William Boyd - The New Confessions

“I should say not.” I pointed my lit cigarette at her. “Politics is self-interest disguised by cant.” This was something Karl-Heinz had said once. I thought it had a good ring to it.

“Surely you don’t mean that.” Her voice was flat and serious, her American accent strong all of a sudden. I sensed I was on the brink of something irrevocable.

“Of course I don’t,” I tried a smile. “Teasing. I tend to tease people — nerves.”

She was frowning at me, skeptically.

“I admit I’m a cynic,” I went on, more desperate than I hoped I looked. “But I do make exceptions.” I nodded at the photograph. “The likes of Rosa, for one.”

I held my breath. She relaxed.

“Alex put you up to this. He said you’d get a rise out of me, right?”

“Alex who?”

“Mavrocordato. He can’t stand that I’m a Communist. The jerk.”

“No, honestly, it was me. My stupid idea of a joke.” I waved my hands about. I had to sit down; my entire left leg was trembling for some reason. What the hell had got into me? Why had nobody warned me? The apartment was full of books; they now looked weighty, earnest, leftist …

I changed the subject and we talked about the script and the part of Julie. She said in all seriousness that she was keen on the role because she was interested in the concept of virtue and was tired of playing “whores and bitches.” We talked on. She was bright and had thought hard about the film. The afternoon wore on and the apartment grew dim. Eventually she got up and switched on the light.

“Do you want a drink, John?” It was the first time she had mentioned my name. I felt the familiar clubbing start up in my chest.

“Do you like to be called John or James?”

“Whatever you like.”

“What about James. Jamie?”

“ Hrrrrm . Hah!.. mng . Sorry. Yes, fine.”

“Right, Jamie, what about that drink?”

“Gin and water. Please.”

“Good God.”

(Why did I drink that drink then? Pure affectation, but it was strong.) She went into another room to get it. Long strides, skirt swirling about her calves. The susurration of her leather pumps on the parquet flooring. I could see at the crown of her head a tiny rosette of dark hair, the blond dye growing out. I knew suddenly why she was such a big star in Europe: she was different from European women, or at least was perceived to be. She came from the New World and was not hidebound or impressed by the old. There was nothing specific about this, nothing you could put your finger on, but that sense of an entrancing alternative seemed to coil about her like ectoplasm.

She handed me the glass. I gulped at the drink. The single light shone on her ivory hair. Her small hooked nose cast a dark shadow across her face.

“You sure Alex didn’t put you up to that Rosa joke?”

“Positive. I haven’t seen him since the contracts were signed.”

“It’d be just like him.…”

Pause.

“Are you and he …? Not that it’s any of my business. But I—”

It was my second mistake. She looked shrewdly at me. For the first time — and I believe this — she sensed the hot moist tentacles of my desire sneaking about her, dabbing at her skirt.

“Why? What’s it to you?”

“Nothing … or rather, energetic curiosity.”

She took this in.

“We blow hot and cold, Alex and me.… Alex and I? That’s all.”

I left shortly after that. I felt a clawing ache in my chest. I walked up the Kurfürstendamm past the bright shops and gleaming cafés, the neon cinemas, the elegant overdecorated terraces of houses. The ache would not go away. It came, I know, from a mixture of intense longing and the saddened conviction that my life, or, rather, most of the things that pertained to me, were going to be altered, bruised or destroyed because of that very longing.

I went into a café, ordered a drink, then went into the WC and masturbated into my handkerchief. It had the desired effect of dispersing those querulous emotions and querulous fears. Now I felt merely depressed and seedy. I hailed a taxi and went home to my wife and family.

I strove intermittently and fairly valiantly to forget Doon. Or, more to the point as I would soon be seeing her every day, I strove to direct the remorseless impulse of my emotions elsewhere. I was not successful. It is an insidious force that operates on you when you love and lust after someone impotently. It not only trammels up you, the agent, it bears down also on those innocent of its workings. Such as Sonia. All the real attraction I used to feel for her slowly evaporated, like a puddle in hot sun. Her neatness, her straight parting, her haunchy bottom-heaviness, became irritants and flaws.

I remember one day in August we went swimming, to the huge beach at Wannsee. Me, Sonia, Vincent and Noreen Shorrold, Vincent junior and baby Hereford. The beach was full of pink-and-brown Berliners. I sat in my swimming costume and toweling robe, steadily drinking cold hock from a Bakelite cup. My son Vincent (he was dark like me, but looked Shorrold through and through) tottered between his grandparents. Sonia knelt over Hereford, a safety pin in her mouth, busying herself with some mopping-up and cleansing operation (I have never known such a child for pissing and shitting himself: he had a vandal’s urge to soil clean things, did Hereford). I felt, and almost welcomed, such was the state of my mind, the harbingers of a headache creeping up on me. Feebly, I tried to nestle into some warm congratulatory mood of self-satisfaction. Here was my happy family, I told myself; here was my wife, my sons. I was comparatively rich, with the prospect of further riches eminently realizable. And, as an artist, I was on the point of making my first real moving picture. Why then did I feel the air around me electric with my own annoyance, crackling with static irritation? Why, when Hereford arched his back and squirmed his head round to look at me, did I not chuck the little fellow under his treble chin or rub his fat tum with a proud parental hand? Because … because I was thinking of Doon and wondering if she was spending the day with that bastard Mavrocordato. Why, that could be them in that white speedboat buzzing by, cutting across the lake heading for some rented birch-embowered villa on the far side of the Havel.… A girl swam strongly out to an anchored wooden raft and hauled herself up onto it in a fluent fluid motion. The cerise wool of her damp swimsuit clung to her breasts and belly. I tried to imagine Doon in a swimsuit. And even when the girl removed her rubber swimming cap and shook out her dark hair I thought of Doon, who had cut her long dark hair and died it blond for Julie . For me.

A tap on my forearm. Little Vince (as his grandparents called him, to my horror) offering me a tongue-and-cress sandwich to the loud applause of the other adults. His eyes were wide with alarm. Why did the boy fear me? Cruelly, I said no, thank you. He burst into tears, dropped the sandwich in the sand and fled to his mother’s wide lap.

“Johnny, really. ”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“Oh, but still …”

“God Almighty! I can’t stuff myself just for his sake!”

I stood up and angrily threw off my robe. I strode down to the water and dived in. Cool shock, a silent glide, a sudden calm. I hated myself.

I will not bore you with the actual details of the filming of Julie . Suffice it to say I knew from very early on it was going well. Karl-Heinz was superb. We whitened his face and hollowed his cheeks and eye sockets to enhance his wracked, soul-tormented personality. The particular frisson in the film was the two types of delicious anticipation that operated in it. The first was before Julie and Saint-Preux’s love was consummated. Then, second, there was more suspense over whether their sense of honor would allow their virtue to survive. It was given an added twist by Doon’s loveliness and irresistible erotic allure. Her manner on screen was one of innocent carnal license, which, in the second half when she was trying to be faithful to Wolmar, toyed with one’s sense of frustration in the most agonizing way. The two lovers desperately wanted each other. All that was physically keeping them apart was the abstract airy strictures of morality. Once old Baron Wolmar left them they had everything — place, occasion, inclination — but some higher code kept them at arm’s length.