‘No, no, no. You’re turning hard science into a metaphor.’
‘Which I’m entitled to. “Dark” illness. “Dark” weather. “Dark” incompetence. “Dark” politics.’
She had to laugh. We walked on, almost bouncing downhill on the springy grass.
‘The “dark” concept explains why you can’t explain things,’ I said. ‘It’s wonderfully liberating. Why won’t my car start this morning? It started yesterday. “Dark” auto-engineering.’
‘Just don’t tell anyone you got it from me.’
‘You see, the “standard model” of the human condition just doesn’t work, either. It’s inadequate. Just as the “standard model” of the universe doesn’t work for you lot.’
‘What’re we having for lunch?’
‘Dark shepherd’s pie.’
I remember we drank a lot at that lunch — we always drank a lot but I think Greer wanted the inhibition-removal that a boozy lunch sometimes provides. She told me about an affair she’d had with a colleague of Calder’s. The affair had ended when he had gone to join a think tank in London — distance working as prophylactic — but he’d written to her, recently, asking her to come and see him.
‘Have you ever had an affair, Amory?’ she asked me.
‘Well, not when I was married,’ I said. ‘But I did have an affair when I was having an affair.’ I paused, thinking back. ‘Twice, in fact.’
‘Only you could make it that complicated,’ she said.
‘I don’t quite know how it happened,’ I said. ‘Dark love?’
‘I’m beginning to see your logic.’ She sipped at her wine. ‘Should I go to London? What do you think?’
‘I think you should do what you want to do. As the poet said: the desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews. .’
She laughed. ‘You’re no help.’
‘Exactly.’
*
For some bizarre reason Dido took a strong liking to Barrandale. She came to stay for a week or so two or three times a year, to ‘rest’ after her concert tours and recitals. ‘I need to recharge every battery, darling,’ she would say. ‘Peace, silence, nothingness, and a large gin and tonic, that’s all I ask.’ In 1966, she was at the height of her fame — Béla Bartók had dedicated a horn trio to her; she was a regular at the BBC Proms; Harold Wilson invited her to lunch at 10 Downing Street; she was awarded the CBE. However, her marriage to Reggie Southover was ending. She was having an affair with a clarinettist from the Orquesta Nacional de España — ‘Poor as a church mouse,’ she said. ‘But rather lovely, all the same. It’s the Latin spirit I crave, I should never have anything to do with Anglo-Saxons.’
Dido Clay CBE, 1966.
I teased her once, asking her if she had an affair with one member of every orchestra she played with.
‘Not every orchestra,’ she said, entirely seriously. ‘No, I’m very picky.’
She once said, ‘Have you noticed, Herbert von Karajan and Lenny Bernstein have exactly the same hair — same floppy front, same distinguished grey, same style — do you think it’s a conductor thing?’
‘Have you slept with either of them? Or both?’ I asked.
‘Well, I had a bit of a moment with one of them, I confess — but I won’t tell you which.’
Even though she obviously loved coming to Barrandale, she always complained about the cottage and its minor privations. She also began to dig away at me.
‘What’re you going to do now the girls have gone? You can’t take photographs of Scottish weddings for the rest of your life.’
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
It happened again. I tried to pick up a jam jar this morning with my left hand to put it back in the refrigerator but I couldn’t. My hand just wouldn’t grip. I sat down, had a minute’s rest, and tried again. It worked — but just as I was going to put it on the shelf my grip loosened and the jar fell to the floor and smashed.
This is as bad as it’s ever been, my particular, worrying problem. My brain told my hand to grip but it refused. Jock Edie — whom I’d told about this problem, and who told me what he suspected was wrong — said that one day I’d have to go and see a neurologist. Perhaps the time has come.
I had lunch with Hugo Torrance at the hotel — during which my hold on the cutlery seemed secure. We were at our usual corner table tucked in beside the fireplace — where, as it happened, the first fire of the autumn was burning nicely, so Hugo informed me. As if to justify its being lit, it was raining quite heavily outside. We ate rare roast beef and drank red wine. I was feeling ideally mellow but suspicious.
‘All this is heading somewhere,’ I said. ‘I can tell by that look in your eye.’
‘It can head anywhere you like.’
‘Come on, spit it out.’
‘I’ve sold the hotel.’
This was indeed a surprise. ‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘Are you pleased?’
‘Yes. And — more news — I’ve bought that ruined cottage round the headland from you. We’re going to be neighbours.’
*
After Dido left to go back to London, Hughie Anstruther called and reminded me that I was covering the Northern Meeting in Inverness. It would be an overnight stay and he wondered if I’d need an assistant.
‘The world and his wife seem to be going this year,’ he said. ‘Get your best frock out, sweetheart.’
I was not enthused. This would be my third Northern Meeting. I could just about handle the ball but the prospect of photographing the bagpipe-competition winners filled me with prescient fatigue. Dido was right — I had to make a change, do something entirely different. But what? All I knew was photography.
I went out for a walk, ostensibly to think, and headed unerringly for the bar at the Glenlarig Hotel. I ordered a whisky and water and asked if Mr Torrance was in and was informed that he was upstairs in his flat. I thought he might be exactly the man to ponder my dilemma with and headed off to find him. As I made my way towards his private rear stairway I passed the residents’ lounge where the door was open wide and a mute television set was silently broadcasting the evening news to a ring of empty armchairs. A flowering fire and dust-filled explosion filled the screen — oddly beautiful in its expanding terrible energy, like a giant grey chrysanthemum or monochrome dahlia — that caught my attention and I stepped inside for a second.
An unsteady hand-held camera was focussed on a bespectacled woman in a dirty, sweaty uniform crouched in a ditch talking into a microphone. She was wearing a tin helmet with the word ‘PRESS’ written on the front in white letters. In the background two ragged columns of smoke rose over jungle hills. Despite her grimy face and the unfamiliar spectacles I realised I knew who this woman was and stooped forward to turn up the volume just as she was signing off.
‘This is Lily Perette, Dang Tra province, with the US Marine Corps.’
What was it that made me decide I had to go to Vietnam? Initially, it was seeing Lily Perette on the television screen and remembering the last war we’d been involved in together. Suddenly I had this feeling that I wanted urgently to be there with her, to ask her questions: what was it like, was it dangerous, how had she come to be in Vietnam of all places? And then I realised — more analysis kicking in — that the emotion I was actually experiencing was envy. I envied Lily Perette at that moment and I felt that unbidden surge of excitement run through me. Perhaps I could go to this war, just like her. I had the same experience, the same qualifications, the same talent. . I didn’t go up to see Hugo but returned to the bar for another pensive drink.