by William Boyd
‘Understood.’
‘I’ll drop you off at the CIB.’
‘Thanks.’
Even though we made our fond farewells – Frank asking for news of the girls, how I was coping out here, kissing me goodbye – I knew I had made a mistake. I should have kept my mouth shut.
I was upstairs at my desk in the SPS bureau trying to draft a resignation letter to Lane Burrell. Seeing John’s paltry collection of possessions had depressed me – a whole young existence subsumed by some dirty laundry, damp-swollen paperbacks and a couple of cameras. It had been no life for John and it was no life for me – and it was time I brought it to a dignified end.
Renata rapped on the door frame. She looked a little alarmed.
‘You’d better come down, Amory.’
I followed her to the reception area to find a US master sergeant with an MP brassard on his arm and two smart ARVN military police acting as escort.
‘Amory Clay?’
‘Yes. What’s this all about?’
He glanced at the sheet of paper in his hand.
‘Your visa has been rescinded. You are illegally in this country. You are under arrest.’
I am writing this down, sitting on my suitcase, somewhere in Tan Son Nhut airport. This hut has a mud floor and no furniture. The door is locked and an ARVN MP is standing outside it. I’m being deported and I know exactly why – because of what I saw the day before yesterday at Nui Dat. Unwittingly, I now share a secret – but a secret no one wants me to share, hence this unseemly rush to have me out of the country.
The master sergeant who took me into custody told me the bare minimum as he allowed me to return to my apartment and pack up my belongings – following orders, highest authority. I sit here feeling frightened and glad. Glad to be leaving – that was planned – but frightened by this exhibition of absolute power. My visa had six more months to run – I had renewed it on my return from Hong Kong. My accreditation was solid. I was being rushed out of this country as if I had the plague. On whose orders? Frank’s? I doubted it. No, Frank would have told someone important about our meeting at Nui Dat; then that information would have gone up the chain of command until a decision was made. Get her out. I’m waiting for a Pan Am charter to Hong Kong where I’m to stay in transit until I’m put on a BOAC flight to London. I am not being charged for any airfares.
FINAL THOUGHTS ON LEAVING VIETNAM
John Oberkamp had more scars on his body than Sholto. Maybe that was what attracted me to him – he reminded me of Sholto in some way. Not physically, but some quality of alertness, of curiosity. Just the loose-limbed, supple way he carried himself. There is still no news. No reports of his capture.1
Truong returned just as I was leaving the apartment with my MP escort. He foolishly tried to grab hold of me and bundle me into his Renault. ‘No, Truong, no!’ I shouted. ‘I’m all right. Don’t worry. I’m going home.’ He began to sob, his hands over his face.
The name of the master sergeant who escorted me out of the country was Sam M. Goodforth. He was burly, unsmiling, florid – as if he’d just stepped from a hot bath – with a close crew cut. I remember his name because it was printed on a plastic rectangle over his left breast pocket. Goodforth – go forth.
After John Oberkamp had motored off up the road to Vinh Hoa, one of the APC crew replaced John’s makeshift bandage with a proper field dressing. ‘You ought to get that properly cleaned up,’ he said. ‘I heard Charlie puts shit on their bullets.’ The lieutenant called in a medevac helicopter for me – as a favour – and it was to be my last trip in a Huey helicopter in Vietnam. I was designated as a ‘lightly wounded casualty (civilian)’. I was choppered back to base hospital in Saigon. That’s how I feel now, on leaving – a lightly wounded casualty (civilian).
And as I sit here, worried, uncomfortable, a bit miserable, a bit angry at this summary, enforced departure, I ask myself if I’d done the right thing in embarking on this Vietnam adventure, leaving my home and my family behind to go on some half-thought-out mission to prove something to myself, to discover something of myself. What did I learn that I didn’t already know? Quite a lot, actually. And I took some good photographs and made a book of them. And made some money. And I met and loved another man . . . I don’t think I can blame myself for wanting to do what I did – and I don’t think Annie and Blythe blame me, either. It is my life, after all, and I have every right to live it to the full. Oh yes, you keep saying that to yourself, don’t you?
