by William Boyd
25 July
Dear Tarquin,
This is an apology. A letter of apology. An apologetic letter to apologize for the series of texts I sent you some weeks ago. They were extreme, shrill and totally uncalled for. The collapse of Oblong or Triangle affected me more than I thought it could, coupled with Jadranka’s betrayal. I was a little unhinged as a result of that double whammy, as I suspect you, of all people, will understand. Films have collapsed under me before and I’ve never reacted this way so I can’t really understand why I was so sideswiped by this one. Perhaps because I had written it for Jadranka and I felt in my bones that this was ‘it’, the one. When will we ever learn, us dreamers? … Congratulations also for the new job – my God, Filmzilla – hot, hot, hot. No one better than you, my man. Great fit. However, if this doesn’t seem too snidely opportune, I have something I think you may be interested in and, moreover, that will fit the Filmzilla slate to the proverbial tee. I’ve written a new script, Circle into Square, for me to direct. Nothing like Claustral, you’ll be glad to hear. True indie fare but with a commercial spin (all right, erotic!). Can I bike it round? It would be great to be back working together. We were always a –
10 August
Dear Dr Manakulasuriya,
Your secretary asked me to list my symptoms before she would give me an appointment with you. I’ve been a patient at the clinic for some five years and this bizarre demand has never been made before. I’m not going to tell some unqualified stranger – a secretary or receptionist – what’s wrong with me! No, these personal problems are for a doctor’s ears alone. I’m sure you understand – hence this missive. I have to admit I have been under some stress these last weeks and months – nothing new, as I work in a highly stressful industry (the movie business). However, I have to say I’ve never experienced such a collection of ailments. Let me list them in no order of importance: extreme lassitude, intermittent nausea, a sense that my skin on my face is being stretched to ripping point, light-headedness, occasional vertigo and loss of balance, acute hunger followed by a sudden detestation of food, chromophobia (especially the colour red), incipient migraine, unexpected attacks of weeping, leaden depression that can last for several hours, racing of the heart, neuralgia, a conviction that the earth is rotating faster than normal, a fear of leaving my house, short-term memory loss. Have you any idea what might be wrong with me? Is there any medication that you –
23 September
Darling Jadranka,
Yes, it’s me. I hope this has arrived safely. I hand-delivered it to a runner on the set and told him to take it immediately to your Winnebago. How wonderful that you’re shooting in London – you should have told me. I wanted to make contact with you ever since I heard the news that Hopkins-Hughes had married Paula Vanni. He is a complete bastard-shit, my darling. Unadulterated, grade ‘A’ manure. I warned you about him. But, paradoxically, even though I hate him even more for what he’s done to you, I’m grateful to the deplorable scumbag that he is: he has brought us back together (I hope). I have news. I have a new job. I am Professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Shoreditch. Here in London, East London. Quite a good salary, long holidays, moderate teaching load. I am living in a very nice two-bedroomed flat in Hackney owned by my brother, Ned. Rent-free for a year (he owes me money). I miss you, my darling. I realize I’ve never loved anyone in the way I loved you. I’ve been physically ill since we split up – I won’t go into details – but it was a bad time. But now my life has stabilized. No more movies – never again, all in the past, that door locked and barred. It’s astonishing how equilibrium returns as soon as you make that decision. Let’s meet up. Let me show you my little flat in Hackney. Come and stay with me for a few days when you finish shooting – or if you have a weekend off. Softly, softly. There never was a couple like us, darling one, you know that. Let’s rebuild what we had. I say I’ve abandoned the movie business but I have to confess I have written another script. It’s called Circle into Square. Very cool, edgily erotic. There is a perfect part for you. Shall I send it round to –
The Things I Stole
I stole a BOAC Speedbird lapel badge from my friend Mark Pertwee. I was eight years old and it was the first act of conscious larceny that I can remember. BOAC – British Overseas Airways Corporation – that dates me; and the ‘Speedbird’ logo is now long gone, also. I can see the small badge in my mind’s eye: a ten-pence piece would cover it – navy blue, edged with silver, a cross between a notional bird-shape and an arrowhead – modern, thrusting, stylish, everything that the 1960s, BOAC and its fleet of mighty, navy blue and white, four-engined, turbo-prop planes were meant to embody …
Mark Pertwee’s mother was a travel agent and she was a source of all manner of travel-agent freebies – timetables, small desktop models of planes (KLM, Pan Am, Air France), little plastic pennants of national flags and their carriers – and she generously shared this bounty with me as well as her son (I was his best friend), but she pointedly did not give me a Speedbird lapel badge. Perhaps she was only provided with one, herself, perhaps it was valuable – silver plate and enamel – it now strikes me. And perhaps this was why I coveted it so.
