Sweet Caress

1. THE HOUSE OF FARR

I CAN RECALL THE exact day when I realised Sholto was seriously ill, seriously damaged by his condition. It was 12 August 1959, the opening of the grouse season and — as we did every year — there was a shooting party for the first day of driven grouse.

I was sitting in the pony and trap with Rory McHarg, the second gamekeeper, as we clopped up the track towards the moor on the westerly slopes of Beinn Lurig, the big mountain that rose up at the end of our glen. We were bringing up lunch for the shooting party and the beaters — sandwiches, sausage rolls, a crate of beer, and Thermos flasks of soup and coffee. It wasn’t a grand shoot — no tables set and laid, staff attending — but it was a tradition that Sholto insisted on keeping. There were around a dozen guests — neighbours whose estates marched with ours, and, as usual, army friends of Sholto: David Farquhar, Aldous King-Marley, Frank Dunn (all ex-15 Commando) and our family doctor, Jock Edie.

It was a windy, cool day for August with an intermittent drizzle, but occasionally the clouds were ripped apart and the sun shone down on the mountains and the wide glen beneath, with the river, Crossan Burn, winding through it, making the heart lift at the astonishing splendour and beauty of the view. Up on the moor, on a clear day you could see a silver finger of the Sound of Sleat and, if the day was exceptional, beyond that the purple humps of the Cuillins on Skye.

I could hear a clink of glass coming from a jute sack bundled by Rory’s feet.

‘What’ve you got there, Rory? Liquid lunch?’

‘Nothing, Lady Farr,’ he said, and I saw the blush spread beneath his beard. I reached down for the sack and opened it. Two bottles of Bell’s whisky.

‘Who’s this for?’

‘His Lordship asked me to bring them up.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘I don’t know why, My Lady. I just received the instruction.’

I replaced the sack at his feet and said nothing, though I wasn’t surprised. I saw the beaters making their way across the burned-off heather to the stone bothy — the drive was over for the morning. Rory gave the reins a shake and the pony picked its feet up.

We laid out the picnic on a trestle table and I looked up to see the shooters wandering over from the line of butts. I intercepted Sholto and drew him to one side.

‘How’s it going?’

‘Twenty-two brace. Not bad. Birds coming in nice and low and fast. Better than last year.’

‘No. I meant how’s it going with you?’

He looked at me, puzzled, his eyes unfocussed, glazed. Dead drunk. I was always amazed how he could function — make coherent conversation, shoot a gun, drink more. I had Rory’s sack in my hand and gave it to him.

‘There’s your whisky. Please ask me in future if you need it — not the staff.’

‘Apologies. Did you bring the wine?’

Then I lost my temper.

‘Couldn’t you have held off today? Just for one day? The girls are coming home.’

‘What girls?’

‘Our fucking girls! Our daughters!’

‘Oh, yes. Them. Don’t worry, darling. They’ll never guess.’ Then he turned and shouted over to Frank Dunn, ‘Save a sandwich for me, you greedy bastard!’ and sauntered off to join the others, leaving me standing there, tears filling my eyes.

In 1946, in Paris, when Sholto described himself as a ‘farmer’ he was telling a sort of truth. It was true that he owned half a dozen farms with tenant farmers, as well as around 20,000 acres of hill, moor and mountain on the west coast of Scotland. He also neglected to tell me during those four days that he’d ended the war a much-decorated lieutenant colonel and that he was, in fact, Sholto, Lord Farr, 12th Baron Farr of Glencrossan.

He admitted to all this when we met again in London after he’d proposed marriage, formally.

‘Why did you keep it from me?’ I asked, a bit astonished.

‘I didn’t want to put you off,’ he said. ‘Not everybody wants to be married to a lord — and be a “lady” all of a sudden. I can understand that.’

I suspect his motives were more shrewd. As a recent divorcé, Lord Farr was probably one of the most eligible new bachelors in Scotland. Better to start a love affair unencumbered by this baggage. It was a test of my sincerity, I suppose, but in a sense I now see he was right: I didn’t particularly want to be a ‘lady’, at all, and as I slowly discovered more of what was involved in being married to Lord Farr, 12th Baron Farr of Glencrossan, I might indeed have thought twice.

Let’s start with the house — the House of Farr, as it was known. It stood at the end of a wide glen some six miles long, and about ten miles from the nearest village, Crossan Bridge, and almost twenty miles from Mallaig, the nearest town of any size. There had been a house in Glen Crossan since the early eighteenth century but in the 1850s almost all of it was demolished and a classic Victorian shooting lodge — with castellations and turrets — was built in its place by Sholto’s grandfather, the 10th baron. Only the entrance hall with its extravagant programme of plasterwork by Dunsterfield and the Robert Adam staircase remained from the old house.

But the House of Farr was decidedly cold and damp when I came to live in it and needed considerable and continued maintenance to make it remotely comfortable and modern. Another surprise was the presence of Sholto’s mother, Dilys, the Dowager Lady Farr, who occupied a suite of rooms on the ground floor, next to the billiard room, with her own maid to look after her. Dilys Farr was a small skinny scrap of a woman, still dyeing her hair a curious bluey-black in her seventies, and she greeted my arrival with unconcealed suspicion. The barbed remark was her speciality and she seemed deliberately to take no pleasure in anything the world could offer. ‘Just ignore her,’ Sholto said to me once when I complained about some unnecessary, cruel comment she’d made. ‘She was born miserable and, anyway, she’s bound to die soon.’

The House of Farr, Glencrossan, Lochaber, 1958.

Another minor irritation was the presence of his ex-wife, Benedicta, Lady Farr, who was living in a large house, a former manse, in Crossan Bridge. Their son, Andrew, the so-called Master of Farr, the heir, aged sixteen, was in the sixth form at Strathblane College, near Perth.

As if a mother-in-law and an ex-wife were not enough, the House of Farr had a sizeable staff. There was a housekeeper, Mrs Dalmire and her husband Peter — a chauffeur-butler-handyman — and two permanent housemaids (more could be summoned if the house was full of guests). On the estate were two gamekeepers and a forester/gardener all living in tied cottages scattered about the glen. There was a factor who appeared Monday to Friday — Mr Kinloss — who ran the estate and supervised the rents from the farms. I learned that there was property, some flats and houses, in Edinburgh and Glasgow, some remote cottages in the neighbourhood of Oban, and a small mews house in South Kensington, not to mention various trust funds and portfolios of stocks and shares managed by the family’s bankers, Carntyne Petre & Co., in Edinburgh.

This was, in essence, the new world I entered. Sholto would say to me, as its landscape was progressively revealed, ‘I’m not a rich man, Amory. I inherited an estate — and it’s a nightmare: to run, to organise, to earn a decent living from. I’m just a rentier with a big house that’s slowly falling apart. It may sound glamorous, being a baron and all that, but it’s not glamorous at all.’

I remember our wedding, of course, in a small church full of tombs and plaques commemorating dead Farrs called St Modans in Crossan Bridge. Its antiquity was rather spoilt by a rash of new council houses built too close that had been put up just after the war. I didn’t care — I was marrying Sholto Farr, the man I loved, and the meanest registry office would have suited me fine. We were married in June 1946, two months after our encounter in Paris. I hated all the official wedding photographs — Dilys Farr glowering by my side — but Donalda McCrae, one of the two housemaids, snapped me as I stepped out of the car (about to take the arm of Aldous King-Marley who was giving me away). It was a bit out of focus and a ‘bad crop’ as we say in the photography trade, but it is my favourite photograph of myself. I had no idea it was being taken — it’s candid, in the best sense — and it was a day during which I was supremely, unequivocally, continually happy. Time stopped by Donalda. And whenever I look at it I can recall all the emotions I was feeling at that moment she inadvertently pressed the button. Life seemed almost insupportably good.

I remember writing a long letter to Charbonneau telling him I was going to be married and explaining why I’d left Paris so suddenly. I wrote to Cleve, also. Charbonneau’s reply was sweet and rueful. ‘Marrying? So fast?’ I think he suspected I’d been disloyal — but then so had he. Cleve was gracious, thanking me formally for everything I’d done for GPW, making a point of saying how personally (underlined) grateful he was and how he’d enjoyed our close (underlined) collaboration over the years. If I ever wanted his help, just call, etc., etc. It wasn’t intimate — I think he felt someone else might read it — all fondness was implicit, between the lines, in the underlines.

I had the odd pang, quitting my job, saying goodbye to Corisande — and the office was closed a week after I left. I realised that a significant portion of my life — my life as a professional photographer — was over. No doubt Miss Ashe would have approved of my change in status.

I remember that Dido and my mother came to the wedding. My mother couldn’t hide her astonishment and relief that her thirty-eight-year-old daughter was finally marrying, and to a handsome Scottish aristocrat, no less. I think she thought it all some kind of charade or pantomime — the pipers outside the church, the House of Farr lit by hundreds of candles, the kilts and the sporrans, the reeling and dancing in the cleared billiard room — and that she would find herself back in East Sussex, waking from her dream, still with two unmarried daughters on her hands.

Greville was living in Italy with a young man called Gianluca and felt the journey was too long to make at his time of life. He sent me a magnum of Brunello di Montalcino.

Dido — my solitary bridesmaid — hadn’t yet married Reggie Southover, and she didn’t bring him to the wedding. For the first time in my life I thought she was jealous of me.

‘My, my, Lady Farr,’ she said, checking the hang of my wedding dress. ‘Do I have to curtsey?’

‘Only on my birthday. And you can always call me Amory when we’re alone.’

‘Fuck off!’

