Sweet Caress Read online

  When my father came home, in those early years after the war, the only real pleasure he seemed to take in life was long walks to the sea, over the Downs, to the beaches at Pevensey and Cooden. He strode out, leading his children and whatever friends and relatives we had with us, like some slightly demented Pied Piper, urging us on. ‘Step we gaily, on we go!’ he would shout back at us as we dawdled and explored.

  My mother joined us later with the motor and we would be driven home at the end of the day to Beckburrow. However, once we arrived at the beach, it was immediately obvious how my father’s mood changed. The high spirits of the walk gave way to taciturn moodiness as he sat there smoking his pipe staring at the sea. We never gave it much thought. Your father was born moody, my mother would say, always brooding about something. He’s a writer who can’t write and it’s making him fractious. And so we put up with his interminable silences punctuated by the odd demonic rant when his patience finally snapped and he would stalk the house shouting at everyone, bellowing for ‘Just a bit of peace and quiet, for the love of Jesus! Is it too much to ask?’ We simply made ourselves scarce and Mother would calm him down, leading him back to his study, whispering in his ear. I’ve no idea what she said to him, but it seemed to work.

  Your parents, however strange they may be in actual fact, always seem ‘normal’ to their offspring. Indeed, the slow realisation of your parents’ defining oddness is a harbinger of your developing maturity – a sign that you are growing up, becoming your own person. In those early years at Beckburrow, from our move there until the mid-1920s, nothing seemed much wrong with our little world. Servants came and went, the garden flourished; Peggy appeared to be some kind of infant prodigy on the piano; baby Xan turned into a somewhat self-contained, thoughtful and almost simple boy who could amuse himself for hours creating elaborate patterns with a handful of sticks and leaves or damming the stream at the bottom of the south lawn, conjuring into being a little empire of rivers and lakes and irrigation channels, setting small balsa-wood rafts off on minuscule voyages of discovery. It would keep him occupied an entire day until he was called in for supper.

  What about our Amory? What about me? So far, so run of the mill. After the dame school in Battle came the secondary school in Hastings. Then in 1921 it was announced that I was going away – to be a boarder at Amberfield School for Girls near Worthing. When I left for Amberfield (Mother accompanying me, Ned driving) and we pulled away down the lanes from Beckburrow it was the first time in my life that I registered the full level of hurt, injustice and disappointment that amounted to a betrayal. My mother would hear nothing of it: ‘You’re a lucky girl, it’s a wonderful school, don’t make a fuss. I hate fuss and fusspots.’

  I came home in the holidays, of course, but, as the one absentee, felt I was something of an outsider. The barn had been converted into a music room for Peggy, wainscotted, painted, a carpet on the floor and furnished with a baby grand piano, where she was taught by a Madame Duplessis from Brighton. Xan mooned about the garden and the lanes around the house, a solemn boy with a rare, transforming smile. My father appeared to be spending most of the week in London, looking for literary work of some sort. He was given a part-time job as an editor and contributor to the Strand magazine and was a reader for various publishing houses. The pot of money from ‘The Belladonna Benefaction’ was running out. A 1919 production in New York closed after a month but cheques continued to arrive in the post, the mysterious enduring legacy of a once successful play. My mother was quite content, it seemed to me, running her big house, or sitting on the bench of the magistrate’s court in Lewes, or initiating and organising charitable works in the East Sussex villages around Claverleigh – fetes, tombolas, bring-and-buy sales.

  And Greville would come down occasionally from London. Only Greville was my friend, I felt, and he taught me how to take better photographs, changing my Box Brownie for a 2A Kodak Jnr, with an extending lens on a concertina mount and, one mysterious afternoon, he blacked out the pantry, unpacked his trays and pungent bottles, and showed me the astonishing alchemy involved in taking images trapped on film and, through the application of chemicals – developer, stopper, fixer and washes – turning them miraculously into negatives which could then be printed into black and white photographs.

