by William Boyd
‘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?’
&
nbsp; ‘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.