I remember in August, at the end of my first summer in Glencrossan, falling strangely ill. I began to suffer odd pains in my abdomen suffering from what is called ‘timpanism’ or ‘meteorism’, a painful bloating of the stomach. I thought I had some kind of bowel obstruction or an internal hernia. When I wasn’t in pain I was immensely fatigued.

Sholto drove me down to Glasgow to see Jock Edie. I liked Jock — he and Sholto had been at school together — and he was self-confessedly one of those doctors for whom medicine is simply the means by which they lead a sophisticated, pleasure-filled life. I had made the mistake of looking up my symptoms in an old medical dictionary I found in the library and had become convinced I had ‘ascites’. I was tapping my bloated stomach with a wooden spoon imagining hearing sounds of ‘shifting dullness’ or ‘fluid thrill’, ghastly symptoms that were listed in the dictionary under ‘ascites’. I was worried I had some kind of chronic liver dysfunction, also, as I kept having to urinate, or some horrid abdominal cancer.

So I was in something of an ill-concealed state as Jock Edie examined me, palpating my stomach and then listening with his stethoscope. He stepped back from the examination couch — as I rearranged my clothes — first smiling, then frowning, tapping his chin with a finger.

‘Do you know, we’ll have to get it confirmed, but I would lay short odds on you being pregnant, Amory.’

‘That’s impossible. I can’t have children. I was badly beaten up, years ago. A specialist told me I was infertile — Sir Victor Purslane.’

‘Well, I’m afraid to say I think Sir Victor has made a serious mistake.’

The pregnancy was confirmed. More than confirmed — I was going to have twins. It was a strange time for me as I retrospectively had to reconfigure almost every certainty I had had about my life and person. I was pleased and I was worried. I was confused as I had resigned myself to childlessness, and was perfectly contented, and now, heading for my thirty-ninth birthday, I was about to have two children, simultaneously. Sholto professed himself delighted at this total surprise but it wasn’t hard to imagine his own consternation. He had thought he and I were going to live as a couple, having had one failed marriage behind him and a child already, but all of a sudden he was about to become the middle-aged father of two babies.

When I think back, now, I realise what a bomb it was that erupted in our lives and blew them apart. All pleasant expectations, all happy assumptions gone — to be replaced by new ones, equally happy, one assumed, but entirely different and unprepared-for. And I was baffled as to how it had happened. Jock Edie said I shouldn’t blame Sir Victor Purslane. Any doctor at that time would have made the same prognosis.

‘But I didn’t have any periods,’ I pointed out.

‘Maybe you had very mild ones or very intermittent ones,’ Jock said. ‘Because you thought you never had them you never noticed them when you did.’

‘No, that’s impossible.’

Then I thought back to my fall on the ice in the rue Monsieur and how the bleeding had restarted and then stopped. Had something been loosened or unlocked in me then? It hadn’t been that long before Sholto had arrived in Paris looking for me. . How could I explain it? How could anyone? I recalled Sir Victor’s words: we think we understand all about the human body but actually we know very little.

‘When did that attack happen, by the way?’ Jock asked.

‘In 1936. It was when Mosley’s fascists were marching in the East End of London.’

‘My God. . It seems like another century. . So, ten years ago.’

‘But why didn’t I get pregnant before this?’

‘Who knows? Did you have an active sex life? Forgive me for asking.’

‘Well, yes. .’ I thought about Cleve and Charbonneau. ‘Pretty active.’

‘Maybe you were just lucky. The timing was always right, if you know what I mean.’

‘And now I’m having bloody twins.’

‘Think of it as a blessing.’

‘Yes. Yes, I will, Jock. Exactly. We’re lucky. We’re blessed.’

The twins duly arrived very early in January 1947. Conceived, as I’d always thought, during those four days in Paris in March with Sholto. Because of my age we took no risks and went to the Western Infirmary in Glasgow instead of the cottage hospital in Oban — and it was just as well because my parturition was complicated. One twin was born after twelve hours of excruciating labour. I understood why that word had been chosen to describe the process of giving birth. The first twin was a girl, whom we called Andra — an old Farr family name. The second twin, also a girl, was born by Caesarean section as I was deemed too weak to go through more hard labour. In fact I didn’t see or hold my new babies for forty-eight hours, such was the practice in the hospital in those days. Eventually I had them in my arms and felt decidedly strange. Sholto was there, with a bunch of carnations, and I began to sob — from joy, I suppose, but also timorous confusion, suddenly confronted with this dual responsibility and a sense that my life was irrevocably turned upside down. No route ahead clear — a topsy-turvy world, as my father would have described it. I looked at my baby girls, Andra and Blythe — as twin number two had been named — and I could see, even that early, that they weren’t identical. That made me pleased, for some reason.

After a week in hospital we all went back to the House of Farr, our surprising new family of four, to find a nanny waiting, a capable girl from the village called Sonia Haldane, who took instant control and suddenly all was well: Sonia could cope with anything, it seemed — two babes in arms were a mere nothing. Life regained a form of stability, a normality began to impose itself.

And we were happy — I mustn’t forget that, as I look back. I was happy with Sholto and we were happy with our growing little children, Annie — as we called Andra — and Blythe. We had four — no, five — entirely happy years. Then Sholto’s mother died. It wasn’t anything to do with her passing away but I date the beginning of the change from the moment of her death. Life was still good but beneath the surface demons were stirring.

2. THE CELLAR

DILYS, LADY FARR, was buried in the small graveyard of the church where Sholto and I were married in Crossan Bridge — St Modan’s. There was a good turnout of tenant farmers and neighbours and both Andrew, the Master of Farr, and his mother, Benedicta, were there as well, Benedicta impressively moved and teary. By then I knew Andrew a little better. He was now at Heriot-Watt College in Edinburgh, studying estate management. He was a tall, ungainly, dull young man with the same sharp-faced look of his mother. The only feature that I could see he’d inherited from his father was his fine straight hair — except Andrew’s wasn’t black, it was mousey-brown. He had a slight cast in one eye that gave him a sly, watchful aspect. When you talked to him you had to resist the urge to turn and look over your shoulder.

Benedicta was a bustling little dynamo of energy, blonde, chatty and knowing. She didn’t like me at all, even though I had had nothing to do with her divorce from Sholto. But because I was the new, slightly younger wife she decided to blame me for the collapse of her marriage — illogically, perversely. What could I do about that? I didn’t care and as I didn’t warm to her I tried to keep out of her way as best I could.

After the funeral everyone returned to the house for drinks and canapés and she cornered me there, all affable concern.

‘This is going to hit Sholto hard,’ she said, dolefully.

‘I don’t think it will,’ I said. ‘He and Dilys weren’t that close.’

‘Just make sure the door to the cellar is locked.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said.

‘How are you coping, generally?’

‘With the children?’

‘With Sholto?’

‘We’re very happy. Very, very, very happy. Thank you for asking, Benedicta. Very happy indeed.’

But Sholto, as if to confirm Benedicta’s snide malice, became very drunk that night — as drunk as I’d ever seen him. After everyone had gone I found him sitting staring at the fire in the small drawing room, a tumbler full of whisky in his hand — half a pint of whisky. I took it from him but he was already incoherent, slurring his words. He lurched to his feet and tried to kiss me and I pushed him off, angry.

‘Look at yourself,’ I hissed. ‘Disgusting!’ And stalked away, hating myself almost instantly because I knew I had sounded and behaved exactly as loathsome Benedicta would.

I remember how we used to drink in those days. Never gave it a passing thought. Gin at lunch — two or maybe three glasses with soda and Angostura bitters. A few whiskies before dinner and then wine. Sholto didn’t sleep well so he’d take a slug of chloral before he went to bed that knocked him out until morning. And we smoked from breakfast onwards. We didn’t care, we were happy, the little girls running around, and Sholto, it seemed to me, took great joy in his surprising new family. We went fishing in lochans up on Beinn Lurig; we took a boat out to Skye and the Hebrides; we spent several weekends a year at the London mews house; we all went on a holiday to Rome in ’55 before the girls went off to boarding school. Of course there were problems, mainly financial, that meant one of the farms had to be sold, and the two flats in Edinburgh, but the House of Farr — crumbling, damp, cold in the winter — was a real home, a place of good cheer, especially now that bitter Dowager Dilys had gone for good. I started repainting her suite of rooms, buying new rugs and curtains. Yes, we were happy, then.

I remember that the one aspect of my new life that I vaguely resented was that I stopped being a photographer. I took photographs, of course — family snapshots — but it wasn’t the same: it was as if some part of my being had been sloughed off, now I was married, a wife and a mother, running the big house. The old Amory Clay had disappeared, drifted away.

I kept my cameras in a locked cupboard, wrapped in chamois leather and sealed in plastic bags. I would take them out from time to time, like an old gunslinger nostalgic for the feel of his weapons, wanting to savour the weight and contours of his six-guns, make sure they were in working order.

Amongst the few pictures I did take some were in colour — Kodachrome slides, expensive but becoming the norm. However, even as I could see my pictures reflected the world as it was I somehow wanted the world as it wasn’t — in monochrome. That was my medium, I knew, and in fact I came to feel it so strongly I wondered if, as the world turned to colour photography, something vital was being lost. The black and white image was, in some essential way, photography’s defining feature — that was where its power lay and colour diminished its artfulness: paradoxically, monochrome — because it was so evidently unnatural — was what made a photograph work best.

I would carefully rewrap my cameras — my Leica, my Rollei, my Voigtländer — and place them back on their shelf in the cupboard and, as I locked the door on them, I wondered if I’d ever be a proper photographer again.

