The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  During the last fortnight Donald and Faye Verulam arrived with Peter Hobhouse. Peter had been badly gassed at Arras and could barely get half a dozen words out between appalling glutinous wheezes. The noise from his lungs sounded like gum boots in a marsh. I tried to forget the details of Captain Tuck’s gas lecture, but I found the combination of Peter’s brave smiles and cadaverous staring eyes too much to bear, and I spent a lot of time away from the house with my camera on ostensible photographic excursions.

  With Faye there was intense embarrassment, but only on my side. It did not last long. She kissed and hugged me when we met, with what seemed like real affection. She and Donald were patently happy; they had been married just after the end of the war. And it was Donald, as ever, who came to my rescue. We were talking one day in the rose garden as I pushed Sir Hector around on his afternoon ramble. Donald asked me what I planned to do. I said I had not the faintest idea.

  “Have you ever thought about the cinema?” he asked. “After all, you are a film cameraman.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “I’ve got a lot of contacts,” he said, “since WOCC. I’ll see what I can do.”

  It took him some time. Summer passed. I sat on aimlessly in Edinburgh for the rest of 1919. My father and I began to fall out with irritating regularity. One day he offered me money to eat and drink nothing but pine nuts and goat’s milk for a week. I refused.

  “What on earth use are you, then?” he shouted.

  “I’m not a bloody monkey!” I shouted back.

  “Well stop sitting round on your backside with your mouth open and I might believe it!”

  I strode out of the room at this point, properly outraged, reminding him of what I had suffered on his and the country’s behalf. Peace was made, truculent apologies were exchanged, but it was ruptured a day or two later. Donald’s news came—fortuitously—just over a year since my return home. There was an opening for a junior cameraman. I should present myself for interview at the Superb-Imperial Film Company studios in Islington, London, Monday next. The salary was five pounds a week.

  I changed trains at Earl’s Court and waited for a nonstopper Inner Circle Line to King’s Cross. I was still with Superb-Imperial, now one of two senior cameramen, and Raymond Maude had promised me that I should direct my first film “soon.” As I recalled this assurance, I frowned. This was one of the few irritants that were marring the banal placidity of my life. Maude had rejected my last four outlines for films. “Simply not Superb-Imperial,” he had said regretfully. He meant it. I knew he was fond of me. “Look what Harry’s doing,” Maude always said. “Take your lead from him.” And that was another irritant. Life did not seem so placid after all. “Harry” was Harold Faithfull, Maude’s—and Superb-Imperial’s—most successful director.…

  I cracked open my paper. “Viscount Curzon said that the government only had nine flying aeroplanes in contrast to eighty-five possessed by the United States government.” I was going to present Maude with another idea today, one of Sonia’s. “Be sensible,” she had said. She was right. Her idea, the film I was going to propose, was called—I could hardly bring myself to utter the title—Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes.

  Sonia … Sonia Todd, née Shorrold. I can see her now as she was then, with her short black hair held in place by clasps, parted like a curtain to reveal her oval face. The faintly puzzled expression that her round tortoiseshell spectacles gave her. The enigmatic expression was misleading. Sonia in those days had a certainty of intent and a clearness of purpose that I found immensely reassuring.

  We had both started at Superb-Imperial in the same week. Her father sold chemicals to the film-developing labs there and managed to get her a job in the film-perforating department. She was bright and dexterous and was shortly moved to the editing rooms, where she became a film joiner. Our status as new employees brought us together. Soon, once or twice a week, we would go for a meal at the grill rooms round the corner from the studio.

  Sonia was my age, a month or two younger. In those days she was quite a big girl, still soft, it seemed, with pubertal puppy fat. She was small-breasted with heavy hips and legs, but was always neat and tidy and dressed thoughtfully in dark colors, greens and blues. Her central parting was white and straight; her hair fell away from it in glossy brown waves. She was not pretty, exactly, but there was a quality about her I found alluring. Perhaps it was the spectacles, which she was obliged to wear for her work and reading. She reminded me of a spruced-up Huguette. And it was that association that encouraged me to ask her out one evening. We went to see Secrets at the Comedy Theatre, which she much enjoyed. I took her home to her parents’ house in Fulham, and so our relationship progressed in its utterly conventional and inevitable way.

