Sweet Caress

1. BLACKSHIRTS

I WOKE VERY EARLY those summer mornings in London — the dawn light seemed to arrive around 5 a.m. and, once more, for the hundredth time, sleep despatched, I resolved to replace my filmy flower-print curtains with something more opaque and tenebrous. I used to toss about under the sheet, punch the pillows, and try to go back to sleep but never with any success. So — it was tumble out of bed, haul on dressing gown, plod into kitchen, set kettle on stove, light gas ring beneath it and let the day begin.

I was living in Chelsea now, on the King’s Road, in a small flat on the top floor of a building halfway between the town hall and Paultons Square. Beneath me was a maisonette rented by the writer Wellbeck Faraday and his American wife, May, a sculptress, and beneath them was a shop, an ironmonger’s. The Faradays went to bed very late, always well after midnight, and loudly so. When I woke early I was careful to pad about in slippers or bare feet — not to wake them — because I liked the Faradays. They liked me too, I think, as they were always inviting me to dinner to meet their friends but I kept my distance to a certain extent, pleading pressure of work. They led a complicated life (who doesn’t?). May Faraday had a studio in Fulham and while she was out all day Wellbeck would receive visitors — mainly female. May used to ask me, when we were alone, if anyone came while she was out but I always pleaded ignorance. They had sublet the top-floor flat to me so were effectively my landlords and I wanted them to cherish me as the ideal tenant.

I sat quietly in my small kitchen and made myself a pot of tea and watched the sun begin to irradiate the tops of the plane trees on Dovehouse Green. I ate a slightly stale Bath bun that I found in the bread bin and returned to my bedroom to choose my outfit for the day. The Global-Photo-Watch office was in Shoe Lane off Fleet Street where the staff consisted solely of me and my secretary, Faith Postings, but, as I was deemed and titled the ‘manager’, I felt — for some perverse reason — that I should dress for the role and always tried to look smart. As my mother would say — you never know whom you might meet; always best to step off on the front foot — and many other homilies. This morning I selected a two-piece beige jumper suit in a ripple knit with a plain chocolate-coloured blouse with a bow at the neck. Cleve had insisted I had expenses for my clothing and so I’d taken him at his word. My cupboard was bulging but I felt a bit of a fraud: this wasn’t truly me, this ‘manager’.

I was still thinking that as I walked the ten minutes down the King’s Road towards Sloane Square Underground and took the train to Blackfriars. It was another ten-minute walk from there to the office. I was in before Faith and brewed up. She arrived promptly at 8.30, feigning shock to see me already at my desk, cup of tea on the go.

Faith Postings was a large ungainly girl from Bermondsey in her early twenties and a tireless and diligent worker. I think she rather worshipped me — nothing I could do would pre-empt her occasional outbursts of compliments. I’m sure it was my former life in New York that impressed her — given that I wasn’t much older than her, anyway — and that I had a career as a photographer. Or it may even have been the new stylish clothes I wore. In any event, she was steadily eroding her South London accent to make it conform more with mine but I liked her for her dedication to me, and by extension to GPW. I was only six years older than her, yet I felt I occupied not so much a sisterly as a near-maternal role in her life, much to my vague disquiet. She would do anything Aunt Amory asked of her, I knew.

Faith made herself a cup of tea and sat down at her desk, by the door across the room from mine, and flicked through her jotting pad.

‘Oh yes. After you left last night, Mr Mosley’s office called: they’ll accept an interview on Thursday week.’

This was most intriguing news. ‘Where do they suggest? Black House? It’s not far from me.’ Oswald Mosley’s headquarters were in Chelsea, in a former teacher training college.

‘To be confirmed. They said a hotel would be more suitable, perhaps.’

‘Send a teleprint to New York.’

The pride and joy of the GPW office — our Delphic Oracle, as I called it — was the Creed Teleprinter Mark II that stood on its own table in a corner. From time to time it would click into life and spew out a thin tape of paper with, miraculously, alphanumeric lettering on it. I had no idea who actually sent the instructions written on the tape — surely not Cleve himself — as they were never signed, but the Creed Teleprinter’s messages organised the business of our daily round. ‘Photo reqd of Dk and Dchess of Yrk’; ‘Arrange intrvw with Irene Ravenal’; ‘Supply team selections of FA Cup finalists’. And so on.

Yesterday the injunction had come: ‘Intrvw with Oswald Mosley soonest.’ Faith duly made the telephone call to the British Union of Fascists. While our petition was being considered — we were an American magazine, it always impressed — another quirkier message arrived: ‘BUF to march through East End. Investigate. Need photogs rgnt.’

What march? I made a few telephone calls to some of the journalists we employed but none of them had heard of any proposed fascist march. No marches or rallies were planned at all, as far as I could discover. I wasn’t surprised as Mosley’s BUF had suffered humiliating public defeats over the disruption of their rallies at Leicester, Hull and Newcastle in the previous year. Membership was dropping; they hadn’t stood in last year’s general election, so somebody in New York seemed to know more than we did in London. Therefore, clearly we needed better intelligence. I looked across the room at Faith Postings, Bermondsey girl, as she lit a cigarette.

‘What is it, Miss Clay?’

‘Grab your hat and coat. You’re going to join the British Union of Fascists.’

At lunchtime, feeling hungry, Faith having been gone a couple of hours, I walked down Shoe Lane to Fleet Street looking for a pie shop or a chop house. In the end I went to a Sandy’s Sandwich Bar and bought a chicken and ham croquette and a glass of milk and sat at a counter in the window watching the bustle of Fleet Street and wondering what news Faith would bring back with her.

I drained my glass of milk and was rummaging in my bag for my cigarette case when I heard a voice say, ‘Amory? Amory Clay?’

I turned in my seat to see God standing there. Miss Ashe, immaculate in black silk and velvet with a fur collar and a buckled sailor hat set cockily to one side.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, seemingly genuinely pleased to see me. ‘I was thinking of you just last night. How uncanny.’ She pointed at the scrap of veil folded up on her hat’s brim. ‘I’m off to a funeral at St Bride’s. Always gives me a terrible hunger, a funeral — I’ve just had two pork pies and a bottle of ginger beer.’

I walked out with her on to Fleet Street, telling myself that she was simply an elegant elderly woman and one, moreover, who wielded no power over me any more. Relax — I was allowed to smoke a cigarette if I wanted to — and I paused and pointedly lit up.

‘What’re you up to these days?’ she asked, as I put my lighter and cigarette case away. ‘Married? Children?’

‘No to both,’ I said.

‘Don’t leave it too late,’ she said.

‘Like you?’ I saw the old cold gaze come into her eyes for a moment and I said, quickly, ‘Actually, I’m almost engaged.’

‘Almost congratulations, then. Are you in town shopping?’

‘I’m running an office here.’ I pointed to Shoe Lane. ‘Just up there. Global-Photo-Watch. It’s an American magazine. I’m the London manager.’

‘Really?’ Miss Ashe paused and looked at me anew.

‘I’m a professional photographer,’ I said with some pride, letting the information sink in.

‘Goodness me.’

‘I make five hundred pounds a year,’ I lied.

‘You must come down and talk to the school. But don’t tell them how much money you make or they’ll all want to be photographers.’ She smiled her thin smile. ‘And that would never do.’

I felt a fool, now, having blurted out a sum of money like that, but I wanted her to know that she had been wrong, that she was fallible, that she didn’t know her girls as well as she thought she did.

‘I’d love to come,’ I said.

‘Have you a card?’

I searched my bag and found one and handed it over. She studied it intently, as if it might be forged.

‘Well, well, Amory Clay,’ she said. ‘Global-Photo-Watch. I’ll write with a formal invitation. How is your dear father?’

‘Not much improved, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m so sorry. Casualties of war. .’ She turned and pointed to a middle-aged man selling matches in a doorway. ‘Some brave soldier, no doubt, reduced to that.’ She looked moved, for a second, then briskly said, ‘Goodbye, Amory, my dear, I’m very proud of you.’

With that she touched my cheek with her gloved hand and darted away across Fleet Street towards St Bride’s.

I stood there for a while feeling oddly shaken by the encounter and irritated with myself. God still had the power to destabilise me, I was annoyed to realise. I walked slowly back to the office wondering how I could have handled the meeting better but coming up with no good or coherent ideas.

Faith was back and showed me her membership card of the British Union of Fascists.

‘Well done,’ I said. ‘Any news?’

‘Turns out there’s lots of marches planned,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘Big ones — to celebrate the fourth anniversary.’

‘Fourth anniversary of what?’

‘The founding of the party. October ’32.’

‘Right. Of course. But the teleprinter said something soon.’

Faith consulted her notebook.

‘There’s a small march next week. Wednesday, 11 a.m. Sort of testing the water — a trial run for the big ones in October.’

‘Where?’

‘Tower of London to St Dunstan’s Church Hall in Maroon Street. William Joyce is speaking. Not Mosley, unfortunately. There’ll be one hundred blackshirts, they say.’

‘Where’s Maroon Street?’

‘Stepney.’

I almost said, where’s Stepney? — but stopped myself. I looked fixedly at her.

‘I’d like you to be on that march, Faith. But only if you want to.’

‘If you want me there, I’ll be there, Miss Clay,’ she said, loyally. ‘But I don’t think it’ll be much of a show.’

