Sweet Caress

1. AMERICANA

1 JANUARY 1934. I woke very early, for some reason, as if I wanted to kick-start the beginning of this particular year, set it off and running with due energy as soon as possible. I slipped out of bed and dressed. The morning light was dull and tarnished — that hint of jaundice in the air that presages snow. I pulled on my heavy tweed coat and stepped out. My apartment — ground floor at the rear — was on Washington Square South in Greenwich Village. Consisting of a long corridor that linked sitting room, kitchen, bathroom and bedroom, the place was dark, apart from the bedroom that overlooked a small yard containing a tall slim ailanthus tree — all for $15 a month.

I headed over to ‘365’ on West 8th Street to buy cigarettes. ‘365’ was not the number of the store’s address but a signal that it opened every day, even on New Year’s Day. When I arrived there, Achilles, the owner, was sliding back the concertina grille on the street door. Across the road a Chinese boy was sweeping the steps of a chop-suey house. The Village was stirring, the year was under way.

Achilles was a stocky, bow-legged man with a permanent white corpse-stubble on his chin and jaw.

‘A happy new year, Miss Amory,’ he said, leading me into the store, effectively a wide long corridor off the street, shelved on both sides with a counter at the end. Flypaper spiralled from the moulded tin ceiling. There was a sign above the counter that said ‘We sell everything apart from liquor’.

I asked for a pack of Pall Malls for me — a little gesture to London in New York — and a pack of Camels for Cleveland. As I was Achilles’ first customer of 1934 I decided to be a good augury and bought some more items at random: a box of Rinso, some Wheat Krumbles and a bag of cinnamon buns.

‘And I’ll take some Alka-Seltzer,’ I said.

‘Partying last night?’

‘No, no. Early to bed. I’ve got a friend coming round for some lunch.’

‘A friend who smokes Camels, I’m guessing. A true hostess. I know you likes the Pall Malls, Miss Amory.’

We chatted on. I took strange pleasure in being known in my neighbourhood, as if I was settled here for a while, as if it gave my life a semblance of normality — that being here in this city was something I had planned, not simply something that had happened to me.

‘Let’s hope ’34 is better than ’33,’ Achilles said, as he bagged my groceries.

‘At least you can have a drink without getting arrested,’ I said. We laughed. In the last three weeks six liquor stores had opened within a two-block radius of Washington Square. America’s drinking was out in the open again.

‘Yeah, ain’t that something new,’ Achilles said, nodding, ‘though I have to say I kinda miss the speakeasies.’

I wandered home with my groceries and sat in my apartment with the wireless on, listening to jazz, reading a book — God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell — while I waited. I had painted the walls in the sitting room a pale ivory to maximise the light that came in through the small solitary window. I had hung some of my photographs here and there and had smartened up the rented sofa and two armchairs with quilted throws I’d bought in a junk shop on Bleecker. The tiled corridor led on past the tiny kitchen and bathroom to the back bedroom that gave on to the yard with its stark spindly tree. The room had a big, twelve-paned sash window and at midday in the summer when the sun shone directly down it was so blazingly luminous you felt you were in the tropics, not Manhattan.

Cleve was running late, clearly, so at 1.30 I made myself a gin and Italian and toasted in the new year, recognising as I did so that I’d been in New York for nearly eighteen months, now — though I still felt a transient, passing through, and that this apartment, this address, my job and my salary were very temporary aspects of my autobiography and whatever significance this sojourn would have in any retrospective view was impossible to discern. Why was I thinking in this mean-spirited, uncharitable way, I asked myself? I was so much better off here than in London, in every sense: solvent, housed, gainfully employed, my notoriety unheard-of. But I was unsettled in some way, I knew, and I knew it was all to do with the love affair—

On cue Cleveland Finzi pressed the buzzer at the main door and I let him in.

We kissed, gently, held each other and wished ourselves a happy 1934.

‘Do you want to eat?’ I asked. ‘Or. .?’

‘I’d like some “or”, please.’

I smiled, turned and walked through to the bedroom, unbuttoning my blouse, hearing the metalled half-moons on the heels of Cleve’s loafers clicking sharply, confidently, on the terracotta tiles of the corridor behind me.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I drove to Glasgow yesterday to see my doctor, Jock Edie. I was up early as my Hillman Imp took a good three hours to make the journey south. Dr Edie’s consulting rooms are on the ground floor of his vast grimy sandstone house on Great Western Road, a renaissance-style villa that would please a pontiff with its own campanile and two-acre garden.

Jock Edie is a large, portly man in his sixties who won three international rugby caps for Scotland when he was a medical student before a spinal injury ended his playing career. Something in the scrum, I’m told — I know nothing more: I loathe rugby. He has magnificent dense untrimmed eyebrows, like greying mini-moustaches lowering above his moist brown eyes. I’m very fond of him and I know he’s fond of me — but we both take special care not to demonstrate this by adopting an amiable but clipped no-nonsense manner with each other.

‘How’re you keeping, lassie?’

‘Very good. Very fit.’

‘Nothing new to worry us?’

‘Absolutely not.’

He opened a drawer in his desk with a key and took out a paper bag with multicoloured balloons printed on it and handed it over.

‘These are for you. They’re not sweeties.’

‘Thank you, Jock. Much obliged.’

‘Keep them in an airtight jar or tin, just to be on the safe side. Or in the refrigerator, even better.’

‘Aye aye, sir.’

He picked up a book from a side table and I saw that it was called Marching on Germany by one Brigadier Muir McCarty.

‘There’s a fair bit about Sholto in here,’ he said, flicking through the pages.

‘I don’t want to read about Sholto.’ Jock and Sholto had known each other as schoolboys.

‘All very complimentary,’ he said.

‘People were always complimentary about Sholto.’

He walked me through the wide hall towards a door glowing with painted glass — St Michael slaying a writhing dragon. Jock hung his good paintings in the hall and there was a small immaculate Cadell by the mirrored coat and hatstand that I always paused by. A meal-white Hebridean beach in sunshine, blue-silvered islands beyond.

‘Maybe I’ll drive out to Barrandale and see you,’ he said, adjusting the painting’s hang by a micro-inch. ‘I miss the islands.’

‘Mi casa es su casa.’

‘Gracias, señora. Heading back?’

‘I’ve a lunch appointment in town.’

‘Are you still smoking?’ Jock asked. ‘By the by.’

‘Yes. Are you?’

‘I am. Probably the only doctor in the West of Scotland who does.’

‘Should I stop? Try to stop?’

‘Perhaps. No. Stop when I stop.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘True.’

We kissed goodbye. I left the car in his wide driveway and caught a bus into the city. I stepped off it at Queen Street and walked past a strange-looking pub called the Muscular Arms as I headed for Rogano’s on Royal Exchange Square.

