Sweet Caress

1. ROOM 42, SAN CARLOS MOTEL

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.

*

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.

His canyon house had a fine, open view over the vast city and its coastal plain. Through the salt and smog haze I could see the blurred rectangles of the tall buildings miles away in downtown LA. Everywhere in the house — corridors, hallway, stacked against walls — were battered cardboard boxes with large, scrawled handwriting on them: Grateful Dead, Peace Sign, Marijuana, Naked Mickey Mouse, Ban the Bomb, Che, and so on.

‘Ah. T-shirts,’ I said.

He pointed at a box: ‘Never Too Young To. .’ He inclined himself apologetically. ‘Not our best seller,’ he said, ‘but steady. In fact I think I may owe you some money.’

He went to a study and came out with a wad of cash from which he paid me several hundred dollars and had me sign for them.

‘Let’s hope these Paris peace talks drag on,’ he said. ‘An ongoing war is good business. Just kidding,’ he added with a sly smile.

We sat down on his deck and he poured me a glass of red wine and I told him why I was here in Los Angeles.

‘My God. English mother comes to California searching for her runaway daughter. I’ll buy the movie rights.’ He leant his long torso forward and topped up my glass. I lit a cigarette.

‘You know, Amory — may I call you Amory? — I would just go home. She’ll come back as soon as she’s bored by her little adventure. How old is she?’

‘Twenty-one.’

‘She’ll run out of money.’

‘She has quite a lot of money. That’s the trouble.’ I explained about Sholto’s legacy. I told him about the strange card sent to me and the letter to Annie with their pointed messages.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I can’t really see why it might appear worrying. . She says she’s happy—’

‘It’s not Blythe,’ I said. ‘I know her too well. Something’s happened to her.’

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think you need a private detective. I have just the man.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

This morning, walking across the gravel to the car, I fell. There was no ice; I didn’t trip, stumble or stub my toe — my left leg just gave way and I fell over. I sat on the ground for a while and counted to a hundred. Then I stood up again. All seemed well, but I knew what was happening — the neurologist had warned me. I tested my grip, both hands, on the door handle — fine. But my throat was dry and I felt frightened: it was as if something else was taking me over — this sudden loss of power, sudden loss of motor control is the significant sign that the disease is gaining ground. Calm, girl, calm. . It comes and goes, chooses its own pace. It may be moving very slowly — don’t panic. One day at a time and all the rest of it. You have the ultimate say, remember.

*

Cole Hardaway of Hardaway Legal Solutions Inc. was the private investigator who Moss Fallmaster recommended. He had an office above a nail parlour in Santa Monica. If you looked out of his window you could see the ocean reflected in the windows of the building opposite. He seemed a little unprepossessing at first, not at all what I’d hoped for or had been expecting in a private eye. He was wearing pale grey trousers and a checked lime-green shirt — a man in his mid-forties with a lean and thoughtful demeanour that was rather undermined by his hairstyle: his brown hair was cut in a Beatles fringe, snipped off straight at his eyebrows. It did make him look a bit younger, I supposed, but any man over forty who deliberately combs his hair forward in a child’s fringe has something suspect about him, I always feel. Anyway, I tried to ignore it as we talked and, slowly but surely, I found myself coming round to a more favourable impression of Cole Hardaway. He had a reassuring deep bass voice and he spoke in a very measured way, always pausing to think, visibly pondering any question you might ask.

‘I was in England in the war,’ he said, explaining that he’d been an army engineer. He had taken part in the construction of several pontoon bridges over the Rhine in 1945. I told him my own experience of crossing the Rhine in ’45.

‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ I said, ‘if I’d crossed the Rhine on one of the bridges you’d helped build?’

It was a throwaway remark but Mr Hardaway thought about it silently for some moments, nodding, weighing up the probabilities.

‘It would certainly be a remarkable coincidence,’ he said, finally. I agreed and we pressed on with the matter of finding Blythe.

I gave him all the information I had plus the fairly recent photograph of Blythe that I carried with me. He informed me that he charged $100 per day not including expenses and advised me to return to my hotel. Relax, he said, see the sights — he would call me as soon as he had anything concrete.

I saw, by the door as I left his office, a photograph on the wall of a young soldier in fatigues sitting on a pile of sandbags, smiling at the camera. It was obviously Vietnam — it could have been one of mine from Vietnam, Mon Amour.

‘I’m just back from Vietnam myself,’ I said, explaining why I’d been there.

‘That’s my son, Leo,’ he said flatly. ‘He was killed in Da Nang last year. A traffic accident.’

I forgave Cole Hardaway his silly fringe.

I saw the sights, such as they were, in Los Angeles. I went on a tour of Universal Studios. I took some photographs on Sunset Boulevard. I watched movies (2001:A Space Odyssey and The Fox), I sat by the small hotel swimming pool and read my books. I was planning a trip to Anaheim to visit Disneyland when Cole Hardaway called, three days after my appointment with him. He had tracked Blythe down and I owed him $425. He suggested we meet up — it was a little complicated.