  I left the train at King’s Cross and took the Piccadilly Line one stop to York Road. She loved the theater, did Sonia, and the cinema. She was deeply affected by what she saw on stage and screen, wholly engrossed in the drama. I do not think I have ever observed such an eager, total and committed suspension of disbelief. Which was why, I suppose, she became so good at her job. She quit the editing department and was appointed a title writer for Superb-Imperial’s two-reelers. She was very good. She had an instinctive feel for the exact clichéd expression that was unsurpassed. She had to leave her job when her pregnancy advanced, but Maude told her she could have it back whenever she was ready.

  Superb-Imperial’s studios were off the Caledonian Road in a converted automobile engineering works. There were two large stages, where the old workshops had been, and where the corrugated asbestos roofing had been replaced by glass. In an alley at the back were the darkrooms, printing and chemical labs, carpenters’ workshops, scenery docks, dressing rooms, a buffet, a greenroom, and the clerical and accounting offices. Everything required for the production of films.

  I arrived at Superb-Imperial in its heyday. Raymond Maude had started making films before the war (backed by investments from his wife, Rosita). He had made his money and reputation on a stream of two-reelers, two series of which proved inexhaustibly successful. These were the Anna series—Anna the Milkmaid, Anna Goes on Holiday, Anna Falls in Love, etc., etc.—and the Fido series, about, naturally, a dog—Fido Saves Baby, Fido at Sea, Fido Falls in Love, etc., etc. It is impossible for me to convey just how truly deplorable these films were. It seems to me now quite inconceivable that anyone should actually pay money to see them, but they did, in their droves, and Maude and Superb Films prospered. In 1918 he bought Imperial films for its studio space and Superb-Imperial was born. Maude still churned out two-reelers, but he had ambitions to make feature-length films. He was a shrewd enough man, was Maude. After the war he hired Harold Faithfull (at five thousand pounds a year) and bought a lot of film stock from the WOCC—hence his connection with Donald Verulam—and produced a seven-reel action-adventure war film called Steady the Buffs. Eighteen months later, when I joined, it was still playing in cinemas up and down the country. Emboldened by this success, Maude created a stock company of actors and started making longer versions of his two-reelers. Gertie Royston, who had played Anna for years, became a real star. Faithfull directed her in Summer Skies, a ghastly sentimental tale about Anna on holiday saving some drowning lad who turns out to be Lord Fortesque’s son and … I cannot bear to go on. In any event, you will understand why my own suggestions were being turned down. Maude was not cynical: he was immensely proud of his company of actors. (You will have heard of some of them: Warwick Sheffield, Alma Urban, Alec Neame and Flora de Solla were the most celebrated. There were others. For the record: Harry Bliss, Violet Scott-Brown, Ivo Keene, and a dreadful old soak called Elwin Hulcup, a has-been music hall comedian who was tolerated because he owned Fido, the famous dog.)

  The first film I shot—Maude himself directing—was a Fido two-reeler called Fido at the Wheel. It was shamefully dire, but I did not care. I was thrilled, excited, intensely grateful to be working. I loved the Islington studio. I was in awe of the actors and actresse
s. I gawped at Warwick Sheffield’s sophistication; I thought Alma Urban the most sensuously beautiful woman I had ever seen. To be allowed to mingle with these luminaries was a fabulous privilege. It did not last. When I heard Harry Bliss’s anecdotes for the third time it took a massive effort to keep the smile pasted on my face. It was not long before I detected a faint but unmistakable West Country burr beneath Flora de Solla’s “French” accent. Warwick Sheffield borrowed five pounds from me one evening after filming and never paid me back.… No matter. For a year or so I was entranced. I filmed Anna Learns to Fly, Anna Triumphant! and Fido’s Fortune and many more. Then Maude teamed me up with Faithfull and we made two 7-reelers: Sanctuary with Alec Neame and Alma Urban, and Taboo starring Reggie Fitzhamon, Flora de Solla and Ivy Pridelle. I learned my trade. Panorams, Akeley shots. How to deploy effectively the electric lights when London fogs made daylight filming difficult: the mercury vapor lamps, the sunlight arcs, the tilts, toplights and spotlights. I was happy; not even Faithfull could disturb me.