I planned my theft well. First of all, I hid it in the Pertwee house, in the cupboard under the sink in the guest toilet. I waited a fortnight (Mark seemed oblivious to its disappearance) before I pocketed it one day and took it home. I never showed it to my parents or my three older sisters – indeed I never wore the Speedbird lapel badge in my lapel. It was, in a way, a pointless theft – Mark Pertwee never knew he had lost it and I was never able to sport it. Was it, even, a bona-fide theft, worthy of the name, given it had never been registered as stolen in the theft-victim’s mind? I think I lost it in one of my parents’ many house moves. I wonder why I stole it at all.
I stole cigarettes from my mother – never money, I want to make that absolutely clear. She smoked heavily, two packs a day, and favoured a brand called Peter Stuyvesant, a cigarette with a somewhat astringent, throat-warming taste, as I recall (and much enjoyed by raffish, square-jawed, Caucasian airline pilots, if the advertisements were to be believed). I would steal four or five cigarettes a week and she never spotted they had gone.
I ask myself again: is this an example of another non-theft? What category of genuine theft have we here? In my teens I must have stolen hundreds, possibly thousands, of cigarettes from her. She would buy cigarettes in cartons and, as I grew more bold, I would steal entire packs from the drawer in her bedroom where she kept her stash. My father was a pipe-smoker, with a penchant for fragrant, aromatic tobaccos (until he died in his fifties from lung cancer). Our house reeked of smoke, like a pub. I smoked in my bedroom and no one noticed; my three sisters smoked. It was like that in those days.
I smoked regularly through my teens, even after my father died, and only gave up when I married my first wife, Encarnacion. She detested smoke and smokers to a neurotic degree – I would not have managed a kiss had I not forsworn cigarettes. I think back to all that subterfuge – opening my mother’s handbag, rifling through its contents looking for the Peter Stuyvesant soft-pack, checking to see how many were left – always risky to steal if there were under ten. Then a few heart-thumping seconds watching her fish in her bag to light up herself, and, later, the furtive, head-reeling inhalation with my friends down the lane, under the railway bridge; the subsequent needless deodorizing of the mouth – chewing gum, Listerine – and clothes and body (Brut aftershave was particularly masking). For years I must have walked through my house leaving in my wake a pungent, invisible contrail of chemical perfume. Nobody noticed, ever.
I stole food at my boarding school. We were allowed a modest food parcel once a week (like POWs) from a local grocer: a few bananas, a box of dates, mini packs of cornflakes – no buns or cakes, no chocolates, nothing that could be purchased from the school tuck shop where fizzy drinks, colas, biscuits and every tooth-rotting sweet the confectionery industry could serve up were on offer.
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br /> In my house there was a very rich Greek boy whose food parcel might have come from Fortnum & Mason, such was its size and magnificence. I and my coevals pillaged this boy’s food with no compunction (he was plump and cried easily). It was thanks to Stavros’s food parcel that I developed my enduring taste for Patum Peperium, The Gentleman’s Relish, a dark pesto-like spread made from anchovies. It is my Proustian madeleine – it summons up all my early pilfering. I can taste its earthy, farinaceous salinity now.
I stole other things, as well – everyone stole at my school – it was tacitly understood that we all stole from each other, all the time. We stole food, drink, deodorant, shampoo, clothes, pornography, pens, stationery, books … We also shoplifted shamelessly and efficiently in the local town and villages. Only stealing money from your schoolmates was the ultimate sin, which brought permanent pariah status on the perpetrator and earned him, for the duration of his school career, the nickname of ‘Fingers’ – his personal badge of iniquity, his mark of Cain.
