William Boyd - Sweet Caress

I was to be given the choice of three ‘dwellings’ owned by the estate, and the one I chose would be mine ‘in perpetuity’. The trust fund that was paying the girls’ school fees would continue and they would each receive a benefaction of £1,000 on their twenty-first birthdays. I was to be guaranteed a personal income of £500 per annum for the next ten years. The quid pro quo was that I and my family could make no further claim on the estate.

I declared myself well pleased and warmly shook Joe Dunraven’s hand — and then spontaneously kissed him on the cheek, such was my relief. Thus encouraged, he asked me out to dinner but I made an excuse: if he didn’t mind, I was still grieving, I wasn’t fit company. But I was a little taken aback — I think Joe Dunraven had acquired a sudden interest in the Scottish aristocracy, however spurious a member of that clan I was.

I looked at the three properties I was offered and chose the least valuable, a cottage on the island of Barrandale. The other two were a terrace house in Mallaig and a large bungalow in Newton Mearns, Glasgow. It showed me that Sholto hadn’t entirely depleted the Farr estate and I wondered what other assets were hidden away. But I didn’t care. Once I’d seen the cottage it wasn’t a difficult decision. Even though Barrandale was barely an island, it was symbolically separate from the mainland and I liked the idea of living in an isolated house, if somewhat decrepit, with its own small bay and a view of the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The girls agreed, instantly, and were very excited. It was the perfect contrast and antidote to the House of Farr — a place I never returned to again.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I still dream about Sholto, all these years later. His death came as a dreaded and devastating shock even though I knew it wasn’t far away; but at the same time I couldn’t deny how ardently he had wished for it — and who was I to demand that he prolong the unending torment that his living hours so obviously were? He wanted to go more than anything else and I was glad for him. I was dry-eyed at his funeral, concentrating on this, thinking: you’re free, Sholto, all your troubles are over. We will soldier on without you but you are now part of the transcendental history of the universe. Dust to dust, atoms to atoms. I realised, as I heard the eulogies and we sang the hymns, that Sholto had enjoyed very little of his life these last several years — not me, nor his daughters, nor his home, his lands, his heritage had made any difference — and if you feel that way about being alive, if life doesn’t offer you the slightest consolation, if you savour nothing, not even the tiniest insignificant feature that the planet and your fellow humans can offer, then you shouldn’t hang around, in my opinion. As Charbonneau once said to me — take the cyanide pill, now.

But it was also clear to me that whatever awful event had occurred in Wesel in 1945 had come, slowly but surely, to dominate his conscious being and had started to define the sort of person he thought he was, and that this had made him drink so much, explained why he was so careless, in every sense of the word, explained why he lost his love for everything. He was too much of the brave soldier to blow his brains out or swallow pills so he killed himself with other means to hand — alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, self-neglect. I felt an enormous weight of sadness at his death but — and is it shocking to admit this? — a huge relief and a kind of happiness for him now he was free of himself, of the world and its burdens.

I kept all this from Annie and Blythe — who were initially shattered, abject, uncomprehending, and then recovered quickly, as the young will, with their own lives to lead beckoning them onwards. Poor Papa, they both said. Why didn’t he take more care? Didn’t he realise what he was doing to himself? We talked about it a great deal, the three of us, and I alluded to a dark unhappiness, to something that had happened to him in the war that had made him go a bit mad, and they both said they understood and provided me with more anecdotes of Sholto’s bizarre behaviour that they had witnessed but hadn’t told me.

We left the House of Farr, with few regrets, once the cottage was ready for us. I bought us a Labrador, Flim, from a kennels in Oban and our new life began.

Flim, Barrandale, 1962.

*

I travelled to England, to Hereford, to meet Frank Dunn. He hadn’t been able to come to the funeral but Aldous King-Marley (who gave the address) told me how to make contact with him.

Frank Dunn had been a twenty-year-old second lieutenant during the Commando Brigade’s attack on Wesel in 1945. Now, aged thirty-seven, he was still in the army, a major in 22 SAS Regiment. He was married with two young children and he still had that lean, super-fit aspect about him that I remembered from Sholto just after the war. He was no jowly pot-bellied habitué of the officers’ mess — Frank Dunn hadn’t stopped serious soldiering, that was very plain.

We left his house and went to a pub down the road so we could talk, uninterrupted by his children. We spoke about Sholto, candidly, and Frank admitted that the man he had become at the end of his life was a bleak shadow of his former commanding officer.

‘What happened in Wesel?’ I said. ‘Sholto would never tell me.’

‘Well, I wasn’t there the whole night,’ Frank said. ‘A bit of shrapnel hit me in the ankle and I had to be strapped up at a dressing station, so I missed a lot — but heard the story later, of course. In fact everyone knew — but nobody ever really wanted to talk about it.’

Frank told me what had taken place that night — using our glasses, ashtray, cigarette packets to make the geography of the town more intelligible. Sometime after midnight on 23 March, 15 Commando’s progress, mopping up and clearing out pockets of resistance that had survived the massive bombardment, had been stopped by heavy fire from one particular building — a former post office — that overlooked a crossroads. This building had a large cellar basement and there were squat, barred, recessed windows with thick mullions set at pavement level in the ground floor’s heavy rustication that gave excellent protection and afforded perfect firing positions on the streets converging on the crossroads.

‘We were losing men. It was like a bunker, that place. The top had fallen in but the ground floor was solid, thick walls and these embrasures let them fire on us from all angles. Machine guns, Panzerfausts, Panzerschrecks — like bazookas, you know. Then someone spotted a small back entrance in the next street.’

He said that Sholto took the decision to lead a section round himself and they saw that if they could blast the door off they might have a way into the cellar.

‘And that’s what they did. Blew the door off,’ Frank said. ‘Sholto had a kitbag full of grenades and he just slung them in, one after another. Boom-boom-boom. Anyone who tried to scramble out was gunned down. Then one of the grenades must have hit a stock of ammo and the whole place was ripped apart. All went quiet.

‘So,’ he went on, a little grimly, ‘Sholto goes in first, then David Farquhar. Almost everyone’s dead, blown to pieces, suffocated, whatever. Thick smoke everywhere. A few wounded, screaming and crying.’ He frowned. ‘The trouble was, once the air cleared, we saw they were all Hitler Youth — adolescent boys, fourteen or fifteen — younger. A couple of older officers, but basically we’d been fighting kiddies, little lads. And Sholto had single-handedly killed them all. That was the thing that got to him.’