Sweet Caress
Page 39
‘Maybe I won’t have any sugar, in fact,’ I said, resignedly. ‘Curb that sweet tooth.’
‘Are you all right, Amory? Is there anything wrong?’
‘Just a bit clumsy in my old age,’ I said, smiling brightly.
She looked at me searchingly, shrewdly.
‘You’d tell me if anything was wrong, wouldn’t you? I wouldn’t forgive you if you kept something from me.’
‘Of course, darling. But there’s nothing wrong. I’m just happy to be sitting here with you.’
Eventually I said I’d better go and catch my plane and she walked with me out to where my car was parked.
‘It was lovely to see you,’ Blythe said. ‘I did enjoy our dinner the other night. I’m sorry I’ve been so busy. I wish we could have spent more time together. It seems like you’ve flown all this way just to have a cup of coffee with me.’
‘Oh, I have to come to California, anyway,’ I lied. ‘I have this sort of business partner out here. My T-shirt is still selling, amazingly.’ That was true: I had dropped in on Moss Fallmaster and he had told me there was almost $400 owed to me. I asked him to send it on to Blythe’s account. ‘It’s always a good excuse to see you, darling,’ I said. ‘We miss you, Blythe. But we understand.’
She frowned hard at this – I suspect to keep tears at bay.
‘I feel I’m doing some good,’ she said. ‘It helps me – helping other people.’
We walked on towards the car – a cream Chevrolet Caprice. A plump young man in baggy green shorts, a Mothers of Invention T-shirt and a greasy baseball cap was standing there, smoking, as if he were waiting for us to appear. He had a droopy moustache.
‘This your fucking car?’ he asked me, aggressively.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, I’m renting it.’
‘You’re in my spot, lady.’
‘It’s a parking meter,’ I said. ‘You can’t reserve a parking meter.’
‘I always park here, lady,’ he said turning his small, pink eyes on me. ‘It’s reserved for me.’
‘It’s OK, sir,’ Blythe said, very politely, stepping in, seeing I was about to explode. ‘She’s just going.’
‘My sincere apologies,’ I said as sarcastically as I could manage and he wandered off muttering to himself.
Blythe watched him go, her hands on her hips.
‘Overweight, obnoxious, unwashed, insane,’ she said, drily.
I laughed – feeling such a wave of relief surge through me that it made me shiver. I kissed her goodbye and she gave me a fleeting hug, a pressure of her hands on my shoulders. Somehow I knew everything would be fine.
*
I still feel a responsibility for her, however illogical that may seem. I keep wondering what would have happened if I hadn’t left the girls and gone off to Vietnam. Would it have made a difference? It didn’t seem to affect Annie . . . Who can say? Life’s unsatisfactory, half-baked, half-assed solutions are sometimes the best. Annie with her Swedish boyfriend in Brussels; Blythe helping junkies in Los Angeles. I really don’t care what my children do with their lives – I have no agenda for them at all – I only want them to be as happy as they can possibly be, given life’s stringent, sudden demands, on whatever road they choose to walk down. The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews, as the poet says: not to be born is the best for man – only that way can you avoid all of life’s complications.
I’m thinking about birth, I should say, because I’m in the process of arranging my death.
Last week I called Annie in Brussels to have a chat about something and she said, ‘Ma, have you been drinking?’ No more than usual, I said, I’ve had two glasses of wine. ‘Well, your voice is slurred,’ she said. ‘Take it easy.’ I was shocked because I had no idea my voice was slurred though I knew exactly what it implied – progressive bulbar palsy. My nasty little smiler with the knife that lurks inside me had inserted the blade again. So I decided the time had come. My birthday was approaching, my seventieth, threescore years and ten is good enough for me.
This is what I looked up in the Bible I borrowed from the Auld Kirk – I found what I was searching for quickly enough. Psalms 90.10:
The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow, for it is soon cut off and we fly away.
I know what’s wrong with me and I know what I will become – a working, vital, thinking brain in a dead and uncontrollable body in which nothing works. No thank you. The days of my life will be threescore years and ten, I have decided. I will cut it off and I will fly away, myself.
Everything is in order. Here I am in my sitting room on 6 March 1978 waiting for midnight. The fire is banked up with peat bricks and I am ideally cosy. On the table beside my armchair is a full bottle of Glen Fleshan malt whisky, a glass and a jam jar full of Jock Edie’s blessed ‘sweeties’. Jock’s capsules are a benzodiazepine – ‘Librium’ in this instance. Take them with alcohol, he advised: alcohol compounds the effects, leading to coma and then death. It’s a tranquil feeling, he had added, consolingly. You won’t be aware of anything. Flam lies by the fire watching me carefully. I think he knows something untoward is going on; he senses my troubled mind and it discomfits him. We’re both animals, after all, so it’s not surprising that he senses something’s amiss. He knows me very well.