I returned to his office in Santa Monica where he offered me a drink. I asked for whisky but he only had bourbon.

‘Shall we go to a bar?’ he suggested. ‘Would you mind going to a bar?’

Not at all, I said, excellent idea — I liked bars. So we wandered down the street to a bar a block away — Hardaway was obviously a regular — and sat in a curved red leatherette booth at the rear. A waitress in a silver miniskirt and a tight black halterneck took our orders.

‘There you be, Cole,’ she said with a warm smile, serving us our drinks. ‘Nice to have you back.’

‘May I call you Cole?’ I asked.

‘Of course, Mrs Farr.’

He told me that the key factor that had allowed him to trace Blythe had been her boyfriend, Jeff Bellamont, who had unwittingly and obligingly left a relatively easy-to-follow trail from Downstairs at Paul’s — unpaid rental on an apartment, a car hire, a night in a motel, a run-in and a ticket from a traffic cop in Fresno — all the way to another hotel in Bishop, Inyo County. Cole had driven up to Bishop — over 200 miles north of Los Angeles. By now he had a photograph of Bellamont, a recent mugshot that he gave to me. It turned out Bellamont had a sizeable roster of crimes and misdemeanours and had even served time in Folsom prison for robbery. A certain amount of judicious asking around in Bishop (not a big place) had produced an accurate identification and a probable location.

‘I’m pretty damn sure I know where he is,’ Cole said. ‘And if he’s there, then your daughter will be there also, most likely. It’s just. .’ he paused for one of his moments of cogitation. ‘It’s just a kind of weird situation. Not dangerous, no, no. Just prepare yourself for something not normal.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Hugo called and invited me to see how his new house was progressing so I walked round the headland and met him there in discussion with the contractors. The roof was now on and complete and I could see it was definitely going to be a fair-sized home. Once it was sealed, windows in and so on, they could work inside through the winter, he told me. He hoped to be in by spring next year.

‘And we’ll be neighbours,’ he added.

‘Which will be great.’

‘You can pop over for a drink.’

‘And vice versa.’

We wandered down to the rocks that the house overlooked — no bay. I had the bay.

‘You know that I’m looking for a particularly close neighbourly relationship,’ he said, taking my hand. He was always taking my hand these days — I didn’t stop him.

‘Hugo,’ I began, ‘I don’t think—’

‘Don’t think. There’s no need for thought. Nothing will be complicated.’

‘Everything’s complicated, surely you realise that by now. At our age.’

He sighed. ‘No, what I mean is. . We’re not young, true, but we’re not decrepit. Something like this — two houses, not so far apart — it can work, Amory. We can keep an eye on each other.’

That actually sounded rather appealing, so I untensed.

‘Well, yes, I can see the advantages,’ I said.

‘And we can get to know each other better.’

I wondered when and if I should tell him about my particular problem.

‘One step at a time, Mr Torrance. Can we go? I’m freezing.’

Some lists I made:

A list of the books written by Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau:

Morceaux bruts

Feu d’artifice

Le Trac

Cacapipitalisme

Avis de passage

Le Trapéziste

Absence de marquage

Chemin sans issue

A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought):

Aide-memoire

Reportage

Work of art

Topography

Erotica/Pornography

Advertisement

Abstract image

Literature

Text

Autobiography

Compositional

Functional illustration

Snapshot

Try it and see: all photographs fall into one of these categories or combinations of them. Actually, I now think there is a fourteenth category, as unique to photography as the stop-time device that is its defining feature, the snapshot — namely, the ‘mis-shot’. It occurs when you make a mistake: you overexpose, you double-expose, the camera shakes or moves or the framing is wrong — the so-called ‘bad-crop’. My most famous photograph, ‘The Confrontation’, is a mis-shot, a bad-crop. I suppose a mistake might function beneficially in other arts — the sculptor’s hammer and chisel slips, the wrong tube of paint is selected, the composer unwittingly changes key — and it might enhance the whole in an aleatory way. But only in photography can our errors so easily become real virtues, again and again and again.

A list of my books:

Absences (1943)

Vietnam, Mon Amour (1968)

And the books I planned:

The View Down (shots from on high looking down)

Sleepers (images of people sleeping or resting)

Static Light (the final project — light stopped)

Bad-Crop (a deliberate selection of mis-shots)

And, crowning glory:

The Horizontal Fall: Photographs by Amory Clay

A list of my lovers:

Lockwood Mower

Cleveland Finzi

Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau

Sholto Farr

John Oberkamp

Hugo Torrance. .?