  Of course Faithfull had not been pleased at my arrival. “We wondered what had become of you, Todd,” he said. His attitude was always cool, though we worked well enough together as a team. But when I saw how complacently Faithfull directed (he was at the height of his renown in the years immediately following the war), I began to have ambitions to direct myself. I went regularly to the cinema, to American and European films, and I soon realized how deficient Superb-Imperial’s product was in almost every area. I worked out a story about a young officer returning from prisoner-of-war camp to find that his fiancée has married his best friend. He tries to be brave and cope with the shocking disappointment, but, to their dismay, the two ex-lovers find their passion renewing itself. The hero ends up with two choices: kill his best friend or himself. He opts for suicide to preserve his fiancée’s happiness. I called it Love’s Sacrifice.

  I took my outline to Maude after I had been with Superb-Imperial for eighteen months. Maude was a diffident-looking man with a slack innocuous face and a soft gray toothbrush moustache. He wore light-brown suede shoes and well-tailored suits. His wife, Rosita, was an overweight extravagant woman with vast breasts and a large mole on one cheek that, oddly, added a strange glamour to her. I think she was half Portuguese—or entirely Portuguese, I am not sure. The money behind Superb-Imperial came from sugar estates in Portuguese East Africa. I rather liked her. She spoke fast breathless English and smoked little black knobbled cheroots in a squat bone holder.

  Maude called me into his office above the carpenters’ shops a couple of days later. Rosita stood behind his chair. I was busy on Taboo. We had been filming a downpour in a jungle. I remember my hair was wet.

  “About Love’s Sacrifice,” he began. He looked doleful. “I’m disappointed, John, very disappointed that you could suggest this to me.”

  “Sorry?” I was baffled.

  “Is not Superb film,” Rosita added loudly. “Is dram. Melodram, yes, maybe. But dram, no. Not at a Superb.”

  “Remember this, John, and you won’t go off the rails. We want people to come out of our cinemas with a smile on their faces. Happy endings, please.”

  There was more of the same platitudinous nonsense. It was possibly the most sustained bout of bad advice I had ever received. I went back to the dank jungles of Taboo.

  Two more of my ideas were turned down for similar reasons. I told Sonia of my troubles on a Saturday afternoon as we sat in a tearoom on the New King’s Road. It must have been October or November. Taboo was over. I was now working on Fido Saves the Day. Sonia was neat in an emerald-green suit trimmed with black velvet. She had put her spectacles on to read the menu. I noticed that she was wearing a little lipstick. I liked to kiss her when she was wearing lipstick (we had progressed that far); I enjoyed the sweet waxy taste. She was going “Tum tum tum tum” as she read through the menu. I looked at her white parting, drilled across the crown of her head, and felt a sudden weakness in my lungs, as if breathing were an effort, and a curious spiraling sensation in my groin. The waitress came over.

  “Pot of tea for two. Ceylon, please. A slice of cherry cake and a rock cake. Wha’ abou’ you, Johnny?” She had a slight glottal stop in her London accent, which she was taking pains to make more genteel. I knew I was in love with her there and then.

  “Cheese bun, please.”

  We were married on January 18, 1922, in St. Peter’s Church, Filmer Road, Fulham. No member of my family was present. My father sent fifty pounds, Oonagh her best wishes and Thompson a set of six silver-plated apostle spoons.

  I now realize that I married Sonia for sex. I was almost twenty-three years old and still a virgin. Before I met Sonia my previous sexual contact with a human being (apart from myself) had been with Karl-Heinz back in Weilburg. And with a woman? Huguette in the dim shed behind the estaminet in 1917. I will not bore you with the details of my and Sonia’s sexual apprenticeship, the gaffes and moist surprises of our wedding night (we honeymooned in Hove over a weekend—I was needed for filming on the Monday), but for two virgins we soon became quite proficient at the act. I was very fond of Sonia’s plump friendly body. She had small firm breasts with odd domed nipples, and remarkably luxuriant pudenda. She used depilatory creams on her armpits and on her legs below the knee. I pleaded vainly with her to let the hair grow again. I liked her too, I confess, because she was strange to me. English, a Londoner, almost as foreign as Huguette, and upper lower class with an uneducated accent. She fell pregnant two months after the marriage. It seemed that after a twenty-three-year delay I was now racing headlong after maturity. I wanted a girl child. I felt I was not ready for a son and heir.