The bar was busy. I eased through noisy young men in dark suits swigging gin and tonics — Glasgow lawyers and businessmen — and turned right into the restaurant, into its pale-walled art-deco splendour, an area altogether more hushed, with a soothing susurrus of muttered conversations and the chime of silverware on crockery.

‘Good afternoon, I’m meeting Madame Pontecorvo,’ I said to the maître d’.

Dido was sitting at a corner in the back reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. She was growing plump, much plumper than when I’d last seen her. Her mass of ink-black hair was swept back from her forehead and coiffed into a great smooth shellacked wave, like some dark calabash settled above her brow. Her dress was silk, a shining tea-rose pink, and she had three ropes of pearls round her soft creased neck. She was giving a recital that evening at the City Halls, still making lots of money.

We kissed and she ordered champagne.

‘I like your hair short like that,’ she said. ‘Very modern.’

‘Thank you, darling.’ I opened the menu.

‘Mind you, you do look a bit like a lesbian, though. And you should wear more make-up.’

‘It’s convenient. Practical,’ I said. ‘And anyway I don’t really care how I look to other people, these days.’

‘No! I won’t hear that. That’s fatal. Don’t neglect yourself, Amory — it’s a slippery slope.’ She drew on her cigarette, studying me, checking out my clothes, my fingernails.

‘Talking of lesbians. .’ she said, her old wicked smile flashing.

‘Yes?’

‘Have you ever been with one?’

‘I’ve been kissed by one but that’s as far as I went.’

‘No! Really?’ She was interested, now. ‘She must have thought you’d respond. Sensed something in you, you know, a fellow sister, as it were. When did this happen?’

‘Berlin, before the war.’

‘I remember. All your filthy pictures.’

‘Maybe we’ve all got a bit of lesbian in us.’

‘Not me, darling.’ She sipped at her champagne. ‘I’m a hundred and ten per cent hetero.’ She tilted her head, thinking, and lowered her voice, leaning forward. ‘Now we’re talking about sex — the other night, when I couldn’t sleep, I started counting all the men I’d known.’

‘Known?’

‘In the biblical sense, I mean. All the men I’d had a fling with, including husbands. Do you know how many I came up with? What the total was? Guess.’

‘A couple of dozen?’

‘Fifty-three.’

I looked at my little sister. There was no answer to that.

‘I’ll start with the whitebait,’ I said. ‘Then the turbot.’

That evening, back at the cottage, I took Flam down to the small bay and sat on a rock, smoking a cigarette as he ran around the beach sniffing at stranded jellyfish and chasing gulls, and I looked out at the scatter of rocky islets in the bay and the Atlantic beyond. Fifty-three men, I thought to myself. My God. I counted up the men I had ‘known’, in the biblical sense. One, two, three, four, five. The fingers of one hand. Dido would have been very underwhelmed.

Flam ran up to me and I grabbed his muzzle and gave his head a shake, setting his tail beating.

‘Silly old dog,’ I said out loud and stood and stretched. I felt well, as I always did after a visit to Jock Edie. Surely there was nothing wrong with me — just age, time passing, the body winding down, creaking and groaning a bit. . I watched the evening sunlight drain into silty orange out on the horizon to the west as the night gathered. Next stop America, I thought. New day dawning there.

I wandered homewards thinking back to Cleveland Finzi and how excited I’d been by his job offer, completely unexpected. New York City; $200 a month; $2,400 a year — almost £500. I’d said yes, virtually instantly, without further thought. However, it took me much longer to sort out the necessary documentation and settle my affairs as I wound down my London life. But in the early autumn of 1932 I booked passage on the SS Arandora Star leaving Liverpool, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York.

Initially, I stayed in a ‘Women Only’ hotel on 3rd Avenue and 66th Street until I’d settled into my job and come to terms with this extraordinary new city I found myself in. I was a rookie staff photographer of Global-Photo-Watch and I took photographs of anything that the picture editor, Phil Adler, told me to. Global-Photo-Watch was one of those heavily illustrated monthly magazines that began to proliferate then: Life, Click, Look, Pic, Photoplay and many more. GPW, as everyone called it, accentuated its internationalism. ‘Our Watch on the World!’ was its stentorious slogan.

From time to time, in the course of working in the East 44th Street offices, I’d bump into Cleveland Finzi — or Cleve, as he was familiarly known — and we’d exchange a few words. He was pleased to see me, had I found a place to stay? Was the work interesting enough? We would chat and separate and I would wonder how long it would take him, when and how.

One evening three months after I’d arrived he was waiting in the marbled lobby as I left a meeting. He had promised me a dinner when I came to New York, hadn’t he? Was I free tonight, by any chance?

*

Cleve stood naked at the window looking out at the yard through a thin gap in the muslin curtains.

‘What kind of tree is that?’ he asked without looking round. ‘I see them everywhere in the Village.’

‘It’s an ailanthus. Commonly called “tree of heaven”.’ I liked this rear view of Cleve: the V of his torso, the deep cleft in his small buttocks, his long thighs. ‘If you stand there much longer, however, Mrs Cisneros will have a heart attack.’ Mrs Cisneros lived across the yard, a widow. I sat up in bed, letting the sheet fall from my breasts and reached for my pack of Pall Malls on the bedside table.

Cleve turned and I saw that his penis was thickening, springy. His penis was smaller than Lockwood’s, though thicker and more heavy-headed; the glans seemed distinctly bigger (no foreskin, of course) — clearly shaped. It was like a medieval soldier’s helmet, called a sallet — I once told him, to his surprise — worn most commonly by archers. He was always puzzled by my pieces of arcane knowledge, my need to know the exact names of things. It seemed vaguely to annoy him, in the same way as it had my mother. He leant back against the window frame, and crossed his arms.

‘How do you know about that? About the goddam tree?’

‘I told you, I like to know the names of things. I don’t just want it to be some anonymous “tree” in my backyard. I want to know what it’s called. Someone took the trouble to differentiate, name and classify that tree. A “tree” doesn’t do it justice.’ I lit my cigarette. Cleve was enjoying standing there, looking at me, listening to me, candidly displaying his potency. I crossed my legs under the sheet and rested my elbows on my knees, inclining my back so that my breasts hung forward, free. Lockwood liked me to do that — it always stirred him. Cleve’s eyes moved here and there.

‘The ailanthus is from China, originally,’ I said, goading him with more arcana. ‘It thrives in poor soil with little care. Like me.’

‘Ah. Hard-done-by girl.’ He came over to the bed. I gripped him.

‘Hungry?’ he asked.

‘I told you; I thrive in poor soil.’

