William Boyd - Sweet Caress

I began to watch him and notice how often he refilled his glass. I searched his study and gunroom when he was absent and found other bottles stashed in cupboards. Yet on the surface all was as it had always been: he was funny, affectionate, enjoying himself, happy to be running his big estate with its many responsibilities. But he was obviously drinking like a desperate man and I found myself at a loss.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I looked through my bookshelves today searching for a Bible, but in vain. I was sure I had an old one with cracked black leather binding and gold embossed letters but there was no sign of it. Then I had an idea — I knew where I could borrow one.

I drove into Achnalorn and parked outside the church at the end of the main street, St Machar’s, or the Auld Kirk of Barrandale, as it was known. It was an unpretentious building in its small bumpy churchyard, circled by a slate wall with rowan trees growing amongst the tilted gravestones. It was simple, like a rectangular house, with a steeply pitched roof with stepped gables and an ornate small cupola with a bell in it — never rung — and a pineapple finial on top, gift of some rich and devout parishioner in the early nineteenth century. A simple stone porch had been crudely added on to one side — it looked like the entry to a garden shed or coal store — and there were four large coloured-glass windows in the nave depicting scenes from the life of St Machar. Inside there were two rows of wooden pews on either side of a central aisle and a table altar on a dais with a heavy brass crucifix in the middle.

The Reverend Patrick Tolland himself was putting the finishing touches to the vases of flowers flanking the crucifix — yellow geraniums and bracken — and he looked round as I came quietly in. He was a young vicar — in his thirties, I guessed — with long hair over his ears and collar. He had an African beaded necklace from which his crude pewter cross hung. I’d met him a few times but, as he clearly couldn’t remember my name, I introduced myself and said I was hoping to borrow a Bible. An authentic King James, if possible.

He strode off to fetch one and as he handed it to me said, ‘I hope we’ll see you at the Sunday service, Lady Farr.’

I never introduced myself as Lady Farr — I always said Amory Farr — so he had obviously realised who I was.

‘No. I’m afraid not,’ I said.

‘But the Bible. .?’

‘I want to look something up. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.’

‘Oh. Right,’ he said, seeming momentarily cast down. Then he walked me solicitously to the door. ‘Lovely day,’ he said, gesturing at the sunlit sky with its drifting clouds. ‘And God saw every thing that he had made and, behold, it was very good.’

I thanked him and set off down the path to the main street and as I did so walked into a fizzing shimmer of midges. I waved my arms about but I could feel the sharp sting of the bites. I turned back to the reverend and shouted.

‘Couldn’t you get Him to do something about the bloody midges?’

*

We sent the girls off to boarding school when they were ten, in 1957. I never really asked why — I had been sent off myself, of course, and had resented it. I raised a mild protest but Sholto insisted — there was no school for them in Mallaig, he said, and we can’t afford private tutors. Of course there was a school — but not for the children of Lord Farr. Selfishly, secretly, I thought it would be good for the two of us to be a couple again — we’d had so little time without the girls. Selfishness is almost always the real, hidden reason why people send their children away to board. I told myself that it was something one did at this level of society and so I drove them to Edinburgh, feeling guilty all the same, and saw them installed in the Maxwell-Milnes School for Girls. They seemed untroubled. Benedicta was an alumna.

I missed the girls but soon saw this change in our family circumstances as something more alarming — the benefits I was expecting never materialised. Perhaps because I suddenly had more time on my hands I began to notice Sholto’s decline more clearly. It was his habit to go to London on a fairly regular basis to vote in the House of Lords on matters relating to Scotland, and Scottish landowners. There was a grouping of Scottish peers who had organised themselves into a form of lobby and Sholto took his responsibilities seriously. Sometimes I went with him but most often he travelled on his own, taking the sleeper from Glasgow, staying at the South Kensington mews house, and returning three or four days later, legislative business done.

One Friday afternoon while Sholto was away in London I had a telephone call from a reporter on the William Hickey column at the Daily Express.

‘How can I help you?’ I asked.

‘Have you any comment to make about your husband’s predicament, Lady Farr?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘He’s been arrested.’

‘What for?’

‘Drunk and disorderly. He tried to beat up a photographer.’

I hung up and didn’t answer when the phone rang again, immediately. I called the mews house but there was no reply. The next day I went into Mallaig and bought the newspaper. There was a picture of Sholto in a dinner suit, his bow tie loosened, his hair plastered with sweat, snarling like an animal, trying to rip the camera from the hands of a photographer. Behind him, pulling at his coat tails was a young woman, screaming out, in a short white fur coat and a dress that revealed much of her breasts. I could see a neon sign behind him that read ‘The Golden Wheel Club’. The caption declared: ‘WAR HERO SCOTTISH LORD ARRESTED’.

Sholto was released with a caution after twenty-four hours in the Rochester Row police station cells and came home at once. I met him in the morning at Glasgow’s Central Station and we drove home in a mood of some tension. He was sheepish and apologetic, explaining that he’d had too much to drink and gone with friends to this club to gamble. Some film star was there, he said, and that explained why press photographers were lurking. He was drunk, he confessed, and had lost his temper.

‘Foolish of me, I know, darling,’ he said. ‘Won’t happen again.’

‘Who was that girl with you?’

‘What? Oh, some Mayfair tart who’d tried to pick me up.’

I wanted to say why was she screaming and pulling you away? Tarts usually run for it.

‘Well, you’re the talk of the neighbourhood,’ I said. ‘As you can imagine. Not a copy of the Express to be had for miles around.’

‘They’ll get over it. They know the Farrs are a wild lot. Seen it all before.’

‘Yes, in the sixteenth century.’

He didn’t want to talk about it any further and I could feel his shame, burning, however light-heartedly he tried to laugh it off.

That evening we were having a drink before dinner, in the small drawing room on the first floor.

‘What’s happening, Sholto?’ I said in a reasonable, unaggressive voice. ‘What went on in London? What goes on in London?’

‘Nothing. I had too much to drink, I told you.’

‘You have too much to drink every night of the week. I meant what’s happening with us?’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘You, me, the girls. The family, the estate. The school fees, the House of Farr. The staff. Everything.’

He stood up and arched his back, his hands pressing into his spine as if he had some acute lumbar pain. He swayed over to the drinks table, inevitably, and poured himself a quadruple whisky.

‘I drink as much as my father did,’ he said, sullenly.

‘What kind of justification is that? He died when you were twenty-three. And you haven’t answered my question.’