William Boyd - Sweet Caress

‘Amory?’

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

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

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

Trudi whispered in her ear and turned back to me.

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

I handed over the money.

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

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

‘My, my,’ I said. ‘What an honour.’

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

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

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

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

‘Actually, I’m rather busy—’

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

‘Ah.’

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

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

‘I’ll be there. Can’t wait.’

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

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

*

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

BERLIN SNAPSHOTS 1930–1

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

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

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