William Boyd - Sweet Caress

There were soldiers everywhere, clean, recently arrived soldiers, curious, poking about the ruins, evidently there to occupy rather than fight. I took some photographs around the cathedral and wandered down a bomb-cratered road to what must have been a park with a boating pond. All the trees were splintered stumps and the shallow pond was filled with floating objects, some of them once human beings, I thought. I wondered if I might find better images in the park — the world had seen too many ghost cities, grey lunar ruins — tortured nature might deliver something more striking. I walked round the boating pond, keeping my distance, not wanting to look too closely at what was floating there and then came upon a group of men, a hundred or so, sitting around the twisted remains of a bandstand.

They were soldiers, British soldiers — I recognised the shape of the tin helmet — though they might have been troglodytes or some race of miners allowed up from underground, after weeks of toil, so filthy were they, almost black with dirt and sweat and mud. They were sitting quietly, smoking, eating rations, swigging from canteens, but their conversations, such as they were, were muttered, hushed, almost inaudible. I moved closer, carefully. They looked as if they had suffered some collective trauma, survivors of an earthquake or some other natural catastrophe. Their blackened faces were drawn and gaunt from awful shared experience, it seemed to me.

A tall man rose to his feet and intercepted me as I drew near. He was wearing an old darned V-neck sweater, moss green, a civilian sweater, over his battledress shirt. His trousers were tucked into heavy, caramel-coloured brogue ankle boots of the sort you go deer-stalking in, and he had a revolver in a canvas holster hanging from his right hip. He was bareheaded and a lock of his greasy black hair hung over one eye. He had deep creases in his cheeks and had a lit cigarette in his hand.

‘What do you want?’ he said. His voice was ragged and patrician. I might have been a housemaid who’d barged in on a bridge game.

‘I’d like to take some photographs,’ I said, pointing to my armband. ‘If I may.’

‘Go away, young lady,’ he said. ‘You’re not welcome here.’

Now I was close to him I could see the lean contours of his face and the colour of his eyes, a pale grey-blue, stark against the grime of his skin. There was a muscle twitching on his cheek and matted blood on his hairline.

‘What unit are you?’ I asked. ‘I work for an American magazine,’ I added, vaguely hoping the old magic formula would work, and I held up my camera. ‘People at home would really like to—’

‘If you try to take any photographs of these men I’ll kill you, here and now,’ he said, entirely reasonably, but not smiling.

‘All right, I’m going,’ I said, suddenly frightened of this tall thin man with his pale eyes. I turned and walked briskly out of the park not looking round, feeling his gaze on my back, and unsettled by the absolute seriousness of his calmly delivered threat.

I made my way back to the farmhouse — my absence unnoticed by anyone — and asked the PRO on duty to provide me with a movement order back to Paris. I’d suddenly had enough of war-reporting and I wanted my old life to be returned to me. Seeing those exhausted, filthy British soldiers sitting resting by the bandstand in the smashed and obliterated park had been disturbing in some profound way. Or was it the tall thin man? Their commanding officer, perhaps, who had so mildly and casually threatened to kill me. What had these men done or undergone in Wesel, I wondered? What death and destruction had they witnessed or effected in the ruined town that had left them so debilitated and quiet? What terrifying bleak tales would they have to tell their children, if they dared? I wanted to be back in Paris — back in Paris with Charbonneau.

My movement order took two days to arrive — the headlong breakout from the Rhine crossings was in full urgent flow and requests such as mine were the lowest priority. The other journalists were shipped forward to Frankfurt while I went in the other direction. A jeep deposited me at a surprisingly undamaged station in Holland in a small town called Nettwaard. I had a piece of paper authorising me to take my place on a troop train heading for Brussels. Once there I had to make my own way home to Paris.

There was a train standing in the station and it had a number painted on it that corresponded with my docket, but it was locked and so hundreds of soldiers, American and English, waited patiently with their kitbags and knapsacks for someone to come and unlock it and give us all permission to board. I wandered up to the furthest end of the platform, away from the soldiers, and found a bench, lit by watery sunshine, settled myself down and smoked a cigarette. It was a cold frosty March day with an intermittent sun piercing the hazy cloud cover. I was glad I was wearing my mackinaw overcoat and turned the collar up.

‘Hello again.’

I turned. It was the tall thin man from the park at Wesel. He looked much better — clean, shaved, his uniform pressed and unmuddied. He was even smiling.

‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I assume you’ve not followed me here to execute me.’

He winced, as if my remark had caused him pain.

‘No, no. Just waiting for a train, like you. May I?’

He lowered himself on to the bench beside me with undue care, as if he might break into a thousand pieces.

‘It seems I’ve fractured half a dozen ribs,’ he explained. ‘I’m all strapped up but if I cough, or laugh. .’ He looked at me. ‘Please don’t make me laugh.’

He was wearing a baggy green beret and a camouflaged smock beneath a leather jerkin. His shoulder ribbon read ‘15 Commando’. He was obviously an officer but I couldn’t see his rank because his jerkin covered his epaulettes. However, as I looked more closely I could see that his jerkin was lined with sheepskin and his smock was closed with horn toggle-buttons. It was a uniform, yes, but a uniform run through the hands of an expert tailor.

‘I want to apologise for the other day,’ he said. ‘It’s been bothering me — my rudeness, my threat — and then I couldn’t believe it when I saw you sitting up here at this end of the platform.’ He took his beret off and ran his hand through his very black hair. ‘We weren’t in the best of shape when you found us in that park.’

‘Don’t bother to apologise,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it was very tough in Wesel, whatever went on.’

He cocked his head and screwed up his eyes as if trying to remember.

‘It was very. . Yes. Severe.’ He smiled, vaguely. ‘You were just doing your job. I had no right to be so offensive. So — apologies.’ He offered his hand. ‘Sholto Farr.’

‘Amory Clay.’

We shook hands.

I was hugely, instantly attracted to this man — drawn to him in a way that alarmed me. I had noted this effect before — with Cleve, with Charbonneau, with any number of men I’d fleetingly encountered. It just arrives, this cognisance — though that word gives it too much logical weight. It’s uncalled-upon. Your body notes it first, as a pure instinct, then transmits the information to your brain where it’s acted upon with more reason, with a bit of luck. I was sitting waiting for a train at a railway station, a bit cold, a bit bored, and then this man appeared and sat beside me and everything changed.

‘You’re English,’ he said. ‘But you told me you worked for an American magazine, if I recall.’

‘It’s a long story,’ I said and then quickly ran through the basic details of my strange professional journey: London to Berlin to New York to Paris.

‘And now I run the office in Paris,’ I said. ‘ Global-Photo-Watch. It’s a big magazine, lots of work, but I decided I wanted to get out from behind my desk.’ I paused. ‘So I did that and now I want to get back behind my desk again.’