‘Doesn’t matter. No one else will be covering it. This might just be our scoop. Blackshirts marching into the East End. .’ I felt excitement building. ‘You’ll be marching, I’ll be taking photographs — and then we’ve got our Mosley interview. Send a teleprint to New York.’

I bought a gazetteer of London with detailed fold-out maps. As I studied them I realised that the East End might easily have been in Siam or Tanganyika or Siberia as far as I was concerned. It seemed that London stopped at Aldgate and the City and all those streets of low houses and docks and wharves and the meandering river were part of a terra incognita that only its denizens penetrated. In the gazetteer, I read:

‘To the east of the City lies Whitechapel, a district largely inhabited by Jews (tailors, dressmakers, furriers, bootmakers, cigar-makers, etc.). Their presence here, and in Mile End and Stepney, is chiefly due to the Russian persecutions of the nineteenth century.’

I unfolded my delicate beautiful map and saw the districts east of the City, traversed by the great thoroughfares heading towards the Thames Estuary — Whitechapel Road, Commercial Road, Cable Street — carving their way through Stepney, Limehouse, Bromley, Poplar, Bow and Stratford. . I felt that strange frisson of anticipation that an explorer in Africa must experience, about to set off into the unknown. Except in this case the map wasn’t blank — every little street, lane and alleyway had its appointed name. This land was densely populated — it had its churches and schools, its police stations, hospitals, post offices and civic buildings. I would be entering Olde England and the names I read were redolent of the country’s long and complex history: Shadwell, Robin Hood Lane, Regent’s Canal, Lochnagar Street, Ropemaker’s Field, Wapping Wall. . But nobody I knew ever went there.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

In anyone’s house at any given time there will, I suppose, be half a dozen appliances or components not functioning properly. A light fused, a door-handle loose, a floorboard creaking, an electric iron inexplicably giving no heat. In the cottage’s case, for example, there is a permanently dripping cold tap in my bathroom, a drawer in the kitchen that will not fully shut, and an armchair that has mysteriously lost one castor. Also, the Hillman Imp seems to be leaking oil from somewhere, judging from the dark stains on the gravel, and my wireless reception will switch off completely for ten minutes or so, offering up muffled voices obscured by crackling gunfire, before it bizarrely resumes normal service.

As with your house, so with your body. I’ve a bruise on my shin, the remains of a splinter in my palm that seems to be turning septic, an ingrowing big toenail and my left knee cartilage twinges with a spasm of pain when I rise from a seat. We make do — favour the right leg, use the left hand, slip a paperback under the armchair where the castor should be. It amazes me what compromises we happily live with. We limp along, patching up, improvising.

Talking of compromises in my life, I see now that Cleve Finzi was my knight in slightly tarnished armour. The fact that he was handsome and successful, selfish and self-absorbed — not to say a little vapid, from time to time — doesn’t reflect badly on me, I believe. At certain periods of our lives we — men and women — need exactly this type of person. Their easiness on the eye is all you require — handsome men, beautiful women, it’s a pleasure just to be close to them. Then growing maturity tells you that this type of person simply will not do any more and we sense instinctively that we need someone, something, altogether more intriguing.

So I ran away from Cleve and New York and his terrifying wife and took off, heading south with Hanna and Constanze. A mistake, another mistake.

I remember Cleve calling the office that week before the march. The teleprinter informed us of the time of the call; the phone rang; the operator connected us and we spoke across, or rather, under the Atlantic. There was a lot of hissing and interference on the line but I could hear his voice distinctly. I waved Faith out of the office, stuck a fingertip in my free ear and listened to my one-time lover’s voice crossing the thousands of miles between us.

‘Everything’s ready,’ I said, all brisk professionalism. ‘We’ve the whole march covered. And I’m going to hire another photographer. I’ll be taking pictures as well. Between the two of us we should get something good.’

‘It’s wonderful to hear your voice, Amory.’

‘I know the other photographer. He’s very competent.’

‘I miss you.’

Why do the simplest most timeworn declarations affect us so?

‘I miss you too,’ I said, clearing my throat, glad he wasn’t in the room with me. ‘But it’s much better this way.’

‘Send me everything you have as soon as possible. You choose and crop the photos. We’re going to do this big piece on fascism in England. Italy, Germany, now England. .’ He paused. ‘When’s the march, again?’

‘Wednesday.’

‘Perfect. We’re going to beat everyone on this. They sound as unpleasant as the Nazis, your blackshirts.’

Well, we shall see on Wednesday, I said, and in close-up. We talked a little more about the practicalities of sending the photographs to the USA and he told me to spare no expense. Motorcycle courier to Southampton, the fastest liner available, and so forth. I assured him I would make every expensive effort and he hung up with a breezy ‘Good luck. Don’t let me down, sweetheart.’

I remember at the weekend going to Sussex, to Beckburrow and finding that Xan was there and, to my surprise, my father. He looked well, though slimmer, and he wore a beret. It was clear that beneath it his head was shaved. Before lunch we went for a stroll around the garden.

‘I’m better now,’ he said, with a wide smile. ‘Cured. I’m home for good.’

‘What happened?’ I said. I still felt odd with him, couldn’t judge his mood and consequently was a little tense. Was this cheery humour genuine or feigned?

‘It’s a wonderful new operation.’

He took off his beret and I saw two round pink scars, like small coins, set just above both his temples, his hair short stubble growing back.

‘They just bore into the skull, you see, from both sides and then cut the fibres, you see, the connections, to the frontal lobes of your brain. It’s amazing. I’ve stopped worrying about everything. Everything. I’m back.’

He opened his arms to me and I stepped into his embrace. He held me tight.

‘Have you forgiven me, my darling?’ he whispered in my ear.

‘Of course, Papa. Of course.’

I remember meeting Lockwood in a pub on Fleet Street, the Dreadnaught. We shook hands, formally, smiling nervously at each other. He had grown a small moustache — it didn’t suit him — and he told me almost instantly that he was engaged to be married. I congratulated him, showing real pleasure, I hoped, and he began to relax.

He said he was working part-time for the Daily Sketch but was hoping for full employment there, soon. I asked him if he’d do some freelance work for Global-Photo-Watch and he said yes, immediately.

‘I love that magazine,’ he said. ‘Better than Time. Better than the Illustrated.’

‘Wednesday morning, eleven o’clock, Tower of London.’

‘What is it?’

I explained — and added I’d be working as well.

‘But we won’t be seen together,’ I said. ‘And be discreet, keep the camera hidden as much as possible. I’ve heard that the blackshirts don’t like photographers.’

Lockwood thought for a few seconds, smoothing his small moustache with his fingertips.

‘What’re you paying?’

‘Five pounds for the day. Plus ten shillings for every photo we use.’

‘Sounds good to me.’

I went on to tell him the kind of photograph that GPW liked to run but I could see he wasn’t really listening and stopped.

‘I think about you a lot, Amory,’ he said, a little awkwardly. ‘Can’t get you out of my mind, sometimes. Wondering where you are, what you’re up to. .’

‘I’ve been away for a good while,’ I said. ‘After Berlin I went to New York and was even in Mexico.’

‘Ah. The glamorous life.’

‘It wasn’t that glamorous, to be honest.’

He went to the bar to buy another round of drinks and I looked at him standing there — slim, tall, broad-shouldered — and I thought about the times we’d had in his small garret above Greville’s darkroom. And I didn’t feel anything. It’s strange how strong emotions can be so easily diminished as your life continues; how deepest intimacies become commonplace half-recalled memories — such as an exotic holiday you once went on, or a cocktail party where you drank far too much, or winning a race at the school sports day. Nothing stirs any more. My affair with Lockwood had happened and had ended and had become part of the texture and detail of my personal history. I was fond of Lockwood and I knew he was a good photographer — that was what mattered, now.

I remember a letter arriving from Hanna, from Berlin, on the day before the march. She was back from her travels, she said, but she was really writing to me to convey the sad news that Constanze had taken her own life some two months earlier in São Paulo. I was initially shocked and then the shock became surprise and then a kind of understanding. I didn’t know Constanze well but I could see how febrile and overwrought she was and how she clashed with the world. It turned out that the two had quarrelled — ‘it was very bitter’, Hanna wrote — and had split up after almost a year living in Costa Rica. Hanna went east and roved the Caribbean while Constanze headed south for Brazil. The letter accompanied a copy of the book they had somehow managed to compile together before the eruption: Winter in Mexico und Costa Rica: Tagebuch einer Reise. It contained three of my photographs, uncredited. It was my first appearance between hard covers.

Hannelore Hahn, Guadalajara, Mexico, 1934.

2. THE MAROON STREET RIOT

ON THE WEDNESDAY MORNING I met Lockwood at Fenchurch Street station, as pre-arranged, at ten o’clock. He showed me the small camera he was using, a Foth Derby. I had my Zeiss Contax that fitted neatly into my handbag. It had rained in the night and the streets were still damp, giving the morning air a raw grey light. I was glad I was wearing my mackintosh and a green felt bowler.

We found a coffee stall and each had a mug of tea.

‘You hungry?’ he said. ‘I fancy one of them cream buns.’

‘Help yourself, Lockwood, please. You’re on unlimited expenses.’

‘Looking forward to this,’ he said, munching away.

