Sweet Caress

  I strolled back into the hall and saw Frances saying goodbye to a couple. I froze but she turned at that moment and saw me. She wheeled her chair round and propelled herself towards me, smiling her empty hostess smile.

  ‘You’re not leaving already, are you?’

  ‘I’m going back to England tomorrow,’ I lied, easily. ‘Still a lot of packing to do.’

  She looked up at me from her chair – a fine ebony seat and bleached woven strand-cane, as elegant a wheelchair as money could buy, I thought – though she might as well have been looking down from some elevated throne, such was the regal hauteur and condescension in her manner.

  ‘Cleve is sleeping with you, isn’t he?’

  ‘Don’t be absurd! Really, what a—’

  ‘Of course he is. I can always tell which ones are his girls.’

  ‘I refuse to dignify your disgraceful accusation by any kind of—’

  ‘You’re not the first since my accident, Miss Clay. You may be the fourth or fifth – I don’t keep a precise count. One thing I’m sure of, though: you won’t be the last.’

  She wheeled herself away but not before delivering a little pitying smile at me. I watched her leave the hall. Smug, frightened, powerful, threatened. Phil Adler ducked his head round the front door. Ready to go?

  Cleveland and Frances Finzi, about 1929, before the accident. The photo that I stole.

  4. SOUTH OF THE BORDER

  I COULDN’T SEE CLEVE after the Connecticut Incident, as I referred to it. I told the office I’d been diagnosed with a bad case of pleurisy and would be confined to bed for at least a week.

  Of course, Cleve telephoned and I didn’t answer. And then he came down to Washington Square, buzzed the buzzer, somehow gained admittance, beat on the door and, when I didn’t respond, slipped a note under it saying ‘I’ve been phoning. We have to speak. Everything is fine. I love you, C.’

  I wondered what world he was living in where ‘everything is fine’? I didn’t blame or hate Cleve – just marvelled at his complacency.

  One strange thing: I had the roll of film from my Voigtländer developed – I was keen to see the covert shot I’d taken of Cleve from the end of the terrace. It wasn’t very good but I found an image on the roll that I’d had nothing to do with. It was a long shot of me and Cleve standing by the lake, talking. Who had taken it? Someone had picked up my Voigtländer and had snapped that moment and preserved it. And, I thought, that someone had also wanted me to see it, or at least had known I’d see it one day . . . Phil Adler? Irene? A stranger? No – I suspected the suede-gloved hand of Frances Moss Finzi. It unsettled me.

  And then, in the perverse, unscripted way that life works, an upheaval arrived in the shape of a telegram from Hannelore Hahn, announcing that she and her travelling companion, Constanze Auger, were in New York for a few days before moving on south to Mexico. We had to see each other.

  We met in the Brevoort Hotel on 5th Avenue. Hanna had changed: her hair was long, shoulder-length; she was wearing a cream crêpe de Chine dress with a red velvet collar. It was Constanze Auger who looked like the beautiful boy, the Bubi. Short blonde hair with the thick forelock hanging over one eye, face tanned, a shoulder-padded navy bolero jacket over apple-green Oxford bags, flat brogue shoes – but all this masculinity undercut by a pair of dangling jet earrings. She was very stern and tense as a person – even within a minute of meeting her I was aware of this: she didn’t have Hanna’s ease or sardonic sense of humour. For Constanze, it was as if her life was a serious mission of some sort, with an import only she could appreciate or understand and where ‘fun’ really had no part to play. She was striking-looking, slim, tall – heads turned in the Brevoort. She was a journalist, she said: she and Hanna were going to Mexico to write a book – text by Constanze, photographs by Hanna.

  As I sat there listening to their plans I found myself envying them. This was a potent whiff of Berlin and its sense of everything being possible passing through Greenwich Village and rather showing the place and its denizens up. We ate, we drank, we smoked, we laughed – even Constanze, eventually. I could have been back in the Klosett-Club. The Brevoort, where I’d deliberately taken them, the Village’s beating intellectual heart, seemed sclerotic, timid, impoverished, provincial.

