William Boyd - Sweet Caress

I remember that Dido and my mother came to the wedding. My mother couldn’t hide her astonishment and relief that her thirty-eight-year-old daughter was finally marrying, and to a handsome Scottish aristocrat, no less. I think she thought it all some kind of charade or pantomime — the pipers outside the church, the House of Farr lit by hundreds of candles, the kilts and the sporrans, the reeling and dancing in the cleared billiard room — and that she would find herself back in East Sussex, waking from her dream, still with two unmarried daughters on her hands.

Greville was living in Italy with a young man called Gianluca and felt the journey was too long to make at his time of life. He sent me a magnum of Brunello di Montalcino.

Dido — my solitary bridesmaid — hadn’t yet married Reggie Southover, and she didn’t bring him to the wedding. For the first time in my life I thought she was jealous of me.

‘My, my, Lady Farr,’ she said, checking the hang of my wedding dress. ‘Do I have to curtsey?’

‘Only on my birthday. And you can always call me Amory when we’re alone.’

‘Fuck off!’

I remember in August, at the end of my first summer in Glencrossan, falling strangely ill. I began to suffer odd pains in my abdomen suffering from what is called ‘timpanism’ or ‘meteorism’, a painful bloating of the stomach. I thought I had some kind of bowel obstruction or an internal hernia. When I wasn’t in pain I was immensely fatigued.

Sholto drove me down to Glasgow to see Jock Edie. I liked Jock — he and Sholto had been at school together — and he was self-confessedly one of those doctors for whom medicine is simply the means by which they lead a sophisticated, pleasure-filled life. I had made the mistake of looking up my symptoms in an old medical dictionary I found in the library and had become convinced I had ‘ascites’. I was tapping my bloated stomach with a wooden spoon imagining hearing sounds of ‘shifting dullness’ or ‘fluid thrill’, ghastly symptoms that were listed in the dictionary under ‘ascites’. I was worried I had some kind of chronic liver dysfunction, also, as I kept having to urinate, or some horrid abdominal cancer.

So I was in something of an ill-concealed state as Jock Edie examined me, palpating my stomach and then listening with his stethoscope. He stepped back from the examination couch — as I rearranged my clothes — first smiling, then frowning, tapping his chin with a finger.

‘Do you know, we’ll have to get it confirmed, but I would lay short odds on you being pregnant, Amory.’

‘That’s impossible. I can’t have children. I was badly beaten up, years ago. A specialist told me I was infertile — Sir Victor Purslane.’

‘Well, I’m afraid to say I think Sir Victor has made a serious mistake.’

The pregnancy was confirmed. More than confirmed — I was going to have twins. It was a strange time for me as I retrospectively had to reconfigure almost every certainty I had had about my life and person. I was pleased and I was worried. I was confused as I had resigned myself to childlessness, and was perfectly contented, and now, heading for my thirty-ninth birthday, I was about to have two children, simultaneously. Sholto professed himself delighted at this total surprise but it wasn’t hard to imagine his own consternation. He had thought he and I were going to live as a couple, having had one failed marriage behind him and a child already, but all of a sudden he was about to become the middle-aged father of two babies.

When I think back, now, I realise what a bomb it was that erupted in our lives and blew them apart. All pleasant expectations, all happy assumptions gone — to be replaced by new ones, equally happy, one assumed, but entirely different and unprepared-for. And I was baffled as to how it had happened. Jock Edie said I shouldn’t blame Sir Victor Purslane. Any doctor at that time would have made the same prognosis.

‘But I didn’t have any periods,’ I pointed out.

‘Maybe you had very mild ones or very intermittent ones,’ Jock said. ‘Because you thought you never had them you never noticed them when you did.’

‘No, that’s impossible.’

Then I thought back to my fall on the ice in the rue Monsieur and how the bleeding had restarted and then stopped. Had something been loosened or unlocked in me then? It hadn’t been that long before Sholto had arrived in Paris looking for me. . How could I explain it? How could anyone? I recalled Sir Victor’s words: we think we understand all about the human body but actually we know very little.

‘When did that attack happen, by the way?’ Jock asked.

‘In 1936. It was when Mosley’s fascists were marching in the East End of London.’

‘My God. . It seems like another century. . So, ten years ago.’

‘But why didn’t I get pregnant before this?’

‘Who knows? Did you have an active sex life? Forgive me for asking.’

‘Well, yes. .’ I thought about Cleve and Charbonneau. ‘Pretty active.’

‘Maybe you were just lucky. The timing was always right, if you know what I mean.’

‘And now I’m having bloody twins.’

‘Think of it as a blessing.’

‘Yes. Yes, I will, Jock. Exactly. We’re lucky. We’re blessed.’

The twins duly arrived very early in January 1947. Conceived, as I’d always thought, during those four days in Paris in March with Sholto. Because of my age we took no risks and went to the Western Infirmary in Glasgow instead of the cottage hospital in Oban — and it was just as well because my parturition was complicated. One twin was born after twelve hours of excruciating labour. I understood why that word had been chosen to describe the process of giving birth. The first twin was a girl, whom we called Andra — an old Farr family name. The second twin, also a girl, was born by Caesarean section as I was deemed too weak to go through more hard labour. In fact I didn’t see or hold my new babies for forty-eight hours, such was the practice in the hospital in those days. Eventually I had them in my arms and felt decidedly strange. Sholto was there, with a bunch of carnations, and I began to sob — from joy, I suppose, but also timorous confusion, suddenly confronted with this dual responsibility and a sense that my life was irrevocably turned upside down. No route ahead clear — a topsy-turvy world, as my father would have described it. I looked at my baby girls, Andra and Blythe — as twin number two had been named — and I could see, even that early, that they weren’t identical. That made me pleased, for some reason.

After a week in hospital we all went back to the House of Farr, our surprising new family of four, to find a nanny waiting, a capable girl from the village called Sonia Haldane, who took instant control and suddenly all was well: Sonia could cope with anything, it seemed — two babes in arms were a mere nothing. Life regained a form of stability, a normality began to impose itself.

And we were happy — I mustn’t forget that, as I look back. I was happy with Sholto and we were happy with our growing little children, Annie — as we called Andra — and Blythe. We had four — no, five — entirely happy years. Then Sholto’s mother died. It wasn’t anything to do with her passing away but I date the beginning of the change from the moment of her death. Life was still good but beneath the surface demons were stirring.

DILYS, LADY FARR, was buried in the small graveyard of the church where Sholto and I were married in Crossan Bridge — St Modan’s. There was a good turnout of tenant farmers and neighbours and both Andrew, the Master of Farr, and his mother, Benedicta, were there as well, Benedicta impressively moved and teary. By then I knew Andrew a little better. He was now at Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh, studying estate management. He was a tall, ungainly, dull young man with the same sharp-faced look of his mother. The only feature that I could see he’d inherited from his father was his fine straight hair — except Andrew’s wasn’t black, it was mousey-brown. He had a slight cast in one eye that gave him a sly, watchful aspect. When you talked to him you had to resist the urge to turn and look over your shoulder.