11

The Confessions: Part I

We began filming The Confessions: Part I in July 1927, a month later than we planned. Part I was to cover Rousseau’s life from his birth in 1712 up to 1740, when reluctantly and with heavy heart he decides to leave his beloved Maman, his lover and benefactress, with his rival, the detestable Witzenreid, and to seek his fortune elsewhere. Part II was to deal with his rise to fame and terminate with the scandal of Émile and flight to Switzerland. Part III—I had barely thought this out, I admit—was to deal with his last years: cold exile in England, the bitter quarrel with Hume, the return to Paris and the serene botanizing of his last years. Thus, broadly, was the great scheme I had conceived. Part I was ready to film, most of Part II was drafted and Part III, I felt sure, would almost write itself when we reached that stage three years hence. I felt intoxicated, full of vigor and enthusiasm, on the brink of a great adventure.

Meanwhile, Doon and I … Nothing happened that night after the meeting. We finished our coffees and kirsch and I walked her home. She allowed me to kiss her on the cheek at the door of her apartment. “I think you’ll like Madame de Warens,” I said.

“I hope so,” she said, sincerely.

After that meeting nothing could bring me to return directly home. I went first to Stralauer Allee to have Karl-Heinz confirm my excuse to Sonia, but Georg’s apartment was in darkness. Then for some reason I drove to the Tiergarten and walked down to gaze—superstitiously, I suppose—at the Rousseau-Insel, a small island planted with trees set in the middle of one of the lakes scattered through the enormous park. Karl-Heinz had told me about this island-monument. I had gone to visit it once or twice, more out of a sense of duty than inspiration. This evening it did not hold much of that last quality either. The trees were bare and patches of snow gleamed in the darkness like wind-scattered sheets of newspaper. I watched my breath condense round me, then evaporate, and tried to think seriously about the work that the next few years held for me, but my mind returned—inevitably—to Doon.… The warm weight of her hand in the crook of my elbow. The temporary moustache of whipped cream on her upper lip as she drank her coffee-kirsch. How the quick wet tip of her tongue had wiped it clean. Would she do Mme. de Warens?… I had not thought of her in the role owing to the rift that had developed since Julie, but now I wondered what had taken me so long to see that possibility. She would figure only in Part I, but it would still mean months of proximity. I exhaled. Was I sure I knew what I was doing, this Christmas night, with my wife and four children waiting, no doubt impatiently, for me to return home? No. Yes. Perhaps.… I turned and walked back to my car.

Throughout the first six months of 1927 I worked strenuously to set the vast machine that would produce The Confessions in motion. My key and crucial aim, my basic working maxim, was to reproduce the facts of one man’s life on film with an attention to detail that had never before been witnessed. Just as for me, as reader, Rousseau had presented himself in all candor for examination, so would I now offer to millions of spectators around the world the portrait of a man rendered in such intimacy, fidelity and verisimiltude that they would come to know him as they knew themselves. Nothing would be spared. It would be the story of the life of one extraordinary human being, but one who was heroic in his humanity alone. The individual spirit would have its great immortal document.

I had grandiose plans as to how this should be achieved and I intended to employ every trick and technique available to the modern film maker—and a few more that I had devised myself. I was going to extend the cinematic form to its very limits.

I was fortunate in that Aram had managed to supply the budget that this dream demanded. Such had been the success of Julie that large investments had been made in the film by a group of German financiers, Pathé in France and Goldfilm, a cinema chain in the U.S.A. Not a penny was forthcoming from my own country. Aram, meanwhile, had returned from the States with a hatful of investors for Realismus Films, and, most peculiarly, a new identity for himself.

This was really bizarre. I went to see him the first morning he was back in the studio. The door to his office suite was open and a workman was replacing the nameplate. I took no notice and walked in. Lately, Aram had taken to wearing colored shirts but kept his collar white, regardless of what kind of suit he was wearing. Today he was in a heavy brown tweed and red shirt. We shook hands. He told me all the good news: Leo Druce had finished Frederick the Great (it was not a first-rate job but it would do; Aram was giving Joan of Arc to Egon Gast) and he was ready to take over as producer on The Confessions. The money was all there, all one and a half million dollars of it (“But no more, John,” Aram said). Doon Bogan was signed to play Mme. de Warens. We talked on about some more details: the new studios that were being converted from warehouses just outside Spandau, how many weeks we would need to spend filming in Switzerland, and so on. When we finished, I stood up and said.

“Well, Aram, I—”

“Ah, yes, that’s another thing.” He handed me a business card.

I looked at it. “Eadweard A. L. Simmonette,” I read. “Who’s he?”

“Me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’ve changed my name.”

“But you don’t spell ‘Edward’ like that.”

“Yes, you can. It’s recognized. But I want to be called Eddie. Eddie Simmonette. From now on, please, John. I won’t answer to Aram Lodokian.”

“Aram, Jesus Christ! Are you—”

His face went hard. He was the most even-tempered of men: to see such hurt and fury was disturbing.

“John, don’t let this come between us, I implore you. I am Eddie now. You must never call me Aram.”

I decided to humor him. “All right. Eddie. Eddie. But it’s not easy.”

“I’ve told everyone else in the company. All my friends and associates.” He smiled. “You’ll see, in a day or two it’ll seem the most natural thing in the world.”

Was he mad? “But why?”

