William Boyd - The New Confessions

She fell asleep almost instantly. I lay in the dark listening to her small snores, wondering if Ian Orr would burst in at any moment. I could hear the noise of male conversation from a room below, which I took to be the temperance bar. Outside the summer night faded into darkness; I heard the rickety-tick of a train on the LNER railway line and a few motorcars passing on the coast road to Musselburgh.

The next morning was a Saturday and it was raining. Senga’s bed was empty when I woke, but her dress and coat were still in the wardrobe. I went to the window and looked out at the wet roofs of Joppa. Beyond the coast road the pewtery firth was calm and beyond that lay the rest of Scotland.… Rain seemed to be falling on the entire country from the solid low sky.

Senga came in, from the lavatory I assumed, wearing my dressing gown.

“Oh, yer up. Borrowed yer dressin’ goon.”

She took it off and handed it to me. She had slept in her underwear and cotton slip, which was badly creased. I could see she had small sharp breasts and there was something provocative about the sight of her bare legs and battered high-heeled shoes. I saw a stubble of dark hair on her shins.

“Senga, I—”

The door was flung open and Ian Orr came in.

“Morning, Mr. Todd, morning to youse all.”

I had to pay Eck Orr for the full two nights. I settled all my bills in the hotel’s office, including Senga’s. We drank to the successful conclusion of my divorce. Eck raised his glass.

“Here’s tae us, wha’s like us?”

“Damn few — and they’re a’ deed,” Ian Orr said.

Later, Eck slyly asked Senga to stay on, but I was glad when she refused. We said good-bye to the Orr brothers and walked to the station.

“Where are you going?” I asked as we waited for a train. “Waverley?”

“I’ll get the stopper to Bonnington.”

We sat on the station bench side by side. It was still raining. I felt obscurely cheated of my second night with her.

“Do you go to that pub — the Linlithgow — often?” It was the only reference I had made to her profession.

“Aye, sometimes.”

“Maybe I’ll see you there.”

“Maybe, aye.”

Her train came in five minutes. She got up.

“Thanks for the spongebag, Mr. Todd. Cheerio, now.”

My film The Divorce had its trade show in August 1935. Close-up described it as “a powerful and at times shocking melodrama, very much in the German style.” Bioscope said, “A skillful and impressive film let down by mediocre performances.” In the film the impossible love affair ends with the hero murdering the uncaring prostitute and then killing himself. I shot it full of shadows, unrelievedly murky in every scene. It was a small inexpensive film compared to the scale I had become accustomed to in The Confessions , but I was pleased with it. It was infused with its own strange passion. On the whole The Divorce received a good press, though it did only average business. This was the result of the inept distribution deal negotiated by the film company I made it for — Astra-King. But I was pleased with the movie for a number of reasons, not the least of which was the fact that it was a memento of the bizarre twenty-four hours I had spent in Joppa committing adultery with Senga. There were other advantages that accrued. The good notices had attracted interest from Gaumont, J. Arthur Rank and British Lion. The Confessions: Part II was being discussed once more.

My most ardent fan was the celebrated Courtney Young, variously known as Mr. Film, Father of the British Cinema and any number of other flattering epithets. Young was a hugely wealthy man who had made his fortune in the ancillary trades of the film business. He started out hiring equipment — lamps and cameras — then he expanded into the costumier side. He bought a studio during the postwar slump, demolished it and then sold the land to the electricity board. The money he made from this purchased the second-largest cinema chain in the North of England. And so on. He was one of those men who would have done well, and done it in the same way, no matter what industry he went into — he just happened to choose the cinema. Now he was making films. His company, Court Films, had produced two expensive flops: Vanity Fair and Sir Walter Raleigh , but this had not dissuaded him. He was mad for The Confessions .

Young was a huge fleshy man with a handsome face spoiled by heavy bags under his eyes. He had thin ginger-blond hair, which he brushed straight back from a pale freckleless face. He looked as if he should have been dark and saturnine. The fact that he was not was somewhat unsettling. For a while I used to wonder if his hair was dyed, but I saw him naked once (showering in his golf club) and his pubic hair was as pale as old thistledown.

I did not like Young much, but I needed him. He was married to a still-beautiful actress of the silent era, Meredith Pershing, and I spent quite a few weekends at their country house near High Wycombe. He paid me to rewrite my scripts so that Rousseau’s English years were emphasized (he wanted Hector Seagoe to play David Hume) and I obliged. It took considerable persuasion to get him to accept Karl-Heinz as Rousseau, but I made it a condition of my directing. In the end he had to agree.

It was the spring of 1936, I think, March or April, when Leo Druce finally returned from Berlin. He was something of a wasted man, having been embroiled in a nasty court case after the death of his ex-wife, Lola Templin-Tavel. Her body had been found in a grove of trees near the Wannsee with a bullet hole in her head and a revolver lying nearby. However, in her room was a suicide note that stated that she and Leo were going to stage a double suicide exactly like Kleist and his mistress Henriette Vogel (Lola had made her name in the role of Henriette Vogel in a long-running play). Leo knew nothing of this and protested as much when he was arrested for murder. There was a lot of lurid publicity and it was only as a result of witnesses testifying to Lola’s total craziness that the charges against him were dropped.

Since his window-cleaner film, Leo had made three other low-quality musical comedies and was now, I suppose, regarded as a director rather than a producer.

We met for lunch in an oyster bar off the Strand. Leo looked thinner and needed a haircut. We shook hands with as much warmth as the gesture can generate.

“I came away with virtually nothing,” he said. “I had to get out of the place. You should have seen those baboons that arrested me … and the jail! It’s all the uniforms I can’t take. Suddenly everybody’s allowed to dress up. And flags. Flags everywhere. Never known a country so keen on flags.”

We ordered turtle soup and three dozen oysters. To my surprise I had developed a taste for them. In celebration of our reunion I called for champagne.

“Doing well, Johnny?”

I told him The Confessions was on the go again.

“Wonderful. Great news. Saw The Divorce . Splendid. The end shook me up a bit, I can tell you.” He lifted his chin and slid an oyster down his throat. “You know — what with Lola topping herself like that.”

I asked him for news of Doon. He told me he had none. We talked on about the occupation of the Rhineland, life in Berlin and mutual friends. He told me that Georg Pfau had died in some kind of internment camp. Karl-Heinz was in a successful play at the Schiller-Theater but was still living in Georg’s old apartment, which he now owned.

“Place is full of dead insects,” Leo said. “Doesn’t seem to care.”

“I must write to him. Get him over to meet Young.” I looked at Leo. “What do you say to keeping The Confessions a Todd-Druce production? I’ll talk to Young about it.”