William Boyd - The New Confessions

There was one scene towards the end of the film that, when we saw the rushes, had us all on the edge of our seats baying obscene encouragement at Karl-Heinz.

It is late one evening. An albescent moon shines on Baron Wolmar’s château. On the terrace Saint-Preux wrestles with his conscience as he smokes a cigarette (remember, it has all been updated). Moths flutter round the lights (thank you, Georg). Then, further up the long terrace, Julie steps out through the French windows of her boudoir. She is wearing a luxuriant flimsy negligee, which billows occasionally in the night breezes. She advances towards Saint-Preux, their eyes fast upon one another. She stops eighteen inches from him. Caption: I love this time of the evening. May I have a cigarette? With one movement Saint-Preux slides his silver cigarette case from his pocket. Close-up of Julie’s fingers as she selects one — her lacquered nails on the slim white cylinder. Saint-Preux — cigarette in mouth — goes for his lighter in another pocket, but a slight hesitation on Julie’s part halts him. She puts the cigarette in her mouth (close-up: those wide dark lips, that white, white paper). She sways towards him. Tip of cigarette meets tip of cigarette. Ignition, burn, smoke wreaths. They move apart gazing at each other. They draw on their cigarettes, exhale. Smoke, backlit by the moon, coils and swoops thickly about them.…

This scene has been much copied, at times blatantly, at times indirectly. It was the first use in a film, I believe, of the cigarette as an erotic symbol. The scene was mightily effective and so powerful that it was almost cut by the censor. Aram reported this dull bureaucrat’s comments to me: “He says they are fornicating on screen.” Our dumb literalness—“But they’re only smoking. They’re not even touching!”—won the day. Not a frame was removed.

Naturally, Doon was a triumph in the film also. Not that she required any elevation from the stellar heights she already occupied. Her last day of filming occurred two weeks before the end of the shoot. It was her deathbed scene, where she declares she has been in love with Saint-Preux all along. Our final two weeks were to be occupied with Saint-Preux in Paris gamely resisting its temptations, sustained by Julie’s faith.

I had champagne and flowers sent to Doon’s dressing room. Aram Lodokian had arranged a formal farewell party for later that evening. I felt calm. We had worked well together and there had been no disagreements. She could see I knew what I was doing (even if you do not know what you are doing, the crucial talent required by a director, as far as actors are concerned, is to give the unchallengeable impression that you do) and, importantly, there had been no hint of intimacy between us. Certainly not from her, and I had been prudent not to let my own desires be revealed again. It seemed to me that I was finally exerting some control over myself. Even when Mavrocordato visited the set a few times. Although, through my green eyes, it looked as if they were getting on uncommonly well for a divorced couple. So why did I go to her room alone? I wanted to say good-bye and I wanted, personally and privately, to set a seal on our relationship. Friendship with a tantalizing hint of what might have been. Or so I told myself.

Doon had not changed from her deathbed nightdress, a strappy satin thing with a low back. She had a long housecoat tied loosely over it. In an anteroom her dresser was ironing. Doon poured me a glass of champagne and we idly exchanged compliments about the film.

“Did you see Alex on your way in?”

“Alex who?” I always did this.

“God, Jamie! Mavrocordato. He’s supposed to be picking me up.”

“No. No sign.”

The dresser — a small, cross-looking woman — came out of the anteroom holding a short black jacket with diamanté buttons.

“Fixed it?” Doon asked.

“You better try it on.”

Doon slipped off the housecoat and put the jacket on.

“It’s fine. Thanks, Dora, you can go.”

Dora left. Doon checked the fit of the jacket, flexing, reaching, stretching, then she took it off and flung it over the arm of her chair. A wayward sleeve knocked her near-empty glass to the ground, shattering it.

“Shit!” she said. She knelt down to pick up the pieces.

Seeing Doon’s slim tall body, one might have thought her small-breasted. Not so. She had wide flat breasts, small-nippled, with almost no sag to them. A gentle convexity covering a largish area, like the lid of a soup tureen. I saw them now as she knelt on the ground before me, the drooping front of her nightdress affording me an unobstructed view.

My tongue seemed to swell to block my throat as I slipped off my chair to kneel before her, my fingers blindly searching for shards and fragments. The erotic archaeologist … I caught a gust of her perfume, a kind of lavender. She looked up. My eyes snapped up just in time.

“Hey, don’t bother, Dora’ll get it in the—”

I kissed her with undue violence, crushing my nose painfully on her cheek, simultaneously clutching her shoulders and hauling us both to our feet. I pressed my taut bulging groin against her thigh and pushed her back and down onto the sofa. She flung her head back.

“I love you, Doon,” I said. “I love — MNEEAAGHHH!”

The pain was infernal, not of this world. The hard apex of her knee mashed my testicles against the unyielding base of my pelvis. I felt as if I had been split from the perineum up to the top of my skull by an ice ax, or impaled, sitting, on a giant freezing horn. (Gentlemen, you surely know what I am talking about. Ladies, take my word for it, there is no more fiendish agony.) Everything went blue, black, purple, orange, white. I opened my eyes. An ultrasonic scream seemed to reverberate around the room as if it were a trapped demented presence. I was on the floor — balled up well and truly, you might say. Glass splinters sparkled before my eyes. My hands cupped the jangling fragments of my ruined groin.

I twisted my head round. Doon stood by the door, fully dressed (how much time had elapsed, for God’s sake?). Through the scream in my head I seemed to hear her say calmly, “I never want to see you again, asswipe.”

I felt the vomit — a prancing bolus — in my throat. I began to crawl to the bathroom. There was a knock on the door behind me, then Mavrocordato’s voice asking, “What is it?”

Doon said, “Nothing,” and the door closed. I am sure I heard laughter.

I never made it to the toilet bowl. I vomited over the linoleum — maroon fleur-de-lis in a pretty pattern — a yard short. I left it for Dora to clean up in the morning.

Julie was an enormous hit. An international success. Realismus Films made over a million dollars in Germany, France, Britain and America. Doon Bogan became for a year or two the most glamorous and celebrated actress in Europe. Karl-Heinz Kornfeld was acclaimed as the “quintessentially hoch modern leading man.” But more of that later. My own life entered a strange troubled phase just as my personal fortunes were at their zenith.

I was, I think, actually driven a little insane by my “falling out” with Doon — if that is not too absurd a euphemism. Even after such a brutal, unequivocal rejection I could not expunge or ignore my feelings for her. What can you do in such circumstances? If you are obsessed, you are obsessed. She telephoned me two days after the incident.

“Are you all right?”

“What? Yes. A slight limp, but otherwise … Look, Doon, I—”

“I shouldn’t have hit you so hard. But I was mad. And not just at you. I was kind of upset that day.”

“God, I’m so sorry. Terribly sorry. I should never—”

“You’re a fool, John James Todd. A great, big, Grade A, ignorant fool.”