“I wanted to, for a long time. I had to wait for my father to die, of course. I don’t want to be a Lodokian anymore.” He touched my elbow. “Times are changing, John. Tomorrow’s world is for the Eddie Simmonettes. You’ve never been to America … that’s where I got the idea.”

It made no sense to me, but it was his right, I suppose. So, no more Aram Lodokian. Enter Eddie Simmonette. And the funny thing about it all, Aram/Eddie was right.

In March I took the family back home for Thompson’s wedding. It was inconvenient, but I had been touched by a personal letter from him asking me to be there. We traveled first class and spent two days in London at Claridge’s. I booked two suites there, one for Sonia and myself, one for Lily and the children. I did the same at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh. At our window in the North British I stood silent for ten minutes or so looking out at the familiar view. The castle, the gardens, Princes Street. It was typically gray and wet. The castle loomed black over the damp wind-lashed gardens and the town, its cliffs slick and slimy with rain. I thought back to my last visit six or seven years before when we had been making Wee MacGregor Wins the Sweepstakes. Here I was now, twenty-eight years old, wealthy, celebrated, large family, servants … I should have felt pleased with myself, smug, full of I-told-you-so superiority. But the longer I stood there looking out at that uncompromising view, the harder self-satisfaction was to achieve. I knew my father would be unimpressed.

We had not seen each other for six years. My eyes were smarting with emotion as he was shown into the suite with Thompson and his bride-to-be. Sonia had our family laid out as if for kit inspection. She was a little nervous too: it was her first encounter with her father-in-law. She had the boys spruce in neat golfing outfits—Norfolk jackets and plus fours—and the girls were propped in the corners of a sofa—cherubs in lace—Lily sitting between them. My father was as he had always been: formal, polite, reserve encasing him like a relic in a glass cabinet.

“Hello, John,” he said. I shook his cool hand vigorously. “And this’ll be Sonia.… You can let go now, John.”

The reunion was stiff, edgy, the conversation absurdly banal. My father was quite gray now, though he was as thin and upright as ever, impressively fit looking for a man in his mid-sixties.

Thompson had settled into his portliness. It suited him. He was one of those stout men for whom weight loss would be something of an affront, almost indecent. He was rising steadily up the hierachy of the bank and had, I think he told me, just been appointed to the board—hence his decision to get married. I envied him his young eager wife, Heather (who shyly told me how much she had loved Julie). She was pretty in an innocuous, pinkish way. She fussed nervously over the children, glad to have some diversion. Beside her, Sonia could almost have been described as matronly. For a young woman the beam of Sonia’s hips was unduly broad: her torso seemed to rest on it like an antique bust on a pedestal. She wore dark expensive clothes, sensibly cut, which to some extent disguised her bulk, but she had a solid big-arsed presence these days that slim nervous Heather beside her accentuated. Heather was one of those girls, I could see, whose sunny temperament would not dim even when overshadowed by the grimmest clouds of adversity (she very charmingly rebuffed me some years after when I made a crude and shameful pass at her). I stood with my father and brother—we all stirred cups of tea, held at chest height—and watched the women marshal and drill the children. I think it was then that the last dregs of love I held for Sonia seeped away forever. Why? Why do these things ever happen?… I knew I had Doon now.

I glanced at father. His face was quite expressionless.

“Well, Innes,” I said. “Grand to have the family back together.”

I saw him flinch as I used his Christian name. Thompson called him Daddy—ridiculous in a grown man, I thought.

“Curious names you’ve chosen for your boys,” he said with a trace of a smile. The old bastard. “That would be the Shorrold line, I take it?”

The wedding. It was all right—tolerable. Normally I detest weddings. All that false, timely sincerity nauseates me. Donald and Faye Verulam were there, Donald ever more courteous and patrician, Faye aging with tact and charm. I was safe with Faye now, quite relaxed. Various burly Dale cousins showed up and I was surprised to see that old Sir Hector was still alive. If anything he was in slightly better condition than I remembered him from 1919, when I used to push him round the garden at Drumlarish House. He was swigging sherry and trying to eat crumbling wedding cake when I approached him.

“Grandfather!” I shouted. “It’s me, John James!”

He was appallingly badly shaved and cake crumbs had caught in the bristles. His moist eyes swiveled uncontrollably.

“Johnny. How are you, laddie?”

“Fine, fine.”

“Got a job yet?”

“Yes, yes.” I told myself to stop repeating my answers. I felt an immense sadness descend abruptly on me as I looked at this collapsed old man in his bath chair.

“Great day,” he said.

“It is, it is.”

“Get us another of these wee sherries before my nurse comes back.”

I did, and had a few whiskeys to cheer myself up, which probably explains why I lost control so completely with Oonagh. She had of course been invited to the wedding but obediently filled her role as former family retainer, sitting on a hard chair at the farthest perimeter of the family group. She was drinking tea and had a plate of fancy cakes on her lap when I found her. She was stooped with arthritis and had given up working for my father, unable to climb the stairs anymore. Two walking sticks hung over the back of her chair. She had softened and expanded with age, her hair prematurely wiry and gray. She wore a baggy white blouse, thick skirt and old-fashioned lace-up boots.

“Not too grand to speak to me, then?”

“Don’t be silly, Oonagh.” I gave her a kiss. My voice was trembling. I felt my head bulging with a decade’s unspilled tears, like a ripe melon about to burst. I sensed here, today, my youth and past life falling away for ever. The changes wrought in my six years’ absence were too large and dramatic to be unconsciously assimilated. I had been away too long. The geography of my early life, its fixed points and certainties, was hopelessly out of date now. I was faced only with mutability and decay: to look back, to recall, only emphasized our awful fragility.

