Sweet Caress

by William Boyd

Amory Clay lives alone in a cottage on a Scottish island where, in 1977, she is writing a journal about her life and career. Born in 1908, she is the eldest of three children in a middle-class family in Sussex. She excels academically at boarding school and was encouraged by her teacher to go to [[Somerville College, Oxford]], but performs badly in her exams after her father, traumatised by his military experiences in the First World War, tries to commit suicide and to kill her as well.

Apprenticed to her uncle, Clay works as a society photographer in London but then seeks more excitement in Berlin, where she frequents the underworld and takes photographs that, when she exhibits them in England, are viewed as scandalous. An American magazine offers her a job and she moves to New York, where she has affairs with her American boss and with a French diplomat who is also a writer. Back in London, where she runs an office for the American magazine, she covers a demonstration by Oswald Mosley’s fascists, in which she is attacked and badly injured. After spending the early part of the Second World War in New York, she returns to Europe as a war photographer covering the Allied Forces as they sweep through France and Germany. She meets and marries a British officer, Sholto Farr, who is also a Scottish lord, and – unexpectedly, as she had thought the injuries she had received from Mosley's supporters had made her infertile – gives birth to twin daughters. Like her own father, her husband is haunted by memories of war. He drinks heavily, gambles, and loses much of the family fortune, before dying of a heart attack. Living in reduced circumstances, Amory returns to photography, seeks excitement as a Vietnam War photographer, then travels to California to search for one of her daughters, who has joined a hippy colony and religious sect, and with whom she is eventually reconciled. Looking back on her life and career, and in increasingly poor health, the 69-year-old Amory contemplates taking her own life.