Sweet Caress

1. TYPHOON

‘FLIGHT LIEUTENANT CLAY, PLEASE,’ I said.

‘Ah, yes. . Yes, Miss, we’re expecting you. And the name of the organisation again? If you don’t mind?’

‘Global-Photo-Watch. It’s an American magazine.’

I was in the adjutant’s office of RAF Cawston in Norfolk. A flight sergeant was checking the appointment diary and collating the entry with my identity papers and letters of introduction. All seemed well.

‘I’ll drive you out there, Miss,’ he said. ‘Can I give you a hand with the cameras?’

‘No, no. I’m fine thanks.’

We stepped outside and he showed me into an olive-green staff car and we sped off through the base, past low hangars, with grass growing on their roofs, and anti-aircraft gun emplacements dotted here and there, towards distant aeroplanes parked by a long thin runway.

‘Thought you’d be more interested in the Yanks next door,’ the flight sergeant said.

‘I’m going there tomorrow.’

‘You’ll eat well, that’s for sure. Oh, yes sirree.’ He went on in the same envious culinary vein comparing what was available in the sergeants’ mess in RAF Cawston with the gourmet feast of ‘amazing grub’ served up at USAF Gressenhall. ‘It’s a different world, Miss, I tell you.’

I let him chat on, not telling him of my familiarity with American ‘grub’, preoccupied with the prospect of seeing Xan after all this time. I felt I’d missed a whole chapter of his life. Two chapters. The diffident schoolboy and guinea-pig breeder I knew best had gone to Oxford, published a book of poetry and was now a fighter pilot. How did these drastic changes happen in life? Then a moment’s thought told me that it happens all the time. Time is a racehorse, eating up the furlongs as it gallops towards the finish line. Look away for a moment, be preoccupied for a moment, and then imagine what has passed you by.

We pulled up at a parked Typhoon fighter plane, surrounded by a thick six-foot semicircular glacis of sandbags. The Typhoon was big and bulky for a single-seater aircraft, canted steeply back on its solid-looking undercarriage, and it had a gaping intake — like a mouth — under the three-bladed propeller. Xan stood beside it, one hand in a pocket, watching us arrive, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing his sheepskin jacket and his flying suit, as requested. He seemed taller and thinner since the last time we’d seen each other at Beckburrow. We embraced. I stepped back and looked him up and down.

‘Well, well, Marjorie — who would’ve thought.’

He laughed and just for a second I saw the little boy in him again.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, wagging his finger at me. ‘When I saw the request, “Miss A. Clay of Global-Photo-something-or-other” wanting to take my photograph, I did smell a rat.’

‘I just wanted to see you,’ I said. ‘I’ve got to take pictures of all these American airmen and their bombers tomorrow so I thought I’d sneak in a visit to my little brother.’

I made him stand by his Typhoon, leaning on the wing by his open cockpit, as if he were about to climb into it and take off on a mission, and pretended to take photos of him — there was no film in my camera — for the benefit of the flight sergeant from the adjutant’s office who was standing looking on, approvingly.

I wandered round the aeroplane. A big solid machine — like a tank with wings, it had remarkable heft, not like the other fighters, the Spitfires or the Hurricanes. This was a beast.

‘What kind of plane is this?’ I asked.

‘A Typhoon.’

‘I know that, silly. What kind of Typhoon?’

‘A Hawker Typhoon Mark Ib. It can fire rockets.’

‘Why is it painted with these black and white stripes?’

‘I’m not allowed to tell.’

‘Something to do with the invasion?’

‘Shall we go to the mess? I’ve got a present for you.’

We were driven to the officers’ mess, an old rectory outside the base perimeter. The drawing room looked on to a wild garden with an unmown tennis court. Outside I could hear a cuckoo calling in the woods beyond the pink-brick boundary wall.

Xan brought me a gin and orange and he had a half-pint of beer. We lit our cigarettes and talked dutifully about the family: Father’s health (good, stable), Mother, Dido’s fame, cousins, aunts and uncles. Then he handed me a slim book in a brown paper bag.

I took the book out and stared at it in some wonder. A purple cover with dull gold lettering. Vertical Poems by Xan Clay, V. L. Lindon and Herbert Percy. I felt tears of absurd pride brim at my eyelids. I hastily flipped through a few pages to distract myself from my emotion. I understood the title immediately — all the poems were thin like ladders, one or two words per line.

‘Why like this, vertically?’

‘Read the afterword — not now, obviously, but when you have a moment.’ He smiled, leaning back, searching for an ashtray. ‘It’s a little poetic movement we’ve started — me and two friends from Oxford — trying to do something different with poetry, out of the ordinary, shake things up a bit, if we can. Maybe you could write about us in your Global-Photo-Thingamajig.’

‘You have to sign it for me.’

‘Oh, but I have.’

I looked at the title page: ‘For Amory with love from Marjorie Clay.’

I blew my nose, had a small coughing fit, all to cover up the tears that had now begun to flow.

‘You’re meant to be happy, not tearful,’ Xan said.

‘These are tears of happiness, Marjorie,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how proud I am of you.’

I grabbed his head with both hands, pulled him towards me and covered him with kisses. He had to beat me off.

Half an hour later he had the mess steward telephone for a taxi to take me to my hotel in Fakenham. As we stood waiting under the rectory’s porch he introduced me to his fellow pilots, fellow officers, as they came and went. They all looked as if they were playing truant from school. This was the curious effect my siblings had on me. I felt like Xan’s great-aunt — decades older than him — while Dido made me feel like a child.

He kissed me on the cheek and opened the door of the taxi for me.

‘It’s absolutely appalling,’ he said. ‘I haven’t asked you a single question about yourself. It’s all been me, me, me.’

‘That’s precisely why I came to see you,’ I said. ‘Now I’m completely au courant.’

‘Are you happy, Amory? You seem happy.’

‘Happy to see you, darling,’ I said, ducking the question.

We drove off down the lane to Fakenham and I looked back through the rear window and saw him wave at me. Then someone asked him for a light and he turned, fishing in his pocket for his lighter.

I wiped away residual tears. Why was he making me so lachrymose? The transformation in him, I suspected — while I wasn’t looking he had become someone entirely different. A competent Xan, a young man who could take his strapping plane, armed with its rockets, power it into the air and go into battle. It shook you up, that kind of realisation.

‘So, Miss,’ the taxi driver said, over his shoulder, ‘what’s your bet for the invasion? July or August?’

The Vertical Poets, Oxford, 1942. Left to right, Herbert Percy, V. L. Lindon and Xan Clay.

‘Premonitions’ by Xan Clay

Stars

foretell

the fall

of

czars.

Strummed

guitars

lead to

hidden

bars.

Huzzahs

greet

news

of life

on

Mars.

Time

stands

still

in

Shangri-las.

2. HIGH HOLBORN

THE NEW GPW (London) offices were at the west end of High Holborn. We had three rooms on the top floor of a building with an oblique view of the dirt-mantled roofs of the British Museum. There was my office, Faith’s annexe and a kind of waiting room where journalists and photographers would gather and that swiftly came to be an informal club. We had a cupboard with a decent supply of liquor (gin, whisky, bourbon, sherry) and cigarettes — courtesy of our New York parent office — a couple of shabby, soft sofas and walls covered with framed photographs and past issues of Global-Photo-Watch. In the time between the pubs closing after lunch and reopening in the evening it was an even more popular venue to gather and while away the dead hours of the afternoon. Free booze, free cigarettes and kindred spirits.

We had opened the offices in the early summer of ’43 and had become something of a holding pen for various American newspapers, magazines and the smaller wire services. Apparently our ability to supply swift accreditation via ETOUSA (European Theatre of Operations US Army) had become well known. It was nothing to do with me — Faith Postings did all the liaising and paperwork and she was clearly very good at it. So, as it turned out, we were also acting as proxies — and charging a fee — for around a dozen other American publications and press agencies, including Mademoiselle and the Louisiana Post-Dispatch. Once the journalist or the photographer had the accreditation from ETOUSA they would be assigned to a particular unit in the services — the air force was the most popular — where they would be handled and supervised by that unit’s press officer and department.

By this stage of the war the process was running fairly smoothly. The journalists — including several women — once accredited, were issued with uniforms and granted the honorary rank of captain. There was always a considerable amount of paperwork involved but, once assigned, the working atmosphere depended on each unit’s particular disposition towards the press — ranging from lax and friendly to hostile and authoritarian — an attitude usually determined by the personality and character of the commanding officer.

One day at the end of May ’44, Faith popped her head around my door and screwed up her face apologetically.

‘There’s a strange gentleman here asking for you. Insisting. Says he knows you.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Mr Reade-Hill, he says.’

Greville was standing in our club-room peering at the photographs on the walls through spectacles so cloudy they seemed opaque.

‘Greville?’

He turned, snatching off his glasses, and strode across the room to embrace me, kissing me on the cheek. I smelled the odour of poverty coming off him, that sour reek of the unbathed, of unwashed clothes. He looked pale and considerably older and his moustache was untrimmed and grey. His suit was shiny with wear and the obvious repairs had been crudely stitched — by Greville himself, no doubt.

We went for a stroll, had a cup of tea and a sandwich in a café and ended up sitting in the watery May sunshine on a bench in Bloomsbury Square. The talk had been banal — all about family matters and a lot of disingenuous quizzing of me about my job at GPW. I was waiting for the real reason for our encounter to arrive.

At the Great Russell Street end of the square, a silver, deflating, three-finned barrage balloon was being winched down on to its lorry. About half a dozen young WAAFs were fussing around and their excited girls’ voices carried across the grass to us.

‘The thing is, darling, I’m pretty much broke, these days,’ Greville said, looking across the square at the barrage balloon, not wanting to meet my eye. ‘I’m afraid young Bruno rather cost me a fortune, one way and another.’ I sensed Greville’s old pride and confidence had turned to bitterness. I remembered the handsome, dashing figure he used to cut in his dinner suit, hobnobbing with royalty, aristocrats and millionaires.

By now the balloon had been pulled down on to the grass and the WAAFs were fussing about its rear end, looking for the leak, I supposed. The balloon was huge, fifty feet long, and as it was half deflated it pulsed and billowed as if it were alive, somehow, gasping for breath, a fantastical sea monster washed up in this small square in central London.

‘I was talking to your mother,’ Greville said, his voice heavy with shamefaced apology, ‘and she mentioned, just in passing, that — ah — you were hiring half the photographers in London.’

‘Not true. We tend to deal only with Americans. We’re an American magazine.’

‘Yes. Of course — silly of me. Thought she’d got it wrong. Anyway, it was a chance to catch up, at least.’ Now he turned to me. ‘I always regret our. . Our little falling-out over your lost photographs. Your Berlin ones.’

‘We didn’t fall out, Greville. The whole thing was a nightmare.’

