William Boyd - Sweet Caress

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

‘Grösze and Greene.’

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

‘ Berlin bei Nacht. ’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What’s your game, Amory?’

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

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

‘What type of motor bicycle?’

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

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

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

‘Your father asks for you all the time.’

‘I sent him a photograph.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

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

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

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

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

‘I should hope so.’

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

*

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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