2. WILLOW RANCH

It was a 250-mile drive to Bishop from Los Angeles, north in the general direction of Death Valley. In the end it took me five and a half hours, with breaks. I set off on the Garden Park Freeway out towards Pasadena, then on to Highway 395 all the way to Bishop. The journey led me round the massive sprawl of Edwards Air Force Base — I saw B-52s climbing slowly into the air, training for Vietnam, no doubt — and then along the periphery of the China Lake weapons testing range. We were entering desert country, the land arid, caught in the rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains, whose long saw-toothed bulk — summits white with snow and ice — I could see as I drove ever northwards into the Owens Valley. On either side of the highway stretched flat steppes of desert scrubland — sagebrush, buckwheat, salt grass and creosote bush — and a lot of sand.

I pulled into a picnic area off the road at one stage to stretch my legs and I looked around at this great parched wilderness baking in the high summer heat. Away from LA’s smog the sky was a crystalline blue — a perfect blue — and the few clouds that hung motionless there were cartoon-like in their whiteness, freshly laundered, ideally puffy, promising not one drop of moisture. I felt very alone all of a sudden and full of an unfamiliar trepidation. Cole Hardaway had insisted that I feel free to call him at any moment if I felt I needed some assistance but I stirred myself into a form of reasoned anger — something had happened to my daughter and changed her, she needed me, and I was going to find her on my own. It occurred to me that those breezily robotic letters were actually a covert cry for help. I simply couldn’t believe that Blythe had run away and foresworn us so casually, our small, close family of three. She must have been suborned, persuaded, turned in some way. I had to find her, talk to her, discover what had happened — and try to persuade her to come home, if that was what she really wanted.

The San Carlos Motel, Glenbrook, California, 1968.

I drove into Bishop and then out again, retracing my steps, finding the San Carlos Motel a few convenient miles down the road in the small town of Glenbrook, valiantly guarding its ‘city limits’ as Bishop’s suburbs remorselessly encroached.

In my room, air conditioner thrumming, unpacked, I laid out my map on the bed and plotted my next move.

Cole Hardaway had told me everything he had discovered about Jeff Bellamont and Blythe. They had travelled from Los Angeles to Bishop, spent a night there, and then gone to a small settlement called Line Lake. At Line Lake they had paused at a convenience store and bought some provisions and made a phone call. Then they had asked directions to and then motored on to an abandoned dude-ranch complex called Willow Ranch and that was where their journey ended, he presumed, there was only one road in and out. Cole hadn’t gone to Willow Ranch himself, but that was where the trail led. As far as he was concerned they were still there.

The problem was, he further explained, that Willow Ranch was no longer abandoned. It appeared that, according to the locals he asked, some sort of hippie community had taken over the existing buildings and had been living there for some two years, now, in sought-for isolation, ‘Growing vegetables and weaving baskets and smoking pot, you know the sort of thing,’ Cole had detailed in his matter-of-fact basso profundo. There were about forty people currently in residence, as far as anyone knew — Willow Ranch had a floating population, people were always arriving and people were always leaving. The place was the benign fiefdom of a charismatic Vietnam veteran called Tayborn Gaines. Gaines reputedly had served three years in Vietnam — and on his release from the army had joined the anti-war movement. He had been a prominent speaker at rallies and marches and had acquired some sort of minor celebrity reputation as he was an articulate and forceful debater. But, now he was installed with his community in Willow Ranch, Tay Gaines had gone off the media radar and rarely left the premises. There were a lot of runaways drawn there, a lot of girls, Cole said, the implication being that Blythe Farr was probably another of them.

There were more muted warnings from Cole, even though I had now received the message loud and clear. The Willow Ranchers kept themselves to themselves and they didn’t welcome visitors. They sold their farm produce and would volunteer for community projects in Bishop and Line Lake. The locals seemed to accept them and respected their need for privacy.

‘Just be cautious, Mrs Farr,’ Cole had said. ‘Up there you’ll be in the middle of a very remote, hot nowhere. The local sheriff is miles away in Bishop. I talked to the cops. None of them had ever been out to Willow Ranch. Never been any trouble, they told me. But it’s clear that the place, and what exactly goes on there, is something of a mystery.’

With that in mind, I had formulated a plan, of sorts, that I hoped would afford me entry to the place. Before I’d left LA I had ordered some business cards to be printed up. ‘Amory Clay. Staff photographer. Global-Photo-Watch.’ I was making the assumption that most people were flattered when professional photographers offered to take their photographs, for a fee, moreover — even, perhaps, publicity-shy people like Tayborn Gaines.

The next day I loaded up my two cameras with film, filled a gallon plastic container with iced water, bought a ham and coleslaw sandwich at a diner and drove out the few miles to Line Lake.