‘I think we just have to be extra careful,’ I said. ‘This march hasn’t been announced. The police know, but the details have only been circulated to BUF members. They don’t want any press attention otherwise there’d be posters everywhere.’

‘Why so secretive?’

‘They’ve got bigger marches in October. This is a trial run. If someone spots you taking photos just pocket the camera and move on.’

‘You’re the boss, Amory.’

We made arrangements to keep as separate from each other as possible so as not to reproduce the same photographs and to meet back at the office at the end of the day. We’d then go straight to a darkroom, develop, print and select the images we liked and send them straight off to America.

We wandered down to Trinity Square, opposite the Tower, where we could see a crowd had gathered — about 200 marchers, I calculated and, also, some thirty blackshirts, young burly men in their pseudo-uniforms, peaked caps and jackboots, giving off an air of pre-emptive menace and self-importance as they organised the marchers (BUF members, I assumed) into a column. I spotted Faith amongst them, wearing no hat, just a violet scarf tied over her hair.

At eleven o’clock a large banner was unfurled that read ‘BRITISH UNION OF FASCISTS AND NATIONAL SOCIALISTS’ and four mounted policemen appeared on their magnificent chargers.

There was a series of blasts on a whistle and the march moved off sedately, led by the blackshirts, heading north up Minories then turning right into Whitechapel High Street, and then everyone was diverted once more on to Commercial Road. Traffic was stopped by the police on their horses and passers-by looked on in mildly amused curiosity, it seemed to me. There was no sense of a fascist threat overwhelming the nation’s capital.

I walked briskly ahead and overtook the front of the march and then, hiding in doorways and lurking behind parked cars and vans, started taking photographs. I looked around but could see no sign of Lockwood.

As the march moved on in orderly fashion down Commercial Road I became aware of small groups of young men standing watching on street corners, but watching in a nervy, fidgety way, chatting amongst themselves in lowered voices. Then the odd unlocatable shout could be heard — ‘Fascists!’ and ‘Fascists go home!’ These shouts were answered in turn by the blackshirts, raising their hands in a Roman ‘hail’ salute and shouting back in unison, ‘Aliens! Aliens! Aliens!’ As soon as any of the blackshirt stewards approached the groups of spectators, the young men split up and drifted away. However, it was evident that the mood had intensified. The march was evidently no surprise; intelligence had been leaked. The marchers closed ranks and the blackshirt stewards spread out to cover the column’s flanks.

I felt a premonition that this was going to turn nasty and I noticed that, mysteriously, the number of blackshirt stewards was increasing as more young, uniformed men joined the march, inconspicuously. I managed to take a photograph of twenty or so blackshirts coming out of Stepney station in a kind of phalanx as the whole march now veered left up White Horse Street, heading for the meeting hall at St Dunstan’s.

And here I saw the absolute proof that the secret march had never been secret. At the junction of Matlock Street a lorry had been turned over on its side and rudimentary barricades flanked it — barrows, packing cases, bits of old furniture. The police horses stopped, more whistles were blown and the march slowed and halted. The groups of young men standing in the alleys and side streets were much larger, now, and I saw there were women with them, also. Stepney wasn’t prepared to let this march happen. They began to chant: ‘You shall not pass! You shall not pass!’

I took a photograph of a young woman holding a frying pan behind her back — as a potential weapon, I supposed. Then across the street I saw Lockwood hovering around a gaggle of police officers, one of them an inspector holding a megaphone.

The inspector stepped forward and shouted through the megaphone, apparently addressing the upended lorry itself, as if it were intentionally responsible for the obstruction it posed.

‘I order you to remove these barricades!’ his amplified voice boomed out. ‘This is a legal procession. You have no right to stop it!’

The reply came in the form of a roar of abuse and a hail of stones and vegetables, mainly potatoes. The marchers recoiled instinctively and backed away a few yards down White Horse Street.

I heard the sound of running feet and turned to see more blackshirts streaming out of an alleyway. There were many more policemen as well — clearly everyone had been expecting trouble — and they began to back the march further away from the Matlock Street barricade and then turned left up Salmon Lane. I looked at my map, torn from my gazetteer. The aim was to outflank the barricade and march everyone down Maroon Street to St Dunstan’s Hall. So Maroon Street was the place to be, I thought, and decided to make my own roundabout way there so I could see the march approach down it. I ran into Belgrave Street to find people — men and women — streaming out of the houses carrying rudimentary clubs — chair legs and pickaxe handles, spindles from banisters — all racing for Maroon Street to stop the marchers before they could progress down it. I snapped a photograph of a young man in a singlet with a slingshot and a bag of marbles — no one spotted me — and ran on to St Dunstan’s.

Astonishingly, Maroon Street was already blocked by a requisitioned tram and kerbstones were being dug up and hammered to pieces to provide potential missiles. Furniture was being hurled from the upper windows of the terraced houses as impromptu barricades were built. However, it was clear that the anti-fascist Stepneyites were now going to have to fight the police, not the blackshirt stewards. Huge reinforcements had appeared from somewhere — and there were now dozens and dozens of police constables, a thick dark-blue line of them, at the head of the march. The BUF banner had disappeared and I hoped that Faith had made herself scarce.

The march began to move forward steadily down Maroon Street and the police constables in the front line linked arms. In the row behind them truncheons were ostentatiously raised. Heads were going to be broken. The strange thing was, I realised, as I took my photos of the police line, that all the blackshirt stewards had suddenly disappeared.

I assumed there was going to be another flanking movement. The blackshirts were going to secure and surround the meeting hall before the march arrived, I reasoned. I ran up Ocean Street to Ben Jonson Road, paused at the junction and peered round the corner.

About fifty blackshirts carrying leather whips and clubs were being spoken to urgently by a man in a pale grey suit. He was issuing instructions, pointing up streets, gesticulating.

I eased myself round the corner, raised my camera and took, in quick succession, five photographs. Then one of the blackshirts saw me — shouted and pointed.

‘Get her!’ the man in the pale grey suit yelled hoarsely, furious. ‘Get her, now!’

I didn’t stop to see how many came after me, I turned and fled away round the back of St Dunstan’s and into a little quadrangle of sooty streets called Spring Garden Square.

That was my mistake. Or rather: that was my bad luck.

I think I would have escaped but, in Spring Garden Square, about thirty blackshirts were standing around waiting for orders. I ran right into them, camera still in my hand, and stopped. They all turned as one to stare at me. I slipped my camera into my bag.

‘She’s Red press!’ somebody shouted from behind.

‘No, I’m not!’ I shouted back as the blackshirts quickly surrounded me, hemming me in as the first pursuers from Ben Jonson Road now arrived. My gaze flicked here and there — I saw the man in the pale grey suit for an instant — and I had a horrid moment of recall, thinking back to Berlin, of that night when Hanna and I ran into that group of drunken Brownshirts. Brownshirts and now blackshirts. But I had no Hanna with me today.

Again I saw the man in the pale grey suit and I shouted over to him.

‘Hey! Listen! I work for an American magazine!’

I realised almost as soon as I’d spoken that, as far as these men were concerned, I might as well have said, ‘I work for a Jewish magazine.’

‘Get the fucking camera!’ the man in the pale grey suit ordered.

One of the young blackshirts grabbed my arm. He had a snub nose and flushed pink cheeks, excited, angry.

‘Gimme the camera, Jewish bitch!’

‘No!’ I shouted back. ‘Let me go!’

I flung a glance behind me, looking for the man in the pale grey suit as if he were some potential source of reason amongst all this unreasoning anger, but he seemed to have disappeared. From beyond St Dunstan’s I could hear the baying of voices on Maroon Street as the march advanced.

Then three of the blackshirts seized me. My bag was snatched, my camera found, opened, the film ripped out and exposed.

Snub-Nose slapped my face, hard, enough to make my hat fall off, snapping my head round, and I cried out in pain.

‘Jewish Red whore!’ he shouted at me and I felt his spittle fleck my cheeks.

I was thrown to the ground. I saw boots stamping on my camera, crushing it to pieces. I could hear police whistles, now, loud and shrill above the clamorous low baying of the mob in Maroon Street, and, ringed as I was by these young men standing above me, looking down on me, I could sense their uncertainty, their anxiety. Police were drawing near, they didn’t control the streets yet, these blackshirts, unlike the Nazis in Berlin — law and order still prevailed in London in a fragile way. I sensed their urge to turn and run, saw them look this way and that, uneasily.

‘Teach her a lesson, lads!’ Snub-Nose shouted as the crowd around me began to thin and drift away, seeking safety. He spat at me. Then one of his friends, almost as an afterthought, kicked me in the arm. That first kick unleashed something in the others and half a dozen or so began to hit at me with their fists as I lay on the ground, thwacking me with their clubs. I rolled into a protective ball, folding my arms around my head — don’t kick me in the head was the chant keening in my brain, don’t kick my head — but I left my back exposed, curved and defenceless and a blow to the kidney made me unfold reflexively, arching in pain and, just at that moment — vulnerable, supine — Snub-Nose kicked me in the stomach, low and very hard, and I felt something crack and give in me. I couldn’t ‘roll with the punch’ as I was worried about the spearing pain in my back and when the toe of his jackboot connected with my lower abdomen I felt it sink in deep and do its damage.