“That’s a nice brooch,” I said hoarsely, pointing to a single cairngorm set in silver that Oonagh was wearing at her throat.

“You gave it to me, silly boy.”

My face wrinkled and the tears surged. Shoulders heaving, snorkeling back the rush of phlegm, I wrote out a check for a hundred pounds and pressed it into Oonagh’s astonished hands.

Later, calmer, I had an awkward conversation with Thompson. I think he wanted to be affectionate, but again the years stood between us and we exchanged only platitudes. It was the closest we ever got as adults, however, which is something. This hot fat man is my brother, I said to myself. We can’t ignore these blood ties. I tried. We talked about money. He asked me if I had a lot of capital. I said yes. He looked round and lowered his voice.

“Get it out of Germany, John, please.”

“Why? Things are doing better. I even get paid in American dollars.”

“That’s something. But I’d still shift it. Back here. Or France or Switzerland. It’s sound advice.”

“I’m filming in Switzerland later this year.”

He stepped closer. His hand hovered a moment as if he were going to place it on my shoulder. He let it touch my sleeve lightly, like a leaf.

“Will you do something for me, John?” he asked. “Get your money, in cash, and take it with you to Switzerland. I’ll tell you where to take it.”

I obviously looked skeptical.

“Please,” he said. “Let me set up everything.” He was excited. The smile he gave me was unlike his ordinary weak grin. For an instant I sensed the almost carnal pleasure he took in his job, and why therefore he was such a good banker. For Thompson, nothing else was as much fun as money, and I daresay that included his new wife. I agreed. He promised to send me the details.

“You’ll thank me for this,” he said. “Believe me, John, I know what I’m saying.” He was right. It was the best and only favor he ever did me.

Aram Lodokian—sorry, Eddie Simmonette—had leased the warehouses and workshops of an old military factory in Spandau on the Staaken, which were readily converted into studios. They were devoted exclusively to The Confessions: Part I. There we had three stages of various sizes plus all the technical equipment and expertise we required.

Let me, without preamble, tell of our first day’s shooting as it unfolded to the members of the cast and crew. It will give you the best example of how I conceived The Confessions and how I planned to make it the most extraordinary film in the history of motion pictures. The following account appeared in the August 1927 edition of Kino. My translation.

July 17, 1927. Realismus Studios, Spandau. Seven A.M. Director John James Todd assembles the entire cast and crew of the film on the largest of the studio’s three stages. Everyone is present whether he or she is required for that day or not. They number in all 167 men, women and children. Todd addresses the company, welcomes them to the film and demands total dedication. He stands above the crowd on a scaffolding platform, part of a set representing Mme. de Warens’s bedchamber in her château at Annecy. His voice is clear, his German simple yet full of errors. His curious accent demands extra concentration. He is a dark intense man of average height, somewhat thick-set. His demeanor is one of almost uncontrollable energy and excitement. He tells his audience that they are immensely privileged to be working on what, he assures them with breathtaking confidence, will become the most celebrated film in the history of cinema. Such is his conviction, such the evident pride and exultation in his own face, that this short furious speech is greeted by loud cheering. Some people shed tears. Todd passes through the crowd, men and women press forward to shake his hand and clap him on the shoulders.

Seven-thirty A.M. On a smaller stage we find the interior of Isaac Rousseau’s house in Geneva. Suzanne Rousseau (Traudl Niemoller) is in the throes of giving birth to Jean Jacques. At one side of the stage sits a fifteen-man orchestra playing Massenet’s “Elégie” Todd spends an hour filming close-ups for Suzanne Rousseau’s face as she is instructed to scream and scream again. His perfectionism reduces her to tears. Standing behind the camera is Karl-Heinz Kornfeld. Todd has asked him to be present during this scene, dressed in costume as if witnessing his own birth.

At 9 A.M. an ambulance arrives containing a nursing mother and her male child born literally a few hours earlier. They are installed in a bed a few feet away from Suzanne Rousseau’s. As the moment of Jean Jacques’s simulated birth arrives, the baby is removed from its real mother’s breast, is smeared with olive oil and held aloft—screaming, dripping between the splayed legs of the actress. Todd spends another thirty minutes filming close-ups of the infant’s face until the exhausted mother insists she and her child be returned to the maternity ward at the local hospital.

At the end of the morning’s filming there follows a one-hour break for lunch. Karl-Heinz Kornfeld dines alone with Todd in a private room.

I have to tell you that Karl-Heinz very nearly did not forgive me for this little trick. But the emotion registered on his face was astonishing. I did it because I wanted Karl-Heinz to be bound up in this film in a way that would be unparalleled. Which is why, so to speak, I wanted him to witness his own beginning; and why I enjoined them all to substitute their own mothers for Suzanne Rousseau. I knew Karl-Heinz’s guilt over his neglect of his mother and I knew that, as his head filled with morbid images, her sudden appearance would be devastating. I was absolutely right. He was ruined, wordless, shivering with confusion and emotional fatigue. The music was excellent and essential too. I used the orchestra for all the important scenes; they were kept permanently on hire and at hand. The actors gave the performances of their lives, even the baby.… That was a brilliant stroke. Such a fragile, wrinkled thing, still red and squashed looking. To see it held there screaming in the arc lights was enormously affecting. Unfortunately, and despite our best efforts, it developed a chill and nearly died. Some meddling relative persuaded the mother to sue (I had paid her handsomely) and we were obliged to settle out of court to avoid the adverse publicity she threatened. Aram/Eddie was mightily displeased at this unforeseen addition to the budget, but when I ran the film for him he had to concede the power in what otherwise might have been a hackneyed scene.

