Sweet Caress

  ‘She called me a snob. Fucking old trout. She—’ He stopped. ‘Why’re you staring at me like that?’

  ‘You look very handsome, all of a sudden, cursing away. Swearing like a trooper.’

  He came over, took my hand and gave me a kiss.

  ‘Greville and Amory versus the world,’ he said.

  ‘Easy winners.’

  ‘Lockwood sort everything out?’

  ‘Yes, I’ll give him a hand developing and printing in the morning – send everything off to the magazine.’

  ‘Sit down, darling. There’s something I have to discuss with you.’

  He led me over to a chair in front of the fireplace and sat me down then knelt in front of me and took both my hands. This is it, I thought – it’s going to happen, now.

  ‘Your father,’ he said. ‘You have to go and see him.’

  I hadn’t seen my father since that day at Hookland Castle Lake when he was taken away by the police. I said to Greville – keeping my voice steady – that I couldn’t bear to be in a room with my father, that it made me ill, unstable.

  ‘I can’t, Greville. He tried to kill me.’

  ‘He wasn’t well – he was deranged. He’s much better now and he asks for you every time he wakes up, it seems, so your mother tells me. The doctors say it might help if you went down and saw him. Each week, each month that you don’t see him, you know, sort of agitates him more.’

  I closed my eyes. Why was I being so foolish?

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Greville said. ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of. He’s making good progress. And it might help you, as well. Catharsis and all that.’

  He was right. But some tears flowed and I gave a little sob. As I hoped, Greville took me in his arms and rocked me gently to and fro. I breathed in, content in the moment, my head filled with the scent of custard and jasmine.

  4. CLOUDSLEY HALL

  CLOUDSLEY HALL, near Rochester in Kent, was the asylum where my father had been taken after the Hookland Castle Lake incident. It was an ugly early neo-Gothic Victorian manor house built on the site of a grand eighteenth-century farm and consequently flattered by its ancient landscaped park dating back to that era. Cloudsley Hall had battlements, corner towers and an unlikely belvedere and there were two lodges at the gate leading to a gently winding drive through sheep-cropped, hillocked and wooded meadows to the hall itself. One might have been visiting a hotel or a private school.

  Greville drove me there in his Alvis. My mother, Peggy and Xan had decided not to join me as they had seen Papa on numerous occasions and it was felt it would be more effective if I went to meet him alone. We were taken to the office of the medical director, a Dr Fabien Lustenburger, who was Swiss, Greville told me, an expert on the latest treatments for ‘mania’.

  Dr Lustenburger was a huge, portly young man, well over six feet, already quite bald but with a wide dense moustache that acted as a counterbalance to his almost indecently burnished pate. He was welcoming and warm, very pleased that I had come, and eagerly took me upstairs to my father’s ward. Greville said he would wait in the library.

  ‘Your father will seem completely well to you,’ Dr Lustenburger said as we reached the landing of the first floor. ‘I warn you. You will be surprised. You will say, why is he in this institution?’ He had a barely noticeable accent. ‘Maybe he will be a bit sleepy. When we rouse the patients they find the state of “waking” a little strange and hard to cope with. They spend so much time sleeping, you see.’

  He led me through a ward of a dozen beds, most of them occupied by sleepers, in fact, men and boys, as far as I could tell from a quick glance to either side. The atmosphere was suitably hushed. Dr Lustenburger showed me in to a glassed-in balcony area that looked over the wide rear lawn of Cloudsley Hall – and the thin oblong of its ornamental lake, I was rather alarmed to see. The place was full of lush potted plants – palms and aspidistras – and overstuffed armchairs with leg rests. My father was sitting on one of them, wearing pyjamas and a quilted scarlet dressing gown. He looked very well, fresh-faced, his hair longer than usual, untrimmed, almost boyish, it seemed to me. He kissed and hugged me enthusiastically – entirely naturally, also, as if nothing had happened between us.

  ‘Amory, Baymory, Taymory! Look at you, sweetheart. Isn’t she the height of modern fashion, Dr Lustenburger?’

  Dr Lustenburger, smiling, backed away without comment.