  When Maude rejected my reworked version of Love’s Sacrifice—the hero, about to commit suicide, learns of his rival’s death in a motoring accident and is then reunited with his former fiancée—I was on the point of abandoning all my ambitions to direct. Superb-Imperial were making their most expensive film ever, a historical-romance-adventure called The Blue Cockade, set in some Ruritanian never-never land. It was costing eighteen thousand pounds, Faithfull was to direct and I was to be cameraman. Maude, in another astute move on his part, or possibly at Rosita’s behest, went to America and hired Mary Mount at a thousand pounds a week to star. Faithfull had negotiated a bonus over his salary of two thousand pounds. Out of the goodness of his heart, Maude gave me one of five hundred. Suddenly I seemed preposterously well off and secure. It was Sonia who urged me to try one more idea on the Maudes.

  I do owe her this, I admit it. I would have done nothing more without her encouragement. Looking back on my hectic life, those early years in London now appear an island of bourgeois inertia and complacency. We had our flat above the pub (three pounds a week), and I could send down for beer whenever I liked. I had a well-paid, stimulating and not too arduous job. I had a pretty, adoring wife. The fly feasting in the jam jar feels no need for a change of scene.

  Maude and Rosita loved the idea of Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes. (I will not inflict the plot on you. It is all there in the title anyway.) They loved it so much, they took me off The Blue Cockade. The film could start as soon as the script was written. I set to work immediately.

  For some reason Harold Faithfull took my transferral from his film as a personal insult. Maude gave me a small office next to the sprocket-punching department where I worked on the logistics of the production. Early one evening, as the girls next door were packing up, Faithfull confronted me.

  Faithfull had grown sleeker since the war. He wore expensive clothes and that evening a ray of sun caused his yellow cashmere cardigan to blaze with arrogant wealth. His sulky handsome face gleamed. He was perspiring slightly, either from drink, choler or the steepness of the stairs.

  “What do you think you’re playing at, Todd?” he demanded. He stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette. He glanced round my office. “What are you trying to do with your poxy little film?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Either thi
s is a misguided attempt to ruin me or you’ve got some nasty little back-street ambitions of your own.”

  “You know I’ve always wanted to make my own films.”

  “But you’re a cameraman, Todd. Always will be. I’m the director.”

  The patrician disdain in his voice made me angry.

  “But you couldn’t direct traffic in a one-way street, Faithfull,” I said calmly.

  It was not such a brilliant riposte, I admit, but it did well in the heat of the moment. Faithfull lumbered forward and swung a punch at me across the desk. He missed, but his momentum knocked some papers and an inkwell to the floor. Ink spattered the cuffs of his pale mushroom trousers.

  “You fucking Scottish lumphead!” he yelled. “You make this film and you’ll never make another!” He stomped out of the room. Some of the girls looked in, giggling, to see what all the fuss was about.

  I was panting with excitement. I felt strangely invigorated. I knew why Faithfull was so upset: it was an oblique tribute to my crucial contribution to Sanctuary and Taboo. Faithfull needed me and he was worried about producing The Blue Cockade without me. I replaced the papers and inkwell on the desk and blotted up the stains. For the first time I had had my own confidence in my talent and ability confirmed—and by a hostile witness, no less. I wore a modest smile of satisfaction all the way back to Fulham.

  It was Sonia’s father, Vincent, who pointed out the advertisement to me. Every Sunday we had dinner chez Shorrold. They lived in a small, brown, terraced house with a good view of Fulham Palace football ground. The meal never changed—gravy soup, leg of mutton, fruit tart with custard; neither did the atmosphere of stifling boredom. After the meal, Sonia and her mother, Noreen—a decent, dull, long-suffering woman—washed up, giving the men the opportunity for a smoke. Vincent Shorrold was a small spry chap with the impressive but ultimately fragile self-assurance of a traveling salesman. He would initiate conversations with remarks of what seemed at first adamantine authority.