The lake itself didn’t really exist any more, apart from some shallow briny pools. Like most of the water in the valley it had had its inflow diverted to feed the Los Angeles aqueduct and was now a dry alkaline flat, cracking up in the relentless sun like a pottery glaze in a furnace. The hamlet managed to survive on passing hikers and there was still some freelance mining going on in the deep incised arroyos in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada — miners needed food and fuel and a place to drink. Line Lake boasted a bar, a gas station and a general store on the one street of brick, wood and plasterboard shacks. It was the twentieth-century version of a one-horse town.

I pulled into the gas station, had the attendant fill up the Dodge’s tank and asked the way to Willow Ranch.

‘You don’t want to go to Willow Ranch, ma’am,’ the attendant said, a raw-boned, deeply tanned man who could have been thirty or sixty. ‘You got nothing but pothead hippie freaks out there.’

‘I’m a photographer,’ I said and gave him my card — record of my passing. He read it carefully. ‘Oh. You should be OK, then.’ It always worked.

The dirt road out of Line Lake ran up the middle of a wide wash where the heat seemed even more intense. I saw a broken sign that said ‘Willow Ranc—’ and persevered. I was stopped by a pine log across the track and beside it sat a wheelless VW Combi with a tarpaulin awning rigged off its side to give shade to a ramshackle stall selling home-grown produce — pots of honey, squash, corn cobs, long thin avocados and an assortment of various-sized straw baskets. A young man, shirtless, stepped out, hands in his pockets, with the unfocussed, blinking gaze of someone just roused from sleep or massively intoxicated.

‘Hey. Nothing down that road for you, ma’am. Ah. . Like private property, you know?’

‘I’ve an appointment with Tayborn Gaines. I’m a photographer.’ I showed him one of my cameras.

‘Oh. OK. Sure.’ He dragged the log away and I drove on to Willow Ranch only to pause, a hundred yards down the track, at a kind of crude gateway. On a rickety arch made of hewn timber and bits of planking there was a message, written in black paint, below the now familiar stylised eye: ‘THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE’.

I drove on under it, slightly more apprehensive. And after a few turns in the dirt road, Willow Ranch was revealed to me. I paused to take a quick photograph.

Willow Ranch, Inyo County, California, 1968.

The abandoned dude ranch was bigger than I expected, with a strange assortment of ramshackle wooden buildings spread over a two- or three-acre site, most of them semi-derelict, some roofless, with, at the centre, a three-storey western ‘saloon’ and a corral overgrown with mesquite bushes. Parked here and there in the shade of scrub oak or stunted cottonwood trees was an assortment of vehicles, sun-bleached cars and trucks and one ancient school bus. There must have been a water source as I saw a generator pump by a well head with black hoses winding out to those various buildings in better repair and to irrigate small vegetable allotments scratched out between the buildings. Here and there were other signs of semi-permanent habitation: a rubbish dump, washing hanging on lines — and graffiti, lots of graffiti. I slowed to take the slogans in — Ban the Bomb signs, flowers, and amongst them, carefully painted and stencilled messages: ‘BRAINWASHERS ARSONISTS SADISTS KILLERS — ENLIST TODAY IN THE SERVICE OF YOUR CHOICE’; ‘GIRLS SAY YES TO BOYS WHO SAY NO’; ‘RICH MAN’S WAR’; ‘WAR IS NOT HEALTHY FOR CHILDREN’; ‘MAKE ART NOT WAR’; ‘WAR IS GOOD BUSINESS INVEST YOUR SON’; ‘GIVE PEACE A CHANCE’.

Young men and women looked on in vague curiosity from doorways, canvas awnings and porches as I bumped along the track in front of the saloon and halted the car in the shade cast by its facade and stepped out. There were advantages to being a woman in your sixties with grey hair — sometimes — you posed no obvious threat, but I noted that my hands were shaking and my throat was constricted. I smiled breezily at a couple of guys wandering towards me. They were smiling. The natives were friendly.

‘Hello,’ I said as calmly as I could manage. ‘I’ve an appointment with a Mr Tayborn Gaines.’

‘Tay!’ one of the guys shouted towards a purple and white bungalow with an ex-army jeep parked outside, and more graffiti above the front door: the big stylised eye and the message ‘CLARITY OF VISION = THOUGHT = PURPOSE’. Then he sniggered as he added, ‘Old lady here to see you, man!’

After about a minute a tall, fit, good-looking man in his thirties emerged from the purple bungalow. He was bare-chested and wearing sawn-off jeans and had a red towel draped round his shoulders. His long, shoulder-length hair was damp, as if he’d just taken a shower, he was wearing sunglasses and had a droopy Mexican-style moustache.

‘Hi there, ma’am, I’m Tay Gaines, what can I do for you?’ he asked me in a friendly open manner, unfolding his towel and drying his hair.

‘Let me give you my card,’ I said. I had put my camera bag on the ground and as I started to rummage in it I covertly snapped a photo, quickly, hoping I’d managed to catch him in the frame. Evidence that might be useful. I stood and handed him a card.

