William Boyd - Sweet Caress

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

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

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

‘How’re you keeping, lassie?’

‘Very good. Very fit.’

‘Nothing new to worry us?’

‘Absolutely not.’

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

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

‘Thank you, Jock. Much obliged.’

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

‘Aye aye, sir.’

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

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

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

‘All very complimentary,’ he said.

‘People were always complimentary about Sholto.’

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

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

‘ Mi casa es su casa. ’

‘ Gracias, señora. Heading back?’

‘I’ve a lunch appointment in town.’

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

‘Yes. Are you?’

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

‘Should I stop? Try to stop?’

‘Perhaps. No. Stop when I stop.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘True.’

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

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

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

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

We kissed and she ordered champagne.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes?’

‘Have you ever been with one?’

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

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

‘Berlin, before the war.’

‘I remember. All your filthy pictures.’

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

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

‘Known?’

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

‘A couple of dozen?’

‘Fifty-three.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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