by William Boyd
‘No invasion today,’ he said. ‘For sure.’
‘What’re you talking about?’
‘The invasion of France. It will probably be tomorrow.’
Faith knocked on the office door, her double rap that meant it was important. I was interviewing a photographer. Five more were waiting in the club-room – we needed people in Normandy, urgently. GPW had nobody with the invasion fleet and I couldn’t understand why we’d been so remiss or how we’d been overlooked. Cleve had no idea so I had to work fast.
‘It’s your mother,’ Faith said. ‘Says it’s a matter of some urgency.’
I took the telephone at Faith’s desk.
‘Mother, what is it? I’m incredibly busy.’
‘Prepare yourself for sad news, my dear.’
‘What? What sad news?’
‘Your father has died.’
It was 6 June 1944. Le Débarquement. And the day my father died. D-Day. Dead Dad Day.
My father had been sitting in his favourite sheltered spot – a small open wooden gazebo that he’d had constructed at the foot of the garden at Beckburrow, working on one of his two-move checkmate chess problems when my mother had summoned him in for lunch. After lunch he said he was feeling tired and was going to take a nap. She called up to him in his bedroom when supper was ready and when he didn’t appear she went to look for him and found him still asleep, so she thought, and shook him by the shoulder – but he was dead. From a heart attack, seemed to be the likely explanation.
The funeral was on 10 June, remarkably speedy, given the momentous times we were living through, and was in Claverleigh’s parish church, St James the Less. It was a short service, one hymn, one reading – I read one of Xan’s poems from his collection, called ‘A Monk, Watching’ – and an address given by Eric Maude, the playwright who had adapted my father’s story ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’ – the one bona fide success in his life. Maude was an elderly, flushed man with a dandelion mane of white filmy hair and whose memory was not sure. He kept referring to my father as ‘Brotherton’, for some reason, not Beverley. ‘Brotherton was the most generous of collaborators.’ I could see my mother growing increasingly irritated.
Other mourners included some colleagues from Strand magazine and the publishing houses that my father read for. His own publisher was not present. Dido was there, of course, and she played a loud and complex toccata by Buxtehude as we all filed out into the graveyard, our ears ringing. Xan was flying combat missions over northern France in his Typhoon and Greville was away in Italy with the 2nd US Army Corps.
As the coffin was lowered into the ground the air was loud for a few minutes with the passage of dozens of high-flying bombers heading across the Channel and we all looked up. As the final blessing was spoken the noise of the planes diminished and I glanced round the small churchyard, dry-eyed, glad that my father’s death had been so sudden and just sorry that the two and a half decades since his awful experience in the First World War had been so devastating and undermining. I was pleased that his last years had been calmer and that his troubles were now over. ‘Rest in peace,’ the vicar said, barely disguising his boredom – he might have been saying ‘Pass the salt’ – but I had to agree.
The day was cool but sunny here in East Sussex, at least, and as the drone of the planes vanished it was replaced by the sound of a wood pigeon calling in the beech trees that lined the graveyard behind its waist-high ashlar wall. Every time I hear wood pigeons I will think of my father, I said to myself, and found the mnemonic consoling.
We decided to walk back to Beckburrow where sherry and biscuits were waiting to be served as a modest wake. Dido and I accompanied Eric Maude, who wielded a stick, but strode briskly, all the same, saying he was more than happy to stroll back, remembering – entirely falsely – the many walks he and Brotherton had taken around Claverleigh. We soon caught up with my mother who was at the head of the party, keen to be first at the house. She was in something of a state, frowning and upset.
‘Don’t worry, Mother,’ I said, taking her arm. ‘It was a lovely service.’
‘There’s been no obituary. It’s a disgrace!’
Her mood didn’t improve and she took to her bed in the afternoon when the guests had departed.
Dido and I went down to the gazebo with a bottle of sherry and a box of cigarettes. My father’s chessboard was still set up with six pieces laid out on it: a rook, a pawn, two knights and two kings. The last two-move composition he had been working on.
‘Make any sense to you, these problems he posed?’ Dido asked, pointing at the chessboard.