  I launched into a somewhat hysterical prattle about my life in London, working with Greville, the parties I went to and the people I’d met. I felt very uneasy being alone with him. It seemed at once wholly normal and quaveringly tense. My father appeared to be listening, a vague smile on his face, and from time to time nodded and said, ‘Wonderful,’ and ‘What larks, Amory,’ and ‘Goodness me.’ Then he lay back in his armchair and closed his eyes.

  I sat there for a few seconds watching him.

  ‘What happened, Papa?’

  He woke up at once and swung his legs off the chair.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ he said abruptly. ‘It’s all gone, that’s the problem. The medicines they give you in here, you know . . .’ He took my hand and studied it. ‘I know something awful happened – and I can remember you and me standing on the top of a car in a lake of some sort . . .’ He gestured out at the vista through the glass, indicating Cloudsley Hall’s lake. ‘Bigger than that. And then I remember police, a police station, then doctors coming and then . . . here.’ He paused, then leant forward and lowered his voice. ‘You know, when I first came here and I woke up the next morning I said, “My, I slept well last night!” And the nurse said, “You’ve been asleep for two weeks, Mr Clay.”’ He frowned. ‘They put you to sleep here, Amory, for days and days at a time. Weeks. I’ve no idea how long I’ve slept. Months. I’m hardly ever awake, it seems to me.’

  ‘Well, as long as it’s making you better.’

  ‘I did something bad to you, didn’t I?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter now, Papa. Everything’s fine. You’ll be all right.’

  ‘All the righter, for a writer. Send me a photo, sweetness. That’ll make me well – I’ll be able to look at you every day.’ He fell back in his armchair again and closed his eyes.

  There was a polite cough behind me and I turned. Dr Lustenburger had arrived silently to take me away. My father was fast asleep so I kissed his forehead and followed Dr Lustenburger down to his office where he explained something of his methods to me. They practised ‘somnitherapy’ at Cloudsley Hall. Dr Lustenburger was convinced that all aberrant and antisocial manias came from unhappy memories. Deep sleep, profound sleep lasting many days, was, he believed, the way to suppress the power of these memories. ‘And in your father’s case,’ he went on, ‘all these memories originate in the Great War.’ He smiled confidently. ‘However, slowly but surely, we are erasing them.’

  Greville drove me to a pub just off the London Road, the Grenadier, near Gravesend, where we each had a whisky and soda. I expressed some optimism about the visit.

  ‘Did Dr Lustenburger mention anything about the drugs, et cetera?’ Greville asked.

  ‘Papa did say medicines – but he wasn’t specific.’

  ‘It’s a drug that makes them sleep so long. Knocks them out for days.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful!’

  Greville gave a knowing smile. ‘It’s called “SomniBrom” – a mixture of a barbiturate and a bromide.’

  ‘Maybe not so wonderful, then. How do you know about all this?’

  ‘Darling – “deep sleep therapy”. DST. It’s so fashionable. Anxiety removed by narcosis.’ He made a face. ‘With the help of a few electric shocks while you’re snoozing.’

  ‘My God! No!’

  ‘My God, yes! Are you surprised he can’t remember anything, anything at all? Electrodes attached to the head and all that. But you don’t feel a thing. Quite benign, I suppose.’

  ‘Poor Papa . . .’ I felt suddenly sad, thinking of my father. ‘It was the war, wasn
’t it?’ I said vaguely. ‘The war did this to him.’

  Greville agreed with my platitude and we talked on, ordering another round of whiskies and soda. As he brought our drinks over the thought came to me that, as we sat there in a booth in the corner of the saloon bar of the Grenadier, somebody coming in and glancing casually over at us chatting away so earnestly might have thought that we were a couple, out courting.

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  I walked over to Inverbarr – a good two-mile hike – for lunch with Calder and Greer McLennan, my best friends on the island. It was a fresh, breezy day, the wind tugging at my jacket and hat, the sun unusually brilliant, almost alpine in its clarity, when it appeared between the ranks of clouds. As well as going for lunch I was returning a book Calder had lent me called The Last Year: April 1944–April 1945 by Dennis Fullerton. It was an account of the war in Europe during its tumultuous endgame and I was trying to chart my own progress through those twelve months and had been somewhat enlightened. At least I now had the big picture to go with my small precise one – where my meandering journeys had fitted into the great march of military history.