Cleve left at six, saying he had to be sure he was back in Connecticut for dinner, home with his family, I knew, his wife, Frances, and his two young sons, Harry and Link. After he’d gone I made another gin cocktail and picked up my book. However, I felt my new-year melancholia returning. Stop it, I told myself, buck up: I was having a passionate affair with a fascinating man and I was earning my living, making more money than I’d done in my life, as a professional photographer in New York City — what was so depressing about that? But I was Cleveland Finzi’s mistress, the other, sour voice in my head told me; I was only with him when it was safe and secret. And it was true — when he was with me everything was grand; when he wasn’t, life returned to the duller, demeaning business of waiting until the coast was clear and no one would suspect.

I had related as much to him — the plaint of every secret lover since adultery began — and he said he understood, but, for various reasons, he had to be very careful, very careful indeed. What could I say? I had entered the ‘deal’ knowingly. But sometimes two weeks or more would go by before he could snatch a night or an afternoon with me. I had been in New York for well over a year now; Cleve and I had been lovers for slightly less. I was happier than I had ever been and at the same time more discontented. My world was awry — maybe you just weren’t cut out to be a mistress, my sour voice whispered at me.

‘Happy 1934,’ Phil Adler hailed me as I came into his office. He was a lean young man in his early thirties with rimless spectacles and short wiry hair. We argued a lot, good-naturedly, principally about photography.

‘You’re from Europe,’ he said, waving me into a chair opposite him.

‘So I’m told,’ I said, sitting down.

‘Ever heard of a French writer called. .’ He looked at his notes in front of him. ‘Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau?’

‘No.’

‘Well you’re going to take his photograph this afternoon.’

Charbonneau was a mid-ranking diplomat at the French consulate — Phil told me, reading from his notes — who also wrote novels. His third novel, Le trac, had just been published in the US as Stage Fright (Steiner & Lamm) and had been very well received with excellent reviews in The Times, the Post, the New Masses, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly — its little splash had attracted GPW’s attention.

‘Et cetera, et cetera. Culture can be news too,’ Phil said feigning a yawn. ‘You know: foreign literary star, strong light and shade, cigarette poised near face, backlit smoke, Gallic charm.’

‘I think I can manage it.’

This Charbonneau lived in a serviced apartment off Columbus Circle. He was a solid chunky mess of a man with rumpled clothes — there were food stains on his tie — and a tousled mass of curly dark hair. He had a very heavy beard, his jaws and chin dark with incipient stubble, and a big nose and full lips. There was really nothing attractive about him at all but, mystifyingly, he gave off an aura of facetious charm as if everything he saw around him — including the people he encountered — amused him in some secret way. He spoke good English with a strong French accent.

He looked at me in surprise when he opened the door. ‘Who are you?’ he said.

I held up my camera. ‘The photographer.’

He smiled. ‘I was expecting a man. A mister photographer.’

‘Well, I am not Mister Photographer.’

‘But you are meant to come tomorrow.’

‘But I am here today.’

He let me in and hurried off to put on a clean tie, at my suggestion. His sitting room had no bookshelves but was full of books stacked in random piles like bulky stalagmites growing towards the ceiling. I pulled down the blind, rigged my spotlight at his work table and took the standard portrait shot in strong chiaroscuro but with no smoking cigarette — rookie or not, even I had my standards — but with chin propped in palm, index finger extended to cheekbone. It was all over in half an hour. We chatted about Berlin, where he had recently been posted.

‘What do you think about the new chancellor?’ I asked.

‘Crazy, no? Un fou.’

I said I hadn’t paid much attention but had seen enough Nazis in the few weeks I was in Berlin to last me a lifetime.

As we nattered on, Charbonneau offered me one of his yellow French cigarettes. I declined and he lit my Pall Mall. We stood and smoked for a moment or two, then he said, ‘Now I suppose you expect me to ask you for dinner.’

I showed him my engagement ring. It was Cleve’s idea for me to wear it — bought in a dime-store. The story was that I was engaged to a young man in England; it pre-empted many problems at work with my unmarried male colleagues and explained my absences at parties and after-work get-togethers. It worked — Charbonneau held up his hands in mock apology.

‘I never saw it. I yield to my rival.’

‘On second thoughts — thank you very much. I accept.’

‘Second thoughts — don’t you find they’re often the best ones?’

What made me accept Charbonneau’s invitation? I think it was a product of my lurking discontent. Why should I go home to Washington Square South for another lonely night with my gin, my radio and my book? I found Charbonneau amusing and suspected he’d be good company — I owed it to myself.

Enthused, Charbonneau suggested the Savoy-Plaza Hotel at seven o’clock. I caught a cab up to Central Park South and met him in the lobby. He took pernickety care over the choice of wine and ordered a steak so rare it was effectively raw, to my eyes. He asked me lots of questions about myself — where was I born, who were my parents — and, enjoying this gentle interrogation, and the second bottle of wine, I found myself opening up to him, telling him the story of the Grösze and Greene fiasco and, indirectly (I wasn’t wearing my engagement ring), that I was having something of an affair here in New York.

‘And what about your poor fiancé in England?’

‘Well, he’s more of a friend than a fiancé. It’s a useful ruse.’

We were at the end of the meal. Charbonneau was on his second brandy and second coffee. I was sipping at a glass of port.

‘Enough about me,’ I said, fishing in my bag for my cigarettes. ‘Tell me about your novel.’

He shrugged. ‘It’s just a little thing. A hundred and thirty pages. I wrote it seven, no, eight years ago but now they’ve published it in English so I have to remember what I wrote. . It’s about a man who has stage fright — le trac, we call it — but stage fright whenever he has to make love.’

‘He’s impotent.’

‘No, no. Have you ever had stage fright? It’s a terrible, physical sensation. You can still go on stage, you can still perform but, I assure you, le trac véritable. .’ He gestured with his cigarette, making a tightening spiral. ‘It seizes your entire being.’

‘Is it an autobiographical novel, then?’

He laughed, loudly enough for nearby diners to turn and stare.

‘I think you are a very bad young woman, Miss Clay. Méchante. No, I’ve had stage fright but only in the theatre. When I was very young.’

‘That’s a relief,’ I said.

He stared at me and I saw ash fall carelessly from his cigarette on to his sleeve. He didn’t bother to brush it away.

‘Actually, I’m taking a bit of a holiday from sex,’ he said. ‘Personally speaking.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. I’m a bit bored with the whole brouhaha, what do you say? The surrounding nonsense.’

‘I see.’

‘Yes. These days I’d rather have a conversation with an interesting and beautiful young woman’ — he leant forward and whispered — ‘than fuck her.’

It was a test, of course — but Charbonneau could have had no idea that I’d worked with the foul-mouthed Greville Reade-Hill and so I listened unmoved and unperturbed.