I remember Hanna came to stay. Elegant, mannish again, her short hair dyed a white-blonde. How she turned heads in Mallaig! However, the strange and troubling aspect of her visit was the antipathy that sprang up between her and Blythe. The twins were six years old at the time and I remember Blythe came to me one day and said, ‘Mummy, I want Hanna to go away.’

‘Why, darling? Hanna’s my friend.’

‘I don’t like her, I want her to go.’

‘I want — gets nothing. Don’t be silly. Run along.’

A day later Hanna confided in me.

‘Is everything all right with Blythe?’

‘Of course. What’s happened?’

‘I was walking yesterday down by the river and someone threw stones at me. It was Blythe. When I went up to her she shouted, “Go away!”’

‘She’s just a little girl — she gets these silly ideas. I’ll talk to her.’

Hanna shrugged. ‘See how she looks at me. Look at lunchtime today. She hates me.’

I did look and I saw Blythe staring down the table at Hanna with a ferocity that I found alarming. I took her aside after lunch and asked her if she’d thrown stones at Hanna. She denied it, vehemently, so I sent her to her room with no supper.

But I was troubled. As your children grow up and become small, thinking people you would be a fool to deny that, like the rest of the human race, they begin to develop their distinct personalities — and there’s very little at all you can do about it. Little Johnny can be shy or stupid, or funny or odd, or carefree or cruel, or duplicitous or guileless. I could see from quite early on in their lives how Annie and Blythe were becoming entirely different people. Annie was sweet, helpful — life was fun, to be enjoyed to the full. Blythe was cleverer, quicker on the uptake, but had dark destructive moods and had a stubborn streak that was almost pathological. When Hanna finally left after her ten days it was as if Blythe had triumphed, somehow. It sounds odd to say this about a six-year-old but for a couple of days her mood was elated, arrogant, and she swaggered about the house, almost insufferable.

I mentioned this behaviour to Sholto but he said he hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.

Something Benedicta said stayed with me: ‘Just make sure the door to the cellar is locked.’ We had a large cellar at Farr where we stored wine and other alcohol and all manner of detritus from the house’s past. It was Sholto’s domain — he kept the house’s drink supply stocked; he did all the ordering from Naismith & McFee Ltd, the big general grocer in Oban. Their olive-green vans were a regular sight in the House of Farr’s driveway — we bought almost all our provisions from them. Mrs Dalmire would phone in the order and the next day a van would appear.

The twins, Blythe and Annie, 1953.

I went down to the cellar and found the door locked. I asked Peter Dalmire for the key and he told me it was kept in His Lordship’s gunroom on its own hook. Peter showed me where it was hung and I explored the cellar. We had an enormous supply of booze, it seemed to me, doing a swift inventory — six cases of gin, ten of whisky, both blended and malt, several hundred bottles of wine, not to mention beer, vermouths, sherry and the like. I counted the bottles of gin and whisky and a week later counted them again, calculating that in those seven days the household at Farr had downed two bottles of gin and four bottles of whisky. There had been two visits from friends passing by but that didn’t explain the amount. I knew how much I had drunk — the usual lunchtime and pre-dinner glass or three — and realised with something of a shock that all the rest had effectively been consumed by Sholto.

I began to watch him and notice how often he refilled his glass. I searched his study and gunroom when he was absent and found other bottles stashed in cupboards. Yet on the surface all was as it had always been: he was funny, affectionate, enjoying himself, happy to be running his big estate with its many responsibilities. But he was obviously drinking like a desperate man and I found myself at a loss.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I looked through my bookshelves today searching for a Bible, but in vain. I was sure I had an old one with cracked black leather binding and gold embossed letters but there was no sign of it. Then I had an idea — I knew where I could borrow one.

I drove into Achnalorn and parked outside the church at the end of the main street, St Machar’s, or the Auld Kirk of Barrandale, as it was known. It was an unpretentious building in its small bumpy churchyard, circled by a slate wall with rowan trees growing amongst the tilted gravestones. It was simple, like a rectangular house, with a steeply pitched roof with stepped gables and an ornate small cupola with a bell in it — never rung — and a pineapple finial on top, gift of some rich and devout parishioner in the early nineteenth century. A simple stone porch had been crudely added on to one side — it looked like the entry to a garden shed or coal store — and there were four large coloured-glass windows in the nave depicting scenes from the life of St Machar. Inside there were two rows of wooden pews on either side of a central aisle and a table altar on a dais with a heavy brass crucifix in the middle.

The Reverend Patrick Tolland himself was putting the finishing touches to the vases of flowers flanking the crucifix — yellow geraniums and bracken — and he looked round as I came quietly in. He was a young vicar — in his thirties, I guessed — with long hair over his ears and collar. He had an African beaded necklace from which his crude pewter cross hung. I’d met him a few times but, as he clearly couldn’t remember my name, I introduced myself and said I was hoping to borrow a Bible. An authentic King James, if possible.

He strode off to fetch one and as he handed it to me said, ‘I hope we’ll see you at the Sunday service, Lady Farr.’

I never introduced myself as Lady Farr — I always said Amory Farr — so he had obviously realised who I was.

‘No. I’m afraid not,’ I said.

‘But the Bible. .?’

‘I want to look something up. I’ll bring it back tomorrow.’

‘Oh. Right,’ he said, seeming momentarily cast down. Then he walked me solicitously to the door. ‘Lovely day,’ he said, gesturing at the sunlit sky with its drifting clouds. ‘And God saw every thing that he had made and, behold, it was very good.’

I thanked him and set off down the path to the main street and as I did so walked into a fizzing shimmer of midges. I waved my arms about but I could feel the sharp sting of the bites. I turned back to the reverend and shouted.

‘Couldn’t you get Him to do something about the bloody midges?’

*

We sent the girls off to boarding school when they were ten, in 1957. I never really asked why — I had been sent off myself, of course, and had resented it. I raised a mild protest but Sholto insisted — there was no school for them in Mallaig, he said, and we can’t afford private tutors. Of course there was a school — but not for the children of Lord Farr. Selfishly, secretly, I thought it would be good for the two of us to be a couple again — we’d had so little time without the girls. Selfishness is almost always the real, hidden reason why people send their children away to board. I told myself that it was something one did at this level of society and so I drove them to Edinburgh, feeling guilty all the same, and saw them installed in the Maxwell-Milnes School for Girls. They seemed untroubled. Benedicta was an alumna.

I missed the girls but soon saw this change in our family circumstances as something more alarming — the benefits I was expecting never materialised. Perhaps because I suddenly had more time on my hands I began to notice Sholto’s decline more clearly. It was his habit to go to London on a fairly regular basis to vote in the House of Lords on matters relating to Scotland, and Scottish landowners. There was a grouping of Scottish peers who had organised themselves into a form of lobby and Sholto took his responsibilities seriously. Sometimes I went with him but most often he travelled on his own, taking the sleeper from Glasgow, staying at the South Kensington mews house, and returning three or four days later, legislative business done.

One Friday afternoon while Sholto was away in London I had a telephone call from a reporter on the William Hickey column at the Daily Express.

‘How can I help you?’ I asked.

‘Have you any comment to make about your husband’s predicament, Lady Farr?’

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

‘He’s been arrested.’

‘What for?’

‘Drunk and disorderly. He tried to beat up a photographer.’

I hung up and didn’t answer when the phone rang again, immediately. I called the mews house but there was no reply. The next day I went into Mallaig and bought the newspaper. There was a picture of Sholto in a dinner suit, his bow tie loosened, his hair plastered with sweat, snarling like an animal, trying to rip the camera from the hands of a photographer. Behind him, pulling at his coat tails was a young woman, screaming out, in a short white fur coat and a dress that revealed much of her breasts. I could see a neon sign behind him that read ‘The Golden Wheel Club’. The caption declared: ‘WAR HERO SCOTTISH LORD ARRESTED’.

Sholto was released with a caution after twenty-four hours in the Rochester Row police station cells and came home at once. I met him in the morning at Glasgow’s Central Station and we drove home in a mood of some tension. He was sheepish and apologetic, explaining that he’d had too much to drink and gone with friends to this club to gamble. Some film star was there, he said, and that explained why press photographers were lurking. He was drunk, he confessed, and had lost his temper.

‘Foolish of me, I know, darling,’ he said. ‘Won’t happen again.’

‘Who was that girl with you?’

‘What? Oh, some Mayfair tart who’d tried to pick me up.’

I wanted to say why was she screaming and pulling you away? Tarts usually run for it.

‘Well, you’re the talk of the neighbourhood,’ I said. ‘As you can imagine. Not a copy of the Express to be had for miles around.’

‘They’ll get over it. They know the Farrs are a wild lot. Seen it all before.’

‘Yes, in the sixteenth century.’

He didn’t want to talk about it any further and I could feel his shame, burning, however light-heartedly he tried to laugh it off.

That evening we were having a drink before dinner, in the small drawing room on the first floor.

‘What’s happening, Sholto?’ I said in a reasonable, unaggressive voice. ‘What went on in London? What goes on in London?’

‘Nothing. I had too much to drink, I told you.’

‘You have too much to drink every night of the week. I meant what’s happening with us?’

‘What’re you talking about?’

‘You, me, the girls. The family, the estate. The school fees, the House of Farr. The staff. Everything.’

He stood up and arched his back, his hands pressing into his spine as if he had some acute lumbar pain. He swayed over to the drinks table, inevitably, and poured himself a quadruple whisky.

‘I drink as much as my father did,’ he said, sullenly.

‘What kind of justification is that? He died when you were twenty-three. And you haven’t answered my question.’