‘I wish I’d been a bit braver, though. I think it was having all those policemen in the drawing room. And then the word “obscene” being mentioned all the time. Very disturbing word, “obscene”, especially when it’s repeated every five seconds, very destabilising. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘It was all a long, long time ago,’ I said, consolingly, and unreflectingly put my hand on his knee, feeling it bony and fleshless, like a thin log beneath the worn worsted of his trousers. I took my hand away.

‘And then this bloody war finished me off,’ he said with some vehemence, and went on to relate that since 1939 his work as a society photographer had virtually ceased.

‘And I’m someone who took a portrait photograph of the Prince of Wales,’ he said. ‘And do you know what my last job was? Three months ago. Some fucking woman wanted me to take a picture of her cockatoo.’

‘Ah. Pet photography.’

‘Exactly. The graveyard.’

I thought a bit. I couldn’t bear to think of Greville Reade-Hill photographing people’s pets.

‘There is one job I might be able to swing your way,’ I said. ‘But it would mean going abroad. Italy.’

‘I love Italy.’

‘Greville, the war’s on there, also. It’s not a holiday.’ I had remembered that one of our GPW photographers had been invalided home, injured by shrapnel.

‘Yes, of course. You’re not sending me to Monte Cassino, I hope. That doesn’t sound much fun at all.’

‘No. But I could get you accredited as one of the photographers we have with the Second Army Corps.’

‘British Army?’

‘American.’

‘I love Americans.’

‘On one condition — that you don’t go near the front line.’

‘No fucking fear!’

We stood up and I suggested he return to the office with me and give all his details to Faith, and we wandered slowly back to High Holborn. I sensed Greville’s confidence returning: an almost physical change seemed to be taking place; he stood taller, his stride lengthened, as if he’d had some sort of mystical transfusion.

‘Where do you live these days?’ I asked.

He looked a little embarrassed. ‘Actually, I’m living in a sort of hotel in Sandgate, on the south coast. Your mother’s very kindly helping me out. What does this job pay, out of curiosity?’

‘A hundred dollars a week.’

‘What’s that in real money?’

‘About twenty pounds.’

‘Marvellous. Bloody hell. Saved my life, Amory, darling.’ He nodded, squared his shoulders and turned to me again. Smiled at me. ‘Darling Amory — resourceful, helpful, sympathetic, lovely — you couldn’t give me a small advance on my salary, could you?’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

This morning I brought Flam back from his overnight stay at the vet’s in Oban and carried him into the cottage and laid him in his basket by the fire. He seemed a little livelier, trying to lick my face, patently glad to be home. I set him down and then placed a bowl of ‘high protein’ dog food in front of him. He sniffed at it but otherwise wasn’t interested.

Yesterday morning I had come downstairs and he was standing awkwardly by his basket, neck and head held low, coughing every five seconds or so. I looked at his face and saw there was a little mucous discharge from his nostrils. He rallied a bit when he saw me but he was moving sluggishly. So I picked him up, dumped him in the front seat of the Imp and drove in to see the new vet in Oban. The vet, oddly enough, was a young Dutchwoman (married to a Scot) called Famke Vogels. ‘Big made’, as my mother used to euphemistically say, but I liked Famke because she didn’t bother much with niceties, just made her point. She told me to leave Flam in overnight and come back tomorrow for the diagnosis.

‘Just a bacterial pneumonia,’ she said when I returned. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

She had given him an antimicrobial vaccination and supplied me with a course of antibiotic pills to be administered twice a day.

‘Do you know how to do this?’ she asked.

‘Yes. He’s not my first dog.’

My first dog, also a black Labrador, was called Flim. He was run over by a farm tractor and his spine was broken. When the anguished farm labourer brought me to him — he was lying in the verge, all twisted, whining — I knew there was nothing I could do. Or rather, there was only one thing to be done.

The vet in Oban, Famke’s predecessor, a Mr McTurk, took one look and said to me, ‘There’s no option, you know that, don’t you?’ I agreed, and Flim was taken away, after I’d given him a farewell kiss, and he was put out of his significant misery, poor dog. I buried him — weeping uncontrollably — at the edge of the beach looking over the bay. I was thinking: poor dog — lucky dog, that his pain ended and his departure from this world was achieved so speedily and with no further suffering than that he’d already endured. You lucky dog — we should be so lucky, as lucky as sick dogs.

As Flam made himself comfortable I went and fetched the pill bottle and crouched down by him.

‘Time to take your medicine, laddie,’ I said.

I try not to talk to my dog as if he’s a sentient human being but it’s impossible, as any dog-owner will tell you.

I opened Flam’s mouth and placed the pill at the back of his tongue to the side. Then I held his jaws closed with one hand, holding them upwards — he was perfectly compliant — and waited a second or two. He didn’t seem to have swallowed so I blew on his nose and massaged his throat, gently. I felt the reflex in his gorge and let him go. He licked his teeth; the pill had gone down.

I gave him a kiss on his forehead and scratched behind his ears and saw his tail give a beat or two of pleasure.

‘What would you do without me, eh, Flam?’ I said.

He was trying to climb up me to lick my face but I pushed him back, the unwelcome thought entering my head: who will feed me my pill when the time comes?

*

I remember, now, that Charbonneau had been far too overconfident about his destination. I travelled back to London from New York in early 1943 — on the Queen Mary, no less — while Charbonneau was sent to North Africa in the aftermath of the Operation Torch invasions and was plunged into the internecine mayhem of who was to take control of the Free French. I assume that the Free French governmental authorities, whoever they were, thought that his American experience and know-how would serve them well with Eisenhower and his staff.

I remember walking into the wide lobby of the Savoy to meet Cleve on his first visit over and seeing him standing there, waiting for me, in his dark suit and brilliant white shirt, and feeling I was taking part in some absurd dream or fantasy. We ate in the downstairs Grill and then went up to his suite and made love. Everything about his demeanour had changed in London; it was like the old days in the Village. He was perfectly relaxed, his usual enthusiastic, funny, dry self and we wandered about London without him glancing once over his shoulder.

Cleve had been right, to that extent — the move away from New York and its attendant paranoias reinvigorated our encounters as they newly occurred, every six weeks or so. But I had changed in the interim — there was the Charbonneau quotient to consider now, unbeknownst to Cleve. I had one short, frustrated letter from Charbonneau — from Algiers, sent to me at the office. The line I recall was ‘I thought Washington was bad. I would cut off my right hand to be back there, now.’ Poor Charbonneau.

I remember accompanying Greville to Victoria station to see him off to Italy. He was going to join a convoy sailing from Portsmouth. He looked smart and raffish, wearing his dark war-correspondent’s uniform with its designated shoulder patches, and he had a fore-and-aft forage cap set on his head at a suitably rakish angle. He carried a musette bag slung over his shoulder with his camera equipment and other essentials in it. I was touched to see that his moustache was trimmed and dyed a hazelnut brown. He looked almost like his old self and I complimented him.

‘Actually, I had the uniform altered at my tailor’s,’ he said. ‘It was very ill-fitting.’

‘Well, you look very pukkah, Captain Reade-Hill, very much the dashing war correspondent. Just don’t do anything dashing.’

‘Cowardice is my middle name,’ he said, kissed me and whispered, ‘Bless you, darling.’

I remember that the most irritating consequence of my precipitate departure from New York was that I had to miss the publication of my first book, Absences (Frankel & Silverman, 1943). It appeared, to deafening press silence, two months after I returned to London. My publisher, Lewis Silverman, said he was sending me six copies. They never arrived, victim, I suppose, of erratic wartime postal services or of some U-boat attack. I asked Cleve to bring me over some copies on his trips to England but he always — typically — forgot. I finally managed to see a copy of Absences after the war, in 1946, three years late, by which time it was already long out of print. I wonder if this experience is unique in the history of publishing. It was a collector’s item, very rare, booksellers told me when I tried to track one down.

Images from Absences by Amory Clay (Frankel & Silverman, 1943).

3. D-DAY

CLEVE CAME OVER AT the end of May for a week. We spent two nights together at the Savoy in his suite with its splendid view of the brown, ever-changing river. On the morning of 4 June, after our second night together, we stayed in bed until noon, calling up room service to order toast and jam and a pot of tea that we spiked with bourbon. We made love again before we sauntered downstairs to the Grill for lunch.

The Grill was full of senior military and naval types along with a smattering of old regulars. If it hadn’t been for the uniforms — and the somewhat reduced menu — you would never have believed we were in our fifth year of the war. We amused ourselves listening to the conversation of two elderly, heavily made-up ladies of a certain age who were sitting behind us and whose patrician voices were ideally clear and carrying.

One said, ‘I’m going to live in Ireland after this war.’

The other, ‘I worry that Ireland will become over-smart.’

‘It’ll never be Kenya-type smart.’

‘I suppose not. . There are some nice houses.’

‘Nice houses and cheap and plentiful staff.’

‘Always an advantage. Why won’t you stay in London?’

‘London will be drab and dreary. I need change. I need heavenly dullness.’

Cleve leant over and whispered.

‘And these are the people our boys are dying for?’

‘Well, they’re not really representative of—’

Then I saw Charbonneau come into the Grill and stopped talking in mid-sentence. He was in his khaki uniform and was wearing his round gendarme-style hat that he swiftly removed. He was led to a table some distance away against the far wall. My mouth was dry and I felt suddenly faint. Cleve signalled to a waiter for more coffee.

‘Let’s just pay our bill, shall we?’ I said.

‘No, no,’ Cleve said. ‘I don’t want to miss the next chapter. Not for the world.’

On cue, the first old lady said, ‘Do you know, I think Gloria lacks feminine charm.’

Her companion said, ‘She doesn’t have a developed social instinct, that’s the problem.’

I heard no more because at that moment Charbonneau spotted me and our eyes met. For an awful moment I thought I was going to vomit as I saw him rise to his feet and cross the dining room towards us.

‘Hello,’ I managed to say, hoping there was sufficient surprise in my voice. ‘How are you?’

Cleve had switched his attention now. So I made the introduction.

‘Cleveland Finzi, this is — I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau.’ He shook my hand, giving it a surreptitious squeeze, then Cleve’s.

‘I met Miss Clay in New York, she took my photograph.’

‘That’s right,’ Cleve said. ‘We ran a story on you, I remember. You wrote a novel, a bestseller.’

‘For a week or so,’ Charbonneau said, with appealing but untypical modesty. I could see he was enjoying himself, now.

‘What a coincidence,’ I said, more faintly than I meant. ‘And here we all are in the Savoy Grill.’

‘Very good to see you again,’ he said, giving me a little bow. ‘Nice to meet you, Mr Finzi,’ he said to Cleve and strolled back to his table.

‘Are you all right?’ Cleve asked.

