William Boyd - Sweet Caress

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. Where was summer? — it was June, for heaven’s sake. I put the kettle on the gas hob and fetched out the teapot. I’d let Charbonneau sleep on and see if my mind cleared a bit. I had never expected him to re-enter my life with such embarrassing surprise.

He emerged looking for coffee at around nine o’clock, wearing his khaki trousers and my too-small dressing gown, his hairy wrists protruding from the tartan sleeves. I was dressed by this time and had been going over GPW paperwork. I had telephoned into the office saying I still felt ill — I was due to meet Cleve for lunch — impossible with Charbonneau around. He took me in his arms and kissed my neck.

‘You’re the best thing for me, Amory. When I’m not with you, I find I’m thinking about you — not all the time, but enough.’ He smiled. ‘It’s not normal for me.’

‘What is normal for you?’

He ignored me. ‘Have you some coffee? I can’t drink your English tea.’

‘What made you go to the Savoy?’ I asked. ‘It was an incredible coincidence that you should just walk in like that.’

‘No, no. I knew that you were there. I went to your office and your charming secretary said you were in a meeting at the Savoy. So I go to the Savoy, I ask for you at the front desk. No — no Miss Clay. Then I see you — with this man — going into the Grill. I went away, I had a drink in a pub and I thought — no, I must see my Amory, I don’t care who she’s with.’ He spread his hands. ‘And here we are. Aren’t you pleased?’

‘I have some coffee essence.’

‘No, don’t worry. I smoke a cigarette.’

He went to the window and lit up and stood there looking down on the King’s Road. I heard a sudden patter of rain on the glass.

‘No invasion today,’ he said. ‘For sure.’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘The invasion of France. It will probably be tomorrow.’

Faith knocked on the office door, her double rap that meant it was important. I was interviewing a photographer. Five more were waiting in the club-room — we needed people in Normandy, urgently. GPW had nobody with the invasion fleet and I couldn’t understand why we’d been so remiss or how we’d been overlooked. Cleve had no idea so I had to work fast.

‘It’s your mother,’ Faith said. ‘Says it’s a matter of some urgency.’

I took the telephone at Faith’s desk.

‘Mother, what is it? I’m incredibly busy.’

‘Prepare yourself for sad news, my dear.’

‘What? What sad news?’

‘Your father has died.’

It was 6 June 1944. Le Débarquement. And the day my father died. D-Day. Dead Dad Day.

My father had been sitting in his favourite sheltered spot — a small open wooden gazebo that he’d had constructed at the foot of the garden at Beckburrow, working on one of his two-move checkmate chess problems when my mother had summoned him in for lunch. After lunch he said he was feeling tired and was going to take a nap. She called up to him in his bedroom when supper was ready and when he didn’t appear she went to look for him and found him still asleep, so she thought, and shook him by the shoulder — but he was dead. From a heart attack, seemed to be the likely explanation.

The funeral was on 10 June, remarkably speedy, given the momentous times we were living through, and was in Claverleigh’s parish church, St James the Less. It was a short service, one hymn, one reading — I read one of Xan’s poems from his collection, called ‘A Monk, Watching’ — and an address given by Eric Maude, the playwright who had adapted my father’s story ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’ — the one bona fide success in his life. Maude was an elderly, flushed man with a dandelion mane of white filmy hair and whose memory was not sure. He kept referring to my father as ‘Brotherton’, for some reason, not Beverley. ‘Brotherton was the most generous of collaborators.’ I could see my mother growing increasingly irritated.

Other mourners included some colleagues from Strand magazine and the publishing houses that my father read for. His own publisher was not present. Dido was there, of course, and she played a loud and complex toccata by Buxtehude as we all filed out into the graveyard, our ears ringing. Xan was flying combat missions over northern France in his Typhoon and Greville was away in Italy with the 2nd US Army Corps.

As the coffin was lowered into the ground the air was loud for a few minutes with the passage of dozens of high-flying bombers heading across the Channel and we all looked up. As the final blessing was spoken the noise of the planes diminished and I glanced round the small churchyard, dry-eyed, glad that my father’s death had been so sudden and just sorry that the two and a half decades since his awful experience in the First World War had been so devastating and undermining. I was pleased that his last years had been calmer and that his troubles were now over. ‘Rest in peace,’ the vicar said, barely disguising his boredom — he might have been saying ‘Pass the salt’ — but I had to agree.

The day was cool but sunny here in East Sussex, at least, and as the drone of the planes vanished it was replaced by the sound of a wood pigeon calling in the beech trees that lined the graveyard behind its waist-high ashlar wall. Every time I hear wood pigeons I will think of my father, I said to myself, and found the mnemonic consoling.

We decided to walk back to Beckburrow where sherry and biscuits were waiting to be served as a modest wake. Dido and I accompanied Eric Maude, who wielded a stick, but strode briskly, all the same, saying he was more than happy to stroll back, remembering — entirely falsely — the many walks he and Brotherton had taken around Claverleigh. We soon caught up with my mother who was at the head of the party, keen to be first at the house. She was in something of a state, frowning and upset.

‘Don’t worry, Mother,’ I said, taking her arm. ‘It was a lovely service.’

‘There’s been no obituary. It’s a disgrace!’

Her mood didn’t improve and she took to her bed in the afternoon when the guests had departed.

Dido and I went down to the gazebo with a bottle of sherry and a box of cigarettes. My father’s chessboard was still set up with six pieces laid out on it: a rook, a pawn, two knights and two kings. The last two-move composition he had been working on.

‘Make any sense to you, these problems he posed?’ Dido asked, pointing at the chessboard.

‘No, not a clue. Mate in two moves. Baffling.’

‘He couldn’t remember the time of day but he could solve fiendish chess problems. . Funny old thing, the human brain. You were Papa’s favourite,’ she said, suddenly, topping up our sherry glasses. ‘Strange fellow, our father. He only tolerated me and Xan.’

‘He tried to kill me, Dido.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Forgot about that.’ She lit a cigarette.

I thought about what Dido had said and wondered if that were true. Had I been my father’s favourite? If I had, then that made his descent into madness all the more poignant, and the inevitable rift that occurred between us all the more sad and remorseful. Everything had changed after that day at the lake and as I sat here looking at his impossible chess problem the regrets began to accumulate within me almost unbearably. Just what had I lost, in fact? What had that war done to my father — and what part of him had been taken away from me forever?