  I still felt this nagging sore of resentment at my banishment, however. One day I generated enough courage to confront my mother and asked her why I had to go away to school when Peggy and Xan could stay at home. My mother sat me down and took my hands. ‘Peggy is a genius,’ she said, breezily, ‘and Xan has problems.’ And that was that, an end to the matter until my father finally went totally insane.

  *

  THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

  I feed Flam, my loyal and loving Labrador, and, as the summer night slowly comes on, light the oil lamps. I use my diesel generator to power the small refrigerator, the washing machine and my radio and hi-fi. I don’t want electric light or a television set – and, anyway, I won’t be around much longer, so what’s the point of more home improvements? I live in a comfortable technological limbo, a halfway house: on the one hand laundry, music, the world’s news and ice cubes for my gin and tonic; and, on the other, a peat fire and the particular glow that the oil lamp gives off – the subtle waver of the incandescent wick, the lambent marshmallow, generating that subtle shadow-shift that makes the room more alive, somehow – breathing, pulsing.

  Barrandale doesn’t really deserve to be called an island. It’s separated from the mainland of the west of Scotland by a narrow ‘sound’, maybe fifty or sixty feet across at its widest. And the sound is bridged, the ‘Bridge over the Atlantic’ as we locals grandiosely like to term it. There’s another island with another more famous, grander, older, stone bridge (ours is made of girders and railway sleepers but is ten feet longer, which makes us feel ever so slightly more superior: we cross a larger portion of the Atlantic). Still, Barrandale is irrefutably an island, and driving over the bridge – over the sound – establishes, almost unknowingly, an island mentality.

  My separate schooling, it turned out – so I learned later – was the result of a will. The death of a great-aunt (Audrey, on my mother’s side) conferred on the Clay family a sum of money for the education of Amory, great-niece and firstborn. My father’s steadily diminishing and erratic income couldn’t have coped with the termly fees demanded by Amberfield, but, if I hadn’t been sent there, or somewhere similar, the benefaction wouldn’t have been forthcoming. Completely strange, unknown currents can shape our lives. Why didn’t my parents tell me? Why did they pretend it was their decision? I was taken away from the familiar comforts and securities of Beckburrow and I was meant to be grateful, the privileged one.

  My mother was a tall, bespectacled, somewhat cumbersome woman. She managed to conceal whatever affection she might have felt for her children with great success. She had two expressions she used all the time: ‘I don’t like a fuss’ and ‘Put that in your pipe and smoke it’. She was always patient with us but in a way that seemed to suggest her mind was elsewhere, that she had more interesting things she could be doing. We always called her ‘Mother’, as if it was a category, a definition, and didn’t reflect our relationship, as if we were saying ‘ironmonger’ or ‘historian’. Here’s the sort of exchange that would ensue:

  ME: Mother, could I have another helping of blancmange, please?

  MOTHER: No.

  ME: Why not? There’s plenty left.

  MOTHER: Because I say so.

  ME: But that’s not fair!

  MOTHER: Well you’ll just have to put that in your pipe and smoke it, won’t you?

  My mother on Cooden beach in the 1920s.

  Taken with my 2A Kodak Jnr. Xan is laughing behind her.

  I never saw any real expression of affection between my mother and my father – and at the same time I have to admit I never saw any signs of resentment or hostility.

  My father’s father, Edwin Clay, was a miner from Staffordshire who w
ent to night classes at a Mechanics’ Institute, educated himself, qualified himself, and ended his career as a director of Edgeware & Rackham, the publishers, where he eventually became the managing editor of five trade magazines that served the building industry. He grew wealthy enough to send his two sons to private schools. My father, a clever boy, won an exhibition to Lincoln College, Oxford, and became a professional writer (his younger brother, Walter, died at the Battle of Jutland, 1915). The one-generation jump was remarkable, I suppose, and yet I always sensed in my father that familiar mixture of pride at his achievements combined with – not shame, but a diffidence, an insecurity: an English social insecurity. Would anyone take him seriously, a miner’s son, as a writer? I believe that part of the reason for buying Beckburrow and enlarging it and living the county life must have been to prove to himself that those insecurities were now worthless and wholly cancelled out. He had become thoroughly middle class; a successful writer of several well-received books married to a judge’s daughter, with three children, living in a large and covetable big house in the East Sussex countryside. Yet he was not entirely a happy man. And then the war came and everything went wrong.

