Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

  I was still fretting over my options when I arrived in LA, where I found a perfectly comfortable hotel, the Heyworth Travel Inn on Santa Monica Boulevard, just three blocks from Downstairs at Paul’s.

  And there my trail petered out and ended in a small jazz/folk club with a tiny stage and about forty seats. Yes, the manager told me, Blythe and Bellamont had played two nights at Downstairs, and they were really quite good. He checked the date – some seven weeks ago. Seven weeks, I thought – where had I been seven weeks ago? In the middle of the Mini-Tet Offensive taking shelter in a bombed-out house with Mary Poundstone, no doubt. I felt the stupid illogical guilt crowding in on me again, and told myself that if I’d been at home Blythe would never have gone gallivanting off like this without telling anyone her plans, despatching bizarrely anodyne postcards to her mother and sister.

  And then I remembered that I’d missed the twins’ birthday, their twenty-first. I’d sent cards and cheques. Surely that couldn’t have – I stopped berating myself. Cheques. I’d sent them each £100 for their twenty-first birthday. A mere gesture beside their inheritance from the Farr estate that fell due on their ‘maturity’: £1,000. A fortune for someone like Blythe, living the way she did, and a fortune, it had just occurred to me, for Jeff Bellamont as well, no doubt. The money influx must have been the catalyst for the trip to America; it explained everything, I was sure.

  I went back to the Heyworth and wondered what to do next. I needed some help, that was obvious; I’d done as much as I could on my own. I thought about calling Cleveland Finzi, my knight in tarnished armour, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone – it wasn’t the time or place or situation to increase my debt to Cleve. Who else did I know in Los Angeles? And then it came to me: my ‘business partner’, Moss Fallmaster.

  I called him. He was delighted to hear from me, he said, and even more delighted that I was in town and invited me over to his ‘factory’ on San Ysidro Drive in the canyons above Beverly Hills. I drove my teal-blue Coronet over there, curious and hopeful.

  Moss Fallmaster was tall, possibly the tallest person I’ve ever known – six foot five or six, I’d say – and he was wearing, in honour of my visit, a ‘Never Too Young To . . .’ T-shirt. He had a pointed sorcerer’s beard tied at the end with an agate jewel and long hair held back in a ponytail. He was charmingly fey and loquacious and the only effect that was at odds with the whole carefully put-together persona was heavy black-framed spectacles that would have looked more at home on a lawyer or government official.

  His canyon house had a fine, open view over the vast city and its coastal plain. Through the salt and smog haze I could see the blurred rectangles of the tall buildings miles away in downtown LA. Everywhere in the house – corridors, hallway, stacked against walls – were battered cardboard boxes with large, scrawled handwriting on them: Grateful Dead, Peace Sign, Marijuana, Naked Mickey Mouse, Ban the Bomb, Che, and so on.

  ‘Ah. T-shirts,’ I said.

  He pointed at a box: ‘Never Too Young To . . .’ He inclined himself apologetically. ‘Not our best seller,’ he said, ‘but steady. In fact I think I may owe you some money.’

  He went to a study and came out with a wad of cash from which he paid me several hundred dollars and had me sign for them.

  ‘Let’s hope these Paris peace talks drag on,’ he said. ‘An ongoing war is good business. Just kidding,’ he added with a sly smile.

  We sat down on his deck and he poured me a glass of red wine and I told him why I was here in Los Angeles.

  ‘My God. English mother comes to California searching for her runaway daughter. I’ll buy the movie rights.’ He leant his long torso forward and topped up my glass. I lit a cigarette.

  ‘You know, Amory – may I call you Amory? – I would just go home. She’ll come back as soon as she’s bored by her little adventure. How old is she?’

  ‘Twenty-one.’

  ‘She’ll run out of money.’

  ‘She has quite a lot of money. That’s the trouble.’ I explained about Sholto’s legacy. I told him about the strange card sent to me and the letter to Annie with their pointed messages.

  ‘You know,’ he said, ‘I can’t really see why it might appear worrying . . . She says she’s happy—’

  ‘It’s not Blythe,’ I said. ‘I know her too well. Something’s happened to her.’

  ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘I think you need a private detective. I have just the man.’

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  This morning, walking across the gravel to the car, I fell. There was no ice; I didn’t trip, stumble or stub my toe – my left leg just gave way and I fell over. I sat on the ground for a while and counted to a hundred. Then I stood up again. All seemed well, but I knew what was happening – the neurologist had warned me. I tested my grip, both hands, on the door handle – fine. But my throat was dry and I felt frightened: it was as if something else was taking me over – this sudden loss of power, sudden loss of motor control is the significant sign that the disease is gaining ground. Calm, girl, calm . . . It comes and goes, chooses its own pace. It may be moving very slowly – don’t panic. One day at a time and all the rest of it. You have the ultimate say, remember.

  *

  Cole Hardaway of Hardaway Legal Solutions Inc. was the private investigator who Moss Fallmaster recommended. He had an office above a nail parlour in Santa Monica. If you looked out of his window you could see the ocean reflected in the windows of the building opposite. He seemed a little unprepossessing at first, not at all what I’d hoped for or had been expecting in a private eye. He was wearing pale grey trousers and a checked lime-green shirt – a man in his mid-forties with a lean and thoughtful demeanour that was rather undermined by his hairstyle: his brown hair was cut in a Beatles fringe, snipped off straight at his eyebrows. It did make him look a bit younger, I supposed, but any man over forty who deliberately combs his hair forward in a child’s fringe has something suspect about him, I always feel. Anyway, I tried to ignore it as we talked and, slowly but surely, I found myself coming round to a more favourable impression of Cole Hardaway. He had a reassuring deep bass voice and he spoke in a very measured way, always pausing to think, visibly pondering any question you might ask.

  ‘I was in England in the war,’ he said, explaining that he’d been an army engineer. He had taken part in the construction of several pontoon bridges over the Rhine in 1945. I told him my own experience of crossing the Rhine in ’45.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be funny,’ I said, ‘if I’d crossed the Rhine on one of the bridges you’d helped build?’

  It was a throwaway remark but Mr Hardaway thought about it silently for some moments, nodding, weighing up the probabilities.

  ‘It would certainly be a remarkable coincidence,’ he said, finally. I agreed and we pressed on with the matter of finding Blythe.

  I gave him all the information I had plus the fairly recent photograph of Blythe that I carried with me. He informed me that he charged $100 per day not including expenses and advised me to return to my hotel. Relax, he said, see the sights – he would call me as soon as he had anything concrete.

  I saw, by the door as I left his office, a photograph on the wall of a young soldier in fatigues sitting on a pile of sandbags, smiling at the camera. It was obviously Vietnam – it could have been one of mine from Vietnam, Mon Amour.

  ‘I’m just back from Vietnam myself,’ I said, explaining why I’d been there.

  ‘That’s my son, Leo,’ he said flatly. ‘He was killed in Da Nang last year. A traffic accident.’

  I forgave Cole Hardaway his silly fringe.

  I saw the sights, such as they were, in Los Angeles. I went on a tour of Universal Studios. I took some photographs on Sunset Boulevard. I watched movies (2001:A Space Odyssey and The Fox), I sat by the small hotel swimming pool and read my books. I was planning a trip to Anaheim to visit Disneyland when Cole Hardaway called, three days after my appointment with him. He had tr
acked Blythe down and I owed him $425. He suggested we meet up – it was a little complicated.

  I returned to his office in Santa Monica where he offered me a drink. I asked for whisky but he only had bourbon.

  ‘Shall we go to a bar?’ he suggested. ‘Would you mind going to a bar?’

  Not at all, I said, excellent idea – I liked bars. So we wandered down the street to a bar a block away – Hardaway was obviously a regular – and sat in a curved red leatherette booth at the rear. A waitress in a silver miniskirt and a tight black halterneck took our orders.

  ‘There you be, Cole,’ she said with a warm smile, serving us our drinks. ‘Nice to have you back.’

  ‘May I call you Cole?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course, Mrs Farr.’

