William Boyd - Sweet Caress

By now the balloon had been pulled down on to the grass and the WAAFs were fussing about its rear end, looking for the leak, I supposed. The balloon was huge, fifty feet long, and as it was half deflated it pulsed and billowed as if it were alive, somehow, gasping for breath, a fantastical sea monster washed up in this small square in central London.

‘I was talking to your mother,’ Greville said, his voice heavy with shamefaced apology, ‘and she mentioned, just in passing, that — ah — you were hiring half the photographers in London.’

‘Not true. We tend to deal only with Americans. We’re an American magazine.’

‘Yes. Of course — silly of me. Thought she’d got it wrong. Anyway, it was a chance to catch up, at least.’ Now he turned to me. ‘I always regret our. . Our little falling-out over your lost photographs. Your Berlin ones.’

‘We didn’t fall out, Greville. The whole thing was a nightmare.’

‘I wish I’d been a bit braver, though. I think it was having all those policemen in the drawing room. And then the word “obscene” being mentioned all the time. Very disturbing word, “obscene”, especially when it’s repeated every five seconds, very destabilising. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

‘It was all a long, long time ago,’ I said, consolingly, and unreflectingly put my hand on his knee, feeling it bony and fleshless, like a thin log beneath the worn worsted of his trousers. I took my hand away.

‘And then this bloody war finished me off,’ he said with some vehemence, and went on to relate that since 1939 his work as a society photographer had virtually ceased.

‘And I’m someone who took a portrait photograph of the Prince of Wales,’ he said. ‘And do you know what my last job was? Three months ago. Some fucking woman wanted me to take a picture of her cockatoo.’

‘Ah. Pet photography.’

‘Exactly. The graveyard.’

I thought a bit. I couldn’t bear to think of Greville Reade-Hill photographing people’s pets.

‘There is one job I might be able to swing your way,’ I said. ‘But it would mean going abroad. Italy.’

‘I love Italy.’

‘Greville, the war’s on there, also. It’s not a holiday.’ I had remembered that one of our GPW photographers had been invalided home, injured by shrapnel.

‘Yes, of course. You’re not sending me to Monte Cassino, I hope. That doesn’t sound much fun at all.’

‘No. But I could get you accredited as one of the photographers we have with the Second Army Corps.’

‘British Army?’

‘American.’

‘I love Americans.’

‘On one condition — that you don’t go near the front line.’

‘No fucking fear!’

We stood up and I suggested he return to the office with me and give all his details to Faith, and we wandered slowly back to High Holborn. I sensed Greville’s confidence returning: an almost physical change seemed to be taking place; he stood taller, his stride lengthened, as if he’d had some sort of mystical transfusion.

‘Where do you live these days?’ I asked.

He looked a little embarrassed. ‘Actually, I’m living in a sort of hotel in Sandgate, on the south coast. Your mother’s very kindly helping me out. What does this job pay, out of curiosity?’

‘A hundred dollars a week.’

‘What’s that in real money?’

‘About twenty pounds.’

‘Marvellous. Bloody hell. Saved my life, Amory, darling.’ He nodded, squared his shoulders and turned to me again. Smiled at me. ‘Darling Amory — resourceful, helpful, sympathetic, lovely — you couldn’t give me a small advance on my salary, could you?’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

This morning I brought Flam back from his overnight stay at the vet’s in Oban and carried him into the cottage and laid him in his basket by the fire. He seemed a little livelier, trying to lick my face, patently glad to be home. I set him down and then placed a bowl of ‘high protein’ dog food in front of him. He sniffed at it but otherwise wasn’t interested.

Yesterday morning I had come downstairs and he was standing awkwardly by his basket, neck and head held low, coughing every five seconds or so. I looked at his face and saw there was a little mucous discharge from his nostrils. He rallied a bit when he saw me but he was moving sluggishly. So I picked him up, dumped him in the front seat of the Imp and drove in to see the new vet in Oban. The vet, oddly enough, was a young Dutchwoman (married to a Scot) called Famke Vogels. ‘Big made’, as my mother used to euphemistically say, but I liked Famke because she didn’t bother much with niceties, just made her point. She told me to leave Flam in overnight and come back tomorrow for the diagnosis.

‘Just a bacterial pneumonia,’ she said when I returned. ‘Nothing to worry about.’

She had given him an antimicrobial vaccination and supplied me with a course of antibiotic pills to be administered twice a day.

‘Do you know how to do this?’ she asked.

‘Yes. He’s not my first dog.’

My first dog, also a black Labrador, was called Flim. He was run over by a farm tractor and his spine was broken. When the anguished farm labourer brought me to him — he was lying in the verge, all twisted, whining — I knew there was nothing I could do. Or rather, there was only one thing to be done.

The vet in Oban, Famke’s predecessor, a Mr McTurk, took one look and said to me, ‘There’s no option, you know that, don’t you?’ I agreed, and Flim was taken away, after I’d given him a farewell kiss, and he was put out of his significant misery, poor dog. I buried him — weeping uncontrollably — at the edge of the beach looking over the bay. I was thinking: poor dog — lucky dog, that his pain ended and his departure from this world was achieved so speedily and with no further suffering than that he’d already endured. You lucky dog — we should be so lucky, as lucky as sick dogs.

As Flam made himself comfortable I went and fetched the pill bottle and crouched down by him.

‘Time to take your medicine, laddie,’ I said.

I try not to talk to my dog as if he’s a sentient human being but it’s impossible, as any dog-owner will tell you.

I opened Flam’s mouth and placed the pill at the back of his tongue to the side. Then I held his jaws closed with one hand, holding them upwards — he was perfectly compliant — and waited a second or two. He didn’t seem to have swallowed so I blew on his nose and massaged his throat, gently. I felt the reflex in his gorge and let him go. He licked his teeth; the pill had gone down.

I gave him a kiss on his forehead and scratched behind his ears and saw his tail give a beat or two of pleasure.

‘What would you do without me, eh, Flam?’ I said.

He was trying to climb up me to lick my face but I pushed him back, the unwelcome thought entering my head: who will feed me my pill when the time comes?

*

I remember, now, that Charbonneau had been far too overconfident about his destination. I travelled back to London from New York in early 1943 — on the Queen Mary , no less — while Charbonneau was sent to North Africa in the aftermath of the Operation Torch invasions and was plunged into the internecine mayhem of who was to take control of the Free French. I assume that the Free French governmental authorities, whoever they were, thought that his American experience and know-how would serve them well with Eisenhower and his staff.

I remember walking into the wide lobby of the Savoy to meet Cleve on his first visit over and seeing him standing there, waiting for me, in his dark suit and brilliant white shirt, and feeling I was taking part in some absurd dream or fantasy. We ate in the downstairs Grill and then went up to his suite and made love. Everything about his demeanour had changed in London; it was like the old days in the Village. He was perfectly relaxed, his usual enthusiastic, funny, dry self and we wandered about London without him glancing once over his shoulder.