  I think tonight I might begin to sort out all those old boxes of photographs. Or maybe not.

  *

  It is 1925. The Amberfield School for Girls, Worthing. My best friend Millicent Lowther stuck on the false moustache and smoothed it down with her fingertips.

  ‘It was all I could find,’ she said. ‘They seemed only to have beards.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I said. ‘I only want to get an idea of the sensation.’

  We were sitting on the floor, our backs to the wall. I leant forward and kissed her gently, lips to lips, no great pressure.

  ‘Don’t pout,’ I said, not pulling away. ‘Men don’t pout.’ The contact with the false moustache wasn’t unpleasant, although, given the choice, I’d always prefer a clean-shaven top lip. I moved slightly, changed the angle, feeling the prickle of the bristles on my cheek. No, it was tolerable.

  We older girls regularly practised kissing at Amberfield but I have to say the experience wasn’t much different from kissing your fingers or the inside of your upper arm. Having never kissed a man, and I was now seventeen years old, I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about, as my mother would have said.

  We broke apart.

  ‘Any moustache pash?’ Millicent asked.

  ‘Not really. It’s just that Greville’s grown one and I wanted to see what it might feel like.’

  ‘Gorgeous Greville. Why don’t you invite him to visit?’

  ‘Because I don’t want you specimens ogling him. Did you get the fags?’

  We bought cigarettes from one of the young Amberfield gardeners, a gormless lad with a harelip called Roy.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Millicent said and fished in her pockets, producing a small wrap of paper and a box of matches. I liked Millicent a great deal – she was smart and sardonic, almost as sardonic as me – but I would have preferred her to have fuller lips, the better to practise kissing – her upper lip was almost non-existent.

  I screwed one of the small Woodbines into the ebony cigarette holder that I had stolen from my mother.

  ‘Just Woodbines,’ Millicent said. ‘Very infra dig, I’m afraid.’

  ‘You can’t expect a poor proletarian like Roy to smoke Craven “A”.’

  ‘Roy, the hoi polloi. I suppose not, but they do burn my throat, rather.’

  ‘While your head spins.’

  I lit Millicent’s cigarette and then my own and we puffed smoke up at the ceiling. We were in my ‘darkroom’, a broom cupboard outside the chemistry laboratory.

  ‘Thank the Lord your chemicals pong so,’ Millicent said. ‘What is that smell?’

  ‘Fixer. It’s called hypo.’

  ‘I’m not surprised no one’s ever descried cigarette smoke in your little cubbyhole.’

  ‘Not once. Is “descried” the mot juste?’

  ‘It’s a word that should be used more often,’ Millicent said, a little smugly, I thought, as if she had invented the verb herself, spontaneously.

  ‘But correctly,’ I admonished.

  ‘Pedant. Annoying pedant.’

  ‘Apart from us, only the Child Killer comes in here, and she loves me.’

  ‘Is she a femme, do you think, the Child Killer?’

  ‘No. I think she’s sexless . . .’ I drew on my Woodbine, feeling the head-reel. ‘I don’t think she really knows what she’s feeling.’ The Child Killer was in fact called Miss Milburn, the science teacher, and I owed her a great deal. She had given me this broom cupboard and encouraged me to set up my dark room in it. She had dense unplucked eyebrows that almost met over her nose, hence her nickname.

  ‘But aren’t we femmes?’ Millicent asked. ‘Kissing each other like this?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We only do it to educate ourselves, to see what it’d be like with a man. We’re not bitter, my dear.’ ‘Bitter’ was Amberfield slang for ‘perverted’.

  ‘Then why do you want to kiss your uncle? Eugh!’

  ‘Simple – I’m in love with him.’