I can hear voices outside the door – American voices. Is it time to leave? Am I finally going home?
*
And that was the end of my Vietnam Scrapbook, but not entirely the end of my Vietnam experience – it travelled with me a few thousand miles. I arrived at Heathrow on the Hong Kong flight early in the morning. As I crossed the tarmac apron towards the airport building two police officers intercepted me and led me to an unmarked car parked nearby. I reminded them that I had a suitcase on board; I was told it would be brought to me.
I was driven through early-morning London, the streets still pretty much empty, to St John’s Wood, north of Regent’s Park, to a block of mansion flats with its own underground car park. I was taken to a service apartment on the fourth floor where I was greeted by a sour-faced, heavily built young woman in a puce suit and sensible shoes. She showed me into a sitting room with brown upholstered furniture and a gas fire and offered me a cup of tea and biscuits. If I wanted to use the toilet, she said, I should ring this bell, pointing at a bell-push by the door. And then she locked me in.
I drank my tea and ate my digestive biscuits and an hour after I had arrived my suitcase was delivered. I waited. At lunchtime I was provided with a round of ham sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. I dozed on the sofa for most of the afternoon. I deliberately didn’t ask my guardian what was going on. Supper was a round of cheese and tomato sandwiches and a glass of orange juice. I stretched out on the sofa again and slept for a troubled few hours.
Very late in the night I was woken by puce-suit and led down a corridor to another room with a dining table and six chairs. Another cup of tea was served. After ten minutes or so I heard voices at the flat’s front door and moments later two young, suited men came in and introduced themselves as they took their seats opposite me: Mr Brown and Mr Green. They were in their thirties; one was dark and solid (Mr Green), the other languid and corpulent with fair, thinning hair (Mr Brown). Both of them were, no doubt, educated at expensive private schools and were graduates of excellent universities. They had polite middle-class accents. They could have happily read the news on the BBC.
MR BROWN: Lady Farr. Your professional name is Amory Clay.
ME: That’s correct.
MR GREEN: We won’t detain you much longer. Our apologies for your wait.
ME: I’m keen to return home. May I ask why I was detained in the first place? I’m not aware of having done anything wrong.
MR BROWN: We had to detain you because of what you thought you saw at [consults notebook] Nui Dat airbase, Vietnam.
ME: I really can hardly remember anything at all.
MR GREEN: We will assume, for your own sake, that you will remember nothing at all.
ME: Of course. I promise.
MR GREEN: Nothing. Ever. For your own sake.
ME: I repeat – I promise.
MR BROWN: Because if you so much as breathe a word . . .
ME: I promise. Nothing.
MR BROWN: Excellent.
And then they both gave tight little smiles and we stood up. Brown asked if I had any money and I said only American dollars. He gave me a £10 note that I had to sign a chit for and I was then shown back to the front door by puce-suit where my suitcase was waiting for me.
I travelled down in the lift alone and stepped out into the first glimmerings of dawn in St John’s Wood. I hailed a passing taxi and asked to be taken to an all-night café. This proved to be in Victoria bus station where – beneath blazing fluorescent light – I
ate, and hugely relished, a greasy breakfast and drank many cups of strong tea.
But I was feeling increasingly strange as I sat there in the refulgent cafeteria considering what had just happened to me in the last forty-eight hours or so and I realised I had experienced this sensation before but I couldn’t remember when. That sense of fearful powerlessness; of other forces suddenly taking over the direction of your life that you had chosen; of being completely out of your depth in what you thought was familiar society. And then I remembered. My ‘obscenity’ trial over my Berlin photographs, all those decades ago – sitting in the Bow Street Magistrates’ Court pleading guilty when I knew I was innocent; learning that my photographs were to be destroyed; being admonished and humiliated by the judge.
When you encounter the implacable power of the state it’s a deeply destabilising moment. In an ordinary life it happens very rarely – maybe never, maybe once or twice. But your individual being, your individual nature, seems suddenly worth nothing – you feel expendable – and that’s what frightens you, fundamentally, that’s what makes your bowels loosen.
