William Boyd - The New Confessions

I had an identical summer house built in a suitable walled garden. Some mornings we spent hours sweeping the fresh snow from the pathways and lawns, re-creating sunlight with our powerful arc lights. It was an important scene — both bizarre and comic — and a key to Mme. de Warens’s own compromised sexual nature that would have special bearing on Part I’s conclusion.

I felt strange directing Karl-Heinz and Doon in a love scene. I intended to fade out on the first kiss to an exterior of the summer house, the panes of glass suddenly opaque and golden with flashing sunlight. The caption I had written was taken directly from the book: “Was I happy? No. I had tasted the pleasure but some invincible sadness poisoned its charm for me.”

How well I understood that emotion! I had never experienced the same natural abandon as I had that first morning with Doon. We made love with intense mutual pleasure and enthusiasm, but she always stopped me when I wanted to tell her how much I cared for her. But you’ve told me that before, she would say. You don’t need to tell me again.

We were back in Berlin by mid-November, the weather having called a halt to filming. I was feeling unwell, I remember, a heavy cold and heavy heart. In Annecy and Chambéry I had felt free of my conscience and responsibilities. The banal truth is that physical distance is all that is required to make adultery safe and worry-free. Now, back at home, duplicity had necessarily to be enrolled as my co-partner. I found the strain of collating my lies and falsehoods with parts of the truth enervating and depressing. And the house seemed like a veritable zoo with the ubiquitous Shorrolds back again for two months over Christmas and New Year’s. Had a year really gone by? I should have been celebrating: my film was being made; I was the lover of the one woman I had ever truly adored. But these equations never work themselves out neatly. In our Charlottenburg villa there were nine of us: five adults and four children and only one bathroom. I started spending nights out at the studio in Spandau just to keep away.

There were huge problems with the film. We edited together a rough cut of the material filmed so far. It came to four hours and forty-five minutes. I did not know how I was going to break the news to Eddie (curiously, it was only now that I found his name easy on the tongue). Part I , furthermore, was nowhere near complete. We had still to shoot the Geneva scenes, and the bad weather we had endured at Annecy and Chambéry meant we would have to return there next year. At the same time there was no gainsaying that what we actually had in the can was superb. A story was unfolding here that was utterly enthralling and both Karl-Heinz and Doon glowed on the screen.

In early January I showed Eddie carefully chosen segments of our rough cut interposed with linking commentary from me. All my caution was needless: he said he was overwhelmed and deeply moved. But then he paused.

“Brilliant. Fantastic. But where’s the film? That’s six months’ work?” He looked sad rather than angry.

“There’s more,” I said. “I haven’t shown you the rest.”

We got down to business. We argued, we haggled. I was in a strong position: Joan of Arc had been a great success — not quite a Julie , but highly satisfying all the same. Julie was still playing in the U.S.A. Eddie wanted Part I complete by July ’28. I demanded the end of September. I won. Eddie stipulated that I must forfeit my twenty-five-thousand-dollar completion bonus if I was one day into October. We saved some money by actually closing down the film for two months — March and April. I add this note because I have read the wildest and most irresponsible accounts of the filming of The Confessions . It has even been written that I spent five years making a two-hour film. For the record, then, the first phase of The Confessions: Part I lasted from July 1927 to February 1928. Phase two was to commence at Chambéry in May 1928.

Doon and I tried to meet as often as we could. She insisted, however, that if we made love we had to be together for a whole night. This not unreasonable demand made life extra-difficult for me, as you might imagine. My lies to Sonia became less and less circumspect. I found the whole business of covering up increasingly effortful. And I was encouraged in my laxity by Sonia’s astonishing naïveté. Or indifference.

I spent a whole weekend with Doon in February. Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night. I returned home on Sunday evening.

“Where were you?” Sonia said.

“I told you. At the studios, editing.”

“But they said you weren’t there. That you’d left on Friday night.”

“That’s nonsense. Of course I was.”

“I telephoned all day Saturday.”

“Well, I was in and out.”

“That would explain it.”

“What?”

“Someone told me they saw you in town on Saturday evening. In a restaurant. Kurfürstendamm.”

Mild panic symptoms. “Yes.… Well, I had to meet Doon Bogan. Script — you know — decisions.”

“How is Doon?”

“What?… Oh, fine, fine. Fine.… Why were you phoning me?”

“Hereford was ill.”

“Is he all right?”

“Seems to be now. Just a bad cold.”

“There’s no need to phone me just because a child’s got a cold, Sonia.”

I found this conversation most disturbing. I looked at Sonia’s expression closely (she was playing patience), but she seemed entirely credulous. Yet she had virtually trapped me in a lie. More intelligent questioning, had she been truly suspicious, would surely have caught me out. Had she been truly suspicious … Why was she not suspicious? Over the next few days this question nagged at me. There were only two answers that I could come up with. One: that she was a trusting fool. Two: that my prolonged absences from the home suited her in some way.

I eventually asked Doon.

“Do you think Sonia could ever have an affair?”

“Why not? You are. Do you think you need a special talent?”

“I suppose so.”

“She’s attractive.”

“ Sonia? ”

“Yeah. In a sort of comforting earth-mothery way.”

“Really?”

“Well, I just know Alex used to say she was sort of sexy. He liked English women.”

This did me no good at all. To me, Sonia seemed unchanged. I had not felt a spasm of sexual attraction towards her since I had met Doon that Christmas night in 1926. But once the seed had been sown, suspicion began to flower. She was alone a lot; she was rich; she had servants, a car, and a driver if need be; the children were looked after.… What did she do all day?

It was during the lay-off months of March and April that these suspicions became intolerable. Doon asked me to come with her to a conference of international socialism in Paris, but I excused myself on the grounds that phase two of Part I required me in Berlin. I felt I had dedicated enough time and effort to the cause, with my generous donations, my signing of innumerable petitions and protesting letters to the newspapers. I had managed to cut down on the meetings, but along with Doon I had actually marched twice through the streets of Berlin on KPD rallies. It was enough, I felt. Much as I loved her I did not want to submit that love to the trials of a two-week conference.

Thus, undistracted, I fell to brooding about Sonia and decided, reluctantly, to have her followed. I asked Eddie if he knew of a private investigator.

“Yes,” he said, “what for?”

I lied. I said a friend of Sonia had asked to borrow money from her. I merely wanted the proposed “scheme” investigated, discreetly.

Eddie looked shrewdly at me. “We used to use a man called Eugen for chasing debts. I never met him but his success rate was high.”