  ‘And you say you’re not bitter!’

  ‘He’s the handsomest, funniest, kindest, most sardonic man I’ve ever met. If you were ever in his presence – not that you’ll ever be – you’d understand.’

  ‘It just seems a bit odd to me.’

  ‘Everything in life is a bit odd, when you come to think of it.’ I was quoting my father – it was something he’d say from time to time.

  Millicent stood up, cigarette between her lips, and squeezed her small breasts.

  ‘I just can’t imagine a man doing this to me . . . Rubbing my bosoms. How would I feel, react? I might want to punch him.’

  ‘That’s why it’s just as well we try everything here, first. One day we’ll get out of this jungle, we’ll be free. We need to have some idea of what’s going to be what.’

  ‘It’s all right for you,’ Millicent said, grudgingly. ‘The world you move in – writers, society photographers . . . My father’s a timber merchant.’

  ‘Your secret’s safe with me.’

  ‘Minx! Queen of the minxes!’

  ‘I’m not a snob, Millicent. My grandfather was a Staffordshire miner.’

  ‘I’d rather my father was a writer than a timber merchant, that’s all I’m saying.’ Millicent carefully removed her false moustache and stubbed out her Woodbine.

  ‘Any more kissing?’ she asked. ‘We haven’t tried it with tongues.’

  ‘Bitter woman! You should be ashamed of yourself.’ I clambered to my feet and went to look at my photographs drying on their line of string. A bell rang in a distant corridor.

  ‘I think I’m meant to be supervising some of the younger specimens,’ she said. ‘See you later, darling.’

  She left and I carefully unpegged the photos. I didn’t print every negative I developed as I didn’t want to waste paper on contact sheets. I would scrutinise the negative with a magnifying glass and was often very confident of the choice I eventually made. The decision to print was somehow key to what I felt about the photograph and each one that I selected would be given a title. I don’t know why I did this – some vague painterly connection, I suppose – but in bestowing a title the photograph lived on in my mind more easily and permanently. I could recall almost every photograph that I’d printed – a memory archive – an album in my head. I think also that the whole process of photography still seemed astonishing at that stage of my life. The abidingly magical process of trapping an image on film through the brief exposure of light and then, through the precisely monitored agency of chemicals and paper, producing a monochrome picture of that instant of time still possessed its alluring sorcery.

  Now, Millicent having gone, summoned by her bell, I took down my three new photographs – stiff, dry – and laid them out on the small table at the end of the box room. I had called the three photographs ‘Xan, Flying’, ‘Boy with Bat
and Hat’ and ‘At the Lido’. I was pleased with them all, particularly ‘Xan, Flying’.

  One hot day the previous August we’d gone down to the Westbourne Swimming Club Lido in Hove where they had a one-acre, unheated salt-water pool with a twenty-five-foot diving board at one end. It took Xan three jumps before I was happy that I’d truly captured him in mid-air.

  I wrote the titles on the back of the prints in a soft pencil, added the date, and slipped them into my loose album. All three photographs were similar in that they were candid shots of people in movement. I liked taking photographs of people in action – walking, coming down steps, running, jumping and, most importantly, not looking into the lens. I loved the way the camera could capture that unreflecting suspended animation, an image of somebody halted utterly in time – their next step, their next gesture, next movement, forever incomplete. Stopped just like that – by me – with the click of a shutter. Even then I think I was aware that only photography could do that – so confidently, so effortlessly – only photography could pull off that magic trick of stopping time; that millisecond of our existence captured, allowing us to live forever.

  Two days later I was in the sixth-form study room taking part in a staring match with Laura Hassall. It was her challenge but I knew I would win – I always won staring matches. We were allowed to speak to each other, deliberately to provoke a lapse in concentration or to distract so eye contact was broken.

  ‘Stanley Baldwin’s been assassinated,’ Laura said.

  ‘Poor. Very poor.’

  ‘No. He has.’

  ‘Good. Horrible man.’

  ‘Xan, Flying’, 1924.