William Boyd - Sweet Caress

I drained my glass of milk and was rummaging in my bag for my cigarette case when I heard a voice say, ‘Amory? Amory Clay?’

I turned in my seat to see God standing there. Miss Ashe, immaculate in black silk and velvet with a fur collar and a buckled sailor hat set cockily to one side.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said, seemingly genuinely pleased to see me. ‘I was thinking of you just last night. How uncanny.’ She pointed at the scrap of veil folded up on her hat’s brim. ‘I’m off to a funeral at St Bride’s. Always gives me a terrible hunger, a funeral — I’ve just had two pork pies and a bottle of ginger beer.’

I walked out with her on to Fleet Street, telling myself that she was simply an elegant elderly woman and one, moreover, who wielded no power over me any more. Relax — I was allowed to smoke a cigarette if I wanted to — and I paused and pointedly lit up.

‘What’re you up to these days?’ she asked, as I put my lighter and cigarette case away. ‘Married? Children?’

‘No to both,’ I said.

‘Don’t leave it too late,’ she said.

‘Like you?’ I saw the old cold gaze come into her eyes for a moment and I said, quickly, ‘Actually, I’m almost engaged.’

‘Almost congratulations, then. Are you in town shopping?’

‘I’m running an office here.’ I pointed to Shoe Lane. ‘Just up there. Global-Photo-Watch. It’s an American magazine. I’m the London manager.’

‘Really?’ Miss Ashe paused and looked at me anew.

‘I’m a professional photographer,’ I said with some pride, letting the information sink in.

‘Goodness me.’

‘I make five hundred pounds a year,’ I lied.

‘You must come down and talk to the school. But don’t tell them how much money you make or they’ll all want to be photographers.’ She smiled her thin smile. ‘And that would never do.’

I felt a fool, now, having blurted out a sum of money like that, but I wanted her to know that she had been wrong, that she was fallible, that she didn’t know her girls as well as she thought she did.

‘I’d love to come,’ I said.

‘Have you a card?’

I searched my bag and found one and handed it over. She studied it intently, as if it might be forged.

‘Well, well, Amory Clay,’ she said. ‘ Global-Photo-Watch. I’ll write with a formal invitation. How is your dear father?’

‘Not much improved, I’m afraid.’

‘I’m so sorry. Casualties of war. .’ She turned and pointed to a middle-aged man selling matches in a doorway. ‘Some brave soldier, no doubt, reduced to that.’ She looked moved, for a second, then briskly said, ‘Goodbye, Amory, my dear, I’m very proud of you.’

With that she touched my cheek with her gloved hand and darted away across Fleet Street towards St Bride’s.

I stood there for a while feeling oddly shaken by the encounter and irritated with myself. God still had the power to destabilise me, I was annoyed to realise. I walked slowly back to the office wondering how I could have handled the meeting better but coming up with no good or coherent ideas.

Faith was back and showed me her membership card of the British Union of Fascists.

‘Well done,’ I said. ‘Any news?’

‘Turns out there’s lots of marches planned,’ she said, pleased with herself. ‘Big ones — to celebrate the fourth anniversary.’

‘Fourth anniversary of what?’

‘The founding of the party. October ’32.’

‘Right. Of course. But the teleprinter said something soon.’

Faith consulted her notebook.

‘There’s a small march next week. Wednesday, 11 a.m. Sort of testing the water — a trial run for the big ones in October.’

‘Where?’

‘Tower of London to St Dunstan’s Church Hall in Maroon Street. William Joyce is speaking. Not Mosley, unfortunately. There’ll be one hundred blackshirts, they say.’

‘Where’s Maroon Street?’

‘Stepney.’

I almost said, where’s Stepney? — but stopped myself. I looked fixedly at her.

‘I’d like you to be on that march, Faith. But only if you want to.’

‘If you want me there, I’ll be there, Miss Clay,’ she said, loyally. ‘But I don’t think it’ll be much of a show.’

‘Doesn’t matter. No one else will be covering it. This might just be our scoop. Blackshirts marching into the East End. .’ I felt excitement building. ‘You’ll be marching, I’ll be taking photographs — and then we’ve got our Mosley interview. Send a teleprint to New York.’

I bought a gazetteer of London with detailed fold-out maps. As I studied them I realised that the East End might easily have been in Siam or Tanganyika or Siberia as far as I was concerned. It seemed that London stopped at Aldgate and the City and all those streets of low houses and docks and wharves and the meandering river were part of a terra incognita that only its denizens penetrated. In the gazetteer, I read:

‘To the east of the City lies Whitechapel, a district largely inhabited by Jews (tailors, dressmakers, furriers, bootmakers, cigar-makers, etc.). Their presence here, and in Mile End and Stepney, is chiefly due to the Russian persecutions of the nineteenth century.’

I unfolded my delicate beautiful map and saw the districts east of the City, traversed by the great thoroughfares heading towards the Thames Estuary — Whitechapel Road, Commercial Road, Cable Street — carving their way through Stepney, Limehouse, Bromley, Poplar, Bow and Stratford. . I felt that strange frisson of anticipation that an explorer in Africa must experience, about to set off into the unknown. Except in this case the map wasn’t blank — every little street, lane and alleyway had its appointed name. This land was densely populated — it had its churches and schools, its police stations, hospitals, post offices and civic buildings. I would be entering Olde England and the names I read were redolent of the country’s long and complex history: Shadwell, Robin Hood Lane, Regent’s Canal, Lochnagar Street, Ropemaker’s Field, Wapping Wall. . But nobody I knew ever went there.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

In anyone’s house at any given time there will, I suppose, be half a dozen appliances or components not functioning properly. A light fused, a door-handle loose, a floorboard creaking, an electric iron inexplicably giving no heat. In the cottage’s case, for example, there is a permanently dripping cold tap in my bathroom, a drawer in the kitchen that will not fully shut, and an armchair that has mysteriously lost one castor. Also, the Hillman Imp seems to be leaking oil from somewhere, judging from the dark stains on the gravel, and my wireless reception will switch off completely for ten minutes or so, offering up muffled voices obscured by crackling gunfire, before it bizarrely resumes normal service.

As with your house, so with your body. I’ve a bruise on my shin, the remains of a splinter in my palm that seems to be turning septic, an ingrowing big toenail and my left knee cartilage twinges with a spasm of pain when I rise from a seat. We make do — favour the right leg, use the left hand, slip a paperback under the armchair where the castor should be. It amazes me what compromises we happily live with. We limp along, patching up, improvising.

Talking of compromises in my life, I see now that Cleve Finzi was my knight in slightly tarnished armour. The fact that he was handsome and successful, selfish and self-absorbed — not to say a little vapid, from time to time — doesn’t reflect badly on me, I believe. At certain periods of our lives we — men and women — need exactly this type of person. Their easiness on the eye is all you require — handsome men, beautiful women, it’s a pleasure just to be close to them. Then growing maturity tells you that this type of person simply will not do any more and we sense instinctively that we need someone, something, altogether more intriguing.