I was now semi-conscious and blood was beginning to flow across my face from a cut above my eye. I clutched at my belly with both hands — my wounded belly — and screamed an atavistic howl of agony. It made them recoil and back away as if I had the plague.

‘You done it now, Lenny,’ I heard someone dimly say as the world went dark and blurry. Then there were police whistles, like shrill violent birdsong, until, all of a sudden, I was aware of Lockwood’s voice in my ear saying, ‘You’re safe, Amory, you’re safe. Don’t worry, we’re going to take you to hospital.’ And that was that.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

The Maroon Street Riot — or Skirmish, or Affray, as it was variously referred to — was overshadowed two months later by the famous ‘Battle of Cable Street’ in October when thousands of Eastenders blocked and then repelled a huge march by Mosley’s blackshirts and some thousands of BUF supporters. Six thousand police were in attendance that day and fought the anti-fascist crowd. The blackshirts, thwarted, turned away from the East End of London and were ruefully dismissed by Mosley at Charing Cross Bridge and that rebuff, that defeat, it can be argued, saw the end of any real continental-style fascist movement in Britain. However virulent the message that continued to be delivered by Mosley and his acolytes, the fact was that the British Union of Fascists never won control of the streets in London and perhaps that’s what sapped their morale and saved us.

It has to be said that I was completely unaware of anything else taking place for the rest of 1936 — such as the course of the Spanish Civil War or the abdication crisis, Roosevelt winning a second term, or the beginning of the Rome — Berlin Axis pact — as I lay in a ward in the London Hospital in Whitechapel. It was felt to be ‘too dangerous’ to move me, the doctors advised, and who was I or anyone else to disagree, given the severity of my condition after the beating I had received?

However, Global-Photo-Watch had its pictures, all taken by Lockwood, and so, capitalising on this exclusive, they duly ran a special issue of the magazine. The world was alerted to the sinister potential of the British Union of Fascists and something of a stir ensued, I learned later. Lockwood made a name for himself and was swiftly employed as a senior photographer by the Daily Sketch but, as I say, all this passed me by at the time.

My medical problem was clear enough: I was suffering from near-constant, stop-start bleeding from my vagina as a result of that final kick delivered by Snub-Nose Lenny. I’d lie in bed for two days without any problems, thinking everything had calmed and then wake in the morning with my sheets drenched in vivid red.

I had three blood transfusions before the year ended but they seemed to make no difference at all. I wore a form of padded nappy-cum-elasticated-rubber-knickers device that managed to contain the bouts of bleeding and save any gross embarrassment but, as the months passed, I became steadily weaker. The doctors who stood deliberating around my bedside had no solutions for me. Diet and rest were all they could prescribe. I ate nothing but bland foods — junket, blancmange, rice and suet puddings, potato cakes and milk dumplings — as if anything tasteless and vaguely pale could stem the ceaseless sanguine flow.

Images from the Maroon Street Riot, 1936 (photographs by Lockwood Mower).

Nevertheless, in the spring of 1937 I was estimated to be well enough to be moved to a cottage hospital near Lewes called Persimmon Hall, closer to home. And, once there, I did seem to begin to recover my health slowly, sitting on a bench in the garden on sunny days (wearing my heavily padded rubber nappy) where I could receive visits from friends and family. I was still very underweight, despite my milky, creamy diet, anaemic and continually tired but, I told myself, I was finally on the mend. Lockwood came and recounted the full story of my rescue — and thanked me profusely for the proper job with the Sketch that had ensued after his photographs were published. Faith Postings came and told me of the motorcycle dash to Southampton with Lockwood’s photographs and negatives. My mother and Xan were my most regular visitors and even my father came by from time to time, though I sensed the quiet trembling of unease in him, despite his constant smile, unconsciously unhappy at finding himself in a hospital environment again. Dido sent a vast bouquet of flowers once a week. Greville came and made me laugh. Then Faith Postings popped in one day and told me the GPW office was being closed down.

And then Cleve Finzi came.

3. PERSIMMON HALL

‘COTTAGE’ HOSPITAL SEEMED THE wrong appellation. ‘Rural hotel’ hospital was more apt. Set in its own capacious grounds off the Lewes — Uckfield road, Persimmon Hall resembled a small country-house hotel with annexes. There was the central building, a medium-sized Georgian mansion in pale sandstone, and connected to it were two long low modern wings overlooking the terraced lawns and gardens. There were a couple of wards but most patients had their own private rooms where they were well catered for by uniformed staff (cleaners, porters, serving girls) as well as nurses.

Through the French windows of my room in the east wing I could see the front terrace with its York stone pathways, herbaceous borders and well-placed teak benches in front of a low retaining wall. Steps led down to a couple of lawns and a lily pond. Cedars, rhododendrons and monkey-puzzle trees marked the boundary. It was all very bourgeois and calming.

I found that the process of recovering from a long illness simplified life unimaginably. All you — the patient — had to do was endure the malady and try to become well. All further concerns — bathing, eating, communicating with the outside world — were dealt with by others offstage, as it were. I lay in bed feeling weak and tired, was fed and medicated, taken for strolls, had my padding changed when it was blood-soaked and lost consciousness punctually each night after my sleeping draught.

And the world turned and history was made — the incendiary destruction of the Hindenburg airship, the Sino-Japanese War, the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — and also the GPW office in Shoe Lane was closed and Faith Postings paid off. My mother and Xan emptied my King’s Road flat and put my bits and pieces, my sticks of furniture, into store and wound up the lease as I lay in my bed, lethargic and uncaring. There is, it should be said, something addictive about being so useless, so dependent. One regresses. An agreeable, creeping sensation of total irresponsibility found me asking myself — sitting on a bench outside my room, on a sunny, warm day, a cup of tea in my hand — why life couldn’t always be like this. It was near ideal. I was succumbing to the potent allure of semi-invalidism.

Months past. I lost more weight, but more slowly, despite the amount of pale pabulum I ingested. I still felt tired and every few days my body would ritually expunge a half-pint or so of blood.

It was my mother who alerted me about Cleve. We were sitting on my bench outside my room, wrapped up because it was chilly.

‘I meant to say,’ she broke off from whatever anecdote she was recounting. ‘I’ve had a peculiar telephone call from an American. A Mr Finzi. He claims to know you.’

‘He was my employer in New York, Mother.’

‘Well, he wants to come and see you — here. Can you imagine?’

I experienced the first sensation of genuine excitement in ages. I felt, for a moment, that I was fully alive again.

‘Fine with me,’ I said, trying to keep the smile off my face. ‘Be a distraction.’

Cleve came to Persimmon Hall. It was a Wednesday morning in June and I was in my tartan dressing gown, sitting on my bench, looking out over the lily pond and the South Downs beyond, when I saw him being led by a nurse along the pathway from the main building.

I sensed that old heart-lurch, the weakening spine-shudder — and then rallied.

He was wearing a three-piece navy blue suit with a brilliant red tie — with the usual tiepin securing it to his shirt. His thick hair was oiled flat and he looked very tanned, as if he’d been sailing for weeks on some sunlit ocean. Absurdly handsome, I thought. Too handsome, really — it was something of a joke.

He kissed my cheek and sat on the bench beside me, staring at me, taking me in.

‘May I take your hand?’

‘There would be terrible gossip. All right, go on, let’s risk it.’

He took my hand in both of his.

‘You look well, Amory. If a little too thin, I must say.’

‘Right. Not true, but compliment duly paid. You, however, look disgustingly well.’

We talked a little more about my state of health, of the general air of bafflement surrounding my condition. I explained that I had seen a dozen doctors, I had had X-rays taken, that I was now on a regime of concentrated iron pills but something profound had happened during that attack, that last kick administered by Snub-Nose Lenny, that had deeply injured me, and my body still hadn’t recovered.

At this he looked pained and unhappy. He stood up, thrust his hands in his trouser pockets and paced about.

‘I have to say this, Amory. I feel it’s all my fault, somehow.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I pressed you to go on that march. I insisted. Look what’s happened in the world since. It wasn’t important. Why was I so obsessed with it?’

‘You weren’t to know that,’ I said. ‘It was just rotten bad luck. What if I’d been hit by a bus? Would you blame yourself?’

‘It was because you were carrying a camera.’

‘If I’d turned up another street it wouldn’t have happened. It was just bad luck.’

He sat down and took my hand again.

‘Bless you for saying that. But I can’t help feeling that my. .’ He searched for a word. ‘My eagerness. That my urging had—’

‘Nothing to do with it.’

He sagged. Smiled. Kissed my forehead.

‘Am I allowed to smoke a cigarette out here?’

‘As long as I can have a puff.’

He smoked a cigarette — I shared it — and he said he wanted to send a specialist down from London, an eminent gynaecologist. Cleve was worried that a diet of white food and iron pills wasn’t good enough, wasn’t modern medicine.

‘Well, of course,’ I said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

When he left, he said, ‘As soon as you’re well, we’ll reopen the office. Get you back to work. Get you taking photographs again.’

Sir Victor Purslane had overseen the delivery of some dozens of babies to minor members of the royal family and major aristocrats and charged twenty guineas per half-hour for a consultation in his Wigmore Street rooms. He was very tall and thin, with the slight stoop that very tall men affect. He was bald and his grey side-hair was swept back in two oiled wings above his ears. An elegant, expensively suited, faultlessly polite man, if not handsome — he had small watery baggy eyes.

