‘Why do I feel a horrible sense of foreboding?’
‘If you come — everything will be a thousand times better. You’ll see.’ He smiled his wide smile, not showing his teeth. ‘We’re going to be together, Amory. Always. I can’t let you go.’
Who can tell about human instincts? Something fanciful in me wondered if Charbonneau’s sexual interest in me had subtly changed my comportment in the way I reacted to Cleve. It was rutting season and there was another bull-male wandering around the neighbourhood. I do believe that our Stone Age natures still function strongly in certain situations — particularly to do with sex and mutual attraction — and are felt at gut level, deep beneath the skin, far from the brain. Anyway, however I had played it, I felt stupidly happy remembering his last words: we’re going to be together, Amory. Always. I can’t let you go.
Charbonneau was being at his most provocative the next time we dined — at a very bad Midtown restaurant called P’tit Paris. As we consulted the menu he spent ten minutes denigrating the apostrophe.
‘Moody, petulant, selfish, spoilt,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’
‘You. I wish I had my camera,’ I said, trying to make him stop moaning. ‘I’d take a great photograph: “Angry Frenchman”.’
He wasn’t amused.
‘I’ve seen your photographs,’ he said.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’
‘You think you’re an artist. I read your titles: “The boy with the ping-pong bat”, “The boy, running”.
‘Wrong,’ I said. ‘I think I’m a photographer, not an artist. I give my pictures titles so I can remember them — not to make them seem pretentious. But there are great artists who are photographers.’ I began to name them. ‘Stieglitz, Adams, Kertész, August Sander—’
‘It’s not an art,’ he said, interrupting me, aggressively. ‘You point your machine. Click. It’s a mechanism.’ He took his fountain pen from his jacket pocket and proffered it to me. ‘Here’s my pen.’ He turned the menu over. ‘Here’s a piece of blank paper. Draw an “Angry Frenchman” and then we’ll discuss if it’s art or not.’
I wasn’t going to enter this argument on his terms.
‘But you have to admit there are great photographs,’ I said.
‘All right. . There are memorable photographs. Remarkable photographs.’
‘So, what makes them memorable or remarkable? What criteria do you use to judge them? To make that decision?’
‘I don’t think about it. I just know. Instinct.’
‘Then maybe you should think about it. You judge a great photo in the same way you judge a great painting or a film or a play or a novel or a statue. It’s art, mon ami.’
‘Shall we get out of this shithole P’tit Paris and have a proper drink somewhere?’
‘I’ve got to have an early night,’ I said. ‘I’m going to a birthday party in Connecticut.’
Charbonneau looked at me shrewdly. I had told him too much in the past.
‘Ah. The American lover. Going to meet the wife and kids?’
‘Going to change my life.’
3. THE WATERSHED
I WAS GIVEN A lift up to New Hastings, Connecticut, by Phil Adler and his wife, Irene. They picked me up outside Grand Central Station in their Studebaker station wagon — with its wooden side panels it was like a travelling garden shed, it seemed to me — but we whizzed on up to Connecticut in fast time. Quite a few of the GPW staff had been invited, they told me. It was cool drizzly weather, not at all like late spring, and I was sitting wrapped up in the back of their car in my camel coat, and glad of it.
‘Have you been to their house before?’ I asked.
‘I have,’ Phil said. ‘Sometimes Cleve has a big Labor Day party.’
‘I haven’t,’ Irene chipped in. ‘Usually it’s no wives.’
‘So what’s different about today?’ I said.
‘I believe it’s her fortieth,’ Phil said.
‘Frances?’
‘The same.’
‘So, she’s older than Cleve.’
‘You’re on fire today, Amory,’ Phil said.
‘No, I mean. . I hadn’t thought, realised. .’ My brain was suddenly busy. ‘What’s she like, Frances?’
‘Beautiful, sophisticated. .’
‘Rich?’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Irene said with feeling.
‘Clever?’
‘Bryn Mawr.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘beautiful, sophisticated, rich, clever.’ Somehow I felt Greville would have done better. I had no clear picture in my head about Frances Finzi so I told Phil and Irene about Greville’s Game — how anyone could be summed up in four well-chosen adjectives.
‘That’s very English,’ Irene said. ‘Very.’
‘Have you met Frances?’ I asked her.
‘Once. Years ago.’
‘Fine. So give me Frances Finzi in four adjectives.’
She thought. ‘Cold, patronising, elegant, plutocratic.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Phil said. ‘She can’t help inheriting money. I’d say “lucky”.’ He thought a second. ‘Maybe that’s not appropriate.’
‘Her father is Albert Moss,’ Irene explained. ‘Moss, Walter & Co. The investment bank? It’s part of the picture. I’m sorry. She’s very plutocratic in her particular way. Wait till you see the house.’
I was beginning to warm to Irene, a small sharp-faced woman with intelligent, knowing eyes.
‘I think the “plutocratic” adjective is inappropriate,’ Phil said. ‘I don’t see it.’
‘Phil said, loyally,’ Irene added. ‘Precisely.’
The Finzi house in New Hastings was a suitably impressive red-brick Colonial Revival mansion set in abundant gardens. It had a shallow-hipped roof with a wide overhang. There was a centred gable with an odd rounded porch with pillars and all the ground-floor windows had broken pediments. Ever so slightly over-decorated, I judged — the rounded porch looked like a bad afterthought, spoiling the clean lines.
We were directed by men in red slickers to park on a terraced lower lawn in front of the house and then more of these men, with umbrellas aloft (it was drizzling, now) walked us up brick pathways to the house itself and along its side to a vast rear lawn where the party was taking place.
On this main garden lawn behind the house was a bedecked marquee. A jazz band played at one end and toqued chefs dispensed hot food from chafing dishes at the other. Waiters and waitresses patrolled with jugs of fruit cocktail, alcoholic or non-.
For all the manifest expense on display the mood was informal. Men were in sports clothes, some without ties. Children ran around pursued by nurses and nannies. Effortless, moneyed ease was the subtext but the main message was clear: enjoy yourselves, eat and drink, wander around the capacious grounds — above all, have fun.
I felt overdressed in a black sequinned day-frock with a cape collar and co-respondent black and white shoes with a low heel, and so decided to keep my coat on. Anyway, it was freezing. But it wasn’t the weather that was making me edgy and jumpy — it was the anticipation. I lost Phil and Irene as soon as I decently could and went in search of Cleve.
I found him on the back terrace — a long platform porch with a balustrade — in the company of four other men. Cleve was smoking a cigar and was wearing a pale blue seersucker suit, a mauve tie and cream canvas shoes. I walked past this group twice so he could see me and then found a corner at the far end of the terrace and snapped him with my little Voigtländer that I was carrying in my pocket. I had been seized with the perverse desire to take a photograph of the legendary Frances and so had brought the camera along with me, on the off-chance. Not a good idea, I now thought, a little daunted by the scale and panache of the Finzi home. I waited.