‘It’s not an either-or, you know,’ I said, then leant forward and whispered to him myself. ‘You can still have a conversation with the people you fuck.’

He sat back in his chair, an uncertain smile on his face. I think that, for a very rare moment in his life, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau found himself at a loss for words. He said nothing, just pointed his finger at me and wagged it in amused admonishment.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

And so my New York, American life progressed in its alternating, vaguely satisfying, vaguely unsatisfying, way. I saw Cleve whenever he could free himself from his wife and family and, as compensation when he wasn’t free, I began to have a regular dinner date with Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau — once a week or so.

I remember a trip Cleve and I made to California for the opening of the Santa Rosa Bridge in Sonoma — one of the first big New Deal projects to be completed — and we managed to spend a whole four days together, the longest consecutive time we’d ever passed in each other’s company. We took a Boeing Air Transport 247 across country, my second flight in an aeroplane, and then my third flight back home to New York. Perhaps because I was with Cleve, sitting beside me, and those four days were bracketed by long cross-country flights with many take-offs and landings, I found I loved flying — despite the rocking turbulence we encountered. I was never alarmed or fearful though I suppose I might have had cause to be so: instead I was intoxicated by the improbability of being in these shiny metal machines powering themselves into the air, looking down on the land we soared over, slicing through clouds into the luminous blue above.

I remember the first night Cleve and I made love. I knew it was bound to happen — it was why I had come to America, after all, though I have to admit that the money was an extra inducement. He drove us north-east out of Manhattan to Westchester County to a roadhouse on Highway 9 called the Demarest Motor Lodge. We ate an indifferent meal but we hadn’t come all this way for the food. There were eight double rooms with attached bathrooms on the floor above.

Cleve said: ‘I could drive you home but I took the precaution of booking a couple of rooms here, just in case we were too tired.’

I said: ‘Now you mention it I am feeling a bit too tired to go back to Manhattan. What a good idea.’

And so we went upstairs to our rooms. Five minutes later Cleve knocked softly on my door.

I remember we made love twice that night, and then once again in the morning. Cleve was adamant that he should wear a contraceptive: he had come prepared. And I remember, on the drive back to Manhattan, the almost drug-like mood of happiness I was in. I hunched over on the bench seat and leant up against Cleve as he drove, feeling his warmth, my hand on his thigh. I looked through the windscreen at the commuter traffic heading back into Manhattan idly noting details: the colours of the cars — mushroom, mouse-grey, glossy black, dull crimson — and the sky with great rafters or bars of cloud set against the blue, almost as if measured and deliberately spaced. I looked with unknowing, innocent eyes, it seemed to me and, as I touched my throat, I felt my skin was hypersensitive, tingling, frictively alive, because, I assumed, of the feeling of bliss inside me: it was almost as if I were coming down with flu.

I remember Phil Adler asking me if I was all right when I came into the office. Why do you ask? You just seem different, as if you’re not quite here, he said. You take about three seconds to answer my questions. Oh. Then I said I wondered if maybe I was coming down with flu. He sent me to photograph the Brooklyn Bridge for the third time. There were a lot of repairs going on and I strayed from my brief. It was one of my first ‘abstract’, compositional photographs. Maybe I was inspired. Phil said it was unusable.

2. THE HOTEL LAFAYETTE

MY DINNERS WITH CHARBONNEAU took on a pattern. Missing Paris, he always tried to seek out a French restaurant and, however well we dined there, he always claimed to be vehemently disappointed; that what had been presented was a travesty of French cooking, an American fiasco. I often contradicted him just to set his indignation raging — to my British palate everything seemed delicious. He was very analytical about the food he ate — even the bread rolls and the salt claimed his gourmet’s focussed attention. Almost without trying I began to learn a lot about what one could demand from the necessities of eating: the meat, the fish, the vegetables that we masticated and swallowed to allow us to live. But Charbonneau gave the process so much forensic thought it seemed almost unhealthy to me.

In search of the perfect French cuisine in New York we ate our way through the French restaurants that the Village had to offer: Le Champignon, Charles, Montparnasse — and numerous others. Pas brillant, was his mildest judgement.

One night we were in the Waldorf Cafeteria on 6th Avenue, where Charbonneau claimed to have tracked down an ‘acceptable’ Bordeaux, a 1924 Château Pavie. He was in a strange unruly mood and had already criticised me for my choice of lipstick — ‘It doesn’t suit you, it makes your mouth look thin’ — but I paid no attention. I was in an odd state of mind myself as I hadn’t seen Cleve for over three weeks — he was off on a GPW trip to Japan and China — and I wasn’t at my most tractable.

‘Don’t you live near here?’ Charbonneau asked, abruptly.

‘Washington Square. A few blocks away.’

‘Would you show me your apartment?’

‘Why do you want to see it?’

‘I’d just like to see where you live, Amory. To fill out the picture, you know.’

So we wandered home and I showed him in. He prowled around and looked at my photographs for a while and then stuck his nose in my bedroom. I was pouring him a Scotch and water when he came up behind me, cupped my breasts and nuzzled my neck.

‘What the hell are you doing, Charbonneau?’ I said, angrily, wheeling round and pushing him away.

‘I think it’s time we got to know each other better.’

‘So, your sexual vacation is over?’

‘Yes. It seems to be. Back to work.’

He tried to grab me again but I snatched up the ice pick from the drinks table and thrust it out at him.

‘French novelist stabbed to death by English photographer,’ I said. ‘Stop this now!’

‘But I want you, Amory. And I think you want me.’

‘Why are you trying to spoil a beautiful friendship like this?’

He sagged. ‘I don’t want a “beautiful friendship”,’ he said, pleadingly. ‘I want something much more complicated and interesting than that. More dangerous. Now, if we can just go to your bedroom—’

‘No, Charbonneau! Non, merci. I’m in love with somebody else.’

‘Love. What does that have to do with anything?’ He picked up his Scotch and sat down, muttering irritatedly to himself. Then he apologised. He was tired, out of sorts, I was a pretty girl, his libido was alive and kicking once more.

‘Don’t be angry with me, Amory.’

‘I’m not angry. Just don’t do this again.’

‘I promise, I promise.’

The now familiar paradoxical aspect about the Charbonneau ‘pass’ and its conspicuous failure was that we became firmer friends as a result. Something had come out into the open and had been pointedly shooed away — but the fact that it had appeared changed our future encounters for the better. We now talked with a frankness and abandon as if we had actually been lovers. The air had been cleared in every way.

Cleve came back from his trip to the Orient. ‘I just don’t understand that world,’ he said, in a strange, baffled voice. ‘I can see what’s happening in front of my eyes in Shanghai or Tokyo but can’t analyse it. I might as well be on Mars or Neptune.’

