William Boyd - The New Confessions

“I can see she might be good,” he said, “but before you give her the job you should see one other person.”

“Who?”

“Doon Bogan.”

Doon Bogan, Doon Bogan. I can hardly write the name even to this day.

VILLA LUXE, June 18, 1972

The old bus from town deposits us at the nunnery on the outskirts of the village. There was no mail for me today — something of a wasted journey, I walk through the village towards the track that leads to my villa. As I pass the church the German girl, Ulrike, steps out from the shadow of one of its crude buttresses.

“Mr. Todd?”

“What!.. Hello. Sorry, you gave me a shock.”

“Can I offer you a drink?”

“Well, I’m in a bit of a—”

“Please, there’s something I want to ask you.”

We go to Ernesto’s bar. Amazingly, he is actually there — I can hear him shouting angrily at his mother in the kitchen. We sit on the terrace and Feliz brings us two beers. It is that pleasant time of the evening. The heat has gone from the sun; pink bathers plod by from the public beach; soon the early bats will be swooping between the pine trees. I raise my cool glass to Ulrike. Without her spectacles and with the even tan she has now acquired, she really is quite pretty.

“Mr. Todd, did you ever make movies?”

For an instant I thought about denying it. “How do you know? Yes, I did.”

“I knew it!” She smiled broadly.

She explained: her boyfriend was a lecturer at the university in Munich. He was very involved with film studies.

“When you told me your name I thought I had heard it before. I wrote to him about you. Yesterday I got his letter.” She looked closely at me. “He said you were very famous.”

“Well, I was, I suppose. Forty years ago.”

She went on to tell me about her boyfriend’s work for some film festival in Berlin. A retrospective: “Silent Films of the German Cinema.” She unfolded a piece of paper.

“He has some questions he would like me to ask you. May I?”

“Fire away.”

“Good. Question one. Do you know the whereabouts of a film star called Doon Bogan?”

I knew whom Karl-Heinz was talking about. Doon Bogan was an American, a film star with a huge following in Germany due to the improbable success of an improbable film called Mephistophela , made by Alexander Mavrocordato in 1922, a version of Faust in which, yes, Mephistopheles was a woman. Doon wore black throughout the film. Her face was chalk-white with shadowed eyes and pale lips, and always framed by a tight black cowl. She was the perfect embodiment of fate, sex and death, and the film itself, in a somewhat ham-fisted Expressionist style, was dark and garish and untidily powerful. Doon Bogan became famous, married her director, Alexander Mavrocordato, divorced him a year later and stayed on in Berlin, where she made other successful films with the likes of Pabst, Murnau and Kluge. I asked Aram what he thought of Karl-Heinz’s idea. He was intrigued and suggested that we meet her and sound her out. He warned only that the budget for Julie would rise considerably if she consented to play the part.

We sent her the script and a meeting was arranged for lunch in the Adlon or Metropol Hotel. Perhaps it was the Bristol.… I am not too clear on the details of that day. I remember feeling the sensation of softness of the pile on the maroon carpet in the hotel bar through the thin soles of my new expensive shoes. Inside, the bar was sumptuously gloomy. Outside it was a dull noon, swagged pewter clouds over the city threatening rain, a fretful gusty wind tugging at the overcoats and skirts of passengers leaving the Friedrichstrasse Station opposite (it must have been the Metropol Hotel, after all). I was early, having visited a travel agent on some matter arising over Sonia’s and the children’s tickets and encountered a mindless bureaucratic problem. The ensuing fruitless argument with the clerk had irritated me and I went straight into the hotel bar for a drink. I ordered a large gin and water and calmed down somewhat.

A blond woman in a jade-green dress sitting in a leather armchair across the room was scrutinizing me. Her hair was pale blond — ivory-colored — bobbed, with a fiercely edged fringe cut short across the middle of her forehead. Wide, thin but well-shaped red lips. A narrow small nose with a perceptible hook. Where had I seen her before …? She stood up. She was tall, tall as me, even wearing flat ballet-dancer-style pumps on long, slightly splayed feet. She walked over towards me with an odd elegance, big strides, like a champion girl swimmer, say; muscled but lean, with a phocine grace.

“Mr. Todd?”

I said yes. I had to look up, just a little — a queer sensation.

“I’m Doon Bogan.”

We shook hands. My suddenly moist palm. Her dry fingers, the knuckly pressure of a big ring, just for an instant.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t … I thought you had dark—” I cleared my throat, suddenly clotted with phlegm. “Dark hair.”

“I do. But Julie’s blond, isn’t she?”

Aram Lodokian arrived at that moment; Alex Mavrocordato, her “adviser,” minutes later.

It took only the space of the subsequent luncheon for me to fall heedlessly, helplessly in love with her. The physical appeal glowed strongly, incandescent, but my emotional commitment followed fast. I think it was her laugh. She laughed easily in a low voice, a crescendo. In some people that facility is merely inane. But with Doon I felt it betokened a true generosity of spirit. Her laughter was a gift to others; you felt good when you heard it — or so I reasoned in my new fantastic state.

We drank. We lunched. I was a husk. I felt weightless on the chair. I picked at my food, but I drank so much Aram had to order two more bottles of wine.

Later, when they had gone, Aram and I sat over coffee and cigars in the Metropol’s smoking room. I had a stinging dehydrated throat and a yammering headache.

“My God, you drank like a fish,” Aram said.

“She’s Julie,” I said huskily. My cigar tasted of vomit.

“We can’t pay twenty-five. It’s crazy. Twenty, maybe. Just.”

“I can’t do it with anybody else.”

Aram looked at me quizzically. He wore a blue suit with a metallic aquamarine shimmer to it. He had expensive bad taste in clothes.

“Take five thousand of my fee,” I said. “Pay me it back as a bonus if we finish on time.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

“It’s not such a bad idea.” He smiled. “It’ll be a good incentive for you.”

Aram liked me, but he was no fool. He saved five thousand and got Doon Bogan. He told me he was impressed by my artistic integrity. I accepted the compliment.

Do you know that feeling? When you meet someone and you know? The sudden hollowing out of your torso, as if your lungs, heart, viscera have gone and the ribs seem to creak like barrel staves under too much pressure? Glimmerings, intimations of the way I felt now had occurred before with Faye Hobhouse, Dagmar — even Huguette. It is, I think, to do with fear: a fear of impotence — not sexual, but of lacking the power of ability to capture the object of your vital passion. A haunting dread that you will never have the chance again, that the moment has passed you by forever.

I sat on with Aram, emptied out, made void by that fear.

“Relax,” Aram said, and patted my knee. “Oh yes, I forgot. This arrived for you at the studio.”

It was a telegram from Sonia: she and the children would be arriving in four days’ time.…

I felt a sudden nausea. A weariness of spirit, an almost complete despair.