When the world was stirring I telephoned Blythe at her flat in Notting Hill but there was no reply. So I tried Annie at her student hall of residence at Sussex University.
‘Ma! I don’t believe it! You’re back! How wonderful, why didn’t you tell us?’
‘Yes, it is wonderful and all very sudden, but I’m here to stay, my darling. No more travelling.’
We spoke some more and I told her I’d tried Blythe with no success. Annie said to keep trying – she hadn’t moved. I had a powerful need to be hugged, close and hard, by someone I loved. I telephoned again, but there was still no reply so I hailed another taxi and was taken to Ladbroke Grove, to a peeling stucco four-storey house with twelve brimming dustbins outside it. I rang the bell for Blythe’s flat and eventually a bleary, long-haired American came to the door. Was Blythe in? I’m her mother. Sorry. Blythe’s been away for weeks. Gone on a long holiday. I couldn’t take any more and began to cry.
BOOK EIGHT: 1968–1977
1. ROOM 42, SAN CARLOS MOTEL
I checked in at reception to a bored gum-chewing young man with a middle parting and an acne problem and was assigned a cabin, room 42, out on the parking lot at the rear of the motel complex. I didn’t care. The Californian desert sun was hammering down as I parked my teal-blue 1965 Dodge Coronet as close to my door as I could. I lugged my suitcase in, switched on the air conditioning and unpacked. I had a huge bed, an ice-making machine, and a clean white-tiled bathroom with a prophylactic polythene shield on the lavatory. I hoped I didn’t have to stay here long.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
One of the most inexpensive joys available to almost everyone – if you’re lucky enough – is to wake up in your warm bed and to realise that you don’t have to leave it and that you can turn over and go back to sleep again. The first three mornings I spent in the cottage when I returned to Barrandale I didn’t quit my bed until well after eleven o’clock. I needed that calm, that banal quotidian luxury of sleep.
I opened up the house, aired it, stocked up on food and drink, reclaimed the dog, Flam, from the farmer who had been looking after him. Flam’s evident delight at seeing me again was another emotional high point – staccato barking, leaping up, face licking. It took him hours to calm down.
Very swiftly I put the pieces of my old life on Barrandale back together. I took long walks around the island; I visited my friends to let them know I was home again and all the while I was re-familiarising myself with this existence that I’d put on hold while I was in Vietnam – but of course what had happened in Vietnam and my precipitate return kept thrusting itself into my mind.
Even now, after so much time has gone by, I still wonder if I was only allowed to leave Vietnam because of my title, because I was the widow of Sholto, Lord Farr. God bless the British class system. What would have happened if I’d been plain Amory Clay? Without ‘Lady Farr’ I’m more and more convinced that on one of my trips I’d have gone mysteriously MIA and been found dead amidst the detritus of some firefight with the Viet Cong. Another foolhardy photographer caught out looking for a scoop. It would have been very easy to arrange. My title and the fact that Frank Dunn knew me and had served with Sholto in the war made the difference. My long wait in the St John’s Wood mansion flat represented the time taken to evaluate the risk I posed, now I knew the secret. A meeting would have been convened. Lady Farr? Widow of Lord Farr MC, DSO? We can’t really do anything to her, can we? Soldier’s widow. Make her promise to keep quiet, see if we can trust her to keep her mouth shut. Mr Green and Mr Brown would have reported back: she’s no fool, she knows what’s at stake. We can let her go.
*
In that first week back Joe Dunraven’s office sent me on a package of my mail – I’d had everything diverted to them so that bills could be paid, the house maintained, and so on. Once a month they had forwarded personal letters to the Sentinel bureau in Saigon. The package that arrived only contained the post of the last few weeks and was insignificant, except for one letter, postmarked in Los Angeles. Inside was a piece of card.
Darling Ma,
I just wanted you to know that I am well and happy and am living in America, now. I won’t be coming home. I’m very happy and very well so please don’t worry about me.
All my love,
Blythe
Under her signature was a small symbol: a Christian cross, with a stylised eye drawn above the upright.
I called Annie.
‘I’m not sure if this is some kind of a joke but I’ve had a very strange card from Blythe.’
