Sweet Caress

1. GIRL WITH A CAMERA

THERE WAS A MISTAKE MADE on the day I was born, when I come to think of it. It doesn’t seem important, now, but on 7 March 1908 — such a long time ago, it seems, threescore years and ten almost — it made my mother very cross. However, be that as it may, I was born and my father, sternly instructed by my mother, placed an announcement in The Times. I was their first child, so the world — the readers of the London Times — was duly informed. ‘7 March 1908, to Beverley and Wilfreda Clay, a son, Amory.’

Why did he say ‘son’? To spite his wife, my mother? Or was it some perverse wish that I wasn’t in fact a girl, that he didn’t want to have a daughter? Was that why he tried to kill me later, I wonder. .? By the time I came across the parched yellow cutting hidden in a scrapbook, my father had been dead for decades. Too late to ask him. Another mistake.

Beverley Vernon Clay, my father — but no doubt best known to you and his few readers (most long disappeared) as B. V. Clay. A short-story writer of the early twentieth century — stories mainly of the supernatural sort — failed novelist and all-round man of letters. Born in 1878, died in 1944. This is what the Oxford Companion to English Literature (third edition) has to say about him:

Clay, Beverley Vernon

B. V. Clay (1878–1944). Writer of short stories. Collected in The Thankless Task (1901), Malevolent Lullaby (1905), Guilty Pleasures (1907), The Friday Club (1910) and others. He wrote several tales of the supernatural of which ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’ is best known. This was dramatised by Eric Maude (q.v.) in 1906 and ran for over three years and 1,000 performances in the West End of London (see Edwardian Theatre).

It’s not much, is it? Not many words to summarise such a complicated, difficult life, but then it’s more than most of us will receive in the various annals of posterity that record our brief passage of time on this small planet. Funnily enough, I was always confident nothing would ever be written about me, B. V. Clay’s daughter, but it turned out I was wrong. .

Anyway, I have memories of my father in my very early childhood but I feel I only began to know him when he came back from the war — the Great War, the 1914–18 war — when I was ten and, in a way, when I was already well down the road to becoming the person and the personality that I am today. So it was different having that gap of time that the war imposed, and everyone has since told me he was also a different man himself, when he came back, irrevocably changed by his experiences. I wish I had known him better before that trauma — and who wouldn’t want to travel back in time and encounter their parents before they become their parents? Before ‘mother’ and ‘father’ turned them into figures of domestic myth, forever trapped and fixed in the amber of those appellations and their consequences?

The Clay family.

My father: B. V. Clay.

My mother: Wilfreda Clay (née Reade-Hill) (b.1879).

Me: Amory, firstborn. A girl (b.1908).

Sister: Peggy (b.1914).

Brother: Alexander, always known as Xan (b.1916).

The Clay family.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I was driving back to Barrandale from Oban in the evening — in the haunted gloaming of a Scottish summer — when I saw a wild cat pick its way across the road, not 200 yards from the bridge to the island. I stopped the car at once and switched off the engine, watching and waiting. The cat halted its deliberate progress and turned its head to me, almost haughtily, as if I’d interrupted it. I reached, without thinking, for my camera — my old Leica — and held it up to my eye. Then put it down. There are no photographs more boring than photographs of animals — discuss. I watched the brindled cat — the size of a cocker spaniel — finish its pedantic traverse of the road and slip into the new conifer plantation, promptly becoming invisible. I started the engine and drove on home to the cottage, strangely exhilarated.

I call it ‘the cottage’, however its true postal designation is 6 Druim Rigg Road, Barrandale Island. As to where numbers 1–5 are, I have no idea, because the cottage sits alone on its small bay and Druim Rigg Road ends with it. It’s a solid, two-storey, thick-walled, mid-nineteenth-century, small-roomed house with two chimney stacks and one-storey outbuildings attached on either side. I assumed somebody farmed here a hundred years ago, but all that’s gone, now. It has mossy tiled roofs and walls of concrete cladding that had aged to an unpleasant, bilious grey-green and that I had painted white when I moved in.

It fronted the small, unnamed bay and if you turned left, west, you could see the southern tip of Mull and the wind-worked grey expanse of the vast Atlantic beyond.

I came in the front door and Flam, my dog, my black Labrador, gave his one glottal bass bark of welcome. I put away my shopping and then went through to the parlour, my sitting room, to check on the fire. I had a big stove with glass doors set in the chimney recess in which I burned peat bricks. The fire was low so I threw some bricks on it. I liked the concept of burning peat, rather than coal — as if I were burning ancient landscapes, whole eons, whole geographies were turning into ash as they heated my house, heated my water.

The cottage on Barrandale Island, before renovations and repainting, c.1960.

It was still light so I summoned Flam and we walked down to the bay. I stood on the small crescent beach, as Flam roved around the tide rack and the rock pools, and I watched the day slip into night, noting the wondrous tonal transformations of the sunset on its dimmer switch, how blood-orange can shade imperceptibly into ice-blue on the knife-edge of the horizon, listening to the sea’s interminable call for silence — shh, shh, shh.

*

When I was born — in Edwardian England — ‘Beverley’ was a perfectly acceptable boy’s name (like Evelyn, like Hilary, like Vivian) and I wonder if that was perhaps why my father chose an androgynous name for me: Amory. Names are important, I believe, they shouldn’t be idly opted for — your name becomes your label, your classification — your name is how you refer to yourself. What could be more crucial? I’ve only met one other Amory in my life and he was a man — a boring man, incidentally, but unenlivened by his interesting name.

When my sister was born, my father was already away at the war and my mother consulted with her brother, my uncle Greville, on what to call this new child. They decided between them on something ‘homely and solid’, so family lore has it, and thus the Clays’ second daughter was called ‘Peggy’ — not Margaret, but a straightforward diminutive from the outset. Perhaps it was my mother’s counter to ‘Amory’, the androgynous name she didn’t choose. So Peggy came into the world — Peggy, the homely and solid one. Never has a child been so misnamed. In the event, when my father returned home on leave to greet his six-month-old daughter the name was firmly established and she was known to all of us as ‘Peg’ or ‘Peggoty’ or ‘Peggsy’, and there was nothing he could do. He never really liked the name Peggy, and was never wholly loving to Peggy as a result, I believe, as if she were some sort of foundling we’d taken in. You see what I mean about the importance of names. Did Peggy feel she had the wrong name because her father didn’t like it, or her, particularly? Was it another mistake? Was that why she changed it later?

As for Alexander, ‘Xan’, that was mutually consented to. My mother’s father, a circuit judge, who died before I was born, was called Alexander. It was my father who shortened it instantly to Xan and that stuck. So, Amory, Peggy and Xan, there we were — the Clay children.

My first memory of my father is of him doing a handstand in the garden at Beckburrow, our house near Claverleigh, in East Sussex. It was something he could do effortlessly — a party trick he had learned as a youngster. Give him a patch of lawn and he would stand easily on his hands and take a few steps. However, after he was wounded in the war he did it less and less, no matter how much we implored him. He said it made his head ache and his eyes lose focus. When we were very young, though, he needed no urging. He liked doing handstands, he would say, because it readjusted his senses and his perspectives. He would do a handstand and say, ‘I look at you girls hanging from your feet like bats and I feel sorry for you, oh, yes, in your topsy-turvy world with the earth above and the sky below. Poor things.’ No, no, we would shriek back, no — you’re the one upside down, Papa, not us!

I remember him coming back on leave in uniform after Xan was born. Xan was three or four months old so it must have been towards the end of 1916. Xan was born on 1 July 1916, the opening day of the battle of the Somme. It’s the only time I recall my father in his uniform — Captain B. V. Clay DSO — the only occasion I can bring him to mind as a soldier. I suppose I must have seen him uniformed at other times but I remember that leave in particular, probably because baby Xan had been born, and my father was holding his son in his arms with a strange, fixed expression on his face.