But it was the lasting effect on Karl-Heinz that most gratified me. He had been typically blasé about the film during the run-up to the first day’s shooting. His brand of relaxed, lazy cynicism was the last thing I required from the man who was going to ignite the imagination of the world as Jean Jacques Rousseau. In one day he saw himself born, saw his mother die and then had her miraculously resurrected. It was a shock from which I never wanted him to recover, and from that day his dedication to The Confessions was second only to mine.

Consequently, he completely understood when I rescheduled the entire filming program after we had been going little more than a month. The plan had been to shoot all our interiors before going to France and Switzerland to do our location work at Geneva and Annecy. But I realized, as the day approached for Doon and Karl-Heinz to play their first scenes together, that filming out of sequence—here and now—would have a disastrous effect on the intensity of mood we had been striving so diligently to achieve. It was quite obvious to me that the vital moment in this story of Jean Jacques as a young man was his meeting and subsequent love affair with Mme. de Warens. To film scenes after that meeting before it occurred (in film time) would be asking too much of the actors to reproduce the heights of feeling I required. Normally, chronological filming is something I am happy to dispense with, but here I knew it was essential. And Karl-Heinz, who had his doubts anyway about producing a convincing heterosexual yearning (this was to be of a different order from the melodrama of Saint-Preux and Julie) agreed. I spent three nights with Leo and our production manager working out a new schedule, then Leo went to Annecy to see if our locations could accommodate our early arrival. We wound up our first segment of filming at Spandau with the celebrated soup-pissing scene. We used real urine (mine) and did not tell the actress playing the quarrelsome crone. Her hawking and spitting when she tasted the soup was entirely authentic. I told her it was laced with vinegar (I had a half-empty bottle nearby), but she took some persuading and the prop was crucial.

We left for Annecy in September, a huge caravan of actors, technicians and equipment that occupied an entire train. I was exhilarated to see this troop assembled at my behest, but I was also troubled. When Rousseau went to meet Mme. de Warens for the first time he envisaged the encounter as a “terrifying audience.” Now, I felt something of that type of apprehension. I was leaving Berlin and my family behind me. Once that had happened, once those checks were removed, I knew it would be impossible for me to control my feelings for Doon any longer. Currently, a fragile equilibrium existed. Doon thought I was being loyal to Sonia, and interpreted my massive effort of self-control as a sign that I had realized we should only be friends. Apart from script conferences and costume fittings and the like, I had seen her socially only three times since that Christmas night, in each case in response to an invitation from her to attend KPD meetings. I tolerated these interminable harangues only because they brought me physically close to her and because afterwards we would go for a drink or a bite to eat. But even then we had only managed to be alone once. Doon always tried to invite other comrades along, and because it was she, they always accepted. My God, the deadly humorless earnestness of those young men and women! I would stare at Doon, enmeshed in passionate debate, and gave the occasional nod or muttered the odd fatuous remark—“Now that’s a fascinating concept,” or “I couldn’t agree more,” “That’s an outrage”—as token of my participation. But all that was behind us. For a month or more we would be living in the same building: the Imperial Palace Hotel on the lakeshore at Annecy.

In those days—1927—Annecy was not the fashionable resort it was to become, but I found it a delightful place, with its spectacular view of the blue lake and its ring of mountains. I loved the old town with its canals and arcaded streets, and the way the castle dominated so many of one’s images of the place reminded me vaguely of Edinburgh. I thought of Jean Jacques here, aged sixteen, arriving at the crucial nexus of his life, walking these narrow lanes.… Even the cathedral, which the guidebooks describe as “a poor Gothic building,” holds a precise and particular charm. Jean Jacques had sung as a chorister here and his voice had echoed beneath this indifferent vaulting.

Somehow, Leo had managed to find accommodation for all of us, but in separate hotels scattered about the town. We went to work straightaway on establishing shots, clearing streets of modern accouterments, hiring locals as extras. For two enchanting days we sailed the small lake in a jolly saloon steamer, with its own restaurant, filming the gently sloping orchards and meadows on the shore and the careless mountains above. The setting, the weather and the clean air all had a suitable Rousseauistic effect on us. That first visit to Annecy was the happiest filming experience of my life. We worked in harmony and with a curious serene efficiency. I was able to send reassuring cables to Aram/Eddie in Berlin. All was well—except for me.

Rousseau had fled from his unhappy apprenticeship in Geneva (we were to film this later) and gone to Savoy—then an independent duchy and a frequent sanctuary for exiles and apostates from Calvinism, who were received with sacred glee by proselytizing priests as political converts to Catholicism. Initially an old curé entertained the young Jean Jacques for a few days and then sent him on to Annecy with a letter of introduction to a Swiss baroness, herself a recent convert, who often gave shelter and succor to Protestant refugees.