  I walked up to the hogback ridge that connected Barrandale’s two biggish hills, Beinn Morr and Cnoc Torran, that formed a crude spine to the island and, once on the ridge, could see Inverbarr below me, set back on the edge of its small cove with a view of the southern tip of Mull and the hammered silver plate of the Atlantic beyond.

  Greer welcomed me at the back door, gin and tonic in one hand, cigarette in the other. She was a handsome tall woman whose snowy white hair was cut in a severe bob with a razored fringe that brushed her eyebrows. She was ten years younger than me but her white hair sometimes made her look older, I thought. She and Calder were retired academics from Edinburgh University. Calder had been a professor of economics while Greer was a cosmologist, ‘of no eminence at all’, she would add. Calder – small, wiry, bearded – was an overactive adult and a hiking, hill-walking obsessive. Greer was more sedate and was writing a book on molluscs, so she claimed. An odd job for a cosmologist, I had remarked when she told me. She had smiled and said simply that she felt the urge to focus on something closer to home.

  Calder had pretensions as a cook and we ate a pearl barley broth and a peppery venison stew. We had coffee and cigarettes in the library. I spotted a large atlas on a low shelf and asked if I could borrow it. The atlas was too cumbersome to carry home on foot – as big as a paving stone – so Greer offered to drive me back round the island to the cottage. She had things to pick up in Achnalorn, she said.

  In the village we parked outside the small supermarket and I took the chance to buy a newspaper, the Glasgow Herald, and two packs of cigarettes. Greer had done the same and we sat in the car park and smoked, flicking through our newspapers, watching the fishing boats come and go in the small harbour.

  I pointed to a story on the front page of the Herald. A new galaxy had been found at some far corner of the known universe.

  ‘Make your heart beat faster?’ I asked.

  ‘Not really my field,’ Greer said. ‘I was concentrating on what happened before the Big Bang. When there was nothing.’

  ‘Stop right now,’ I said with a laugh. ‘I can’t understand these concepts: “Nothing”, “Infinity”, “Timelessness”. My brain won’t go there.’

  ‘That’s why I retired early,’ Greer said, with a rueful smile. ‘I realised that what I was doing was meaningless to the entire human race apart from about six people in distant universities.’

  ‘I need boundaries,’ I said. ‘I can’t get to grips with “nothing”. That once upon a time there was nothing and time didn’t exist and that “nothing” was infinite . . .’ I smiled. ‘Or maybe I’m just stupid.’

  ‘That’s why I’m studying small molluscs in tiny rock pools,’ Greer said, tossing her cigarette end out of the window and exhaling. ‘We’re just a certain kind of ape on a small planet circling an insignificant star. Why should I be fretting about what might or might not have happened thirteen billion years ago?’

  ‘A certain kind of ape. I like that.’

  ‘So I decided to chuck it in. It just seemed pointless, all of a sudden.’

  ‘Good for you,’ I said, then added, with more feeling than I meant, ‘It’s not as if the here and now isn’t problematic enough.’

  ‘Exactly,’ she said, starting the car and pulling away.

  ‘Talking of which. How’s Alisdair?’ Alisdair was their son, a diplomat, recently messily divorced. Two very young children involved and a bitter ex-wife.

  ‘He’s being posted to Vietnam,’ she said dryly. ‘That should keep him out of trouble.’

  ‘Vietnam,’ I said, not thinking. ‘Well, it got me in serious trouble.’

  Greer looked at me sharply.

  ‘My, you’re full of surprises, Amory,’ she said. ‘You dark horse. When were you in Vietnam, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘What? Me? . . . Oh, years ago. When the war was in full swing.’

  We had arrived at the cottage. Greer stopped the car and turned to me, keen to talk further, I could sense. I didn’t want to linger and opened the door.

  ‘Thanks so much for lunch.’

  ‘Don’t forget your atlas,’ Greer said.

  I opened the rear door and hefted it out.

  ‘I’ll tell you all about Vietnam one day,’ I said.

  ‘Promises, promises,’ she said.

  That night I drank too much whisky to stop myself thinking about the wars I’d known. In bed I felt ideally drowsy and when I closed my eyes the room tilted slightly, agreeably. Whisky – my deep sleep therapy.

  *

  Greville opened the bottle of champagne, poured us each a glass and we toasted each other.