He paused and looked at me. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Much the better for seeing you, after all these years.’

We’d spent the afternoon making love in my apartment; now we were in the café of the Hotel Lafayette on University Place. I was drinking gin and orange, Cleve had an Americano. On the table next to us two old men were playing chequers. I lit a Pall Mall.

‘Did anything happen while I was away?’ he asked, aware of my mood — prickly, almost resentful.

‘Lots of things happened. The world didn’t stop turning, Cleve.’

‘You seem different, somehow.’

‘People can change in a couple of months. You haven’t seen me for a long while. Likewise.’

I looked down at the small lozenge-shaped tiles on the café floor: pale cream with a dirty magenta flower effect dotted regularly across the room. Cleve said something, softly.

‘What did you say? I didn’t catch it.’

‘I said, I love you, Amory. I want you to know that. That’s what being away from you has brought home to me.’

I looked at him and felt a huge weakness sweep through me as I stared at him across the table, this handsome, super-competent, confident man with his thin straight nose and thick wet-sand-coloured hair. I think I was a bit shocked because I never thought he would say it to me first. I was always certain, in my predictive fantasies about our life together, about this moment, that I would be the one to make the declaration and that he would respond. But no — he said it first.

‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘You know I feel the same about you.’

He reached across the table and took my hand.

‘When I saw you that night — at your exhibition in that strange gallery — I knew something had happened to me.’

I felt emboldened. ‘And here we are,’ I said, ‘over two years later. Something happened to you, then — but something has to happen to us, now, Cleve, don’t you see?’ I said with deliberate emphasis.

‘I know,’ he said, frowning suddenly. ‘I know. I’ve not been fair.’ He signalled for another drink. ‘I want you to come to the house. I want you to meet Frances.’

‘Are you completely out of your—’

‘It’s her birthday next week. We’re having a big party. There’ll be a hundred people there. You just need to see for yourself. Meet her.’

‘Why do I feel a horrible sense of foreboding?’

‘If you come — everything will be a thousand times better. You’ll see.’ He smiled his wide smile, not showing his teeth. ‘We’re going to be together, Amory. Always. I can’t let you go.’

Who can tell about human instincts? Something fanciful in me wondered if Charbonneau’s sexual interest in me had subtly changed my comportment in the way I reacted to Cleve. It was rutting season and there was another bull-male wandering around the neighbourhood. I do believe that our Stone Age natures still function strongly in certain situations — particularly to do with sex and mutual attraction — and are felt at gut level, deep beneath the skin, far from the brain. Anyway, however I had played it, I felt stupidly happy remembering his last words: we’re going to be together, Amory. Always. I can’t let you go.

Charbonneau was being at his most provocative the next time we dined — at a very bad Midtown restaurant called P’tit Paris. As we consulted the menu he spent ten minutes denigrating the apostrophe.

‘Moody, petulant, selfish, spoilt,’ I said.

‘What’s that?’

‘You. I wish I had my camera,’ I said, trying to make him stop moaning. ‘I’d take a great photograph: “Angry Frenchman”.’

He wasn’t amused.

‘I’ve seen your photographs,’ he said.

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘You think you’re an artist. I read your titles: “The boy with the ping-pong bat”, “The boy, running”.

‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘I think I’m a photographer, not an artist. I give my pictures titles so I can remember them — not to make them seem pretentious. But there are great artists who are photographers.’ I began to name them. ‘Stieglitz, Adams, Kertész, August Sander—’

‘It’s not an art,’ he said, interrupting me, aggressively. ‘You point your machine. Click. It’s a mechanism.’ He took his fountain pen from his jacket pocket and proffered it to me. ‘Here’s my pen.’ He turned the menu over. ‘Here’s a piece of blank paper. Draw an “Angry Frenchman” and then we’ll discuss if it’s art or not.’

I wasn’t going to enter this argument on his terms.

‘But you have to admit there are great photographs,’ I said.

‘All right. . There are memorable photographs. Remarkable photographs.’

‘So, what makes them memorable or remarkable? What criteria do you use to judge them? To make that decision?’

‘I don’t think about it. I just know. Instinct.’

‘Then maybe you should think about it. You judge a great photo in the same way you judge a great painting or a film or a play or a novel or a statue. It’s art, mon ami.’

‘Shall we get out of this shithole P’tit Paris and have a proper drink somewhere?’

‘I’ve got to have an early night,’ I said. ‘I’m going to a birthday party in Connecticut.’

Charbonneau looked at me shrewdly. I had told him too much in the past.

‘Ah. The American lover. Going to meet the wife and kids?’

‘Going to change my life.’

3. THE WATERSHED

I WAS GIVEN A lift up to New Hastings, Connecticut, by Phil Adler and his wife, Irene. They picked me up outside Grand Central Station in their Studebaker station wagon — with its wooden side panels it was like a travelling garden shed, it seemed to me — but we whizzed on up to Connecticut in fast time. Quite a few of the GPW staff had been invited, they told me. It was cool drizzly weather, not at all like late spring, and I was sitting wrapped up in the back of their car in my camel coat, and glad of it.

‘Have you been to their house before?’ I asked.

‘I have,’ Phil said. ‘Sometimes Cleve has a big Labor Day party.’

‘I haven’t,’ Irene chipped in. ‘Usually it’s no wives.’

‘So what’s different about today?’ I said.

‘I believe it’s her fortieth,’ Phil said.

‘Frances?’

‘The same.’

‘So, she’s older than Cleve.’

‘You’re on fire today, Amory,’ Phil said.

‘No, I mean. . I hadn’t thought, realised. .’ My brain was suddenly busy. ‘What’s she like, Frances?’

‘Beautiful, sophisticated. .’

‘Rich?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Irene said with feeling.

‘Clever?’

‘Bryn Mawr.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘beautiful, sophisticated, rich, clever.’ Somehow I felt Greville would have done better. I had no clear picture in my head about Frances Finzi so I told Phil and Irene about Greville’s Game — how anyone could be summed up in four well-chosen adjectives.

‘That’s very English,’ Irene said. ‘Very.’

‘Have you met Frances?’ I asked her.

‘Once. Years ago.’

‘Fine. So give me Frances Finzi in four adjectives.’

She thought. ‘Cold, patronising, elegant, plutocratic.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Phil said. ‘She can’t help inheriting money. I’d say “lucky”.’ He thought a second. ‘Maybe that’s not appropriate.’

‘Her father is Albert Moss,’ Irene explained. ‘Moss, Walter & Co. The investment bank? It’s part of the picture. I’m sorry. She’s very plutocratic in her particular way. Wait till you see the house.’

I was beginning to warm to Irene, a small sharp-faced woman with intelligent, knowing eyes.