We had some trouble with Karl-Heinz, who patently did not look sixteen. We provided him with a longish dark wig—shoulder length—with a rough fringe, and this made him look strangely but suitably boyish. Annecy, in 1728, was a kind of convert center—busy and vital, well populated by exiles and attendant nuns and priests. That street scene twenty minutes into the film was one of my best-ever manipulations of a crowd and the first in which I used a mobile camera to its full effect. I had a camera and tripod bolted to a small wheeled cart, which was pulled by a couple of strong lads. We start the scene in close-up on the clashing bells of a church tower, pull back and pan down to Jean Jacques’s face looking up at them. Then the camera begins to move away and we see him push uncertainly through the throng of urchins, citizens, priests, soldiers and nuns. The camera appears to move effortlessly through the crisscrossing bodies, as if it were an invisible presence, then weaves sinuously through the arcades as Jean Jacques, clutching his letter of introduction, makes his hesitant way towards the “terrifying audience” with Mme. de Warens.

It took me five days to shoot this scene. I admit I prolonged it unduly in order to delay and heighten Doon’s first appearance in the film, but the crew were used by now to my near-fanatical desire for perfection and no one guessed at my real motive. I had extras recostumed, buildings repainted. I even moved a line of six cypress trees fifty yards along the skyline to aid the composition of a single shot. But finally I could postpone it no longer—Doon herself was growing impatient. We had been two weeks in Annecy and she had done nothing but rehearse.

We had discovered a spot almost identical to the site of Mme. de Warens’s original house (later demolished, would you believe, to make room for a new police commissariat!). In his Confessions, Jean Jacques relates how he called on her there only to be informed that she had just left for mass. She had a private door into the nearby church, which she reached by a small passageway, bounded on one side by a garden wall and on the other by a stream. It was here that Jean Jacques caught up with her just as she was about to enter the church. He called her name, she turned and—as he puts it—“in that moment I was hers.”

I did not sleep the night before we were due to film the scene. How to encapsulate that instant, those boiling, tremulous seconds when your love detonates for another person? I thought back, naturally, to that meeting in the Metropol bar in Berlin. How banal, how humdrum the setting—an empty cocktail bar in a fancy hotel! How doltishly inept my first words.… How could I invest the meeting of Jean Jacques and his Maman with everything I felt for Doon? There was no possibility of doing so, of course. Music would help; so would my editing of the images and the veracity of the expressions on the actors’ faces. I even had my own lens: the Todd Soft-Focus Lens—a lanolin gel of exceptional clarity held between two plates of glass, which did not cloud or blur so much as give faces a luminous powdery beauty. (I took the precaution of patenting this in both Europe and the U.S.A.: royalties from it later provided a vital financial mainstay.) With luck and hard work we could make it look wonderful, but I could never reproduce my emotions.

Baroness Mme, de Warens. Louise Éléonore. No authenticated portraits exist, but she comes to life in Jean Jacques’s loving description. She was twenty-eight years old when they met. He was sixteen. She had abandoned home and husband for the Catholic religion, but in her life religious devotion and erotic yearnings often overlapped. She was an efficent proselytizer. Significantly, her converts were all young men who lived in her apartments as they underwent instruction. “She had a caressing and tender air,” Jean Jacques says, “a very soft gaze, an angelic smile and plentiful ash-blonde hair of exceptional beauty worn in a casual unaffected negligence that increased her attraction. She was small in stature and a little plump, but it would be impossible to find a lovelier head or more beautiful bosom, or more graceful hands and arms.”

Doon’s height was inaccurate, but I felt the hair was a remarkable coincidence. Her hair was longer now than it had been in Julie, but we had several wigs made in the casual style described by Rousseau and in them she looked incredibly beguiling. I dressed her in a jade-green gown, quite décolleté, with a transparent silk scarf thrown across her throat and cleavage. Whether anyone would have gone to church like that in 1728 I did not know or care—the realism I sought here was emotional and not to do with any pedantic accuracy of historical costume.

We filmed the meeting scene in the late afternoon when the light was soft and glowing and the shadows long. Technical problems managed to distract me from my own breathless emotions, though I still felt, throughout the entire day, that someone had wedged a matchbox down my throat, I kept massaging my windpipe, coughing and gulping air. At one moment I took the place of my cameraman—Horst Immelman—behind the camera. I reserved for myself the shooting of Doon’s close-ups as she reacted to Jean Jacques’s call … Doon’s face as she turned to gaze into the lens: piety—shading to surprise, to stirring curiosity. It was almost too much for me to bear. The pure curve of her jaw, neck and throat set against the dark grain of the iron-studded church door was a masterful, tense counterposition. The sheen of translucent silk over her round shadowed breasts, their barely perceptible heave and subsidence as she breathed, the subtle shifts of their pale contours, represented the very apex of discreet but fervent emotion. And then I made her walk towards Jean Jacques. Her full length was held in the frame of the lens as the camera retreated before her on its trundling dolly. I sat behind it—protected by it—and watched that particular stalking stride, and I was back that day in the Metropol Hotel as she came towards me across the thick carpets and the glossy parquet, through the groups of leather armchairs, her thighs brushing their round backs as she weaved by. Her long, muscled swimmer’s legs. Those curious, endearing, slightly splayed, slightly too large feet in their impossible dancer’s shoes …

Do I sound delirious? Do I sound overwhelmed, engrossed, utterly trammeled up? Do I sound in love? I called “Cut” somehow and gave orders to wrap up for the day, despite the fact we had scheduled Karl-Heinz’s close-ups. The crew mutely complied. I left the scene. I had to get away. Wordless, trembling, I went down to the lake, glorious in the evening light, and spontaneously boarded one of the neat steamers that left hourly for a tour of the small summer resorts on the lakeshore. I got off at Menthon-St.-Bernard and sat on the terrace of the Pension des Glaïeuls, staring emptily at the darkening view and, steadily over the next four hours, drank three bottles of wine and numerous Cognacs. I paid a small fortune to a yokel who owned a motorcar to drive me back to Annecy. After numerous minor breakdowns and a wrong turning, we arrived there well after midnight.

