William Boyd - Sweet Caress

Barrandale doesn’t really deserve to be called an island. It’s separated from the mainland of the west of Scotland by a narrow ‘sound’, maybe fifty or sixty feet across at its widest. And the sound is bridged, the ‘Bridge over the Atlantic’ as we locals grandiosely like to term it. There’s another island with another more famous, grander, older, stone bridge (ours is made of girders and railway sleepers but is ten feet longer, which makes us feel ever so slightly more superior: we cross a larger portion of the Atlantic). Still, Barrandale is irrefutably an island, and driving over the bridge — over the sound — establishes, almost unknowingly, an island mentality.

My separate schooling, it turned out — so I learned later — was the result of a will. The death of a great-aunt (Audrey, on my mother’s side) conferred on the Clay family a sum of money for the education of Amory, great-niece and firstborn. My father’s steadily diminishing and erratic income couldn’t have coped with the termly fees demanded by Amberfield, but, if I hadn’t been sent there, or somewhere similar, the benefaction wouldn’t have been forthcoming. Completely strange, unknown currents can shape our lives. Why didn’t my parents tell me? Why did they pretend it was their decision? I was taken away from the familiar comforts and securities of Beckburrow and I was meant to be grateful, the privileged one.

My mother was a tall, bespectacled, somewhat cumbersome woman. She managed to conceal whatever affection she might have felt for her children with great success. She had two expressions she used all the time: ‘I don’t like a fuss’ and ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it’. She was always patient with us but in a way that seemed to suggest her mind was elsewhere, that she had more interesting things she could be doing. We always called her ‘Mother’, as if it was a category, a definition, and didn’t reflect our relationship, as if we were saying ‘ironmonger’ or ‘historian’. Here’s the sort of exchange that would ensue:

ME: Mother, could I have another helping of blancmange, please?

MOTHER: No.

ME: Why not? There’s plenty left.

MOTHER: Because I say so.

ME: But that’s not fair!

MOTHER: Well you’ll just have to put that in your pipe and smoke it, won’t you?

My mother on Cooden beach in the 1920s.

Taken with my 2A Kodak Jnr. Xan is laughing behind her.

I never saw any real expression of affection between my mother and my father — and at the same time I have to admit I never saw any signs of resentment or hostility.

My father’s father, Edwin Clay, was a miner from Staffordshire who went to night classes at a Mechanics’ Institute, educated himself, qualified himself, and ended his career as a director of Edgeware & Rackham, the publishers, where he eventually became the managing editor of five trade magazines that served the building industry. He grew wealthy enough to send his two sons to private schools. My father, a clever boy, won an exhibition to Lincoln College, Oxford, and became a professional writer (his younger brother, Walter, died at the Battle of Jutland, 1915). The one-generation jump was remarkable, I suppose, and yet I always sensed in my father that familiar mixture of pride at his achievements combined with — not shame, but a diffidence, an insecurity: an English social insecurity. Would anyone take him seriously, a miner’s son, as a writer? I believe that part of the reason for buying Beckburrow and enlarging it and living the county life must have been to prove to himself that those insecurities were now worthless and wholly cancelled out. He had become thoroughly middle class; a successful writer of several well-received books married to a judge’s daughter, with three children, living in a large and covetable big house in the East Sussex countryside. Yet he was not entirely a happy man. And then the war came and everything went wrong.

I think tonight I might begin to sort out all those old boxes of photographs. Or maybe not.

*

It is 1925. The Amberfield School for Girls, Worthing. My best friend Millicent Lowther stuck on the false moustache and smoothed it down with her fingertips.

‘It was all I could find,’ she said. ‘They seemed only to have beards.’

‘It’s perfect,’ I said. ‘I only want to get an idea of the sensation.’

We were sitting on the floor, our backs to the wall. I leant forward and kissed her gently, lips to lips, no great pressure.

‘Don’t pout,’ I said, not pulling away. ‘Men don’t pout.’ The contact with the false moustache wasn’t unpleasant, although, given the choice, I’d always prefer a clean-shaven top lip. I moved slightly, changed the angle, feeling the prickle of the bristles on my cheek. No, it was tolerable.

We older girls regularly practised kissing at Amberfield but I have to say the experience wasn’t much different from kissing your fingers or the inside of your upper arm. Having never kissed a man, and I was now seventeen years old, I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about, as my mother would have said.

We broke apart.

‘Any moustache pash?’ Millicent asked.

‘Not really. It’s just that Greville’s grown one and I wanted to see what it might feel like.’

‘Gorgeous Greville. Why don’t you invite him to visit?’

‘Because I don’t want you specimens ogling him. Did you get the fags?’

We bought cigarettes from one of the young Amberfield gardeners, a gormless lad with a harelip called Roy.

‘Oh, yes,’ Millicent said and fished in her pockets, producing a small wrap of paper and a box of matches. I liked Millicent a great deal — she was smart and sardonic, almost as sardonic as me — but I would have preferred her to have fuller lips, the better to practise kissing — her upper lip was almost non-existent.

I screwed one of the small Woodbines into the ebony cigarette holder that I had stolen from my mother.

‘Just Woodbines,’ Millicent said. ‘Very infra dig, I’m afraid.’

‘You can’t expect a poor proletarian like Roy to smoke Craven “A”.’

‘Roy, the hoi polloi. I suppose not, but they do burn my throat, rather.’

‘While your head spins.’

I lit Millicent’s cigarette and then my own and we puffed smoke up at the ceiling. We were in my ‘darkroom’, a broom cupboard outside the chemistry laboratory.

‘Thank the Lord your chemicals pong so,’ Millicent said. ‘What is that smell?’

‘Fixer. It’s called hypo.’

‘I’m not surprised no one’s ever descried cigarette smoke in your little cubbyhole.’

‘Not once. Is “descried” the mot juste ?’

‘It’s a word that should be used more often,’ Millicent said, a little smugly, I thought, as if she had invented the verb herself, spontaneously.

‘But correctly,’ I admonished.

‘Pedant. Annoying pedant.’

‘Apart from us, only the Child Killer comes in here, and she loves me.’

‘Is she a femme, do you think, the Child Killer?’

‘No. I think she’s sexless. .’ I drew on my Woodbine, feeling the head-reel. ‘I don’t think she really knows what she’s feeling.’ The Child Killer was in fact called Miss Milburn, the science teacher, and I owed her a great deal. She had given me this broom cupboard and encouraged me to set up my dark room in it. She had dense unplucked eyebrows that almost met over her nose, hence her nickname.

‘But aren’t we femmes?’ Millicent asked. ‘Kissing each other like this?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We only do it to educate ourselves, to see what it’d be like with a man. We’re not bitter, my dear.’ ‘Bitter’ was Amberfield slang for ‘perverted’.