William Boyd - The New Confessions

I was prepared to wait it out. I had not let the weather spoil my film thus far and was not about to make compromises now. Doon sat in a deck chair beside me, in costume and makeup, reading a book. I glanced at her strong profile and felt a pleasant pang of love for her. My one night with Monika Alt at Falkenhagen had been a momentary aberration, a mere matter of circumstance and mood (and Monika) conspiring against me. I had no guilt about it because it had made no difference. Doon and I still saw each other virtually every day. I spent most nights at her apartment. I kept many of my clothes and possessions there. I talked from time to time of buying a new larger apartment for us both — Doon did not object and the implication was that we would both be living together before too long. My only worry was to do with future filming. Mme. de Warens, at the end of Part I , disappears completely from the story of The Confessions . We would be often separated over the coming three years as I filmed Part II and Part III .

Doon reached into her handbag and removed a cigarette case. I smiled, enjoying the oddly exciting anachronism of an eighteenth-century noblewoman smoking a Lucky Strike. She looked round and caught my eye.

“Bloody rain,” I said.

“Jamie, I was thinking, wouldn’t the scene be better in rain? I mean, it’s a low moment.”

“Absolutely not.” I reiterated my reasons. She was bored, idle. She knew she would never get me to compromise.

“Well, could I go down to the hotel? I’ve got some stuff to sort out.”

I looked up at the massed, packed gray clouds. If the sun appeared we would only have time to do Jean Jacques’s walk to the front door. I said yes. She went off with understandable relief.

What took me back down the valley early? What made me leave in advance of the cast and crew? I cannot remember. I think Leo brought a cable from Eddie querying some expense and I think I wanted to check my production notes before I dictated a reply. Anyway, whatever it was, I had myself driven down to the Hôtel de France on the Quai Nezia (I can recommend it, if ever you find yourself in Chambéry). It was an agreeable drive, even in the rain. I remember that because my mood was so placid and settled. I had one scene left to film; The Confessions: Part I was everything I had dreamed it to be. I felt the benign confidence of a great artist — a da Vinci, a Rembrandt, a Monet — staring at his completed canvas, wondering only where to inscribe his signature.

Did I stop at my room before I went to Doon’s suite? (The hotel had only one, rather poky, on the top floor under the eaves, converted from servants’ quarters.) I think so. I think I confirmed or refuted Eddie’s inquiry. Then I sauntered along the corridor and up the steep stairs, and walked into Doon’s sitting room.

Alexander Mavrocordato sat there, smoking, reading a script, my script. A briefcase rested against his chair leg. He was dressed casually— à l’anglaise —sports coat, twills, a cream shirt and a cravat. He looked up as I came in. There was no surprise, no guilt, no welcome.

“Ah, Todd,” he said. “I hear the weather is causing you problems.”

I thought for an instant I was going to have a heart attack, so intense was the pain that seemed to zigzag transversely across my chest from my left armpit. But it passed with gratifying suddenness. (Did I tell you Mavrocordato was Russian? Or so he claimed to be. He spoke English with a clotted central European accent. I am sure his name was assumed. Someone once told me his real name was Otto Blâc — the c pronounced ch.)

“Yes,” I managed to say, forcing my head to stay still and not swivel round to Doon’s bedroom door. “Minor problems. Minor. Very minor.… Yes, entirely minor.”

He threw the script on the table. “That’s some film you’re making.”

“Thank you.” I stood like a major domo, unnaturally rigid in the middle of the room, canted forward ever so slightly, as if waiting to receive an order. I felt that if Doon did not come in soon I would shatter, so tensely was I holding myself.

She came through the door brushing her hair. I saw the bed for a second — flat, unrumpled. I relaxed, marginally.

“Hi, darling,” she said to me. “Look who’s here,” she said, indicating Mavrocordato.

“Yes,” I said, turning to him. “What exactly do you want?”

“He’s making a film,” Doon said. “He wants me to be in it.”

“No,” I said.

“No what?” Mavrocordato asked.

“No, she will not be in your film.”

“Jamie? Are you all right?”

Mavrocordato smiled wearily. “I don’t think that’s your decision, Todd, with great respect.”

“Forget it,” I said. “With great respect.”

Doon fixed me with a wide-eyed angry look. She turned to Mavrocordato. “We’ll talk later.”

He got up, picked up his briefcase, opened it and placed a script on the table. I picked it up and handed it to him. I smelled the sour reek of his cheroot.

“I leave you script, Doon,” he said, setting it down again. I picked it up and handed it to him. We did this three times.

“Take it, Blâc,” I said.

He swore expansively at me in his tiny improvised language, mangled munching sounds.

“Fuck off, cunt,” I said. Proud Anglo-Saxon brevity.

“Stop it, Jamie!” Doon was furious but I did not care. I felt cool, as if all my arteries and veins were ventilated suddenly with clear Alpine air. He stood there with his hands on his hips as if I were some irritating mendicant who would not take no for an answer.

“Is he always such a child?” he asked Doon.

It was the look he gave her that did it. Familiar, possessive, knowing.

Spontaneously I said to Doon, “Have you ever slept with him? Since we—”

I left it unfinished. Her face was taut, stretched.

A hooting laugh from Mavrocordato. “Ah, yes ! Now we are there. So English!”

“Well?”

“Yes,” she said. “Once or twice.”

“For old time sake,” Mavrocordato said.

I hit him with all my strength, a curved high right hook, catching him in front of his left ear. I heard, before I felt the pain, my knuckles break. He went crashing down and got up staggering almost at once. I swung two more wild hits at his face, a left and a right. The left squashed his nose, the right slammed into his shoulder. I bellowed in agony as my broken knuckles ground bone on bone.

Mavrocordato was swaying, snorting blood and mucus — nose-jam — onto the carpet like a dying bull in a bullfight. Doon was cursing and yelling at us to stop. My right hand felt as if it had been plunged in a bucket of sharp knives. The hot pain had a jangling metallic quality to it.

His first punch caught me a glancing blow high on the head. Then he tried to knee me in the groin but, doubled over as I was, his knee drove into my ribs, blasting the air out of my lungs. I felt myself going down slowly and his second punch landed more like a club on the back of my head. He grabbed my collar, opened the door and dragged me through. I could see nothing but light meteors swarming like a shoal of darting fish in front of my eyes. I reached to grab something — I thought there was a wall in front of me — and I clutched air. Then I was launched into space with the vicious force of his boot in my arse. I took a header down the stairs.

I finished filming the final scene of The Confessions ten days later with two broken knuckles, a severe compound fracture of my right arm, three broken ribs and massive body-wide contusions. My torso was heavily strapped, my right arm and hand set in plaster and my brain fuddled with analgesics.

Doon could not stop laughing and we were obliged to shoot many takes. But it worked and was finally done exactly as I wanted.