‘Actually, I feel a bit sick,’ I said. ‘I think I’d better get back to the room.’

Back in the suite I kept up the charade. I went into the bathroom and retched and spat, ran water. It must have been something I ate, I said, better get home, see you tomorrow.

Cleve wanted to call a doctor — I said no, I’d be fine, I insisted. He made me sit down and drink a glass of fizzing Bromo-Seltzer that he had in his bag and I composed myself.

‘Is this good for nausea?’ I asked.

‘It’s good for anything.’

Half an hour later I walked out of Savoy Court on to the Strand to find Charbonneau waiting for me in a shop doorway, smoking a cigarette.

Back in Chelsea — in my new flat on the corner of Oakley Street and the King’s Road — I poured each of us a whisky and water while Charbonneau did his usual prospective-tenant act, opening drawers at random, peering into my small bedroom, flushing the WC.

‘That was him, wasn’t it?’ he said as I handed him his whisky.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Your American boyfriend. He’s the one.’

‘Boyfriend is the wrong word. He’s the man I’m in love with, yes.’

‘You don’t love him, it’s obvious.’

‘Wrong, Charbonneau, I do.’

‘I thought you loved me.’

‘Ha-ha. I’m very attached to you. I love Cleve.’

‘Nonsense. Deep down, au fond, you really love me.’

I closed my eyes. I wasn’t going to continue this conversation.

I had never thought of myself as promiscuous, or a ‘loose woman’, as my mother would have put it. I was thirty-six years old and had only made love with three men. It was hardly evidence of nymphomania, but, as I lay awake in bed beside the gently snoring Charbonneau, I found it hard to come to terms with the fact that I had slept with both my lovers in the last twenty-four hours — well under twenty-four hours, in fact. It didn’t feel like me, somehow — and yet it incontrovertibly was the case. What was happening? It hadn’t been planned, so that was some reassurance.

I slipped out of bed and padded through to the kitchen. It was five past five in the morning according to the clock on the shelf by the cooker and a faint citrus light — grapefruit and orange — was beginning to seep into the sky above Chelsea and I could see it was a cloudy blustery day if the darkly tossing crowns of the plane trees in Carlyle Square were any indicator. Where was summer? — it was June, for heaven’s sake. I put the kettle on the gas hob and fetched out the teapot. I’d let Charbonneau sleep on and see if my mind cleared a bit. I had never expected him to re-enter my life with such embarrassing surprise.

He emerged looking for coffee at around nine o’clock, wearing his khaki trousers and my too-small dressing gown, his hairy wrists protruding from the tartan sleeves. I was dressed by this time and had been going over GPW paperwork. I had telephoned into the office saying I still felt ill — I was due to meet Cleve for lunch — impossible with Charbonneau around. He took me in his arms and kissed my neck.

‘You’re the best thing for me, Amory. When I’m not with you, I find I’m thinking about you — not all the time, but enough.’ He smiled. ‘It’s not normal for me.’

‘What is normal for you?’

He ignored me. ‘Have you some coffee? I can’t drink your English tea.’

‘What made you go to the Savoy?’ I asked. ‘It was an incredible coincidence that you should just walk in like that.’

‘No, no. I knew that you were there. I went to your office and your charming secretary said you were in a meeting at the Savoy. So I go to the Savoy, I ask for you at the front desk. No — no Miss Clay. Then I see you — with this man — going into the Grill. I went away, I had a drink in a pub and I thought — no, I must see my Amory, I don’t care who she’s with.’ He spread his hands. ‘And here we are. Aren’t you pleased?’

‘I have some coffee essence.’

‘No, don’t worry. I smoke a cigarette.’

He went to the window and lit up and stood there looking down on the King’s Road. I heard a sudden patter of rain on the glass.

‘No invasion today,’ he said. ‘For sure.’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘The invasion of France. It will probably be tomorrow.’

Faith knocked on the office door, her double rap that meant it was important. I was interviewing a photographer. Five more were waiting in the club-room — we needed people in Normandy, urgently. GPW had nobody with the invasion fleet and I couldn’t understand why we’d been so remiss or how we’d been overlooked. Cleve had no idea so I had to work fast.

‘It’s your mother,’ Faith said. ‘Says it’s a matter of some urgency.’

I took the telephone at Faith’s desk.

‘Mother, what is it? I’m incredibly busy.’

‘Prepare yourself for sad news, my dear.’

‘What? What sad news?’

‘Your father has died.’

It was 6 June 1944. Le Débarquement. And the day my father died. D-Day. Dead Dad Day.

My father had been sitting in his favourite sheltered spot — a small open wooden gazebo that he’d had constructed at the foot of the garden at Beckburrow, working on one of his two-move checkmate chess problems when my mother had summoned him in for lunch. After lunch he said he was feeling tired and was going to take a nap. She called up to him in his bedroom when supper was ready and when he didn’t appear she went to look for him and found him still asleep, so she thought, and shook him by the shoulder — but he was dead. From a heart attack, seemed to be the likely explanation.

The funeral was on 10 June, remarkably speedy, given the momentous times we were living through, and was in Claverleigh’s parish church, St James the Less. It was a short service, one hymn, one reading — I read one of Xan’s poems from his collection, called ‘A Monk, Watching’ — and an address given by Eric Maude, the playwright who had adapted my father’s story ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’ — the one bona fide success in his life. Maude was an elderly, flushed man with a dandelion mane of white filmy hair and whose memory was not sure. He kept referring to my father as ‘Brotherton’, for some reason, not Beverley. ‘Brotherton was the most generous of collaborators.’ I could see my mother growing increasingly irritated.

Other mourners included some colleagues from Strand magazine and the publishing houses that my father read for. His own publisher was not present. Dido was there, of course, and she played a loud and complex toccata by Buxtehude as we all filed out into the graveyard, our ears ringing. Xan was flying combat missions over northern France in his Typhoon and Greville was away in Italy with the 2nd US Army Corps.

As the coffin was lowered into the ground the air was loud for a few minutes with the passage of dozens of high-flying bombers heading across the Channel and we all looked up. As the final blessing was spoken the noise of the planes diminished and I glanced round the small churchyard, dry-eyed, glad that my father’s death had been so sudden and just sorry that the two and a half decades since his awful experience in the First World War had been so devastating and undermining. I was pleased that his last years had been calmer and that his troubles were now over. ‘Rest in peace,’ the vicar said, barely disguising his boredom — he might have been saying ‘Pass the salt’ — but I had to agree.

The day was cool but sunny here in East Sussex, at least, and as the drone of the planes vanished it was replaced by the sound of a wood pigeon calling in the beech trees that lined the graveyard behind its waist-high ashlar wall. Every time I hear wood pigeons I will think of my father, I said to myself, and found the mnemonic consoling.

We decided to walk back to Beckburrow where sherry and biscuits were waiting to be served as a modest wake. Dido and I accompanied Eric Maude, who wielded a stick, but strode briskly, all the same, saying he was more than happy to stroll back, remembering — entirely falsely — the many walks he and Brotherton had taken around Claverleigh. We soon caught up with my mother who was at the head of the party, keen to be first at the house. She was in something of a state, frowning and upset.

‘Don’t worry, Mother,’ I said, taking her arm. ‘It was a lovely service.’

‘There’s been no obituary. It’s a disgrace!’

Her mood didn’t improve and she took to her bed in the afternoon when the guests had departed.

Dido and I went down to the gazebo with a bottle of sherry and a box of cigarettes. My father’s chessboard was still set up with six pieces laid out on it: a rook, a pawn, two knights and two kings. The last two-move composition he had been working on.

‘Make any sense to you, these problems he posed?’ Dido asked, pointing at the chessboard.

‘No, not a clue. Mate in two moves. Baffling.’

‘He couldn’t remember the time of day but he could solve fiendish chess problems. . Funny old thing, the human brain. You were Papa’s favourite,’ she said, suddenly, topping up our sherry glasses. ‘Strange fellow, our father. He only tolerated me and Xan.’

‘He tried to kill me, Dido.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Forgot about that.’ She lit a cigarette.

I thought about what Dido had said and wondered if that were true. Had I been my father’s favourite? If I had, then that made his descent into madness all the more poignant, and the inevitable rift that occurred between us all the more sad and remorseful. Everything had changed after that day at the lake and as I sat here looking at his impossible chess problem the regrets began to accumulate within me almost unbearably. Just what had I lost, in fact? What had that war done to my father — and what part of him had been taken away from me forever?

Dido was saying something — I was glad of the distraction.

‘Sorry. I was just thinking of Papa,’ I said.

‘I’ve got something to tell you. I’m leaving Peregrine.’

I thought for a moment. Yes, this was significant: leaving Peregrine Moxon, the composer, the mentor, the man who had created Dido Clay from humble Peggy, the child prodigy.

‘Are you just leaving him? Or leaving him for someone else?’

‘For someone else.’

‘Do I know him?’

‘Reggie Southover.’

Blank. ‘Should I have heard of him?’

‘For heaven’s sake, Amory! Reginald Southover, the playwright.’

‘At least it’s not Eric Maude.’

‘That’s not in the least bit funny. You must have heard of him. He had two shows running in the West End in the summer before the war.’

‘I was in New York.’

‘Well, we’re madly in love.’

‘How old is he?’

‘Fifty-five. No, fifty-seven.’

‘Dido, you’re twenty-nine.’

‘I’m old for my age.’

‘That’s true. Is he rich?’

‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’ Pause. ‘He’s well off, I admit.’

‘What about Peregrine?’

‘He says he’ll kill himself.’

‘Poor thing.’

‘Good luck to him, I say.’

I closed my eyes as Dido rambled on about Peregrine’s failings — his enormous selfishness, his profound weakness as a man, his persistent jealous attempts to control her career — and tried to conjure up an image of my father before he was ill and I saw him, in my mind’s eye, standing on his hands, mocking and pitying us poor deluded inhabitants of our topsy-turvy world.

Peggy (Dido), my father and me around 1918.

I remember the month of June 1944. I stayed on at Beckburrow to keep my mother company, commuting to London by train, but it wasn’t really necessary as she seemed to pick up her old life without fuss. I suppose my father’s inconspicuous presence these past years had barely registered as she went about her business. He kept himself to himself, working on his chess problems; there was a cook and a housemaid to provide for and supervise him and they both met only at the evening meal — or sometimes not. Now he was gone so were the small traces he left at Beckburrow.

The sky above East Sussex in those weeks of June was full of aircraft flying to France and back again. Then in mid-June came the flying bombs — the doodlebugs — announced by the annoying sputtering roar of their engines. ‘Bugs’ was the wrong name — they were big, like small single-seater aeroplanes. I remember standing on the roof of the Holborn offices and seeing three of them at once and then the motor cut out on one of them and it arced down, like a thrown stone, somewhere in the region of St Paul’s. There was a percussive boom and a cloud of smoke and brick dust blossomed up prettily from the impact. In Chelsea I would lie in bed and hear them coming over — like a small motorcycle in the sky or an aerial lawnmower. There was something almost comic about the noise. But I lay there rigid — the noise was what you wanted; when it suddenly stopped, the fear kicked in as you imagined it hurtling down out of the night sky.

