by William Boyd
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 chi
ldren 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 sto
p 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.