William Boyd - Sweet Caress

Flam is standing now, as if he senses this new direction in my thinking, and he shakes himself, licks his chops and comes over to me and puts his muzzle on my knee and looks into my eyes. No, I’m not going to rub your ears, old dog, go and lie down.

I pick up another pill. .

But I’ve put it back in the bottle and screwed the cap tightly on. Was I making another mistake, I thought, my last mistake? Was I being a little hasty. .? If I can plan my breakfast and look forward to the day ahead with its simple pleasures — isn’t that a sign? Wouldn’t it be wiser to experience the day ahead and savour it, as if it were my last, and postpone for a while my appointment with my pills and my whisky until the moment comes when I don’t feel like coping any more and all anticipation has gone? I have the means so I can decide at any time of my choosing — Jock Edie says the pills will keep for years. I push the pill bottle away and pour myself a large dram of Glen Fleshan.

I am thinking — hard, concentrating. My life has been complicated, true, very complicated, and it seems to be entering another realm of complexity. But, then again, isn’t everybody’s and won’t everybody’s be just as complicated? Any life of any reasonable length throws up all manner of complications, just as intricate as mine have been. I pick up an orange and contemplate it. Remarkable fruit. I test its rind with my thumbnail. Like skin, porous, soft. What’s waiting for me? A cold fine day, a dog, a walk, a white beach, the wind-scored ocean, a camera, an urgent concentrating eye, a curious active mind. I weigh the orange in my hand, sniff its citrus astringency. The singular beauty of the orange. . The here and now. Seize the day, Amory.

Yes, my life has been very complicated but, I realise, it’s the complications that have engaged me and made me feel alive. I think I should let my horizontal fall continue just a little while longer — keep falling horizontally until I decide to stop.

I know I won’t sleep now that I’ve made my decision. I hold my glass of whisky up to the glow from the peat bricks in the fire and watch the small flames shuffle and refract through the golden liquid. Yes, I’ll go down to the beach with Flam — now, in the middle of the moonless night and listen to the waves — and walk on the shore and look out at the darkness of the ocean, all senses dimmed except the auditory; stroll on my beach with the lights of my house burning yellow behind me in the enveloping blue-black sea-dark and contemplate this uncertain future that I’ve just bestowed on myself — me, Amory Clay, a certain type of ape on a small planet circling an insignificant star in a solar system that’s part of an unimaginably vast expanding universe — and I will stand there in all humility and calm myself, with the ocean’s endless, unchanging, consoling call for silence — shh, shh, shh . .

AMORY CLAY

Photographer

Born

7 March 1908

Died

23 June 1983

(by her own hand)

Hannelore Hahn, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Margaret Michaelis, Lee Miller, Gerda Taro, Trude Fleischmann, Gloria Emerson, Steffi Brandt, Martha Gellhorn, Constanze Auger, M. F. K. Fisher, Nina Leen, Gerti Deutsch, Lily Perette, Harriet Cohen, Greta Kolliner, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Renata Alabama, Marianne Breslauer, Lisette Model, Edith Tudor-Hart, Françoise Demulder, Dora Kallmuss, Catherine Leroy, Edith Glogau, Dickey Chapelle, Margaret Bourke-White, Mary Poundstone, Diane Arbus, Rebecca West, Kate Webb, Inge Bing (and all the others).

WILLIAM BOYDis the author of fourteen novels including A Good Man in Africa , winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War , winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Any Human Heart , winner of the Prix Jean Monnet and adapted into a BAFTA-winning Channel 4 drama; Restless , winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection; the Sunday Times bestseller Waiting for Sunrise , and, most recently, Solo , a James Bond novel. William Boyd lives in London and France.

www.williamboyd.co.uk

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1‘Killed in Action’ and ‘Missing in Action’.

2The Caravelle Hotel was the favourite of the Vietnam Press Corps. AP and UPI had suites of offices there and its rooftop bar was the prime hang-out.

1Truong Ngoc Thong was hired by me on my third day in Saigon. I had rented a scooter that I thought would allow me to whizz about the city. Two near-accidents in half an hour showed me I had made a possibly fatal miscalculation. Truong spoke bad English, better French and, of course, fluent Vietnamese. His car was an old blue Renault Colorale. I would never have survived without him.

2Lane Burrell was as good as his word and my accreditation duly arrived. I had my ID: my ‘non-combatant’ certificate of identity issued by the US Department of Defense. I was described as a ‘British Photojournalist’. I was entitled to go to the daily Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV) briefing — the ‘five o’clock follies’, as they were known — draw combat fatigues, C-rations, travel on military transport, and had the right to go into battle.

1My translation. Un peu loufouque is hard to render exactly in English as it has many nuances: burlesque, extravagant, bizarre and droll, amongst others. It’s very disconcerting to read such a portrait, with no disguise, in a published book. It’s like overhearing other people discussing you, unaware of your presence. You are confronted with your effect — the last thing anyone knows about themselves.

1 Bao chi is Vietnamese for ‘journalist’ or ‘press’.

1Central Information Bureau.

1John Oberkamp was never spotted again after his capture by the Viet Cong in Vinh Hoa. No trace of his body has ever been discovered. His fate remains one of the many mysteries of the Vietnam War.