I remember I saw Cleve just once, briefly, after my night with Charbonneau. He seemed to suspect nothing; all was well and he said he’d be back in August. But I told Charbonneau he couldn’t stay on in my flat — to his sulky irritation. I found it impossible being the meat in a Charbonneau — Finzi sandwich. I didn’t like them both being in the city, paradoxically — I found it different from the situation in New York. How can I explain this? Perhaps because Cleve was back to his old self and I felt guilty betraying him. Life is complicated enough and I think I felt that, now my father had died, I didn’t need any more complications.

In the event, Charbonneau didn’t stay long in London. He left the week after Cleve, posted to Corsica to prepare for Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France that took place two months later. He was liaising between General de Lattre de Tassigny’s French Army B and the US 7th Army. He sent me a regular supply of postcards detailing how fed up he was — and how well fed he was.

I remember going on a three-day holiday to Woolacombe in Devon towards the end of June. An English GPW photographer — Gerry Mallow — had a cottage there and a ketch, named Palinurus, moored in Ilfracombe harbour. We would take the ketch out with a picnic and many bottles of beer and cider and sail out to Lundy Island.

It was an odd experience being on a holiday like that with people I didn’t really know very well. I went for walks and read books, happy to leave the running of the office to Faith. In an unconscious way I was also coming to terms with my father’s death, I now realise. I wasn’t feeling grief; I was assessing the end of a relationship. My natural father — daughter relationship with B. V. Clay had ended that afternoon when, in his madness, he had tried to kill us both. Every encounter I had with him subsequently had been shadowed by that event and despite the civil, dutiful signs of affection between us, I was always wary of him, watchful. The bonds had been broken and all that was left was the official designation — a father, a daughter.

I took a camera with me to Woolacombe, of course, but barely used it. One day when we were out sailing on the Palinurus I left it by the wheelhouse and somebody took a photograph of me. I discovered it two weeks later when I had the film developed.

*

Me on the Palinurus, 1944.

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I don’t have many photographs of myself — a trait common to most professional photographers, I believe — but I’ve always been fond of this one, for some reason. It’s probably my second favourite photograph of myself, after the one taken on my wedding day.

Flam has made a speedy recovery. The familiar dog in him is back. We walked over to the McLennans’ today and it tired him out rather — I mustn’t forget he’s as old as me in dog years.

*

I remember the doorbell ringing in my Chelsea flat very early in the morning on 1 July. It was 6.30, I saw by the kitchen clock. It rang and rang. I hauled on my dressing gown and hurried downstairs to the street entrance. It was my mother, but my mother as I’d never seen her — hair wild, eyes red-raw from weeping. I rushed her upstairs, she was wordless, sobbing, and sat her down. She sat there shaking, staring at her hands.

‘What is it mother, what’s happened?’

‘It’s Xan. I’ve had a telegram.’

I felt my lungs empty and my spine arch. I sat down slowly.

‘Xan’s missing. Missing in action, they say.’

4. PARIS

I LOOKED AT THE map again.

‘Take the next right,’ I said to Pearson Sorel, the driver of my jeep.

We bumped along a track, a sunken lane between high hedges of beech and hazel in the depths of the Normandy bocage, and turned right, pulling into the front yard of a farm called Le Moulin à Vent. A tethered collie gave a harsh peal of angry barks and then lay down again.

‘Wait here,’ I said to Pearson, stepped out of the jeep and approached the front door of a low stone building with a shallow-pitched tile roof. To one side of the courtyard there was an open wooden barn and a small stable with two loose boxes. I was wearing olive-green fatigues and a tin helmet, wanting to look as martial as I could. I had my camera in my knapsack and a box of 200 Lucky Strike cigarettes for use as a potential present, if required. I knocked on the door and said ‘Bonjour’ to the stooped ancient woman wrapped in a shawl who opened it. She looked me up and down and shouted ‘Arnaud! Arnaud!’ — and Arnaud duly appeared, a toothless smiley man with rosy cheeks and an immense soup-strainer moustache, like Nietzsche’s. Son or spouse? It wasn’t clear. I showed him the document I had — in French — my French wasn’t good enough to explain what I wanted. He searched for and found a pair of spectacles and read it carefully.

‘Ah, finalement,’ he said. ‘Suivez-moi, mademoiselle.’

We walked across the farmyard and through a gap between the barn and the stables. The land sloped down to a large apple orchard, an acre or so in extent. It was now September and the leaves were turning yellow and the ground between the trees was lumpy with windfalls. We made our way down through the orchard towards its end. Halfway through our progress I began to see the smashed trees, some snapped cleanly in half, and there, like some sort of bizarre tilted metallic ruin, was Xan’s Typhoon. The great boss of the propeller was buried deep in the turf, the blades shattered, the plane’s back broken. The Perspex canopy had been pushed open and the seat and the instrument panel already looked mossy and mouldy and I saw a spider’s web strung from the joystick to the cockpit fairing. One wing was fifty yards away, ripped off by the impact; the other wing was lifted crazily, near-vertical, showing the empty rail mountings where the rockets had been slung.

Strangely, the Typhoon, smashed and broken up like this, seemed even bigger and heftier in the orchard than it had when parked by the runway at RAF Cawston. Maybe it was the size of the apple trees, mature yet stunted and broad as apple trees are, that caused this delusion of scale, making the crashed plane seem even more surreally out of place in this orchard than it already was.

Arnaud was complaining and I understood enough to know that he was asking why this wreck that had been in his orchard for over two months now had not been cleared away.

‘Bientôt,’ I said, confidently. ‘Très bientôt,’ as if I had some power to effect its removal. I walked around the Typhoon, taking photographs, thinking about Xan’s last flight. I had used my journalistic connections with the air ministry, and then his squadron, to piece together as much information as was available.

Xan had flown a sortie at the end of June, the target a chateau in the Argentan area that was believed to be an army-group headquarters. He and the three other Typhoons in the flight had released their rockets in the face of only light anti-aircraft fire and had substantially damaged the chateau. It was therefore bad luck that Xan’s plane was hit, I was told, as it was observed peeling away after the first pass and trailing smoke and was then seen to crash in an apple orchard a few miles away. Apparently Xan had survived the crash and was standing waiting by his plane when he was shot dead by the first panicked German troops that arrived. A week later when Canadian forces overran the sector they were led by the local priest to Xan’s body, lying in a crypt in the church.

These were the few facts I had and as I walked around the plane I tried not to let my mind fill in the gaps and failed. Xan’s relief at surviving the crash, climbing stiffly out of the cockpit — maybe he lit a cigarette. . Then hearing shouts, seeing the German soldiers running through the trees towards him, resigning himself to becoming a prisoner, raising his hands in surrender. Then the shots. .

I turned to Arnaud.

‘Le pilote. Il était là?’ I pointed to the ground beside the plane. ‘Ou plus loin?’

Arnaud shrugged. He didn’t know. There were a lot of German troops hiding in the village from the air attacks. They had seen the plane crash and had come running. He stayed back.

‘Il a été abattu, le pilote. Vous savez?’

‘Yes. He was my brother,’ I said without thinking, then, seeing his uncomprehending face, translated it into French. ‘Il était mon frère.’ It sounded so different in French, so final, somehow, and it proved too much for me. I began to cry and the old man took my hand and led me carefully out of the orchard.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I still think about Xan, all these years later, thirty or so years on, and still curse myself for not having had any film in my camera that day at RAF Cawston. Why does it bother me? I’ve plenty of photographs of Xan — as a boy, as a young man — he’s stopped in time forever. But somehow I feel it would have been good to have snapped him by his plane, his Typhoon that became his coffin. Stupid mistake. Another mistake.

I was thinking about the mistakes we all make — or rather the concept of a ‘mistake’. It’s something that can only be realised in hindsight — big mistake or a small one. It was a mistake to marry him. It was a mistake to go to Brighton on a bank holiday. It was a mistake to write that letter in red ink. It was a mistake to have left home without an umbrella. We don’t sense mistakes coming, there’s this crucial unforeseen factor to them. So I found myself asking the question: what is the opposite of a mistake? And I realised there wasn’t a word, in fact, precisely because a mistake always arises from best intentions that go awry. You can’t set out to make a mistake. Mistakes happen — there’s nothing we can do about them.

I walked along the beach on my little bay thinking of Xan. He was only twenty-seven. Almost 100,000 RAF airmen died during the Second World War, I read somewhere. The fact that Xan was one unit in that huge number makes it all the more terrible. One butcher’s bill for one family amongst the myriad served up by that conflict.

*

But it was Xan’s death that sent me to Paris. I felt I had to leave London, do something, and after the liberation of Paris in August I sent a teleprint to Cleve saying that we should set up a GPW office in Paris. ‘New York Times and Chicago Tribune have reopened their Paris offices,’ I wrote. ‘We will be left trailing behind.’ A week later the go-ahead came with one caveat: I was to be joined as co-bureau chief by one R. J. Fielding, a seasoned journalist and foreign correspondent who had just been let go by the Washington Post, for some obscure reason, and promptly hired by Cleve. I didn’t mind — I didn’t care — I only had this overwhelming desire to go to France and find out where Xan had died.

R. J. Fielding — ‘Jay’ — was a lean, tall fifty-year-old who had covered the Spanish Civil War and the Sino-Japanese War in the 1930s. He had his grey hair shaved in a severe crew cut and wore rimless spectacles that made him look like a sporty professor. He was a widower and had a wry, unperturbed view of the human predicament. I became very fond of him and I’m sure, following on the death of my father, I saw him as a handy paternal substitute.

Paris in 1944 was a beautiful illusion. If you kept your eyes half open the city seemed unchanged and as perfect as ever, even after four years of war. If you opened your eyes wider the changes forced on it became apparent. Little things: the clatter of wooden-soled shoes, not leather; a very erratic electricity supply; no hot water; a main course of tinned peas and nothing else served without apology at a fancy restaurant. But the mood, despite these privations, was buoyant and intoxicating — liberation was liberating — somehow these minor inconveniences were not going to be allowed to undermine Paris’s spirit of place.