‘We are in a bit of trouble,’ he said. ‘A bit. We might have to sell a couple more of the farms.’

I continued with my gentle interrogation and discovered that Sholto had lost nearly £10,000 at baccarat that night in the Mayfair casino. There had been no celebrity actor present. It was casino practice routinely to alert the press when a big loser was leaving the premises — the unwelcome publicity, the blinded stare faced with popping flashbulbs, had the effect of reminding everyone — particularly the loser — of the loser’s fiscal responsibilities.

Worse was to come. My questioning opened the door to Sholto’s occasional gambling binges. He tried to confine them to his trips to London, but further enquiries unearthed a bookkeeper in Glasgow who held his notes for his flutters on the horses. Sholto owed him close to £8,000. These were vast sums, by any standard.

My worst suspicions were confirmed when I went into Oban, to Naismith & McFee. I had my chequebook at the ready but never expected a line of credit that had recently crossed the £1,000 mark. ‘We would appreciate an early settlement, Lady Farr,’ Mr Naismith himself requested in his office, his polite smile and inclined head failing to disguise his anxiety. I wrote him a cheque and the next day went to see our banker in Edinburgh, Mr Fairbairn Dodd, managing director of Carntyne Petre & Co.

Fairbairn Dodd was a plump, smiling, clever man with perfectly white hair, a fact that added to his spurious aura of disinterested benignity. He was extremely polite, ordered me a pot of tea, and outlined the details of Sholto’s stewardship of the House of Farr estates since he had inherited them on the death of his father in 1929. There were only two farms left, it turned out, providing an income of £800 a year. The land remaining was still several thousand acres but of a less valuable non-agricultural nature — fen, moor and mountain. There were still the few cottages in the Oban — Mallaig area but they brought in insignificant revenue. The Glasgow and Edinburgh properties had almost all been sold and the mews house in South Kensington now had a second mortgage. The current overdraft with Carntyne Petre was running at £23,000.

‘We’re effectively bankrupt,’ I said.

‘No. You have the House of Farr and its contents and several thousand acres of Scottish countryside. These are considerable assets.’

‘What should we do, Mr Dodd?’

‘First of all, Lord Farr has to stop throwing money away with such promiscuous abandon. Then, perhaps, sell the Raeburn portraits, and the tenth baron’s porcelain collection. Sell the house in London.’ He smiled. ‘We can arrange all this for you, very discreetly. Let the grouse moor to a wealthy sporting Englishman. August and September — it’s a fifteen-hundred-brace moor. A real asset.’ He thought. ‘And surely Lord Farr could be a further asset to the boardrooms of certain companies. . Defence, whisky, tourism. Let me look into that. Everything’s changing, Lady Farr. Your husband has a name and a reputation he can exploit.’

‘Get a job, in other words.’

‘It’s an option. Worth considering.’

I went back to Farr and laid out the facts to Sholto as Fairbairn Dodd had laid them out to me. Sholto seemed chastened as I outlined the brutal details of his massive indebtedness.

‘You have to stop drinking, darling.’

‘I’ll cut down, I promise.’

And then, a month later, he had a heart attack. Again it was in London, in the entrance hall of his club, Brydges. It wasn’t serious and he was out of hospital within a week, armed with many bottles of pills to take. I went with him to see Jock Edie and refused to leave the room when Sholto asked me to.

Jock had copies of Sholto’s X-rays.

‘Well, the bad news is that you have to stop drinking and smoking, now. Forever,’ Jock said, amiably. ‘And the good news is that if you do as you’re told you should see your daughters married and you may even dandle your grandchildren on your knee.’

‘That’s the good news, is it?’ Sholto said, his voice small and monotone. ‘I suppose you think I should see a trick-cyclist, as well.’

‘Only if you want to. You have to want psychiatric help if it’s going to be of any use.’

‘We can certainly think about that,’ I said, trying to be positive.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

End of September on Barrandale equals end of midges. These little blurry clouds of stinging flies are the bane of Scottish summers and, to celebrate their absence, I took Flam out for a walk and wasn’t bitten once. We walked round the headland on the western edge of the bay and I was surprised to see a Land Rover parked by the ruined cottage. There was a young man taking photographs and measuring the rooms with a multi-yard tape. He was a surveyor, he said.

‘Somebody’s interested in buying it,’ he confided. ‘Wants to put a new roof on, do the whole place up.’

I asked him who it was but he wouldn’t tell me.

I walked home, my head full of thoughts, of suppositions. This new person would be my closest neighbour but would be over half a mile away and entirely out of sight. I could hardly complain. But, I thought, I could certainly find out who it was with a bit of judicious asking around. It was hard to keep a secret on Barrandale.

*

Sholto became physically transformed after he left hospital — thin, diminished — and he looked unwell, his face unnaturally flushed, his fine straight hair losing its lustre, becoming dry and brittle. It was if the memento mori he had received — the attack of his heart — had surprised him profoundly. Sholto Farr, the invincible man, baron, war hero, commando, had been brought low.

Sholto followed doctor’s orders — but on his terms. He cut down — only two packs of cigarettes a day, not three. He only drank whisky in the evening, contenting himself with a glass of beer at lunch. Or so he said. I kept finding bottles here and there, secreted about the house. I found his hip flask half full of gin in his fishing jacket. He stashed bottles in the walled garden and I would watch him from the sitting room unearthing them and having a few covert swigs and then pretend to inspect the roses.

But we became solvent, after a fashion. We quietly sold the Raeburns to the Scottish National Gallery — double portraits of the 7th Baron Farr and of his wife, Lady Zepherina — and the porcelain collection of Sholto’s grandfather. The South Kensington mews went, and a shooting syndicate rented the Beinn Lurig grouse moor for three years. Our overdraft with Carntyne Petre & Co. was reduced to £2,000. Sholto joined the board of Glen Fleshan Distilleries Ltd for a generous annual stipend. A trust fund continued to pay for the girls’ school fees and we managed, amazingly, to live approximately in the style we were accustomed to on our remaining rents and the odd dividend from our stocks and shares.

However, slowly but surely, the house began to fall apart. The staff was reduced to the Dalmires. I started doing more housework. We let one gamekeeper and the forester go and rented their cottages to tourists in the summer.

And as the house grew dingier and damper, and other pieces of furniture were sold at auction to pay the bills (we made an astonishing £1,000 from a lacquered Chinese cabinet), so Sholto seemed to decline in tandem. We had screaming rows — or rather I screamed at him as he sat in his armchair, a cigarette in one hand, a glass of whisky in the other, his head bowed, a prematurely old man being castigated by his harridan wife.

I remember I was hoovering our bedroom when I heard a gunshot — inside the house, down below on the main floor. As I raced downstairs I heard more blasts — a shotgun — coming from Sholto’s gunroom. My terrified panic — suicide — turned to irritation: Sholto shooting at rabbits on the lawn from the window. I flung open the door and saw him sitting behind his desk taking aim at something high on the cornice. He fired and I reeled away as a blast of powder erupted on the ceiling.

‘Got him!’ he shouted.

‘What are you doing, you madman!’ I yelled at him. Mrs Dalmire had now appeared at the door.

‘A fucking fly,’ Sholto said. ‘Buzzing around, driving me insane.’

He broke the gun and took out the spent cartridges and stood up, one hand on the desk top for support. He was falling-over drunk.

‘No need to make so much fuss, ladies,’ he said and sank to his knees and vomited all over the parquet.

I remember Annie and Blythe coming to me one evening as I was watching television in the back parlour where we kept the set.

‘What’s wrong with Papa?’ Annie said, looking alarmed.

‘Nothing’s wrong.’

‘If there’s nothing wrong why is he lying on the front lawn in his underpants?’ Blythe said, dispassionately.

I remember going to Glasgow to see Jock Edie and asking his advice.

‘It’s very simple,’ Jock said. ‘And I’ve told him to his face. If he doesn’t stop drinking and smoking he’s going to die. Very soon, I’m sorry to say.’

‘But why’s he doing this — to himself, to us?’

Jock gently touched his fingertips together several times as he thought further.

‘I think it was something that happened in the war. At the end, in ’45.’

‘He never talks about it. He refuses.’

‘It was something Frank Dunn said, in passing. I just picked up on it. “Sholto’s massacre”, is what he said. A throwaway remark. You should ask Frank about it.’

I remember in fact I asked Sholto, myself. It was quite late at night and we were in the television room. He’d had a couple of large whiskies and was like his old sharp observant self commenting on something we’d seen on the news — the Bay of Pigs invasion: war was in the air so it seemed a good moment, the perfect cue. There was a fire going and it was warm, the curtains drawn. I lit a cigarette and gathered myself.

‘What happened in the war, darling? To you, I mean?’

The question took him aback. He blinked as he thought how to reply and opted for insouciance.

‘Quite a lot. I had rather a busy time of it, from 1942 onwards.’

‘Was it something that happened in Wesel? When we met up.’

The name Wesel seemed to jolt him, physically.

‘Oh, Wesel. Jesus. Yes, that was. .’ He searched for the words. ‘A fucking nightmare.’

I remembered coming across him and his men, sitting silently around the shattered bandstand; remembered their faces, filthy, drawn and gaunt.

‘Did something happen, then?’ I pressed gently. ‘In Wesel. March 1945.’

‘Oh, God, what happened?. . Oh, yes. That’s right. I killed dozens of people. Lots.’

‘People?’

‘Soldiers. Well, hardly soldiers.’ His face began to crumple and his lips trembled. ‘Kids.’

Then he wouldn’t say any more.