‘Global-Photo-Watch. I don’t understand.’

‘We have an appointment,’ I said. ‘Don’t we?’

I don’t know quite what I’d been expecting — some kind of low-life down-and-out, I suppose — but Tayborn Gaines was a handsome well-built man and clearly proud of his lean, muscled body. And something of a full-on narcissist, I suspected.

‘No, I don’t recall any “appointment”,’ he said politely, looking around at the small crowd that had gathered. ‘I think you must have made some kind of mistake.’

‘My editor told me to come here,’ I said. ‘He told me everything was arranged.’

‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’ve had absolutely no contact with’ — he glanced at my card — ‘any Global-Photo-Watch.’ He smiled. ‘I stopped talking to the press a long time ago.’ He handed his towel to another girl — a pale-faced black girl with a huge Afro hairstyle — as she wandered out of the bungalow, curious to see what was going on. He put his hands on his hips and stared at me, head on one side.

‘Crossed wires, I guess,’ he said.

‘We’re doing this piece on alternative Californian communities,’ I said. ‘You know, the Esalen Institute, Hog Farm, Drop City, the White Lodge Commune in Marin County.’ I smiled apologetically. ‘I’m just a photographer, I go where they send me. I was told everything was arranged.’

Gaines smiled apologetically too, and then glanced again at my card.

‘I was also told a permission fee of two hundred dollars had been agreed. Sorry,’ I said and handed over an envelope containing $200. It was an old trick: cash usually overcomes the camera-shy. Gaines took out the money and riffled through the notes, $20 bills — I could see he was more interested now. I took the opportunity to turn and look around me. A dozen or so people had gathered, curious. All young, unkempt, grubby-looking. No sign of Blythe or anyone that looked like Jeff Bellamont.

‘I’m afraid it’s not convenient today,’ Gaines said, smiling broadly. His smile revealed poor teeth with visible gaps and one incisor was black. The handsome, fit man revealed the malnourished youth when he smiled. ‘Where are you staying? Close by?’

‘The San Carlos Motel in Glenbrook.’ I would have preferred not to tell him but there was no alternative.

‘Well, if it’s OK with you, I’d suggest you go back to your motel and we’ll call you when we’re good and ready.’

‘Yes, of course. I apologise if there’s been a mix-up but, as I said, I’m just the photographer.’

‘Yes, sure, I know what it’s like. Carry out those orders,’ he said. ‘And, by the way, would you mind telling me the name of your editor? You understand — I have to be a little careful.’

‘Mr Cleveland Finzi.’

‘I have to talk to my friends here — see if it’s something we’re prepared to consider — but I promise I’ll give you a call in the next twenty-four hours.’

I climbed back into my car and drove away from Willow Ranch, my hands sweaty on the steering wheel. I felt a tremble of high tension in my body but also a curious sense that — however strange the set-up at Willow Ranch was — it didn’t seem sinister. Perhaps, it struck me, Blythe was indeed safe and well, just as she had said.

Tayborn Gaines. Willow Ranch, Line Lake, California, 1968.

One day went by, then two. I spent a lot of time in my room waiting and hoping for Gaines to phone, not wanting to miss him. I went for a stroll on the morning of the third day, a Wednesday, and when I returned the receptionist told me that a Mr Gaines had called and it would be convenient for me to call on him at 4 p.m.

I prepared another envelope with $200 — just in case more financial incentive might help — but I drove back out to Willow Ranch with low expectations. Maybe Bellamont and Blythe had moved on and Gaines was just using this for what he thought would be an opportunity for more publicity. But there was no log across the track and no one in the VW Combi, nor any parched vegetables set out on the stall. I drove warily under the ‘NONE SO BLIND’ archway and parked outside the saloon again where a young guy with mutton-chop whiskers was waiting and led me into the purple bungalow.

He left me alone in what passed for the sitting room. The walls had once been white but were now smirched and foxed like old parchment with that greasy handled sheen you find on much-thumbed banknotes. There were four stained and sagging mattresses pushed back against the wall and the worn emerald-green carpet made quiet sucking noises as I shifted about nervously. There was that incipient smell again of neglect: dampness, smoke, body odour. I was reminded of Blythe’s room in Notting Hill.

Then Gaines pushed open the door and came in. He was wearing an olive drab field jacket with a grey T-shirt on beneath it and faded denim jeans. Over the left breast pocket ‘US ARMY’ was written, but over the right — where his name, ‘GAINES’, should have been — was a paler patch, as if it had been ripped off. As he shook my hand I noted the insignia on his shoulder: an embroidered red square containing a blue circle with AA curved into the diameter.

‘Eighty-Second Airborne,’ I said. ‘All American.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Third Brigade.’

‘I was with some of you boys just a few weeks ago. That’s how I know.’

