Sweet Caress

CODA IN BARRANDALE: 1978

My mother died in 1969. Greville died in 1972. The Clay family, diminishing.

Is it true that your life is just a long preparation for your death — the one thing we can all be sure of, all the billions of us? The deaths you witness, hear about, that are close to you — that you may cause or bring about, however inadvertently (I think of my dog, Flim) — are preparing you, covertly, incrementally, for your own eventual departure. I think of all the deaths in my life — the ones that left me riven, the strangers’ deaths I happened to see — and understand how they have steered me to this position, this intellectual conviction, that I hold now. You don’t realise this when you’re young but as you age this steady accumulation of knowledge teaches you, becomes relentlessly pertinent to your own case.

But then I wonder — turn this notion on its head. Are all the deaths you encounter and experience in fact an enhancement of the life you lead? Your personal history of death teaches you what’s important, what makes it actually worth being alive — sentient and breathing. It’s a key lesson because when you know that, you also know its opposite — you know when life’s no longer worth living — and then you can die, happy.

*

I met Blythe at a coffee shop down in Westchester, on West 82nd Street off Sepulveda Boulevard, near Los Angeles International Airport. I was on my way home so it was convenient even though I could see the neighbourhood was run-down and shabby. Our order was taking its time to arrive and Blythe left our booth and went to speak to the waitress. To me she sounded like an American, now, her English accent all but gone. She was wearing a black and white striped shirt and jeans; her hair was cut carelessly short — there was a long untrimmed strand at the back — and she was wearing no make-up. She returned to our booth and sat down, managing a genuine smile, it seemed to me.

‘Something’s gone wrong in the kitchen. It’ll be two minutes.’

‘Doesn’t matter, darling, seeing you again before I go is the main thing.’ I reached for her hand and squeezed it and then let it go and turned the gesture into an airy wave, indicating the streetscape out of the window.

‘So this is where you work.’

‘Just round the corner. You have to go to the needy — they won’t come to you.’

‘Of course, makes sense.’

‘There’s nothing to see — just a room with a coffee machine and a few small offices.’

‘Well, at least I have a picture of the neighbourhood.’

This was the third visit I had made to the US to see Blythe in the eight years since she crossed the road in front of the San Carlos Motel and went to rejoin her husband, Tayborn Gaines, who was waiting patiently for her in his jeep.

I suppose it was some private consolation to me that the marriage didn’t even make its first anniversary. Some months after I’d left, the Willow Ranch Community was raided by the police and significant quantities of LSD and marijuana were discovered. Gaines was prosecuted but acquitted for lack of convincing evidence. He and Blythe moved to Los Angeles and then some weeks later he left. I don’t know what happened — I had all this information from Annie who was more closely in touch with Blythe than I was — but I suspect that Blythe’s Farr legacy had finally run out. Time for Tayborn to move on.

Curiously, Blythe kept Tayborn’s name — she was Blythe Gaines from now on, not Farr. I think I understand. The name was all that remained of the dream-life she thought she had acquired and then lost so suddenly and cruelly. Or, now I come to think about it, maybe it was a harsh aide-memoire — don’t get fooled again, girl. In any event she stayed on in Los Angeles and picked up the career in music she had abandoned; writing songs, playing in bands in and around the Los Angeles area.

On my first visit to see her she was living in a ramshackle house on Coldwater Canyon Drive with half a dozen other people — young men and women, all musicians, I think. She had dyed her hair auburn and parted it in the middle — I thought it didn’t suit her. She smoked as much as I did. In the few days I spent with her we must have consumed a dozen packets of ‘smokes’, as she called them. The significant fact I remember about that trip was that she asked if I would mind if she called me ‘Amory’ rather than ‘Ma’. I said it was fine with me.

She was better, more like the Blythe I knew than the Blythe of the Willow Ranch experiment, but she was more distant, cooler with me — hence my name change, I surmise — consciously treating me as an equal rather than her mother. I knew why: she was feeling a residual shame about the whole Tayborn Gaines period, for being so hopelessly duped by him. I tried to raise the subject in the hope of expiating it. I said she should forget all about that period of time, not feel ashamed. She was still very young; I started to list all the mistakes I had made at her age but she cut me off abruptly and said she never wanted to talk about it again. So I let it go. People are opaque, even those closest to you. What do we know about the interior lives of our children? Only as much as they choose to reveal.