I remember, in the next school holidays, Annie coming downstairs to find me, saying, Mummy come quickly, something’s gone wrong with Papa. I sent her away and went upstairs, walking quietly into our bedroom. Sholto was sitting on his bed in his pyjamas, looking out through the big bay window at the view down Glen Crossan, weeping.

‘What’s wrong, my love?’ I said softly, sitting down beside him and putting an arm round his shoulders.

‘I want to die,’ he whispered. ‘Why’s it taking so long?’

Sholto had his wish when his second, fatal, heart attack took place in September 1961. Mrs Dalmire found him unconscious on the floor of the gunroom. An ambulance was called and sped him to the hospital in Oban and then, when he couldn’t be revived, he was rushed to the Royal Infirmary in Glasgow where, just before midnight, he was pronounced dead. He was fifty-five years old.

3. CONSEQUENCES

THE MASTER OF FARR, Andrew Farr (unmarried), became the 13th Baron Farr of Glencrossan. And Benedicta, Lady Farr, became his Cardinal Richelieu, Jezebel and the Duchess of Malfi combined. Another mistake — Sholto had died without changing his will. The will that existed was the will he had made when Andrew was born. He’d never added any codicil that referred to me, or Annie and Blythe. And thus my troubles began, anew.

There was immediate consternation about the disarray in the Farr estate finances. Two weeks after Sholto’s funeral I was summoned to a meeting at Benedicta’s house in Crossan Bridge. Andrew was there and Mr Archibald Strathray, the family solicitor, and Mr Fairbairn Dodd from Carntyne Petre & Co. Tea was offered; I asked for a whisky and soda.

Benedicta wasted no time in apportioning blame. What exactly had occurred in the fifteen years I’d been married to Sholto? How could a once-thriving estate now be so penurious? I suggested that Fairbairn Dodd confirm to Benedicta what he had once told me, namely that Sholto had gambled away tens of thousands of pounds without my knowledge and that he had progressively sold off the estate’s assets in an attempt to conceal his addiction.

‘Addiction?’ Benedicta scoffed. ‘That’s absurd.’

‘Mr Dodd, please.’

‘Yes, I was aware of the problem, Lady Farr,’ he said to Benedicta. He was uncomfortable but there was nothing he could do. Then Benedicta and Andrew — Andrew meekly nodding and muttering consent as his mother spoke — laid out their plans. I was to vacate the House of Farr: the will was explicit, Andrew was to inherit everything. I sat there and listened resolutely as my new future was blocked out, feeling the ache of the loss of Sholto and also a growing anger at his oversight. Everything could have been so much simpler — another bloody mistake, I thought, as we began to bicker over the scraps that remained. Benedicta was particularly incensed by the sale of the Raeburns — ‘Our heritage, gone forever!’ — and the South Kensington mews house (her holidays in the capital ruined). At every rebuke I turned to Mr Dodd and he edgily backed me up. ‘Lady Farr had no alternative,’ he told Lady Farr.

‘In point of fact, Mr Dodd,’ I said, ‘it was on your advice that I sold the Raeburns.’

‘I believe it was.’

We broke up with nothing resolved. Archibald Strathray, as we collected our coats in the hall, turned to me and, in a low voice, recommended that I find myself a lawyer, fast. I had allies among the functionaries.

So I asked Jock Edie if he knew someone ferocious and uncompromising and not too expensive and he recommended a patient of his, a young Glasgow solicitor called Joe Dunraven. We duly met. Joe Dunraven was a small, fair, handsome man with a distinct Glasgow accent and a quickly revealed social anger at anyone he regarded as lazy and over-privileged. I think I only escaped his censure because he could see I was broke and being persecuted by the family. After five minutes’ conversation I asked him to represent me and, to my surprise, he agreed instantly. He wasn’t cheap, in fact, but Dido had offered to pay his fee. I looked forward to his coming encounter with Benedicta, Lady Farr. I told him what I required, as a matter of basic survival — first, a place to live, now I was being turfed out of the House of Farr, my home of fifteen years. It was clear I was unwelcome anywhere on the Glencrossan estate; that my daughters’ school fees be paid, and that I receive a basic income until their education was over.

‘I think we can do better than that, Amory,’ he said with a confident grin. I had invited him to call me Amory after he insisted that I call him Joe. It established our egalitarian standards.

I didn’t attend the next meeting at Crossan Bridge, leaving it to my fired-up proxy to make my case. After it was over he came to the house, not quite managing to keep the smile from his lips, and we each drank a large whisky together and smoked a cigarette in celebration as he told me what he had won from the Farrs.

I was to be given the choice of three ‘dwellings’ owned by the estate, and the one I chose would be mine ‘in perpetuity’. The trust fund that was paying the girls’ school fees would continue and they would each receive a benefaction of £1,000 on their twenty-first birthdays. I was to be guaranteed a personal income of £500 per annum for the next ten years. The quid pro quo was that I and my family could make no further claim on the estate.

I declared myself well pleased and warmly shook Joe Dunraven’s hand — and then spontaneously kissed him on the cheek, such was my relief. Thus encouraged, he asked me out to dinner but I made an excuse: if he didn’t mind, I was still grieving, I wasn’t fit company. But I was a little taken aback — I think Joe Dunraven had acquired a sudden interest in the Scottish aristocracy, however spurious a member of that clan I was.

I looked at the three properties I was offered and chose the least valuable, a cottage on the island of Barrandale. The other two were a terrace house in Mallaig and a large bungalow in Newton Mearns, Glasgow. It showed me that Sholto hadn’t entirely depleted the Farr estate and I wondered what other assets were hidden away. But I didn’t care. Once I’d seen the cottage it wasn’t a difficult decision. Even though Barrandale was barely an island, it was symbolically separate from the mainland and I liked the idea of living in an isolated house, if somewhat decrepit, with its own small bay and a view of the Atlantic Ocean beyond. The girls agreed, instantly, and were very excited. It was the perfect contrast and antidote to the House of Farr — a place I never returned to again.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I still dream about Sholto, all these years later. His death came as a dreaded and devastating shock even though I knew it wasn’t far away; but at the same time I couldn’t deny how ardently he had wished for it — and who was I to demand that he prolong the unending torment that his living hours so obviously were? He wanted to go more than anything else and I was glad for him. I was dry-eyed at his funeral, concentrating on this, thinking: you’re free, Sholto, all your troubles are over. We will soldier on without you but you are now part of the transcendental history of the universe. Dust to dust, atoms to atoms. I realised, as I heard the eulogies and we sang the hymns, that Sholto had enjoyed very little of his life these last several years — not me, nor his daughters, nor his home, his lands, his heritage had made any difference — and if you feel that way about being alive, if life doesn’t offer you the slightest consolation, if you savour nothing, not even the tiniest insignificant feature that the planet and your fellow humans can offer, then you shouldn’t hang around, in my opinion. As Charbonneau once said to me — take the cyanide pill, now.

But it was also clear to me that whatever awful event had occurred in Wesel in 1945 had come, slowly but surely, to dominate his conscious being and had started to define the sort of person he thought he was, and that this had made him drink so much, explained why he was so careless, in every sense of the word, explained why he lost his love for everything. He was too much of the brave soldier to blow his brains out or swallow pills so he killed himself with other means to hand — alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs, self-neglect. I felt an enormous weight of sadness at his death but — and is it shocking to admit this? — a huge relief and a kind of happiness for him now he was free of himself, of the world and its burdens.

I kept all this from Annie and Blythe — who were initially shattered, abject, uncomprehending, and then recovered quickly, as the young will, with their own lives to lead beckoning them onwards. Poor Papa, they both said. Why didn’t he take more care? Didn’t he realise what he was doing to himself? We talked about it a great deal, the three of us, and I alluded to a dark unhappiness, to something that had happened to him in the war that had made him go a bit mad, and they both said they understood and provided me with more anecdotes of Sholto’s bizarre behaviour that they had witnessed but hadn’t told me.

We left the House of Farr, with few regrets, once the cottage was ready for us. I bought us a Labrador, Flim, from a kennels in Oban and our new life began.

Flim, Barrandale, 1962.

*

I travelled to England, to Hereford, to meet Frank Dunn. He hadn’t been able to come to the funeral but Aldous King-Marley (who gave the address) told me how to make contact with him.

Frank Dunn had been a twenty-year-old second lieutenant during the Commando Brigade’s attack on Wesel in 1945. Now, aged thirty-seven, he was still in the army, a major in 22 SAS Regiment. He was married with two young children and he still had that lean, super-fit aspect about him that I remembered from Sholto just after the war. He was no jowly pot-bellied habitué of the officers’ mess — Frank Dunn hadn’t stopped serious soldiering, that was very plain.

We left his house and went to a pub down the road so we could talk, uninterrupted by his children. We spoke about Sholto, candidly, and Frank admitted that the man he had become at the end of his life was a bleak shadow of his former commanding officer.

‘What happened in Wesel?’ I said. ‘Sholto would never tell me.’

‘Well, I wasn’t there the whole night,’ Frank said. ‘A bit of shrapnel hit me in the ankle and I had to be strapped up at a dressing station, so I missed a lot — but heard the story later, of course. In fact everyone knew — but nobody ever really wanted to talk about it.’

Frank told me what had taken place that night — using our glasses, ashtray, cigarette packets to make the geography of the town more intelligible. Sometime after midnight on 23 March, 15 Commando’s progress, mopping up and clearing out pockets of resistance that had survived the massive bombardment, had been stopped by heavy fire from one particular building — a former post office — that overlooked a crossroads. This building had a large cellar basement and there were squat, barred, recessed windows with thick mullions set at pavement level in the ground floor’s heavy rustication that gave excellent protection and afforded perfect firing positions on the streets converging on the crossroads.