I went straight to Doon’s suite and knocked several times before she answered the door. I had clearly woken her up.

“Jamie? What the hell’s going on?”

“I had to say, that this afternoon you were … it was stunning.”

“Well, thanks.”

She wore a child’s flannel nightdress, white, printed with small blue flowers, ankle length. I swayed; she put a hand out to steady me. It was all the invitation I needed.

We made love that night, though I have only Doon’s word for it. I remember nothing, a rank alcoholic amnesia depriving me of all memories beyond that image of her nightgown. Doon said later that I “came in a second.” I suppose it was a fittingly impulsive coda to an impulsive day.

I woke early the next morning, naked, in Doon’s big double bed. My head pulsed and hummed like a dynamo. I imagined my temples bulging and retracting horribly, like the throats on certain tropical frogs when they croak, or rut, or claim territorial precedence or whatever they do. Then Doon came in from the sitting room with a wide rattling, clinking tray of breakfast, which she sat down on the bed by my feet. Then she cruelly threw back the curtains and my eyeballs seemed to shrivel as if a jet of lemon juice had hit them. With my eyes shut I felt her open the windows. A breeze.

“Lovely day,” she said. “Morning.”

She pecked me on the cheek. “Who tied one on last night, then?” She smiled. She seemed to be in a good mood.

Slowly, very slowly, I was taking in the implications of our circumstances. She sat cross-legged at the foot of the bed. She still wore her nightgown (bluebirds, not flowers), its skirt stretched, a drumskin, between her knees. She poured me coffee. I took the cup and noisily set it down on my chest, its comforting warmth soon penetrating the intervening sheet. She lit a cigarette for me and handed it over.

I took a few sips of my coffee, a cautious puff on my cigarette. I found my voice.

“Doon, I—”

“Don’t talk,” she said. “You don’t need to say anything.” She shifted her position, rested her weight on one elbow, sipped at her own coffee or tea. A breast bulged heavily against the flannelette of her nightdress. Her ivory-blond hair was untidy. She looked at me across the small steaming crater of her cup.

“You were nice last night,” she said. “You came in a second, but you were nice.”

Her lips were wet. She reached back behind her for a plate, which she filled with toast, butter, a honey pot, a knife. Her breasts shifted, flattened and fell with her movements. I gulped my coffee, felt its hot horizontal progress to my gut. I clenched my buttocks against the rumpled cotton of the sheet. I rubbed the back of my head very slowly to and fro on the pillow. Heard the hairs on my head grate against each other. Doon’s knee—blunt, bony—appeared beneath the hem of her nightdress. Knife scrape on toast. Textures everywhere, suddenly.

“You can’t remember,” she said.

“I can. I meant—mean—every word.”

She bit. Shkrnch. Palp of a finger on a crumb at her lips’ corner. She unscrewed the lid on the honey jar. Milled metal on milled glass. Clear honey. Liquid sun in this warm light. Sun glanced off her knife. Those rays—photons, Hamish called them—from sun across curved solar space to this angled blade to my phobic retina. Outside, the blue lake and the mountains …

“What did you say, then?”

I felt my swelling cock roll across my thigh.

“Well?”

The tented sheet at my groin sagged, rose.

“Come on.”

I lifted my coffee cup from my chest, a preliminary move to setting it down on the bedside table, but before I could do so Doon had reached forward and flipped the sheet back.

“Mmm. What have we here?” Her grip closed firm about its base.

I was in the middle of the big bed. My right arm, extended, holding the coffee cup and saucer was six inches short of the right bedside table. My cigarette was in my left hand. I had to put that cup down. I transferred it, urgently to my left hand with some rattling and slopping. Four inches short. I felt pinioned, immobilized. Arms spread, crucified, pegged down. Doon’s hand on the stake that held me fast.

“Doon!” I said weakly. She was doing something with her knife.

The honey was cool, surprisingly—it always looks warm, like something molten, but it was cool. I watched her spread it. It ran thickly down the ridges of her knuckles and pooled, gleamy, in the hairs on my groin. My left leg twitched, my back arched.

“Doon, Christ …” Feebly, as if succumbing to an anesthetic. The coolness shifted quickly up through the heat spectrum, warming.

She looked at me as she did it, cheeks hollowed, eyes candid and lively. Full of fun. I could not meet that gaze for long. I lay back. The pressure grew. The cigarette fell and rolled off the bed. Then, soon after, the coffee went with a clatter, spilling, soaking into the sheets.

God alone knows what the chambermaids thought when they saw that ruined bed later that morning, covered in honey trails, toast crumbs, coffee stains and a cigarette burn. My foot at the moment of climax kicked the tray awash with Doon’s verbena infusion, sent knives sliding, tipped out plates’ contents. It was only later, that evening, when I saw the immaculate plateau of the remade bed, that I remarked on it to Doon. She laughed. “God, you’re a messy bastard,” she said. She reassured me. Chambermaids have seen it all, she said; they’re like nurses, nothing shocks them.

