Thank you. But it was hardly a trial. I pleaded guilty.’

‘That was the right thing to do. But, you know, I think you should look on it as a sign.’

‘A sign of what?’ I reached for a box of cigarettes, opened it, selected one of the two cigarettes remaining and lit it. I was enjoying hearing Cleveland Finzi’s calm American accent — he sounded even more sure of himself, if such a thing were possible.

‘A sign of my stupidity?’ I asked, exhaling.

‘It’s a sign that you had done something significant. Your photographs shocked people. They had an effect. How often can any photographer say that in today’s modern world?’

‘I’ll try to console myself with that thought.’

‘What’re you going to do now, Miss Clay?’

‘You mean before I commit suicide?’

‘There’s no hurry. You can do that any time. Ever been to New York?’

‘No.’

‘Would you like to go?’

‘One day, perhaps. Yes.’

‘Before you commit suicide.’

‘Obviously. Ha-ha.’

There was a silence, then he said: ‘What if I offer you a job? Would that lure you over?’

I felt that heart-lurch, throat-closure. I drew deep on my cigarette.

‘Well. . Maybe,’ I said, carefully, sensing implications, expectations — a future — suddenly crowding round me.

‘Two hundred a month. What do you say?’

‘Two hundred what?’

‘Dollars.’

Images from Berlin bei Nacht (now lost). Girls from the Xanadu-Club, Berlin, 1931.

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Today is Xan’s birthday. He would have been sixty-one. Poor Xan. I searched for his book of poems and found it and read the poem he’d dedicated to me. It made me cry and I hate crying, now.

The Anti-cliché (for Amory)

We were

tropical

opposites,

Capricorn and

Cancer,

diametrically aligned.

But

life is a

vertiginous

elevated railroad.

Timor mortis

has us both

in its

pincer-like

grip.

We cling on

for dear

existence,

fearful of the

undignified isolation

of death,

the long

hello.