William Boyd - The New Confessions

The day after I wrote that diary entry, Eddie Simmonette turned up. It was in the evening and we had just finished dinner when he arrived. I knew there was something wrong because his clothes were dirty. He was unshaven and the cleft in his chin was dense with bristles. He had driven all the way from Berlin, via Austria, an arduous journey that had taken him five days. He brought the worst news. First, the luckless Georg Pfau had been arrested and incarcerated for some reason. His connection with Realismus Films had led to the studio’s being investigated. Shortly after that, Eddie had apparently been declared a “non-Aryan.” The scandal attaching to this had prompted the banks to foreclose on him and the creditors to rush in. The studios were shut down, the staff paid off, all Eddie’s property impounded.

“Everything?” I asked. I felt a horrible cold nausea squirming in my body, like something trapped in a burrow.

“The lot.”

“What about The Confessions? ” I could hardly get the words out. “The negative?”

“Oh, I’ve got that in the back of my car. And that old trunk you kept there. No, I’m talking about my house, the studios—”

There and then I made him take me out to his car — a big Audi — and open it. I saw the flat gleaming aluminum boxes. I counted them — fourteen. I let my forehead touch the car’s cold roof for a few seconds.

“Have you heard from Doon?” he asked.

“No.”

“She made a long-distance call, looking for you. I couldn’t speak to her — the police were there.”

“When was that?”

“Ten days ago.”

It made no sense — I thought she knew where I was — but I had no time to ponder on it. We summoned the crew to a meeting in the hotel dining room and told them what had happened. Eddie said he would pay them off the next day. He speculated vaguely about setting himself up in Paris and reassembling everything at the end of that year once he had a secure base.

Later that evening Eddie and I talked alone. He told me that after paying off the crew and settling the film’s debts he would have approximately two thousand dollars left in the world.

“It’s over,” he said. “I’m sorry, John.”

“For the time being,” I said bravely. “It survived talkies and the Wall Street crash. We’ll just have to postpone it.” Half of me actually believed this, I suppose; the other half wanted to lie down and die.

“You have some money here, don’t you?” he asked.

I had, in Geneva. My profits from Julie , which Thompson had told me to transfer from Germany, minus certain payments to Sonia.

“Yes. Why?”

“I want to sell you the negative to The Confessions, ” he said, “for fifty thousand dollars.”

To this day I sometimes wonder if Eddie fooled me. Sometimes I am convinced he did; at others, absolutely not. He knew I had money in Switzerland because I had passed on to him Thompson’s advice to me — which he had chosen to ignore.

At one dark stage in my life I was convinced he had set up The Confessions: Part II only to get me to Switzerland for the express purpose of selling me Part I . He must have known I would buy it. In the end, though, I have to absolve him; the plot was far too complicated even for Eddie’s Byzantine mind. For example, he could not have known he would be investigated and declared a non-Aryan by the Nazis. But out of disaster the cards fell conveniently for him. I had something over seventy thousand dollars in a bank in Geneva. Eddie had pitched his price just right.

It took a couple of days to sort out our affairs in Neuchâtel. We bade each other morose farewells. Karl-Heinz said he would go back to Berlin to see what he could do for Georg. I told him I would go straight to Paris and urged him to join Doon and me there. He said he would wait and see.

Anny La Lance contemplated the sudden demise of her short-lived film career and the resumption of her old identity with surprising calm. She said it had always seemed too good to be true and asked only for a lift back to Geneva, where both Eddie and I were going.

We spent a day with a lawyer. Fortuitously, Eddie had brought all the necessary documents with him. Now we had cause to bless the existence of Jean Jacques! The Confessions: Part I belonged entirely to Realismus Films Verlag A. G. The film negative and everything that had been shot of Part II were now purchased by John James Todd, Esq., for fifty thousand dollars less the legal fees the advocate demanded. I went to my bank and withdrew the money, in cash — all of which, to my surprise, Eddie managed to fit into his briefcase.

It was a mild wintry day, the sun shone on the lake, as we sat in a café enjoying a farewell drink. Anny was still with us, holding on to her lost future until the final minute. Parked nearby on the curb was Eddie’s big Audi, which was now mine — he had generously included it in the deal.

“So,” I said, “that’s it. When are you off to Paris?”

“I’m not going,” he said. “I’m going to America.” He patted his briefcase. “See what I can do there.” He smiled. “Why don’t you join me? Eh, Johnny? That’s where the future lies.”

“My future’s sitting in that car,” I said. “No, I’m going to Paris. Find Doon.”

I rang the doorbell on Doon’s apartment door. She lived in a rather shabby building on the Rue de Grenelle. There was no answer. I went to look for the concierge. This turned out to be a beefy man in vest and braces who was watering the weeds in the damp courtyard with weedkiller. He told me Mlle. Bogan had gone.

“When will she be back?” I asked.

No. I had not understood. She had gone away. She was not returning.

I felt sadness infect me like a germ.

“Where has she gone? Did she say?”

“No,” he said. “She just left. Monsieur Mavrocordato came and they went away together.”

I was back in London within a week. I sold the Audi in Paris and bought a large tin cabin trunk to take the contents of the old one and the reels of The Confessions . This I then deposited in the vault of a bank in Piccadilly. I rented a modest dusty flat in Islington not far from the site of the old Superb-Imperial studios and contemplated my future.

It was strange to be back in London after a gap of ten years. It was busier and dustier than Berlin; apart from that, to my indifferent eyes, it seemed more or less unchanged. Sonia and the children now lived in a large house near Parson’s Green. I deliberately chose a place to live as far away from Shorrold territory as possible.

I was depressed and often quite miserable during those initial weeks back in London. I had taken the demise of Realismus Films and the end of my dreams about The Confessions extraordinarily well, or so I thought. I suppose it was because I had never truly felt that the sound version was really feasible. Making it was a despairing effort rather than an enthusiastic one — an act of bravado, not conviction. I needed more time to generate that last emotion.

In fact, ambition had become almost extinct in me since 1929, hard though it may be to believe. I set up Part II and did what filming I could manage powered by an energy that was derived more from dwindling momentum than from any self-generating creative source. Ambition had died, and now I needed a strong deep sentiment to fill the spaces it had vacated. That was why I drove to Paris with such joyous anticipation, and that was why Doon’s betrayal was the most savage shock I had to take.

I could hardly believe that she had gone off with Mavrocordato. I could feel only hate and revulsion for what she had done to me. To try to forget, I spent a couple of days getting drunk (we drank much more then, I think). Finally, sober, crapulous, fed up, I wondered what to do next. To go back to Berlin was out of the question. Eddie was going to America, so why not follow him there? For a while I was tempted. I even went to a shipping agency and inquired about booking a passage. But I was too hurt and sorrowful to take such a step straightaway. And so I turned for home with my films, my scripts and my bits and pieces, to set about the task of putting my life back together in a mood not far off apathetic.