‘I’ve got nothing against the division,’ he said, evenly. ‘They just shouldn’t be in this corrupt war.’

‘So I noticed,’ I said.

‘I hate this game, war,’ he said. ‘Decided I didn’t want to play it no more. So I moved to Willow Ranch. All like-minded folks seeking clarity are welcome.’

‘Would you let me take some photographs?’

‘I’m afraid not. We had a vote and you lost.’

‘Oh. Right.’

‘But before you go, I’d like you to meet someone.’ He turned and called out. ‘Honey? You there?’

We waited a moment and then Blythe walked into the room.

I felt a bolus of vomit rise in my throat. She looked very thin, her hair was longer than I’d ever seen it, almost down to her waist, lank and heavy. Her eyes were tired and she had a freckling of pink spots at the corners of her mouth. She was wearing a long white T-shirt, almost down to her knees, with the number ‘3’ on it. She had bare feet, filthy bare feet.

‘This is my wife. Mrs Tayborn Gaines.’

‘Hello, Ma,’ Blythe said, calmly. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘Hello, darling. Are you all right?’

‘Never been better. I told you.’

‘See, “Lady” Farr,’ Gaines interrupted, sternly, all his polite bonhomie gone, ‘your daughter is happily married to an upstanding American man. I resent your subterfuge, your duplicity. You are free to see Blythe any time you want. Assuming she wants to see you.’

I was hearing a kind of fizzing in my head, a constant effervescence as if my blood had turned to soda. I was, I realised, at a total loss.

‘Do you think I’m so stupid, Lady Farr?’ Gaines went on, almost pleadingly. ‘Do you think I’m so dumb that I can’t make a phone call to Global-Photo-Watch and ask if they’ve got some English lady photographer out on a shoot in California?’

I ignored him.

‘Come home with me, darling,’ I said to Blythe, gently. ‘Everything will be fine. We miss you. Annie sends her love. We want you back home with us.’

‘I’m happy here, Ma. Happy with Tay. I love him, he loves me,’ she said with a small monotone laugh. I suddenly thought she might be drugged in some way. Gaines put an arm around her and squeezed her shoulder.

‘You made what our Mexican friends call a cálculo equivocado, Lady Farr-Clay. A real mal paso. You thought there was something wrong going on but you can see there isn’t. We’re a close community here. Self-sufficient as much as we can be. We want nothing to do with the world out there—’ He gestured, widely, grandly, as if taking in the whole of California, the entire United States. ‘This is our world. Willow Ranch. Blythe was looking for it and she found it.’

Blythe opened her arms and I stepped into her embrace. She smelt sweaty, unwashed and her body seemed too thin as I hugged her, all ridged bones and starved muscles. I had the presence of mind to slip the small many-folded square of paper with my room number and the name and address of the motel into her hand. Gaines saw nothing and Blythe didn’t react as her fingers closed around it. I felt a thrill of complicity — all was not lost. I stepped back.

‘May I come back and see you again?’ I asked, failing to keep the tremor from my voice.

‘Of course,’ Gaines said. ‘You’re more than welcome.’

I turned and left the room.

3. MRS TAYBORN GAINES

I felt cold, rather than upset. Inert, rather than panicky or angry, as if I hadn’t fully taken in all the complex implications of what I’d seen — or didn’t want to. Back at the San Carlos I called Cole Hardaway and told him I had found Blythe — but I couldn’t see how I could extract her from Willow Ranch and her new life.

‘She’s married to this Tayborn Gaines,’ I said. ‘Or so they both claim.’

‘I can find out in an hour or two.’

‘It would be good to know for sure,’ I said, feeling a little queasy. Then something else struck me. ‘Gaines says he was in the Eighty-Second Airborne Division, Third Brigade. But I’m not sure I believe him.’

‘I can check on that, as well.’

‘Thank you, Cole.’ I thought further. ‘Is there any way we can get the police involved?’

‘We’d need a reason.’

‘What if I say I think she’s being held against her will?’

‘Sounds to me like that won’t fly. Especially if she’s married the man.’

‘It just seems wrong, somehow. The whole place seems sort of fake.’

‘Nobody’s complained, that’s our problem. Everyone who’s there wants to be there, I guess.’

‘So what can we do?’ I asked, more plaintively than I meant.

‘Why don’t I come on up there tomorrow, talk to the sheriff in Bishop and see what I can set up. Any sign of Bellamont?’

‘No. I didn’t see him. I think he must have gone.’ I had studied Bellamont’s mugshot and I would have recognised his slumped resentful handsome face — long fair hair, with a General Custer blond moustache — had I seen it.

‘Well that may help — could be our pretext,’ Cole thought out loud. ‘We could ask the police to locate Bellamont. Say he’s stolen your daughter’s money, or something. I’ll see you tomorrow, Mrs Farr. Don’t worry, don’t do anything, we’ll figure this out.’

