Amory Clay is at boarding school and working her way through the standard teenage rebellions – smoking, sexual experimentation, talking back to a headteacher who’d like to persuade her to try for Oxford – when her father arrives on an unexpected visit. He is cheery, handsome and confident, a successful short-story writer who has produced nothing since service in the trenches. He takes her for a drive in the countryside, past where she thinks they might stop, towards a castle – perhaps there is a tea shop? – but no, they keep going, right into a lake. No one dies (he was misinformed about its depth), but she is thus notified how war and the effects of war will run through her 20th-century life like a rotten seam, cracking open what seems solid ground, twisting through generations, reappearing in unforeseen ways. She takes time off school, sits exams badly; there is no more mention of Oxford.
Sweet Caress is her story, told plain by herself, from the beginning – the mother who “managed to conceal whatever affection she felt for her children with great success”, the variously exceptional siblings, the father subjected to shock therapy and finally to a lobotomy, making him smilingly undangerous. And the parallel beginning, when, at seven, she is given a camera by an uncle invalided out of the air force and now a photographer. School ends and she joins him in London, to be his assistant and a photographer in her own right, using her camera to support herself, express herself, as a passport – to Berlin, New York, France at war, Vietnam – and as a shield. The account is intercut with her present-day journal of a comfortable, drink-tinged life in a cottage on the Scottish coast.
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