Blythe came over to England a couple of years later to appear on a music show on television. She was one of three backing singers in a band called Franklin Canyon Park — part of that Californian soft-rock movement of the early 1970s — that had a couple of hit records in Europe. I remember watching the show when the band appeared on TV and feeling an absurd overweening pride when I caught two or three glimpses of Blythe in the background as the camera panned to and fro between the leading members of the group.

She came up to Barrandale to stay for a few days and collect her ‘stuff’, clearing out her bedroom, removing almost every trace of Blythe Farr from 6 Druim Rigg Road. Again I understood what was going on but in fact we were fine together during the time she was there. We went for long walks; she became very fond of Flam, the dog, and even opened up a little more to me, telling me of a man she had met (there was never any sign of Gaines — it was as if he’d disappeared off the face of the earth), a sound engineer, called Griffin, in a studio where she recorded. ‘Don’t worry, Amory, I won’t be marrying him. I’m never going to marry anyone ever again.’

She never really achieved anything significant with her music. Annie told me that a song she’d co-written for Franklin Canyon Park had reached number thirty-six in the Billboard charts but that was the apex. Her life with Griffin the sound engineer ended also when his drug problem became too much to bear, Annie informed me.

On my second trip over I discovered that she was working as a volunteer at the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. She was living alone in a small apartment in Anaheim but she did seem more contented. She played in bars at weekends, singing her own songs and rock standards to make something of a living. Luckily she had a small but steady royalty stream from the songs she’d written with Franklin Canyon Park (now long disbanded) but she was very happy to accept some money from me when I offered it. ‘It’s a loan, Amory. I’ll pay you back.’ I think Annie sent her money also and I arranged with Moss Fallmaster to divert any cash that came from the slowly diminishing sales of the ‘Never Too Young To. .’ T-shirts into her bank account. She also insisted that these occasional payments were a loan — I would be repaid in full, one day. She seemed to survive fairly well, in fact: it was a modest life that she led but a busy one. She’d put on a bit of weight. There was another man in her life, Annie said, but Blythe told me nothing.

I knew in my heart she wouldn’t come back to Britain. She changed job and stayed on in Los Angeles, working with former inmates from the Californian Institute of Women (a prison) at a drug-rehabilitation centre called Clean ’n’ Sober in the Westchester district of Los Angeles. To be honest, I don’t think we’ll ever recover that old, unfettered, instinctive relationship we once had. Annie has seen more of her than I have and she says Blythe will come round, eventually, Blythe will see the reality of the situation, just ‘give it time’. Well, time is exactly what I’m short of.

Our coffee finally arrived and we chatted about this and that — she told me more about her work with drug addicts and alcoholics and the appalling problems the poor and downtrodden of Los Angeles experienced. I told her more about Annie — about her teaching at CIDBS (the Conservatory for International Development and Business Studies), a private university near Brussels; that she had a boyfriend — whom I hadn’t met — a Swedish colleague called Nils. Blythe didn’t ask about me, or Dido, or the family — except to request a photo of Flam, whenever I had a moment. This was a good sign, I thought. I held on to it.

The coffee was strong — it had been stewing on a burner for ages — and I decided I needed it sweeter. As I reached for the sugar-shaker and picked it up my hand wouldn’t grip and the shaker clattered on to the Formica tabletop. I righted it with my other hand but Blythe had noticed my expression.

‘Maybe I won’t have any sugar, in fact,’ I said, resignedly. ‘Curb that sweet tooth.’

‘Are you all right, Amory? Is there anything wrong?’

‘Just a bit clumsy in my old age,’ I said, smiling brightly.

She looked at me searchingly, shrewdly.

‘You’d tell me if anything was wrong, wouldn’t you? I wouldn’t forgive you if you kept something from me.’

‘Of course, darling. But there’s nothing wrong. I’m just happy to be sitting here with you.’