I hung up and closed my eyes. Trying not to think of Blythe in her grubby ‘3’ T-shirt and her filthy feet. What had happened to my little Blythe? What had led her down this road? I began to blame myself. Why had I gone off to Vietnam? Why had I thought only of myself? Stop. Think. Your children are free individuals — they can decide to become anyone they want and you can’t prevent it. And she was twenty-one. It was no comfort.

I went into Bishop that night and found a diner where I ate half a plate of meatballs and spaghetti. I pushed it away; I wasn’t hungry. I bought a pint of Irish whiskey in a liquor store and took it back to my room where I watched television in an aimless unfocussed way, changing channels back and forth whenever the advertisements appeared, sipping my whiskey from a tooth-glass. There was nothing I could realistically do, I just had to wait for Cole Hardaway to call back.

I was a bit drunk and unsteady by the time I took to my bed but I wanted unconsciousness and could hardly rebuke myself after what I’d witnessed today, so I reasoned. I lay in bed letting the room tilt and fall, listening to the hum of the air conditioner, and thinking how perplexing and strange life was, how complicated it was in the way it suddenly threw you these ‘curveballs’, as the GIs used to say in Vietnam. Sometimes it seemed to me as if my life had been made up entirely of curveballs and unwelcome surprises. No daughter expects her father to try and kill her by driving the family car into a fucking lake. No young photographer expects to be prosecuted for obscenity — or beaten half to death by fucking fascists. . I ranted on profanely in my drink-fuelled, self-pitying outrage, railing futilely against all the injustices; the mistakes I’d made and mistakes that had been thrust upon me. .

I had fallen into a blank, dreamless sleep, thanks to my whiskey overdose, but I woke abruptly, fully alert, when I heard the rattle of the doorknob being turned. Thank God I had locked it and fitted the security chain. My head started to ache as I slipped out of bed — I was in my pyjamas — and, going to the window, pulled back the curtains an inch and looked out over the parking lot at the rear of the motel. The few arc lights dotted here and there cast a cold white gleam over the rows of cars and, as I peered out, I thought I saw a figure flit through the dark shadows. I pulled on my shoes and my cotton dressing gown, unlocked the door and stepped out into the warm, dry night. I walked away from my room heading towards where I had seen the figure, my eyes slowly growing accustomed to the gloom of the night.

‘Blythe?’ I called out, perhaps foolishly, but I was hoping she had come to me, had escaped from Tayborn Gaines, somehow. I ranged around the car park for another minute calling Blythe’s name quietly but the place was empty, just the sleeping metallic herd of motor vehicles. I walked back to my room — the door had definitely been tried but it was probably just some tipsy late-homecoming motel guest mistaking the number.

I wandered back along the pathway to my room, feeling tired all of a sudden, pushed the door open and stepped in. It was completely dark and, as I felt for the light switch, I knew there was someone else in the room with me. I could hear breathing.

I clicked the light on.

Blythe was sitting on the end of the bed.

‘Hello, Ma,’ she said. ‘I thought we should have a little talk.’

She was wearing a denim jacket and black jeans and tennis shoes on her feet. Her hair was pulled back in a loose bun, strands hanging down in front of her ears.

I gave her a kiss and sat down in a chair opposite her, my hands shaking, a feeling of breathlessness almost overwhelming me.

‘You haven’t a cigarette, by any chance, have you?’ she asked.

‘Of course.’ I fetched my packet, gladly, taking time to rummage in my handbag, finding my lighter, telling myself to calm down, and offered her one. We both lit up and I sat down again.

‘Tayborn prefers me not to smoke,’ she said.

‘Right. Well, he won’t like me much, then.’ I stood up again and went for my bottle of Irish whiskey. ‘What’s his position on drinking?’ I said as I poured an inch into my glass.

‘He’ll have a drink from time to time. Just beer, though.’

‘Thank God for that. Is he religious?’

‘In his own special way. He believes in Jesus, but not really in God.’

‘Fair enough.’ I looked at her and felt my eyes fill with tears.

‘You’re not taking drugs, or anything?’ I asked carefully.

‘What? No, of course not.’

‘Are you sure? You don’t look very well, darling. You seem different, somehow.’

‘Because I am different. I’ve changed.’

‘You’re not actually married to him, are you?’

‘Yes. I love him, Ma — he’s a wonderful, strong, fascinating man. Wait until you get to know him properly. He was a soldier, just like Papa.’

I suddenly remembered something my father used to say: ‘We all see the world differently from each other; we all have unique vision.’ I looked at my daughter and felt a bizarre pang that she’d never known Beverley Clay, her grandfather. I had a feeling they would have got on inordinately well.

