William Boyd - Sweet Caress

Charbonneau’s small apartment was on boulevard Saint-Germain though he was rarely in it. He gave me a set of keys but I spent only one night there alone as I found the Charbonneau atmosphere — his possessions, his clutter, his smells, his personal spoor, as it were — too unsettling, sans Charbonneau, himself. He was busy travelling through liberated France on Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur business, seeming permanently exhausted, always complaining — but he was glad, nonetheless, to have me in his city and was very keen on me in uniform.

‘You know, American uniforms are so much better than British or French,’ he would say, looking me up and down. ‘More chic. More rugged. Even the shape of the American tin helmet is better. Soigné. ’

‘Yes, yes, yes.’ He was driving me mad with this analysis. Like many French intellectuals of the time Charbonneau had a sophisticated contempt for the USA — crass, vulgar, philistine, no cuisine, money-obsessed, and so on — but was simultaneously passionately Americanophile when it came to cultural matters — films, jazz, literature.

One of his favourite authors, Brandon Ritt, was in Paris working for Time magazine and Charbonneau had contrived to meet him and they had struck up a sort of friendship and he often asked him to dine with us. I’d vaguely heard of Ritt during my New York years. He had written one hugely successful, 600-page novel, The Beautiful Lie , that had been an enormous prewar bestseller and was made into a movie (that flopped), and he had been living off its success now for nearly a decade while working on its long-awaited, much-heralded sequel, The Ugly Truth. He was in his mid-forties and good-looking in a ravaged, dissipated way — he was the heaviest drinker I’d ever met, up until then — and was a strange mixture of occasionally disarming and funny self-deprecation at war with an off-putting, overweening egotism. ‘I may be a shit writer,’ I remember him saying once, ‘but I’m richer than any of the good ones.’ Charbonneau was oblivious to this polarity, always ready to exalt Ritt as a genius — something Ritt was happy to hear as often as Charbonneau cared to mention it.

After my trip to Normandy to find Xan’s crash site I tried to concentrate on my work. We were busy, Jay and I: Allied armies were in Italy, and advancing up from the Mediterranean and racing on through France and Belgium on a front that now stretched from the Channel to Switzerland, all readying themselves for the final push into Germany. Apart from GPW business we were still accrediting journalists and photographers from other magazines and newspapers so our days were filled.

I went one day to the Scribe to introduce a young woman journalist, who’d just flown in from the States, to the chief press relations officer of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force — that had superseded ETOUSA). She was called Lily Perette and was twelve years younger than me. As we sat in the lobby waiting for our appointment she began speculating about what unit she’d be assigned to — ‘Anything in Patton’s Third Army,’ she said — and I found myself envying her. Lily Perette was duly assigned to the 3rd Army and was absurdly grateful to me — as if I had been responsible, somehow. I realised, as we had a drink in the Scribe’s bar to celebrate her posting, that I was still restless, still troubled by Xan’s death, and I wanted to be up and doing things not buried under bureaucratic documentation in Paris. I was a photographer, I reminded myself, not an administrator — so why shouldn’t I be assigned to a unit as well, just like Lily Perette?

I cabled Cleve seeking permission and he refused. I threatened to resign and he reluctantly conceded. I sped myself through the accreditation procedure — I would still be working for GPW — and waited to see where I would be assigned. It turned out to be longer than I thought as there were so many journalists heading for the European front, now that the war seemed to be entering its final phase, that units in the field didn’t want any more — they were becoming a burden. I looked about me at the Scribe and saw dozens of men and women hanging around waiting for their posting. I asked Jay Fielding to use his old war-correspondent experience and pull some strings.

I remember Charbonneau telling me he had a week’s leave and that we were going on a trip. He had a car, he had a laissez-passer and, more importantly, he had six jerry cans of petrol. I told him that if I was assigned I’d have to leave and return immediately but, in all honesty, it didn’t seem likely, so I was keen to go.

We drove south down the routes nationales to Provence, to a village called Sainte-Innocence about ten miles east of Saint-Rémy. It took us two days to reach there, travelling through a provincial France that showed few signs of the occupation. We might have been driving south in the 1930s, I thought, in Charbonneau’s big black Citroën, staying at small hotels, eating surprisingly well, setting off in the morning sunshine with the windows open, the plane trees at the side of the road swishing monotonously by.

We arrived at Sainte-Innocence at dusk and Charbonneau picked up the keys to a house from the local butcher. We drove out of the village and turned up a dirt road that climbed to a small wood of umbrella pines on a bluff that was a stepping stone, a threshold, to a bigger, rockier mountain behind.

He swung open iron gates and we drove into an overgrown garden — there was just enough light to see — of oleanders, rosemary bushes and a great stand of cypresses planted as a barrier to the mistral. The house itself was a classic pink crépis Provençal mas. Two storeys, long and thin, one room deep with a terrace running along the facade and an old stone barn set opposite so that a sort of courtyard was formed.

‘It’s called the Mas d’Epines,’ Charbonneau said, stepping out of the car and looking about him. ‘It was all thorn bushes here before they cleared it.’

‘It’s very beautiful,’ I said. ‘Wonderful. Whose is it?’

‘It belongs to me,’ Charbonneau said with a proprietorial smile. ‘I bought it with the royalties from my fourth novel — Cacapipitalisme. A little present to myself. I haven’t been here since 1939.’

‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘Lucky you.’ Somehow Charbonneau always managed to surprise me.

The house was filthy, full of blown leaves and years of accumulating dust. Birds had been roosting in some rooms. Spiders and their webs were everywhere and I didn’t want to think about the rodent population. We lit an oil lamp, swept out a bedroom, and on a horsehair mattress we laid fresh sheets that we had brought with us. Charbonneau had bought several bottles of local red wine and a large saucisson sec in Sainte-Innocence and we sat on the terrace wall as the night came on eating slices of saucisson and drinking as much wine as we reasonably could. At a nice pitch of inebriation we went to bed, chasing a bat out of the room before we settled down.

‘I love this house,’ I said, lying in his arms, stroking his soft pelt. ‘I don’t know why but I just love it.’

‘We could be happy here, I think,’ Charbonneau said. ‘Don’t you?’

‘Is that a proposition?’ I asked.

‘Let’s say it’s an invitation.’

‘But I have to get back to Paris. I’m going to be assigned.’

‘This war will be ending soon,’ Charbonneau said, rolling on top of me and looking down at my face. ‘Sooner than you think. What will you do then, Amory Clay?’

I remember one day, when we had come back from our week in Provence and I was still waiting for my assignment to arrive, Jay Fielding and I were hanging round the lobby of the Hotel Scribe wondering where we could go and eat when I saw Brandon Ritt step out of the lift. He sauntered over to us — he seemed a little unsteady.