Apparently he had left precise instructions about the naming of his third child: Alexander if he was a boy; Marjorie if a girl. How do I know this? Because sometimes when I was cross with Xan and wanted to tease him I called him ‘Marjorie’, so it must have been common knowledge. All family histories, personal histories, are as sketchy and unreliable as histories of the Phoenicians, it seems to me. We should note everything down, fill in the wide gaps if we can. Which is why I am writing this, my darlings.

During the war, the man we saw most of, and who lived with us at Beckburrow from time to time, was my mother’s younger brother, Greville — my uncle Greville. Greville Reade-Hill had been a photo-reconnaissance observer in the Royal Flying Corps, and was something of a legend owing to the fact that he had stepped unscathed from four crashes until his fifth crash duly broke his right leg in five places and he was invalided out of the service. I remember him in his uniform limping around Beckburrow. And then he transformed himself into Greville Reade-Hill, the society photographer. He hated being called a ‘society photographer’ even though that was exactly and evidently what he did. ‘I’m a photographer,’ he would say, plaintively, ‘impure and not so simple.’ Greville — I never called him uncle, he forbade it — set my life on its course, unknowingly, when he gave me a Kodak Brownie No. 2 as a present for my seventh birthday in 1915. This is the first photograph I ever took.

In the garden at Beckburrow, spring 1915.

Greville Reade-Hill. Let me call him to mind then, just after the war, as his career was beginning to take off, unsteadily but definitely upwards, like a semi-filled hydrogen balloon. He was tall, broad-shouldered and good-looking, real handsomeness marred only by a slightly too large nose. The Reade-Hill nose, not the Clay nose (I have the Reade-Hill nose, as well). A slightly large nose can make you look more interesting, both Greville and I have always agreed — who wants to look ‘conventionally’ handsome or beautiful? Not me, no, thank you very much.

I can’t remember a great deal about that first photograph — that momentous first click of the shutter that was the starting pistol that set me off on the race for the rest of my life. It was a birthday party — I think my mother’s — held at Beckburrow in the spring of 1915. I seem to recall a marquee in the garden, also. Greville showed me how to load the film into the camera and how to operate it — simplicity itself: look down into the small limpid square of the viewfinder, select your target and press down the little lever at the side. Click. Wind on the film and take another.

I heard the laughter in the garden and ran to find my camera. And then scampered across the lawn and turned the lens on the ladies in their hats and long dresses strolling down towards the beeches at the garden’s end that screened the pond.

Click. I took my photograph.

But my remaining memories of that day are more to do with Greville. As he crouched by me showing me how the camera worked what has stayed in my mind more than anything else was the smell of the pomade or Macassar that he put on his hair — a scent of custard and jasmine. I think it may have been ‘Rowland’s Macassar’ that he wore. He was very fastidious about his clothes and grooming, as if he were always on show in some way or, now I come to think of it, as if he were about to be photographed. Maybe that was it — as someone who photographed people in their finery he became particularly aware of how he was looking, himself, at any hour of the day. I don’t think I ever saw him tousled or dishevelled, except once. . But we’ll come to that in good time.

Beckburrow, East Sussex, our home. In fact I was born in London, in Hampstead village, where we lived in a rented two-floor maisonette in Well Walk just a hundred yards from the Heath. We left Hampstead when I was two because my father became temporarily rich as a result of the royalties he received from Eric Maude’s dramatisation of his short story, ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’. He used the financial windfall to buy an old house in a four-acre garden half a mile from the village of Claverleigh in East Sussex (between Herstmonceux and Battle). He had a new kitchen wing added with bedrooms above and installed electric light and central heating — all very newfangled in 1910. Here is what The Buildings of England: Sussex had to say about Beckburrow in 1965:

CLAVERLEIGH, a small village with no plan but considerable charm below the South Downs. One winding street ending at a small church, ST JAMES THE LESS at the S end (1744, rebuilt in 1865 in a limp, mongrel version of the classical style). . BECKBURROW ½ m. E on the lane to Battle, a good capacious C18 tile-roofed cottage with attractive materials — brick, flint, clunch — and remains of timber framing at one gable end. The small mullioned windows of the old facade give an air of immense solidity. Sober neo-Georgian additions (1910) with a heavy-hipped roof. Inoffensive, a home to be lived in rather than an exposition of taste. A good weatherboard BARN.

That was what I always felt about Beckburrow — ‘a home to be lived in’. We were happy there, the Clay family, or so it seemed to me as I was growing up. Even when Papa came home after the war — thin, irritable, unable to write — nothing really seemed to have changed in the place’s benign enfolding atmosphere. We had a nanny, two housemaids, a cook (Mrs Royston who lived in Claverleigh) and a gardener/factotum called Ned Gunn. I went to a dame school in Battle, driven there and back by Ned Gunn in a dog cart, until we acquired our own motor car in 1914 and Ned added ‘chauffeur’ to his list of accomplishments.

When my father came home, in those early years after the war, the only real pleasure he seemed to take in life was long walks to the sea, over the Downs, to the beaches at Pevensey and Cooden. He strode out, leading his children and whatever friends and relatives we had with us, like some slightly demented Pied Piper, urging us on. ‘Step we gaily, on we go!’ he would shout back at us as we dawdled and explored.

My mother joined us later with the motor and we would be driven home at the end of the day to Beckburrow. However, once we arrived at the beach, it was immediately obvious how my father’s mood changed. The high spirits of the walk gave way to taciturn moodiness as he sat there smoking his pipe staring at the sea. We never gave it much thought. Your father was born moody, my mother would say, always brooding about something. He’s a writer who can’t write and it’s making him fractious. And so we put up with his interminable silences punctuated by the odd demonic rant when his patience finally snapped and he would stalk the house shouting at everyone, bellowing for ‘Just a bit of peace and quiet, for the love of Jesus! Is it too much to ask?’ We simply made ourselves scarce and Mother would calm him down, leading him back to his study, whispering in his ear. I’ve no idea what she said to him, but it seemed to work.

Your parents, however strange they may be in actual fact, always seem ‘normal’ to their offspring. Indeed, the slow realisation of your parents’ defining oddness is a harbinger of your developing maturity — a sign that you are growing up, becoming your own person. In those early years at Beckburrow, from our move there until the mid-1920s, nothing seemed much wrong with our little world. Servants came and went, the garden flourished; Peggy appeared to be some kind of infant prodigy on the piano; baby Xan turned into a somewhat self-contained, thoughtful and almost simple boy who could amuse himself for hours creating elaborate patterns with a handful of sticks and leaves or damming the stream at the bottom of the south lawn, conjuring into being a little empire of rivers and lakes and irrigation channels, setting small balsa-wood rafts off on minuscule voyages of discovery. It would keep him occupied an entire day until he was called in for supper.

What about our Amory? What about me? So far, so run of the mill. After the dame school in Battle came the secondary school in Hastings. Then in 1921 it was announced that I was going away — to be a boarder at Amberfield School for Girls near Worthing. When I left for Amberfield (Mother accompanying me, Ned driving) and we pulled away down the lanes from Beckburrow it was the first time in my life that I registered the full level of hurt, injustice and disappointment that amounted to a betrayal. My mother would hear nothing of it: ‘You’re a lucky girl, it’s a wonderful school, don’t make a fuss. I hate fuss and fusspots.’

I came home in the holidays, of course, but, as the one absentee, felt I was something of an outsider. The barn had been converted into a music room for Peggy, wainscotted, painted, a carpet on the floor and furnished with a baby grand piano, where she was taught by a Madame Duplessis from Brighton. Xan mooned about the garden and the lanes around the house, a solemn boy with a rare, transforming smile. My father appeared to be spending most of the week in London, looking for literary work of some sort. He was given a part-time job as an editor and contributor to the Strand magazine and was a reader for various publishing houses. The pot of money from ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’ was running out. A 1919 production in New York closed after a month but cheques continued to arrive in the post, the mysterious enduring legacy of a once successful play. My mother was quite content, it seemed to me, running her big house, or sitting on the bench of the magistrate’s court in Lewes, or initiating and organising charitable works in the East Sussex villages around Claverleigh — fetes, tombolas, bring-and-buy sales.

