Sweet Caress (2015) by William Boyd

Author:William Boyd [Boyd, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9781443444880
Google: CiUXCAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1632863324
Goodreads: 23848587
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2015-09-14T12:00:00+00:00

The Vertical Poets, Oxford, 1942. Left to right, Herbert Percy, V. L. Lindon and Xan Clay.

‘Premonitions’ by Xan Clay

Stars

foretell

the fall

of

czars.

Strummed

guitars

lead to

hidden

bars.

Huzzahs

greet

news

of life

on

Mars.

Time

stands

still

in

Shangri-las.

2. HIGH HOLBORN

THE NEW GPW (London) offices were at the west end of High Holborn. We had three rooms on the top floor of a building with an oblique view of the dirt-mantled roofs of the British Museum. There was my office, Faith’s annexe and a kind of waiting room where journalists and photographers would gather and that swiftly came to be an informal club. We had a cupboard with a decent supply of liquor (gin, whisky, bourbon, sherry) and cigarettes – courtesy of our New York parent office – a couple of shabby, soft sofas and walls covered with framed photographs and past issues of Global-Photo-Watch. In the time between the pubs closing after lunch and reopening in the evening it was an even more popular venue to gather and while away the dead hours of the afternoon. Free booze, free cigarettes and kindred spirits.

We had opened the offices in the early summer of ’43 and had become something of a holding pen for various American newspapers, magazines and the smaller wire services. Apparently our ability to supply swift accreditation via ETOUSA (European Theatre of Operations US Army) had become well known. It was nothing to do with me – Faith Postings did all the liaising and paperwork and she was clearly very good at it. So, as it turned out, we were also acting as proxies – and charging a fee – for around a dozen other American publications and press agencies, including Mademoiselle and the Louisiana Post-Dispatch. Once the journalist or the photographer had the accreditation from ETOUSA they would be assigned to a particular unit in the services – the air force was the most popular – where they would be handled and supervised by that unit’s press officer and department.

By this stage of the war the process was running fairly smoothly. The journalists – including several women – once accredited, were issued with uniforms and granted the honorary rank of captain. There was always a considerable amount of paperwork involved but, once assigned, the working atmosphere depended on each unit’s particular disposition towards the press – ranging from lax and friendly to hostile and authoritarian – an attitude usually determined by the personality and character of the commanding officer.

One day at the end of May ’44, Faith popped her head around my door and screwed up her face apologetically.

‘There’s a strange gentleman here asking for you. Insisting. Says he knows you.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Mr Reade-Hill, he says.’

Greville was standing in our club-room peering at the photographs on the walls through spectacles so cloudy they seemed opaque.

‘Greville?’

He turned, snatching off his glasses, and strode across the room to embrace me, kissing me on the cheek. I smelled the odour of poverty coming off him, that sour reek of the unbathed, of unwashed clothes. He looked pale and considerably older and his moustache was untrimmed and grey.

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