He was escorted to my room by a guard of honour of two nurses and Dr Wellfleet, the director of Persimmon Hall. The great man had deigned to visit the provinces; the obeisance was almost grotesque.

He examined me thoroughly, internally and externally, he looked at my X-rays, he consulted the records from the London Hospital, Whitechapel, and the daily reports from Persimmon Hall. However sizeable the reimbursement Sir Victor was receiving from Cleve, I still sensed in him an urge to be gone as soon as decently possible, gamely resisting the temptation to look at his pocket watch, hanging from its gold chain and tucked in his waistcoat. Persimmon Hall was not his natural habitat.

Eventually Sir Victor did look at his watch and exhaled.

‘You’re going to be disappointed, Miss Clay,’ he said.

‘Disappoint me, Sir Victor.’

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Why you’re bleeding like this.’

‘Oh.’

‘The trauma you suffered was the cause — but you know that as well as I do. Better.’ He seemed uncomfortable, for a moment. ‘Modern medicine. . Its triumphs. . We think we understand all about the human body, have solved its mysteries. But actually I think we know very little.’ He reached into his pocket for a small battered silver case and selected one of the five cigarettes it contained and lit it.

‘Last week,’ he went on, ‘I was present at the delivery of a perfectly healthy, bouncing baby boy. Eight pounds. He died yesterday. I haven’t a clue why.’

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—’

‘Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Exactly.’

He stood up and placed his palm on my forehead and smoothed my hair back. It was a spontaneous, unreflecting gesture, perhaps prompted by his recollection of that baby’s unaccountable death — and here he was confronted by another mystery. As soon as he realised what he was doing he took his hand away, quickly.

‘Time, Miss Clay. Time. You will be well but your own body will have to do all the work. We doctors and our medications can’t help you. I’ve no idea how long it’ll take but, in some months, I surmise, you’ll start to feel truly better. You’ll know it yourself. You’re a young woman in her prime. Nature will effect her cure.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me. That’s the good news. Now for the bad.’

‘Bad?’ I felt a spasm of alarm.

‘In my judgement, as a result of the severe internal injuries you received in the attack, I believe you will never be able to bear children.’

I looked at him in astonishment. I’d never considered this, not for one moment.

‘Really? Are you sure?’ I said vaguely, feeling hot, all of a sudden.

‘The continual bleeding. The clotting that was observed in the blood in the initial weeks. Everything points at permanent infertility.’

‘Right.’ Now I felt tears prickle at the corners of my eyes. ‘I’ll have to think about that. Take it on board.’

‘Yes, of course. And now I really must go for my train.’

He shook my hand formally and left.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Today was one of those weird Mediterranean moments you are sometimes blessed with on the west coast of Scotland. A sky of unobstructed azure, no breeze, a constant, steadily warming sun, razor-edged shadows. If only we had cicadas. . Flam and I walked down from the cottage to the little bay and I had a picnic lunch there — a cheese sandwich, an apple, a square of chocolate and iced gin and tonic from a Thermos flask.

When I think back to my encounter with Sir Victor Purslane and his pronouncement I can still remember the sense of shock I felt, but the strangest consequence of his visit was that the bleeding stopped, almost immediately. Two days, four days, six days went by — no blood. He was correct in another matter: I sensed the change in myself — something had happened, some corner had been turned, I knew, and I began to feel better, slowly and surely. I felt less tired, felt my natural energy returning, I wanted to eat food that had colours in it. My weight loss arrested itself and my pale face began to recover its usual healthy mien.

Dido made one of her rare visits bearing her weekly bouquet herself.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘What’s happened? Health — picture of. You’ve got to leave this ghastly place.’

And so I returned home, to Beckburrow, and reclaimed my old bedroom. A nurse was hired to look after me but she left before two weeks were up as she had nothing to do. I began to eat food that the family ate — steak pies, roast chicken, broccoli, raspberry crumble — and I went for walks, progressively longer, with my genial, ever-beaming father.

My parents had been informed, by handwritten letter from Sir Victor, of my now infertile state. There was little emotion expressed. In fact my mother — mother of three — said quietly to me one day when we were alone, ‘You may find it’s a blessing in disguise, my dear.’

Xan was at the house a great deal as I convalesced, I remember. He was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, of all astonishing eventualities. After years of dullard mediocrity, he had experienced a sudden spurt of intellectual energy, as if a dam had been broken. His Higher School Certificate results were excellent. When he went for his interview at Balliol he wore a canary-yellow suit and a matching bow tie. Asked his ambitions, he said he wanted to be a poet. He was awarded a £100 exhibition.

I started to become interested in the world again and what was going on in it. I listened to the wireless, I read newspapers and learned that Germany had annexed Austria, that a 500-ton meteorite had landed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that something called ‘instant’ coffee had been invented and that Orson Welles had broadcast The War of the Worlds and caused widespread panic.

My father, however, lived in the immediate, proximate here and now. His lobotomy — that was the operation he had undergone — seemed to have left him pretty much unchanged, on casual examination. His mood was uniformly good but he had lost all interest in his old profession, the world of letters: he didn’t write a word, he didn’t read a word. His entire intellectual life, it seemed, was concentrated around the business of two-move chess problems — composing, plotting, testing and then sending them in to newspapers and chess magazines. And he was extravagantly unpunctual, showing up for lunch at 5.30 in the afternoon, or going to a dentist’s appointment in Brighton three days late. I once waited for him at Lewes station for two hours (he had arranged to pick me up in the car). I telephoned the house and was told that he’d set out to collect me just after breakfast. We had no idea what he’d been doing or where he’d been when he returned home shortly before midnight. He smilingly said he’d gone to pick me up but I wasn’t there. He gardened diligently and went for long walks on the Downs, a small travelling chessboard bulking out his jacket pocket. His world had become very circumscribed but he was entirely happy within it.

Towards the end of the year Cleve sent me a lengthy apologetic letter (I had written telling him of the transformation in my health, but not Sir Victor’s diagnosis). The London office would not be reopening, he said, offering up the usual excuses — money, the world crisis, the state of US publishing, retrenchment in the magazine business, other areas of expansion taking precedence — but he wanted me to meet a friend, a certain Priscilla Lucerne, who was coming to London early in the new year. He would set everything up — he thought it would be worth my while.

In February 1939 Priscilla Lucerne’s letter arrived. She would be in London for a week, staying at Claridge’s before moving on to Paris. She would love to invite me for tea. So I went up to London to meet her in the Palm Court. She was a petite, slim, elegantly dressed woman in her forties with her hair dyed Bible-black with a short fringe to mid-forehead. Her lips were painted the deepest scarlet. She smoked cigarettes from a ten-inch holder. She failed to hide her disappointment when it became apparent that I had never heard of her, apart from her connection with Cleve. She wasted no time in enlightening me: she was the editor of American Mode — and she wanted to offer me a job as a staff photographer.

I saw the hand of Cleve Finzi everywhere — Cleve’s sense of guilt in action, trying to make life good for me again after the disaster of Global-Photo-Watch.

‘But I’m not a fashion photographer,’ I said to Priscilla.

‘Cleve Finzi says you’re an excellent photographer and that’s all I’m interested in,’ she said, fixing another cigarette into its holder. She looked at me, openly. ‘Let’s be honest, dear Amory, taking a photograph of a fashion model is well within your capabilities. You know how to light an interior shot, I assume.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘We choose the model, the outfit, the location — even, sometimes, the pose. I’m sure you’ll cope admirably.’

I wondered what she owed Cleve Finzi, what debt to him had been cancelled by her offering me this opportunity. She didn’t seem particularly enthused; she didn’t even ask to see my portfolio. I requested some time to think about it. I explained I was convalescing after a long illness.

‘Take all the time you wish, my dear,’ she said with a wide but empty smile. She had done her duty.

I did think about it, for some weeks, as my strength returned and I began to feel like my old self again. Cleve wrote, prompting me further. Nothing else appealing was on the horizon and I had to earn a living so, eventually, I replied to Priscilla Lucerne saying I would like to accept her kind offer. Formalities ensued; there were the inevitable bureaucratic delays, but in the summer of 1939 I embarked once again for the United States of America, leaving Europe on the brink of war.

4. LE CAPITAINE

WE HAD SPENT THE morning in Central Park, west side, up in the 80s, shooting outdoors as if we were in the country, and now, in the afternoon, had moved back to a rented studio on 7th Avenue in the Garment District. I was taking photographs for a section of American Mode entitled ‘As You Were Leaving’. On the final two or three pages of the magazine there would be a spread of fashion shots of ‘affordable’ clothes by unnamed American designers, tacked on as an afterthought for readers who couldn’t afford French couture — not that there was much of that available now the war was well under way. This was my daily bread; I didn’t enjoy it particularly and I wasn’t very good at it, to be honest, but it paid my wages and my name was never credited.

Similarly, the models we employed on ‘As You Were Leaving’ were not the best known, perhaps a little past their prime, happy to accept a reduction in their usual fee just to be in work. The model I had been photographing in Central Park was Kitty Angrec, in her thirties, like me, and, like me, relatively content to be a back-page girl.