And Greville would come down occasionally from London. Only Greville was my friend, I felt, and he taught me how to take better photographs, changing my Box Brownie for a 2A Kodak Jnr, with an extending lens on a concertina mount and, one mysterious afternoon, he blacked out the pantry, unpacked his trays and pungent bottles, and showed me the astonishing alchemy involved in taking images trapped on film and, through the application of chemicals — developer, stopper, fixer and washes — turning them miraculously into negatives which could then be printed into black and white photographs.

I still felt this nagging sore of resentment at my banishment, however. One day I generated enough courage to confront my mother and asked her why I had to go away to school when Peggy and Xan could stay at home. My mother sat me down and took my hands. ‘Peggy is a genius,’ she said, breezily, ‘and Xan has problems.’ And that was that, an end to the matter until my father finally went totally insane.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I feed Flam, my loyal and loving Labrador, and, as the summer night slowly comes on, light the oil lamps. I use my diesel generator to power the small refrigerator, the washing machine and my radio and hi-fi. I don’t want electric light or a television set — and, anyway, I won’t be around much longer, so what’s the point of more home improvements? I live in a comfortable technological limbo, a halfway house: on the one hand laundry, music, the world’s news and ice cubes for my gin and tonic; and, on the other, a peat fire and the particular glow that the oil lamp gives off — the subtle waver of the incandescent wick, the lambent marshmallow, generating that subtle shadow-shift that makes the room more alive, somehow — breathing, pulsing.

Barrandale doesn’t really deserve to be called an island. It’s separated from the mainland of the west of Scotland by a narrow ‘sound’, maybe fifty or sixty feet across at its widest. And the sound is bridged, the ‘Bridge over the Atlantic’ as we locals grandiosely like to term it. There’s another island with another more famous, grander, older, stone bridge (ours is made of girders and railway sleepers but is ten feet longer, which makes us feel ever so slightly more superior: we cross a larger portion of the Atlantic). Still, Barrandale is irrefutably an island, and driving over the bridge — over the sound — establishes, almost unknowingly, an island mentality.

My separate schooling, it turned out — so I learned later — was the result of a will. The death of a great-aunt (Audrey, on my mother’s side) conferred on the Clay family a sum of money for the education of Amory, great-niece and firstborn. My father’s steadily diminishing and erratic income couldn’t have coped with the termly fees demanded by Amberfield, but, if I hadn’t been sent there, or somewhere similar, the benefaction wouldn’t have been forthcoming. Completely strange, unknown currents can shape our lives. Why didn’t my parents tell me? Why did they pretend it was their decision? I was taken away from the familiar comforts and securities of Beckburrow and I was meant to be grateful, the privileged one.

My mother was a tall, bespectacled, somewhat cumbersome woman. She managed to conceal whatever affection she might have felt for her children with great success. She had two expressions she used all the time: ‘I don’t like a fuss’ and ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it’. She was always patient with us but in a way that seemed to suggest her mind was elsewhere, that she had more interesting things she could be doing. We always called her ‘Mother’, as if it was a category, a definition, and didn’t reflect our relationship, as if we were saying ‘ironmonger’ or ‘historian’. Here’s the sort of exchange that would ensue:

ME: Mother, could I have another helping of blancmange, please?

MOTHER: No.

ME: Why not? There’s plenty left.

MOTHER: Because I say so.

ME: But that’s not fair!

MOTHER: Well you’ll just have to put that in your pipe and smoke it, won’t you?

My mother on Cooden beach in the 1920s.

Taken with my 2A Kodak Jnr. Xan is laughing behind her.

I never saw any real expression of affection between my mother and my father — and at the same time I have to admit I never saw any signs of resentment or hostility.

My father’s father, Edwin Clay, was a miner from Staffordshire who went to night classes at a Mechanics’ Institute, educated himself, qualified himself, and ended his career as a director of Edgeware & Rackham, the publishers, where he eventually became the managing editor of five trade magazines that served the building industry. He grew wealthy enough to send his two sons to private schools. My father, a clever boy, won an exhibition to Lincoln College, Oxford, and became a professional writer (his younger brother, Walter, died at the Battle of Jutland, 1915). The one-generation jump was remarkable, I suppose, and yet I always sensed in my father that familiar mixture of pride at his achievements combined with — not shame, but a diffidence, an insecurity: an English social insecurity. Would anyone take him seriously, a miner’s son, as a writer? I believe that part of the reason for buying Beckburrow and enlarging it and living the county life must have been to prove to himself that those insecurities were now worthless and wholly cancelled out. He had become thoroughly middle class; a successful writer of several well-received books married to a judge’s daughter, with three children, living in a large and covetable big house in the East Sussex countryside. Yet he was not entirely a happy man. And then the war came and everything went wrong.

I think tonight I might begin to sort out all those old boxes of photographs. Or maybe not.

*

It is 1925. The Amberfield School for Girls, Worthing. My best friend Millicent Lowther stuck on the false moustache and smoothed it down with her fingertips.

‘It was all I could find,’ she said. ‘They seemed only to have beards.’

‘It’s perfect,’ I said. ‘I only want to get an idea of the sensation.’

We were sitting on the floor, our backs to the wall. I leant forward and kissed her gently, lips to lips, no great pressure.

‘Don’t pout,’ I said, not pulling away. ‘Men don’t pout.’ The contact with the false moustache wasn’t unpleasant, although, given the choice, I’d always prefer a clean-shaven top lip. I moved slightly, changed the angle, feeling the prickle of the bristles on my cheek. No, it was tolerable.

We older girls regularly practised kissing at Amberfield but I have to say the experience wasn’t much different from kissing your fingers or the inside of your upper arm. Having never kissed a man, and I was now seventeen years old, I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about, as my mother would have said.

We broke apart.

‘Any moustache pash?’ Millicent asked.

‘Not really. It’s just that Greville’s grown one and I wanted to see what it might feel like.’

‘Gorgeous Greville. Why don’t you invite him to visit?’

‘Because I don’t want you specimens ogling him. Did you get the fags?’

We bought cigarettes from one of the young Amberfield gardeners, a gormless lad with a harelip called Roy.

‘Oh, yes,’ Millicent said and fished in her pockets, producing a small wrap of paper and a box of matches. I liked Millicent a great deal — she was smart and sardonic, almost as sardonic as me — but I would have preferred her to have fuller lips, the better to practise kissing — her upper lip was almost non-existent.

I screwed one of the small Woodbines into the ebony cigarette holder that I had stolen from my mother.

‘Just Woodbines,’ Millicent said. ‘Very infra dig, I’m afraid.’

‘You can’t expect a poor proletarian like Roy to smoke Craven “A”.’

‘Roy, the hoi polloi. I suppose not, but they do burn my throat, rather.’

‘While your head spins.’

I lit Millicent’s cigarette and then my own and we puffed smoke up at the ceiling. We were in my ‘darkroom’, a broom cupboard outside the chemistry laboratory.

‘Thank the Lord your chemicals pong so,’ Millicent said. ‘What is that smell?’

‘Fixer. It’s called hypo.’

‘I’m not surprised no one’s ever descried cigarette smoke in your little cubbyhole.’

‘Not once. Is “descried” the mot juste?’

‘It’s a word that should be used more often,’ Millicent said, a little smugly, I thought, as if she had invented the verb herself, spontaneously.

‘But correctly,’ I admonished.

‘Pedant. Annoying pedant.’

‘Apart from us, only the Child Killer comes in here, and she loves me.’

‘Is she a femme, do you think, the Child Killer?’

‘No. I think she’s sexless. .’ I drew on my Woodbine, feeling the head-reel. ‘I don’t think she really knows what she’s feeling.’ The Child Killer was in fact called Miss Milburn, the science teacher, and I owed her a great deal. She had given me this broom cupboard and encouraged me to set up my dark room in it. She had dense unplucked eyebrows that almost met over her nose, hence her nickname.