  But maybe it was my own sour, damaged mood making me think like this. As I became more drunk, repeatedly ordering rounds of bourbon and ginger ale, my latest favourite tipple, I opened up to them and told them both about my affair with Cleve and the fiasco of the New Hastings weekend.

  ‘I tell you, Amory,’ Constanze said, lighting a hand-rolled cigarette, ‘he did it deliberately. He’s setting out – how do you say it? – marking the ground linings and the goalposts in a different configuration.’

  ‘The playing field. On his terms, you mean. Yes . . .’

  ‘How could he take you to meet his crippled wife?’ Hanna said, seeming genuinely upset. ‘It’s disgusting.’

  ‘He just sees the world differently,’ I said, feeling I had to defend Cleve, somewhat. ‘Something that appears difficult, or a problem, to me, or to anyone, doesn’t seem like that to him. Everything has a way of being solved.’

  ‘It’s called arrogance, that attitude,’ Constanze said. ‘Or Solipsismus, yes? I live alone in my world. I have no problems. Who are you? What do you want?’

  ‘I don’t think he has any idea how I see him,’ I said, becoming confused, my mind blurry with drink, all coherence going. ‘I think he’d be outraged if I called him arrogant. Shocked.’

  Hanna took my hand. ‘But you can’t stay here – in this situation. It’s impossible, Liebchen. Why don’t you come with us?’

  ‘To Mexico?’

  ‘Yes,’ Constanze added. ‘Bring your camera. Two photographers and a writer. We will make a wonderful book.’

  In my mood of pleasant self-pitying inebriation, fuzzy and heroic with drink, in the company of these vibrant confident women, it seemed the perfect solution. I had money in the bank, it would be an adventure and, more significantly, it would show Cleve that I wasn’t prepared to fit in with his skewed, solipsistic vision of our future.

  The next day I made an appointment to see him. We met in his office at the end of the afternoon. He was very calm.

  ‘How are you feeling, Amory?’

  ‘Much better, thank you. I needed the rest.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He was sitting behind his wide desk, his jacket off, braided wire garters on his shirtsleeves, keeping his cuffs trim. I wished, not for the first time, that I had my camera, to capture Cleve like this, his eyes full of messages despite his compromised position as my boss – all his contradictions gathered in one room: casual, formal; editor-in-chief, adulterer; handsome man, inadequate husband; a power-broker who was about to find himself powerless in this instance.

  ‘I’m quitting,’ I said, deliberately using the American term.

  ‘No, you’re not. I won’t accept it.’

  ‘It’s not up to you. I’m going back to London.’

  I think he was genuinely shocked – he hadn’t remotely expected this.

  ‘Don’t do anything rash,’ he said.

  ‘This is the opposite of rash. How I was living before was rash.’

  ‘Take a vacation. I’ll think of something. Don’t worry.’

  ‘I don’t need you to think of anything, Cleve, for once in your life,’ I said, feeling myself sag inside and my love for him well up, unbidden, unwanted. The man who could think of something. Who could think of anything. No.

  I stood up and offered my hand, not confident of being able to speak without my voice breaking – and there was a secretary just outside the door. He took my hand in both of his and squeezed.

  ‘Amory . . . I’ll work something out. This isn’t finished. Call me when you get back home. I’ll come over to London and see you.’ He mouthed, silently: I love you. I love you.

  ‘Goodbye, Cleve.’ I dropped my voice to a whisper to cover up the emoti
on. ‘I really did love you as well, for a while.’

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  I lied to my sister, Dido. I did sleep with a woman, once. It was Constanze Auger in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 1934, though I’m convinced now that the whole thing was set up by Hanna. We had arrived in Guadalajara and had found a small, clean hotel – with running, drinkable water, electric light – when all of a sudden Hanna had to go to the German consulate in Mexico City to sort out a problem with a residency permit, or some such bureaucratic muddle, and she’d be away for a couple of days.

  So Constanze and I were left on our own in the hotel – the misnamed Emporia Paradiso – waiting for Hanna to return, thrust together. We were perfectly at ease in each other’s company – the roles we occupied on our adventure south of the border were clearly defined. However, as the first day wore on it seemed to me that I was just a listening post – Constanze talked constantly, passionately, about this book she and Hanna were going to create (with a little help from me, perhaps). It was a bit manic but I couldn’t recognise true mania, then.