Eventually I said I’d better go and catch my plane and she walked with me out to where my car was parked.

‘It was lovely to see you,’ Blythe said. ‘I did enjoy our dinner the other night. I’m sorry I’ve been so busy. I wish we could have spent more time together. It seems like you’ve flown all this way just to have a cup of coffee with me.’

‘Oh, I have to come to California, anyway,’ I lied. ‘I have this sort of business partner out here. My T-shirt is still selling, amazingly.’ That was true: I had dropped in on Moss Fallmaster and he had told me there was almost $400 owed to me. I asked him to send it on to Blythe’s account. ‘It’s always a good excuse to see you, darling,’ I said. ‘We miss you, Blythe. But we understand.’

She frowned hard at this — I suspect to keep tears at bay.

‘I feel I’m doing some good,’ she said. ‘It helps me — helping other people.’

We walked on towards the car — a cream Chevrolet Caprice. A plump young man in baggy green shorts, a Mothers of Invention T-shirt and a greasy baseball cap was standing there, smoking, as if he were waiting for us to appear. He had a droopy moustache.

‘This your fucking car?’ he asked me, aggressively.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m renting it.’

‘You’re in my spot, lady.’

‘It’s a parking meter,’ I said. ‘You can’t reserve a parking meter.’

‘I always park here, lady,’ he said turning his small, pink eyes on me. ‘It’s reserved for me.’

‘It’s OK, sir,’ Blythe said, very politely, stepping in, seeing I was about to explode. ‘She’s just going.’

‘My sincere apologies,’ I said as sarcastically as I could manage and he wandered off muttering to himself.

Blythe watched him go, her hands on her hips.

‘Overweight, obnoxious, unwashed, insane,’ she said, drily.

I laughed — feeling such a wave of relief surge through me that it made me shiver. I kissed her goodbye and she gave me a fleeting hug, a pressure of her hands on my shoulders. Somehow I knew everything would be fine.

*

I still feel a responsibility for her, however illogical that may seem. I keep wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t left the girls and gone off to Vietnam. Would it have made a difference? It didn’t seem to affect Annie. . Who can say? Life’s unsatisfactory, half-baked, half-assed solutions are sometimes the best. Annie with her Swedish boyfriend in Brussels; Blythe helping junkies in Los Angeles. I really don’t care what my children do with their lives — I have no agenda for them at all — I only want them to be as happy as they can possibly be, given life’s stringent, sudden demands, on whatever road they choose to walk down. The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, as the poet says: not to be born is the best for man — only that way can you avoid all of life’s complications.

I’m thinking about birth, I should say, because I’m in the process of arranging my death.

Last week I called Annie in Brussels to have a chat about something and she said, ‘Ma, have you been drinking?’ No more than usual, I said, I’ve had two glasses of wine. ‘Well, your voice is slurred,’ she said. ‘Take it easy.’ I was shocked because I had no idea my voice was slurred though I knew exactly what it implied — progressive bulbar palsy. My nasty little smiler with the knife that lurks inside me had inserted the blade again. So I decided the time had come. My birthday was approaching, my seventieth, threescore years and ten is good enough for me.

This is what I looked up in the Bible I borrowed from the Auld Kirk — I found what I was searching for quickly enough. Psalms 90.10:

The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away.

I know what’s wrong with me and I know what I will become — a working, vital, thinking brain in a dead and uncontrollable body in which nothing works. No thank you. The days of my life will be threescore years and ten, I have decided. I will cut it off and I will fly away, myself.

Everything is in order. Here I am in my sitting room on 6 March 1978 waiting for midnight. The fire is banked up with peat bricks and I am ideally cosy. On the table beside my armchair is a full bottle of Glen Fleshan malt whisky, a glass and a jam jar full of Jock Edie’s blessed ‘sweeties’. Jock’s capsules are a benzodiazepine — ‘Librium’ in this instance. Take them with alcohol, he advised: alcohol compounds the effects, leading to coma and then death. It’s a tranquil feeling, he had added, consolingly. You won’t be aware of anything. Flam lies by the fire watching me carefully. I think he knows something untoward is going on; he senses my troubled mind and it discomfits him. We’re both animals, after all, so it’s not surprising that he senses something’s amiss. He knows me very well.