The new GPW office was in the deuxiéme arrondissement — a top-floor flat in an apartment block in the rue Louis-le-Grand, just a couple of blocks away from the Hotel Scribe, the journalistic headquarters for all newspapers, radio stations and press agencies covering the Allies’ push towards the German border. In rue Louis-le-Grand we had converted the sitting room into our office (we had no telephones) with desks for Jay Fielding and myself. One bedroom was for our rather grand secretary, Corisande de Villerville, a pale moon-faced young woman, almost terminally polite, who spoke perfect English and was happy to work all hours for our limited wages. I had a room in the Scribe but I often slept in the apartment’s spare bedroom — something about the crazed bustle of the Scribe put me off — rather too many people playing at being war correspondents, intoxicated and self-important at being in liberated Paris. All communications were at the Scribe and the military censors, also, vetting copy and photographs, and so I was obliged to spend much of the day there. It was a relief to leave and go back to the calm and solitude of the apartment. Jay Fielding had a room at the Lancaster — I suspected he was independently wealthy — and of course I had Charbonneau.

Charbonneau’s small apartment was on boulevard Saint-Germain though he was rarely in it. He gave me a set of keys but I spent only one night there alone as I found the Charbonneau atmosphere — his possessions, his clutter, his smells, his personal spoor, as it were — too unsettling, sans Charbonneau, himself. He was busy travelling through liberated France on Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur business, seeming permanently exhausted, always complaining — but he was glad, nonetheless, to have me in his city and was very keen on me in uniform.

‘You know, American uniforms are so much better than British or French,’ he would say, looking me up and down. ‘More chic. More rugged. Even the shape of the American tin helmet is better. Soigné.’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He was driving me mad with this analysis. Like many French intellectuals of the time Charbonneau had a sophisticated contempt for the USA — crass, vulgar, philistine, no cuisine, money-obsessed, and so on — but was simultaneously passionately Americanophile when it came to cultural matters — films, jazz, literature.

One of his favourite authors, Brandon Ritt, was in Paris working for Time magazine and Charbonneau had contrived to meet him and they had struck up a sort of friendship and he often asked him to dine with us. I’d vaguely heard of Ritt during my New York years. He had written one hugely successful, 600-page novel, The Beautiful Lie, that had been an enormous prewar bestseller and was made into a movie (that flopped), and he had been living off its success now for nearly a decade while working on its long-awaited, much-heralded sequel, The Ugly Truth. He was in his mid-forties and good-looking in a ravaged, dissipated way — he was the heaviest drinker I’d ever met, up until then — and was a strange mixture of occasionally disarming and funny self-deprecation at war with an off-putting, overweening egotism. ‘I may be a shit writer,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but I’m richer than any of the good ones.’ Charbonneau was oblivious to this polarity, always ready to exalt Ritt as a genius — something Ritt was happy to hear as often as Charbonneau cared to mention it.

After my trip to Normandy to find Xan’s crash site I tried to concentrate on my work. We were busy, Jay and I: Allied armies were in Italy, and advancing up from the Mediterranean and racing on through France and Belgium on a front that now stretched from the Channel to Switzerland, all readying themselves for the final push into Germany. Apart from GPW business we were still accrediting journalists and photographers from other magazines and newspapers so our days were filled.

I went one day to the Scribe to introduce a young woman journalist, who’d just flown in from the States, to the chief press relations officer of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force — that had superseded ETOUSA). She was called Lily Perette and was twelve years younger than me. As we sat in the lobby waiting for our appointment she began speculating about what unit she’d be assigned to — ‘Anything in Patton’s Third Army,’ she said — and I found myself envying her. Lily Perette was duly assigned to the 3rd Army and was absurdly grateful to me — as if I had been responsible, somehow. I realised, as we had a drink in the Scribe’s bar to celebrate her posting, that I was still restless, still troubled by Xan’s death, and I wanted to be up and doing things not buried under bureaucratic documentation in Paris. I was a photographer, I reminded myself, not an administrator — so why shouldn’t I be assigned to a unit as well, just like Lily Perette?

I cabled Cleve seeking permission and he refused. I threatened to resign and he reluctantly conceded. I sped myself through the accreditation procedure — I would still be working for GPW — and waited to see where I would be assigned. It turned out to be longer than I thought as there were so many journalists heading for the European front, now that the war seemed to be entering its final phase, that units in the field didn’t want any more — they were becoming a burden. I looked about me at the Scribe and saw dozens of men and women hanging around waiting for their posting. I asked Jay Fielding to use his old war-correspondent experience and pull some strings.

I remember Charbonneau telling me he had a week’s leave and that we were going on a trip. He had a car, he had a laissez-passer and, more importantly, he had six jerry cans of petrol. I told him that if I was assigned I’d have to leave and return immediately but, in all honesty, it didn’t seem likely, so I was keen to go.

We drove south down the routes nationales to Provence, to a village called Sainte-Innocence about ten miles east of Saint-Rémy. It took us two days to reach there, travelling through a provincial France that showed few signs of the occupation. We might have been driving south in the 1930s, I thought, in Charbonneau’s big black Citroën, staying at small hotels, eating surprisingly well, setting off in the morning sunshine with the windows open, the plane trees at the side of the road swishing monotonously by.

We arrived at Sainte-Innocence at dusk and Charbonneau picked up the keys to a house from the local butcher. We drove out of the village and turned up a dirt road that climbed to a small wood of umbrella pines on a bluff that was a stepping stone, a threshold, to a bigger, rockier mountain behind.

He swung open iron gates and we drove into an overgrown garden — there was just enough light to see — of oleanders, rosemary bushes and a great stand of cypresses planted as a barrier to the mistral. The house itself was a classic pink crépis Provençal mas. Two storeys, long and thin, one room deep with a terrace running along the facade and an old stone barn set opposite so that a sort of courtyard was formed.

‘It’s called the Mas d’Epines,’ Charbonneau said, stepping out of the car and looking about him. ‘It was all thorn bushes here before they cleared it.’

‘It’s very beautiful,’ I said. ‘Wonderful. Whose is it?’

‘It belongs to me,’ Charbonneau said with a proprietorial smile. ‘I bought it with the royalties from my fourth novel — Cacapipitalisme. A little present to myself. I haven’t been here since 1939.’

‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘Lucky you.’ Somehow Charbonneau always managed to surprise me.

The house was filthy, full of blown leaves and years of accumulating dust. Birds had been roosting in some rooms. Spiders and their webs were everywhere and I didn’t want to think about the rodent population. We lit an oil lamp, swept out a bedroom, and on a horsehair mattress we laid fresh sheets that we had brought with us. Charbonneau had bought several bottles of local red wine and a large saucisson sec in Sainte-Innocence and we sat on the terrace wall as the night came on eating slices of saucisson and drinking as much wine as we reasonably could. At a nice pitch of inebriation we went to bed, chasing a bat out of the room before we settled down.

‘I love this house,’ I said, lying in his arms, stroking his soft pelt. ‘I don’t know why but I just love it.’

‘We could be happy here, I think,’ Charbonneau said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Is that a proposition?’ I asked.

‘Let’s say it’s an invitation.’

‘But I have to get back to Paris. I’m going to be assigned.’

‘This war will be ending soon,’ Charbonneau said, rolling on top of me and looking down at my face. ‘Sooner than you think. What will you do then, Amory Clay?’

I remember one day, when we had come back from our week in Provence and I was still waiting for my assignment to arrive, Jay Fielding and I were hanging round the lobby of the Hotel Scribe wondering where we could go and eat when I saw Brandon Ritt step out of the lift. He sauntered over to us — he seemed a little unsteady.

‘Jay, Amory. Wanna go to a party at the Ritz?’ he said. ‘Lots to drink.’

‘Sure,’ Jay said. ‘And maybe I could take a shower.’ The Ritz was famously the only hotel in Paris with constant hot water in 1944. ‘Coming, Amory?’ he asked.

‘Why not?’ I said, and so we strolled the short distance from the Scribe to the place Vendôme. I had never been in the Ritz, and walking across the wide square with its tall monument towards the hotel entrance — Ritt involved in some harsh denunciation of an American writer I had never heard of — and then stepping into the huge lobby was another of those Paris ’44 time-travelling moments. I was in my uniform — dark brown khaki jacket, pearl-grey skirt, my forage cap in my handbag — but, as we rode up in the elevator to the suite of rooms on the third floor where the party was taking place — I could hear the volume of noise in the elevator by the second floor — I had the sensation of being some ingénue in a 1920s film, a young girl going to a decadent party where bad behaviour would occur.

Ritt led us down the corridor — a dozen people had already spilled out of the rooms as the party spread inexorably. We pushed our way in; the roar of noise was tremendous, as if everybody was shouting instead of talking. The windows on to the place Vendôme had been flung open to try and dispel the fug of cigarette and cigar smoke, most of it rising from two poker tables with eight-man games under way. On a large dresser under an ornate cut-glass mirror with crystal sconces were ranked bottles of bourbon, gin and rum, and ice buckets filled with bottles of champagne.

I lit a cigarette quickly — it’s curious how smoking in a smoky room clears the sting from your eyes. Ritt brought me a glass of champagne — Jay had disappeared, maybe in search of an unoccupied bathroom with a shower.

‘You’re a very attractive woman, Amory,’ he leered. ‘Tell me about you and Charbonneau. What exactly is the situation?’

‘We’re getting engaged,’ I lied.

‘That’s great. Congratulations. So maybe we could have some fun before you’re actually fiancés. .’

‘I don’t think Jean-Baptiste would be very happy about that.’

Ritt put his arms around me.

‘Jean-Baptiste would let me fuck his—’

He never finished because from behind came a great bellow.

‘Get your dirty hands off that young woman, you talentless cunt!’

I turned to see a thickset man with a full beard. He embraced Ritt and then they shadow-boxed each other. Ritt introduced us, out of breath.

‘Amory Clay, the most beautiful photographer in the European theatre. Meet Waldo Fartface.’

More raucous laughter. I said hello, pleased to meet you.

‘Are you English?’ the man asked, looking me up and down. ‘But in an American uniform. I like that.’ He looked at my sleeve badge. ‘Ah, war correspondent, like me. Welcome to the club.’

‘I am indeed English.’

‘Well, listen, my English beauty, if you’re a photographer there’s one man here you have to meet.’ He started shouting in Spanish. ‘Dónde está Montsicard?’

A shout in reply came from one of the poker tables and ‘Waldo’ led me over to the table — he was reeling drunk, it was clear by now — where a thin young man in a cheap suit stood up. He had very olive skin and the white of his open-necked shirt seemed to glow against it.

‘Felip Montsicard, meet a beautiful English photographer.’ We shook hands and Waldo turned to me. ‘Felip was the best fucking photographer in the Spanish war.’

Waldo lurched off leaving me with Felip Montsicard himself. I felt I was in some sort of weird parlour game. Who would I meet next? Marlene Dietrich? Maurice Chevalier? Oscar Wilde?

