William Boyd - The New Confessions

“But why,” I had asked carefully on hearing this, “why in God’s name didn’t you contact me?”

“I tried. I tried to call you in Berlin; I got some policeman on the line. I went to Neuchâtel; you were all gone. It was over, Jamie, you know that. I couldn’t go chasing around Europe looking for you.”

I let that one go.

“I’m happy now,” she said. “Really, I wasn’t happy in Paris.”

So I told her what had happened to me. I felt glum, suddenly immensely tired. I could have slept for a week.

“So you’re making Westerns? For Eddie Simmonette? Isn’t that a bit degrading?”

“I make ends meet with no great difficulty.”

“See. We’re arguing already.… Sorry,” she said. “Have some more tea.”

She stood up to fetch the pitcher. I went over to her.

“Doon, I saw Alex Mavrocordato—”

“Alex? How is he?”

“ Stop it! Stop being so fucking hardboiled!”

Morris Drexel glanced into the room. I calmed down.

“Don’t you see? I thought you had gone off with him . I thought you had chosen him instead of me.… That’s why I never tried to get in touch. I was trying to get over it, do you see? Trying to forget you.”

“Well, of course. You had to do that.”

“But then he told me what really happened.” I looked out of the window and saw two ladies walk by with canvases under their arms. Two “artists,” Like Morris, paying guests.

I shut my eyes. My head seemed to hum with a high, keening melancholic whine. I had been driving too long. The huge needless frustrations of the years without Doon were almost insupportable. Only my irritation with her own calm was preventing me from weeping. I was exhausted too from my weeks’ work on the film. What had I expected to find here? The Doon I had known in Berlin in the twenties? In her green dress and her short blond fringe? Dully, I started calling myself names: fool, idiot, hopeless romantic … I opened my eyes; Doon had sat down and was looking at me. She had hooked a leg over the arm of the soft chair she was sitting in. She still had that lean dancer’s grace I always associated with her. Perhaps, in time, we could reestablish old intimacies.… But too much history bulked between us. My Doon was a blond, smooth-skinned, provocative beauty full of crazy enthusiasms. This thin, tanned, deep-voiced cynic was someone else entirely.

“You’ve hardly changed at all, Jamie,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “You’re not so slim, maybe. A few gray hairs. You look a bit tired.” She smiled. “Why did you come?”

“I’ve missed you,” I said hopelessly. “Nothing’s been the same. I wanted to see you. I can’t tell you—”

“I hope you weren’t too shocked.” She got up and moved to the door. Clearly, she didn’t want to talk. “Staying for lunch?”

“Yes,” I said. I coudn’t simply leave. “Please.”

So I stayed, and chatted effortfully with dull Morris and Rita and Elaine, the two spry lesbians, and tried not to think about Doon and the past.

When I left that afternoon, she removed her spectacles to let me kiss her cheek. I looked into her myopic eyes and tried to conjure up that day in the Metropol Hotel in Berlin twenty years before.

“Don’t fret about it,” she said softly. “I remember you told me once, ‘Make your own rut.’ I’m happy, I told you. Now, you be happy. Come back and see us, soon.”

I drove off in blackest despair. I was convinced we would never meet again. I was wrong.

I could not shake off my depression. I could measure it in millibars. You know these moods? I’m sure you do. I saw my life as a catalogue of wasted opportunities, of intemperate decisions, of blind, crazy impulsiveness and, of course, heedless circumstance and filthy luck. It seemed to me to be the most desperate tragedy that Doon and I, of all people, had ended up almost strangers. I looked back over the last decade and saw it as a fruitless wasteland shadowed by clouds of disappointment, betrayal, flight and persecution. Perhaps, I thought, my individual life was merely acting as a conduit for the Zeitgeist of that low dishonest decade … but we now were four years into the forties — I was four years into my forties. I was as old as the century and yet entirely out of step with it. The world was at war and what was I doing? Undermining the Billy the Kid myth and making a forlorn and futile visit to my old love. I was stuck in my thirties mood — failure and disillusionment. It was time for a change.

There were two baffling letters waiting for me on my return from Montezuma, both a fortnight old. One was from Hamish. It announced merely that he had recently arrived in the States and was working for a U.S. government organization called the National Research Institute, in Zion, New Jersey, not far from Princeton. He said he hoped that we might meet up soon, then he added, “I can’t tell you how sorry I was to see you vilified in that despicable way. I wrote several letters in your defense but none were printed. I suspect you have become the scapegoat for more eminent appeasers.”

What vilification? What appeasement was he talking about? The second letter was from my father and even more perplexing.

My dear John,

I am prompted to write because I know the distress you must be suffering at these scandalous allegations. The fine letter in your defense from a Mr. Julian Teague published in Wednesday’s Times came a little too late. I fear, to undo the damage or halt the momentum. I merely wanted you to know that your family (and that includes Thompson) is standing by you during this difficult and unpleasant time.

I am surprisingly fit for an old man. Please convey my respects to your new wife, Monika, and I hope we will all meet soon in more happy circumstances.

Yours aye,

Dad

It was the “Dad” that shook me. He had never signed himself so affectionately before. But what was going on? Clearly some vile slander on me had been perpetrated in the British press. I wrote to my father and Hamish immediately asking for more information.

I didn’t have long to wait. I was in an editing suite at Lone Star working on The Equalizer when I received a call from a reporter on the L.A. Times . He would like to talk to me, he said. I assumed it was about the new film.

I met him in a bar round the corner. It was a sunny fresh morning and the place was quiet. Rumba music played gently on the radio. I ordered a Four Roses with ice and ginger ale in a tall glass. I munched some pretzels from the bartop bowl. The journalist arrived and introduced himself as Karl Shumway. He fanned out a series of newspaper clippings on the bar.

“What do you say to this?” he asked.

Let me summarize briefly the history of this particularly sordid campaign of character assassination. It had begun in a small-circulation British film magazine called Cinema Monthly , in an article entitled “Fun in the Sun: Our Absent Industry.” This purported to criticize the large number of British actors, producers, writers and directors who were living the high life in Hollywood while war was being waged at home. In fact, over three quarters of its length was given over to a sustained attack on me. Among the lies were these: I had been pro-Nazi before the war when I had made my name in Berlin during the twenties; I had stayed on long after Hitler came to power. I had been unable to further my career in Britain and had left for the U.S.A. when war clouds (predictably) “loomed” over Europe. In Hollywood I had consorted with Germans, married a German actress — one Mathilde Halte — and when the war began had fled to Mexico for several months before sneaking back to Hollywood when I thought the coast was clear. Now I whiled away my time making worthless films and living in a loud and ostentatious style.