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William Boyd

Sweet Caress

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Amory Clay in 1928.

PROLOGUE

What drew me down there, I wonder, to the edge of the garden? I remember the summer light — the trees, the bushes, the grass luminously green, basted by the bland, benevolent late-afternoon sun. Was it the light? But there was the laughter, also, coming from where a group of people had gathered by the pond. Someone must have been horsing around making everyone laugh. The light and the laughter, then.

I was in the house, in my bedroom, bored, with the window open wide so I could hear the chatter of conversation from the guests and then the sudden arpeggio of delighted laughter came that made me slip off my bed and go to the window to see the gentlemen and ladies and the marquee and the trestle tables laid out with canapés and punchbowls. I was curious — why were they all making their way towards the pond? What was the source of this merriment? So I hurried downstairs to join them.

And then, halfway across the lawn, I turned and ran back to the house to fetch my camera. Why did I do that? I think I have an idea, now, all these years later. I wanted to capture that moment, that benign congregation in the garden on a warm summer evening in England; to capture it and imprison it forever. Somehow I sensed I could stop time’s relentless motion and hold that scene, that split second — with the ladies and the gentlemen in their finery, as they laughed, careless and untroubled. I would catch them fast, eternally, thanks to the properties of my wonderful machine. In my hands I had the power to stop time, or so I fancied.

BOOK ONE: 1908–1927

1.

 GIRL WITH A CAMERA

THERE WAS A MISTAKE MADE on the day I was born, when I come to think of it. It doesn’t seem important, now, but on 7 March 1908 — such a long time ago, it seems, threescore years and ten almost — it made my mother very cross. However, be that as it may, I was born and my father, sternly instructed by my mother, placed an announcement in The Times. I was their first child, so the world — the readers of the London Times — was duly informed. ‘7 March 1908, to Beverley and Wilfreda Clay, a son, Amory. ’

Why did he say ‘son’? To spite his wife, my mother? Or was it some perverse wish that I wasn’t in fact a girl, that he didn’t want to have a daughter? Was that why he tried to kill me later, I wonder. . ? By the time I came across the parched yellow cutting hidden in a scrapbook, my father had been dead for decades. Too late to ask him. Another mistake.

Beverley Vernon Clay, my father — but no doubt best known to you and his few readers (most long disappeared) as B. V. Clay. A short-story writer of the early twentieth century — stories mainly of the supernatural sort — failed novelist and all-round man of letters. Born in 1878, died in 1944. This is what the Oxford Companion to English Literature (third edition) has to say about him: