William Boyd - Sweet Caress

I was driven through early-morning London, the streets still pretty much empty, to St John’s Wood, north of Regent’s Park, to a block of mansion flats with its own underground car park. I was taken to a service apartment on the fourth floor where I was greeted by a sour-faced, heavily built young woman in a puce suit and sensible shoes. She showed me into a sitting room with brown upholstered furniture and a gas fire and offered me a cup of tea and biscuits. If I wanted to use the toilet, she said, I should ring this bell, pointing at a bell-push by the door. And then she locked me in.

I drank my tea and ate my digestive biscuits and an hour after I had arrived my suitcase was delivered. I waited. At lunchtime I was provided with a round of ham sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. I dozed on the sofa for most of the afternoon. I deliberately didn’t ask my guardian what was going on. Supper was a round of cheese and tomato sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. I stretched out on the sofa again and slept for a troubled few hours.

Very late in the night I was woken by puce-suit and led down a corridor to another room with a dining table and six chairs. Another cup of tea was served. After ten minutes or so I heard voices at the flat’s front door and moments later two young, suited men came in and introduced themselves as they took their seats opposite me: Mr Brown and Mr Green. They were in their thirties; one was dark and solid (Mr Green), the other languid and corpulent with fair, thinning hair (Mr Brown). Both of them were, no doubt, educated at expensive private schools and were graduates of excellent universities. They had polite middle-class accents. They could have happily read the news on the BBC.

MR BROWN: Lady Farr. Your professional name is Amory Clay.

ME: That’s correct.

MR GREEN: We won’t detain you much longer. Our apologies for your wait.

ME: I’m keen to return home. May I ask why I was detained in the first place? I’m not aware of having done anything wrong.

MR BROWN: We had to detain you because of what you thought you saw at [consults notebook] Nui Dat airbase, Vietnam.

ME: I really can hardly remember anything at all.

MR GREEN: We will assume, for your own sake, that you will remember nothing at all.

ME: Of course. I promise.

MR GREEN: Nothing. Ever. For your own sake.

ME: I repeat — I promise.

MR BROWN: Because if you so much as breathe a word. .

ME: I promise. Nothing.

MR BROWN: Excellent.

And then they both gave tight little smiles and we stood up. Brown asked if I had any money and I said only American dollars. He gave me a £10 note that I had to sign a chit for and I was then shown back to the front door by puce-suit where my suitcase was waiting for me.

I travelled down in the lift alone and stepped out into the first glimmerings of dawn in St John’s Wood. I hailed a passing taxi and asked to be taken to an all-night café. This proved to be in Victoria bus station where — beneath blazing fluorescent light — I ate, and hugely relished, a greasy breakfast and drank many cups of strong tea.

But I was feeling increasingly strange as I sat there in the refulgent cafeteria considering what had just happened to me in the last forty-eight hours or so and I realised I had experienced this sensation before but I couldn’t remember when. That sense of fearful powerlessness; of other forces suddenly taking over the direction of your life that you had chosen; of being completely out of your depth in what you thought was familiar society. And then I remembered. My ‘obscenity’ trial over my Berlin photographs, all those decades ago — sitting in the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court pleading guilty when I knew I was innocent; learning that my photographs were to be destroyed; being admonished and humiliated by the judge.

When you encounter the implacable power of the state it’s a deeply destabilising moment. In an ordinary life it happens very rarely — maybe never, maybe once or twice. But your individual being, your individual nature, seems suddenly worth nothing — you feel expendable — and that’s what frightens you, fundamentally, that’s what makes your bowels loosen.

When the world was stirring I telephoned Blythe at her flat in Notting Hill but there was no reply. So I tried Annie at her student hall of residence at Sussex University.

‘ Ma! I don’t believe it! You’re back! How wonderful, why didn’t you tell us ?’

‘ Yes, it is wonderful and all very sudden, but I’m here to stay, my darling. No more travelling. ’

We spoke some more and I told her I’d tried Blythe with no success. Annie said to keep trying — she hadn’t moved. I had a powerful need to be hugged, close and hard, by someone I loved. I telephoned again, but there was still no reply so I hailed another taxi and was taken to Ladbroke Grove, to a peeling stucco four-storey house with twelve brimming dustbins outside it. I rang the bell for Blythe’s flat and eventually a bleary, long-haired American came to the door. Was Blythe in? I’m her mother. Sorry. Blythe’s been away for weeks. Gone on a long holiday. I couldn’t take any more and began to cry.

I checked in at reception to a bored gum-chewing young man with a middle parting and an acne problem and was assigned a cabin, room 42, out on the parking lot at the rear of the motel complex. I didn’t care. The Californian desert sun was hammering down as I parked my teal-blue 1965 Dodge Coronet as close to my door as I could. I lugged my suitcase in, switched on the air conditioning and unpacked. I had a huge bed, an ice-making machine, and a clean white-tiled bathroom with a prophylactic polythene shield on the lavatory. I hoped I didn’t have to stay here long.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

One of the most inexpensive joys available to almost everyone — if you’re lucky enough — is to wake up in your warm bed and to realise that you don’t have to leave it and that you can turn over and go back to sleep again. The first three mornings I spent in the cottage when I returned to Barrandale I didn’t quit my bed until well after eleven o’clock. I needed that calm, that banal quotidian luxury of sleep.

I opened up the house, aired it, stocked up on food and drink, reclaimed the dog, Flam, from the farmer who had been looking after him. Flam’s evident delight at seeing me again was another emotional high point — staccato barking, leaping up, face licking. It took him hours to calm down.

Very swiftly I put the pieces of my old life on Barrandale back together. I took long walks around the island; I visited my friends to let them know I was home again and all the while I was re-familiarising myself with this existence that I’d put on hold while I was in Vietnam — but of course what had happened in Vietnam and my precipitate return kept thrusting itself into my mind.

Even now, after so much time has gone by, I still wonder if I was only allowed to leave Vietnam because of my title, because I was the widow of Sholto, Lord Farr. God bless the British class system. What would have happened if I’d been plain Amory Clay? Without ‘Lady Farr’ I’m more and more convinced that on one of my trips I’d have gone mysteriously MIA and been found dead amidst the detritus of some firefight with the Viet Cong. Another foolhardy photographer caught out looking for a scoop. It would have been very easy to arrange. My title and the fact that Frank Dunn knew me and had served with Sholto in the war made the difference. My long wait in the St John’s Wood mansion flat represented the time taken to evaluate the risk I posed, now I knew the secret. A meeting would have been convened. Lady Farr? Widow of Lord Farr MC, DSO? We can’t really do anything to her, can we? Soldier’s widow. Make her promise to keep quiet, see if we can trust her to keep her mouth shut. Mr Green and Mr Brown would have reported back: she’s no fool, she knows what’s at stake. We can let her go.