‘But aren’t we femmes?’ Millicent asked. ‘Kissing each other like this?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘We only do it to educate ourselves, to see what it’d be like with a man. We’re not bitter, my dear.’ ‘Bitter’ was Amberfield slang for ‘perverted’.

‘Then why do you want to kiss your uncle? Eugh!’

‘Simple — I’m in love with him.’

‘And you say you’re not bitter!’

‘He’s the handsomest, funniest, kindest, most sardonic man I’ve ever met. If you were ever in his presence — not that you’ll ever be — you’d understand.’

‘It just seems a bit odd to me.’

‘Everything in life is a bit odd, when you come to think of it.’ I was quoting my father — it was something he’d say from time to time.

Millicent stood up, cigarette between her lips, and squeezed her small breasts.

‘I just can’t imagine a man doing this to me. . Rubbing my bosoms. How would I feel, react? I might want to punch him.’

‘That’s why it’s just as well we try everything here, first. One day we’ll get out of this jungle, we’ll be free. We need to have some idea of what’s going to be what.’

‘It’s all right for you,’ Millicent said, grudgingly. ‘The world you move in — writers, society photographers. . My father’s a timber merchant.’

‘Your secret’s safe with me.’

‘Minx! Queen of the minxes!’

‘I’m not a snob, Millicent. My grandfather was a Staffordshire miner.’

‘I’d rather my father was a writer than a timber merchant, that’s all I’m saying.’ Millicent carefully removed her false moustache and stubbed out her Woodbine.

‘Any more kissing?’ she asked. ‘We haven’t tried it with tongues.’

‘Bitter woman! You should be ashamed of yourself.’ I clambered to my feet and went to look at my photographs drying on their line of string. A bell rang in a distant corridor.

‘I think I’m meant to be supervising some of the younger specimens,’ she said. ‘See you later, darling.’

She left and I carefully unpegged the photos. I didn’t print every negative I developed as I didn’t want to waste paper on contact sheets. I would scrutinise the negative with a magnifying glass and was often very confident of the choice I eventually made. The decision to print was somehow key to what I felt about the photograph and each one that I selected would be given a title. I don’t know why I did this — some vague painterly connection, I suppose — but in bestowing a title the photograph lived on in my mind more easily and permanently. I could recall almost every photograph that I’d printed — a memory archive — an album in my head. I think also that the whole process of photography still seemed astonishing at that stage of my life. The abidingly magical process of trapping an image on film through the brief exposure of light and then, through the precisely monitored agency of chemicals and paper, producing a monochrome picture of that instant of time still possessed its alluring sorcery.

Now, Millicent having gone, summoned by her bell, I took down my three new photographs — stiff, dry — and laid them out on the small table at the end of the box room. I had called the three photographs ‘Xan, Flying’, ‘Boy with Bat and Hat’ and ‘At the Lido’. I was pleased with them all, particularly ‘Xan, Flying’.

One hot day the previous August we’d gone down to the Westbourne Swimming Club Lido in Hove where they had a one-acre, unheated salt-water pool with a twenty-five-foot diving board at one end. It took Xan three jumps before I was happy that I’d truly captured him in mid-air.

I wrote the titles on the back of the prints in a soft pencil, added the date, and slipped them into my loose album. All three photographs were similar in that they were candid shots of people in movement. I liked taking photographs of people in action — walking, coming down steps, running, jumping and, most importantly, not looking into the lens. I loved the way the camera could capture that unreflecting suspended animation, an image of somebody halted utterly in time — their next step, their next gesture, next movement, forever incomplete. Stopped just like that — by me — with the click of a shutter. Even then I think I was aware that only photography could do that — so confidently, so effortlessly — only photography could pull off that magic trick of stopping time; that millisecond of our existence captured, allowing us to live forever.

Two days later I was in the sixth-form study room taking part in a staring match with Laura Hassall. It was her challenge but I knew I would win — I always won staring matches. We were allowed to speak to each other, deliberately to provoke a lapse in concentration or to distract so eye contact was broken.

‘Stanley Baldwin’s been assassinated,’ Laura said.

‘Poor. Very poor.’

‘No. He has.’

‘Good. Horrible man.’

‘Xan, Flying’, 1924.

‘At the Lido’, 1924.

‘Boy with Bat and Hat’ (Xan Clay), 1924.

We kept staring at each other, faces two feet apart, chins propped on our hands, eye to eye. Everyone else in the room was working at their prep, not bothering remotely with our contest.

‘Laura?’

‘Yes?’

‘Romulus and Remus. Heard of them?’

‘Ah. . Yeshhh.’ She said it as a dullard would, irritated.

‘Then, imagine,’ I said, in a speculative tone, as if the idea had just occurred to me, ‘imagine that Rome had been founded by Remus — and not Romulus.’

‘Yes. . So what?’

‘In that case, the city would be called Reme.’

Laura thought about this, instinctively, and lost. Her gaze flickered.

‘Damnation! Shit and damnation!’

There was a knock at the door and a junior specimen appeared. She looked straight at me. Junior specimens were not allowed to talk unless spoken to.

‘What is it, you odious child?’ I said.

‘God wants you.’

‘God’ was our headmistress, Miss Grace Ashe. I was wary of Miss Ashe — I suspected that she saw through me, saw my very nature. I knocked on the door of her office and waited, conscious that I was a bit on edge, that I was feeling nervy, not at my best. Such an evening summons was rare. I heard her say ‘Come!’ and I checked my uniform, smoothed the creases from the knees of my beige lisle stockings, and pushed the door open.

Miss Ashe’s ‘office’ did not live up to the name — it was a sitting room, with a large burr-walnut bureau covered in papers and files set in an alcove. I could have been in a country house. The carpet was a navy blue with a scarlet border; a sofa faced two armchairs, all in white linen loose covers, across a long padded tapestry stool with books placed on it. The wallpaper had a cream and coffee-coloured stripe and the room’s paintings were real and modern, stylised landscapes and still lifes painted by Miss Ashe’s brother, Ivo (who had died in the war). Pale blue hessian curtains were allowed to bulk their hems on the floor and the table lamps burned dimly behind mottled parchment shades. Taste was being exhibited here, I realised, confident yet understated.

Miss Ashe was in her early forties, so we had calculated, pale and slim with her dark auburn hair combed tightly back from her brow to be gathered into a complex knotted bun. We all agreed she was ‘chic’. Millicent and I had decided she looked like a retired prima ballerina. We were all, in truth, rather frightened and in awe of her and her elegant, impassive demeanour, but I made it my strategy never to show this. I tried to be uncharacteristically breezy and gay with her and I think she was consequently rather annoyed by my attitude, aware it was feigned for her benefit. She was always rather short and stern with me. No smiles, as a norm.

But she was smiling now as she waved me to a chair. I was disarmed, for a second or two.

‘Evening, Miss Ashe,’ I said, trying to regain the upper hand. ‘That’s a beautiful bracelet.’

She looked at the heavy silver and Bakelite bracelet on her wrist as if she’d forgotten she’d put it on.

‘Thank you, Amory. Do sit.’

She sat down herself and reached for a cardboard file and opened it on her knee. She was wearing an emerald-green afternoon frock, trimmed with a lemon-yellow scarf at the neck. She flipped up the lid of a silver cigarette box on the table beside her chair, took out a cigarette, searched for a lighter, and lit her cigarette, all the time keeping her eyes on the open file. We’d noticed how Miss Ashe pointedly smoked in front of the older girls — it was a provocation. Thus provoked, I spoke.

‘I suppose that’s my dossier.’

She looked up. ‘It’s your file. All pupils have a file.’

‘All the facts.’

‘All the facts we know. .’ She cocked her head, as if she were taking me in better. Pale blue eyes, unblinking. I didn’t want to start a staring match with Miss Ashe, so I lowered mine and picked invisible fluff off my skirt.

‘I’m sure there are many more “facts” we’re unaware of.’

