William Boyd - The New Confessions

Do I sound delirious? Do I sound overwhelmed, engrossed, utterly trammeled up? Do I sound in love? I called “Cut” somehow and gave orders to wrap up for the day, despite the fact we had scheduled Karl-Heinz’s close-ups. The crew mutely complied. I left the scene. I had to get away. Wordless, trembling, I went down to the lake, glorious in the evening light, and spontaneously boarded one of the neat steamers that left hourly for a tour of the small summer resorts on the lakeshore. I got off at Menthon-St.-Bernard and sat on the terrace of the Pension des Glaïeuls, staring emptily at the darkening view and, steadily over the next four hours, drank three bottles of wine and numerous Cognacs. I paid a small fortune to a yokel who owned a motorcar to drive me back to Annecy. After numerous minor breakdowns and a wrong turning, we arrived there well after midnight.

I went straight to Doon’s suite and knocked several times before she answered the door. I had clearly woken her up.

“Jamie? What the hell’s going on?”

“I had to say, that this afternoon you were … it was stunning.”

“Well, thanks.”

She wore a child’s flannel nightdress, white, printed with small blue flowers, ankle length. I swayed; she put a hand out to steady me. It was all the invitation I needed.

We made love that night, though I have only Doon’s word for it. I remember nothing, a rank alcoholic amnesia depriving me of all memories beyond that image of her nightgown. Doon said later that I “came in a second.” I suppose it was a fittingly impulsive coda to an impulsive day.

I woke early the next morning, naked, in Doon’s big double bed. My head pulsed and hummed like a dynamo. I imagined my temples bulging and retracting horribly, like the throats on certain tropical frogs when they croak, or rut, or claim territorial precedence or whatever they do. Then Doon came in from the sitting room with a wide rattling, clinking tray of breakfast, which she sat down on the bed by my feet. Then she cruelly threw back the curtains and my eyeballs seemed to shrivel as if a jet of lemon juice had hit them. With my eyes shut I felt her open the windows. A breeze.

“Lovely day,” she said. “Morning.”

She pecked me on the cheek. “Who tied one on last night, then?” She smiled. She seemed to be in a good mood.

Slowly, very slowly, I was taking in the implications of our circumstances. She sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She still wore her nightgown (bluebirds, not flowers), its skirt stretched, a drumskin, between her knees. She poured me coffee. I took the cup and noisily set it down on my chest, its comforting warmth soon penetrating the intervening sheet. She lit a cigarette for me and handed it over.

I took a few sips of my coffee, a cautious puff on my cigarette. I found my voice.

“Doon, I—”

“Don’t talk,” she said. “You don’t need to say anything.” She shifted her position, rested her weight on one elbow, sipped at her own coffee or tea. A breast bulged heavily against the flannelette of her nightdress. Her ivory-blond hair was untidy. She looked at me across the small steaming crater of her cup.

“You were nice last night,” she said. “You came in a second, but you were nice.”

Her lips were wet. She reached back behind her for a plate, which she filled with toast, butter, a honey pot, a knife. Her breasts shifted, flattened and fell with her movements. I gulped my coffee, felt its hot horizontal progress to my gut. I clenched my buttocks against the rumpled cotton of the sheet. I rubbed the back of my head very slowly to and fro on the pillow. Heard the hairs on my head grate against each other. Doon’s knee — blunt, bony — appeared beneath the hem of her nightdress. Knife scrape on toast. Textures everywhere, suddenly.

“You can’t remember,” she said.

“I can. I meant — mean — every word.”

She bit. Shkrnch . Palp of a finger on a crumb at her lips’ corner. She unscrewed the lid on the honey jar. Milled metal on milled glass. Clear honey. Liquid sun in this warm light. Sun glanced off her knife. Those rays — photons, Hamish called them — from sun across curved solar space to this angled blade to my phobic retina. Outside, the blue lake and the mountains …

“What did you say, then?”

I felt my swelling cock roll across my thigh.

“Well?”

The tented sheet at my groin sagged, rose.

“Come on.”

I lifted my coffee cup from my chest, a preliminary move to setting it down on the bedside table, but before I could do so Doon had reached forward and flipped the sheet back.

“Mmm. What have we here?” Her grip closed firm about its base.

I was in the middle of the big bed. My right arm, extended, holding the coffee cup and saucer was six inches short of the right bedside table. My cigarette was in my left hand. I had to put that cup down. I transferred it, urgently to my left hand with some rattling and slopping. Four inches short. I felt pinioned, immobilized. Arms spread, crucified, pegged down. Doon’s hand on the stake that held me fast.

“Doon!” I said weakly. She was doing something with her knife.

The honey was cool, surprisingly — it always looks warm, like something molten, but it was cool. I watched her spread it. It ran thickly down the ridges of her knuckles and pooled, gleamy, in the hairs on my groin. My left leg twitched, my back arched.

“Doon, Christ …” Feebly, as if succumbing to an anesthetic. The coolness shifted quickly up through the heat spectrum, warming.

She looked at me as she did it, cheeks hollowed, eyes candid and lively. Full of fun. I could not meet that gaze for long. I lay back. The pressure grew. The cigarette fell and rolled off the bed. Then, soon after, the coffee went with a clatter, spilling, soaking into the sheets.

God alone knows what the chambermaids thought when they saw that ruined bed later that morning, covered in honey trails, toast crumbs, coffee stains and a cigarette burn. My foot at the moment of climax kicked the tray awash with Doon’s verbena infusion, sent knives sliding, tipped out plates’ contents. It was only later, that evening, when I saw the immaculate plateau of the remade bed, that I remarked on it to Doon. She laughed. “God, you’re a messy bastard,” she said. She reassured me. Chambermaids have seen it all, she said; they’re like nurses, nothing shocks them.

During the filming at Annecy we slept together every night. When we moved to Chambéry in October, Doon returned to Berlin for ten days. She was not required, she said, and I had a lot of work to catch up on. She was right — we were at least two weeks behind schedule. I asked her not to see Mavrocordato when she was in Berlin. She told me not to be stupid.

She left and the weather changed: squalling rain and snow showers, which made us even slower. When she came back we managed some scenes at the Les Charmettes farmhouse and also shot the celebrated summer house episode.

Time has passed and Rousseau is now twenty-one, earning his living as a music teacher in Chambéry, where Mme. de Warens has moved her household. An attractive young man, he is proving rather too alluring to the mothers of the young girls he teaches. It can only be a matter of time before he is seduced. Mme. de Warens decides to act herself. The moment occurs, or rather the option is mooted, in a summer house set in a herb garden that Mme. de Warens owns. Rousseau works in this summer house regularly and in fine weather he and Mme. de Warens dine there. One evening, after dinner, Mme. de Warens suggests quite openly to him that it is time he lost his virginity and proposes that she be his partner in the enterprise. In a tone of high seriousness she gives him eight days to reflect on the proposition, which delay Rousseau, somewhat shocked, eagerly accepts. Eight days later in the little summer house, sexual congress takes place.