‘In the biblical sense, I mean. All the men I’d had a fling with, including husbands. Do you know how many I came up with? What the total was? Guess.’
‘A couple of dozen?’
‘Fifty-three.’
I looked at my little sister. There was no answer to that.
‘I’ll start with the whitebait,’ I said. ‘Then the turbot.’
That evening, back at the cottage, I took Flam down to the small bay and sat on a rock, smoking a cigarette as he ran around the beach sniffing at stranded jellyfish and chasing gulls, and I looked out at the scatter of rocky islets in the bay and the Atlantic beyond. Fifty-three men, I thought to myself. My God. I counted up the men I had ‘known’, in the biblical sense. One, two, three, four, five. The fingers of one hand. Dido would have been very underwhelmed.
Flam ran up to me and I grabbed his muzzle and gave his head a shake, setting his tail beating.
‘Silly old dog,’ I said out loud and stood and stretched. I felt well, as I always did after a visit to Jock Edie. Surely there was nothing wrong with me — just age, time passing, the body winding down, creaking and groaning a bit. . I watched the evening sunlight drain into silty orange out on the horizon to the west as the night gathered. Next stop America, I thought. New day dawning there.
I wandered homewards thinking back to Cleveland Finzi and how excited I’d been by his job offer, completely unexpected. New York City; $200 a month; $2,400 a year — almost £500. I’d said yes, virtually instantly, without further thought. However, it took me much longer to sort out the necessary documentation and settle my affairs as I wound down my London life. But in the early autumn of 1932 I booked passage on the SS Arandora Star leaving Liverpool, bound for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and New York.
Initially, I stayed in a ‘Women Only’ hotel on 3rd Avenue and 66th Street until I’d settled into my job and come to terms with this extraordinary new city I found myself in. I was a rookie staff photographer of Global-Photo-Watch and I took photographs of anything that the picture editor, Phil Adler, told me to. Global-Photo-Watch was one of those heavily illustrated monthly magazines that began to proliferate then: Life, Click, Look, Pic, Photoplay and many more. GPW, as everyone called it, accentuated its internationalism. ‘Our Watch on the World!’ was its stentorious slogan.
From time to time, in the course of working in the East 44th Street offices, I’d bump into Cleveland Finzi — or Cleve, as he was familiarly known — and we’d exchange a few words. He was pleased to see me, had I found a place to stay? Was the work interesting enough? We would chat and separate and I would wonder how long it would take him, when and how.
One evening three months after I’d arrived he was waiting in the marbled lobby as I left a meeting. He had promised me a dinner when I came to New York, hadn’t he? Was I free tonight, by any chance?
*
Cleve stood naked at the window looking out at the yard through a thin gap in the muslin curtains.
‘What kind of tree is that?’ he asked without looking round. ‘I see them everywhere in the Village.’
‘It’s an ailanthus. Commonly called “tree of heaven”.’ I liked this rear view of Cleve: the V of his torso, the deep cleft in his small buttocks, his long thighs. ‘If you stand there much longer, however, Mrs Cisneros will have a heart attack.’ Mrs Cisneros lived across the yard, a widow. I sat up in bed, letting the sheet fall from my breasts and reached for my pack of Pall Malls on the bedside table.
Cleve turned and I saw that his penis was thickening, springy. His penis was smaller than Lockwood’s, though thicker and more heavy-headed; the glans seemed distinctly bigger (no foreskin, of course) — clearly shaped. It was like a medieval soldier’s helmet, called a sallet — I once told him, to his surprise — worn most commonly by archers. He was always puzzled by my pieces of arcane knowledge, my need to know the exact names of things. It seemed vaguely to annoy him, in the same way as it had my mother. He leant back against the window frame, and crossed his arms.
‘How do you know about that? About the goddam tree?’
‘I told you, I like to know the names of things. I don’t just want it to be some anonymous “tree” in my backyard. I want to know what it’s called. Someone took the trouble to differentiate, name and classify that tree. A “tree” doesn’t do it justice.’ I lit my cigarette. Cleve was enjoying standing there, looking at me, listening to me, candidly displaying his potency. I crossed my legs under the sheet and rested my elbows on my knees, inclining my back so that my breasts hung forward, free. Lockwood liked me to do that — it always stirred him. Cleve’s eyes moved here and there.
‘The ailanthus is from China, originally,’ I said, goading him with more arcana. ‘It thrives in poor soil with little care. Like me.’
‘Ah. Hard-done-by girl.’ He came over to the bed. I gripped him.
‘Hungry?’ he asked.
‘I told you; I thrive in poor soil.’
Cleve left at six, saying he had to be sure he was back in Connecticut for dinner, home with his family, I knew, his wife, Frances, and his two young sons, Harry and Link. After he’d gone I made another gin cocktail and picked up my book. However, I felt my new-year melancholia returning. Stop it, I told myself, buck up: I was having a passionate affair with a fascinating man and I was earning my living, making more money than I’d done in my life, as a professional photographer in New York City — what was so depressing about that? But I was Cleveland Finzi’s mistress, the other, sour voice in my head told me; I was only with him when it was safe and secret. And it was true — when he was with me everything was grand; when he wasn’t, life returned to the duller, demeaning business of waiting until the coast was clear and no one would suspect.
I had related as much to him — the plaint of every secret lover since adultery began — and he said he understood, but, for various reasons, he had to be very careful, very careful indeed. What could I say? I had entered the ‘deal’ knowingly. But sometimes two weeks or more would go by before he could snatch a night or an afternoon with me. I had been in New York for well over a year now; Cleve and I had been lovers for slightly less. I was happier than I had ever been and at the same time more discontented. My world was awry — maybe you just weren’t cut out to be a mistress, my sour voice whispered at me.
‘Happy 1934,’ Phil Adler hailed me as I came into his office. He was a lean young man in his early thirties with rimless spectacles and short wiry hair. We argued a lot, good-naturedly, principally about photography.
‘You’re from Europe,’ he said, waving me into a chair opposite him.
‘So I’m told,’ I said, sitting down.
‘Ever heard of a French writer called. .’ He looked at his notes in front of him. ‘Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau?’
‘No.’
‘Well you’re going to take his photograph this afternoon.’
Charbonneau was a mid-ranking diplomat at the French consulate — Phil told me, reading from his notes — who also wrote novels. His third novel, Le trac, had just been published in the US as Stage Fright (Steiner & Lamm) and had been very well received with excellent reviews in The Times, the Post, the New Masses, Esquire, the Atlantic Monthly — its little splash had attracted GPW’s attention.
‘Et cetera, et cetera. Culture can be news too,’ Phil said feigning a yawn. ‘You know: foreign literary star, strong light and shade, cigarette poised near face, backlit smoke, Gallic charm.’