‘I don’t think so, Miss Ashe.’ I smiled, sweetly. ‘I’ve nothing to hide.’

‘Really? You’re an open book, are you, Amory?’

‘For those who can read me.’

She laughed, seeming genuinely amused at my remark and I felt the beginnings of a blush creep up my neck and warm my cheeks and ears. Stupid Amory, I thought. Say as little as possible. Miss Ashe was scrutinising my file again.

‘You passed all subjects at School Certificate with distinction.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you decided to drop maths, science and Greek.’

‘I’m more interested in—’

‘History, French and English. What’s your subsidiary?’ She turned a page.

‘Geography.’

She made a note and then closed the file, looking at me directly again.

‘Are you happy here at Amberfield, Amory?’

‘Would you define “happy” for me, Miss Ashe?’

‘You’re answering a question with a question. Playing for time. Just be honest — but don’t say you’re bored. I don’t care if a girl is stupid or bad but to be bored is a defeat, un échec. If you’re bored with life you might as well die.’

Something about Miss Ashe’s absolute assurance stung me. Without thinking I blurted out an answer.

‘If you want me to be honest, then I feel I’m disintegrating, here. I’m not a groaner, Miss Ashe — I know you hate groaners as much as you hate boredom — but I feel. . lifeless. Everything’s insincere, sterile and spineless. Sometimes I feel inhuman, a robot—’ I stopped. I was already regretting abandoning my usual poise.

‘Goodness me. I’d never have guessed.’ Miss Ashe very carefully stubbed out her cigarette.

You fool, Amory, I said to myself, angry. You’ve let her win. I stared at a book on the stool between us: The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler.

‘Interesting language you use,’ Miss Ashe said.

‘Sorry?’

‘Disintegrating, lifeless, spineless, inhuman, robot. It’s just a school, Amory. We’re trying to teach you, to equip you for your adult life. We’re not some kind of autocratic regime trying to crush the life from you.’

‘I feel I’m stagnating. Trapped in this gutless, antisocial jungle—’ I stopped for the second time. I’d run out of words.

‘Well, you can certainly express yourself, Amory. Which is a gift. Very colourful. Which brings me to the point of this delightful encounter.’ She stood up and went to her desk to pick up a slip of paper.

‘I’m very pleased to tell you,’ she said with a certain formality, turning and crossing the carpet towards me, ‘that you’ve won the Roxburgh Essay Prize. Five guineas. I’ll make the announcement at prayers this evening. But you may tell your closest friends in the meantime.’ She handed me the slip of paper — that turned out to be a cheque. I failed to conceal my surprise as I took it from her. I wasn’t sure why I had spontaneously decided to enter the competition. Perhaps it was because this year’s subject had intrigued me: ‘Is it really “modern” to be modern?’ In any event I had entered, written the essay, and here I was, the winner.

Miss Ashe sat down and studied me. I stared at the cheque, realising I could now buy the new camera I coveted, the Butcher ‘Klimax’.

‘I was thinking, Amory, about Oxford.’

‘Oxford?’

‘After Higher School Certificate, you come back for a term and prepare for Oxford entrance. The Senior History Scholarship at Somerville, to be precise. I think you’d stand an excellent chance, judging by your work — and the essay you wrote.’

Miss Ashe was a graduate of Somerville College. I was aware that I was about to become a protégée, now this suggestion had been made.

‘But I don’t want to go to Oxford,’ I said.

‘That’s a very stupid remark.’

‘I don’t want to go to any university in particular.’

‘You want to “live”, I suppose.’

I could sense Miss Ashe was now quite irritated. The tide in this confrontation was turning my way.

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘It’s entirely possible to “live” while you’re at university, you know.’

‘I’d rather do something else.’

‘And what do you want to do, Amory?’

‘I want to be a photographer.’

‘An intriguing and rewarding hobby. Miss Milburn has told me about your darkroom.’

‘I want to be a professional photographer.’

Miss Ashe stared at me, as if I were mocking her in some abstruse way. As if I’d said I wanted to become a professional prostitute.

‘But you can’t do that,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Because you’re a—’ She managed to stop herself saying ‘woman’. ‘Because it’s not a reliable profession. For someone like you.’

‘I can try, can’t I?’

‘Of course you can, Amory, my dear. But remember that going to university doesn’t preclude a career as a “photographer”. And you’ll have a degree, something to fall back on. Give Somerville some thought, I urge you.’ She stood and crossed the room again to place my file on her desk. The meeting with God was over. I made for the door but she stopped me with a raised palm.

‘I almost forgot. Your father telephoned me this morning. He asked if he could take you out for tea tomorrow afternoon.’

‘He did? But it’s Wednesday tomorrow.’

‘You can have an exeat. I’ll gladly waive the usual rules. Consider it as a bonus to the Roxburgh Prize.’

I frowned. ‘Why does he want to take me out to tea?’

‘He said he had something to discuss with you, face to face. He didn’t want to put it in a letter.’ Miss Ashe looked at me, almost with kindness, I felt, sensing my puzzlement shading quickly into alarm. ‘Have you any idea what he wants to talk to you about?’ she asked, her hand briefly on my shoulder.

‘It must be some sort of family matter, I suppose. I can’t think what else.’

Miss Ashe smiled. ‘He sounded very positive and cheerful. Maybe it’s good news.’

2. FAMILY MATTERS

I STOOD AT THE front door of Gethsemane, my boarding house at Amberfield, waiting for my father. I was in the full humiliating walking-out uniform: the long black gaberdine raglan coat with attached cape trimmed with cherry-red piping, the straw bonnet, the sensible buckled shoes. Half Jane Austen spinster, half Crimean War veteran, we thought. The rude boys of Worthing had great scurrilous fun with us whenever we walked in phalanx through the town.

I saw the family motor car, the maroon Crossley ‘14’, sweep through the gates at the end of the south drive, and waved, trying to ignore my apprehension, feeling my mouth dry and salty all of a sudden. It was a cool September day with an erratic breeze pushing little gaps of blue between the bulky bright clouds — grey-white, slatey — streaky, pied skies.

The car pulled up and my father stepped out. He was wearing a navy blue double-breasted suit and his green and gold regimental tie. He looked handsome and confident — I remembered what Miss Ashe had said about his mood on the telephone and relaxed, somewhat. Perhaps there wasn’t going to be any awful news about a separation or divorce or a mistress or some fatal illness after all.

He put his hands on my shoulders and kissed my forehead.

‘Ah, Amory, Baymory, Taymory. Don’t you look strange in that outfit? What can they be thinking of? Take that ridiculous bonnet off at once.’

‘I have to wait until we leave the grounds. Are you all right, Papa?’

‘Never been righter.’ He thought about what he had said, then smiled. ‘For a writer.’

‘Why’ve you come in the middle of the week?’

‘I needed to see you, my darling, to talk about something.’

‘What’s wrong? Is it mother? Peggy, Xan?’

‘Everything’s perfect. I’ve some interesting news, that’s all.’

I relaxed again and opened the passenger door to climb in but he suggested I’d be more comfortable in the back.

‘There’s a spring about to come through the front seat. You don’t want to be stabbed.’

So I slid into the back while he took up his position behind the wheel, turning to smile at me.

‘I thought we might head up to West Grinstead.’

‘But that’s miles away. I’ve got to be back for prayers, Miss Ashe said.’

‘There’s a lovely little tea house I know — very cosy. We’ll have you back in time for your devotions, don’t worry.’

We drove north away from Worthing and the coast, over the Downs on the road for Horsham, Papa talking about Peggy and her unending flow of achievements, her bursary, her acclaim at the Royal Academy of Music — my sister, the prodigy.

‘How’s Xan?’ I asked, keen to hear less of Peggy.

‘Oh, you know Xan. Mooning about, talking to himself. He’s breeding guinea pigs — he’s got dozens. Keeps him busy.’

‘How’s he doing at school?’

‘Very badly, by all accounts. Thank goodness for you two girls. I think my son’s a goner.’