  He told me that the key factor that had allowed him to trace Blythe had been her boyfriend, Jeff Bellamont, who had unwittingly and obligingly left a relatively easy-to-follow trail from Downstairs at Paul’s – unpaid rental on an apartment, a car hire, a night in a motel, a run-in and a ticket from a traffic cop in Fresno – all the way to another hotel in Bishop, Inyo County. Cole had driven up to Bishop – over 200 miles north of Los Angeles. By now he had a photograph of Bellamont, a recent mugshot that he gave to me. It turned out Bellamont had a sizeable roster of crimes and misdemeanours and had even served time in Folsom prison for robbery. A certain amount of judicious asking around in Bishop (not a big place) had produced an accurate identification and a probable location.

  ‘I’m pretty damn sure I know where he is,’ Cole said. ‘And if he’s there, then your daughter will be there also, most likely. It’s just . . .’ he paused for one of his moments of cogitation. ‘It’s just a kind of weird situation. Not dangerous, no, no. Just prepare yourself for something not normal.’

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  Hugo called and invited me to see how his new house was progressing so I walked round the headland and met him there in discussion with the contractors. The roof was now on and complete and I could see it was definitely going to be a fair-sized home. Once it was sealed, windows in and so on, they could work inside through the winter, he told me. He hoped to be in by spring next year.

  ‘And we’ll be neighbours,’ he added.

  ‘Which will be great.’

  ‘You can pop over for a drink.’

  ‘And vice versa.’

  We wandered down to the rocks that the house overlooked – no bay. I had the bay.

  ‘You know that I’m looking for a particularly close neighbourly relationship,’ he said, taking my hand. He was always taking my hand these days – I didn’t stop him.

  ‘Hugo,’ I began, ‘I don’t think—’

  ‘Don’t think. There’s no need for thought. Nothing will be complicated.’

  ‘Everything’s complicated, surely you realise that by now. At our age.’

  He sighed. ‘No, what I mean is . . . We’re not young, true, but we’re not decrepit. Something like this – two houses, not so far apart – it can work, Amory. We can keep an eye on each other.’

  That actually sounded rather appealing, so I untensed.

  ‘Well, yes, I can see the advantages,’ I said.

  ‘And we can get to know each other better.’

  I wondered when and if I should tell him about my particular problem.

  ‘One step at a time, Mr Torrance. Can we go? I’m freezing.’

  Some lists I made:

  A list of the books written by Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau:

  Morceaux bruts

  Feu d’artifice

  Le Trac

  Cacapipitalisme

  Avis de passage

  Le Trapéziste

  Absence de marquage

  Chemin sans issue

  A list of the thirteen types of photograph (plus an afterthought):

  Aide-memoire

  Reportage

  Work of art

  Topography

  Erotica/Pornography

  Advertisement

  Abstract image

  Literature

  Text

  Autobiography

  Compositional

  Functional illustration

  Snapshot

  Try it and see: all photographs fall into one of these categories or combinations of them. Actually, I now think there is a fourteenth category, as unique to photography as the stop-time device that is its defining feature, the snapshot – namely, the ‘mis-shot’. It occurs when you make a mistake: you overexpose, you double-expose, the camera shakes or moves or the framing is wrong – the so-called ‘bad-crop’. My most famous photograph, ‘The Confrontation’, is a mis-shot, a bad-crop. I suppose a mistake might function beneficially in other arts – the sculptor’s hammer and chisel slips, the wrong tube of paint is selected, the composer unwittingly changes key – and it might enhance the whole in an aleatory way. But only in photography can our errors so easily become real virtues, again and again and again.

  A list of my books:

  Absences (1943)

  Vietnam, Mon Amour (1968)

  And the books I planned:

  The View Down (shots from on high looking down)

  Sleepers (images of people sleeping or resting)

  Static Light (the final project – light stopped)

  Bad-Crop (a deliberate selection of mis-shots)

  And, crowning glory:

  The Horizontal Fall: Photographs by Amory Clay

  A list of my lovers:

  Lockwood Mower

  Cleveland Finzi

  Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau

  Sholto Farr

  John Oberkamp

  Hugo Torrance . . . ?