Montsicard offered to refill my glass and off he went leaving me alone again. I lit another cigarette and moved to the window, feeling the density and weight of the heavy gold brocade curtains hanging there, held back in a swag by plaited black velvet bands. Across the room, surrounded by cheering onlookers, Brandon Ritt was breaking up a chair, stamping it to tinder, as if it had attacked him in some way.

Montsicard returned with my champagne.

‘You are photographer? With who?’

‘Global-Photo.’

‘Is good.’ He had a thick Spanish accent. ‘I am with Life.’

‘I know.’

‘So you know who I am. Montsicard, the photographer.’

‘Yes, it’s a pleasure to meet you.’

‘You know Capa? He’s here also.’ He pointed at a poker table, at a small-dark haired man studying his hand.

‘No I don’t know him.’

‘That’s Capa.’

Ritt was now throwing the remains of the chair out of the window on to the place Vendôme.

‘He means well,’ Montsicard said, diplomatically. ‘But Ritt is very unhappy. In love matters, you know.’

I saw Jay Fielding pushing his way across the room towards me, his cropped hair gleaming with water droplets.

‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked.

‘Taking a shower, I told you.’

I looked round and saw Capa sliding out of his seat at the poker table, heading for the drinks. Jay scanned the room.

‘They’re all here tonight. Look, there’s Irwin Shaw. George Stevens, John Steinbeck. .’ he smiled at me. ‘All we need now is Marlene Dietrich.’

And then Marlene Dietrich walked in.

Charbonneau was actually very annoyed when I told him where I’d been. Extremely annoyed.

‘Brandon took you there? To the Ritz?’

‘He just said come to a party. How was I to know?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why no telephone call?’

‘I thought you were in Bordeaux. Ritt asked and I said you were out of town.’

His exasperation made his voice uncharacteristically shrill. He was growing even more annoyed.

‘But I was here — here in my apartment, doing nothing.’

‘How was I to know?’

‘Irwin Shaw was there?’

‘Everyone was there, yes, and Irwin Shaw. Everyone. Even Marlene Dietrich.’

‘Putain!’

He paced about his little sitting room, sulking, cross. Just as in his New York apartment the walls were lined with ascending columns of books, heading for the ceiling.

‘I saw Robert Capa and met Felip Montsicard.’

‘Who are they?’

‘Photographers. Famous photographers.’

‘I don’t give one shit for photographers.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘Did you speak to Shaw?’

‘Yes, for quite a long time.’

‘What about?’

‘I can’t remember. I was shockingly drunk by then.’

‘Ce n’est pas vrai. Ce. N’est. Pas. Vrai.’

He calmed down after a while and we went to the Café de Flore across the street and had a plate of carrots and a bottle of very bad Burgundy.

‘I have news,’ I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage, as we finished the wine.

‘You’re going to marry Ernest Hemingway.’

‘I’ve been assigned. Finally. I’m going to the US Seventh Army in the Vosges mountains.’

5. THE SUPER-TANK

ALL OF US, the four journalists and two photographers, sat in our folding canvas chairs waiting for Colonel Richard ‘Dick’ Bovelander to arrive. We were sitting in the chilly entrance hall of the small chateau near Villeforte in the foothills of the Vosges mountains, west of Strasbourg, some miles behind the notional front line that the US 7th Army was holding, now in November 1944.

Our mood ranged from very disgruntled to indifferent. Colonel Bovelander, commanding officer of the 631st Parachute Infantry Regiment, to which we were all assigned, did not like the press. He had kept us well away from all combat, far in the rear, corralled in a series of houses — an abbey, maisons de maître, and now a chateau — as the 7th Army advanced remorselessly on the Rhine. We had been taken to see the mayors of liberated villages present bouquets to various American units. We had visited base hospitals and rear-echelon supply dumps. We had witnessed hundred-lorry convoys passing by; had photographed tank transporters debouching their tanks; we had watched squadrons of P-51 Mustang fighters take off from airbases on ground-support missions. And so on. In short, we had witnessed everything that a modern army did in the field, except fight.

We had lodged a unanimous protest on behalf of our newspapers and magazines, hence this face-to-face encounter with Colonel Bovelander. Of the six of us, there were two women — me and a veteran reporter for McCall’s named Mary Poundstone (who, I strongly suspected, didn’t much like me. Mary preferred to be the only woman in the team). The four men, three journalists and a photographer from Associated Press, weren’t too unhappy with this boring but easy life. It was Mary and I who had allied to provide the consensus, this united front of free expression, and we were not going to be cowed by Bovelander’s bluster.

He strode in, accompanied by his public relations officer. Bovelander was thirty-two years old, one of the youngest regimental commanders in the US Army, fair, tall and handsome, and was wearing his trademark, a red bandana tied loosely at the throat. ‘Farm boy,’ Poundstone had sneered when she’d first seen it. ‘Oh, yeah. Nice touch.’

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ Bovelander began without any formalities, ‘your protest has been noted — and rejected. I resent this waste of my time. Anyone who does not follow the precise instructions of Captain Enright here,’ he indicated the PRO beside him, ‘will be arrested and charged.’

‘Charged with what, pray?’ Mary Poundstone called out.

‘Insubordination. Good morning.’

He smiled and walked out.

‘Well, at least we protested,’ I said.

‘I’ve got to get reassigned,’ Poundstone said and went to speak to Enright.

I wandered out on to the rear terrace that overlooked a long untended garden. The lawns had been churned up by vehicle tracks and at the far end by an ornamental stable block was an advanced dressing station that had a big tarpaulin with a red cross draped over the stable’s tiled roof. I lit a cigarette and wandered over. I knew a few of the medics — they were as far behind the front as we were and seemed to travel with us as we advanced. I saw a young private I knew — Ephraim Abrams — stacking packs into the back of a jeep that had its engine running. I had taken Abrams’ photograph standing by an abandoned 88 mm field gun and developed the print so he could send it back to his parents in New Jersey.

‘Where’re you off to?’ I asked.

‘Heading up to Villeforte. We cleared it out yesterday.’

‘Can I hitch a ride?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll be two seconds.’

I ran into my room and grabbed my helmet, cameras and film, and raced back out to the stables. I jumped in the rear of the jeep, pulled my helmet down low and wrapped a scarf around my face as Abrams gunned the motor and we drove out of the yard up a muddy lane towards Villeforte. As usual the traffic was heavy, and going both ways — trucks, jeeps, half-tracks and a long column of German prisoners tramping sullenly back towards captivity — and it took us almost an hour to travel the two miles to the small town. Villeforte showed few signs of fighting. There was a large hole in the roof of the mairie and some of the bigger farms on the outskirts that had been used as strongpoints were pretty much levelled — shattered walls and piles of rubble — but there were no fires burning and the clock in the church tower was telling the correct time.

Abrams pulled into a supply dump and I hopped off, but not before I had covertly snaffled a red-cross armband that I found on the jeep’s floor.

‘When are you heading back?’ I asked.

‘In an hour. Give or take.’

‘Don’t leave without me.’

I wandered off, up the road to the town, slipping on my armband, feeling a sudden surge of excitement in me as if I were playing truant. I was certainly disobeying Bovelander; categorically ignoring his explicit order. Fuck Bovelander, I thought and then paused, as I saw a small unit of military police up ahead directing traffic. I turned right down a farm track and as soon as I was out of sight cut across a meadow heading for another road that would lead me to the town centre, aiming for the spire of the church. I climbed over a wooden fence. And stopped.

The body of a German soldier lay there, his head a battered turnip of blood, bone and hair. He was supine on flattened meadow-grass a few yards from a tall blackthorn hedge. I looked around, feeling a little dizzy. How had he been missed by the corpsmen? I took out my camera and snapped him lying there. My excitement had disappeared, replaced by a hyper-alert apprehension. It was my first picture as a war photographer. I moved on.

Dead German soldier, Villeforte, November 1944.

I wandered cautiously into the narrow lanes of Villeforte, all the houses shuttered and locked. Here and there on the streets were groups of soldiers, sitting, lounging, eating, smoking. None of them paid me any attention — my red-cross armband the perfect passport.

However, I was stopped by a sentry as I tried to enter the main square.

‘Sorry,’ the soldier said. ‘We got brass checking out the tank.’

I backed off and circled round. The tank? From another side street I managed to gain an oblique view of the square and I could see an enormous German tank — the size of a house, it seemed — painted a matt sandy-grey and apparently undamaged, with American soldiers clambering over it. I could hear excited chatter and the odd whoop of elation. I crept forward to a doorway and fired off a few shots. I’d never seen a tank this large — some sort of captured secret weapon? Was that another reason the press were being kept out of Villeforte?

German mystery-tank, Villeforte, November 1944.

I looked at my watch. Time to return to Abrams at the supply dump. I headed off down a sloping paved lane — I could see fields at its end. I felt elated, pleased with my initiative at going AWOL like this. I intended to do the same as Poundstone and apply to be reassigned to a different unit with a more accommodating CO. Bovelander wasn’t worth bothering about, he—

The air was suddenly filled with a curious combination of noise: shrill tin whistles and the ripping of stiff canvas. Then, from somewhere on the edge of town a volley of percussive explosions. I felt the blast sweep through the streets to tug at my clothes. I crouched down. Shouts. Then more shrill whistling and explosions. Within seconds there was a crazed reaction of firing, as if every weapon in Villeforte was being loosed off.

I ran down the lane to its foot and hugged the wall of the last house before the countryside began. I could see a wide ploughed field and beyond it straggling copses of leafless trees. Peering round the corner I saw a squad of GIs sheltering in a patch of garden behind a waist-high wall. Every now and then one of them would poke his head up and fire off a few shots at some target across the field towards a distant wood. I peered — I could hear some vehicles revving in the scrub by the trees and I thought I saw small figures in green-grey uniforms scurrying about.

I shouted at the soldiers and ran over, ducking down behind the wall.

‘What’s happening?’

‘Fuckin’ counter-attack. You a medic?’

‘What? Yeah.’

Artillery shells — ours, I assumed — began to explode in the wood across the field. Great towering billows of chocolate-brown smoke, then the shock wave rocking us. I watched a tree slowly fall — creaking, the tear of timber splitting — then the crash and blustering cloud of twigs and branches. The air was full of the fat-popping noise of small arms. Then bits of tile began to fly up in the air on the roof of the house behind us and shards fell tinkling on and around us. We all ducked down. I’m under fire, I thought, so this is what it’s like.

The man I spoke to had a stubbly beard and a circular patch on his arm with a star in it.

‘OK, fellas,’ he shouted. ‘We’re getting outta here.’

He pointed at the entry to a narrow sunken lane. ‘Let’s get our asses in there. I’ll check it out.’ And he scurried off towards the lane, running in a crouch. Nobody fired at him and he arrived at the entry to the lane, squatting down between its thick banks.

‘OK, come on!’ he shouted. ‘One at a time.’