  ‘Got to be a record,’ he said. ‘Three balls in one evening. What’s happening to London? It’s unprecedented.’

  I lit a cigarette, watching him throw off his jacket and fall into an armchair. I knew that tonight had to be the night.

  ‘Couldn’t have done it without you, darling. Thanks a million,’ he said.

  ‘And Lockwood.’

  ‘Locky’s a Trojan. But I think we might need another assistant if this goes on.’

  I sat down opposite him.

  ‘But it can’t go on like this, surely. It’s some sort of a mad exception. Everyone’s out of control.’

  ‘And it’s not even the season . . .’ Greville thought. ‘I know. Divide and rule. What if we split up? Do you think you could do one on your own? You take Lockwood. I’ll find someone new.’ He stood up and paced around the drawing room, thinking. ‘We could do four events a night. Two each.’

  ‘It sounds logical,’ I said. ‘But people only pay attention to me because they know I’m with you. They don’t want to be photographed by Amory Clay. They won’t pay to be photographed by Amory Clay, more to the point.’

  ‘But they will.’ He wandered back across the room towards me. ‘Wait till they see your work.’ He picked up my right hand and kissed it. ‘My right-hand girl. I’m exhausted. Sweet dreams.’

  In my little bedroom I slipped out of my gown and underclothes and put on a filmy silk shift that came to my knees. I touched a little perfume behind my ears and unpinned my hair. I felt very calm, I was surprised to note – this was no inebriated, wild decision. Matters had to come to a head. Then I paused and thought, as coldly as I could, about what I was about to do and the risks attached. It could all go horribly wrong, of course, but, I told myself, you could have died a few months ago, trapped in a car beneath the waters of Hookland Castle Lake. Don’t let your life go by you, thinking of what might have been. Live for yourself, for what you truly want.

  Live for yourself, I repeated as I padded through the dark flat towards Greville’s bedroom. There was no light shining under the door. I knocked.

  ‘Greville? Can I have a word?’ I pushed the door open as he switched on his bedside light. His hair was tousled, a thick loc
k falling over his forehead. I’d never seen him so uncombed.

  ‘Amory? What’s happening? Is there anything wrong?’

  I slid into bed beside him.

  ‘I’m cold,’ I said and, putting my arms around him, tried to kiss his lips.

  Very gently but firmly he pushed me off.

  ‘What’re you doing? Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘I’ve fallen in love with you.’

  ‘Don’t be fucking stupid, I’m your uncle!’

  ‘So what? It doesn’t matter.’

  He sat up and ran his fingers through his hair, smoothing it back. He climbed out of bed and picked up his dressing gown. He was wearing taupe pyjamas with a darker piping, I saw. He threw the dressing gown at me.

  ‘You’re practically naked, you silly girl. Put that on. Why’re you trying to seduce me? Have you had too much to drink?’

  ‘Because I’m tired of being a “girl”!’ My voice was shriller than I meant it to be. ‘Tired of being a “silly” girl, even worse! And I love you. And I don’t want anyone else to love me, or to . . .’ I couldn’t think of the right word. ‘To possess me.’

  He laughed and then walked to his dresser, found a cigarette and lit it.

  ‘You have got a hell of a lot to learn, my dear.’

  ‘I’m nineteen years old. I could have died. My father tried to kill me. I can’t just wait for—’

  He put up his hand to silence me and shook his head incredulously. I could hear him making little popping noises with his lips.

  ‘The thing is, I’m not interested in girls, Amory. Can’t you tell?’

  ‘Tell what?’

  ‘I’m interested in men. And boys . . . I’m what the smart set would call a “queen”.’

  I looked at him.

  ‘Jesus. My God . . . I didn’t . . . I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Don’t be embarrassed, darling. In fact I’m rather flattered you should think I’m appropriate material. The disguise is working very well.’

  I yanked on his dressing gown, suddenly absurdly conscious of my tiny skimpy slip, of the light shining on my bare arms and shoulders. My breasts seemed, all of a sudden, preposterously white and large. I hugged the gown to me, feeling a chill shudder up my back. Cold shame, not hot shame, even worse. I wasn’t going to cry but I’d never felt so stupid. Like a vast block of cast iron, tons of insensate metal.