I took her photograph, setting her against a wide paper magenta roll lit with a 500-watt spotlight and a photo-flood number one with silver reflector. I knew it would look fine but my heart wasn’t in it and neither was hers — we were both growing tired; it had been a long day. I had an assistant, Todd — they were always changing, some kid or other — and I left him to remove the film from the camera, label it and send it round to the Mode labs and followed Kitty into the changing rooms for a drink and a cigarette.

Kitty was a rangy girl who just missed out on being a true beauty. That strange geometry that a face has — eye versus nose versus lips — had managed only to make her ordinarily good-looking. Her top lip was a little too long, the brow-lash connection slightly skewed. . I had tried to analyse it but couldn’t quite understand what was so slightly out of kilter. We both lit cigarettes and I took out a quart of rum and poured a couple of shots into paper cups. Kitty began to undress.

‘You want to meet up tonight, Amory? I’ve got a sitter.’

Kitty had a three-year-old son whose father was in the US Navy.

‘Not a bad idea. What’ll we do?’

We ran through the options as she removed her clothes. She slipped off her skirt to reveal fishnet stockings and high heels, and as she shimmied out of her slip she dropped her cigarette and stooped to pick it up.

‘Don’t move,’ I said and scampered off to find my camera. I snatched it from Todd — it was a Rolleiflex.

‘You haven’t unloaded.’

‘Not yet, Miss Clay.’

I ran back into the dressing room and switched on all the lights.

‘Just do what you did before,’ I said to Kitty. ‘Stoop down as if you’re picking up your cigarette.’

She stooped, bending her knees reaching for an imaginary cigarette. Click.

The resulting image was my best ever fashion shot, in my opinion, of all the hundreds I took for American Mode. I shot it in ten seconds with the lighting available in the room. I had it printed up and took it to Priscilla the next day.

‘Nice,’ she said. ‘But I can’t run this in Mode.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re not Bazaar, we’re not Vogue. We’re American Mode. It’s a big difference.’ She handed the print back to me. ‘Nice try, Amory. But it’s too. . provocative. It would have been fine in your scandalous show but not in my magazine. Sorry.’

I thought about this as I slipped the print back into its buff envelope.

‘How do you know about my show? It was years and years ago.’

‘Cleve Finzi told me.’

The Cleve connection, once again.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘It was worth a try.’

‘Just keep up the good work, Amory,’ Priscilla said, beginning to rummage through papers on her desk. ‘We’re all very pleased with you.’

It didn’t take long to make me realise that I was no fashion photographer — time and again I looked at my photographs for American Mode and I saw only stiffness, fakery, self-consciousness — mediocrity. The few snapshots that I managed to take of the models as they changed or grabbed a cup of coffee or chatted at the end of a session seemed a thousand times more full of life. However, nobody wanted those images.

The American Mode years. The best and the worst.

But I dutifully fulfilled my assignments when I was called upon and I lived the good life that the USA effortlessly provided. I was earning $300 a month and was living on the Upper East Side (I didn’t want to go back to the Village). I was well, weight regained, hair glossy. No bleeding at all, apart from the odd smear or speckle on my knickers, and my menses had never restarted — stopped altogether, just as Sir Victor had predicted. Some months I would get the familiar cramps, the sensations, the scratchiness, the mood change — but nothing happened. Snub-Nose Lenny’s boot had done its damage.

As time went by I sometimes asked myself why I had come back to New York. The main reason, so I rationalised, was that it was a symbol of my return to health. My old life had resumed, Amory Clay was taking photographs again and being paid to do so even if it was strange to be in America as the war in Europe unfolded. I read about it in newspapers, heard bulletins on the radio; I had letters from home; I started sending parcels of food to Beckburrow — it was undeniably there, undeniably taking place, but somehow far in the background.

In the morning I would leave my apartment on 3rd Avenue and 65th and walk to the subway, picking up a newspaper in which I read about the Blitz, that Japan had invaded Singapore, that the Afrika Korps had retaken Tobruk, that the US Navy had triumphed in the Battle of the Coral Sea, but it was as if I were studying something in a dusty historical tome. Here in Manhattan all the lights were turned on, America’s profligacy was on tap and there was fun to be had.

Of course, the real reason I came back was Cleveland Finzi. Our affair restarted within two weeks of my landfall, though it was not like the old carefree days. I was worried, also, that first time we made love — it was the first time since my accident, however, to my relief, all seemed well — no pain, just pleasure. My libido was working as normal.

I may have felt the same but Cleve was different — so watchful he seemed almost terrified. We had to meet under conditions of secrecy that an expert spy would have been proud of.

‘Frances doesn’t even know you’re in the country,’ he explained to me when I moaned about the preposterous lengths we went to in order our tracks should be covered. ‘If she did, it would finish her.’

‘That would be a start,’ I said. ‘Sorry, not funny.’

We were lying in my bed drinking Scotch and soda. We had made love. It was lunchtime.

‘She can never know you’re in the city,’ he said. ‘You can’t imagine the consequences.’

‘All right,’ I said, reaching for a cigarette. ‘Got the message.’ I didn’t want to talk about Frances Moss Finzi.

Cleve found a lighter and lit my cigarette and then lit his own.

‘We just have to be very careful, Amory. Very.’

‘Of course. I don’t want to jeopardise your happy marriage.’

He seemed to relax when I said this, as if I were being serious.

‘But you’re here and you’re well and we’re together, that’s the main thing.’

He held me and kissed me and I felt the familiar lung-inflation, the headspin. He had that effect on me, Cleve. He still moved and disturbed me, whatever guilt he was experiencing, or trying to assuage, or fooling himself, or however irritated or dissatisfied I was at his self-regarding complacency. I could see him for what he was but couldn’t resist him. Or at least I couldn’t be bothered resisting him, to be more precise. I didn’t care: I was in that one-day-at-a-time mode. I owed it to myself, I thought, as recompense for all I’d suffered since that awful day at the Maroon Street Riot. If I wasn’t entirely happy, I was at least not entirely unhappy, and that state of affairs wasn’t to be disparaged.

The Pearl Harbor cataclysm had altered everything, instantly, like a vast weather system sweeping across the country. Pressure changed, social barometers went crazily awry. In New York I felt it was as if we were suddenly instructed to become serious and responsible; the long endless vacation was over, duty was calling, the conflicted world had come knocking at our door. It was as if the nation collectively grew up and assumed adulthood overnight.

I had exultant letters from my mother and Dido. At last, at last! What took you so long? From my point of view — however happy I was at the change in the military balance of power — the major effect of Japan’s surprise attack on the American fleet in Hawaii was that it brought Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau back into my life.

I was in my apartment, one Saturday afternoon in January 1942, when the telephone rang.

‘Amory Clay?’

‘Yes, speaking.’

‘I don’t believe it! Putain!’

‘Who is this?’

‘Who do you think? Charbonneau!’

In honour of our first dinner together we agreed to meet again at the Savoy-Plaza the following evening. I was deliberately early and sat in the lobby waiting for him, in a good mood, anticipating. Perhaps Charbonneau was what I really needed, now — a true friend.

A tall thin man with a moustache and an unusual military uniform came in through the revolving doors and looked around. Was it? Yes! Charbonneau, a soldier — impossible. He saw me and strode over, arms wide. We embraced then he took my hand and ducked his head over it, not kissing it, in that formal, symbolic French manner. Then he embraced me again and I felt him press himself against me in an overfamiliar way.

I pushed him off.

‘Steady on!’

‘You look beautiful.’

‘You look bizarre.’

‘I’m a captain in the Free French forces. You should salute me.’ He stepped back and assessed me, up and down, like a farmer inspecting livestock.

‘Yes. Your hair is shorter,’ he said. ‘And you’ve lost weight.’

‘So have you.’ I shrugged. ‘I’ve been ill — for quite a long time. But now I’m better.’

‘And I’ve been running away from Nazis.’

We walked into the dining room. Charbonneau didn’t like the table we had been given so we tried another two until he was finally happy. He then ordered a bottle of champagne and a bottle of Château Duhart-Milon 1934 to be decanted, ready for the main course.

He raised his goblet of champagne to me and smiled.

‘I feel I’m alive again, Amory. As if nothing has happened since the last time we were sitting here.’

We both savoured the irony. The century was galloping away without us.

Then he told me about the fall of France, the flight from Paris to Bordeaux where the interim government had established its temporary capital for a couple of weeks. After the Armistice, he had thought about staying on in France but had decided it was better to trust his luck abroad, so he headed for Spain and then Portugal.

‘It’s an interesting city, Lisbon,’ he said, musingly. ‘I’ll take you there one day.’

In early 1941 he had made his way to London — by seaplane — to join de Gaulle’s government in exile, the Forces Françaises Libres.

‘Yes, and when I was in London I came looking for you,’ he said. ‘I went to your little flat. All closed. No Amory.’

‘I was already over here, in New York.’

He leant back. ‘And here we both are in New York. Now. Isn’t life very strange?’

‘Your uniform doesn’t fit you very well.’

‘We are a very poor army, the Free French. But they think that if I wear a uniform I will be taken more seriously. I borrowed this uniform. Even these medals are borrowed.’ He pointed at the row of medal ribbons over his left breast-pocket. Then he looked rueful and downed his champagne in one gulp. ‘They don’t like us Frenchies in Washington. Roosevelt hates de Gaulle. Churchill hates de Gaulle. My compatriots don’t understand it. Aren’t we allies? But no.’ He poured more champagne. ‘This American civil servant in the State Department said to me: de Gaulle is just a brigadier in the French army, why should we give him all this money, all this support?’ He frowned. ‘It’s a real problem, I tell you, Amory, ma puce.’

