‘I thought the lake was deeper,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d read somewhere that the lake here was exceptionally deep.’
‘Lucky it wasn’t.’
‘You’ve saved my life, Amory,’ he said. Then he began to cry, suddenly, almost howling like an animal. I hugged myself to him and begged him to stop — which he did, quickly, sniffing and coughing, breathing deeply.
‘I’m not well, Amory,’ he said quietly. ‘You have to remember that. You have to forgive me.’
‘I forgive you, Papa. We’re safe, unharmed, that’s the main thing.’
‘Just wet through.’ He kissed my forehead. ‘Amory, Faymory, Daymory. . Shall we head for the shore? It seems ridiculous to be waiting here, standing on the car roof.’
‘You won’t do anything silly. Promise?’
‘I have a feeling I won’t do anything silly ever again. Promise.’
We slid into the water and swam to the shore.
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
I drink gin at lunch, whisky in the evening. One large gin seems to do me fine in the middle of the day but as night falls I find the whisky too alluring. I drink it diluted with a little water in a heavy-bottomed tumbler — just standard blended whisky, whatever I can find in the shops in Oban (I’d never buy on the island, in Achnalorn, too many curious folk) — but I think I’m addicted to it, all the same. Three glasses, sometimes four. I sit reading, smoking, listening to the radio or to music and let my senses tilt steadily over into mild and delicious inebriation, hearing the wind-thud, the hoarse sea-heaving outside. It sends me to an easeful sleep and, I believe, calms and soothes my disturbing dreams. The few nights I haven’t had my whisky anaesthetic are too haunted by the past, too febrile to be endured. I leave my bed, throw more peat bricks on the fire, watch the flames sway and flicker and wait for dawn to arrive, the dog Flam curled up on his blanket watching me, uneasy, troubled.
*
The immediate consequence of our headlong drive into the waters of Hookland Castle Lake was that my father was certified insane and sent to a ‘posh loony bin’, as my mother termed it. I had what I now suppose was a form of nervous breakdown. I seemed unable to stop crying and would even experience a kind of fit — body-wide tremors and copious sweating — that seemed epileptic but in fact was psychotic, catalysed by sudden and spontaneous memories of those frantic seconds in the car with the water rising, the fight to open the door and, always, the image of my father’s impassive floating face, the bubble-beads streaming upwards from his mouth as if the few moments of consciousness left to him were being transformed into those buoyant quicksilver pearls of air, slowing visibly as his lungs filled with water.
I missed the rest of that Trinity term at Amberfield, and Michaelmas, following, confined to bed, subject to ever-changing regimes of boiling baths and poultices on my back — as if something could be drawn out of me — broths and teas and drugs of some sort, no doubt. I returned in the spring of 1926 to prepare for my Higher School Certificate. The other girls were kind to me — I was an almost mythic figure, once the story of the car in the lake and the rescue of my father emerged. Even Miss Ashe, every time we crossed paths, would make a point of stopping and chatting and solicitously enquiring after me: ‘How are you, dear Amory. .?’ I did badly in my exams — three passes and one failure — but was never blamed. There was no further talk of Somerville College and the Senior History Scholarship.
Curiously, I took no photographs for months and my darkroom was abandoned. That summer, after my exams, I searched my father’s study looking for his novel ‘about the war’, rummaging through the drawers in his desk and his bookcases looking for Naked in Hell, thinking it might give me some sort of clue as to why he’d tried to kill us both, but found nothing. My mother, when I asked her what Papa had been working on, said that he hadn’t written a word for two years at least, as far as she was aware.
I was correct in one thing, however: the war did have something to do with my father’s madness. The clue wasn’t to be found in the novel he never wrote but, many years later, I did try to discover what had happened to him in France that had brought him home so changed. It was in the history of his regiment, the East Sussex Light Infantry, the ‘Martlets’, and it did help me understand a little what it might have been that had turned his mind against himself. And, thereby, me.
Events of March 1918
After the withdrawal to the position fronting the edge of the Bois de Vinaigre outside Saint-Croix the 5/1 service battalion occupied the new front line. Owing to the nature of the ground the enemy was never closer than 400 yards and sometimes on occasion over 800 yards distant. It was the widest stretch of no-man’s-land that the ESLI had encountered since 1915 at Loos and posed particular problems; lack of clear information regarding the German forces’ dispositions being the most significant.
The short lull in the fighting allowed the new trenches to be strengthened and there were few casualties over the following days (two dead, seven wounded). Colonel Shawfield, commanding the 5/1 battalion, ordered a raid to be sent out on the night of the 26th to determine the nature and preparedness of the forces opposite in advance of the 5th Army’s counteroffensive scheduled for the 30th.
The raiding party (led by Captain B. V. Clay DSO) was composed of twenty men, including two signallers who were to run a telephone line out to the ruined farm of Trois Tables, formerly battalion HQ before the retreat. The raiding party left our trenches at 2 a.m. A diversionary artillery barrage took place at 2.30 a.m. to the left of the German line at Lembras-la-Chapelle. Captain Clay’s raid met heavy resistance and at 4 a.m. only ten men had regained the ESLI lines. Captain Clay himself was missing.
Three days later, during the 5th Army counter-attack, Trois Tables farm was retaken and Captain Clay was discovered hiding in a deep cellar beneath the ruined farm building, barely clad in a few shreds of his uniform. The bodies of Corporal S. D. Westmacott, Private W. D. Hawes and Signaller S. R. Thatcher were recovered from the same cellar. Captain Clay was starved and semi-conscious and could give no coherent account of what had happened in the three days since his raiding party had left the ESLI lines. He was sent to the base hospital at Saint-Omer where he slowly regained his strength though his memory of those three days never returned. He was awarded a bar to his DSO. The citation read that his example ‘was a monument to the strength and survival instinct of the human will under the most distressing and alarming conditions of warfare’.
The Regimental History of the East Sussex Light Infantry,
Vol. III, 1914–1918
3. HIGH SOCIETY
I WAS PLEASED WITH the way I looked. Greville said that the key thing was that I should ‘blend in’. He himself was always impeccably smart. He looked me over before we went off to Lady Cremlaine’s reception — to celebrate her daughter’s twenty-first birthday — walking around me, frowning and nodding, as if I were about to go on parade. I was wearing a floor-length silver satin dance gown with a little maroon velvet coatee over it. Hair up to one side, a diamanté clip holding it in place. My shoes were gold calf with the highest heels I could find. Heavy make-up: kohl on my eyelids, lurid crimson lips.
‘Very good, darling,’ Greville said. ‘You’ll be fighting all the young blades off.’ Greville had reduced his wide and luxuriant hussar’s moustache to thin pencil lines of clipped bristle — a little chevron above his lips. It made him look quite different, I thought, more sophisticated and mysterious.