Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  In early February ’46 I slipped on a patch of ice on the rue Monsieur and fell heavily to the ground, stunning myself. I fractured my right elbow (and wore a sling for two weeks) but, more worryingly, the fall made my vaginal bleeding start up after years of quiescence, and I was obliged to resume wearing my padded rubber knickers again. I was on the point of going to see a doctor when it suddenly stopped.

  I didn’t tell Charbonneau any of this, though he kept rebuking me – when he was home – for being boring. I wasn’t my usual annoying, animated self, I admit. But when the bleeding stopped and I discarded my nappy I felt my joie de vivre return. Except that Charbonneau was away again and couldn’t appreciate my rejuvenation.

  6. TRANSFORMATIONS

  IT WAS THE DAY after my thirty-eighth birthday – 8 March. The doorbell rang at the street entrance of 12 bis rue Monsieur, and Corisande went down to see who it was. She returned in some perplexity.

  ‘It’s a man, Miss Amory.’ She called me ‘Miss Amory’ even though I begged her repeatedly to drop the ‘Miss’.

  ‘Well, show him in.’

  ‘He has flowers.’

  ‘He’s delivering flowers from a florist?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  I smiled to myself. Charbonneau was home. Playing one of his tricks, surprising me.

  ‘I’ll get it,’ I said, and left our little apartment and went down to the lobby by the street door.

  Sholto Farr stood there with a posy of primroses in his hand.

  How can you describe these physical sensations, these instinctive body-wide manifestations of your mental state, without sounding like some sentimental fool? When I first saw him in that split second – he was wearing a dark pinstriped suit and a camel overcoat – I felt my lungs empty, sucked dry as if by some sort of vacuum pump. I was in a form of shock, I realised. Then I felt heat – all in a further split second – my belly warmed, my ears glowed. Then I lost power over my limbs: my knees seemed unable to support the weight of my body; I felt a tremor pass through my shoulders and run down my arms. And then all these symptoms disappeared in another split second and I became entirely calm. Ice-lady. Calm with absolute certainty.

  ‘Hello, hello,’ I said, breezily. ‘What a lovely surprise. How did you track me down?’

  I remember the four days we spent together as vividly as if they had taken place last week. Sholto handed me his bouquet, we shook hands and he asked me to dinner. I said I’d be delighted. He was staying at a small hotel in the rue de l’Université, the Hotel Printemps, aptly enough – I said I would meet him there at seven o’clock.

  I went back home, to Charbonneau’s flat, bathed and selected my clothes with some care. I wore a black dull-surfaced silk dress with a stamped motif of acorns and cherries and a sequinned collar – stylish but unflashy. Not too much make-up. I felt like a sixteen-year-old going to her first dance. Despite the many signs of Charbonneau all around me in the apartment I managed to banish all thoughts of him from my mind – tonight I was a single woman, I told myself.

  Sholto took me to Voisin in the rue Saint-Honoré. It was expensive, even for post-war Paris, and he insisted we eat as well as we could. We had foie gras, boeuf en daube, cheese, and a soufflé Monte Cristo. Sholto smoked three cigarettes to my one. He was one of those smokers for whom the act of smoking is as natural as breathing – he lit and smoked cigarettes with the same unconcern as he would scratch his chin or run his hand through his hair.

  We told each other something of ourselves. His important news was that he was recently divorced. He had married too young, he said (he was two years older than me), and he had one child, a son, Andrew, aged sixteen, at a boarding school in Scotland. I asked him what his job was, now his soldiering was over, and he said he was a farmer. He had a large farm on the west coast of Scotland, between Oban and Mallaig, if I was familiar with those towns and that part of Scotland. I said I wasn’t. I told him about my family – he knew who Dido was, had heard of her – and about Xan and his death in Normandy. I didn’t ask him much about his war, about what he and his commandos had got up to before I came across them in the park in Wesel. I don’t think he wanted to tell me, in any event: he steered clear of military matters.

  This was what we talked about as we dined. Under the surface – and I know he felt the same – was a surging boiling current of mutual attraction. Let’s call it lust. But we chatted away and smiled, smoked countless cigarettes and ached for each other.

  Sholto had fine hair, almost blue-black, parted at the side, which he tried to hold in place with some potent oil but which, under the lights of the restaurant, lost its grip halfway through the meal, and fell, his forelock hanging over his brow. He would sweep it back – a particular gesture I came to associate with him – and seconds later it would fall again.

  Sholto Farr. Alexandria, 1943.

