by William Boyd
I had fallen into a blank, dreamless sleep, thanks to my whiskey overdose, but I woke abruptly, fully alert, when I heard the rattle of the doorknob being turned. Thank God I had locked it and fitted the security chain. My head started to ache as I slipped out of bed – I was in my pyjamas – and, going to the window, pulled back the curtains an inch and looked out over the parking lot at the rear of the motel. The few arc lights dotted here and there cast a cold white gleam over the rows of cars and, as I peered out, I thought I saw a figure flit through the dark shadows. I pulled on my shoes and my cotton dressing gown, unlocked the door and stepped out into the warm, dry night. I walked away from my room heading towards where I had seen the figure, my eyes slowly growing accustomed to the gloom of the night.
‘Blythe?’ I called out, perhaps foolishly, but I was hoping she had come to me, had escaped from Tayborn Gaines, somehow. I ranged around the car park for another minute calling Blythe’s name quietly but the place was empty, just the sleeping metallic herd of motor vehicles. I walked back to my room – the door had definitely been tried but it was probably just some tipsy late-homecoming motel guest mistaking the number.
I wandered back along the pathway to my room, feeling tired all of a sudden, pushed the door open and stepped in. It was completely dark and, as I felt for the light switch, I knew there was someone else in the room with me. I could hear breathing.
I clicked the light on.
Blythe was sitting on the end of the bed.
‘Hello, Ma,’ she said. ‘I thought we should have a little talk.’
She was wearing a denim jacket and black jeans and tennis shoes on her feet. Her hair was pulled back in a loose bun, strands hanging down in front of her ears.
I gave her a kiss and sat down in a chair opposite her, my hands shaking, a feeling of breathlessness almost overwhelming me.
‘You haven’t a cigarette, by any chance, have you?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’ I fetched my packet, gladly, taking time to rummage in my handbag, finding my lighter, telling myself to calm down, and offered her one. We both lit up and I sat down again.
‘Tayborn prefers me not to smoke,’ she said.
‘Right. Well, he won’t like me much, then.’ I stood up again and went for my bottle of Irish whiskey. ‘What’s his position on drinking?’ I said as I poured an inch into my glass.
‘He’ll have a drink from time to time. Just beer, though.’
‘Thank God for that. Is he religious?’
‘In his own special way. He believes in Jesus, but not really in God.’
‘Fair enough.’ I looked at her and felt my eyes fill with tears.
‘You’re not taking drugs, or anything?’ I asked carefully.
‘What? No, of course not.’
‘Are you sure? You don’t look very well, darling. You seem different, somehow.’
‘Because I am different. I’ve changed.’
‘You’re not actually married to him, are you?’
‘Yes. I love him, Ma – he’s a wonderful, strong, fascinating man. Wait until you get to know him properly. He was a soldier, just like Papa.’
I suddenly remembered something my father used to say: ‘We all see the world differently from each other; we all have unique vision.’ I looked at my daughter and felt a bizarre pang that she’d never known Beverley Clay, her grandfather. I had a feeling they would have got on inordinately well.
And then I began to understand what had happened – or understand some of it – as she talked with a strange quiet passion about Tayborn’s life as a soldier and the horrible things that he had seen, done and experienced in his Vietnam tour of duty and how it had altered him forever, made him see clearly how the world and its workings were; how it had made him hate the war and the forces that waged the war, the politicians, the industrialists, the generals. I thought about my father and Sholto and wanted to say, no, darling, your Tayborn Gaines is nothing like those men. But now I was beginning to feel slightly queasy and so forced myself to sit quietly and appear to listen to Blythe who was now going on about Tayborn’s ambitions to make a new life, a new sheltered environment where people ‘could see clearly’ and so he had moved to Willow Ranch and created the Willow Ranch Community.
‘But how did you ever wind up there, darling? I thought you wanted to be a singer, write songs, play your music. What happened to your boyfriend, Jeff Bellamont? You were living together in London, for heaven’s sake – where did he go?’
