Yesterday morning I had come downstairs and he was standing awkwardly by his basket, neck and head held low, coughing every five seconds or so. I looked at his face and saw there was a little mucous discharge from his nostrils. He rallied a bit when he saw me but he was moving sluggishly. So I picked him up, dumped him in the front seat of the Imp and drove in to see the new vet in Oban. The vet, oddly enough, was a young Dutchwoman (married to a Scot) called Famke Vogels. ‘Big made’, as my mother used to euphemistically say, but I liked Famke because she didn’t bother much with niceties, just made her point. She told me to leave Flam in overnight and come back tomorrow for the diagnosis.
‘Just a bacterial pneumonia,’ she said when I returned. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
She had given him an antimicrobial vaccination and supplied me with a course of antibiotic pills to be administered twice a day.
‘Do you know how to do this?’ she asked.
‘Yes. He’s not my first dog.’
My first dog, also a black Labrador, was called Flim. He was run over by a farm tractor and his spine was broken. When the anguished farm labourer brought me to him — he was lying in the verge, all twisted, whining — I knew there was nothing I could do. Or rather, there was only one thing to be done.
The vet in Oban, Famke’s predecessor, a Mr McTurk, took one look and said to me, ‘There’s no option, you know that, don’t you?’ I agreed, and Flim was taken away, after I’d given him a farewell kiss, and he was put out of his significant misery, poor dog. I buried him — weeping uncontrollably — at the edge of the beach looking over the bay. I was thinking: poor dog — lucky dog, that his pain ended and his departure from this world was achieved so speedily and with no further suffering than that he’d already endured. You lucky dog — we should be so lucky, as lucky as sick dogs.
As Flam made himself comfortable I went and fetched the pill bottle and crouched down by him.
‘Time to take your medicine, laddie,’ I said.
I try not to talk to my dog as if he’s a sentient human being but it’s impossible, as any dog-owner will tell you.
I opened Flam’s mouth and placed the pill at the back of his tongue to the side. Then I held his jaws closed with one hand, holding them upwards — he was perfectly compliant — and waited a second or two. He didn’t seem to have swallowed so I blew on his nose and massaged his throat, gently. I felt the reflex in his gorge and let him go. He licked his teeth; the pill had gone down.
I gave him a kiss on his forehead and scratched behind his ears and saw his tail give a beat or two of pleasure.
‘What would you do without me, eh, Flam?’ I said.
He was trying to climb up me to lick my face but I pushed him back, the unwelcome thought entering my head: who will feed me my pill when the time comes?
*
I remember, now, that Charbonneau had been far too overconfident about his destination. I travelled back to London from New York in early 1943 — on the Queen Mary, no less — while Charbonneau was sent to North Africa in the aftermath of the Operation Torch invasions and was plunged into the internecine mayhem of who was to take control of the Free French. I assume that the Free French governmental authorities, whoever they were, thought that his American experience and know-how would serve them well with Eisenhower and his staff.
I remember walking into the wide lobby of the Savoy to meet Cleve on his first visit over and seeing him standing there, waiting for me, in his dark suit and brilliant white shirt, and feeling I was taking part in some absurd dream or fantasy. We ate in the downstairs Grill and then went up to his suite and made love. Everything about his demeanour had changed in London; it was like the old days in the Village. He was perfectly relaxed, his usual enthusiastic, funny, dry self and we wandered about London without him glancing once over his shoulder.
Cleve had been right, to that extent — the move away from New York and its attendant paranoias reinvigorated our encounters as they newly occurred, every six weeks or so. But I had changed in the interim — there was the Charbonneau quotient to consider now, unbeknownst to Cleve. I had one short, frustrated letter from Charbonneau — from Algiers, sent to me at the office. The line I recall was ‘I thought Washington was bad. I would cut off my right hand to be back there, now.’ Poor Charbonneau.
I remember accompanying Greville to Victoria station to see him off to Italy. He was going to join a convoy sailing from Portsmouth. He looked smart and raffish, wearing his dark war-correspondent’s uniform with its designated shoulder patches, and he had a fore-and-aft forage cap set on his head at a suitably rakish angle. He carried a musette bag slung over his shoulder with his camera equipment and other essentials in it. I was touched to see that his moustache was trimmed and dyed a hazelnut brown. He looked almost like his old self and I complimented him.
‘Actually, I had the uniform altered at my tailor’s,’ he said. ‘It was very ill-fitting.’
‘Well, you look very pukkah, Captain Reade-Hill, very much the dashing war correspondent. Just don’t do anything dashing.’
‘Cowardice is my middle name,’ he said, kissed me and whispered, ‘Bless you, darling.’
I remember that the most irritating consequence of my precipitate departure from New York was that I had to miss the publication of my first book, Absences (Frankel & Silverman, 1943). It appeared, to deafening press silence, two months after I returned to London. My publisher, Lewis Silverman, said he was sending me six copies. They never arrived, victim, I suppose, of erratic wartime postal services or of some U-boat attack. I asked Cleve to bring me over some copies on his trips to England but he always — typically — forgot. I finally managed to see a copy of Absences after the war, in 1946, three years late, by which time it was already long out of print. I wonder if this experience is unique in the history of publishing. It was a collector’s item, very rare, booksellers told me when I tried to track one down.
Images from Absences by Amory Clay (Frankel & Silverman, 1943).
3. D-DAY
CLEVE CAME OVER AT the end of May for a week. We spent two nights together at the Savoy in his suite with its splendid view of the brown, ever-changing river. On the morning of 4 June, after our second night together, we stayed in bed until noon, calling up room service to order toast and jam and a pot of tea that we spiked with bourbon. We made love again before we sauntered downstairs to the Grill for lunch.
The Grill was full of senior military and naval types along with a smattering of old regulars. If it hadn’t been for the uniforms — and the somewhat reduced menu — you would never have believed we were in our fifth year of the war. We amused ourselves listening to the conversation of two elderly, heavily made-up ladies of a certain age who were sitting behind us and whose patrician voices were ideally clear and carrying.
One said, ‘I’m going to live in Ireland after this war.’
The other, ‘I worry that Ireland will become over-smart.’
‘It’ll never be Kenya-type smart.’
‘I suppose not. . There are some nice houses.’