And then I began to understand what had happened — or understand some of it — as she talked with a strange quiet passion about Tayborn’s life as a soldier and the horrible things that he had seen, done and experienced in his Vietnam tour of duty and how it had altered him forever, made him see clearly how the world and its workings were; how it had made him hate the war and the forces that waged the war, the politicians, the industrialists, the generals. I thought about my father and Sholto and wanted to say, no, darling, your Tayborn Gaines is nothing like those men. But now I was beginning to feel slightly queasy and so forced myself to sit quietly and appear to listen to Blythe who was now going on about Tayborn’s ambitions to make a new life, a new sheltered environment where people ‘could see clearly’ and so he had moved to Willow Ranch and created the Willow Ranch Community.

‘But how did you ever wind up there, darling? I thought you wanted to be a singer, write songs, play your music. What happened to your boyfriend, Jeff Bellamont? You were living together in London, for heaven’s sake — where did he go?’

‘Jeff was a friend of Tayborn’s. Was a friend. We went to Willow Ranch together and then, after about a week, Jeff just went away. Disappeared. Didn’t leave a note. He took the car and whatever money I had in my bag and vanished.’

‘Enter Tayborn.’

‘He saved me, Ma.’

‘I’m sure he did.’

‘Don’t be cynical.’

‘Sorry.’ I drew on my cigarette. ‘Why on earth did you have to marry him, though?’

‘Tayborn believes in marriage. As an institution.’

Feeling weak, suddenly, I poured out the rest of the bottle, just a few drops.

‘How long have you been married?’

‘About five weeks.’

‘Where is he? Does he know you’re here? Seeing me?’

‘Of course. He brought me here. He’s parked out front at the reception.’

‘Come home, Blythe, come home with me.’

‘No, Ma. Willow Ranch is my home. Tayborn’s my husband. I’ve never been happier.’

We talked a little more and I didn’t ask her to come home with me again. I had made the plea and it had been rejected. I walked back with her to the reception area, my arm around her thin shoulders. Across the street I could see Gaines’s jeep parked in the shadow of the motel sign. We kissed goodbye and she promised she would write to me, let me know what she was doing, all the time reassuring me how happy and at peace she was, seriously, Ma, really and truly.

I let her hand go and watched her cross the moon-shadowed tarmac towards her new husband. She didn’t look back as she gave me a quick wave.

Cole Hardaway, his face impassive, sat across from me in one of the curved red leatherette booths in the bar just down the street from his office. We were both drinking what Cole called ‘highballs’ but that I knew as Scotch and soda. I had an almost uncontrollable urge to reach forward and sweep his stupid fringe aside, off his forehead, but that was probably just a symptom of my frustration. I had come to like Cole Hardaway.

‘You’re sure,’ I said, not hiding my disappointment — it had been my last desperate hope. ‘A real marriage.’

‘I’m afraid so. Married by the clerk of Inyo County about a month and a half ago.’

I felt that emptiness well up inside me, instinctively — then it subsided as I sipped my drink. Why was Blythe being so crazily stupid? Why Tayborn Gaines of all people? But I thought I knew the answer to that. And then I remembered how at her age I had slipped into the bed of my homosexual uncle and asked him to make love to me. We are not logical beings, especially when it comes to affairs of the heart.

‘However,’ Cole said, his expression unchanging, ‘Tayborn Gaines never served in the US military. There are no records. Certainly not in the Eighty-Second Airborne.’

Now, I felt a little bloom of elation. Now I had my way in, my fifth column to destabilise this union. So Gaines was no soldier, as I had suspected. What fantasies of warfare and warriorhood had he spun for Blythe?

Back at the Heyworth Travel Inn, in my room, the air conditioner at full blast, I took my time over the letter I wrote.

Darling Blythe,

It was both lovely and, I have to be honest, a bit disturbing to see you in your new life. Believe me, I understand better than anyone your desire to be happy and I understand that you are convinced that you have found that happiness with Tayborn. I love you and all I wish for you is to be happy — it’s as simple as that. But I also wish you hadn’t done everything so swiftly. It takes time to truly come to know a person and, I wonder, what do you truly know about this man you are so deeply in love with?

I ask because I’ve discovered that one thing he claims to be isn’t in fact true. Tayborn Gaines was never a soldier. He was never in the 82nd Airborne. He never served in Vietnam. Now, I ask you — if a man can lie so convincingly about something he claims is of fundamental importance and significance to his being what then does that imply for—

I stopped. I felt that sickness in me again. It was a conscious realisation that I was wasting my time and the absolute knowledge of this fact made me want to vomit. I stood up and walked around the room taking deep breaths. Then I sat down at the table again. It was Blythe’s life and she had every right to live it as she wished. Slowly I tore up my letter to her about the lies of Tayborn Gaines. As I arranged the shreds into a small neat square pile I found I was weeping inconsolably. I knew I had finally lost my daughter.