‘We were losing men. It was like a bunker, that place. The top had fallen in but the ground floor was solid, thick walls and these embrasures let them fire on us from all angles. Machine guns, Panzerfausts, Panzerschrecks — like bazookas, you know. Then someone spotted a small back entrance in the next street.’

He said that Sholto took the decision to lead a section round himself and they saw that if they could blast the door off they might have a way into the cellar.

‘And that’s what they did. Blew the door off,’ Frank said. ‘Sholto had a kitbag full of grenades and he just slung them in, one after another. Boom-boom-boom. Anyone who tried to scramble out was gunned down. Then one of the grenades must have hit a stock of ammo and the whole place was ripped apart. All went quiet.

‘So,’ he went on, a little grimly, ‘Sholto goes in first, then David Farquhar. Almost everyone’s dead, blown to pieces, suffocated, whatever. Thick smoke everywhere. A few wounded, screaming and crying.’ He frowned. ‘The trouble was, once the air cleared, we saw they were all Hitler Youth — adolescent boys, fourteen or fifteen — younger. A couple of older officers, but basically we’d been fighting kiddies, little lads. And Sholto had single-handedly killed them all. That was the thing that got to him.’

Frank went on to say that when he limped up, some half an hour after the battle around the post office had ended, the bodies had been carried out into the street and laid out in rows. ‘About thirty or so of them, all told,’ he said. ‘It was very upsetting, no getting away from it, seeing these dead boys. It wasn’t right, you know, asking these children to fight our lot. They didn’t stand a hope in hell.’

I thought back to that morning, to the bandstand in the ruined park and the eerie silence of the commandos, taking in what they’d just seen and done.

‘There’s a difference between a young soldier and a boy,’ Frank said. ‘Most soldiers are very young — but those Hitler Youth. I mean, I was only twenty, for God’s sake. But I was a man, exceptionally well trained in my job. These boys should have been at school or at home with their mum and dad. And I could see, even then, that Sholto was affected very badly. I think it was because he’d taken it on himself to throw all the grenades in. We all said: how could anyone know? They were shooting at us, killing and wounding us. As far as we were concerned they might have been SS storm troopers. But it shook him up — it shook me up. I think now we shouldn’t have brought the bodies up from the cellar, laid them out in the street like that; we should have just left them in the house and moved on. A lot of the guys were very upset when they saw how young they were. .’

He tailed off and finished his gin and tonic. He was looking a bit grim and upset himself, thinking back in this way.

‘I definitely need another large one of these,’ he said.

I said I did too.

4. SCOTIA!

‘Right everybody. Big smile! Say “cheese”!’

The group stiffened up, checked their positions, put on their unnatural smiles and I took the photograph. Some twenty people were lined up, arranged in two rows, the bride and groom centred, in front of the entrance to the old parish church in Peebles, in the Tweed Valley. I took two more photographs for luck and let the wedding party disperse to the reception at the Tontine Hotel about a hundred yards away.

I packed away my camera and tripod and lugged them back to where I’d parked the Imp. I felt the usual depression settle on my shoulders and ignored it. No, Amory, stop it. I wasn’t photographing pets but it was close. Still, I had a job, I was earning money. I had no right to complain or feel aggrieved.

I was working for a monthly illustrated magazine called Scotia!. It was a rival to similar magazines such as Scottish Field, Caledonia, Scotland Today, Bonny Scotland and the like, whose staple journalistic menu dealt with the seasonal traditions of our small country — shooting, fishing (‘Rod, Reel and Line’), stalking, game fairs, agricultural shows (‘Country Notes’), robust outdoor fashion, motor cars and — this is where I came in — the social round. Weddings, balls (‘How to Wear a Sash’), christenings, Highland gatherings, tournaments, military tattoos, funerals and so on, were covered by Scotia! with all the nuance and artistic flair reserved for team photographs of rugby, football, golf and cricket clubs. The subjects formed a line and they were photographed. Couples stood side by side, ditto. These subjects and couples then usually asked for copies of said photographs and thereby provided a significant revenue stream for the magazine. It was not to be taken lightly, so the editor regularly told me.

Scotia! was edited by a client of Joe Dunraven. Joe had secured me the job as a favour once he knew my history as a professional photographer. His client, Hughie Anstruther, was more than happy to take me on, given my experience (and my title), but he very quickly advised me: don’t get any fancy ideas, Lady Farr, this is not American Mode. I didn’t.

Hughie Anstruther was a neat, waspish, vain man who combed his side hair over his bald pate in an elaborate coil, like a table mat or hemp rope, and was oblivious to the tonsorial effect of this on his otherwise respectable appearance. But I came to like him and the job he gave me allowed me to supplement my allowance from the Farr settlement. I wasn’t poor but I had to budget carefully. I had a house to live in but it was certainly no palace. It struck me that, entirely inadvertently, I had come full circle. I had started off an impoverished young woman, taking society photographs with Greville in the 1920s to make ends meet, and here I was, decades on, an impecunious middle-aged woman, doing exactly the same.

The world of Scotia! © Scotia Media Enterprises Ltd, 1964.

I was beginning to feel, also, after the turmoil of my recent years with Sholto, that I’d entered a form of quietus. The cottage was entirely comfortable, though a little basic; the girls were on the point of leaving school; I was relatively solvent, relatively comfortably housed, secure enough, employed, after a fashion. I couldn’t complain. But was I happy?

I had integrated myself, as far as any newcomer could, into the small but diverse island community of Barrandale. I had found a few new friends and, another bonus, because they were new I could tell them as much or as little about my past as I wanted. I never advertised myself as the widow of Sholto, Lord Farr. I was just Mrs Farr, or Amory, to the people I dealt with or counted as my new acquaintances.

I hadn’t sought the Scotia! job. Joe Dunraven who, as a matter of course, knew far too much about me, had suggested me to Hughie, and Hughie, thinking my background would open more doors, had eagerly hired me. The job was undemanding: once I’d returned home from whatever wedding or grand ceilidh or memorial service I would develop the film, print contact sheets, annotate them with the names to fill the captions and post them off with the rolls of film to the office in Glasgow. And the next month there would be the evidence of my work on the ‘social pages’. I was consoled only by the thought that I had insisted on remaining uncredited and that I was — in a manner of speaking — still a professional photographer.

I remember when she was fourteen Blythe said that she wanted a guitar for her birthday and so I bought her one. She was quite musical, it turned out — Dido was delighted — and also took piano lessons at school. One night in the cottage when she and Annie were home on holiday I asked her to play something. She sang a song she had written, a plangent minor-key version of the folk song ‘Bobbie Shafto’. She sang it in a husky but true voice as Annie and I sat opposite her, Annie sitting on the floor by my feet, Blythe perched on a stool in front of the fire, her big guitar balanced across her knee.

Bonny Sholto’s gone away,

He’ll not be back another day.

Wherever he’s gone, he’s there to stay,

Bonny Daddy, Sholto.

The song continued — ‘Bonny Sholto went to war’ — but the three of us were sobbing halfway through the second verse and had to stop and hug each other. It was a moment of real catharsis for us all and I had a full sense of the girls’ loss, also. It wasn’t just my grief; the difficult, complicated life of Sholto Farr wasn’t just my problem; the damage wasn’t just limited to me.

I remember that we all went on holiday to Italy to see Greville in his new life. Having sent him out there on assignment in 1944 for GPW, I’m not sure we ever received one photograph in return. But somehow, in his leisurely travels as he — at careful distance — followed the 110th Infantry Division as it advanced north up through Italy, he had contrived to engage a young artist as his translator, called Gianluca Furlan. Gianluca had inherited a small but rather lovely house up in the hills behind Viareggio, in northern Tuscany. After the war Greville moved in. He took photographs; Gianluca painted the Tuscan landscape. They seemed entirely happy and Greville swore he owed it all to me.

We spent two weeks with them in 1965. The girls had just done their A levels. We were there in July and every two days or so we’d drive down to the wide beach at Viareggio and spend a day by the sea. Greville took this photograph of the three of us. The three Farr women, he called us.

Me and the twins, Viareggio, 1965.

I remember buying a book, a popular military history about the last months of the Second World War called Desperate Endgame: British Armies in the Final Year, 1944–1945. There was a page or two dedicated to the battle for Wesel during Operation Plunder. All it had to say relevant to Sholto was this:

15 Commando, under the command of Lt Col Lord Farr, encountered stiff resistance at a crossroads to the east of the town centre. It took some hours to clear out the strongpoint. At daybreak 15 Commando gathered in a small park where it was discovered that their casualties were six dead, fourteen wounded. The assault on Wesel was a copybook Commando action: in the ferocious street fighting they had proved their mettle.

No comment.

I remember once we were having a picnic, me and the girls, out at the foot of Beinn Morr on a windy, sunny day, the grass bleached and bending in the tugging breeze, and Blythe, who was sitting beside me, asked if we could play Greville’s Game. At that time of her life she was always asking me if we could play the game with her. Annie couldn’t be bothered joining in — she thought it was ‘stupid’.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What about that little river?’

‘Wet, brown, fast, silky. Too easy, Ma. Let’s do people.’

‘Mr Kinloss. Remember him?’

‘Fat, grey, polite, mysterious.’

‘Good. Yes! I never thought of that.’ She was fast, Blythe, never taking more than a few seconds to come up with her adjectives.

‘Now it’s your turn,’ she said, brightly. ‘Do me. And be honest.’

