William Boyd - Sweet Caress

We ate eggs Benedict and drank cold Chablis.

‘I feel I’m in another world, another universe,’ she said. ‘The voyage over was completely terrifying. And you should see London. Blackout, impenetrable darkness. Then as the sun rises, smoking ruins everywhere. People frightened, miserable. Try to buy a box of matches — impossible. People saying to you, “Better dead than defeated.” It’s appalling.’ She looked around the bright, raucous room. ‘We’re losing, Amory. We’re not going to win on our own, not even with the Russians — and they’ll be done for any day now. That’s what’s terrifying us.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Why won’t the Yanks join in? What’s stopping them? Can’t they see the awful danger?’

‘It’s very complicated,’ I said. ‘When you’ve been here, even a day or two, you’ll begin to understand. What’s going on in Europe seems a million miles away. Nothing to do with us.’

‘I’m going to order another eggs Benedict,’ she said. ‘Is that too, too greedy? Eggs, eggs, eggs. What wonderful things.’

I summoned a waiter over and ordered another round of eggs Benedict and another bottle of Chablis.

Dido lit a cigarette. ‘By the way,’ she said. ‘hold on to your hat. Xan has joined the Royal Air Force.’

I remember being sent out by Mode on a fashion shoot to Taos, New Mexico, in January 1942, just before I met Charbonneau again. This wasn’t for ‘As You Were Leaving’, this shoot was to be used as backdrop for the summer fashion issue and we needed sunshine. I assumed Priscilla couldn’t find a photographer of any repute so she had decided to entrust me with the assignment. It rained the entire week we were there and all my photographs were rejected. I offered my resignation. It was accepted and then promptly rescinded twenty-four hours later. Cleveland Finzi running my life again.

What the incident showed me was that I had to stop taking photographs of pretty girls in expensive frocks and I began to search through my small archive trying to assemble a collection of my own work, work that I was proud of. It was not substantial. So I began to take new photographs — a sequence that I called ‘Absences’. Clean plates on a kitchen table. Empty chairs on the gravelled path of a garden square. A hat and a scarf hanging on a coat stand. The human presence was absent but its traces remained. I told myself that the impetus for these pictures arose because I was lonely in America, far from home, but a little further thought made me realise that these photographs of empty or recently vacated places might have had something to do with my infertility. The absence looming in my life.

I remember going into Saks Fifth Avenue and buying a grey suit with green check for $35. I wore it out of the store and went straight to the Algonquin Hotel to meet Cleve. We drank cocktails then went upstairs to the room he had booked to make love. That evening we saw a movie called Dark November and ate at Sardi’s before returning to the Algonquin. As we walked back the streets were full of soldiers and sailors — America at war! — and I recall feeling particularly happy, as if I had won a prize. But as I acknowledged that happiness the thought came that life couldn’t continue like this. Change was in the air for everyone; the world was changing, me included.

I remember the moment when I knew it was over. Cleve and I were staying at a small hotel — the Sawtucket Inn — on Cape Cod Bay. I hadn’t seen him in over a month but somehow he’d managed to secure this two-night break for us. Frances suspected nothing. Cleve had told her he was at a colleague’s funeral and would be away for a couple of days.

We were lying in bed in the morning in that fuzzy self-indulgent mood of bliss you experience when you’ve made love on waking and know you don’t have to get up and go to work, or anywhere, if you don’t feel like it, and are vaguely contemplating the possibilities of one more fuck before a big breakfast. Shall we? When will we be together like this again? I don’t know if I can. Oh, you’ll be fine, leave it to me. .

Somehow the idle conversation turned to a movie. Cleve leant over me and brushed the hair from my brow. I felt his cock thickening against my thigh. He kissed my throat.

‘It’s just like that moment,’ he said, ‘you know, in the movie we saw — when Haden Frost looks at — what’s her name? — Lucille Villars. What was it called? And you just know. You know they’re going to jump into bed.’

I frowned, thinking. ‘What movie?’

Cleve ran his hands over my breasts. Kissed my nipples, kissed my right ear.

‘Come on. You said it yourself. The sexiest look between actors in the cinema. Ever.’

‘I said that?’

‘The sexiest look ever. ’

‘Haden Frost wasn’t in Dark November. ’

‘I know. It was I Want Tomorrow. ’

‘I haven’t seen that film.’

He wasn’t really listening, that was his mistake.

‘We talked about it for half an hour, honey. Remember? How in movies these looks — if they work — can do more than ten pages of dialogue. That’s the acting skill. .’ He stopped, realising suddenly.

I sat up slowly, my brain working fast. He rolled back off me, reached for his cigarettes.

‘I haven’t seen that movie,’ I repeated. ‘We never had that conversation.’

He was good, Cleve, didn’t give anything away. He took his time lighting his cigarette and smiled at me, shrugged.

‘Sorry. Must have been talking to Frances about it, then.’

‘Probably.’

I snuggled back down next to him, not wanting him to see my face and the shock registering on it. That’s when I knew he was seeing somebody else. Frances never went to the movies because of her wheelchair. There was another woman in Cleve Finzi’s life. Now we were three.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Lunch today at the Glenlarig Hotel with Alisdair McLennan, Greer and Calder’s son. He was up on a visit with his two children, parking them with his parents as much as he could. He wanted to meet me, he said, wanted to talk about Vietnam, hence the lunch. He was in his thirties, with fine reddish-blond hair, and a blunt ordinary-looking face — pale-lashed, pale blue eyes — but he was attractive in a vital, super-intelligent way that was all to do with his brain. He had one of those restless, opinionated minds, always seizing on something to say or comment on; some sharp observation was made whether it was about the daily amount of seaweed washed up on a beach, or trade-union manipulation of the Labour Party, or ferry monopolies in the Western Isles, or that Anthony Eden was the best prime minister we’d ever had — but never realised. Everything was potential grist to his brain power.

Within about two minutes I knew I didn’t like him — not because of his manifest intelligence but because he was one of those men who cannot conceal their sexual interest — their sexual curiosity — about any and every woman they encounter.

I was aware of him eyeing me up, looking at my breasts, my face, my hair, my clothes — stripping me naked, mentally — as we sat drinking our gin and tonics in the hotel bar. Here I was, sixty-nine years old, chatting away, as this young man’s querying lust, his snouty evaluation, first assessed and then casually rejected me. Maybe all men do this — instinctively consider the sexual potential of every woman they meet. I can’t say — but all the men I’ve known have taken care to conceal it from you, if you’re a woman, unless that encounter is taking place expressly with some sexual end in mind, of course.

I saw Alisdair’s sexual radar switch from me to Isla, the young waitress who brought us our menus. Isla was a big plain girl with strange caramel-brown eyes and I sensed Alisdair McLennan’s idle carnal interest now play over her as she stood there, taking our orders, like an invisible torch beam, probing, considering, and then being switched off. Nothing doing.