During the filming at Annecy we slept together every night. When we moved to Chambéry in October, Doon returned to Berlin for ten days. She was not required, she said, and I had a lot of work to catch up on. She was right—we were at least two weeks behind schedule. I asked her not to see Mavrocordato when she was in Berlin. She told me not to be stupid.

She left and the weather changed: squalling rain and snow showers, which made us even slower. When she came back we managed some scenes at the Les Charmettes farmhouse and also shot the celebrated summer house episode.

Time has passed and Rousseau is now twenty-one, earning his living as a music teacher in Chambéry, where Mme. de Warens has moved her household. An attractive young man, he is proving rather too alluring to the mothers of the young girls he teaches. It can only be a matter of time before he is seduced. Mme. de Warens decides to act herself. The moment occurs, or rather the option is mooted, in a summer house set in a herb garden that Mme. de Warens owns. Rousseau works in this summer house regularly and in fine weather he and Mme. de Warens dine there. One evening, after dinner, Mme. de Warens suggests quite openly to him that it is time he lost his virginity and proposes that she be his partner in the enterprise. In a tone of high seriousness she gives him eight days to reflect on the proposition, which delay Rousseau, somewhat shocked, eagerly accepts. Eight days later in the little summer house, sexual congress takes place.

I had an identical summer house built in a suitable walled garden. Some mornings we spent hours sweeping the fresh snow from the pathways and lawns, re-creating sunlight with our powerful arc lights. It was an important scene—both bizarre and comic—and a key to Mme. de Warens’s own compromised sexual nature that would have special bearing on Part I’s conclusion.

I felt strange directing Karl-Heinz and Doon in a love scene. I intended to fade out on the first kiss to an exterior of the summer house, the panes of glass suddenly opaque and golden with flashing sunlight. The caption I had written was taken directly from the book: “Was I happy? No. I had tasted the pleasure but some invincible sadness poisoned its charm for me.”

How well I understood that emotion! I had never experienced the same natural abandon as I had that first morning with Doon. We made love with intense mutual pleasure and enthusiasm, but she always stopped me when I wanted to tell her how much I cared for her. But you’ve told me that before, she would say. You don’t need to tell me again.

We were back in Berlin by mid-November, the weather having called a halt to filming. I was feeling unwell, I remember, a heavy cold and heavy heart. In Annecy and Chambéry I had felt free of my conscience and responsibilities. The banal truth is that physical distance is all that is required to make adultery safe and worry-free. Now, back at home, duplicity had necessarily to be enrolled as my co-partner. I found the strain of collating my lies and falsehoods with parts of the truth enervating and depressing. And the house seemed like a veritable zoo with the ubiquitous Shorrolds back again for two months over Christmas and New Year’s. Had a year really gone by? I should have been celebrating: my film was being made; I was the lover of the one woman I had ever truly adored. But these equations never work themselves out neatly. In our Charlottenburg villa there were nine of us: five adults and four children and only one bathroom. I started spending nights out at the studio in Spandau just to keep away.

There were huge problems with the film. We edited together a rough cut of the material filmed so far. It came to four hours and forty-five minutes. I did not know how I was going to break the news to Eddie (curiously, it was only now that I found his name easy on the tongue). Part I, furthermore, was nowhere near complete. We had still to shoot the Geneva scenes, and the bad weather we had endured at Annecy and Chambéry meant we would have to return there next year. At the same time there was no gainsaying that what we actually had in the can was superb. A story was unfolding here that was utterly enthralling and both Karl-Heinz and Doon glowed on the screen.

In early January I showed Eddie carefully chosen segments of our rough cut interposed with linking commentary from me. All my caution was needless: he said he was overwhelmed and deeply moved. But then he paused.

“Brilliant. Fantastic. But where’s the film? That’s six months’ work?” He looked sad rather than angry.

“There’s more,” I said. “I haven’t shown you the rest.”

We got down to business. We argued, we haggled. I was in a strong position: Joan of Arc had been a great success—not quite a Julie, but highly satisfying all the same. Julie was still playing in the U.S.A. Eddie wanted Part I complete by July ’28. I demanded the end of September. I won. Eddie stipulated that I must forfeit my twenty-five-thousand-dollar completion bonus if I was one day into October. We saved some money by actually closing down the film for two months—March and April. I add this note because I have read the wildest and most irresponsible accounts of the filming of The Confessions. It has even been written that I spent five years making a two-hour film. For the record, then, the first phase of The Confessions: Part I lasted from July 1927 to February 1928. Phase two was to commence at Chambéry in May 1928.

Doon and I tried to meet as often as we could. She insisted, however, that if we made love we had to be together for a whole night. This not unreasonable demand made life extra-difficult for me, as you might imagine. My lies to Sonia became less and less circumspect. I found the whole business of covering up increasingly effortful. And I was encouraged in my laxity by Sonia’s astonishing naïveté. Or indifference.

I spent a whole weekend with Doon in February. Friday night, Saturday, Saturday night. I returned home on Sunday evening.

“Where were you?” Sonia said.

“I told you. At the studios, editing.”

“But they said you weren’t there. That you’d left on Friday night.”

“That’s nonsense. Of course I was.”

“I telephoned all day Saturday.”

“Well, I was in and out.”

“That would explain it.”

“What?”

“Someone told me they saw you in town on Saturday evening. In a restaurant. Kurfürstendamm.”

Mild panic symptoms. “Yes.… Well, I had to meet Doon Bogan. Script—you know—decisions.”