  He was something of a dandy, I noticed – like Cleve, unlike Charbonneau. His shirt was tailored – you can always tell by the set of the collar – as bespoke as his suit. His maroon silk tie had a neat hard knot the size of a hazelnut, as if pulled tight by pliers. He had a tiny ruby jewel of a razor nick on his jaw by his left ear. His eyes were a very pale blue-grey (I think I’ve told you that already). For a Scotsman he had no trace of a Scottish accent.

  I remember, when he dropped me back at Charbonneau’s, I almost gave in and I nearly said, do you want to come up for a drink? I resisted, somehow. I wanted him but I didn’t want him in Charbonneau’s bed. He said goodnight, kissed my cheek – just a brush of his lips – said how much he’d enjoyed the evening and was I free for lunch tomorrow. I said that, as it happened, my lunch appointment had been cancelled, luckily, and that I was able to meet him, that would be lovely. Weber at one? Perfect.

  I remember we ate ice cream at Weber – it was famous for its ice cream. By now we had pretty much run out of conversation and the subtext to our second Parisian encounter was almost grotesquely obvious. We weren’t exactly panting at each other with our tongues hanging out but we might as well have been.

  We ordered coffee and brandy. We ordered more coffee and brandy. I couldn’t think of anything to say and, clearly, neither could he. So we sat there, smoking our cigarettes, drinking coffee and brandy, smiling stupidly at each other.

  ‘What really brought you to Paris?’ I said finally, something I hadn’t in fact asked him. ‘“On business” isn’t working, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I came to Paris to find you,’ he said simply, as if it was self-evident.

  ‘Oh. Right . . . Was it difficult?’

  ‘No. Surprisingly easy. I remembered everything you said to me at that station in Holland. Your name, that you were a photographer, that you worked for Global-Photo-Watch, that you had an office in Paris. The receptionist at my hotel looked you up in the phonebook and there you were: Agence GPW, 12 bis rue Monsieur, Septième.’

  ‘Well. Good thing I told you what my job was.’

  ‘Very fortunate.’

  ‘Of course I could have moved. Changed jobs.’

  ‘I would have found you, one way or another.’

  I felt tears in my eyes at this – possibly the most romantic words that had ever been said to me.

  ‘Good.’

  He took my hand and looked at my fingers for a moment. ‘My hotel is very small,’ he said. ‘So, I went to the trouble of booking a room at the Crillon.’ Now he glanced up. ‘I think a big hotel – lots of coming and going – is better. More discreet. Don’t you?’

  ‘What a good idea,’ I said. ‘Shall we go there now?’

  I remember travelling up in the lift to the third floor where our room was. We had no luggage, of course (it was being ‘sent on’ from the airport at Le Bourget, Sholto improvised, when we checked in). The lift operator was a small, thin, frail old man who kept his head down, looking at his shiny shoes. He had no doubt seen many a luggage-less couple to their room in the Crillon of an afternoon.

  I whispered in Sholto’s ear. ‘There’s
something you should know,’ I said. ‘Before.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I can’t have children.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  I had a postcard from Greer McLennan this morning, from Paris – a view of the Jardin des Tuileries. ‘I demand to know the full Paris story on return!’ she had written.

  *

  Sholto and I spent four days together that March in Paris, most of the time in our big room at the Crillon that looked out on to the place de la Concorde, wandering out to eat from time to time, then running back to the hotel, unable to restrain ourselves, sexually. But then Sholto had to return to London and, anyway, Charbonneau was due back from Algiers.

  ‘What’re we going to do?’ Sholto said. ‘I know it’s more complicated for you.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry. It may take a little time but I’ll work something out.’

  ‘Let me know if you need me and I’ll just come over.’

  It’s funny how, sometimes, one can be so convinced, so utterly certain, about something as entirely fickle as strong emotion. There was an instant, unspoken mutual trust between us, as if we’d known each other for forty years, not four days.

  I may have been certain about Sholto but I was in a state of nerves, worried about how I’d feel and act once Charbonneau was back. Obligingly, the day after Sholto left, my body gave me a severe cold so that when Charbonneau returned, I was in bed, coughing and sniffling, my bones aching, my nose rubbed raw, red and running – most unsightly.

  ‘You need a holiday,’ Charbonneau said, with untypical sweetness. ‘You’re working too hard. Leave it to me.’

  He took me south, by train to Bordeaux and then on to Biarritz on the Atlantic coast, to the Hotel du Palais, perched on its rocky promontory at the end of the gentle crescent sweep of the grande plage. I was apprehensive – and not just because of my own troubled emotional state – Charbonneau seemed to be acting out of character – caring, selfless. What was he up to? Had he some idea about Sholto and the days we’d spent together?

