William Boyd - The New Confessions

It was not exactly what I wanted, but I could not ignore this good fortune. And, I suppose, this was a happy enough time, this summer of 1923. Leo had moved down to London and we both shared an office in the alley at Islington. Sonia and the baby were fine, and Sonia soon came up with the script for Wee MacGregor’s Holiday and had a promising idea for the third film— King Wee MacGregor!

But I was somewhat unsettled and preoccupied. The Wee MacGregor films were far from the ambitions that had been born with Aftermath of Battle . I applied myself professionally to them but my mind was barely engaged. It was as if my imagination was away on patrol, scouting the countryside for a task that was equal to it. The garrison it left behind, as it were, kept the fort running, ticking over, but life there was drab and tedious. I felt myself oddly demeaned. I was an artist; I had grand plans, fabulous conceptions. The Wee MacGregors allowed me some license to experiment technically, but I was growing to loathe them, and myself for making them. A measure of my disquiet was the fact that I had a bitter stand-up row, over some matter or other, with the irrepressibly chirpy Harry Bliss — whom I could not separate from the character and consequently detested as much. We almost came to blows. Leo told me to bide my time — soon I would be able to do exactly as I wanted. But all I could see was an endless run of Wee MacGregors . Success can confine as easy as liberate. The appalling and interminable Anna and Fido series were dire warnings.

That summer Hamish passed briefly through London. He had just been awarded a research fellowship at Oxford. We went for a meal in a chophouse on the Strand. I told him of my worries.

“I can see this rut stretching ahead of me,” I said. “It gets deeper and deeper.”

He looked at me without speaking for a while. I have never forgotten the clear force of his expression.

“Make your own rut,” he said. “It’s the only way.”

He was right and it cheered me up. I resolved that King Wee MacGregor! would be my last compromise. “Make your own rut” would become my motto.

Perhaps I should have seen the signs. Raymond Maude asked if he could pay me my fee in installments. I agreed and to my astonishment he handed me a banker’s draft for only a hundred pounds. In September, halfway through filming in Great Yarmouth, a pier owner said that a check Leo had written had bounced. Leo wrote another for him. We finished the film in five weeks and returned to London to start editing. On October 3, 1923, Maude announced to his assembled staff that Superb-Imperial Film Company was bankrupt.

VILLA LUXE, June 16, 1972

Something is in the air, these days, and it’s not just the scent from the yucca flowers. A small electric charge crackles between Emilia and me. I can’t put my finger on it. Something is different. The quality of the looks she gives me. It’s like that time with Oonagh. Superficially all is as it always was, but beneath the surface new currents are running. Something tacit now exists between us, and while I don’t know what it is, it sets me on edge.

I spend the day fretting vaguely. I try to avoid her. When I hear her motorbike disappearing up the track, I go into her WC. I peer at the shutter. I feel as though a billiard ball were jammed in my throat. My small drilled hole is neatly blocked with a pellet of lavatory paper.

The rain pelted down on Knesebeckstrasse. I held the car door open with one hand; the other raised the large umbrella sheltering the fur-clad old crone who was climbing with preposterous difficulty into her waiting taxi. Drips formed and fell from my cap’s glossy peak. I could feel the damp seeping through to my shoulder blades. I kept the smile rigid as I shut the door on her. The window glass took an age to wind down. Her bejeweled hand presented me with a shamefully inadequate tip.

“ Vielen Danke, ” I said.

I backed gratefully under the canopy at the front of the Hotel Windsor. I was the doorman. It was February 1925. Berlin, I was making my own rut.

I have leaped a dismal year or so. Nineteen twenty-four. All the wearisome frustrations of the Superb-Imperial bankruptcy and my own concomitant slump into insolvency preoccupied me for months. Raymond Maude was undeniably grief stricken. It was the extravagant costs of The Blue Cockade and its total failure that had done for him. He sold everything the studio owned, including his remaining rights to Wee MacGregor’s Holiday . It was truly galling to see the queues forming outside the cinemas, where it was playing as profitably as its predecessor, and know that all the revenue it earned would benefit the Todd family not one penny. Finally, in the summer I joined the other litigants and sued Superb-Imperial for the outstanding nineteen-hundred pounds they owed me on the Holiday film. (I waived my claim on the stillborn King Wee MacGregor! ) In the eventual meager share-out, I received 187 pounds, 18 shillings and 6 pence. It was something, I suppose. One other unhappy side effect was that the Maude marriage broke up under the strain. Rosita took herself off back to Beira or Lisbon, and Vincent never saw his godmother again.

About July or August I accepted the inevitable and started looking for another job, but to my surprise and alarm found there was nothing forthcoming. Gainsborough Films offered me a week’s work as a stand-in cameraman. Astro-Biocraft thought there might be an opening in their editing department in a few months’ time. The film industry had entered one of its periodic slumps, true, but I soon began to suspect the malign hand of Harold Faithfull. It was my mistake, or bad luck, that I was almost unknown in the film community outside Superb-Imperial. I remembered Faithfull’s absurd threat and dismissed it as sheer fantasy until I read in a trade paper that he was making a film called The Sultan and the Temptress for Talbot Instructional Films and UFA in Germany. A man who could get work so quickly after the almighty disaster of The Blue Cockade must have some power and influence. I became convinced that Faithfull had effectively blacklisted me. He was the first in a long line of enemies that have dogged and tried to destroy my career. I have no idea why, but I seem to attract malice in the way cattle attract flies. I am not belligerent but I always end up fighting someone. What had I done to Faithfull? How could my Wee MacGregor films have possibly discomfited him? It was his own inadequacies that compelled him to hate me. It has always been that way: the talentless envy the talented in the same way as the petty envy the strong.

I took the week’s work at Gainsborough, around the corner from Superb-Imperial in Islington, as a stand-in assistant cameraman on a film called Passionate Adventure . And then, nothing. The year wore on and our savings dwindled. In August, Sonia announced she was pregnant again. That was all I needed.

Leo Druce was similarly impoverished. He restarted his car-hire agency in London and from time to time I would do a job as chauffeur or bus driver on outings for a pound or two. It was hardly a living and Leo could not afford to take on a partner. And besides, I wanted to make moving pictures, not drive charabancs.

And then in October came my salvation. One morning a postcard arrived, forwarded from Edinburgh. The stamps were German. On one side was a picture of the Brandenburg Gate. And on the other:

Hello, Johnny!

How are you doing? Well? I am in Berlin making lots of films and plays. Come and see me. Why not?

Kind best wishes from your old prison guard,