‘I think the “plutocratic” adjective is inappropriate,’ Phil said. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Phil said, loyally,’ Irene added. ‘Precisely.’

The Finzi house in New Hastings was a suitably impressive red-brick Colonial Revival mansion set in abundant gardens. It had a shallow-hipped roof with a wide overhang. There was a centred gable with an odd rounded porch with pillars and all the ground-floor windows had broken pediments. Ever so slightly over-decorated, I judged — the rounded porch looked like a bad afterthought, spoiling the clean lines.

We were directed by men in red slickers to park on a terraced lower lawn in front of the house and then more of these men, with umbrellas aloft (it was drizzling, now) walked us up brick pathways to the house itself and along its side to a vast rear lawn where the party was taking place.

On this main garden lawn behind the house was a bedecked marquee. A jazz band played at one end and toqued chefs dispensed hot food from chafing dishes at the other. Waiters and waitresses patrolled with jugs of fruit cocktail, alcoholic or non-.

For all the manifest expense on display the mood was informal. Men were in sports clothes, some without ties. Children ran around pursued by nurses and nannies. Effortless, moneyed ease was the subtext but the main message was clear: enjoy yourselves, eat and drink, wander around the capacious grounds — above all, have fun.

I felt overdressed in a black sequinned day-frock with a cape collar and co-respondent black and white shoes with a low heel, and so decided to keep my coat on. Anyway, it was freezing. But it wasn’t the weather that was making me edgy and jumpy — it was the anticipation. I lost Phil and Irene as soon as I decently could and went in search of Cleve.

I found him on the back terrace — a long platform porch with a balustrade — in the company of four other men. Cleve was smoking a cigar and was wearing a pale blue seersucker suit, a mauve tie and cream canvas shoes. I walked past this group twice so he could see me and then found a corner at the far end of the terrace and snapped him with my little Voigtländer that I was carrying in my pocket. I had been seized with the perverse desire to take a photograph of the legendary Frances and so had brought the camera along with me, on the off-chance. Not a good idea, I now thought, a little daunted by the scale and panache of the Finzi home. I waited.

Cleve was with me two minutes later. We shook hands. His eyes, it seemed to me, were full of feeling, almost tearful.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘I was convinced you wouldn’t.’

‘I couldn’t not come—’

‘It means a lot to me, Amory.’

‘I hope. .’ I began and then couldn’t recall what I was hoping for.

‘Come and meet Frances.’

I put my Voigtländer down with my bag on a wrought-iron table and followed Cleve into the house, trying, and failing, to drive all apprehension from my mind.

Inside it was airy and tasteful, if a little over-furnished. Not an empty corner to be seen — occasional tables and grouped chairs, planters with ferns and palms. It was painted in pastel colours throughout and the vast arrangements of flowers on all available surfaces created a slightly oppressive sense of crowded elegance.

As we crossed the chequerboard marble hall — beige and brown — two little boys ran up to him shouting ‘Papa! Papa!’ They were made to stand still and face me.

‘This is Harry and this is Lincoln,’ Cleve said, introducing his sons to me (six and four, I guessed, or seven and five — I wasn’t good with children’s ages).

I shook their proffered hands.

‘Hello, I’m Amory.’ They also said hello, politely, dutifully, absolutely incurious. One dark, one fair: plain little boys with short identical hairstyles and round faces — in neither of them could I see a trace of Cleve.

‘You boys run along, now,’ Cleve said. ‘Amory’s going to see Mumsie.’

The boys ran off through the hall and Cleve led me to a spacious long drawing room with four bay windows overlooking the rear lawn. There was a baby grand piano, half a dozen soft sofas and a stacked drinks table. Over the fireplace was an eight-foot swagger portrait of a woman from the last century in a silk ballgown draped with marmoset skins.

Cleve raised his voice. ‘Frances? Are you there?’ He turned to me. ‘Will you have a drink?’

‘I certainly will, my darling. Brandy and soda. A big one.’ I had to remind myself that this man was my lover, that we had been naked in bed with each other, days previously. The fact that I was about to meet ‘Mumsie’ didn’t change those facts one iota.

Cleve busied himself at the drinks table and I turned to see a woman in an apricot-coloured silk organza tea gown steer herself through double doors at the far end of the room in a wheelchair. She rolled silently towards me across the parquet.

Cleve handed me my brandy and soda, smiling.

‘Amory Clay, let me introduce you to Frances Moss Finzi.’

We shook hands, smiling furiously. I noticed she was wearing the finest grey suede gloves. I thought I was touching skin. Despite my smile my mind was a disaster area: props falling, the roof collapsing, fires flaring, men screaming, waves of water breaking.

‘Hello,’ Frances Moss Finzi said in a deep smoky voice. ‘How charming to meet you.’

‘Amory’s our new star photographer from England.’

‘Congratulations. I’d like a cigarette, Cleve.’

A figured brass box was found, proffered, cigarette selected, lit. I said no thank you, gulping at my potent brandy. She had an unusual, arresting face, Frances. Pale hooded blue eyes, a high forehead, a mannish face — her looks compromised by a poor buckled perm of her auburn hair, crimped over her ears. She could have afforded better, in my opinion.

‘Happy birthday,’ I said, raising my glass.

‘A watershed,’ she smiled away the compliment. ‘Nobody’s going to be spared. That’s one consolation.’

Was that for my benefit, I wondered? In the event we talked away, politely. How was I finding New York after London? Had I a decent apartment? How she adored the Village. Photography was the democratic art form of our age. She loved taking photographs, herself. Snap, snap, snap.

‘Why don’t you wheel me out into the world, Cleve. And fetch me a shawl. I’ll brave the elements.’

I followed them out on to the terrace and then darted away, making my temporary farewells, and raced for the marquee where I gulped down a glass of the alcoholic fruit punch and smoked a cigarette.

Phil and Irene ambled by.

‘Hey, there’s Amory. Thought we’d lost you. Having fun?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me, Phil?’

‘Tell you what?’

‘That Frances was in a fu—. In a flipping wheelchair.’

‘I thought you knew. Everyone knows.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘It’s like Roosevelt has callipers. Our esteemed president is a cripple. Everyone knows, nobody bothers to mention it.’

‘Well, it was a bit of a shock. What happened to her?’

‘Car smash,’ Irene said. ‘Just after the little one was born.’

‘Lincoln,’ Phil said. ‘No. Harry. Lincoln? What’s the youngest called?’

‘Lincoln. There was a crash,’ Irene continued. ‘Awful. And she’s been in a wheelchair ever since. With the two little boys. . Very sad.’

I was calculating. If Lincoln was four or five she’d been in a wheelchair for many years, now. I looked round, distractedly, and saw Cleve signalling to me from an opening at the end of the marquee.

