William Boyd - Sweet Caress

We laid out the picnic on a trestle table and I looked up to see the shooters wandering over from the line of butts. I intercepted Sholto and drew him to one side.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Twenty-two brace. Not bad. Birds coming in nice and low and fast. Better than last year.’

‘No. I meant how’s it going with you?’

He looked at me, puzzled, his eyes unfocussed, glazed. Dead drunk. I was always amazed how he could function — make coherent conversation, shoot a gun, drink more. I had Rory’s sack in my hand and gave it to him.

‘There’s your whisky. Please ask me in future if you need it — not the staff.’

‘Apologies. Did you bring the wine?’

Then I lost my temper.

‘Couldn’t you have held off today? Just for one day? The girls are coming home.’

‘What girls?’

‘Our fucking girls! Our daughters!’

‘Oh, yes. Them. Don’t worry, darling. They’ll never guess.’ Then he turned and shouted over to Frank Dunn, ‘Save a sandwich for me, you greedy bastard!’ and sauntered off to join the others, leaving me standing there, tears filling my eyes.

In 1946, in Paris, when Sholto described himself as a ‘farmer’ he was telling a sort of truth. It was true that he owned half a dozen farms with tenant farmers, as well as around 20,000 acres of hill, moor and mountain on the west coast of Scotland. He also neglected to tell me during those four days that he’d ended the war a much-decorated lieutenant colonel and that he was, in fact, Sholto, Lord Farr, 12th Baron Farr of Glencrossan.

He admitted to all this when we met again in London after he’d proposed marriage, formally.

‘Why did you keep it from me?’ I asked, a bit astonished.

‘I didn’t want to put you off,’ he said. ‘Not everybody wants to be married to a lord — and be a “lady” all of a sudden. I can understand that.’

I suspect his motives were more shrewd. As a recent divorcé, Lord Farr was probably one of the most eligible new bachelors in Scotland. Better to start a love affair unencumbered by this baggage. It was a test of my sincerity, I suppose, but in a sense I now see he was right: I didn’t particularly want to be a ‘lady’, at all, and as I slowly discovered more of what was involved in being married to Lord Farr, 12th Baron Farr of Glencrossan, I might indeed have thought twice.

Let’s start with the house — the House of Farr, as it was known. It stood at the end of a wide glen some six miles long, and about ten miles from the nearest village, Crossan Bridge, and almost twenty miles from Mallaig, the nearest town of any size. There had been a house in Glen Crossan since the early eighteenth century but in the 1850s almost all of it was demolished and a classic Victorian shooting lodge — with castellations and turrets — was built in its place by Sholto’s grandfather, the 10th baron. Only the entrance hall with its extravagant programme of plasterwork by Dunsterfield and the Robert Adam staircase remained from the old house.

But the House of Farr was decidedly cold and damp when I came to live in it and needed considerable and continued maintenance to make it remotely comfortable and modern. Another surprise was the presence of Sholto’s mother, Dilys, the Dowager Lady Farr, who occupied a suite of rooms on the ground floor, next to the billiard room, with her own maid to look after her. Dilys Farr was a small skinny scrap of a woman, still dyeing her hair a curious bluey-black in her seventies, and she greeted my arrival with unconcealed suspicion. The barbed remark was her speciality and she seemed deliberately to take no pleasure in anything the world could offer. ‘Just ignore her,’ Sholto said to me once when I complained about some unnecessary, cruel comment she’d made. ‘She was born miserable and, anyway, she’s bound to die soon.’

The House of Farr, Glencrossan, Lochaber, 1958.

Another minor irritation was the presence of his ex-wife, Benedicta, Lady Farr, who was living in a large house, a former manse, in Crossan Bridge. Their son, Andrew, the so-called Master of Farr, the heir, aged sixteen, was in the sixth form at Strathblane College, near Perth.

As if a mother-in-law and an ex-wife were not enough, the House of Farr had a sizeable staff. There was a housekeeper, Mrs Dalmire and her husband Peter — a chauffeur-butler-handyman — and two permanent housemaids (more could be summoned if the house was full of guests). On the estate were two gamekeepers and a forester/gardener all living in tied cottages scattered about the glen. There was a factor who appeared Monday to Friday — Mr Kinloss — who ran the estate and supervised the rents from the farms. I learned that there was property, some flats and houses, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, some remote cottages in the neighbourhood of Oban, and a small mews house in South Kensington, not to mention various trust funds and portfolios of stocks and shares managed by the family’s bankers, Carntyne Petre & Co., in Edinburgh.

This was, in essence, the new world I entered. Sholto would say to me, as its landscape was progressively revealed, ‘I’m not a rich man, Amory. I inherited an estate — and it’s a nightmare: to run, to organise, to earn a decent living from. I’m just a rentier with a big house that’s slowly falling apart. It may sound glamorous, being a baron and all that, but it’s not glamorous at all.’

I remember our wedding, of course, in a small church full of tombs and plaques commemorating dead Farrs called St Modans in Crossan Bridge. Its antiquity was rather spoilt by a rash of new council houses built too close that had been put up just after the war. I didn’t care — I was marrying Sholto Farr, the man I loved, and the meanest registry office would have suited me fine. We were married in June 1946, two months after our encounter in Paris. I hated all the official wedding photographs — Dilys Farr glowering by my side — but Donalda McCrae, one of the two housemaids, snapped me as I stepped out of the car (about to take the arm of Aldous King-Marley who was giving me away). It was a bit out of focus and a ‘bad crop’ as we say in the photography trade, but it is my favourite photograph of myself. I had no idea it was being taken — it’s candid, in the best sense — and it was a day during which I was supremely, unequivocally, continually happy. Time stopped by Donalda. And whenever I look at it I can recall all the emotions I was feeling at that moment she inadvertently pressed the button. Life seemed almost insupportably good.

I remember writing a long letter to Charbonneau telling him I was going to be married and explaining why I’d left Paris so suddenly. I wrote to Cleve, also. Charbonneau’s reply was sweet and rueful. ‘Marrying? So fast?’ I think he suspected I’d been disloyal — but then so had he. Cleve was gracious, thanking me formally for everything I’d done for GPW , making a point of saying how personally (underlined) grateful he was and how he’d enjoyed our close (underlined) collaboration over the years. If I ever wanted his help, just call, etc., etc. It wasn’t intimate — I think he felt someone else might read it — all fondness was implicit, between the lines, in the underlines.

I had the odd pang, quitting my job, saying goodbye to Corisande — and the office was closed a week after I left. I realised that a significant portion of my life — my life as a professional photographer — was over. No doubt Miss Ashe would have approved of my change in status.