‘That’s an awful thing to say, Papa! Xan has real. .’ I thought. ‘Xan sees the world differently to the rest of us.’

My father glanced at me over his shoulder for a moment.

‘We all see the world differently from each other. There’s nothing unusual in that. That’s the whole point — we all have unique vision.’

It made no sense to me so I looked out of the window as we motored through Findon and Washington.

‘What did you want to talk to me about?’ I asked, after a while.

‘My novel,’ he said. ‘I’m halfway through. It’s going terribly well.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘The war. I’m telling the truth. The unvarnished truth. Nobody’s ever written anything like it. I’m going to call it Naked in Hell.’

‘I don’t think people want to read about the war. They want to look forward.’

‘You can only look forward with confidence if you know the truth about your past.’

‘There’s the sign for West Grinstead!’

But, rather than turn right, my father turned left, down a narrow lane between dense hawthorn and elder hedges that led towards a beech wood.

‘Where are we going, Papa?’

I saw a fingerpost that said ‘Hookland Castle’ and then, through the trees, caught a glimpse of a silver expanse of water, a long thin lake. The lane we’d taken led us directly to its southern edge, curving round into more woodland up ahead that partially screened the castle with its battlemented tower. Maybe there was a tea room at the castle, I thought, as we arrived at the lakeside. It was man-made, I could now see, part of a vast landscaped park, the water grey and corrugated by the breeze. There was some sort of classical Greek temple-folly on a small round island. We seemed to be going faster all of a sudden and my father glanced back at me, his face contorted in a strange grimace, as if he were fighting to keep back tears.

‘I love you, my darling girl. Never forget that.’

And then he turned the wheel abruptly to the right and we swerved off the metalled road with a bump, roared across a thin strip of grass and the car fell headlong into the lake. The impact with the water flung me forward against the front seat, blasting the air from my lungs. I screamed as the light darkened as we plunged beneath the water and a monstrous whooshing and gurgling noise filled the interior of the car.

Then, almost instantly, the Crossley hit the bottom, our fall stopped, and the car canted over a few degrees. Water was rising through the floor and small jets sprayed in from the window mountings. My father had fallen sideways, away from the wheel, and seemed unconscious, his head leaning against the window at an odd angle. I felt the seconds slow to minutes. I crouch-stood, now knee deep in water, screaming — Papa! Papa! — but he didn’t respond. I kicked off my shoes and shrugged myself out of my heavy coat. I wrestled with the door handle but I couldn’t push it open. It gave only an inch or so as the water pressure from outside was too powerful. I unwound the window and a great torrent rushed in, bitter cold, the level rising almost instantly, it seemed, to my waist. But now the door would open and I fought my way out and swam my way up and emerged, choking, gasping, in a second. The Crossley was barely submerged, its roof just two feet below the surface. I clambered on to it and stood up, sucking in huge lungfuls of air. I could see the tracks we had made on the turf before the car had leapt over the stone banking of the lake edge and dived. Our momentum had driven us twenty feet or so into the body of the lake. A few strokes would take me to safety. Man-made lake, therefore not very deep, I thought, with preposterous rationality. Then I remembered my father.

I jumped back in and ducked under the surface to see that the interior of the car was now full of water. My father was floating in the space between the front seat and the windscreen, his eyes open, bubbles rising from his parted lips as his lungs emptied. I opened the front door — it opened easily — and grabbed the waving end of his regimental tie and pulled. He slid buoyantly out and I pushed him up to the roof before crawling on to it myself, grabbing him round the neck with an armlock like a wrestler, and raising his head so he could breathe.

This was all I could do, I reasoned. He had only been underwater a few seconds — surely he wouldn’t have had time to drown. So I sat there and waited, holding him up and, on cue, he coughed, water dribbled from his mouth and he opened his eyes.

‘What happened?’ he said, and coughed again, vomiting more water.

‘We’re safe,’ I said. ‘What were you trying to do to us?’

‘Oh, God. Oh, God, no!’ he shouted. He shrugged off my arm and stood up. For an awful moment I thought he was going to fling himself back into the water.

‘Papa! No!’ I stood up and grabbed the sopping front of his jacket. He looked at me with awful intensity, putting his hands on my shoulders.

‘It wasn’t meant to be like this, Amory.’ His voice sounded calmer, almost reasonable. ‘I didn’t want to go on my own, you see. I wanted you to come with me.’

A car had stopped in the lane — the driver no doubt arrested by the sight of two people apparently walking on water, and tooted its horn. I turned and waved and shouted that we’d crashed into the lake.

‘I’ll call the fire brigade! Up at the castle,’ the driver shouted through the open window. ‘Two minutes!’ He drove off at speed.

My father shifted his position on the Crossley’s roof, and the car beneath us wobbled slightly. He ran his hands through his dripping hair.

‘What a mess,’ he said. He put his arm round my shoulders and smiled at me, a strange little smile. A mad smile, his eyes dead.

‘I thought the lake was deeper,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d read somewhere that the lake here was exceptionally deep.’

‘Lucky it wasn’t.’

‘You’ve saved my life, Amory,’ he said. Then he began to cry, suddenly, almost howling like an animal. I hugged myself to him and begged him to stop — which he did, quickly, sniffing and coughing, breathing deeply.

‘I’m not well, Amory,’ he said quietly. ‘You have to remember that. You have to forgive me.’

‘I forgive you, Papa. We’re safe, unharmed, that’s the main thing.’

‘Just wet through.’ He kissed my forehead. ‘Amory, Faymory, Daymory. . Shall we head for the shore? It seems ridiculous to be waiting here, standing on the car roof.’

‘You won’t do anything silly. Promise?’

‘I have a feeling I won’t do anything silly ever again. Promise.’

We slid into the water and swam to the shore.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I drink gin at lunch, whisky in the evening. One large gin seems to do me fine in the middle of the day but as night falls I find the whisky too alluring. I drink it diluted with a little water in a heavy-bottomed tumbler — just standard blended whisky, whatever I can find in the shops in Oban (I’d never buy on the island, in Achnalorn, too many curious folk) — but I think I’m addicted to it, all the same. Three glasses, sometimes four. I sit reading, smoking, listening to the radio or to music and let my senses tilt steadily over into mild and delicious inebriation, hearing the wind-thud, the hoarse sea-heaving outside. It sends me to an easeful sleep and, I believe, calms and soothes my disturbing dreams. The few nights I haven’t had my whisky anaesthetic are too haunted by the past, too febrile to be endured. I leave my bed, throw more peat bricks on the fire, watch the flames sway and flicker and wait for dawn to arrive, the dog Flam curled up on his blanket watching me, uneasy, troubled.

*

The immediate consequence of our headlong drive into the waters of Hookland Castle Lake was that my father was certified insane and sent to a ‘posh loony bin’, as my mother termed it. I had what I now suppose was a form of nervous breakdown. I seemed unable to stop crying and would even experience a kind of fit — body-wide tremors and copious sweating — that seemed epileptic but in fact was psychotic, catalysed by sudden and spontaneous memories of those frantic seconds in the car with the water rising, the fight to open the door and, always, the image of my father’s impassive floating face, the bubble-beads streaming upwards from his mouth as if the few moments of consciousness left to him were being transformed into those buoyant quicksilver pearls of air, slowing visibly as his lungs filled with water.

I missed the rest of that Trinity term at Amberfield, and Michaelmas, following, confined to bed, subject to ever-changing regimes of boiling baths and poultices on my back — as if something could be drawn out of me — broths and teas and drugs of some sort, no doubt. I returned in the spring of 1926 to prepare for my Higher School Certificate. The other girls were kind to me — I was an almost mythic figure, once the story of the car in the lake and the rescue of my father emerged. Even Miss Ashe, every time we crossed paths, would make a point of stopping and chatting and solicitously enquiring after me: ‘How are you, dear Amory. .?’ I did badly in my exams — three passes and one failure — but was never blamed. There was no further talk of Somerville College and the Senior History Scholarship.