‘I’ll be right back,’ I said and headed off.

Cleve and I wandered out into the garden and down a wide flight of steps towards an ornamental lake fringed with bullrushes and teazles. A dozen geese cruised about on the water. There was a boathouse encrusted with gingerbread moulding with a jetty and an extravagantly prowed giant canoe moored to it.

‘You somehow forgot to tell me your wife was confined to a wheelchair,’ I said, managing to keep my voice calm.

‘I don’t even think about it. It’s been years now.’

‘Well, it was a bit of a shock to me. To put it very mildly.’

He looked at me. ‘You know how I feel about you, Amory. It doesn’t change anything.’

‘I’m sorry, but I think it does.’

‘I needed you to see for yourself.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I can’t leave her, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

‘I was driving the car when we had the accident. We’d both been drinking but it wasn’t my fault. Some kid in his dad’s Buick swiped us and we rolled down an embankment. I had a bruised elbow. Frances broke her spine — became paraplegic.’

‘My God. How awful.’

We stood silent by the lake looking at its choppy, slatey waters. I hugged myself. I had an overwhelming urge to leave.

‘That’s why I wanted you to meet her,’ he said in his entirely reasonable way, ‘so you could understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘What we will have. You and me.’

‘You’ve lost me. What’re you talking about? What do we have? You and me.’

‘Everything. Everything — short of marriage. But, all the same, a marriage of two people, of two minds, in everything but its judicial formalities.’ He faced me. ‘I want to kiss you. To hold you. These are just words. I want you to feel the love I have for you. I love you, Amory. I need you to be part of my life.’

‘I need to think. .’ I thought I might faint, then, and topple into the cold lake. I stepped back. ‘Think about it all. Take it in.’

I turned and walked away without looking round. I was remembering something my father used to say. ‘Inertia is a very underrated state of mind,’ he once told me. ‘If you feel you have to make a decision then decide not to make a decision. Let time pass. Do nothing.’ Which was what I decided to do. I returned to the terrace, picked up my bag and my camera and set off in search of Phil Adler.

Phil said he and Irene weren’t ready to leave but he would drive me to the station at New Hastings where I could catch a train back to the city. He wandered off to find his car while I mooched about the hall and the big drawing room, trying to keep my brain inert and ignore the clamouring contradictions that were queuing up to be heard. As I prowled around, distracting myself, I saw a small, framed photograph amongst a clutch of others on a side table. It was an impromptu photo of Cleve and Frances, not looking at the camera, in near profile, both of them in casual clothes and taken early in their marriage, I imagined, long before the accident. I picked up the frame — tortoiseshell — and swung the little brass clips free on the back. I pocketed the photo and slid the frame into a bureau drawer. I had no idea why I’d done this or what had prompted me — it was a strange kind of trophy, I supposed, something that I had stolen and could keep and that would remind me of this cold afternoon in Connecticut: a symbol of something that had ended or was about to end.

I strolled back into the hall and saw Frances saying goodbye to a couple. I froze but she turned at that moment and saw me. She wheeled her chair round and propelled herself towards me, smiling her empty hostess smile.

‘You’re not leaving already, are you?’

‘I’m going back to England tomorrow,’ I lied, easily. ‘Still a lot of packing to do.’

She looked up at me from her chair — a fine ebony seat and bleached woven strand-cane, as elegant a wheelchair as money could buy, I thought — though she might as well have been looking down from some elevated throne, such was the regal hauteur and condescension in her manner.

‘Cleve is sleeping with you, isn’t he?’

‘Don’t be absurd! Really, what a—’

‘Of course he is. I can always tell which ones are his girls.’

‘I refuse to dignify your disgraceful accusation by any kind of—’

‘You’re not the first since my accident, Miss Clay. You may be the fourth or fifth — I don’t keep a precise count. One thing I’m sure of, though: you won’t be the last.’

She wheeled herself away but not before delivering a little pitying smile at me. I watched her leave the hall. Smug, frightened, powerful, threatened. Phil Adler ducked his head round the front door. Ready to go?

Cleveland and Frances Finzi, about 1929, before the accident. The photo that I stole.

4. SOUTH OF THE BORDER

I COULDN’T SEE CLEVE after the Connecticut Incident, as I referred to it. I told the office I’d been diagnosed with a bad case of pleurisy and would be confined to bed for at least a week.

Of course, Cleve telephoned and I didn’t answer. And then he came down to Washington Square, buzzed the buzzer, somehow gained admittance, beat on the door and, when I didn’t respond, slipped a note under it saying ‘I’ve been phoning. We have to speak. Everything is fine. I love you, C.’

I wondered what world he was living in where ‘everything is fine’? I didn’t blame or hate Cleve — just marvelled at his complacency.

One strange thing: I had the roll of film from my Voigtländer developed — I was keen to see the covert shot I’d taken of Cleve from the end of the terrace. It wasn’t very good but I found an image on the roll that I’d had nothing to do with. It was a long shot of me and Cleve standing by the lake, talking. Who had taken it? Someone had picked up my Voigtländer and had snapped that moment and preserved it. And, I thought, that someone had also wanted me to see it, or at least had known I’d see it one day. . Phil Adler? Irene? A stranger? No — I suspected the suede-gloved hand of Frances Moss Finzi. It unsettled me.

And then, in the perverse, unscripted way that life works, an upheaval arrived in the shape of a telegram from Hannelore Hahn, announcing that she and her travelling companion, Constanze Auger, were in New York for a few days before moving on south to Mexico. We had to see each other.

We met in the Brevoort Hotel on 5th Avenue. Hanna had changed: her hair was long, shoulder-length; she was wearing a cream crêpe de Chine dress with a red velvet collar. It was Constanze Auger who looked like the beautiful boy, the Bubi. Short blonde hair with the thick forelock hanging over one eye, face tanned, a shoulder-padded navy bolero jacket over apple-green Oxford bags, flat brogue shoes — but all this masculinity undercut by a pair of dangling jet earrings. She was very stern and tense as a person — even within a minute of meeting her I was aware of this: she didn’t have Hanna’s ease or sardonic sense of humour. For Constanze, it was as if her life was a serious mission of some sort, with an import only she could appreciate or understand and where ‘fun’ really had no part to play. She was striking-looking, slim, tall — heads turned in the Brevoort. She was a journalist, she said: she and Hanna were going to Mexico to write a book — text by Constanze, photographs by Hanna.

As I sat there listening to their plans I found myself envying them. This was a potent whiff of Berlin and its sense of everything being possible passing through Greenwich Village and rather showing the place and its denizens up. We ate, we drank, we smoked, we laughed — even Constanze, eventually. I could have been back in the Klosett-Club. The Brevoort, where I’d deliberately taken them, the Village’s beating intellectual heart, seemed sclerotic, timid, impoverished, provincial.