On the coffee table in front of me is my will, a letter for Annie and Blythe and my life story in a cardboard file and I will add the ‘Barrandale Journal’ to it before I fly away. Pinned to the front door is an envelope for Hugo with ‘Hugo. Read this before entry!’ written on it. I’ve arranged for him to come round tomorrow, ostensibly to travel to Oban to look for pots and pans and other kitchen utensils for his new house. In the envelope is a letter telling him what I’ve done — what I’m about to do. I don’t want to shock anyone, which is one reason why I’m sitting in an armchair. I suspect I shall look as if I’ve dozed off when he pushes open the front door and comes through the hall into the parlour. He’ll have been forewarned.

I don’t like the word ‘suicide’ or ‘assisted dying’ or ‘mercy killing’ or any of the few other synonyms available. I prefer the expression ‘by my own hand’. I will take my life by my own hand at a moment chosen by me — not by my disease. ‘By my own hand’ speaks to me of autonomy, of free will.

I feel very calm. I truly believe this option should be available to anyone who wants it. In fact I feel quite passionate about this issue now I’m about to put it into practice — it should be available to anyone who wants it as a matter of civil liberty, of human rights and human dignity. You go to your doctor, explain the situation, you sign all manner of affidavits testifying to your determination, clarity of mind, familiarity with consequences and so forth. You have the documentation witnessed, if required. Then you’re given your bottle of pills, or, even better, one pill, and you go home, set your affairs in order, make your necessary farewells, if you want to, and gladly leave your life behind. End of story. I’m not going to give the lethal pill to anyone else. If I buy a kitchen knife no one asks me if I’m going to stab someone with it. With your purchase you are simultaneously handed the responsibility to use your knife as it was designed to be used — so too with my notional pill. Our lives are filled with potential lethal weapons, after all; a pill that will end your life painlessly is just another. If we’re treated as responsible beings we tend to act responsibly.

There was a French writer — Charbonneau told me his name but I can’t remember it now — who defined life as a ‘horizontal fall’. It’s a neat metaphor. I just want to end my horizontal fall now, before the bleak prison of my particular ailment closes in around me. What could be more reasonable than that?

Charbonneau’s name coming to mind makes me think fondly of him — and all the people I’ve loved during my own horizontal fall. My threescore years and ten have been rich and intensely sad, fascinating, droll, absurd and terrifying — sometimes — and difficult and painful and happy. Complicated, in other words.

It’s midnight. I take my first pill and wash it down with a sip of Glen Fleshan. I’ve decided to keep writing in my journal until my last moment of consciousness. Flam looks at me, his tail thumps on the carpet. I’ve walked him so he’ll just have to wait until Hugo arrives in the morning. I’ve ordered Hugo to take Flam and Hugo can walk him, later, when he’s been. And it’ll be a fine day tomorrow, for a March day on Barrandale — a good day for a long walk. Clear skies have been announced, bracing sunlit weather. I should never have listened to the weather forecast. I take another pill.

My eyes flit around my sitting room, taking it in for the last time.

In a fruit bowl on the table in front of me are four oranges and a banana. And I think — without thinking — ah, breakfast tomorrow. The banana is freckling nicely. I could slice it into a bowl of porridge. I could have freshly squeezed orange juice and then a bowl of porridge with sliced banana and then go for a walk with Flam, down to the bay, round to the headland. Call Hugo, invite him for lunch. A bottle of wine. . Except there won’t be a tomorrow, I realise.

I take another pill, another sip of whisky. I won’t feel a thing, Jock Edie said, just drift off to sleep and not wake up.

But, annoyingly, I keep thinking about freshly squeezed orange juice and the day ahead waiting for me. Sun on the wavelets in the bay and that cold bright weather that here on the west coast is about as invigorating as you can experience — cheeks numb, breath condensing, the light and shade razor-edged, the focus precisely sharp. I could take some more light-pictures by the rock pools. .

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. .