William Boyd - Sweet Caress

‘Ah. The American lover. Going to meet the wife and kids?’

‘Going to change my life.’

I WAS GIVEN A lift up to New Hastings, Connecticut, by Phil Adler and his wife, Irene. They picked me up outside Grand Central Station in their Studebaker station wagon — with its wooden side panels it was like a travelling garden shed, it seemed to me — but we whizzed on up to Connecticut in fast time. Quite a few of the GPW staff had been invited, they told me. It was cool drizzly weather, not at all like late spring, and I was sitting wrapped up in the back of their car in my camel coat, and glad of it.

‘Have you been to their house before?’ I asked.

‘I have,’ Phil said. ‘Sometimes Cleve has a big Labor Day party.’

‘I haven’t,’ Irene chipped in. ‘Usually it’s no wives.’

‘So what’s different about today?’ I said.

‘I believe it’s her fortieth,’ Phil said.

‘Frances?’

‘The same.’

‘So, she’s older than Cleve.’

‘You’re on fire today, Amory,’ Phil said.

‘No, I mean. . I hadn’t thought, realised. .’ My brain was suddenly busy. ‘What’s she like, Frances?’

‘Beautiful, sophisticated. .’

‘Rich?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Irene said with feeling.

‘Clever?’

‘Bryn Mawr.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘beautiful, sophisticated, rich, clever.’ Somehow I felt Greville would have done better. I had no clear picture in my head about Frances Finzi so I told Phil and Irene about Greville’s Game — how anyone could be summed up in four well-chosen adjectives.

‘That’s very English,’ Irene said. ‘Very.’

‘Have you met Frances?’ I asked her.

‘Once. Years ago.’

‘Fine. So give me Frances Finzi in four adjectives.’

She thought. ‘Cold, patronising, elegant, plutocratic.’

‘That’s not fair,’ Phil said. ‘She can’t help inheriting money. I’d say “lucky”.’ He thought a second. ‘Maybe that’s not appropriate.’

‘Her father is Albert Moss,’ Irene explained. ‘Moss, Walter & Co. The investment bank? It’s part of the picture. I’m sorry. She’s very plutocratic in her particular way. Wait till you see the house.’

I was beginning to warm to Irene, a small sharp-faced woman with intelligent, knowing eyes.

‘I think the “plutocratic” adjective is inappropriate,’ Phil said. ‘I don’t see it.’

‘Phil said, loyally,’ Irene added. ‘Precisely.’

The Finzi house in New Hastings was a suitably impressive red-brick Colonial Revival mansion set in abundant gardens. It had a shallow-hipped roof with a wide overhang. There was a centred gable with an odd rounded porch with pillars and all the ground-floor windows had broken pediments. Ever so slightly over-decorated, I judged — the rounded porch looked like a bad afterthought, spoiling the clean lines.

We were directed by men in red slickers to park on a terraced lower lawn in front of the house and then more of these men, with umbrellas aloft (it was drizzling, now) walked us up brick pathways to the house itself and along its side to a vast rear lawn where the party was taking place.

On this main garden lawn behind the house was a bedecked marquee. A jazz band played at one end and toqued chefs dispensed hot food from chafing dishes at the other. Waiters and waitresses patrolled with jugs of fruit cocktail, alcoholic or non-.

For all the manifest expense on display the mood was informal. Men were in sports clothes, some without ties. Children ran around pursued by nurses and nannies. Effortless, moneyed ease was the subtext but the main message was clear: enjoy yourselves, eat and drink, wander around the capacious grounds — above all, have fun.

I felt overdressed in a black sequinned day-frock with a cape collar and co-respondent black and white shoes with a low heel, and so decided to keep my coat on. Anyway, it was freezing. But it wasn’t the weather that was making me edgy and jumpy — it was the anticipation. I lost Phil and Irene as soon as I decently could and went in search of Cleve.

I found him on the back terrace — a long platform porch with a balustrade — in the company of four other men. Cleve was smoking a cigar and was wearing a pale blue seersucker suit, a mauve tie and cream canvas shoes. I walked past this group twice so he could see me and then found a corner at the far end of the terrace and snapped him with my little Voigtländer that I was carrying in my pocket. I had been seized with the perverse desire to take a photograph of the legendary Frances and so had brought the camera along with me, on the off-chance. Not a good idea, I now thought, a little daunted by the scale and panache of the Finzi home. I waited.

Cleve was with me two minutes later. We shook hands. His eyes, it seemed to me, were full of feeling, almost tearful.

‘Thank you for coming,’ he said. ‘I was convinced you wouldn’t.’

‘I couldn’t not come—’

‘It means a lot to me, Amory.’

‘I hope. .’ I began and then couldn’t recall what I was hoping for.

‘Come and meet Frances.’

I put my Voigtländer down with my bag on a wrought-iron table and followed Cleve into the house, trying, and failing, to drive all apprehension from my mind.

Inside it was airy and tasteful, if a little over-furnished. Not an empty corner to be seen — occasional tables and grouped chairs, planters with ferns and palms. It was painted in pastel colours throughout and the vast arrangements of flowers on all available surfaces created a slightly oppressive sense of crowded elegance.

As we crossed the chequerboard marble hall — beige and brown — two little boys ran up to him shouting ‘Papa! Papa!’ They were made to stand still and face me.

‘This is Harry and this is Lincoln,’ Cleve said, introducing his sons to me (six and four, I guessed, or seven and five — I wasn’t good with children’s ages).

I shook their proffered hands.

‘Hello, I’m Amory.’ They also said hello, politely, dutifully, absolutely incurious. One dark, one fair: plain little boys with short identical hairstyles and round faces — in neither of them could I see a trace of Cleve.

‘You boys run along, now,’ Cleve said. ‘Amory’s going to see Mumsie.’

The boys ran off through the hall and Cleve led me to a spacious long drawing room with four bay windows overlooking the rear lawn. There was a baby grand piano, half a dozen soft sofas and a stacked drinks table. Over the fireplace was an eight-foot swagger portrait of a woman from the last century in a silk ballgown draped with marmoset skins.

Cleve raised his voice. ‘Frances? Are you there?’ He turned to me. ‘Will you have a drink?’

‘I certainly will, my darling. Brandy and soda. A big one.’ I had to remind myself that this man was my lover, that we had been naked in bed with each other, days previously. The fact that I was about to meet ‘Mumsie’ didn’t change those facts one iota.

Cleve busied himself at the drinks table and I turned to see a woman in an apricot-coloured silk organza tea gown steer herself through double doors at the far end of the room in a wheelchair. She rolled silently towards me across the parquet.

Cleve handed me my brandy and soda, smiling.

‘Amory Clay, let me introduce you to Frances Moss Finzi.’

We shook hands, smiling furiously. I noticed she was wearing the finest grey suede gloves. I thought I was touching skin. Despite my smile my mind was a disaster area: props falling, the roof collapsing, fires flaring, men screaming, waves of water breaking.

‘Hello,’ Frances Moss Finzi said in a deep smoky voice. ‘How charming to meet you.’