Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  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.

  S
o 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, o
ne 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 . . .’