‘No, not a clue. Mate in two moves. Baffling.’
‘He couldn’t remember the time of day but he could solve fiendish chess problems . . . Funny old thing, the human brain. You were Papa’s favourite,’ she said, suddenly, topping up our sherry glasses. ‘Strange fellow, our father. He only tolerated me and Xan.’
‘He tried to kill me, Dido.’
‘Oh yes, of course. Forgot about that.’ She lit a cigarette.
I thought about what Dido had said and wondered if that were true. Had I been my father’s favourite? If I had, then that made his descent into madness all the more poignant, and the inevitable rift that occurred between us all the more sad and remorseful. Everything had changed after that day at the lake and as I sat here looking at his impossible chess problem the regrets began to accumulate within me almost unbearably. Just what had I lost, in fact? What had that war done to my father – and what part of him had been taken away from me forever?
Dido was saying something – I was glad of the distraction.
‘Sorry. I was just thinking of Papa,’ I said.
‘I’ve got something to tell you. I’m leaving Peregrine.’
I thought for a moment. Yes, this was significant: leaving Peregrine Moxon, the composer, the mentor, the man who had created Dido Clay from humble Peggy, the child prodigy.
‘Are you just leaving him? Or leaving him for someone else?’
‘For someone else.’
‘Do I know him?’
‘Reggie Southover.’
Blank. ‘Should I have heard of him?’
‘For heaven’s sake, Amory! Reginald Southover, the playwright.’
‘At least it’s not Eric Maude.’
‘That’s not in the least bit funny. You must have heard of him. He had two shows running in the West End in the summer before the war.’
‘I was in New York.’
‘Well, we’re madly in love.’
‘How old is he?’
‘Fifty-five. No, fifty-seven.’
‘Dido, you’re twenty-nine.’
‘I’m old for my age.’
‘That’s true. Is he rich?’
‘That’s got nothing to do with it.’ Pause. ‘He’s well off, I admit.’
‘What about Peregrine?’
‘He says he’ll kill himself.’
‘Poor thing.’
‘Good luck to him, I say.’
I closed my eyes as Dido rambled on about Peregrine’s failings – his enormous selfishness, his profound weakness as a man, his persistent jealous attempts to control her career – and tried to conjure up an image of my father before he was ill and I saw him, in my mind’s eye, standing on his hands, mocking and pitying us poor deluded inhabitants of our topsy-turvy world.
Peggy (Dido), my father and me around 1918.
I remember the month of June 1944. I stayed on at Beckburrow to keep my mother company, commuting to London by train, but it wasn’t really necessary as she seemed to pick up her old life without fuss. I suppose my father’s inconspicuous presence these past years had barely registered as she went about her business. He kept himself to himself, working on his chess problems; there was a cook and a housemaid to provide for and supervise him and they both met only at the evening meal – or sometimes not. Now he was gone so were the small traces he left at Beckburrow.
The sky above East Sussex in those wee
ks of June was full of aircraft flying to France and back again. Then in mid-June came the flying bombs – the doodlebugs – announced by the annoying sputtering roar of their engines. ‘Bugs’ was the wrong name – they were big, like small single-seater aeroplanes. I remember standing on the roof of the Holborn offices and seeing three of them at once and then the motor cut out on one of them and it arced down, like a thrown stone, somewhere in the region of St Paul’s. There was a percussive boom and a cloud of smoke and brick dust blossomed up prettily from the impact. In Chelsea I would lie in bed and hear them coming over – like a small motorcycle in the sky or an aerial lawnmower. There was something almost comic about the noise. But I lay there rigid – the noise was what you wanted; when it suddenly stopped, the fear kicked in as you imagined it hurtling down out of the night sky.
I remember I saw Cleve just once, briefly, after my night with Charbonneau. He seemed to suspect nothing; all was well and he said he’d be back in August. But I told Charbonneau he couldn’t stay on in my flat – to his sulky irritation. I found it impossible being the meat in a Charbonneau–Finzi sandwich. I didn’t like them both being in the city, paradoxically – I found it different from the situation in New York. How can I explain this? Perhaps because Cleve was back to his old self and I felt guilty betraying him. Life is complicated enough and I think I felt that, now my father had died, I didn’t need any more complications.