  The first night she knocked on my door and I thought, oh God, not more monologuing, but before I could switch on the light, she shucked off her cotton pyjamas and slipped into my bed. We kissed – her tongue touched mine. There is always an animal instinct of arousal that flares up instantly when two human beings, of whatever sex, find themselves naked and pressed up against each other in the confines of a bed in the darkness of a room. Whatever you may be thinking – no, not for me, thanks – the close proximity of a warm unclothed body activates different triggers. It may not last long, this surge of atavistic lust, but it makes itself known very quickly. Constanze and I kept on kissing. She nuzzled at my breasts, I ran my hands down her back and squeezed her buttocks. She was incredibly flat-chested, like an adolescent girl, little mounds with nipples, and to me it felt like being in bed with a tall lithe boy (one key component missing) and I felt that sex-urge. Perhaps something might have happened but suddenly she asked for the light to be switched on, pinched one of my American cigarettes and lay beside me, smoking, and began talking about her book and her new doubts that Hanna was the right photographer to fulfil the ambitions she had for it, as if the last few minutes had never taken place at all. As I lay there, bemused, all excitement draining from me – I had lit a cigarette myself – I wondered if I was being offered the job as attendant photographer to the Constanze caravan. Nein danke, Constanze . . .

  Then she said she felt incredibly tired, kissed me goodnight, put on her pyjamas and left. Hanna, returning the next day, asked me, as soon as we found ourselves alone, if Constanze and I had slept together. I said yes, sort of.

  ‘She’s very aggressive in that way, Constanze,’ Hanna said, thoughtfully, unperturbed. ‘Because we – you and me – have known each other in Berlin she wanted you – for herself.’

  ‘Well, she didn’t get me.’

  Hanna then began to outline her plans. Mexico City was no longer on our route, it transpired – we were going to head down to Costa Rica instead and find somewhere to stay in San José. I let her chat on, half listening. Then Constanze joined us, kissing me affectionately, almost possessively, on the forehead – as an aunt would kiss a favourite niece – something she’d never done before. And I knew – at once – that I had to leave these two to their complex, unfathomable relationship and go back to London. There was nothing for me here any more – I was an adjunct, a toy, a spur for emotional skirmishes I had no desire to participate in. New York was over and the Hanna/Constanze voyage through Latin America was destined to end in some fraught crisis – I felt absolutely certain. It was time to discreetly make an exit; time to reposition my life on its old trajectory again.

  BOOK FOUR: 1934–1943

  1. BLACKSHIRTS

  I WOKE VERY EARLY those summer mornings in London – the dawn light seemed to arrive around 5 a.m. and, once more, for the hundredth time, sleep despatched, I resolved to replace my filmy flower-print curtains with something more opaque and tenebrous. I used to toss about under the sheet, punch the pillows, and try to go back to sleep but never with any success. So – it was tumble out of bed, haul on dressing gown, plod into kitchen, set kettle on stove, light gas ring beneath it and let the day begin.

  I was living in Chelsea now, on the King’s Road, in a small flat on the top floor of a building halfway between the town hall and Paultons Square. Beneath me was a maisonette rented by the writer Wellbeck Faraday and his American wife, May, a sculptress, and beneath them was a shop, an ironmonger’s. The Faradays went to bed very late, always well after midnight, and loudly so. When I woke early I was careful to pad about in slippers or bare feet – not to wake them – because I liked the Faradays. They liked me too, I think, as they were always inviting me to dinner to meet their friends but I kept my distance to a certain extent, pleading pressure of work. They led a complicated life (who doesn’t?). May Faraday had a studio in Fulham and while she was out all day Wellbeck would receive visitors – mainly female. May used to ask me, when we were alone, if anyone came while she was out but I always pleaded ignorance. They had sublet the top-floor flat to me so were effectively my landlords and I wanted them to cherish me as the ideal tenant.

