William Boyd - Sweet Caress

And then Cleve Finzi came.

‘COTTAGE’ HOSPITAL SEEMED THE wrong appellation. ‘Rural hotel’ hospital was more apt. Set in its own capacious grounds off the Lewes — Uckfield road, Persimmon Hall resembled a small country-house hotel with annexes. There was the central building, a medium-sized Georgian mansion in pale sandstone, and connected to it were two long low modern wings overlooking the terraced lawns and gardens. There were a couple of wards but most patients had their own private rooms where they were well catered for by uniformed staff (cleaners, porters, serving girls) as well as nurses.

Through the French windows of my room in the east wing I could see the front terrace with its York stone pathways, herbaceous borders and well-placed teak benches in front of a low retaining wall. Steps led down to a couple of lawns and a lily pond. Cedars, rhododendrons and monkey-puzzle trees marked the boundary. It was all very bourgeois and calming.

I found that the process of recovering from a long illness simplified life unimaginably. All you — the patient — had to do was endure the malady and try to become well. All further concerns — bathing, eating, communicating with the outside world — were dealt with by others offstage, as it were. I lay in bed feeling weak and tired, was fed and medicated, taken for strolls, had my padding changed when it was blood-soaked and lost consciousness punctually each night after my sleeping draught.

And the world turned and history was made — the incendiary destruction of the Hindenburg airship, the Sino-Japanese War, the release of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs — and also the GPW office in Shoe Lane was closed and Faith Postings paid off. My mother and Xan emptied my King’s Road flat and put my bits and pieces, my sticks of furniture, into store and wound up the lease as I lay in my bed, lethargic and uncaring. There is, it should be said, something addictive about being so useless, so dependent. One regresses. An agreeable, creeping sensation of total irresponsibility found me asking myself — sitting on a bench outside my room, on a sunny, warm day, a cup of tea in my hand — why life couldn’t always be like this. It was near ideal. I was succumbing to the potent allure of semi-invalidism.

Months past. I lost more weight, but more slowly, despite the amount of pale pabulum I ingested. I still felt tired and every few days my body would ritually expunge a half-pint or so of blood.

It was my mother who alerted me about Cleve. We were sitting on my bench outside my room, wrapped up because it was chilly.

‘I meant to say,’ she broke off from whatever anecdote she was recounting. ‘I’ve had a peculiar telephone call from an American. A Mr Finzi. He claims to know you.’

‘He was my employer in New York, Mother.’

‘Well, he wants to come and see you — here. Can you imagine?’

I experienced the first sensation of genuine excitement in ages. I felt, for a moment, that I was fully alive again.

‘Fine with me,’ I said, trying to keep the smile off my face. ‘Be a distraction.’

Cleve came to Persimmon Hall. It was a Wednesday morning in June and I was in my tartan dressing gown, sitting on my bench, looking out over the lily pond and the South Downs beyond, when I saw him being led by a nurse along the pathway from the main building.

I sensed that old heart-lurch, the weakening spine-shudder — and then rallied.

He was wearing a three-piece navy blue suit with a brilliant red tie — with the usual tiepin securing it to his shirt. His thick hair was oiled flat and he looked very tanned, as if he’d been sailing for weeks on some sunlit ocean. Absurdly handsome, I thought. Too handsome, really — it was something of a joke.

He kissed my cheek and sat on the bench beside me, staring at me, taking me in.

‘May I take your hand?’

‘There would be terrible gossip. All right, go on, let’s risk it.’

He took my hand in both of his.

‘You look well, Amory. If a little too thin, I must say.’

‘Right. Not true, but compliment duly paid. You, however, look disgustingly well.’

We talked a little more about my state of health, of the general air of bafflement surrounding my condition. I explained that I had seen a dozen doctors, I had had X-rays taken, that I was now on a regime of concentrated iron pills but something profound had happened during that attack, that last kick administered by Snub-Nose Lenny, that had deeply injured me, and my body still hadn’t recovered.

At this he looked pained and unhappy. He stood up, thrust his hands in his trouser pockets and paced about.

‘I have to say this, Amory. I feel it’s all my fault, somehow.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘I pressed you to go on that march. I insisted. Look what’s happened in the world since. It wasn’t important. Why was I so obsessed with it?’

‘You weren’t to know that,’ I said. ‘It was just rotten bad luck. What if I’d been hit by a bus? Would you blame yourself?’

‘It was because you were carrying a camera.’

‘If I’d turned up another street it wouldn’t have happened. It was just bad luck.’

He sat down and took my hand again.

‘Bless you for saying that. But I can’t help feeling that my. .’ He searched for a word. ‘My eagerness. That my urging had—’

‘Nothing to do with it.’

He sagged. Smiled. Kissed my forehead.

‘Am I allowed to smoke a cigarette out here?’

‘As long as I can have a puff.’

He smoked a cigarette — I shared it — and he said he wanted to send a specialist down from London, an eminent gynaecologist. Cleve was worried that a diet of white food and iron pills wasn’t good enough, wasn’t modern medicine.

‘Well, of course,’ I said. ‘That’s very kind of you.’

When he left, he said, ‘As soon as you’re well, we’ll reopen the office. Get you back to work. Get you taking photographs again.’

Sir Victor Purslane had overseen the delivery of some dozens of babies to minor members of the royal family and major aristocrats and charged twenty guineas per half-hour for a consultation in his Wigmore Street rooms. He was very tall and thin, with the slight stoop that very tall men affect. He was bald and his grey side-hair was swept back in two oiled wings above his ears. An elegant, expensively suited, faultlessly polite man, if not handsome — he had small watery baggy eyes.

He was escorted to my room by a guard of honour of two nurses and Dr Wellfleet, the director of Persimmon Hall. The great man had deigned to visit the provinces; the obeisance was almost grotesque.

He examined me thoroughly, internally and externally, he looked at my X-rays, he consulted the records from the London Hospital, Whitechapel, and the daily reports from Persimmon Hall. However sizeable the reimbursement Sir Victor was receiving from Cleve, I still sensed in him an urge to be gone as soon as decently possible, gamely resisting the temptation to look at his pocket watch, hanging from its gold chain and tucked in his waistcoat. Persimmon Hall was not his natural habitat.

Eventually Sir Victor did look at his watch and exhaled.

‘You’re going to be disappointed, Miss Clay,’ he said.

‘Disappoint me, Sir Victor.’

‘I don’t know what’s wrong with you. Why you’re bleeding like this.’

‘Oh.’

‘The trauma you suffered was the cause — but you know that as well as I do. Better.’ He seemed uncomfortable, for a moment. ‘Modern medicine. . Its triumphs. . We think we understand all about the human body, have solved its mysteries. But actually I think we know very little.’ He reached into his pocket for a small battered silver case and selected one of the five cigarettes it contained and lit it.