On the coffee table in front of me is my will, a letter for Annie and Blythe and my life story in a cardboard file and I will add the ‘Barrandale Journal’ to it before I fly away. Pinned to the front door is an envelope for Hugo with ‘Hugo. Read this before entry!’ written on it. I’ve arranged for him to come round tomorrow, ostensibly to travel to Oban to look for pots and pans and other kitchen utensils for his new house. In the envelope is a letter telling him what I’ve done – what I’m about to do. I don’t want to shock anyone, which is one reason why I’m sitting in an armchair. I suspect I shall look as if I’ve dozed off when he pushes open the front door and comes through the hall into the parlour. He’ll have been forewarned.
I don’t like the word ‘suicide’ or ‘assisted dying’ or ‘mercy killing’ or any of the few other synonyms available. I prefer the expression ‘by my own hand’. I will take my life by my own hand at a moment chosen by me – not by my disease. ‘By my own hand’ speaks to me of autonomy, of free will.
I feel very calm. I truly believe this option should be available to anyone who wants it. In fact I feel quite passionate about this issue now I’m about to put it into practice – it should be available to anyone who wants it as a matter of civil liberty, of human rights and human dignity. You go to your doctor, explain the situation, you sign all manner of affidavits testifying to your determination, clarity of mind, familiarity with consequences and so forth. You have the documentation witnessed, if required. Then you’re given your bottle of pills, or, even better, one pill, and you go home, set your affairs in order, make your necessary farewells, if you want to, and gladly leave your life behind. End of story. I’m not going to give the lethal pill to anyone else. If I buy a kitchen knife no one asks me if I’m going to stab someone with it. With your purchase you are simultaneously handed the responsibility to use your knife as it was designed to be used – so too with my notional pill. Our lives are filled with potential lethal weapons, after all; a pill that will end your life painlessly is just another. If we’re treated as responsible beings we tend to act responsibly.
There was a French writer – Charbonneau told me his name but I can’t remember it now – who defined life as a ‘horizontal fall’. It’s a neat metaphor. I just want to end my horizontal fall now, before the bleak prison of my particular ailment closes in around me. What could be more reasonable than that?
Charbonneau’s name coming to mind makes me think fondly of him – and all the people I’ve loved during my own horizontal fall. My threescore years and ten have been rich and intensely sad, fascinating, droll, absurd and terrifying – sometimes �
� and difficult and painful and happy. Complicated, in other words.
It’s midnight. I take my first pill and wash it down with a sip of Glen Fleshan. I’ve decided to keep writing in my journal until my last moment of consciousness. Flam looks at me, his tail thumps on the carpet. I’ve walked him so he’ll just have to wait until Hugo arrives in the morning. I’ve ordered Hugo to take Flam and Hugo can walk him, later, when he’s been. And it’ll be a fine day tomorrow, for a March day on Barrandale – a good day for a long walk. Clear skies have been announced, bracing sunlit weather. I should never have listened to the weather forecast. I take another pill.
My eyes flit around my sitting room, taking it in for the last time.
In a fruit bowl on the table in front of me are four oranges and a banana. And I think – without thinking – ah, breakfast tomorrow. The banana is freckling nicely. I could slice it into a bowl of porridge. I could have freshly squeezed orange juice and then a bowl of porridge with sliced banana and then go for a walk with Flam, down to the bay, round to the headland. Call Hugo, invite him for lunch. A bottle of wine . . . Except there won’t be a tomorrow, I realise.
I take another pill, another sip of whisky. I won’t feel a thing, Jock Edie said, just drift off to sleep and not wake up.
But, annoyingly, I keep thinking about freshly squeezed orange juice and the day ahead waiting for me. Sun on the wavelets in the bay and that cold bright weather that here on the west coast is about as invigorating as you can experience – cheeks numb, breath condensing, the light and shade razor-edged, the focus precisely sharp. I could take some more light-pictures by the rock pools . . .
Flam is standing now, as if he senses this new direction in my thinking, and he shakes himself, licks his chops and comes over to me and puts his muzzle on my knee and looks into my eyes. No, I’m not going to rub your ears, old dog, go and lie down.
I pick up another pill . . .
But I’ve put it back in the bottle and screwed the cap tightly on. Was I making another mistake, I thought, my last mistake? Was I being a little hasty . . . ? If I can plan my breakfast and look forward to the day ahead with its simple pleasures – isn’t that a sign? Wouldn’t it be wiser to experience the day ahead and savour it, as if it were my last, and postpone for a while my appointment with my pills and my whisky until the moment comes when I don’t feel like coping any more and all anticipation has gone? I have the means so I can decide at any time of my choosing – Jock Edie says the pills will keep for years. I push the pill bottle away and pour myself a large dram of Glen Fleshan.