‘That’s not fair.’

‘No, you do me, then I’ll do you.’

I felt a little shadow of worry — this could have consequences, I realised, not necessarily welcome, but there was no avoiding the issue. Annie had wandered off with her bottle of lemonade and was tossing pebbles into the shallow burn that gurgled by our picnic spot — she couldn’t hear our conversation, I was sure.

I looked at Blythe.

‘Pretty, stubborn, clever, complicated.’

She thought about this, frowning, making a little moue with her lips, weighing up the epithets and seeing if they fitted.

‘Now you do me,’ I said.

‘Pretty, stubborn, clever, complicated,’ she said instantly.

I laughed and she joined in but I had received the message — especially as she now glanced over her shoulder to make sure that Annie hadn’t overheard. I was beginning to think she’d laid a trap for me — and now there was a private bond between us. She was telling me — so I reasoned — like mother, like daughter. She was probably right.

‘Now do Andrew Farr,’ I said, wanting to break the mood.

‘Dull, shifty, boring, dominated.’

Annie wandered over.

‘What are you two laughing at?’ she asked, irritated.

I remember receiving the A level results for the twins in the post and undergoing the ritual opening of the envelopes at the breakfast table. Annie had done well; Blythe less so — but she said she didn’t care. She was going to be a musician, A levels were of no use. I agreed.

Annie secured a place at one of the new universities, Sussex, to read for a degree entitled ‘International Relations’, whatever that was.

I took her out to dinner in Oban, to celebrate (Blythe was away, somewhere). I looked at her across the table and allowed my love for serious Annie to brim. She had a long thin face — Blythe’s was rounder, prettier — and she was taller than Blythe, also.

‘Ma, would you mind if I asked you a favour?’ she said.

‘Anything.’

‘You know that, because of Papa’s title, I’m “the Honourable” Andra Farr?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, I don’t ever want to be called that. I got a letter from the university and it called me “the Honourable”. I was so embarrassed.’

‘That’s all right, darling. I understand.’

‘I just don’t want that title ever to be used. Ever again. No disrespect to Papa, and all that.’

‘Of course. I don’t much like being “Lady Farr” either.’ I squeezed her hand. ‘It’s expunged.’

At the university, in her hall of residence, she was less than an hour from Beckburrow and, much to my surprise, went there every other weekend or so to spend time with her grandmother, who was old, and ailing, but still feistily alert. While Annie was there she unearthed a cache of my early photographs, and others of the period. She sent me a small selection: there was a tattered one of me when I was twenty, standing in the pond at Beckburrow, posing; and one of me as a little girl with my father, taken by Greville. It must be in 1913 or 1914, just before he went off to war.

I remember one odd moment. Blythe and I were out for a walk on the beach with Flim — Annie had gone south to check out her new hall of residence.

‘I hate that bitch, Benedicta,’ Blythe said, all of a sudden.

‘Well, so do I,’ I admitted. ‘Nasty piece of work. Grasping, smug, malicious, insincere.’

‘Do you think if someone killed her anyone would mind for one minute? For one second?’

‘Don’t say that sort of thing, Blythe, not even as a joke.’

‘It’s not a joke. She kicked us out.’

I took her hand — she was flushed, there was a real rage building.

‘It doesn’t matter, darling. We wouldn’t have been happy there, at the House. It was never really our home.’

It seemed to mollify her. She was leaving as well, the next day, for London, to stay with Dido and Reggie Southover at their rather grand house on Camden Hill. Blythe wanted to audition for folk bands or rock groups — she didn’t care, keyboard or guitar, she just wanted to play music. Dido was her inspiration and they became quite close. There was a musical gene in the Clay family, shared by Dido and Blythe — they were different from the rest of us, the littérateurs, the photographers.

I remember I had a rare letter from Charbonneau telling me the news of the birth of his second child — a son, Luc. He enclosed a photograph of himself, ‘So you won’t forget what I look like.’ I saw he’d put on weight and grown a moustache again. He was standing on a terrace on the Italian Riviera, somewhere, and I supposed he vaguely wanted me to feel jealous about the high life he was leading. I couldn’t help thinking he didn’t look particularly happy.

Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau, 1962.

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

I liked to quiz Greer about her old subject, cosmology, as there were aspects of it that intrigued me, to her occasional exasperation.

‘So the Big Bang happened thirteen billion years ago?’ I once asked her, when we were out for a walk.

‘Thirteen point eight billion years ago. Give or take a day or two,’ she said. ‘Oh God, you’re going to ask me more questions, aren’t you?’

‘Because I’m interested,’ I said. ‘You’ve stimulated my interest, Greer. You should be pleased.’

We were walking down from the heights of Cnoc Torran, that we’d climbed that morning, heading back for lunch at the cottage. We had a magnificent view of the various islands around Barrandale. I could see Mull as clearly as I’d ever seen it — I could see a red car driving on the road along the north end of Loch Don.

‘The Big Bang explains all this,’ I said, gesturing freely towards Mull and the ocean beyond. ‘Everything started then.’

‘Everything. It explains everything. You and me. This grass, the clouds above.’ She pointed. ‘That insect — and the universe. It all began then.’

‘How can you be so sure?’ I paused to tie a lace on my walking boot.

‘Well, we have something called the “standard model”. It explains almost everything.’

‘Almost.’

‘Yes.’

‘And the stuff you can’t explain?’

Greer looked at me shrewdly. ‘I know I’m going to regret this.’

‘That’s where your dark matter comes in, doesn’t it,’ I said. ‘Dark matter explains the things that don’t add up, in theory.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘And dark gravity. And dark energy.’

‘I know it sounds rather spooky and exciting, but it’s complicated. There has to be dark matter to explain the anomalies.’

I snapped my fingers.

‘You need all these “dark” things to explain why the “standard model” doesn’t supply all the answers.’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

‘You see that’s what I love about cosmology. It’s exactly the same for the rest of us.’

‘You mustn’t do this, Amory. We hate this. Scientists hate this. . this appropriation. You don’t understand.’

‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘Or yes, I do. Just like you cosmologists, we can’t explain everything. Things don’t add up. What about “dark” love? Why did I fall in love with that hopeless person? “Dark” love explains it. Why did I get this annoying illness? “Dark” disease. Stuff I can’t see is affecting me, the way I act.’

‘No, no, no. You’re turning hard science into a metaphor.’

‘Which I’m entitled to. “Dark” illness. “Dark” weather. “Dark” incompetence. “Dark” politics.’

She had to laugh. We walked on, almost bouncing downhill on the springy grass.

‘The “dark” concept explains why you can’t explain things,’ I said. ‘It’s wonderfully liberating. Why won’t my car start this morning? It started yesterday. “Dark” auto-engineering.’

‘Just don’t tell anyone you got it from me.’

‘You see, the “standard model” of the human condition just doesn’t work, either. It’s inadequate. Just as the “standard model” of the universe doesn’t work for you lot.’

‘What’re we having for lunch?’

‘Dark shepherd’s pie.’

I remember we drank a lot at that lunch — we always drank a lot but I think Greer wanted the inhibition-removal that a boozy lunch sometimes provides. She told me about an affair she’d had with a colleague of Calder’s. The affair had ended when he had gone to join a think tank in London — distance working as prophylactic — but he’d written to her, recently, asking her to come and see him.

‘Have you ever had an affair, Amory?’ she asked me.

‘Well, not when I was married,’ I said. ‘But I did have an affair when I was having an affair.’ I paused, thinking back. ‘Twice, in fact.’

‘Only you could make it that complicated,’ she said.

‘I don’t quite know how it happened,’ I said. ‘Dark love?’

‘I’m beginning to see your logic.’ She sipped at her wine. ‘Should I go to London? What do you think?’

‘I think you should do what you want to do. As the poet said: the desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews. .’

She laughed. ‘You’re no help.’

‘Exactly.’

*

For some bizarre reason Dido took a strong liking to Barrandale. She came to stay for a week or so two or three times a year, to ‘rest’ after her concert tours and recitals. ‘I need to recharge every battery, darling,’ she would say. ‘Peace, silence, nothingness, and a large gin and tonic, that’s all I ask.’ In 1966, she was at the height of her fame — Béla Bartók had dedicated a horn trio to her; she was a regular at the BBC Proms; Harold Wilson invited her to lunch at 10 Downing Street; she was awarded the CBE. However, her marriage to Reggie Southover was ending. She was having an affair with a clarinettist from the Orquesta Nacional de España — ‘Poor as a church mouse,’ she said. ‘But rather lovely, all the same. It’s the Latin spirit I crave, I should never have anything to do with Anglo-Saxons.’

Dido Clay CBE, 1966.

I teased her once, asking her if she had an affair with one member of every orchestra she played with.

‘Not every orchestra,’ she said, entirely seriously. ‘No, I’m very picky.’

She once said, ‘Have you noticed, Herbert von Karajan and Lenny Bernstein have exactly the same hair — same floppy front, same distinguished grey, same style — do you think it’s a conductor thing?’

‘Have you slept with either of them? Or both?’ I asked.

‘Well, I had a bit of a moment with one of them, I confess — but I won’t tell you which.’

Even though she obviously loved coming to Barrandale, she always complained about the cottage and its minor privations. She also began to dig away at me.

‘What’re you going to do now the girls have gone? You can’t take photographs of Scottish weddings for the rest of your life.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

It happened again. I tried to pick up a jam jar this morning with my left hand to put it back in the refrigerator but I couldn’t. My hand just wouldn’t grip. I sat down, had a minute’s rest, and tried again. It worked — but just as I was going to put it on the shelf my grip loosened and the jar fell to the floor and smashed.