‘Jeff was a friend of Tayborn’s. Was a friend. We went to Willow Ranch together and then, after about a week, Jeff just went away. Disappeared. Didn’t leave a note. He took the car and whatever money I had in my bag and vanished.’
‘Enter Tayborn.’
‘He saved me, Ma.’
‘I’m sure he did.’
‘Don’t be cynical.’
‘Sorry.’ I drew on my cigarette. ‘Why on earth did you have to marry him, though?’
‘Tayborn believes in marriage. As an institution.’
Feeling weak, suddenly, I poured out the rest of the bottle, just a few drops.
‘How long have you been married?’
‘About five weeks.’
‘Where is he? Does he know you’re here? Seeing me?’
‘Of course. He brought me here. He’s parked out front at the reception.’
‘Come home, Blythe, come home with me.’
‘No, Ma. Willow Ranch is my home. Tayborn’s my husband. I’ve never been happier.’
We talked a little more and I didn’t ask her to come home with me again. I had made the plea and it had been rejected. I walked back with her to the reception area, my arm around her thin shoulders. Across the street I could see Gaines’s jeep parked in the shadow of the motel sign. We kissed goodbye and she promised she would write to me, let me know what she was doing, all the time reassuring me how happy and at peace she was, seriously, Ma, really and truly.
I let her hand go and watched her cross the moon-shadowed tarmac towards her new husband. She didn’t look back as she gave me a quick wave.
Cole Hardaway, his face impassive, sat across from me in one of the curved red leatherette booths in the bar just down the street from his office. We were both drinking what Cole called ‘highballs’ but that I knew as Scotch and soda. I had an almost uncontrollable urge to reach forward and sweep his stupid fringe aside, off his forehead, but that was probably just a symptom of my frustration. I had come to like Cole Hardaway.
‘You’re sure,’ I said, not hiding my disappointment – it had been my last desperate hope. ‘A real marriage.’
‘I’m afraid so. Married by the clerk of Inyo County about a month and a half ago.’
I felt that emptiness well up inside me, instinctively – then it subsided as I sipped my drink. Why was Blythe being so crazily stupid? Why Tayborn Gaines of all people? But I thought I knew the answer to that. And then I remembered how at her age I had slipped into the bed of my homosexual uncle and asked him to make love to me. We are not logical beings, especially when it comes to affairs of the heart.
‘However,’ Cole said, his expression unchanging, ‘Tayborn Gaines never served in the US military. There are no records. Certainly not in the Eighty-Second Airborne.’
Now, I felt a little bloom of elation. Now I had my way in, my fifth column to destabilise this union. So Gaines was no soldier, as I had suspected. What fantasies of warfare and warriorhood had he spun for Blythe?
Back at the Heyworth Travel Inn, in my room, the air conditioner at full blast, I took my time over the letter I wrote.
Darling Blythe,
It was both lovely and, I have to be honest, a bit disturbing to see you in your new life. Believe me, I understand better than anyone your desire to be happy and I understand that you are convinced that you have found that happiness with Tayborn. I love you and all I wish for you is to be happy – it’s as simple as that. But I also wish you hadn’t done everything so swiftly. It takes time to
truly come to know a person and, I wonder, what do you truly know about this man you are so deeply in love with?
I ask because I’ve discovered that one thing he claims to be isn’t in fact true. Tayborn Gaines was never a soldier. He was never in the 82nd Airborne. He never served in Vietnam. Now, I ask you – if a man can lie so convincingly about something he claims is of fundamental importance and significance to his being what then does that imply for—
I stopped. I felt that sickness in me again. It was a conscious realisation that I was wasting my time and the absolute knowledge of this fact made me want to vomit. I stood up and walked around the room taking deep breaths. Then I sat down at the table again. It was Blythe’s life and she had every right to live it as she wished. Slowly I tore up my letter to her about the lies of Tayborn Gaines. As I arranged the shreds into a small neat square pile I found I was weeping inconsolably. I knew I had finally lost my daughter.
