‘Let’s hope ’34 is better than ’33,’ Achilles said, as he bagged my groceries.
‘At least you can have a drink without getting arrested,’ I said. We laughed. In the last three weeks six liquor stores had opened within a two-block radius of Washington Square. America’s drinking was out in the open again.
‘Yeah, ain’t that something new,’ Achilles said, nodding, ‘though I have to say I kinda miss the speakeasies.’
I wandered home with my groceries and sat in my apartment with the wireless on, listening to jazz, reading a book — God’s Little Acre by Erskine Caldwell — while I waited. I had painted the walls in the sitting room a pale ivory to maximise the light that came in through the small solitary window. I had hung some of my photographs here and there and had smartened up the rented sofa and two armchairs with quilted throws I’d bought in a junk shop on Bleecker. The tiled corridor led on past the tiny kitchen and bathroom to the back bedroom that gave on to the yard with its stark spindly tree. The room had a big, twelve-paned sash window and at midday in the summer when the sun shone directly down it was so blazingly luminous you felt you were in the tropics, not Manhattan.
Cleve was running late, clearly, so at 1.30 I made myself a gin and Italian and toasted in the new year, recognising as I did so that I’d been in New York for nearly eighteen months, now — though I still felt a transient, passing through, and that this apartment, this address, my job and my salary were very temporary aspects of my autobiography and whatever significance this sojourn would have in any retrospective view was impossible to discern. Why was I thinking in this mean-spirited, uncharitable way, I asked myself? I was so much better off here than in London, in every sense: solvent, housed, gainfully employed, my notoriety unheard-of. But I was unsettled in some way, I knew, and I knew it was all to do with the love affair—
On cue Cleveland Finzi pressed the buzzer at the main door and I let him in.
We kissed, gently, held each other and wished ourselves a happy 1934.
‘Do you want to eat?’ I asked. ‘Or. .?’
‘I’d like some “or”, please.’
I smiled, turned and walked through to the bedroom, unbuttoning my blouse, hearing the metalled half-moons on the heels of Cleve’s loafers clicking sharply, confidently, on the terracotta tiles of the corridor behind me.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I drove to Glasgow yesterday to see my doctor, Jock Edie. I was up early as my Hillman Imp took a good three hours to make the journey south. Dr Edie’s consulting rooms are on the ground floor of his vast grimy sandstone house on Great Western Road, a renaissance-style villa that would please a pontiff with its own campanile and two-acre garden.
Jock Edie is a large, portly man in his sixties who won three international rugby caps for Scotland when he was a medical student before a spinal injury ended his playing career. Something in the scrum, I’m told — I know nothing more: I loathe rugby. He has magnificent dense untrimmed eyebrows, like greying mini-moustaches lowering above his moist brown eyes. I’m very fond of him and I know he’s fond of me — but we both take special care not to demonstrate this by adopting an amiable but clipped no-nonsense manner with each other.
‘How’re you keeping, lassie?’
‘Very good. Very fit.’
‘Nothing new to worry us?’
‘Absolutely not.’
He opened a drawer in his desk with a key and took out a paper bag with multicoloured balloons printed on it and handed it over.
‘These are for you. They’re not sweeties.’
‘Thank you, Jock. Much obliged.’
‘Keep them in an airtight jar or tin, just to be on the safe side. Or in the refrigerator, even better.’
‘Aye aye, sir.’
He picked up a book from a side table and I saw that it was called Marching on Germany by one Brigadier Muir McCarty.
‘There’s a fair bit about Sholto in here,’ he said, flicking through the pages.
‘I don’t want to read about Sholto.’ Jock and Sholto had known each other as schoolboys.
‘All very complimentary,’ he said.
‘People were always complimentary about Sholto.’
He walked me through the wide hall towards a door glowing with painted glass — St Michael slaying a writhing dragon. Jock hung his good paintings in the hall and there was a small immaculate Cadell by the mirrored coat and hatstand that I always paused by. A meal-white Hebridean beach in sunshine, blue-silvered islands beyond.
‘Maybe I’ll drive out to Barrandale and see you,’ he said, adjusting the painting’s hang by a micro-inch. ‘I miss the islands.’
‘Mi casa es su casa.’
‘Gracias, señora. Heading back?’
‘I’ve a lunch appointment in town.’
‘Are you still smoking?’ Jock asked. ‘By the by.’
‘Yes. Are you?’
‘I am. Probably the only doctor in the West of Scotland who does.’
‘Should I stop? Try to stop?’
‘Perhaps. No. Stop when I stop.’
‘That’s not fair.’
‘True.’
We kissed goodbye. I left the car in his wide driveway and caught a bus into the city. I stepped off it at Queen Street and walked past a strange-looking pub called the Muscular Arms as I headed for Rogano’s on Royal Exchange Square.
The bar was busy. I eased through noisy young men in dark suits swigging gin and tonics — Glasgow lawyers and businessmen — and turned right into the restaurant, into its pale-walled art-deco splendour, an area altogether more hushed, with a soothing susurrus of muttered conversations and the chime of silverware on crockery.
‘Good afternoon, I’m meeting Madame Pontecorvo,’ I said to the maître d’.
Dido was sitting at a corner in the back reading a newspaper and smoking a cigarette. She was growing plump, much plumper than when I’d last seen her. Her mass of ink-black hair was swept back from her forehead and coiffed into a great smooth shellacked wave, like some dark calabash settled above her brow. Her dress was silk, a shining tea-rose pink, and she had three ropes of pearls round her soft creased neck. She was giving a recital that evening at the City Halls, still making lots of money.
We kissed and she ordered champagne.
‘I like your hair short like that,’ she said. ‘Very modern.’
‘Thank you, darling.’ I opened the menu.
‘Mind you, you do look a bit like a lesbian, though. And you should wear more make-up.’
‘It’s convenient. Practical,’ I said. ‘And anyway I don’t really care how I look to other people, these days.’
‘No! I won’t hear that. That’s fatal. Don’t neglect yourself, Amory — it’s a slippery slope.’ She drew on her cigarette, studying me, checking out my clothes, my fingernails.
‘Talking of lesbians. .’ she said, her old wicked smile flashing.
‘Yes?’
‘Have you ever been with one?’
‘I’ve been kissed by one but that’s as far as I went.’
‘No! Really?’ She was interested, now. ‘She must have thought you’d respond. Sensed something in you, you know, a fellow sister, as it were. When did this happen?’
‘Berlin, before the war.’
‘I remember. All your filthy pictures.’
‘Maybe we’ve all got a bit of lesbian in us.’
‘Not me, darling.’ She sipped at her champagne. ‘I’m a hundred and ten per cent hetero.’ She tilted her head, thinking, and lowered her voice, leaning forward. ‘Now we’re talking about sex — the other night, when I couldn’t sleep, I started counting all the men I’d known.’
‘Known?’