But maybe it was my own sour, damaged mood making me think like this. As I became more drunk, repeatedly ordering rounds of bourbon and ginger ale, my latest favourite tipple, I opened up to them and told them both about my affair with Cleve and the fiasco of the New Hastings weekend.

‘I tell you, Amory,’ Constanze said, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette, ‘he did it deliberately. He’s setting out — how do you say it? — marking the ground linings and the goalposts in a different configuration.’

‘The playing field. On his terms, you mean. Yes. .’

‘How could he take you to meet his crippled wife?’ Hanna said, seeming genuinely upset. ‘It’s disgusting.’

‘He just sees the world differently,’ I said, feeling I had to defend Cleve, somewhat. ‘Something that appears difficult, or a problem, to me, or to anyone, doesn’t seem like that to him. Everything has a way of being solved.’

‘It’s called arrogance, that attitude,’ Constanze said. ‘Or Solipsismus, yes? I live alone in my world. I have no problems. Who are you? What do you want?’

‘I don’t think he has any idea how I see him,’ I said, becoming confused, my mind blurry with drink, all coherence going. ‘I think he’d be outraged if I called him arrogant. Shocked.’

Hanna took my hand. ‘But you can’t stay here — in this situation. It’s impossible, Liebchen. Why don’t you come with us?’

‘To Mexico?’

‘Yes,’ Constanze added. ‘Bring your camera. Two photographers and a writer. We will make a wonderful book.’

In my mood of pleasant self-pitying inebriation, fuzzy and heroic with drink, in the company of these vibrant confident women, it seemed the perfect solution. I had money in the bank, it would be an adventure and, more significantly, it would show Cleve that I wasn’t prepared to fit in with his skewed, solipsistic vision of our future.

The next day I made an appointment to see him. We met in his office at the end of the afternoon. He was very calm.

‘How are you feeling, Amory?’

‘Much better, thank you. I needed the rest.’

‘Of course.’

He was sitting behind his wide desk, his jacket off, braided wire garters on his shirtsleeves, keeping his cuffs trim. I wished, not for the first time, that I had my camera, to capture Cleve like this, his eyes full of messages despite his compromised position as my boss — all his contradictions gathered in one room: casual, formal; editor-in-chief, adulterer; handsome man, inadequate husband; a power-broker who was about to find himself powerless in this instance.

‘I’m quitting,’ I said, deliberately using the American term.

‘No, you’re not. I won’t accept it.’

‘It’s not up to you. I’m going back to London.’

I think he was genuinely shocked — he hadn’t remotely expected this.

‘Don’t do anything rash,’ he said.

‘This is the opposite of rash. How I was living before was rash.’

‘Take a vacation. I’ll think of something. Don’t worry.’

‘I don’t need you to think of anything, Cleve, for once in your life,’ I said, feeling myself sag inside and my love for him well up, unbidden, unwanted. The man who could think of something. Who could think of anything. No.

I stood up and offered my hand, not confident of being able to speak without my voice breaking — and there was a secretary just outside the door. He took my hand in both of his and squeezed.

‘Amory. . I’ll work something out. This isn’t finished. Call me when you get back home. I’ll come over to London and see you.’ He mouthed, silently: I love you. I love you.

‘Goodbye, Cleve.’ I dropped my voice to a whisper to cover up the emotion. ‘I really did love you as well, for a while.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I lied to my sister, Dido. I did sleep with a woman, once. It was Constanze Auger in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1934, though I’m convinced now that the whole thing was set up by Hanna. We had arrived in Guadalajara and had found a small, clean hotel — with running, drinkable water, electric light — when all of a sudden Hanna had to go to the German consulate in Mexico City to sort out a problem with a residency permit, or some such bureaucratic muddle, and she’d be away for a couple of days.

So Constanze and I were left on our own in the hotel — the misnamed Emporia Paradiso — waiting for Hanna to return, thrust together. We were perfectly at ease in each other’s company — the roles we occupied on our adventure south of the border were clearly defined. However, as the first day wore on it seemed to me that I was just a listening post — Constanze talked constantly, passionately, about this book she and Hanna were going to create (with a little help from me, perhaps). It was a bit manic but I couldn’t recognise true mania, then.

The first night she knocked on my door and I thought, oh God, not more monologuing, but before I could switch on the light, she shucked off her cotton pyjamas and slipped into my bed. We kissed — her tongue touched mine. There is always an animal instinct of arousal that flares up instantly when two human beings, of whatever sex, find themselves naked and pressed up against each other in the confines of a bed in the darkness of a room. Whatever you may be thinking — no, not for me, thanks — the close proximity of a warm unclothed body activates different triggers. It may not last long, this surge of atavistic lust, but it makes itself known very quickly. Constanze and I kept on kissing. She nuzzled at my breasts, I ran my hands down her back and squeezed her buttocks. She was incredibly flat-chested, like an adolescent girl, little mounds with nipples, and to me it felt like being in bed with a tall lithe boy (one key component missing) and I felt that sex-urge. Perhaps something might have happened but suddenly she asked for the light to be switched on, pinched one of my American cigarettes and lay beside me, smoking, and began talking about her book and her new doubts that Hanna was the right photographer to fulfil the ambitions she had for it, as if the last few minutes had never taken place at all. As I lay there, bemused, all excitement draining from me — I had lit a cigarette myself — I wondered if I was being offered the job as attendant photographer to the Constanze caravan. Nein danke, Constanze. .

Then she said she felt incredibly tired, kissed me goodnight, put on her pyjamas and left. Hanna, returning the next day, asked me, as soon as we found ourselves alone, if Constanze and I had slept together. I said yes, sort of.

‘She’s very aggressive in that way, Constanze,’ Hanna said, thoughtfully, unperturbed. ‘Because we — you and me — have known each other in Berlin she wanted you — for herself.’

‘Well, she didn’t get me.’

Hanna then began to outline her plans. Mexico City was no longer on our route, it transpired — we were going to head down to Costa Rica instead and find somewhere to stay in San José. I let her chat on, half listening. Then Constanze joined us, kissing me affectionately, almost possessively, on the forehead — as an aunt would kiss a favourite niece — something she’d never done before. And I knew — at once — that I had to leave these two to their complex, unfathomable relationship and go back to London. There was nothing for me here any more — I was an adjunct, a toy, a spur for emotional skirmishes I had no desire to participate in. New York was over and the Hanna/Constanze voyage through Latin America was destined to end in some fraught crisis — I felt absolutely certain. It was time to discreetly make an exit; time to reposition my life on its old trajectory again.