CODA IN BARRANDALE: 1978
My mother died in 1969. Greville died in 1972. The Clay family, diminishing.
Is it true that your life is just a long preparation for your death – the one thing we can all be sure of, all the billions of us? The deaths you witness, hear about, that are close to you – that you may cause or bring about, however inadvertently (I think of my dog, Flim) – are preparing you, covertly, incrementally, for your own eventual departure. I think of all the deaths in my life – the ones that left me riven, the strangers’ deaths I happened to see – and understand how they have steered me to this position, this intellectual conviction, that I hold now. You don’t realise this when you’re young but as you age this steady accumulation of knowledge teaches you, becomes relentlessly pertinent to your own case.
But then I wonder – turn this notion on its head. Are all the deaths you encounter and experience in fact an enhancement of the life you lead? Your personal history of death teaches you what’s important, what makes it actually worth being alive – sentient and breathing. It’s a key lesson because when you know that, you also know its opposite – you know when life’s no longer worth living – and then you can die, happy.
*
I met Blythe at a coffee shop down in Westchester, on West 82nd Street off Sepulveda Boulevard, near Los Angeles International Airport. I was on my way home so it was convenient even though I could see the neighbourhood was run-down and shabby. Our order was taking its time to arrive and Blythe left our booth and went to speak to the waitress. To me she sounded like an American, now, her English accent all but gone. She was wearing a black and white striped shirt and jeans; her hair was cut carelessly short – there was a long untrimmed strand at the back – and she was wearing no make-up. She returned to our booth and sat down, managing a genuine smile, it seemed to me.
‘Something’s gone wrong in the kitchen. It’ll be two minutes.’
‘Doesn’t matter, darling, seeing you again before I go is the main thing.’ I reached for her hand and squeezed it and then let it go and turned the gesture into an airy wave, indicating the streetscape out of the window.
‘So this is where you work.’
‘Just round the corner. You have to go to the needy – they won’t come to you.’
‘Of course, makes sense.’
‘There’s nothing to see – just a room with a coffee machine and a few small offices.’
‘Well, at least I have a picture of the neighbourhood.’
This was the third visit I had made to the US to see Blythe in the eight years since she crossed the road in front of the San Carlos Motel and went to rejoin her husband, Tayborn Gaines, who was waiting patiently for her in his jeep.
I suppose it was some private consolation to me that the marriage didn’t even make its first anniversary. Some months after I’d left, the Willow Ranch Community was raided by the police and significant quantities of LSD and marijuana were discovered. Gaines was prosecuted but acquitted for lack of convincing evidence. He and Blythe moved to Los Angeles and then some weeks later he left. I don’t know what happened – I had all this information from Annie who was more closely in touch with Blythe than I was – but I suspect that Blythe’s Farr legacy had finally run out. Time for Tayborn to move on.
Curiously, Blythe kept Tayborn’s name – she was Blythe Gaines from now on, not Farr. I think I understand. The name was all that remained of the dream-life she thought she had acquired and then lost so suddenly and cruelly. Or, now I come to think about it, maybe it was a harsh aide-memoire – don’t get fooled again, girl. In any event she stayed on in Los Angeles and picked up the career in music she had abandoned; writing songs, playing in bands in and around the Los Angeles area.
On my first visit to see her she was living in a ramshackle house on Coldwater Canyon Drive with half a dozen other people – young men and women, all musicians, I think. She had dyed her hair auburn and parted it in the middle – I thought it didn’t suit her. She smoked as much as I did. In the few days I spent with her we must have consumed a dozen packets of ‘smokes’, as she called them. The significant fact I remember about that trip was that she asked if I would mind if she called me ‘Amory’ rather than ‘Ma’. I said it was fine with me.
