Sweet Caress

My 15 highlights

• One of the most inexpensive joys available to almost everyone – if you’re lucky enough – is to wake up in your warm bed and to realise that you don’t have to leave it and that you can turn over and go back to sleep again.

• I was initially in a state of some alarm – I’d never seen such a shaggy monster of a man – but as soon as he embraced me I realised that the hairs on his body were soft and yielding, like a fine expensive fur, and after a while I found his hirsute presence quite stimulating.

• Good God, look at that.’ I turned slightly to see a young balding man in a grey coat with a musquash collar. ‘Look at the spats,’ Greville said, trying not to laugh, then added, ‘Insecure, wealthy, ugly, vain.’ I responded. ‘Talentless, self-conscious, myopic, stupid.’ Greville had this theory that it only took four adjectives to describe absolutely anyone, anyone in the entire world.

• 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.

• How did these drastic changes happen in life? Then a moment’s thought told me that it happens all the time. Time is a racehorse, eating up the furlongs as it gallops towards the finish line. Look away for a moment, be preoccupied for a moment, and then imagine what has passed you by. We pulled up at a parked Typhoon fighter

• eyebrows. It did make him look a bit younger, I supposed, but any man over forty who deliberately combs his hair forward in a child’s fringe has something suspect about him, I always feel.

• I had my camera in my knapsack and a box of 200 Lucky Strike cigarettes for use as a potential present, if required. I knocked on the door and said ‘Bonjour’ to the stooped ancient woman wrapped in a shawl who opened it. She looked me up and down and shouted ‘Arnaud! Arnaud!’ – and Arnaud duly appeared, a toothless smiley man with rosy cheeks and an immense soup-strainer moustache, like Nietzsche’s. Son or spouse? It wasn’t clear.

• I slipped out of bed and padded through to the kitchen. It was five past five in the morning according to the clock on the shelf by the cooker and a faint citrus light – grapefruit and orange – was beginning to seep into the sky above Chelsea and I could see it was a cloudy blustery day if the darkly tossing crowns of the plane trees in Carlyle Square were any indicator.

• Greville swore all the time in private, arguing that we owed it to the English language to exploit the full range of forceful expressions it offered.

• The Faradays went to bed very late, always well after midnight, and loudly so.

• Within about two minutes I knew I didn’t like him – not because of his manifest intelligence but because he was one of those men who cannot conceal their sexual interest – their sexual curiosity – about any and every woman they encounter.

• What does this job pay, out of curiosity?’ ‘A hundred dollars a week.’ ‘What’s that in real money?’ ‘About twenty pounds.’

• Paris in 1944 was a beautiful illusion.

• ‘It’s a magazine in America. You may have heard of it.’ I hadn’t, but said, as one does, ‘Yes, now you come to mention it. Definitely.’ ‘I’ll call you in a couple of days,’ he said. ‘I’ll look forward to talking to you.’ ‘I’ll look forward to talking to you,’ I repeated like a simpleton.

• Pale blue hessian curtains were allowed to bulk their hems on the floor and the table lamps burned dimly behind mottled parchment shades.