I stole a pair of Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses from a department store in Bath where I was at university doing a degree in Architecture. I tried them on, then tried on a dozen others, replacing some back on their little racks, taking them off again and, halfway through this elaborate process, putting on my own spectacles and slipping the Ray-Bans into my spectacle case. I wore them all summer to much acclaim. I was probably wearing them when I met Encarnacion (my future wife, the one who hated smoking) who was working as an au pair for a solicitor’s family in nearby Bristol. I look back on my university years as my thieving pomp. I stole at will, whenever I felt like it. Nothing grand, nothing exceptional, just things I wanted and didn’t feel like paying for. I stole newspapers and magazines (the New Statesman, Mayfair, Men Only, Flight, Gramophone); I stole hardback books (I still remember some titles: The History Man, Keats and Embarrassment, The Metropolitan Critic); I stole food – Mars bars, sandwiches, fruit. I once stole a haunch of venison from a delicatessen. One day I stole a tin of cherry pie-filling – I’ve no idea why I did so: I don’t particularly like cherries and had no intention of making a pie. The man who ran the corner shop, where I casually lifted the tin from a shelf on my way out, saw me and gave chase. I lost him after a couple of streets – I ran fast – but I have never since experienced such a pure rush of emotion: an atavistic fear followed by an adrenaline-fuelled exhilaration that made me sway as I stood there catching my breath.
I stole nothing for several years – I simply stopped stealing for a while. Perhaps it was marriage to Encarnacion, the swift arrival of the twins (Lolita and Bonita) and the responsibilities that went with my job. I was an architect working in a large and prestigious firm – the Freedlander, Cobb Partnership – I was a married man and a father of two lovely little girls. Stealing in these circumstances would seem demeaning, despoiling, almost filthy. All right, like everyone else in the firm I fiddled my expenses but no one in their right mind would call that theft. However, it was over a fractious and unpleasant formal query about my expenses that I met the managing partner of Freedlander, Cobb – Margaret Warburton, FCA, and my life changed.
I stole my daughters’ happiness. Perhaps that’s too strong: I stole Lolita’s and Bonita’s right to a stable family life with two parents, a father and a mother. To this day I don’t know how Encarnacion discovered my affair with Margaret Warburton but when she presented the evidence of our liaison (her father José and her brother, Severiano, also sternly present, their dark eyes shining with implacable loathing) it was compendious and irrefutable. We separated, she took the girls back to Valladolid, we divorced and I moved in with Margaret.
I missed the girls but I did not miss Encarnacion much, I have to confess. There is a problem marrying someone who speaks your own language imperfectly – all nuance is lost: and with nuance goes humour, irony, sarcasm, subtext, secrets. All these were present with Margaret Warburton – a clever, sly and salacious mind operated beneath that perfect accountant’s exterior: the lean, pale, expressionless face, the deliberately too-tight, well-cut suits, the coiffed dark helmet of hair, the black-framed officious spectacles – swiftly removed and swiftly replaced to make forensic points in meetings. Indeed it was exactly this juxtaposition that made my adulterous sex life with her so energetic and alluring. I didn’t take enough care – I didn’t take any care, I now realize – all I wanted and waited for was the covert rendezvous, the snatched weekend, the airport hotel, the meeting of two cars, nose to nose, in some rural lay-by.
I stole £985,622 from Freedlander, Cobb over a period of seven years. Margaret Warburton, the managing partner, supervising the burgeoning accounts of the firm, saw the opportunity, especially as more and more of our projects were abroad – the desalination plant in Saudi Arabia, the new terminal at Calcutta airport, three office blocks in Shanghai, and so on. She needed a senior partner in the firm to collude – and why wouldn’t I collude with my clever wife? (We married shortly after the divorce, but told no one, not even my mother and sisters – Margaret’s idea.) I signed wherever she told me – overruns, unforeseen expenses, delays, extra hours worked at night in London because of global time differences – the opportunities were manifold. In a $100 million contract do you notice an extra $80,000? No, not if it’s all properly accounted. We were careful, we took our time, we weren’t greedy. Small amounts on almost every job were hived off and banked in the Cayman Islands. Sometimes we deliberately admitted to our mistakes, apologized and reimbursed the client. Everything appeared above board. We lived well, holidayed discreetly but at considerable expense (Margaret bought us a permanent suite on one of those floating cruise-ship hotels) and we maintained separate houses for form’s sake. When we were arrested together, in Margaret’s office in the new Freedlander, Cobb headquarters in Southwark – the one that looks like a hand grenade – it came as a massive shock. I felt like an innocent man, wrongly arraigned on a trumped-up charge.