  However, Biarritz worked its charms. Charbonneau had said that we needed surf, real ocean – not lapping Mediterranean wavelets – and early spring on the Atlantic coast provided spectacular foaming breakers in endless succession. And the unique aspect of the Palais, as opposed to other grand hotels on seafronts, is that there is no wide promenade between the hotel and the ocean.

  We were shown to our suite on the third floor and, flinging open the windows, received the full panorama of the sea, with no interruption of traffic, there in all its surging glory. The creaming white surf rolled in to break on the rocks directly below us. It was loud – the ocean can be very loud – but invigorating.

  We settled in to our room but now I was sensing an edginess in Charbonneau – he wasn’t quite his usual hedonistic, cocksure self and I began to suspect this new solicitous persona as he kept asking me how I was feeling. Did I need a rest, should he order me some coffee? No, no, I said, I was feeling much better now that I was beside the sea.

  He suggested that we eat that evening in the town rather than in the Palais’ rather stuffy restaurant and we found a big brasserie on the main square. Biarritz had been bombed in ’44 and the repairs to the damaged buildings were still in evidence, almost two years on, roads patched up, gable ends and shopfronts held in place by heavy timber raking-shores. There were concrete gun emplacements on the cliffs – and one realised this was the southern end of Hitler’s Atlantic Wall. The carefree resort town hadn’t fully expunged its wartime persona.

  Charbonneau as usual fussed over the wine list, opting finally for some obscure Basque wine with a rare grape variety. I was, meanwhile, feigning a tranquil, utterly benign mood: everything pleased me, the brasserie was charming, the wine delicious, the freshness of the ocean air, perfection. I knew my serenity was making Charbonneau even more ill at ease.

  He waited until the end of the meal.

  ‘You know that I love you, Amory—’

  ‘Oh dear, that sounds ominous.’

  ‘Please don’t make everything a joke. It’s the worst habit of the English.’

  ‘Wrong, it’s our best feature, our saving grace.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Continue.’

  I lit a cigarette in my most mondaine manner and plumed smoke at the ceiling.

  ‘I am going to be married,’ he said, solemnly. ‘The announcement will be in Le Figaro next week.’

  This did take me by surprise. I almost dropped my cigarette.

  ‘You’re obviously not going to marry me. Do I know the lucky young woman?’

  ‘You have met her, once or twice.’

  ‘And her name?’

  ‘Louise-Elisabeth.’

  ‘Louise-Elisabeth Dupont?’

  ‘No. If you must know – her name is Louise-Elisabeth Croÿ d’Havré de Tourzel de la Billardie.’

  ‘Goodness. No contest with plain old Amory Clay, then. Is she from Paris?’

  ‘From Burgundy.’

  ‘No doubt they have hillsides and hillsides of expensive vineyards.’

  ‘Yes that’s true.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘Le coeur a ses raisins que les raisins ne connaissent point.’ He laughed at his joke as he always did and then his smile disappeared and he actually looked miserable for a moment, playing with the rind of cheese left on his plate. He gave a kind of rueful chuckle.

  ‘You know, I was wise once,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes? When was that?’

  ‘When I was born.’

  ‘I know what you mean. It gets difficult from then onwards.’

  ‘I want you to know, Amory, that my relationship with you will be unaffected by this marriage.’

  ‘Wrong. I assure you it will be very affected.’

  ‘Don’t be difficult. Let’s be sophisticated.’

  ‘No. Let’s be sensible. Let’s be honest. Why are you marrying this person?’

  ‘Because . . . Because I wish to have a son. I’m forty-five years old. I’m at a certain age when a man—’

  ‘Do excuse me. I need some fresh air.’

  I left the brasserie and strolled back towards the hotel, an unstoppable smile growing on my face. I wandered down to the esplanade, past the Casino Municipal, bright and noisy, right on the beach, and walked down some steps on to the sand, slipping off my high-heeled shoes and picking my way towards the foaming surf-edge. The constant roar of the waves was the sonic interference I required – I needed my head filled with noise. Off to the right the irregular sweep of the lighthouse on the clifftop flashed in my eyes. My clear eyes. I was happy for Charbonneau with his young aristocratic, fertile woman from the gratin. No doubt along with the vineyards there was a small perfect chateau to add to her allure. More importantly, I was happy for myself. I would give Charbonneau something of a hard time, of course, exacerbate his guilt over this betrayal, but, as I stood on the beach at Biarritz, I felt like dancing and singing; I felt like throwing my shoes in the air and running into the sea I was so happy. I knew where my life was heading, now, after so many years of mistakes and uncertainty and wrong turnings. I was going to marry Sholto Farr.

  BOOK SIX: 1947–1966

  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 a
round 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.