Curiously, I took no photographs for months and my darkroom was abandoned. That summer, after my exams, I searched my father’s study looking for his novel ‘about the war’, rummaging through the drawers in his desk and his bookcases looking for Naked in Hell, thinking it might give me some sort of clue as to why he’d tried to kill us both, but found nothing. My mother, when I asked her what Papa had been working on, said that he hadn’t written a word for two years at least, as far as she was aware.

I was correct in one thing, however: the war did have something to do with my father’s madness. The clue wasn’t to be found in the novel he never wrote but, many years later, I did try to discover what had happened to him in France that had brought him home so changed. It was in the history of his regiment, the East Sussex Light Infantry, the ‘Martlets’, and it did help me understand a little what it might have been that had turned his mind against himself. And, thereby, me.

Events of March 1918

After the withdrawal to the position fronting the edge of the Bois de Vinaigre outside Saint-Croix the 5/1 service battalion occupied the new front line. Owing to the nature of the ground the enemy was never closer than 400 yards and sometimes on occasion over 800 yards distant. It was the widest stretch of no-man’s-land that the ESLI had encountered since 1915 at Loos and posed particular problems; lack of clear information regarding the German forces’ dispositions being the most significant.

The short lull in the fighting allowed the new trenches to be strengthened and there were few casualties over the following days (two dead, seven wounded). Colonel Shawfield, commanding the 5/1 battalion, ordered a raid to be sent out on the night of the 26th to determine the nature and preparedness of the forces opposite in advance of the 5th Army’s counteroffensive scheduled for the 30th.

The raiding party (led by Captain B. V. Clay DSO) was composed of twenty men, including two signallers who were to run a telephone line out to the ruined farm of Trois Tables, formerly battalion HQ before the retreat. The raiding party left our trenches at 2 a.m. A diversionary artillery barrage took place at 2.30 a.m. to the left of the German line at Lembras-la-Chapelle. Captain Clay’s raid met heavy resistance and at 4 a.m. only ten men had regained the ESLI lines. Captain Clay himself was missing.

Three days later, during the 5th Army counter-attack, Trois Tables farm was retaken and Captain Clay was discovered hiding in a deep cellar beneath the ruined farm building, barely clad in a few shreds of his uniform. The bodies of Corporal S. D. Westmacott, Private W. D. Hawes and Signaller S. R. Thatcher were recovered from the same cellar. Captain Clay was starved and semi-conscious and could give no coherent account of what had happened in the three days since his raiding party had left the ESLI lines. He was sent to the base hospital at Saint-Omer where he slowly regained his strength though his memory of those three days never returned. He was awarded a bar to his DSO. The citation read that his example ‘was a monument to the strength and survival instinct of the human will under the most distressing and alarming conditions of warfare’.

The Regimental History of the East Sussex Light Infantry,

Vol. III, 1914–1918

3. HIGH SOCIETY

I WAS PLEASED WITH the way I looked. Greville said that the key thing was that I should ‘blend in’. He himself was always impeccably smart. He looked me over before we went off to Lady Cremlaine’s reception — to celebrate her daughter’s twenty-first birthday — walking around me, frowning and nodding, as if I were about to go on parade. I was wearing a floor-length silver satin dance gown with a little maroon velvet coatee over it. Hair up to one side, a diamanté clip holding it in place. My shoes were gold calf with the highest heels I could find. Heavy make-up: kohl on my eyelids, lurid crimson lips.

‘Very good, darling,’ Greville said. ‘You’ll be fighting all the young blades off.’ Greville had reduced his wide and luxuriant hussar’s moustache to thin pencil lines of clipped bristle — a little chevron above his lips. It made him look quite different, I thought, more sophisticated and mysterious.

We left Greville’s apartment and went round to the mews behind the building, where the studio and the darkroom was, to find Lockwood Mower, Greville’s apprentice, loading the backdrops, the lights, the tripods and the leather cases containing the heavy plate cameras — the Dallmeyer Reflex and the Busch Portrait — and belting them securely on the luggage rack at the rear of the motor.

‘You look a proper film star, Miss Clay,’ Lockwood said. I gave a demure little stage-bow. Lockwood was a tall, burly lad, about my age, I suppose, with tar-black hair and a very dark complexion, as if he were a gypsy or very heavily suntanned, like a Mediterranean sailor or olive-picker. His even features were spoiled by a slightly undershot jaw and the fact that his eyes were set a little too far apart. He looked both pugnacious and somewhat surprised, ‘like a boxer who’s just received bad news’ was how I’d described him to Greville, who found that very amusing.

Lockwood was softly spoken and diligent and I’d noticed, in the weeks I’d been working with Greville, how Greville relied on him more and more. Lockwood did not have to blend in. He would rig up the room set aside to be used as an impromptu studio in whatever house or venue we happened to be working in and stay there. Tonight he was in his usual outfit: a black three-piece serge suit, navy blue flannel shirt and cerise tie. He had begun to copy Greville by putting some sort of pomade in his hair and there was always a pungent odour of cheap cologne about him.

Greville and I sat in the back seat and Lockwood took the wheel.

‘Allons-y, mes braves,’ Greville said and we set off. I felt a little boil of excitement in my stomach as we pulled on to Kensington High Street and headed to Mayfair. Off on a job — as if we were going on a mission of some kind — ready to storm the redoubts of high society.

Greville took out his cigarette case and offered it to me. I selected a cigarette and he lit it, before lighting his own.

‘Who’s this for, tonight?’ I asked, blowing smoke at the car roof. ‘The Illustrated?’

‘Beau Monde.’

‘Oh, dear, Tatler will be cross with you.’

‘Good,’ he smiled at me. ‘We’ve got some real scalps tonight. I might need you to ferret them out.’

‘My pleasure.’

I sat back in my seat as we drove up Knightsbridge. I had always thought it highly likely that I should fall in love with my uncle — and once I had gone to work for him that likelihood became irresistible, as far as I was concerned. To sit beside him like this, smoking a cigarette, our elbows touching as we were driven to Lady Cremlaine’s party, seemed the very apogee of bliss. We were already partners, working together, and I knew how much he liked me, how fond he was of me — he kept on saying it — it could only be a matter of time.

I checked that everything was ready. Lockwood had set up in a ground-floor reception room off the hall. Lights rigged, backdrop in place — hanging in carefully arranged folds from its frame — assorted potted plants carefully positioned, and the two big cameras on their wooden tripods, lenses receiving a final polish from Lockwood’s lint-free duster.

‘All shipshape, Miss Clay. Who’s up first?’

I looked at my list. ‘The Honourable Miss Edith Medcalf. Is she important? Have we done her before?’

‘Not by me. Maybe Mr Reade-Hill knows her.’

‘I’ll ask our hostess.’

I found the Hon. Miss Medcalf — a lumpy-faced and offhand youngish woman reputedly in her late twenties, but who appeared much older (her dress looked like it had been run up from a pair of discarded curtains). She was one of those people who wouldn’t age: she’d look the same at twenty-five or sixty-five. She turned out to be very pleased with herself and her new engagement ring and I delivered her to Lockwood. Then I went in search of Greville. He had to be there to take the photograph even though all that was involved was a few seconds’ chit-chat and a click of the shutter release. Lockwood and I had done all the work, but society ladies wanted Greville Reade-Hill to take their photographs, not his niece or, heaven forbid, his apprentice.

I swept back upstairs to the ballroom where a sizeable dance band was playing ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ and on the wide landing outside I saw Greville chatting to a diminutive slim man and two women in billowing lace. I sidled round to catch Greville’s eye; he spotted me, excused himself and came over.

‘Miss Medcalf awaits,’ I said.

He handed me another list of names.

‘Track this lot down,’ he said. ‘We should be out of here within an hour.’

‘Who was that little chap you were talking to? I thought I recognised him.’

‘That “little chap” is the Prince of Wales. Our future king.’

I looked round but he’d gone.

