William Boyd - Sweet Caress

‘Last week,’ he went on, ‘I was present at the delivery of a perfectly healthy, bouncing baby boy. Eight pounds. He died yesterday. I haven’t a clue why.’

‘There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio—’

‘Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. Exactly.’

He stood up and placed his palm on my forehead and smoothed my hair back. It was a spontaneous, unreflecting gesture, perhaps prompted by his recollection of that baby’s unaccountable death — and here he was confronted by another mystery. As soon as he realised what he was doing he took his hand away, quickly.

‘Time, Miss Clay. Time. You will be well but your own body will have to do all the work. We doctors and our medications can’t help you. I’ve no idea how long it’ll take but, in some months, I surmise, you’ll start to feel truly better. You’ll know it yourself. You’re a young woman in her prime. Nature will effect her cure.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Don’t thank me. That’s the good news. Now for the bad.’

‘Bad?’ I felt a spasm of alarm.

‘In my judgement, as a result of the severe internal injuries you received in the attack, I believe you will never be able to bear children.’

I looked at him in astonishment. I’d never considered this, not for one moment.

‘Really? Are you sure?’ I said vaguely, feeling hot, all of a sudden.

‘The continual bleeding. The clotting that was observed in the blood in the initial weeks. Everything points at permanent infertility.’

‘Right.’ Now I felt tears prickle at the corners of my eyes. ‘I’ll have to think about that. Take it on board.’

‘Yes, of course. And now I really must go for my train.’

He shook my hand formally and left.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Today was one of those weird Mediterranean moments you are sometimes blessed with on the west coast of Scotland. A sky of unobstructed azure, no breeze, a constant, steadily warming sun, razor-edged shadows. If only we had cicadas. . Flam and I walked down from the cottage to the little bay and I had a picnic lunch there — a cheese sandwich, an apple, a square of chocolate and iced gin and tonic from a Thermos flask.

When I think back to my encounter with Sir Victor Purslane and his pronouncement I can still remember the sense of shock I felt, but the strangest consequence of his visit was that the bleeding stopped, almost immediately. Two days, four days, six days went by — no blood. He was correct in another matter: I sensed the change in myself — something had happened, some corner had been turned, I knew, and I began to feel better, slowly and surely. I felt less tired, felt my natural energy returning, I wanted to eat food that had colours in it. My weight loss arrested itself and my pale face began to recover its usual healthy mien.

Dido made one of her rare visits bearing her weekly bouquet herself.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘What’s happened? Health — picture of. You’ve got to leave this ghastly place.’

And so I returned home, to Beckburrow, and reclaimed my old bedroom. A nurse was hired to look after me but she left before two weeks were up as she had nothing to do. I began to eat food that the family ate — steak pies, roast chicken, broccoli, raspberry crumble — and I went for walks, progressively longer, with my genial, ever-beaming father.

My parents had been informed, by handwritten letter from Sir Victor, of my now infertile state. There was little emotion expressed. In fact my mother — mother of three — said quietly to me one day when we were alone, ‘You may find it’s a blessing in disguise, my dear.’

Xan was at the house a great deal as I convalesced, I remember. He was an undergraduate at Balliol College, Oxford, of all astonishing eventualities. After years of dullard mediocrity, he had experienced a sudden spurt of intellectual energy, as if a dam had been broken. His Higher School Certificate results were excellent. When he went for his interview at Balliol he wore a canary-yellow suit and a matching bow tie. Asked his ambitions, he said he wanted to be a poet. He was awarded a £100 exhibition.

I started to become interested in the world again and what was going on in it. I listened to the wireless, I read newspapers and learned that Germany had annexed Austria, that a 500-ton meteorite had landed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that something called ‘instant’ coffee had been invented and that Orson Welles had broadcast The War of the Worlds and caused widespread panic.

My father, however, lived in the immediate, proximate here and now. His lobotomy — that was the operation he had undergone — seemed to have left him pretty much unchanged, on casual examination. His mood was uniformly good but he had lost all interest in his old profession, the world of letters: he didn’t write a word, he didn’t read a word. His entire intellectual life, it seemed, was concentrated around the business of two-move chess problems — composing, plotting, testing and then sending them in to newspapers and chess magazines. And he was extravagantly unpunctual, showing up for lunch at 5.30 in the afternoon, or going to a dentist’s appointment in Brighton three days late. I once waited for him at Lewes station for two hours (he had arranged to pick me up in the car). I telephoned the house and was told that he’d set out to collect me just after breakfast. We had no idea what he’d been doing or where he’d been when he returned home shortly before midnight. He smilingly said he’d gone to pick me up but I wasn’t there. He gardened diligently and went for long walks on the Downs, a small travelling chessboard bulking out his jacket pocket. His world had become very circumscribed but he was entirely happy within it.

Towards the end of the year Cleve sent me a lengthy apologetic letter (I had written telling him of the transformation in my health, but not Sir Victor’s diagnosis). The London office would not be reopening, he said, offering up the usual excuses — money, the world crisis, the state of US publishing, retrenchment in the magazine business, other areas of expansion taking precedence — but he wanted me to meet a friend, a certain Priscilla Lucerne, who was coming to London early in the new year. He would set everything up — he thought it would be worth my while.

In February 1939 Priscilla Lucerne’s letter arrived. She would be in London for a week, staying at Claridge’s before moving on to Paris. She would love to invite me for tea. So I went up to London to meet her in the Palm Court. She was a petite, slim, elegantly dressed woman in her forties with her hair dyed Bible-black with a short fringe to mid-forehead. Her lips were painted the deepest scarlet. She smoked cigarettes from a ten-inch holder. She failed to hide her disappointment when it became apparent that I had never heard of her, apart from her connection with Cleve. She wasted no time in enlightening me: she was the editor of American Mode — and she wanted to offer me a job as a staff photographer.

I saw the hand of Cleve Finzi everywhere — Cleve’s sense of guilt in action, trying to make life good for me again after the disaster of Global-Photo-Watch.

‘But I’m not a fashion photographer,’ I said to Priscilla.

‘Cleve Finzi says you’re an excellent photographer and that’s all I’m interested in,’ she said, fixing another cigarette into its holder. She looked at me, openly. ‘Let’s be honest, dear Amory, taking a photograph of a fashion model is well within your capabilities. You know how to light an interior shot, I assume.’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘We choose the model, the outfit, the location — even, sometimes, the pose. I’m sure you’ll cope admirably.’

I wondered what she owed Cleve Finzi, what debt to him had been cancelled by her offering me this opportunity. She didn’t seem particularly enthused; she didn’t even ask to see my portfolio. I requested some time to think about it. I explained I was convalescing after a long illness.