More roof tiles behind us were hit. The shards fell with a fragile, near-melodic sound like a wind chime. Nobody moved. One of the men was looking at me strangely.

‘You a nurse?’

‘Sort of,’ I said.

‘For fuck’s sake, come on, guys!’ the man in the sunken lane shouted. I rummaged in my kitbag and took out my other camera and fitted a 50 mm lens to it and wound the film on. The photographer in me was thinking: don’t miss this. A counterattack. Under fire. Don’t miss this.

The man in the lane shouted again but no one seemed very keen to follow the intrepid soldier and run the few exposed yards along the ploughed field, even to the evident security of the lane with its high banks. He waved and shouted once more and then suddenly, there was a boom of an explosion behind him and a great puff of smoke seemed to rush down the lane to envelop him. He fell down and his carbine went spiralling high up in the air to land twenty feet away. He stood up, apparently unhurt, and began to run back towards us, not bothering about his weapon, his pack banging against his hip as he raced for the cover of the garden wall. I peered over the top and took some shots of the wood. I could still hear the firecracker pops of rifles and machine guns but could see nothing stirring any more amongst the trees.

‘Get the fuck down!’ the running man screamed at me as he raced towards us. I swung round as he shouted and saw him hit, just a jolt that shortened his stride, and, entirely reflexively, my finger pressed the release button. He fell to the ground and others raced out to drag him back behind the wall. He was completely limp. They pulled him into the cover of the street that led down from the town square, and laid him against a wall, the men huddled round him, fumbling with his jacket and webbing. Click, I took another photo. Just at that moment I saw a half-track lurch into view at the top of the sloping street and I sprinted up towards it, having the presence of mind to thrust my camera back in its bag.

‘We’ve got a casualty down here!’ I yelled, and men began to spill out of the half-track and run towards me.

Colonel Richard ‘Dick’ Bovelander sat behind his desk and looked me over. It was a disdainful stare.

‘You know that you have the rank of captain in the US Army,’ he said.

‘Yes, I do.’

‘So, as you’re attached to my regiment, I am your commanding officer.’

‘In theory.’

‘In theory I can have my military police arrest you and lock you up pending a court martial.’

‘Listen, Colonel, we all know that—’

‘No. You listen, Miss Clay. Within minutes of me giving that order you disobeyed it. You could easily have gotten yourself killed.’

‘I was just curious.’

‘This is a war zone. Not an opportunity for someone like you — some photographer — to take photographs.’

I closed my eyes for a second. Bovelander was going to exact his pound of flesh whatever I said. However, I had the feeling that at another time, in another place, we might actually have liked each other.

‘I want the film from your camera,’ he said, holding his hand out.

‘No. Out of the question.’

‘Provost Marshal!’

‘All right. All right.’

I had been expecting this. I took my two cameras from my knapsack, rewound the film, opened the rear flaps and handed over the rolls. They were brand new: the two rolls that I had used were snug beneath my armpits, tucked in my brassiere.

‘Colonel,’ I began, ‘we, the journalists and the photographers, are not a subversive presence, trying to make your job harder. Your soldiers — sons, fathers, nephews, grandsons — have another army, the hundreds of thousands of their family members back in the US, who care about them and want to know about the lives they’re leading. Your orders are preventing us doing our job. It’s wrong.’

‘You’re English, aren’t you, Miss Clay.’

‘I am.’

‘Maybe they do things differently in the British Army but while you’re under my command you take orders as an American soldier.’ He looked at me in that disdainful way again. I crossed my legs and took out a cigarette. I wanted to rile him.

‘Have you a light, by the way, Colonel? Please?’

‘Sergeant McNeal will take you to the railhead. If you’re still here in ten minutes you’ll be in jail.’

I stood. ‘I wish you luck, Colonel,’ I said, and left his headquarters without a backward glance.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Colonel Bovelander was killed in a friendly-fire incident a few months later in March 1945 when Allied artillery shells dropped devastatingly short during Operation Varsity and he and two of his staff were killed in their observation post. He was posthumously promoted to lieutenant general. I would like to record it as an instance of the Curse of Clay but I was sorry to hear the news. I bore him no ill will even though he was a self-important man, albeit a good-looking one — all the same, someone like Bovelander deserved a more heroic demise than a tragic accident.

My smuggled photograph of the mysterious German tank — some kind of vast self-propelled gun, I learned later — made the cover of Global-Photo-Watch in December 1944, as did my shot of the dead German soldier I’d discovered in the field outside Villeforte. The headline of my issue — as I like to think of it — was ‘Exclusive: First Glimpse of Nazi Super-Tank’. I achieved a certain notoriety in the purlieus of the Hotel Scribe. Cleve was delighted at my scoop and urged me to return to the front line. Easier urged than achieved, as Bovelander had left a scathing and damning report about me and my unreliability, and I found it very difficult to be reassigned. I continued to apply to other units while running the GPW offices with the indefatigable help of Corisande — the French equivalent of Faith Postings — as Cleve had sent Jay Fielding to Guam to cover the Pacific theatre.

I never published my photo of Private First Class Anthony G. Sasso — until now — whose snapshot I took at the very moment of his death. I learned his name later — he was the only fatality of the futile and quickly aborted counter-attack on Villeforte — and as luck, good or bad, would have it, I was there to preserve the instant of his passing for posterity.

‘Falling Soldier’. PFC Anthony G. Sasso at the moment of his death. Villeforte, 15 November 1944.

When I developed the image and printed it I immediately called it ‘Falling Soldier’ after Robert Capa’s famous photograph from the Spanish Civil War of a Republican soldier. The soldier, rifle falling from his hand, is flung backwards, arms dramatically spread, against a background of rolling scrubby hills. It is one of the most famous war photographs ever taken and it made Capa’s name. Of course, there has been a mass of controversy surrounding the image. Was it faked? A photo opportunity carefully staged? Other questions arrive: do people really die in such a histrionic way when a fatal bullet hits them? Does a rifle or machine-gun bullet fling you backwards like this? I think that’s the problem. Capa’s soldier, falling back, arms akimbo, would not have looked out of place in a Hollywood B-movie western. This soldier seems to be dying ‘on stage’, as it were.

By contrast, my photo of the death of Anthony Sasso is mundane in the extreme. He has just been hit in the body by a bullet and his face, for a split second, instinctively registers the shock and the realisation. The jolt of the bullet’s impact has brought him slightly more erect and his helmet strap is flung forward by the momentary arrest in his run. I discovered later that the bullet entered under his right armpit and tore through his chest cavity. He was dead by the time he hit the ground, half a second later. And I was there. My follow-up photo of his comrades gathered round his body is overexposed and blurry (I was in shock) but it is authentic. Capa’s follow-up shot just adds more queries. The body has been moved. The background is slightly different. Too many anomalies.

GIs tend to the fallen body of Anthony Sasso. Villeforte, 15 November 1944.

The key fact that I remember about Sasso’s death is that he just fell forward, crumpled forward. He didn’t cry or scream or throw his arms out wide, he just went down. I remember asking a veteran of the First World War — an old comrade of my father — who had seen dozens of men shot alongside him during attacks on the German line what happened at the moment of bullet impact and death. ‘They just fall forward,’ he said. ‘Don’t make a sound. Thump. They just go down like a sack of potatoes.’ That’s what happened with Anthony Sasso. Thump. Dead.

*

I spent the Christmas and New Year of 1944–5 with Charbonneau at the Mas d’Epines where we had made some rudimentary improvements. Rooms had been painted; there was a functioning outdoor lavatory. We had installed a wood-burning stove and range in the kitchen that also heated water so baths could be had (with some effort). There was still no electricity and it was a cold winter of iron frosts, that year, even in Provence. We built great log fires in the main room that we kept going all day, burning vast amounts of wood, until we went — usually drunkenly — to bed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

German POWs, March 1945.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Hello again.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Amory Clay.’

We shook hands.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Paris,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

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

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

‘Yes, please.’

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

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

‘Medicinal,’ he said.

‘Of course.’

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

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

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

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m on this one.’

‘Too bad.’

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

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

‘I hope we meet again one day.’

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

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

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

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

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

Greer looked at me questioningly.

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

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

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

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

Greer sat back and looked at me squarely.

‘Any more secrets, Amory?’

*

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

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

In early February ’46 I slipped on a patch of ice on the rue Monsieur and fell heavily to the ground, stunning myself. I fractured my right elbow (and wore a sling for two weeks) but, more worryingly, the fall made my vaginal bleeding start up after years of quiescence, and I was obliged to resume wearing my padded rubber knickers again. I was on the point of going to see a doctor when it suddenly stopped.

I didn’t tell Charbonneau any of this, though he kept rebuking me — when he was home — for being boring. I wasn’t my usual annoying, animated self, I admit. But when the bleeding stopped and I discarded my nappy I felt my joie de vivre return. Except that Charbonneau was away again and couldn’t appreciate my rejuvenation.

6. TRANSFORMATIONS

IT WAS THE DAY after my thirty-eighth birthday — 8 March. The doorbell rang at the street entrance of 12 bis rue Monsieur, and Corisande went down to see who it was. She returned in some perplexity.

‘It’s a man, Miss Amory.’ She called me ‘Miss Amory’ even though I begged her repeatedly to drop the ‘Miss’.

‘Well, show him in.’

‘He has flowers.’

‘He’s delivering flowers from a florist?’

‘I don’t think so.’

I smiled to myself. Charbonneau was home. Playing one of his tricks, surprising me.

‘I’ll get it,’ I said, and left our little apartment and went down to the lobby by the street door.

Sholto Farr stood there with a posy of primroses in his hand.

How can you describe these physical sensations, these instinctive body-wide manifestations of your mental state, without sounding like some sentimental fool? When I first saw him in that split second — he was wearing a dark pinstriped suit and a camel overcoat — I felt my lungs empty, sucked dry as if by some sort of vacuum pump. I was in a form of shock, I realised. Then I felt heat — all in a further split second — my belly warmed, my ears glowed. Then I lost power over my limbs: my knees seemed unable to support the weight of my body; I felt a tremor pass through my shoulders and run down my arms. And then all these symptoms disappeared in another split second and I became entirely calm. Ice-lady. Calm with absolute certainty.

‘Hello, hello,’ I said, breezily. ‘What a lovely surprise. How did you track me down?’

I remember the four days we spent together as vividly as if they had taken place last week. Sholto handed me his bouquet, we shook hands and he asked me to dinner. I said I’d be delighted. He was staying at a small hotel in the rue de l’Université, the Hotel Printemps, aptly enough — I said I would meet him there at seven o’clock.

I went back home, to Charbonneau’s flat, bathed and selected my clothes with some care. I wore a black dull-surfaced silk dress with a stamped motif of acorns and cherries and a sequinned collar — stylish but unflashy. Not too much make-up. I felt like a sixteen-year-old going to her first dance. Despite the many signs of Charbonneau all around me in the apartment I managed to banish all thoughts of him from my mind — tonight I was a single woman, I told myself.