Our meal arrived, another repeat: rare steaks with a tomato salad. Charbonneau poured the Duhart-Milon.

‘American meat, French wine, beautiful English girl. The world is at war but life is good.’

We clinked glasses and drank a mouthful. Then he took my hand. I knew what was coming next.

‘I feel it is our fate, our destiny,’ he said, lowering his voice and looking me in the eyes, ‘to meet like this. I want to spend the rest of the night with you. I don’t want to tell you stupid romantic things, talking for hours in this kind of rubbish talk. I respect you too much, I tell you straight, Amory, en toute franchise.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ He seemed genuinely annoyed. ‘What’s wrong with me?’

‘Nothing. But I’m in love with somebody else.’

He muttered to himself in French, then sighed and looked at me.

‘I will get you one day, Amory. You wait and see.’

I had to laugh.

‘Eat your steak, mon capitaine,’ I said. ‘It’s getting cold.’

I remember exactly when I heard the news about Pearl Harbor. I was in a small deli on 6th Avenue having a late lunch, eating a meat-loaf sandwich with a Dr Pepper to wash it down. I was acquiring American tastes. It was Sunday morning in Hawaii and the first baffled news reports were coming in over the radio to the East Coast. The whole delicatessen fell silent and we looked at the radio on the counter as if it were some demonic instrument of propaganda.

‘John Jack Anthony!’ somebody shouted at the back of the room — an oath I’d never heard uttered before or since. ‘What the heck’s gonna happen now?’

I remember Dido coming to New York towards the end of 1941 to play in a recital at Carnegie Hall — part of a big pro-British, join-our-war push. There was a programme of English music: Elgar, Delius, Moxon, Vaughan Williams.

Dido and I went to the 21 Club after her recital. The room stood and applauded as she entered — twenty-seven years old, my little sister, plucky, pale, beautiful, radiating self-assurance as she blew kisses and bowed gently as the acclaim washed over her. A new Britannia. I took a few steps back from the limelight.

We ate eggs Benedict and drank cold Chablis.

‘I feel I’m in another world, another universe,’ she said. ‘The voyage over was completely terrifying. And you should see London. Blackout, impenetrable darkness. Then as the sun rises, smoking ruins everywhere. People frightened, miserable. Try to buy a box of matches — impossible. People saying to you, “Better dead than defeated.” It’s appalling.’ She looked around the bright, raucous room. ‘We’re losing, Amory. We’re not going to win on our own, not even with the Russians — and they’ll be done for any day now. That’s what’s terrifying us.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Why won’t the Yanks join in? What’s stopping them? Can’t they see the awful danger?’

‘It’s very complicated,’ I said. ‘When you’ve been here, even a day or two, you’ll begin to understand. What’s going on in Europe seems a million miles away. Nothing to do with us.’

‘I’m going to order another eggs Benedict,’ she said. ‘Is that too, too greedy? Eggs, eggs, eggs. What wonderful things.’

I summoned a waiter over and ordered another round of eggs Benedict and another bottle of Chablis.

Dido lit a cigarette. ‘By the way,’ she said. ‘hold on to your hat. Xan has joined the Royal Air Force.’

I remember being sent out by Mode on a fashion shoot to Taos, New Mexico, in January 1942, just before I met Charbonneau again. This wasn’t for ‘As You Were Leaving’, this shoot was to be used as backdrop for the summer fashion issue and we needed sunshine. I assumed Priscilla couldn’t find a photographer of any repute so she had decided to entrust me with the assignment. It rained the entire week we were there and all my photographs were rejected. I offered my resignation. It was accepted and then promptly rescinded twenty-four hours later. Cleveland Finzi running my life again.

What the incident showed me was that I had to stop taking photographs of pretty girls in expensive frocks and I began to search through my small archive trying to assemble a collection of my own work, work that I was proud of. It was not substantial. So I began to take new photographs — a sequence that I called ‘Absences’. Clean plates on a kitchen table. Empty chairs on the gravelled path of a garden square. A hat and a scarf hanging on a coat stand. The human presence was absent but its traces remained. I told myself that the impetus for these pictures arose because I was lonely in America, far from home, but a little further thought made me realise that these photographs of empty or recently vacated places might have had something to do with my infertility. The absence looming in my life.

I remember going into Saks Fifth Avenue and buying a grey suit with green check for $35. I wore it out of the store and went straight to the Algonquin Hotel to meet Cleve. We drank cocktails then went upstairs to the room he had booked to make love. That evening we saw a movie called Dark November and ate at Sardi’s before returning to the Algonquin. As we walked back the streets were full of soldiers and sailors — America at war! — and I recall feeling particularly happy, as if I had won a prize. But as I acknowledged that happiness the thought came that life couldn’t continue like this. Change was in the air for everyone; the world was changing, me included.

I remember the moment when I knew it was over. Cleve and I were staying at a small hotel — the Sawtucket Inn — on Cape Cod Bay. I hadn’t seen him in over a month but somehow he’d managed to secure this two-night break for us. Frances suspected nothing. Cleve had told her he was at a colleague’s funeral and would be away for a couple of days.

We were lying in bed in the morning in that fuzzy self-indulgent mood of bliss you experience when you’ve made love on waking and know you don’t have to get up and go to work, or anywhere, if you don’t feel like it, and are vaguely contemplating the possibilities of one more fuck before a big breakfast. Shall we? When will we be together like this again? I don’t know if I can. Oh, you’ll be fine, leave it to me. .

Somehow the idle conversation turned to a movie. Cleve leant over me and brushed the hair from my brow. I felt his cock thickening against my thigh. He kissed my throat.

‘It’s just like that moment,’ he said, ‘you know, in the movie we saw — when Haden Frost looks at — what’s her name? — Lucille Villars. What was it called? And you just know. You know they’re going to jump into bed.’

I frowned, thinking. ‘What movie?’

Cleve ran his hands over my breasts. Kissed my nipples, kissed my right ear.

‘Come on. You said it yourself. The sexiest look between actors in the cinema. Ever.’

‘I said that?’

‘The sexiest look ever.’

‘Haden Frost wasn’t in Dark November.’

‘I know. It was I Want Tomorrow.’

‘I haven’t seen that film.’

He wasn’t really listening, that was his mistake.

‘We talked about it for half an hour, honey. Remember? How in movies these looks — if they work — can do more than ten pages of dialogue. That’s the acting skill. .’ He stopped, realising suddenly.

I sat up slowly, my brain working fast. He rolled back off me, reached for his cigarettes.

‘I haven’t seen that movie,’ I repeated. ‘We never had that conversation.’

He was good, Cleve, didn’t give anything away. He took his time lighting his cigarette and smiled at me, shrugged.

‘Sorry. Must have been talking to Frances about it, then.’

‘Probably.’

I snuggled back down next to him, not wanting him to see my face and the shock registering on it. That’s when I knew he was seeing somebody else. Frances never went to the movies because of her wheelchair. There was another woman in Cleve Finzi’s life. Now we were three.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Lunch today at the Glenlarig Hotel with Alisdair McLennan, Greer and Calder’s son. He was up on a visit with his two children, parking them with his parents as much as he could. He wanted to meet me, he said, wanted to talk about Vietnam, hence the lunch. He was in his thirties, with fine reddish-blond hair, and a blunt ordinary-looking face — pale-lashed, pale blue eyes — but he was attractive in a vital, super-intelligent way that was all to do with his brain. He had one of those restless, opinionated minds, always seizing on something to say or comment on; some sharp observation was made whether it was about the daily amount of seaweed washed up on a beach, or trade-union manipulation of the Labour Party, or ferry monopolies in the Western Isles, or that Anthony Eden was the best prime minister we’d ever had — but never realised. Everything was potential grist to his brain power.

Within about two minutes I knew I didn’t like him — not because of his manifest intelligence but because he was one of those men who cannot conceal their sexual interest — their sexual curiosity — about any and every woman they encounter.

I was aware of him eyeing me up, looking at my breasts, my face, my hair, my clothes — stripping me naked, mentally — as we sat drinking our gin and tonics in the hotel bar. Here I was, sixty-nine years old, chatting away, as this young man’s querying lust, his snouty evaluation, first assessed and then casually rejected me. Maybe all men do this — instinctively consider the sexual potential of every woman they meet. I can’t say — but all the men I’ve known have taken care to conceal it from you, if you’re a woman, unless that encounter is taking place expressly with some sexual end in mind, of course.

I saw Alisdair’s sexual radar switch from me to Isla, the young waitress who brought us our menus. Isla was a big plain girl with strange caramel-brown eyes and I sensed Alisdair McLennan’s idle carnal interest now play over her as she stood there, taking our orders, like an invisible torch beam, probing, considering, and then being switched off. Nothing doing.

As a consequence, I became a bit dry with him, a bit clipped and cynical, as if to say: I’ve got your number, my friend — and it doesn’t appeal. But I don’t think he picked up the nuances — these kind of men don’t. It’s a variant version of pure ego — they’re never aware how others are judging them.