I am thinking – hard, concentrating. My life has been complicated, true, very complicated, and it seems to be entering another realm of complexity. But, then again, isn’t everybody’s and won’t everybody’s be just as complicated? Any life of any reasonable length throws up all manner of complications, just as intricate as mine have been. I pick up an orange and contemplate it. Remarkable fruit. I test its rind with my thumbnail. Like skin, porous, soft. What’s waiting for me? A cold fine day, a dog, a walk, a white beach, the wind-scored ocean, a camera, an urgent concentrating eye, a curious active mind. I weigh the orange in my hand, sniff its citrus astringency. The singular beauty of the orange . . . The here and now. Seize the day, Amory.
Yes, my life has been very complicated but, I realise, it’s the complications that have engaged me and made me feel alive. I think I should let my horizontal fall continue just a little while longer – keep falling horizontally until I decide to stop.
I know I won’t sleep now that I’ve made my decision. I hold my glass of whisky up to the glow from the peat bricks in the fire and watch the small flames shuffle and refract through the golden liquid. Yes, I’ll go down to the beach with Flam – now, in the middle of the moonless night and listen to the waves – and walk on the shore and look out at the darkness of the ocean, all senses dimmed except the auditory; stroll on my beach with the lights of my house burning yellow behind me in the enveloping blue-black sea-dark and contemplate this uncertain future that I’ve just bestowed on myself – me, Amory Clay, a certain type of ape on a small planet circling an insignificant star in a solar system that’s part of an unimaginably vast expanding universe – and I will stand there in all humility and calm myself, with the ocean’s endless, unchanging, consoling call for silence – shh, shh, shh . . .
AMORY CLAY
Photographer
Born
7 March 1908
Died
23 June 1983
(by her own hand)
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Hannelore Hahn, Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Margaret Michaelis, Lee Miller, Gerda Taro, Trude Fleischmann, Gloria Emerson, Steffi Brandt, Martha Gellhorn, Constanze Auger, M. F. K. Fisher, Nina Leen, Gerti Deutsch, Lily Perette, Harriet Cohen, Greta Kolliner, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Renata Alabama, Marianne Breslauer, Lisette Model, Edith Tudor-Hart, Françoise Demulder, Dora Kallmuss, Catherine Leroy, Edith Glogau, Dickey Chapelle, Margaret Bourke-White, Mary Poundstone, Diane Arbus, Rebecca West, Kate Webb, Inge Bing (and all the others).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WILLIAM BOYD is the author of fourteen novels including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Any Human Heart, winner of the Prix Jean Monnet and adapted into a BAFTA-winning Channel 4 drama; Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year, the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year and a Richard & Judy selection; the Sunday Times bestseller Waiting for Sunrise, and, most recently, Solo, a James Bond novel. William Boyd lives in London and France.
www.williamboyd.co.uk
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ALSO BY WILLIAM BOYD
Novels
A Good Man in Africa
An Ice-Cream War
Stars and Bars
The New Confessions
Brazzaville Beach
The Blue Afternoon
Armadillo
Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960
Any Human Heart
Restless
Ordinary Thunderstorms
Waiting for Sunrise
Solo
Short Story Collections
On the Yankee Station
The Destiny of Nathalie X
Fascination
The Dream Lover
Plays
School Ties
Six Parties
Longing
The Argument
Non-Fiction
Bamboo
CREDITS
FRONT COVER PHOTO: SISOJ / GETTY IMAGES
COPYRIGHT
SWEET CARESS
Copyright © 2015 by William Boyd.
All rights reserved under all applicable International Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Sweet Caress is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc. First published in Canada by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd in 2015 in an original trade paperback edition.
Photographs are from the author’s personal collection.
Every reasonable effort has been made to trace copyright holders of material reproduced in this book, but if any have been overlooked the publishers would be glad to hear from them.
EPub Edition: August 2015 ISBN: 9781443444880
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1‘Killed in Action’ and ‘Missing in Action’.
2The Caravelle Hotel was the favourite of the Vietnam Press Corps. AP and UPI had suites of offices there and its rooftop bar was the prime hang-out.
1Truong Ngoc Thong was hired by me on my third day in Saigon. I had rented a scooter that I thought would allow me to whizz about the city. Two near-accidents in half an hour showed me I had made a possibly fatal miscalculation. Truong spoke bad English, better French and, of course, fluent Vietnamese. His car was an old blue Renault Colorale. I would never have survived without him.