In the event, Charbonneau didn’t stay long in London. He left the week after Cleve, posted to Corsica to prepare for Operation Dragoon, the invasion of southern France that took place two months later. He was liaising between General de Lattre de Tassigny’s French Army B and the US 7th Army. He sent me a regular supply of postcards detailing how fed up he was – and how well fed he was.
I remember going on a three-day holiday to Woolacombe in Devon towards the end of June. An English GPW photographer – Gerry Mallow – had a cottage there and a ketch, named Palinurus, moored in Ilfracombe harbour. We would take the ketch out with a picnic and many bottles of beer and cider and sail out to Lundy Island.
It was an odd experience being on a holiday like that with people I didn’t really know very well. I went for walks and read books, happy to leave the running of the office to Faith. In an unconscious way I was also coming to terms with my father’s death, I now realise. I wasn’t feeling grief; I was assessing the end of a relationship. My natural father–daughter relationship with B. V. Clay had ended that afternoon when, in his madness, he had tried to kill us both. Every encounter I had with him subsequently had been shadowed by that event and despite the civil, dutiful signs of affection between us, I was always wary of him, watchful. The bonds had been broken and all that was left was the official designation – a father, a daughter.
I took a camera with me to Woolacombe, of course, but barely used it. One day when we were out sailing on the Palinurus I left it by the wheelhouse and somebody took a photograph of me. I discovered it two weeks later when I had the film developed.
*
Me on the Palinurus, 1944.
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I don’t have many photographs of myself – a trait common to most professional photographers, I believe – but I’ve always been fond of this one, for some reason. It’s probably my second favourite photograph of myself, after the one taken on my wedding day.
Flam has made a speedy recovery. The familiar dog in him is back. We walked over to the McLennans’ today and it tired him out rather – I mustn’t forget he’s as old as me in dog years.
*
I remember the doorbell ringing in my Chelsea flat very early in the morning on 1 July. It was 6.30, I saw by the kitchen clock. It rang and rang. I hauled on my dressing gown and hurried downstairs to the street entrance. It was my mother, but my mother as I’d never seen her – hair wild, eyes red-raw from weeping. I rushed her upstairs, she was wordless, sobbing, and sat her down. She sat there shaking, staring at her hands.
‘What is it mother, what’s happened?’
‘It’s Xan. I’ve had a telegram.’
I felt my lungs empty and my spine arch. I sat down slowly.
‘Xan’s missing. Missing in action, they say.’
4. PARIS
I LOOKED AT THE map again.
‘Take the next right,’ I said to Pearson Sorel, the driver of my jeep.
We bumped along a track, a sunken lane between high hedges of beech and hazel in the depths of the Normandy bocage, and turned right, pulling into the front yard of a farm called Le Moulin à Vent. A tethered collie gave a harsh peal of angry barks and then lay down again.
‘Wait here,’ I said to Pearson, stepped out of the jeep and approached the front door of a low stone building with a shallow-pitched tile roof. To one side of the courtyard there was an open wooden barn and a small stable with two loose boxes. I was wearing olive-green fatigues and a tin helmet, wanting to look as martial as I could. I had my camera in my knapsack and a box of 200 Lucky Strike cigarettes for use as a potential present, if required. I knocked on the door and said ‘Bonjour’ to the stooped ancient woman wrapped in a shawl who opened it. She looked me up and down and shouted ‘Arnaud! Arnaud!’ – and Arnaud duly appeared, a toothless smiley man with rosy cheeks and an immense soup-strainer moustache, like Nietzsche’s. Son or spouse? It wasn’t clear. I showed him the document I had – in French – my French wasn’t good enough to explain what I wanted. He searched for and found a pair of spectacles and read it carefully.
‘Ah, finalement,’ he said. ‘Suivez-moi, mademoiselle.’