She was better, more like the Blythe I knew than the Blythe of the Willow Ranch experiment, but she was more distant, cooler with me – hence my name change, I surmise – consciously treating me as an equal rather than her mother. I knew why: she was feeling a residual shame about the whole Tayborn Gaines period, for being so hopelessly duped by him. I tried to raise the subject in the hope of expiating it. I said she should forget all about that period of time, not feel ashamed. She was still very young; I started to list all the mistakes I had made at her age but she cut me off abruptly and said she never wanted to talk about it again. So I let it go. People are opaque, even those closest to you. What do we know about the interior lives of our children? Only as much as they choose to reveal.
Blythe came over to England a couple of years later to appear on a music show on television. She was one of three backing singers in a band called Franklin Canyon Park – part of that Californian soft-rock movement of the early 1970s – that had a couple of hit records in Europe. I remember watching the show when the band appeared on TV and feeling an absurd overweening pride when I caught two or three glimpses of Blythe in the background as the camera panned to and fro between the leading members of the group.
She came up to Barrandale to stay for a few days and collect her ‘stuff’, clearing out her bedroom, removing almost every trace of Blythe Farr from 6 Druim Rigg Road. Again I understood what was going on but in fact we were fine together during the time she was there. We went for long walks; she became very fond of Flam, the dog, and even opened up a little more to me, telling me of a man she had met (there was never any sign of Gaines – it was as if he’d disappeared off the face of the earth), a sound engineer, called Griffin, in a studio where she recorded. ‘Don’t worry, Amory, I won’t be marrying him. I’m never going to marry anyone ever again.’
She never really achieved anything significant with her music. Annie told me that a song she’d co-written for Franklin Canyon Park had reached number thirty-six in the Billboard charts but that was the apex. Her life with Griffin the sound engineer ended also when his drug problem became too much to bear, Annie informed me.
On my second trip over I discovered that she was working as a volunteer at the Long Beach Memorial Medical Center. She was living alone in a small apartment in Anaheim but she did seem more contented. She played in bars at weekends, singing her own songs and rock standards to make something of a living. Luckily she had a small but steady royalty stream from the songs she’d written with Franklin Canyon Park (now long disbanded) but she was very happy to accept some money from me when I offered it. ‘It’s a loan, Amory. I’ll pay you back.’ I think Annie sent her money also and I arranged with Moss Fallmaster to divert any cash that came from the slowly diminishing sales of the ‘Never Too Young To . . .’ T-shirts into her ban
k account. She also insisted that these occasional payments were a loan – I would be repaid in full, one day. She seemed to survive fairly well, in fact: it was a modest life that she led but a busy one. She’d put on a bit of weight. There was another man in her life, Annie said, but Blythe told me nothing.
I knew in my heart she wouldn’t come back to Britain. She changed job and stayed on in Los Angeles, working with former inmates from the Californian Institute of Women (a prison) at a drug-rehabilitation centre called Clean ’n’ Sober in the Westchester district of Los Angeles. To be honest, I don’t think we’ll ever recover that old, unfettered, instinctive relationship we once had. Annie has seen more of her than I have and she says Blythe will come round, eventually, Blythe will see the reality of the situation, just ‘give it time’. Well, time is exactly what I’m short of.
Our coffee finally arrived and we chatted about this and that – she told me more about her work with drug addicts and alcoholics and the appalling problems the poor and downtrodden of Los Angeles experienced. I told her more about Annie – about her teaching at CIDBS (the Conservatory for International Development and Business Studies), a private university near Brussels; that she had a boyfriend – whom I hadn’t met – a Swedish colleague called Nils. Blythe didn’t ask about me, or Dido, or the family – except to request a photo of Flam, whenever I had a moment. This was a good sign, I thought. I held on to it.
The coffee was strong – it had been stewing on a burner for ages – and I decided I needed it sweeter. As I reached for the sugar-shaker and picked it up my hand wouldn’t grip and the shaker clattered on to the Formica tabletop. I righted it with my other hand but Blythe had noticed my expression.