‘Second thoughts,’ Greville said, ‘I’d better chase after him. You snap Miss Medcalf. Then I’ll find Lady Foster-Porter.’

‘Me?’

‘I think you’re more than ready to open the batting,’ he said, and gave me a swift kiss on the cheek.

Miss Medcalf was not at all pleased to discover that her photograph was to be taken by Miss Amory Clay and initially refused, demanding Greville’s presence.

‘He’s with the Prince of Wales,’ I said, and that both calmed and impressed her but she strode off after the photo had been taken without a word of farewell or thanks.

The Hon. Miss Edith Medcalf at Lady Cremlaine’s ball, 1927.

‘Charming,’ Lockwood said. ‘Glass of champagne, Miss Clay? I snaffled a bottle from downstairs.’ Lockwood poured us both a glass, we toasted my first ‘society’ photograph and I then went in search of the Countess of Rackham and the Marchesa Lucrezia Barberini.

Greville was right, we had nabbed our trophies in just over an hour and Lockwood drove me and the equipment back to Falkland Court. Greville was following later, continuing his wooing of the prince — a royal photograph would put him squarely in the elite and ensure a consequent rise in fees and clients. He’d already taken Prince Aly Kahn and was after Mrs Dudley Ward and Marmaduke Furness. The Prince of Wales would unlock many doors.

Lockwood pulled up outside the mews and began to unpack the motor — he lived in a small room under the roof with a tiny dormer window — while I made sure all the film and plates were properly stored and safe and returned to the flat. Greville’s apartment was on the top floor of a large mansion block just behind the High Street and from the drawing-room windows there was a good view of Kensington Gardens and the palace. Greville’s bedroom, dressing room, bathroom and study took up most of the rest of the space. I was in the maid’s quarters behind the kitchen — a little room with a WC and a basin in a cupboard — but otherwise I had the run of the flat. I had painted the walls of my room emerald green and had hung red sackcloth curtains at the small window. I’d had some of my photographs framed and hung on the wall (‘Xan, Flying’, ‘Boy with Bat and Hat’ and ‘Running Boy’), laid a second-hand Persian rug on the floor and a patchwork quilt on the bed. There was too much colour and too much busyness for such a small room but I felt snug and secure. I was living in London — and Falkland Court was my first home away from Beckburrow — and I was earning a living (seven shillings and sixpence a day) — and I was going out to parties with all the swells at least three times a week if not four.

I slipped out of my smart dress and hung it in the cupboard, putting on my new ‘Zemana’ — house pyjamas — with its floral appliqués. I wandered through to the drawing room, poured myself a small brandy and soda and lit a cigarette, waiting for Greville to return.

He really did have excellent taste for a man, I thought to myself. The drawing room had lacquered red walls and a polished near-white parquet floor with silk rugs scattered here and there. A painting of a naked Negro boy dancer hung above the mantel and the occasional tables were clustered with silver- and tortoiseshell-framed photographs of his biggest social prizes. I stood at the window with my cigarette looking over the roofscape toward the palace. Life was indeed good. You’re only nineteen, I said to myself, look how well you’re doing, a year out of boarding school. Laura and Millicent would sell their souls to the Devil to be where I was now. And who would have thought? I was meant to be at Somerville College, Oxford, reading history. Non, merci. Let life come to you, my father always said, don’t rush about looking for it. Then I heard Greville coming in the front door and I felt myself tense with warm anticipation.

‘You still up, you naughty girl?’

‘Well. .?’ I said, queryingly, as he came in. ‘You have to tell me.’

‘He didn’t say yes — and he didn’t say no. I think he’s genuinely interested — he wants to see how I’ve taken some of his set. Have we got those portraits of Lady Furness? That’ll swing it. We’ll look them out in the morning.’ He undid his tie and headed for the drinks table where he poured himself a whisky.

‘A perfectly acceptable evening was marred by a rather unpleasant row with Lady Foster-Porter.’ He drained his glass and topped himself up. ‘There’s no other word for it but I’m afraid Lady Foster-Porter is a ghastly old cunt.’

I wasn’t shocked. Greville swore all the time in private, arguing that we owed it to the English language to exploit the full range of forceful expressions it offered. He went on to explain why the disagreement had arisen with Lady Foster-Porter — her refusal to honour the fee he’d demanded for her son’s wedding.

‘Very tiresome woman,’ he said. ‘She actually said her chauffeur could have done a better job.’

‘Sourpuss bitch!’ I threw in, loyally. ‘How dare she?’

‘Well, I was fuming by then, you can imagine. Boiling. I said her son’s wedding merited exactly the treatment I’d given it. And reminded her I’d done the Earl of Wargrave’s wedding the very next day. And he’d been delighted.’

‘Did she shut up?’

‘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 lock 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.

He sat down beside me and took both my hands in his, just as he’d done when he’d urged me to go and see my father. In another world.

‘Do you really want to stop being a virgin?’

‘That was the plan. Now I’m not so sure. As you say I’ve got a lot to learn. Maybe I’ll become a nun instead.’

Greville scrutinised me.

‘You’re incredibly impetuous, Amory, you know. Very headstrong.’

‘Very stupid.’

‘Yes, that’s a way of putting it. It could get you into trouble in life.’

‘It already has.’ I retightened the belt on the dressing gown, feeling tears salty in my eyes. I wasn’t going to cry. ‘It’s my problem. My curse.’

‘Which means I don’t think you’d be a very good nun, I’m afraid.’

I had to smile. ‘Probably not.’

He looked at me searchingly, but in a kindly way.

‘You know, if I thought I could, I’d help you out. You’re a very pretty girl. But it would be awful — for us both. Too ghastly and embarrassing. Might ruin you for life. I’m just not made that way, darling. The machinery wouldn’t work, if you know what I mean.’

‘I’d better go. I think I’m going to die of shame. I’m so sorry, Greville, I never—’

‘Why don’t you seduce young Lockwood?’

‘What? Lockwood?’

‘He’s obsessed with you. Shines out of his eyes. He adores you. Can’t you tell?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve only been thinking of you.’

‘You’d be much better off losing your virginity with strapping young Lockwood than an inefficient pansy like me.’

We only see what we want to see and that’s how mistakes are made. Greville suddenly came into focus for me, like a lens being turned.

At breakfast the next morning I crept into the kitchen but he was already there, spruce in his morning suit, ready for the wedding we were to photograph at the Brompton Oratory. He looked like an illustration from Tailor & Cutter.

‘You’re not going to jump on me, Amory, are you?’

‘Very funny.’

But of course it was exactly the right thing to say. He made light of it. We could joke about it and therefore it was possible for me to be with him again, to function, at ease, even though everything was different. In a strange way I felt closer to him, now I knew about him. Now we had our secret.

‘Any luck with Lockwood?’ he said to me one day.

‘Greville! Please!’

‘He’s a nice lad. Strong but gentle.’

‘You make him sound like a shire horse.’

‘You know what they say about shire horses don’t you, darling?’

‘No, I don’t. And I don’t want to know.’

But because Greville kept talking about him, kept introducing Lockwood and his charms into our conversation, I became aware of Lockwood in a way I hadn’t before. I realised he was in fact always looking at me, covertly; I began to notice how he would take every opportunity to stand as close to me as propriety demanded. I saw that Greville was right: Lockwood was obsessed with me.

We were closing up the darkroom one evening, a few weeks after my fiasco with Greville. The red light was on and we moved about our business limned by its unreal thick luminosity. I was hanging up strips of developed negatives and I could feel Lockwood’s eyes on me, like an invisible beam through the redness, playing on me. I thought — why not? It has to happen sometime — and the sooner the better. And having allowed the thought to enter my head I felt the concurrent physical consequences: that bowel-stir, that bone-weakness of pleasant anticipation.

Lockwood reached to turn on the main light but I caught his wrist before he could. We stood there looking at each other.

‘What is it, Miss Clay?’ His voice was dry, hushed.

‘Would you like to kiss me, Lockwood?’