I stole tobacco from my fellow prisoners in the austere but not intolerable open prison where I was sent to pay my debt to society for my shameful white-collar crime. For some reason, I received a sentence of six years and Margaret three. Tobacco, cigarettes – is this the thieving leitmotif in my life? . . . I stole tobacco – I’d given up smoking years before, remember – to buy alcohol. Prisoners who worked in the allotments made a virulently potent hooch from potatoes and other tubers. I would pinch fingerfuls of roll-up tobacco from casually set-down plastic envelopes of the stuff and when I had enough accumulated (a fistful, say) would exchange it for half a pint of moonshine and a few hours of oblivion. It was like drinking some sort of burning, ruthless, liquid toxin, you sensed small ulcers forming in your stomach almost immediately. You felt it could have de-iced aeroplanes in the Arctic Circle, stripped layers of paint from antique cars. It was marvellously strong. My drink problem became more acute after Margaret left prison and quickly divorced me. She moved abroad, to Latin America, and I never heard from her again, of course. How much had we really stolen? I had no idea. The prosecuting counsel came up with the £985,622 figure but for all I know it could have been double. It was entirely Margaret’s plan, the whole operation – she was the thief, the real thief, not me. Old Julius Freedlander himself took the stand to destroy my character, claiming only to be ‘sadly disappointed’ with Margaret’s betrayal. Margaret was demure, only rarely weepy – I think I seemed some brutal mastermind who had dumped his nice Spanish wife to manipulate this blameless accountant. Both Margaret and I were advised by our briefs to plead guilty, advice we took – it seemed to work for her.
I stole three and a half pints of bitter, a near-full gin and tonic and a Bacardi Breezer in the Richard the Lionheart in Cromer, Norfolk, last night. It’s laughably easy – a legacy of my prison-induced alcoholism. I steal drinks in crowded pubs at weekends or, better still, pubs with beer gardens in the summer. I sit nursing my bitter lemon or Diet Coke waiting for the bar staff to emerge and start clearing up empty glasses. I just follow them around and
in the bustle that their progress creates more often than not can help myself to an unguarded drink, take it as far away as possible and consume it quickly. Crowds of young men and women, always leaving their drinks to go out and smoke, are very fair game. You’ll see five or six glasses on a ledge or a table – nobody knows whose drink it is, nobody pays attention. Solitary drinkers who leave their drink to go to the lavatory are also useful prey. It’s amazing how many people buy a pint or a glass of wine and leave the pub without finishing them. I discreetly help myself to these unwanted drinks – but then again that’s not stealing. If you read a discarded newspaper on the train have you stolen it? Of course not.
To go into prison a successful, highly trained, middle-class professional and emerge a semi-functioning alcoholic was hardly what I planned and naturally, after the disgrace, the profession no longer allowed me to call myself ‘Architect’. I managed to buy a small cottage in South Runton near Cromer and set myself up as a ‘Designer’. In the first years I was commissioned to do a few jobs – a cricket pavilion, a conservatory in a nursery, a wing of a doctors’ clinic in King’s Lynn – and managed to live quietly, respectably. But the jobs seemed slowly but steadily to diminish – I wonder if word had leaked out somehow about the Freedlander, Cobb scandal. I wouldn’t be surprised if Julius Freedlander himself wasn’t quietly blackening my name around East Anglia … In any event I haven’t worked in eighteen months and I’m seriously behind on my mortgage repayments. I recently sold my car and bought a bicycle.
My great pleasure, apart from drinking, are my daughters, Lolita and Bonita – rather, I should say ‘Lola y Bona’. They are a pop sensation in Spain and other Mediterranean countries – Greece, Croatia, Cyprus. They have a website: www.lolaybona.es – check it out, their fame is local but huge. I cycle into Cromer once a week and buy all the foreign celebrity magazines, you know the ones – Calor!, Proximité, Peep’L. I cut out the pictures of Lola y Bona and stick them on a huge pinboard that covers one wall in my kitchen. My wall of celebration, I call it, at least something turned out well.
