William Boyd - Sweet Caress

He was staring at me intently as I spoke as if I were saying something of profound importance instead of chit-chat. I suddenly found myself incapable of coming up with a coherent sentence so spread my hands and lapsed into silence. He was meant to speak now, so I thought, but he said nothing, and the silence between us built until it became unignorable. Finally, he broke it.

‘Paris,’ he said. ‘Yes.’

He reached into his smock and pulled out a burnished silver hip flask and offered it to me.

‘Would you like a drink? Malt whisky. The best.’

‘Yes, please.’

I unscrewed the top and had a swig, savouring the peaty burn of the malt as it went down, my nostrils and sinuses warming with the finish.

He took a large gulp himself when I handed the flask back.

‘Medicinal,’ he said.

‘Of course.’

Then we were distracted by the arrival of another train chuffing into the platform opposite, halting with the usual tortured scream of metal on metal. A soldier appeared and saluted Sholto Farr.

‘This in fact is our train, sir,’ he said, pointing at the new arrival.

‘Are you coming with us?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m on this one.’

‘Too bad.’

‘Trains that pass in the night,’ I said, smiling. And he laughed and clutched his ribs.

‘I specially asked you not to do that,’ he said, rising carefully to his feet, one hand on his injured side, the other replacing the beret on his head.

‘I hope we meet again one day.’

15 Commando, Western Desert, Tunisia, 1943. Sholto Farr on the right. Aldous King-Marley on the left; David Farquhar in the middle.

‘Yes, so do I,’ I said, sincerely, knowing full well that would never happen, that this was one of those encounters to be celebrated in song or story by someone else, in due course. What might have been. He gave a small wave of his hand, turned and walked away with his soldier to join the shuffling files of men crossing the tracks to board the troop train. I had a camera in my kitbag, I realised, why hadn’t I thought of taking a photograph of Sholto Farr?

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I had the McLennans for lunch yesterday. I’m not a good cook, I know that. I can cook — I can place hot food on the table — but not very well. I started off with macaroni and tomatoes and added a pinch of curry powder as the recipe suggested. Then I served up poulet au paprika but I think I stirred too much flour into the gravy and my braised rice was also on the dry side. The key factor when you’re not a particularly accomplished cook is to compensate by overdoing the wine. I poured and poured the Valpolicella — two bottles — and I think that by the end of the meal I could have served up banana sandwiches and Greer and Calder wouldn’t have complained. I was happy enough myself as I presented my orange pudding with orange sauce — infallible — and relinquished my role as chef. Coffee, whisky and cigarettes saw us through to the late afternoon.

The McLennans were planning a trip to Paris and I found myself, in my brief euphoria, giving them all kinds of detailed advice about where to go and what to do.

Greer looked at me questioningly.

‘Anyone would think you were a Parisienne,’ she said.

‘Well, I did live there for a good while.’ I regretted saying that as soon as I had spoken.

‘Oh, yes? When?’ Calder said. He was quite tipsy by now. ‘You lived in Paris? I never knew.’

‘A while ago,’ I said. ‘You know. End of the war. And 1946.’

Greer sat back and looked at me squarely.

‘Any more secrets, Amory?’

*

We continued to run the GPW office — Corisande and I — for some months beyond VE Day, in May 1945 — though, inevitably, we had less and less to report; our newsworthiness, as far as GPW was concerned, diminished fairly rapidly. Months went by without a ‘Dateline Paris’ story. I tried to cut costs by moving us out of rue Louis le Grand and into a single-room apartment (with WC) in the rue Monsieur. I did make savings but, inevitably, the call came. We had a functioning telephone by now and Cleve gently suggested, one afternoon in February 1946, that I return to London and resume my responsibilities in High Holborn once more. I offered my resignation — Cleve refused to accept it and backtracked. Paris could remain open as long as more economies could be made. I realised that Cleve would agree to almost anything I asked — a situation that was both pleasing and troubling. I suggested a fifty per cent cut in my salary — Cleve said that would be helpful and so the Paris office stayed open, for a while. I hadn’t seen Cleve for over a year and in the way that certain love affairs just fizzle out or die a quiet, almost unacknowledged peaceful death, so did my relationship with Cleve pass away. Charbonneau was the man in my life now.

Or, occasionally in my life, let’s say. Post-war French politics meant that he was away from Paris a great deal, mainly in Algeria and Tunisia and other outposts of the French Empire, doing what he could to support the Quatrième République. I had moved into his Saint-Germain apartment and made it as homely as possible. The climbing columns of books were now in bookshelves; rooms had been repainted in my usual choice of vivid colours (our bedroom was Lincoln green, the kitchen terracotta); the parquet had been sanded and revarnished and I had added some bright cotton rugs. When he came home Charbonneau professed himself pleased once I’d pointed out the changes. We had an insomniac above us who paced the floor all night and a cellist below who practised four hours a day, but, as was the case with most Parisians, your apartment was merely a place where you bathed, changed and slept (sometimes). Real life, the rest of life, was lived outside on the streets. I never complained.

In early February ’46 I slipped on a patch of ice on the rue Monsieur and fell heavily to the ground, stunning myself. I fractured my right elbow (and wore a sling for two weeks) but, more worryingly, the fall made my vaginal bleeding start up after years of quiescence, and I was obliged to resume wearing my padded rubber knickers again. I was on the point of going to see a doctor when it suddenly stopped.

I didn’t tell Charbonneau any of this, though he kept rebuking me — when he was home — for being boring. I wasn’t my usual annoying, animated self, I admit. But when the bleeding stopped and I discarded my nappy I felt my joie de vivre return. Except that Charbonneau was away again and couldn’t appreciate my rejuvenation.

IT WAS THE DAY after my thirty-eighth birthday — 8 March. The doorbell rang at the street entrance of 12 bis rue Monsieur, and Corisande went down to see who it was. She returned in some perplexity.

‘It’s a man, Miss Amory.’ She called me ‘Miss Amory’ even though I begged her repeatedly to drop the ‘Miss’.

‘Well, show him in.’

‘He has flowers.’

‘He’s delivering flowers from a florist?’

‘I don’t think so.’

I smiled to myself. Charbonneau was home. Playing one of his tricks, surprising me.

‘I’ll get it,’ I said, and left our little apartment and went down to the lobby by the street door.

Sholto Farr stood there with a posy of primroses in his hand.

How can you describe these physical sensations, these instinctive body-wide manifestations of your mental state, without sounding like some sentimental fool? When I first saw him in that split second — he was wearing a dark pinstriped suit and a camel overcoat — I felt my lungs empty, sucked dry as if by some sort of vacuum pump. I was in a form of shock, I realised. Then I felt heat — all in a further split second — my belly warmed, my ears glowed. Then I lost power over my limbs: my knees seemed unable to support the weight of my body; I felt a tremor pass through my shoulders and run down my arms. And then all these symptoms disappeared in another split second and I became entirely calm. Ice-lady. Calm with absolute certainty.