William Boyd - The New Confessions

I was in the camp at Mainz for five months, and in a way I look on them as more dulling to the spirit than my time at Weilburg. In Mainz I became like the Russians — morose, pessimistic, unwilling to be plucky or cheerful. Nothing happened to me there to rival my experiences in my solitary room above the gymnasium. My fellow prisoners were affable enough, but to me — grown used to the exhilaration of my own company, Rousseau’s and Karl-Heinz’s — they seemed insufferably bland. In a funny way I came to feel nostalgic for Weilburg and its melancholic absurdities — the glum alcoholic Russians, the dotard generals in tweed. I felt left out here in beefy British Mainz (always l’homme de l’extrême gauche) . I attracted no attention; my participation in the camp’s social life was minimal; I was in no sense a character or personality. I would wager that none of my fellow inmates, a few years later, would have been able even to recall the features of my face. “Todd?… Todd?…” I can hear them say, faces screwed up to goad their memories. “Was he the chap with the ginger hair and a wooden leg?… No? Oh.… Can’t help you, I’m afraid.”

Perhaps it was a psychological problem? After Weilburg, to find myself in the society of men once more, in all its crude stinking intimacy, must have subdued me. Who can say? The war ended in November and within a month I was back in Edinburgh, just in time for New Year’s Eve.

VILLA LUXE, June 13, 1972

This morning as I shave I catch myself wondering how often in my life I have performed this mundane operation. On average, say once a day since I was eighteen years old? Thousands upon thousands of times …

I rinse the bristles from my razor. All gray now. Whitebeard. My mind still works at the notion. Suppose, for the sake of argument, I shave off a quarter of an inch of bristle every week. That’s one inch a month. A foot a year. That’s a fifty-foot beard during a life, give or take a foot or two.… I try to imagine myself with a fifty-foot beard. Think of all the hair we men remove in a lifetime. Think of all the hair the human race cuts and shaves, plucks and depilates from heads, armpits, legs and groins. Think of all those locks and fuzz, whiskers and fluff, building up through the history of recorded time. Where has it all gone? How astonishing that the world has been able to absorb it!

Later, Emilia arrives and sets about her cleaning. Ostentatiously, I pick up a book and go out to my lookout. I sit there half an hour and then, unobserved, I follow a circuitous route round the field, through a small clump of banana trees, to arrive at the back of the house. There, behind an obligingly thick jasmine creeper, is the small shuttered window of Emilia’s WC.

I squinny through my tiny hole and settle down to wait. My heart beats with alarming strength, my breaths are deep and urgent. I reflect that this voyeuristic thrill seems hardly worth the strain it puts on the cardiovascular system.

I wait, it seems, for hours. Hot, scratched by the jasmine, pestered by flies … Finally, Emilia comes in. I breathe quietly through my mouth. The small hole is perfectly angled. I can see the top of the cistern and, where she is standing now, Emilia’s legs from her ankles to her knees.… She doesn’t move. She hums to herself. She must be looking in the mirror. Then she approaches the toilet bowl. She flips up her skirt, thumbs fit into her pants and in one fast smooth action she sits down.

Nothing. I didn’t see a thing. I lean back against the wall. The toilet flushes and I hear the door close.

I feel the very opposite of aroused. I feel grimy, shameful, bothered. Suddenly I loathe my snouty old man’s craving. What has driven me to this sordid pastime?… I know. The German girls. Ulrike. Old memories have crawled out like lizards from beneath their stones. The past is catching up with me.

London. July 1922. I kissed my pregnant wife good-bye and walked down the stairs to the front door. Sonia stood and watched me go.

“Remember. Be sensible. Use your head.”

“Don’t worry.”

I stepped outside onto the Dawes Road, Fulham. A dray was delivering beer to the pub, the Salisbury, above which we lived. The weather was sultry, overcast, but not too hot. I took off my hat and resettled it on my head. Ten-thirty in the morning — it was not such a bad time to be going to work. I felt in quite a good mood. I crossed the road to the news agent and bought a copy of the Morning Post , I sauntered off down the road to Walham Green underground station. I worked in Islington and had a long journey to make across the city from Fulham. We lived in Fulham because Sonia had been born there and did not want to move far from her parents (a moderately pleasant couple: he was a retired salesman in pharmacological goods; we were never short of medicaments).

At Walham Green I bought a first-class ticket to King’s Cross. I was earning over six hundred pounds a year: I could afford to travel first class — which was one reason I preferred the underground to the more egalitarian “tube,” which had no first-class carriages.

I smoked a cigarette as I waited for the train. I felt calm, pleasantly secure, as if my life had finally reached the plateau of stability it had always been striving for.

When I returned to Edinburgh from Mainz at the end of 1918 I had possessed no such equilibrium. I have to say, though, that the side effects of my war experience and confinement had left no physical scars. My hands did not tremble, I did not start at every slamming door, I slept tolerably well with no nightmares. The immediate psychological effect, apart from the permanent one I mentioned earlier, was a curious disorienting lassitude. At first I lived reasonably happily with it, thankful that this was the sole consequence of those two traumatic years I would have to bear. But as 1919 wore on and I still found myself held in this lethargic stasis, I began to grow more worried.

But I am jumping ahead.

Was there anyone to meet me at Waverley Station in response to my telegram from London announcing my return home from the war? Answer: no. I walked across George IV Bridge towards the High Street with a thin bitter smile on my face. It was a cold, steel morning in Edinburgh with the usual frigid, scouring wind. I wore a flat felt cap, a secondhand suit of clothes provided for me at a Portsmouth hospital, and an army greatcoat. Once again my unusual status as only an honorary officer had run me foul of established procedure. I did not look like a returning hero. I had imagined myself in my well-cut coat, my jodhpurs, my glossy boots, a jaunty cap. Now I looked as if I had just been turned out of a Salvation Army hostel.

I tramped up the worn spiral stairs to our apartment and beat on the door. Oonagh opened it. It was two and a half years since I had last seen her. She was a little plumper but otherwise unchanged.

“Good God, it’s you!” she said with some surprise. “John James … my, my.”

“Yes, it’s me,” I said avidly, stepping inside.

“Your father said you’d be back today sometime. But there’s no luncheon for you. You’re too late.”

“ I don’t want any fucking luncheon! ”

I threw my cap down on a hall chair.

“Dearie, dearie me. What a fuss!”

I had calmed down by the time my father returned. He looked older, the eyes more deeply set, the wrinkles on his face more emphatic, his cheekbones’ tufts more grizzled. His mood was one of faint embarrassment, clearly perceptible through his halfhearted attempts to go through the correct welcoming motions. For example, he put his hands on my shoulders and said with ghastly theatricality, “Let me look at you!”