This is as bad as it’s ever been, my particular, worrying problem. My brain told my hand to grip but it refused. Jock Edie — whom I’d told about this problem, and who told me what he suspected was wrong — said that one day I’d have to go and see a neurologist. Perhaps the time has come.

I had lunch with Hugo Torrance at the hotel — during which my hold on the cutlery seemed secure. We were at our usual corner table tucked in beside the fireplace — where, as it happened, the first fire of the autumn was burning nicely, so Hugo informed me. As if to justify its being lit, it was raining quite heavily outside. We ate rare roast beef and drank red wine. I was feeling ideally mellow but suspicious.

‘All this is heading somewhere,’ I said. ‘I can tell by that look in your eye.’

‘It can head anywhere you like.’

‘Come on, spit it out.’

‘I’ve sold the hotel.’

This was indeed a surprise. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Are you pleased?’

‘Yes. And — more news — I’ve bought that ruined cottage round the headland from you. We’re going to be neighbours.’

*

After Dido left to go back to London, Hughie Anstruther called and reminded me that I was covering the Northern Meeting in Inverness. It would be an overnight stay and he wondered if I’d need an assistant.

‘The world and his wife seem to be going this year,’ he said. ‘Get your best frock out, sweetheart.’

I was not enthused. This would be my third Northern Meeting. I could just about handle the ball but the prospect of photographing the bagpipe-competition winners filled me with prescient fatigue. Dido was right — I had to make a change, do something entirely different. But what? All I knew was photography.

I went out for a walk, ostensibly to think, and headed unerringly for the bar at the Glenlarig Hotel. I ordered a whisky and water and asked if Mr Torrance was in and was informed that he was upstairs in his flat. I thought he might be exactly the man to ponder my dilemma with and headed off to find him. As I made my way towards his private rear stairway I passed the residents’ lounge where the door was open wide and a mute television set was silently broadcasting the evening news to a ring of empty armchairs. A flowering fire and dust-filled explosion filled the screen — oddly beautiful in its expanding terrible energy, like a giant grey chrysanthemum or monochrome dahlia — that caught my attention and I stepped inside for a second.

An unsteady hand-held camera was focussed on a bespectacled woman in a dirty, sweaty uniform crouched in a ditch talking into a microphone. She was wearing a tin helmet with the word ‘PRESS’ written on the front in white letters. In the background two ragged columns of smoke rose over jungle hills. Despite her grimy face and the unfamiliar spectacles I realised I knew who this woman was and stooped forward to turn up the volume just as she was signing off.

‘This is Lily Perette, Dang Tra province, with the US Marine Corps.’

What was it that made me decide I had to go to Vietnam? Initially, it was seeing Lily Perette on the television screen and remembering the last war we’d been involved in together. Suddenly I had this feeling that I wanted urgently to be there with her, to ask her questions: what was it like, was it dangerous, how had she come to be in Vietnam of all places? And then I realised — more analysis kicking in — that the emotion I was actually experiencing was envy. I envied Lily Perette at that moment and I felt that unbidden surge of excitement run through me. Perhaps I could go to this war, just like her. I had the same experience, the same qualifications, the same talent. . I didn’t go up to see Hugo but returned to the bar for another pensive drink.

I sat and considered my options. Could I rejoin GPW? No. That road was closed. Was there another way? I couldn’t just buy a plane ticket and fly out to the country like a tourist. Or could I. .? And then the sensible portion of my mind recalled that I had a secure and steady job, albeit moderately paid, and I should just head on up north to Inverness and the bagpipe competitions and forget all this impulsiveness, this foolishness.

Yet the more the realistic, sensible, solutions lined up and presented themselves the more the idea of somehow trying to go to Vietnam began to consume me. I wanted my old job back — I wanted to be a proper photographer again. The thought of Vietnam and its distant war seemed like the perfect antidote to more Scottish weddings and eightsome reels.

I think now — now that time has passed — that what I really wanted, fundamentally, was to confront warfare again. Not so much to test myself — I had been tested — but to see how the ‘me’ that existed then would function in a war zone, would experience war differently. War had shaped, directed and distorted my life in so many ways — through my father, Xan, Sholto — that I think that the zeal I was feeling was an unconscious response to this deeper need. After Sholto and my life with him, I wanted to experience something of what he had gone through but with my new knowledge — about him, about me — informing everything. I couldn’t rewind time and be wise after the event but I could go forward and seek some answers out for myself. The newer, older, wiser Amory Clay could live through what the former, younger, more innocent Amory hadn’t been able to evaluate fully. My education as a person, so I reasoned, would never be complete if I didn’t do this, if I didn’t see for myself — and then see myself, plain. I needed to learn how I would react and respond, what it would tell me about my life and my being.

Or so I internally argued as the evening wore on in the bar of the hotel. But I was a mother, also, I made the point, with two much-loved, precious daughters. Were my arguments specious or genuine? Was I being true to myself or selfish? Well, I would never know until I actually travelled out there and confronted my demons face to face.

It was as I wandered homeward in the dark that the answer came to me: I realised I knew exactly whom I could call — not Cleveland Finzi, but another former lover who might well be in a position to help me out. More to the point, he owed me a big favour, did Lockwood Mower, from way back.

I travelled down to London and arranged to meet Lockwood — much to his delighted surprise — in his offices at the Daily Sketch where he was now the senior picture editor. Lockwood was stouter, greyer and his moustache was wider though startlingly dark, like his eyebrows. The effect was strange, as if he were wearing a rather bad and conspicuous disguise. Once the pleasantries were over, I told him why I needed his help in what I wanted to do. He was aghast.

‘Vietnam? Are you out of your mind? You can’t go out there, Amory, you’re too—’ he didn’t finish as he could see my expression change.

‘You owe me this favour, Lockwood. Look at you — picture editor, big office, national newspaper.’ I leant forward. ‘Just add me quietly to your team.’

‘We don’t have a team. You can’t go out there on our ticket. Mr French would have a fit.’

‘Who’s Mr French?’

‘The editor.’

‘Then where do you get your Vietnam stuff from? You do know there’s a war on out there.’

‘Very funny, Amory. We buy it in from agencies.’

‘What agencies?’

He thought for a second.

‘We get most pictures from the Yanks, of course. A lot from this company, Sentinel Press Services. Very reasonable.’

‘American. Even better. I worked for an American magazine for years. Tell this Sentinel I worked for Global-Photo-Watch, ran their London and Paris offices in the war.’

He rubbed his chin.

‘No harm in trying, I suppose.’

‘I really want this to happen, Lockwood. Think about it — if I’m out there I can make sure you get all the good stuff.’

He agreed, it made sense. I lit a cigarette, sensing him looking at me in his old intense way, almost as if we were working together back in Greville’s studio.

‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you, Amory? It’s not some kind of whim, some mad idea?’

‘Deadly serious.’

‘All right. I’ll put a call in to the Sentinel people. See what I can do.’

I stayed on in London while I waited for news from Lockwood. I took Blythe and Annie out for dinner to a Vietnamese restaurant on the Cromwell Road called the Nam Quoc Palace as a rather too obvious pretext for letting them know my plans. When I told them that I wanted to pick up my old career again and go out to Vietnam to be a photojournalist, Annie appeared as excited by the prospect as I was — but Blythe seemed almost shocked.

‘It’s bloody dangerous, Ma,’ she said, frowning darkly at me. ‘What’re you thinking of?’

‘I’ve done it before,’ I said. ‘It was my job. I know what I’m doing — and I won’t be taking any risks, I can assure you.’

But Blythe kept on at me.

‘If you’ve done it once I don’t see why you need to do it again.’

‘I have to prove something to myself.’

‘What? Prove that you’re stupid?’

I let that go because I didn’t want to sour the mood of the evening any further. When Annie left to catch her train to Brighton Blythe stayed on and we ordered another coffee and some kind of sweet rice dumpling. Her mood seemed to calm and she took my hand and twiddled my wedding ring.

‘It’s because of Papa, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘That’s why you feel you need to go.’

‘Partly, yes,’ I said, trying to hide my surprise at her insight. ‘And it’s partly to do with me. And my life.’

She turned my ring round on my finger, then sighed and let my hand go. She busied herself meticulously rolling a thin cigarette. I lit up to keep her company and the two of us puffed away in silence for a few moments.

‘It’s so far away,’ she said, finally. ‘I think that’s what’s bothering me. You’re going to be on the other side of the world.’

‘I won’t be there forever.’

‘For how long, then?’ she asked, almost aggressively.

‘I’m not sure, yet. I have to get out there first.’

‘I may never see you again,’ she said, her eyes suddenly large with tears.

‘Don’t be so silly, darling,’ I said, perhaps more testily than I meant. ‘You know, I have a life to lead as well as you two. I can’t just sit and rot on Barrandale.’

‘Of course,’ she said, letting her body sag in the chair, closing her eyes and smiling to herself. ‘I just like the idea of you being close at hand.’

We hugged goodbye on the pavement and I promised I would call her as often as possible. She seemed more reconciled to the idea of my going away, now we were outside the restaurant, and I wondered if the pointed Vietnam theme had been a bad idea. Too late, anyway. I watched her saunter away towards her bus stop, a tall, thin and limber young woman in her shaggy coat, her long hair halfway down her back, and felt the old love-pang corkscrew through me. My pretty, stubborn, clever, complicated daughter.

When I returned to the hotel there was a message to call Lockwood at the Sketch.

‘Hello, Lockwood, it’s me.’

‘You’re on. Bon voyage.’