  I sat quietly in my small kitchen and made myself a pot of tea and watched the sun begin to irradiate the tops of the plane trees on Dovehouse Green. I ate a slightly stale Bath bun that I found in the bread bin and returned to my bedroom to choose my outfit for the day. The Global-Photo-Watch office was in Shoe Lane off Fleet Street where the staff consisted solely of me and my secretary, Faith Postings, but, as I was deemed and titled the ‘manager’, I felt – for some perverse reason – that I should dress for the role and always tried to look smart. As my mother would say – you never know whom you might meet; always best to step off on the front foot – and many other homilies. This morning I selected a two-piece beige jumper suit in a ripple knit with a plain chocolate-coloured blouse with a bow at the neck. Cleve had insisted I had expenses for my clothing and so I’d taken him at his word. My cupboard was bulging but I felt a bit of a fraud: this wasn’t truly me, this ‘manager’.

  I was still thinking that as I walked the ten minutes down the King’s Road towards Sloane Square Underground and took the train to Blackfriars. It was another ten-minute walk from there to the office. I was in before Faith and brewed up. She arrived promptly at 8.30, feigning shock to see me already at my desk, cup of tea on the go.

  Faith Postings was a large ungainly girl from Bermondsey in her early twenties and a tireless and diligent worker. I think she rather worshipped me – nothing I could do would pre-empt her occasional outbursts of compliments. I’m sure it was my former life in New York that impressed her – given that I wasn’t much older than her, anyway – and that I had a career as a photographer. Or it may even have been the new stylish clothes I wore. In any event, she was steadily eroding her South London accent to make it conform more with mine but I liked her for her dedication to me, and by extension to GPW. I was only six years older than her, yet I felt I occupied not so much a sisterly as a near-maternal role in her life, much to my vague disquiet. She would do anything Aunt Amory asked of her, I knew.

  Faith made herself a cup of tea and sat down at her desk, by the door across the room from mine, and flicked through her jotting pad.

  ‘Oh yes. After you left last night, Mr Mosley’s office called: they’ll accept an interview on Thursday week.’

  This was most intriguing news. ‘Where do they suggest? Black House? It’s not far from me.’ Oswald Mosley’s headquarters were in Chelsea, in a former teacher training college.

  ‘To be confirmed. They said a hotel would be more suitable, perhaps.’

  ‘Send a teleprint to New York.’

  The pride and joy of the GPW office – our Delphic Oracle, as I called it – was the Creed Teleprinter Mark II that stood on its own table in a corner. From time to time it would click into life and spew out a t
hin tape of paper with, miraculously, alphanumeric lettering on it. I had no idea who actually sent the instructions written on the tape – surely not Cleve himself – as they were never signed, but the Creed Teleprinter’s messages organised the business of our daily round. ‘Photo reqd of Dk and Dchess of Yrk’; ‘Arrange intrvw with Irene Ravenal’; ‘Supply team selections of FA Cup finalists’. And so on.

  Yesterday the injunction had come: ‘Intrvw with Oswald Mosley soonest.’ Faith duly made the telephone call to the British Union of Fascists. While our petition was being considered – we were an American magazine, it always impressed – another quirkier message arrived: ‘BUF to march through East End. Investigate. Need photogs rgnt.’

  What march? I made a few telephone calls to some of the journalists we employed but none of them had heard of any proposed fascist march. No marches or rallies were planned at all, as far as I could discover. I wasn’t surprised as Mosley’s BUF had suffered humiliating public defeats over the disruption of their rallies at Leicester, Hull and Newcastle in the previous year. Membership was dropping; they hadn’t stood in last year’s general election, so somebody in New York seemed to know more than we did in London. Therefore, clearly we needed better intelligence. I looked across the room at Faith Postings, Bermondsey girl, as she lit a cigarette.

  ‘What is it, Miss Clay?’

  ‘Grab your hat and coat. You’re going to join the British Union of Fascists.’

  At lunchtime, feeling hungry, Faith having been gone a couple of hours, I walked down Shoe Lane to Fleet Street looking for a pie shop or a chop house. In the end I went to a Sandy’s Sandwich Bar and bought a chicken and ham croquette and a glass of milk and sat at a counter in the window watching the bustle of Fleet Street and wondering what news Faith would bring back with her.