We walked across the farmyard and through a gap between the barn and the stables. The land sloped down to a large apple orchard, an acre or so in extent. It was now September and the leaves were turning yellow and the ground between the trees was lumpy with windfalls. We made our way down through the orchard towards its end. Halfway through our progress I began to see the smashed trees, some snapped cleanly in half, and there, like some sort of bizarre tilted metallic ruin, was Xan’s Typhoon. The great boss of the propeller was buried deep in the turf, the blades shattered, the plane’s back broken. The Perspex canopy had been pushed open and the seat and the instrument panel already looked mossy and mouldy and I saw a spider’s web strung from the joystick to the cockpit fairing. One wing was fifty yards away, ripped off by the impact; the other wing was lifted crazily, near-vertical, showing the empty rail mountings where the rockets had been slung.
Strangely, the Typhoon, smashed and broken up like this, seemed even bigger and heftier in the orchard than it had when parked by the runway at RAF Cawston. Maybe it was the size of the apple trees, mature yet stunted and broad as apple trees are, that caused this delusion of scale, making the crashed plane seem even more surreally out of place in this orchard than it already was.
Arnaud was complaining and I understood enough to know that he was asking why this wreck that had been in his orchard for over two months now had not been cleared away.
‘Bientôt,’ I said, confidently. ‘Très bientôt,’ as if I had some power to effect its removal. I walked around the Typhoon, taking photographs, thinking about Xan’s last flight. I had used my journalistic connections with the air ministry, and then his squadron, to piece together as much information as was available.
Xan had flown a sortie at the end of June, the target a chateau in the Argentan area that was believed to be an army-group headquarters. He and the three other Typhoons in the flight had released their rockets in the face of only light anti-aircraft fire and had substantially damaged the chateau. It was therefore bad luck that Xan’s plane was hit, I was told, as it was observed peeling away after the first pass and trailing smoke and was then seen to crash in an apple orchard a few miles away. Apparently Xan had survived the crash and was standing waiting by his plane when he was shot dead by the first panicked German troops that arrived. A week later when Canadian forces overran the sector they were led by the local priest to Xan’s body, lying in a crypt in the church.
These were the few facts I had and as I walked around the plane I tried not to let my mind fill in the gaps and failed. Xan’s relief at surviving the crash, climbing stiffly out of the cockpit – maybe he lit a cigarette . . . Then hearing shouts, seeing the German soldiers running through the trees towards him, resigning himself to becoming a prisoner, raising his hands in surrender. Then the shots . . .
I turned to Arnaud.
‘Le pilote. Il était là?’ I pointed to the ground beside the plane. ‘Ou plus loin?’
Arnaud shrugged. He didn’t know. There were a lot of German troops hiding in the village from the air attacks. They had seen the plane crash and had come running. He stayed back.
‘Il a été abattu, le pilote. Vous savez?’
‘Yes. He was my brother,’ I said without thinking, then, seeing his uncomprehending face, translated it into French. ‘Il était mon frère.’ It sounded so different in French, so final, somehow, and it proved too much for me. I began to cry and the old man took my hand and led me carefully out of the orchard.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I still think about Xan, all these years later, thirty or so years on, and still curse myself for not having had any film in my camera that day at RAF Cawston. Why does it bother me? I’ve plenty of photographs of Xan – as a boy, as a young man – he’s stopped in time forever. But somehow I feel it would have been good to have snapped him by his plane, his Typhoon that became his coffin. Stupid mistake. Another mistake.
I was thinking about the mistakes we all make – or rather the concept of a ‘mistake’. It’s something that can only be realised in hindsight – big mistake or a small one. It was a mistake to marry him. It was a mistake to go to Brighton on a bank holiday. It was a mistake to write that letter in red ink. It was a mistake to have left home without an umbrella. We don’t sense mistakes coming, there’s this crucial unforeseen factor to them. So I found myself asking the question: what is the opposite of a mistake? And I realised there wasn’t a word, in fact, precisely because a mistake always arises from best intentions that go awry. You can’t set out to make a mistake. Mistakes happen – there’s nothing we can do about them.