  2. WILLOW RANCH

  It was a 250-mile drive to Bishop from Los Angeles, north in the general direction of Death Valley. In the end it took me five and a half hours, with breaks. I set off on the Garden Park Freeway out towards Pasadena, then on to Highway 395 all the way to Bishop. The journey led me round the massive sprawl of Edwards Air Force Base – I saw B-52s climbing slowly into the air, training for Vietnam, no doubt – and then along the periphery of the China Lake weapons testing range. We were entering desert country, the land arid, caught in the rain-shadow of the Sierra Nevada mountains, whose long saw-toothed bulk – summits white with snow and ice – I could see as I drove ever northwards into the Owens Valley. On either side of the highway stretched flat steppes of desert scrubland – sagebrush, buckwheat, salt grass and creosote bush – and a lot of sand.

  I pulled into a picnic area off the road at one stage to stretch my legs and I looked around at this great parched wilderness baking in the high summer heat. Away from LA’s smog the sky was a crystalline blue – a perfect blue – and the few clouds that hung motionless there were cartoon-like in their whiteness, freshly laundered, ideally puffy, promising not one drop of moisture. I felt very alone all of a sudden and full of an unfamiliar trepidation. Cole Hardaway had insisted that I feel free to call him at any moment if I felt I needed some assistance but I stirred myself into a form of reasoned anger – something had happened to my daughter and changed her, she needed me, and I was going to find her on my own. It occurred to me that those breezily robotic letters were actually a covert cry for help. I simply couldn’t believe that Blythe had run away and foresworn us so casually, our small, close family of three. She must have been suborned, persuaded, turned in some way. I had to find her, talk to her, discover what had happened – and try to persuade her to come home, if that was what she really wanted.

  The San Carlos Motel, Glenbrook, California, 1968.

  I drove into Bishop and then out again, retracing my steps, finding the San Carlos Motel a few convenient miles down the road in the small town of Glenbrook, valiantly guarding its ‘city limits’ as Bishop’s suburbs remorselessly encroached.

  In my room, air conditioner thrumming, unpacked, I laid out my map on the bed and plotted my next move.

  Cole Hardaway had told me everything
he had discovered about Jeff Bellamont and Blythe. They had travelled from Los Angeles to Bishop, spent a night there, and then gone to a small settlement called Line Lake. At Line Lake they had paused at a convenience store and bought some provisions and made a phone call. Then they had asked directions to and then motored on to an abandoned dude-ranch complex called Willow Ranch and that was where their journey ended, he presumed, there was only one road in and out. Cole hadn’t gone to Willow Ranch himself, but that was where the trail led. As far as he was concerned they were still there.

  The problem was, he further explained, that Willow Ranch was no longer abandoned. It appeared that, according to the locals he asked, some sort of hippie community had taken over the existing buildings and had been living there for some two years, now, in sought-for isolation, ‘Growing vegetables and weaving baskets and smoking pot, you know the sort of thing,’ Cole had detailed in his matter-of-fact basso profundo. There were about forty people currently in residence, as far as anyone knew – Willow Ranch had a floating population, people were always arriving and people were always leaving. The place was the benign fiefdom of a charismatic Vietnam veteran called Tayborn Gaines. Gaines reputedly had served three years in Vietnam – and on his release from the army had joined the anti-war movement. He had been a prominent speaker at rallies and marches and had acquired some sort of minor celebrity reputation as he was an articulate and forceful debater. But, now he was installed with his community in Willow Ranch, Tay Gaines had gone off the media radar and rarely left the premises. There were a lot of runaways drawn there, a lot of girls, Cole said, the implication being that Blythe Farr was probably another of them.

  There were more muted warnings from Cole, even though I had now received the message loud and clear. The Willow Ranchers kept themselves to themselves and they didn’t welcome visitors. They sold their farm produce and would volunteer for community projects in Bishop and Line Lake. The locals seemed to accept them and respected their need for privacy.