Sholto took me to Voisin in the rue Saint-Honoré. It was expensive, even for post-war Paris, and he insisted we eat as well as we could. We had foie gras, boeuf en daube, cheese, and a soufflé Monte Cristo. Sholto smoked three cigarettes to my one. He was one of those smokers for whom the act of smoking is as natural as breathing — he lit and smoked cigarettes with the same unconcern as he would scratch his chin or run his hand through his hair.

We told each other something of ourselves. His important news was that he was recently divorced. He had married too young, he said (he was two years older than me), and he had one child, a son, Andrew, aged sixteen, at a boarding school in Scotland. I asked him what his job was, now his soldiering was over, and he said he was a farmer. He had a large farm on the west coast of Scotland, between Oban and Mallaig, if I was familiar with those towns and that part of Scotland. I said I wasn’t. I told him about my family — he knew who Dido was, had heard of her — and about Xan and his death in Normandy. I didn’t ask him much about his war, about what he and his commandos had got up to before I came across them in the park in Wesel. I don’t think he wanted to tell me, in any event: he steered clear of military matters.

This was what we talked about as we dined. Under the surface — and I know he felt the same — was a surging boiling current of mutual attraction. Let’s call it lust. But we chatted away and smiled, smoked countless cigarettes and ached for each other.

Sholto had fine hair, almost blue-black, parted at the side, which he tried to hold in place with some potent oil but which, under the lights of the restaurant, lost its grip halfway through the meal, and fell, his forelock hanging over his brow. He would sweep it back — a particular gesture I came to associate with him — and seconds later it would fall again.

Sholto Farr. Alexandria, 1943.

He was something of a dandy, I noticed — like Cleve, unlike Charbonneau. His shirt was tailored — you can always tell by the set of the collar — as bespoke as his suit. His maroon silk tie had a neat hard knot the size of a hazelnut, as if pulled tight by pliers. He had a tiny ruby jewel of a razor nick on his jaw by his left ear. His eyes were a very pale blue-grey (I think I’ve told you that already). For a Scotsman he had no trace of a Scottish accent.

I remember, when he dropped me back at Charbonneau’s, I almost gave in and I nearly said, do you want to come up for a drink? I resisted, somehow. I wanted him but I didn’t want him in Charbonneau’s bed. He said goodnight, kissed my cheek — just a brush of his lips — said how much he’d enjoyed the evening and was I free for lunch tomorrow. I said that, as it happened, my lunch appointment had been cancelled, luckily, and that I was able to meet him, that would be lovely. Weber at one? Perfect.

I remember we ate ice cream at Weber — it was famous for its ice cream. By now we had pretty much run out of conversation and the subtext to our second Parisian encounter was almost grotesquely obvious. We weren’t exactly panting at each other with our tongues hanging out but we might as well have been.

We ordered coffee and brandy. We ordered more coffee and brandy. I couldn’t think of anything to say and, clearly, neither could he. So we sat there, smoking our cigarettes, drinking coffee and brandy, smiling stupidly at each other.

‘What really brought you to Paris?’ I said finally, something I hadn’t in fact asked him. ‘“On business” isn’t working, I’m afraid.’

‘I came to Paris to find you,’ he said simply, as if it was self-evident.

‘Oh. Right. . Was it difficult?’

‘No. Surprisingly easy. I remembered everything you said to me at that station in Holland. Your name, that you were a photographer, that you worked for Global-Photo-Watch, that you had an office in Paris. The receptionist at my hotel looked you up in the phonebook and there you were: Agence GPW, 12 bis rue Monsieur, Septième.’

‘Well. Good thing I told you what my job was.’

‘Very fortunate.’

‘Of course I could have moved. Changed jobs.’

‘I would have found you, one way or another.’

I felt tears in my eyes at this — possibly the most romantic words that had ever been said to me.

‘Good.’

He took my hand and looked at my fingers for a moment. ‘My hotel is very small,’ he said. ‘So, I went to the trouble of booking a room at the Crillon.’ Now he glanced up. ‘I think a big hotel — lots of coming and going — is better. More discreet. Don’t you?’

‘What a good idea,’ I said. ‘Shall we go there now?’

I remember travelling up in the lift to the third floor where our room was. We had no luggage, of course (it was being ‘sent on’ from the airport at Le Bourget, Sholto improvised, when we checked in). The lift operator was a small, thin, frail old man who kept his head down, looking at his shiny shoes. He had no doubt seen many a luggage-less couple to their room in the Crillon of an afternoon.

I whispered in Sholto’s ear. ‘There’s something you should know,’ I said. ‘Before.’

‘What?’

‘I can’t have children.’

‘Lucky you.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I had a postcard from Greer McLennan this morning, from Paris — a view of the Jardin des Tuileries. ‘I demand to know the full Paris story on return!’ she had written.

*

Sholto and I spent four days together that March in Paris, most of the time in our big room at the Crillon that looked out on to the place de la Concorde, wandering out to eat from time to time, then running back to the hotel, unable to restrain ourselves, sexually. But then Sholto had to return to London and, anyway, Charbonneau was due back from Algiers.

‘What’re we going to do?’ Sholto said. ‘I know it’s more complicated for you.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. It may take a little time but I’ll work something out.’

‘Let me know if you need me and I’ll just come over.’

It’s funny how, sometimes, one can be so convinced, so utterly certain, about something as entirely fickle as strong emotion. There was an instant, unspoken mutual trust between us, as if we’d known each other for forty years, not four days.

I may have been certain about Sholto but I was in a state of nerves, worried about how I’d feel and act once Charbonneau was back. Obligingly, the day after Sholto left, my body gave me a severe cold so that when Charbonneau returned, I was in bed, coughing and sniffling, my bones aching, my nose rubbed raw, red and running — most unsightly.

‘You need a holiday,’ Charbonneau said, with untypical sweetness. ‘You’re working too hard. Leave it to me.’

He took me south, by train to Bordeaux and then on to Biarritz on the Atlantic coast, to the Hotel du Palais, perched on its rocky promontory at the end of the gentle crescent sweep of the grande plage. I was apprehensive — and not just because of my own troubled emotional state — Charbonneau seemed to be acting out of character — caring, selfless. What was he up to? Had he some idea about Sholto and the days we’d spent together?

However, Biarritz worked its charms. Charbonneau had said that we needed surf, real ocean — not lapping Mediterranean wavelets — and early spring on the Atlantic coast provided spectacular foaming breakers in endless succession. And the unique aspect of the Palais, as opposed to other grand hotels on seafronts, is that there is no wide promenade between the hotel and the ocean.

We were shown to our suite on the third floor and, flinging open the windows, received the full panorama of the sea, with no interruption of traffic, there in all its surging glory. The creaming white surf rolled in to break on the rocks directly below us. It was loud — the ocean can be very loud — but invigorating.

We settled in to our room but now I was sensing an edginess in Charbonneau — he wasn’t quite his usual hedonistic, cocksure self and I began to suspect this new solicitous persona as he kept asking me how I was feeling. Did I need a rest, should he order me some coffee? No, no, I said, I was feeling much better now that I was beside the sea.

He suggested that we eat that evening in the town rather than in the Palais’ rather stuffy restaurant and we found a big brasserie on the main square. Biarritz had been bombed in ’44 and the repairs to the damaged buildings were still in evidence, almost two years on, roads patched up, gable ends and shopfronts held in place by heavy timber raking-shores. There were concrete gun emplacements on the cliffs — and one realised this was the southern end of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The carefree resort town hadn’t fully expunged its wartime persona.

Charbonneau as usual fussed over the wine list, opting finally for some obscure Basque wine with a rare grape variety. I was, meanwhile, feigning a tranquil, utterly benign mood: everything pleased me, the brasserie was charming, the wine delicious, the freshness of the ocean air, perfection. I knew my serenity was making Charbonneau even more ill at ease.

He waited until the end of the meal.

‘You know that I love you, Amory—’

‘Oh dear, that sounds ominous.’

‘Please don’t make everything a joke. It’s the worst habit of the English.’

‘Wrong, it’s our best feature, our saving grace.’

‘Please.’

‘Continue.’

I lit a cigarette in my most mondaine manner and plumed smoke at the ceiling.

‘I am going to be married,’ he said, solemnly. ‘The announcement will be in Le Figaro next week.’

This did take me by surprise. I almost dropped my cigarette.

‘You’re obviously not going to marry me. Do I know the lucky young woman?’

‘You have met her, once or twice.’

‘And her name?’

‘Louise-Elisabeth.’

‘Louise-Elisabeth Dupont?’

‘No. If you must know — her name is Louise-Elisabeth Croÿ d’Havré de Tourzel de la Billardie.’

‘Goodness. No contest with plain old Amory Clay, then. Is she from Paris?’

‘From Burgundy.’

‘No doubt they have hillsides and hillsides of expensive vineyards.’

‘Yes that’s true.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘Le coeur a ses raisins que les raisins ne connaissent point.’ He laughed at his joke as he always did and then his smile disappeared and he actually looked miserable for a moment, playing with the rind of cheese left on his plate. He gave a kind of rueful chuckle.

‘You know, I was wise once,’ he said.

‘Oh, yes? When was that?’

‘When I was born.’

‘I know what you mean. It gets difficult from then onwards.’

‘I want you to know, Amory, that my relationship with you will be unaffected by this marriage.’

‘Wrong. I assure you it will be very affected.’

‘Don’t be difficult. Let’s be sophisticated.’

‘No. Let’s be sensible. Let’s be honest. Why are you marrying this person?’

‘Because. . Because I wish to have a son. I’m forty-five years old. I’m at a certain age when a man—’

‘Do excuse me. I need some fresh air.’

I left the brasserie and strolled back towards the hotel, an unstoppable smile growing on my face. I wandered down to the esplanade, past the Casino Municipal, bright and noisy, right on the beach, and walked down some steps on to the sand, slipping off my high-heeled shoes and picking my way towards the foaming surf-edge. The constant roar of the waves was the sonic interference I required — I needed my head filled with noise. Off to the right the irregular sweep of the lighthouse on the clifftop flashed in my eyes. My clear eyes. I was happy for Charbonneau with his young aristocratic, fertile woman from the gratin. No doubt along with the vineyards there was a small perfect chateau to add to her allure. More importantly, I was happy for myself. I would give Charbonneau something of a hard time, of course, exacerbate his guilt over this betrayal, but, as I stood on the beach at Biarritz, I felt like dancing and singing; I felt like throwing my shoes in the air and running into the sea I was so happy. I knew where my life was heading, now, after so many years of mistakes and uncertainty and wrong turnings. I was going to marry Sholto Farr.