William Boyd - Sweet Caress

*

In that first week back Joe Dunraven’s office sent me on a package of my mail — I’d had everything diverted to them so that bills could be paid, the house maintained, and so on. Once a month they had forwarded personal letters to the Sentinel bureau in Saigon. The package that arrived only contained the post of the last few weeks and was insignificant, except for one letter, postmarked in Los Angeles. Inside was a piece of card.

Darling Ma,

I just wanted you to know that I am well and happy and am living in America, now. I won’t be coming home. I’m very happy and very well so please don’t worry about me.

All my love,

Blythe

Under her signature was a small symbol: a Christian cross, with a stylised eye drawn above the upright.

I called Annie.

‘I’m not sure if this is some kind of a joke but I’ve had a very strange card from Blythe.’

‘So have I,’ Annie sounded upset. ‘I had a letter.’

‘Posted in America?’

‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t know she’d gone there.’

‘Neither did I.’ She paused. ‘It’s all very sweet and lovely and she keeps going on about how happy and well she is. But she says she’s never coming back. Ever.’ Now there was a catch in her voice. ‘But it doesn’t sound like Blythe. It sounds like she’s taking dictation.’

‘Is there a funny kind of symbol on it?’

‘A kind of cross with an eye on top. I think.’

‘It is her handwriting though.’

‘Oh yes. But the tone seems wrong.’

Now I felt disturbed, a small shiver of alarm and worry. I told Annie I’d been to the Notting Hill flat and had been told she was on ‘holiday’. Maybe somebody there would know something. I’d spoken to an American guy who was living there, I told her.

‘I’ll go this weekend,’ she said.

‘No, don’t worry. I’ll go myself.’

The journey to room 42 in the San Carlos Motel had not been straightforward, I reflected, as I unpacked my clothes. I’d already been two weeks in California and at times had despaired — but now, in theory, I was only a few miles away from Blythe herself; it couldn’t be very long before we were face to face.

I had travelled down to London within twenty-four hours of speaking to Annie, and went straight to Blythe’s flat in Notting Hill. There I met the man who had opened the door to me after my night in St John’s Wood. He was affable and candid, not American but Canadian, he corrected me, politely — his name was Ted Lundegaard.

‘Is anything actually wrong?’ he asked me. ‘Is Blythe in some kind of trouble?’

‘We just don’t know where she is.’ I improvised. ‘She needs medication, medicines, she left without enough supplies and I’m worried.’

‘Oh, right. Jeez. I see what you mean. Could be nasty.’

Blythe had gone to America, he told me, with her boyfriend, Jeff — an American.

‘Her boyfriend?’

‘They played in this band together, Platinum Scrap.’

‘Do you know Jeff’s last name?’

‘Bellamont. Jeff Bellamont. They were going to set themselves up as a duo, you know: “Blythe and Bellamont”. Jeff said they had a booking at a club in LA.’

‘Do you know the name of this club?’

‘Sorry. I forget. I know he told me but. . Wait a sec.’

I followed him from the sitting room with its two busted sofas and huge loudspeakers into a large bay-windowed bedroom at the front of the house looking on to a strip of untended public garden opposite. This was Blythe’s bedroom, Ted informed me, Blythe’s and Jeff’s. In a way it was as dispiriting as John Oberkamp’s hooch at Nui Dat airbase. There was a double mattress on the floor with grubby sheets and a blanket, a central light with a dusty paper globe-shade, a dressing table with a propped mirror and about a dozen cardboard boxes that functioned as a wardrobe, filled with clothes and shoes. There was no carpet. By the bed on both sides were ashtrays full of ancient cigarette butts. The smell of dust, mould and ash overlaid with some cheap deodorant permeated the air. What do we know of our children’s private lives, I asked myself? Nothing.

Ted was searching a cork pinboard next to the dressing table. He held up a card and passed it to me.

‘Hey. We got lucky.’

The card said ‘DOWNSTAIRS AT PAUL’S’, under a logo of crossed guitars, and gave an address on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood.

So I bought a plane ticket, BOAC to Los Angeles, and left the next day, grateful to the gods of luck that I was sufficiently in funds to do this, spontaneously, thanks to my windfall from the Matthew B. Brady Award. On the flight I had many hours to think and I wondered about Blythe and whether I was (a) being a fool, or (b) doing the right thing, or (c) risking alienating my daughter even more by rushing after her in this panicked way.

Everything about her letters had been meant to reassure — I’m fine, Ma, nothing’s wrong — but I had an unmoving apprehension that all was not that well with her and I reasoned that I would rather draw down Blythe’s irritation and accusations than stay on Barrandale vaguely worrying about her and feeling guilty for doing nothing. But guilt was the issue, I realised. I was feeling guilty that I’d gone away and left her and my deepening guilt was driving me on to make this trip, however annoying and futile it might prove to be.

I was still fretting over my options when I arrived in LA, where I found a perfectly comfortable hotel, the Heyworth Travel Inn on Santa Monica Boulevard, just three blocks from Downstairs at Paul’s.

And there my trail petered out and ended in a small jazz/folk club with a tiny stage and about forty seats. Yes, the manager told me, Blythe and Bellamont had played two nights at Downstairs, and they were really quite good. He checked the date — some seven weeks ago. Seven weeks, I thought — where had I been seven weeks ago? In the middle of the Mini-Tet Offensive taking shelter in a bombed-out house with Mary Poundstone, no doubt. I felt the stupid illogical guilt crowding in on me again, and told myself that if I’d been at home Blythe would never have gone gallivanting off like this without telling anyone her plans, despatching bizarrely anodyne postcards to her mother and sister.

And then I remembered that I’d missed the twins’ birthday, their twenty-first. I’d sent cards and cheques. Surely that couldn’t have — I stopped berating myself. Cheques. I’d sent them each £100 for their twenty-first birthday. A mere gesture beside their inheritance from the Farr estate that fell due on their ‘maturity’: £1,000. A fortune for someone like Blythe, living the way she did, and a fortune, it had just occurred to me, for Jeff Bellamont as well, no doubt. The money influx must have been the catalyst for the trip to America; it explained everything, I was sure.

I went back to the Heyworth and wondered what to do next. I needed some help, that was obvious; I’d done as much as I could on my own. I thought about calling Cleveland Finzi, my knight in tarnished armour, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone — it wasn’t the time or place or situation to increase my debt to Cleve. Who else did I know in Los Angeles? And then it came to me: my ‘business partner’, Moss Fallmaster.

I called him. He was delighted to hear from me, he said, and even more delighted that I was in town and invited me over to his ‘factory’ on San Ysidro Drive in the canyons above Beverly Hills. I drove my teal-blue Coronet over there, curious and hopeful.

Moss Fallmaster was tall, possibly the tallest person I’ve ever known — six foot five or six, I’d say — and he was wearing, in honour of my visit, a ‘Never Too Young To. .’ T-shirt. He had a pointed sorcerer’s beard tied at the end with an agate jewel and long hair held back in a ponytail. He was charmingly fey and loquacious and the only effect that was at odds with the whole carefully put-together persona was heavy black-framed spectacles that would have looked more at home on a lawyer or government official.