‘So have I,’ Annie sounded upset. ‘I had a letter.’
‘Posted in America?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t know she’d gone there.’
‘Neither did I.’ She paused. ‘It’s all very sweet and lovely and she keeps going on about how happy and well she is. But she says she’s never coming back. Ever.’ Now there was a catch in her voice. ‘But it doesn’t sound like Blythe. It sounds like she’s taking dictation.’
‘Is there a funny kind of symbol on it?’
‘A kind of cross with an eye on top. I think.’
‘It is her handwriting though.’
‘Oh yes. But the tone seems wrong.’
Now I felt disturbed, a small shiver of alarm and worry. I told Annie I’d been to the Notting Hill flat and had been told she was on ‘holiday’. Maybe somebody there would know something. I’d spoken to an American guy who was living there, I told her.
‘I’ll go this weekend,’ she said.
‘No, don’t worry. I’ll go myself.’
The journey to room 42 in the San Carlos Motel had not been straightforward, I reflected, as I unpacked my clothes. I’d already been two weeks in California and at times had despaired – but now, in theory, I was only a few miles away from Blythe herself; it couldn’t be very long before we were face to face.
I had travelled down to London within twenty-four hours of speaking to Annie, and went straight to Blythe’s flat in Notting Hill. There I met the man who had opened the door to me after my night in St John’s Wood. He was affable and candid, not American but Canadian, he corrected me, politely – his name was Ted Lundegaard.
‘Is anything actually wrong?’ he asked me. ‘Is Blythe in some kind of trouble?’
‘We just don’t know where she is.’ I improvised. ‘She needs medication, medicines, she left without enough supplies and I’m worried.’
‘Oh, right. Jeez. I see what you mean. Could be nasty.’
Blythe had gone to America, he told me, with her boyfriend, Jeff – an American.
‘Her boyfriend?’
‘They played in this band together, Platinum Scrap.’
‘Do you know Jeff’s last name?’
‘Bellamont. Jeff Bellamont. They were going to set themselves up as a duo, you know: “Blythe and Bellamont”. Jeff said th
ey had a booking at a club in LA.’
‘Do you know the name of this club?’
‘Sorry. I forget. I know he told me but . . . Wait a sec.’
I followed him from the sitting room with its two busted sofas and huge loudspeakers into a large bay-windowed bedroom at the front of the house looking on to a strip of untended public garden opposite. This was Blythe’s bedroom, Ted informed me, Blythe’s and Jeff’s. In a way it was as dispiriting as John Oberkamp’s hooch at Nui Dat airbase. There was a double mattress on the floor with grubby sheets and a blanket, a central light with a dusty paper globe-shade, a dressing table with a propped mirror and about a dozen cardboard boxes that functioned as a wardrobe, filled with clothes and shoes. There was no carpet. By the bed on both sides were ashtrays full of ancient cigarette butts. The smell of dust, mould and ash overlaid with some cheap deodorant permeated the air. What do we know of our children’s private lives, I asked myself? Nothing.
Ted was searching a cork pinboard next to the dressing table. He held up a card and passed it to me.
‘Hey. We got lucky.’
The card said ‘DOWNSTAIRS AT PAUL’S’, under a logo of crossed guitars, and gave an address on Fountain Avenue in West Hollywood.
So I bought a plane ticket, BOAC to Los Angeles, and left the next day, grateful to the gods of luck that I was sufficiently in funds to do this, spontaneously, thanks to my windfall from the Matthew B. Brady Award. On the flight I had many hours to think and I wondered about Blythe and whether I was (a) being a fool, or (b) doing the right thing, or (c) risking alienating my daughter even more by rushing after her in this panicked way.
Everything about her letters had been meant to reassure – I’m fine, Ma, nothing’s wrong – but I had an unmoving apprehension that all was not that well with her and I reasoned that I would rather draw down Blythe’s irritation and accusations than stay on Barrandale vaguely worrying about her and feeling guilty for doing nothing. But guilt was the issue, I realised. I was feeling guilty that I’d gone away and left her and my deepening guilt was driving me on to make this trip, however annoying and futile it might prove to be.