William Boyd - Sweet Caress

Xan brought me a gin and orange and he had a half-pint of beer. We lit our cigarettes and talked dutifully about the family: Father’s health (good, stable), Mother, Dido’s fame, cousins, aunts and uncles. Then he handed me a slim book in a brown paper bag.

I took the book out and stared at it in some wonder. A purple cover with dull gold lettering. Vertical Poems by Xan Clay, V. L. Lindon and Herbert Percy. I felt tears of absurd pride brim at my eyelids. I hastily flipped through a few pages to distract myself from my emotion. I understood the title immediately — all the poems were thin like ladders, one or two words per line.

‘Why like this, vertically?’

‘Read the afterword — not now, obviously, but when you have a moment.’ He smiled, leaning back, searching for an ashtray. ‘It’s a little poetic movement we’ve started — me and two friends from Oxford — trying to do something different with poetry, out of the ordinary, shake things up a bit, if we can. Maybe you could write about us in your Global-Photo-Thingamajig. ’

‘You have to sign it for me.’

‘Oh, but I have.’

I looked at the title page: ‘For Amory with love from Marjorie Clay.’

I blew my nose, had a small coughing fit, all to cover up the tears that had now begun to flow.

‘You’re meant to be happy, not tearful,’ Xan said.

‘These are tears of happiness, Marjorie,’ I said. ‘You’ve no idea how proud I am of you.’

I grabbed his head with both hands, pulled him towards me and covered him with kisses. He had to beat me off.

Half an hour later he had the mess steward telephone for a taxi to take me to my hotel in Fakenham. As we stood waiting under the rectory’s porch he introduced me to his fellow pilots, fellow officers, as they came and went. They all looked as if they were playing truant from school. This was the curious effect my siblings had on me. I felt like Xan’s great-aunt — decades older than him — while Dido made me feel like a child.

He kissed me on the cheek and opened the door of the taxi for me.

‘It’s absolutely appalling,’ he said. ‘I haven’t asked you a single question about yourself. It’s all been me, me, me.’

‘That’s precisely why I came to see you,’ I said. ‘Now I’m completely au courant. ’

‘Are you happy, Amory? You seem happy.’

‘Happy to see you , darling,’ I said, ducking the question.

We drove off down the lane to Fakenham and I looked back through the rear window and saw him wave at me. Then someone asked him for a light and he turned, fishing in his pocket for his lighter.

I wiped away residual tears. Why was he making me so lachrymose? The transformation in him, I suspected — while I wasn’t looking he had become someone entirely different. A competent Xan, a young man who could take his strapping plane, armed with its rockets, power it into the air and go into battle. It shook you up, that kind of realisation.

‘So, Miss,’ the taxi driver said, over his shoulder, ‘what’s your bet for the invasion? July or August?’

The Vertical Poets, Oxford, 1942. Left to right, Herbert Percy, V. L. Lindon and Xan Clay.

‘Premonitions’ by Xan Clay

Stars

foretell

the fall

of

czars.

Strummed

guitars

lead to

hidden

bars.

Huzzahs

greet

news

of life

on

Mars.

Time

stands

still

in

Shangri-las.

THE NEW GPW (London) offices were at the west end of High Holborn. We had three rooms on the top floor of a building with an oblique view of the dirt-mantled roofs of the British Museum. There was my office, Faith’s annexe and a kind of waiting room where journalists and photographers would gather and that swiftly came to be an informal club. We had a cupboard with a decent supply of liquor (gin, whisky, bourbon, sherry) and cigarettes — courtesy of our New York parent office — a couple of shabby, soft sofas and walls covered with framed photographs and past issues of Global-Photo-Watch. In the time between the pubs closing after lunch and reopening in the evening it was an even more popular venue to gather and while away the dead hours of the afternoon. Free booze, free cigarettes and kindred spirits.

We had opened the offices in the early summer of ’43 and had become something of a holding pen for various American newspapers, magazines and the smaller wire services. Apparently our ability to supply swift accreditation via ETOUSA (European Theatre of Operations US Army) had become well known. It was nothing to do with me — Faith Postings did all the liaising and paperwork and she was clearly very good at it. So, as it turned out, we were also acting as proxies — and charging a fee — for around a dozen other American publications and press agencies, including Mademoiselle and the Louisiana Post-Dispatch. Once the journalist or the photographer had the accreditation from ETOUSA they would be assigned to a particular unit in the services — the air force was the most popular — where they would be handled and supervised by that unit’s press officer and department.

By this stage of the war the process was running fairly smoothly. The journalists — including several women — once accredited, were issued with uniforms and granted the honorary rank of captain. There was always a considerable amount of paperwork involved but, once assigned, the working atmosphere depended on each unit’s particular disposition towards the press — ranging from lax and friendly to hostile and authoritarian — an attitude usually determined by the personality and character of the commanding officer.

One day at the end of May ’44, Faith popped her head around my door and screwed up her face apologetically.

‘There’s a strange gentleman here asking for you. Insisting. Says he knows you.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Mr Reade-Hill, he says.’

Greville was standing in our club-room peering at the photographs on the walls through spectacles so cloudy they seemed opaque.

‘Greville?’

He turned, snatching off his glasses, and strode across the room to embrace me, kissing me on the cheek. I smelled the odour of poverty coming off him, that sour reek of the unbathed, of unwashed clothes. He looked pale and considerably older and his moustache was untrimmed and grey. His suit was shiny with wear and the obvious repairs had been crudely stitched — by Greville himself, no doubt.

We went for a stroll, had a cup of tea and a sandwich in a café and ended up sitting in the watery May sunshine on a bench in Bloomsbury Square. The talk had been banal — all about family matters and a lot of disingenuous quizzing of me about my job at GPW. I was waiting for the real reason for our encounter to arrive.

At the Great Russell Street end of the square, a silver, deflating, three-finned barrage balloon was being winched down on to its lorry. About half a dozen young WAAFs were fussing around and their excited girls’ voices carried across the grass to us.

‘The thing is, darling, I’m pretty much broke, these days,’ Greville said, looking across the square at the barrage balloon, not wanting to meet my eye. ‘I’m afraid young Bruno rather cost me a fortune, one way and another.’ I sensed Greville’s old pride and confidence had turned to bitterness. I remembered the handsome, dashing figure he used to cut in his dinner suit, hobnobbing with royalty, aristocrats and millionaires.