In any event, we did talk about Vietnam, vaguely. I said it had been so long since I was there that I didn’t think any observations I might make would be valid any more.

‘You got into a bit of trouble when you were out there, didn’t you?’ he said, casually, pouring us both another glass of wine.

‘How do you know that?’ I said, at my driest.

‘You know, that whole SAS thing.’

‘You haven’t answered my question: how do you know that?’

‘I read your file.’

‘What file?’

‘Everyone has a file somewhere — especially if they’ve led a life as interesting as yours.’ He smiled, and couldn’t keep his patronising manner concealed. ‘I’m in the diplomatic service, I get to see files.’

I took my time, drank a mouthful of the Bordeaux, and put my glass down, turning it on the tablecloth for a moment. Then I looked at him squarely.

‘It was a very difficult time, back in the late Sixties. Everybody was lying. Everything was falling apart.’

‘Well — all ancient history.’ And he smiled again and changed the subject.

I knew then at once that although he may ostensibly have been going to Saigon as a diplomat he was in fact working for the security services — a spy, or a handler of spies. That was why he wanted to meet me.

‘Do you still keep in touch with anyone out there, by the way?’ he asked, later, pouring the rest of the wine.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re all dead, now.’

5. OPERATION TORCH

THE STRANGE ASPECT ABOUT the affair I embarked on with Charbonneau was that it seemed almost immediately normal — as if we’d been lovers for years — the question in my mind being why had it taken us so long?

We had dined together two or three times, whenever Charbonneau could slip away from Washington and come to New York. I remember towards the end of the year he called me in a foul mood, saying he had to escape from the hell of DC and his ‘foutue mission’. What about dinner? Choose a new French restaurant — it had to be French — let’s test it, as we used to. I need some fun, he said. Come to the apartment and have a drink, first, I said. I’ll find somewhere interesting.

My new place was on 65th Street between 3rd Avenue and Park. I had the top floor of an old crumbling brownstone with my own entrance at the side. An ancient lady and her maid lived in the rest of the building but I rarely saw them. Once a whole two months went by without a glimpse.

Charbonneau arrived, took off his ill-fitting captain’s jacket and explored my rooms as I mixed two manhattans. I heard him opening cupboards and drawers, running taps in the bathroom as if he were a prospective tenant.

He wandered back into the sitting room and I handed him his drink.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked. ‘You seem a bit depressed.’

‘We are invading French Africa tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Morocco. Or rather you are. Americans and British fighting the French. C’est bien déprimant.’

‘Fighting the bad French — you’re good French.’

‘It’s very complicated.’

‘Everything’s very complicated, Charbonneau. Life is complicated. It’s what you always tell me.’

‘It’s top secret. Don’t tell anyone.’

I raised my glass. ‘Bon courage aux alliés.’

‘Your accent is terrible but the sentiments I approve.’ He paused, thinking. ‘Approve of.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘At least we have twelve million Russians soldiers on our side. How can we lose, in the long run?’ He seemed uncomfortable, all of a sudden. ‘What is it, Amory? Why are you looking at me like this?’

‘I’m just looking at you. A cat may look at a king.’

‘Have you found us a restaurant?’

‘No.’

His exasperation was obvious.

‘All right. So we don’t eat. We call for a Chinese meal.’

‘Afterwards.’

He looked at me, understanding now what was going on. He closed his eyes and did a little shimmy on the spot, shuffling his feet, rolling his shoulders. He looked at me.

‘So?’

‘The answer is yes.’

I lay in the dark of my bedroom beside Charbonneau — who was sleeping the sleep of a satiated man — thinking about Cleve. Had I done this because of what I’d discovered about the other woman, whoever she was? Perhaps. Then I thought: maybe it’s more complicated, like everything, as Charbonneau said; maybe it was a way of showing myself that I was free.

In the morning I brought Charbonneau a cup of coffee as he lay in bed.

‘Is this “light” coffee or “dark” coffee?’ he asked.

‘I think it’s light. Lots of hot milk.’

‘Only in America.’

I sat down beside him.

‘I want you to know something,’ I said. ‘I told you I’d been very ill. One of the consequences is that I can’t have any children.’

He shrugged, put his coffee down and took my hand.

‘Well, you know, it could be worse. I have a child. I never see her.’

‘You have a daughter?’

‘From my first marriage. She’s called Séverine. She’s ten years old.’

‘I don’t know very much about you,’ I said.

‘And I don’t know very much about you,’ he countered and flipped back the sheet. ‘Shall we get to know each other better?’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I suppose I should add, in the spirit of fair comparison with the other men whom I have made love with, that Charbonneau’s penis was quite small and stubby, though he had a surprisingly and disproportionately large and heavy scrotum. What shook me first, though, when he was naked, was his hairiness. He had a great pelt of black hair over his chest and belly and loins. Out of this thicket his small, darkly pigmented penis protruded. He had hair on his back also and of course on his arms and legs. I was initially in a state of some alarm — I’d never seen such a shaggy monster of a man — but as soon as he embraced me I realised that the hairs on his body were soft and yielding, like a fine expensive fur, and after a while I found his hirsute presence quite stimulating.

Today, I took out my old Leica and went down to the end of the bay where the rock pools are. It was sunny, with just a few speeding clouds going by and I wanted to take pictures of the rock pools with the sun bright and glaring overhead — spangling, dazzling. I intended, in other words, to take pictures of light in such a way that you would never know it was light reflected in rock pools. This was my new plan, my new obsession. Snapshots of light-effects were what I wanted to capture — luminescent starburst abstract moments that no painter could reproduce. Windows reflecting street lamps; close-ups of chrome bodywork in full sunshine; shallow puddles clustering dappled sunspots. Light stopped — light static. Only the automatic eye could do this. I had a new book in mind.

*

It seemed to me that, after my intermittent affair with Charbonneau had been going on for a few weeks, Cleve was beginning to sense something. He sensed a change in me — but it would be wrong to say that he was suspicious.

About two days after Charbonneau’s latest visit from Washington and his ‘projet inutile’ I received a telephone call from Cleve late at night. I was alarmed as he never called the apartment.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I want us to meet. But at the office. A proper meeting.’

‘What if Frances hears about it?’

‘It doesn’t matter any more.’

‘What’s changed?’

‘Come and see me. I’ll explain.’

We met the following day at GPW’s offices in Midtown. I passed Phil Adler in the corridor on the way to Cleve’s office. He had a wax paper cup of water in his hand and he stopped so abruptly on seeing me that it slopped over the rim and splattered on to the floor.

‘Amory! You’re back. My God! Call me, we have to get together.’ He kissed me on the cheek. ‘This is great.’

‘Back after a fashion,’ I said. ‘But I’ll call you.’

Cleve sat me down across from his desk and we both lit cigarettes. I was still in Charbonneau mood and found that I could look at Cleve objectively with no miasma of emotion blurring the view. He was wearing mauve braces — suspenders — over his pale blue shirt and his cerise tie was loosened at the neck. He looked every square inch the handsome magazine editor in his corner office but I wasn’t quite so beguiled by it in the way I used to be. It struck me that this was what pleased and satisfied Cleve about his life and it explained why he would never leave Frances. It would be too inconvenient, too hard and awkward to maintain the image, otherwise. And of course I was part of that perfect big glossy picture, also. Thank you, Jean-Baptiste. I was seeing Cleveland Finzi plain.

‘What’s going on, Cleve?’

‘We’re reopening the London office.’

‘Really?’

‘And of course I want you to run it again.’

‘Why?’

‘There are hundreds of thousands of American servicemen in England. Pouring in. Soldiers, sailors, airmen. We’re missing out — Collier’s, Life, Saturday Evening Post — everyone is running over there. I put it to the board — they agreed we should reopen. You’ve done the job before; you have all the contacts. We can steal a march.’

I sat there in silence for a few seconds then tapped the ash off my cigarette. I knew at once I was going to say yes but I wanted him to earn it.

‘I like it here,’ I said. ‘And I’ll miss you.’

‘I’ll be coming over all the time. And when I’m over it’ll be different — better. No ducking and diving, none of this secret-agent stuff.’

‘But my apartment, American Mode—’

‘I’ll take care of everything. Seventy-five pounds a month, plus expenses.’

I thought to myself: Diana Vreeland is on $500 a month and she’s the fashion editor of Bazaar.

‘Can I think about it?’

‘No. Absolutely no. It has to be you. I can’t send anybody else.’

‘When would I have to leave?’

‘Yesterday.’

Charbonneau poured himself another glass of wine, and then emptied the bottle at my invitation.

‘Let’s have another,’ he said. ‘I leave chiant DC and I come here to New York to see you — and life has some meaning, at last. It makes me want to get drunk. Like a fish.’

‘As drunk as a fish — I like that. But don’t get too drunk. We want to enjoy our last night together.’

He actually spluttered, then dabbed at his chin with his napkin and set his glass down carefully.

‘What are you saying to me, Amory?’

‘I’m going back to London. I’ve got a new job. Sorry to bring you the bad news on our lovely evening.’

‘Well, not so bad.’ He smiled, his big, tigerish, pleased-with-himself smile. ‘One reason I’m drinking so much is that I didn’t know how to tell you my own news.’

‘Which is?’

‘I’m going back to London, also.’