“How is Doon?”

“What?… Oh, fine, fine. Fine.… Why were you phoning me?”

“Hereford was ill.”

“Is he all right?”

“Seems to be now. Just a bad cold.”

“There’s no need to phone me just because a child’s got a cold, Sonia.”

I found this conversation most disturbing. I looked at Sonia’s expression closely (she was playing patience), but she seemed entirely credulous. Yet she had virtually trapped me in a lie. More intelligent questioning, had she been truly suspicious, would surely have caught me out. Had she been truly suspicious … Why was she not suspicious? Over the next few days this question nagged at me. There were only two answers that I could come up with. One: that she was a trusting fool. Two: that my prolonged absences from the home suited her in some way.

I eventually asked Doon.

“Do you think Sonia could ever have an affair?”

“Why not? You are. Do you think you need a special talent?”

“I suppose so.”

“She’s attractive.”

“Sonia?”

“Yeah. In a sort of comforting earth-mothery way.”

“Really?”

“Well, I just know Alex used to say she was sort of sexy. He liked English women.”

This did me no good at all. To me, Sonia seemed unchanged. I had not felt a spasm of sexual attraction towards her since I had met Doon that Christmas night in 1926. But once the seed had been sown, suspicion began to flower. She was alone a lot; she was rich; she had servants, a car, and a driver if need be; the children were looked after.… What did she do all day?

It was during the lay-off months of March and April that these suspicions became intolerable. Doon asked me to come with her to a conference of international socialism in Paris, but I excused myself on the grounds that phase two of Part I required me in Berlin. I felt I had dedicated enough time and effort to the cause, with my generous donations, my signing of innumerable petitions and protesting letters to the newspapers. I had managed to cut down on the meetings, but along with Doon I had actually marched twice through the streets of Berlin on KPD rallies. It was enough, I felt. Much as I loved her I did not want to submit that love to the trials of a two-week conference.

Thus, undistracted, I fell to brooding about Sonia and decided, reluctantly, to have her followed. I asked Eddie if he knew of a private investigator.

“Yes,” he said, “what for?”

I lied. I said a friend of Sonia had asked to borrow money from her. I merely wanted the proposed “scheme” investigated, discreetly.

Eddie looked shrewdly at me. “We used to use a man called Eugen for chasing debts. I never met him but his success rate was high.”

“Sounds ideal,” I said. “What’s his address?”

I was relieved that E. P. Eugen lived in an unfashionable northern quarter of the city—Wedding—in a small street next to the infectious-diseases hospital, and with a drab view of the Berlin ship canal at its southern end. I found it—and I am sure all Eugen’s clients felt the same—strangely reassuring to visit such an anonymous address. I traveled there by the Ringbahn—it seemed more fitting—and got off at Putlitzstrasse Station. I had never visited this district before: it was oddly spread out—warehouses, a new park that seemed not to have taken to its surroundings, the vast modern functional-looking hospital. I made my way quickly to Fehmarnstrasse.

On the door it said EUGEN P. EUGEN, LOAN REPOSSESSION AND CHARACTER REFERENCES. I knocked and was admitted by a young bespectacled girl. A small man, almost dainty, rested one haunch on what I took to be her desk. He turned and examined the dangling, gleaming toe of his boot.

“I have an appointment with Herr Eugen,” I said. “I am Herr Braun.”

“Ah, Herr Braun.” The little man stood up. “I am Eugen. Come in.”

I followed Eugen into his office. He really was very small, not much over five feet, and immaculately dressed. He had neatly parted blond hair with almost-white eyelashes, which gave him a look of childish openness. We sat down. Eugen took a long cigar out of a drawer in his desk and lit it. I imagined this was a reflex gesture. It seemed to say: “I may be a small man but I have a big cock.” I immediately disliked him.

He told me of his terms and I told him my business. I told him that I wanted a woman followed with the utmost discretion. I gave no name, just my address and Sonia’s description. I wanted to know where she went, who was there and what they did. It was simple, straightforward and our discussion lasted less than five minutes. I paid in advance and he agreed to provide a full report in one month. I got up to leave but Eugen was round his desk like a cat and stopped me at the door.

“Would you oblige me with your autograph, Herr Todd? For my secretary. She’s seen Julie five or ten times. Fifteen, perhaps.”

I signed, grudgingly, but without comment,

“Too, I am a great admirer,” he said in English, in a soft confidential voice. Then as I left he added pointedly, “Good day to you, Herr Braun.”

It was only two weeks before I heard from him. I was busy with the approaching restart of the film. Leo was away in Switzerland supervising construction of a huge set near the small town of Grex, which was doubling as eighteenth-century Geneva. I was working on a revolutionary technical device and was plotting its integration with the film when Eugen’s phone call was transferred to me in the photographic laboratories at Spandau.

“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you,” I said.

“There is good and bad news,” he said. “I must discuss them with you.”

We arranged to meet in a small café around the corner from his office in the late afternoon. It turned out to be a cellar café, a few uncomfortable doors away from the main entrance to the Institut für Infektionskrankenhaus. Eugen sat at the back of the café at a thin table, eating stuffed cucumbers. He had a bad fresh graze on his forehead and chin; apart from that he was as dapper as ever. He stopped eating as soon as he saw me and lit one of his stupid cigars.

“Can I offer you some beer? Some wine? There is excellent food here. Excellent—and at modest prices.”

“No, thanks. What happened?”

“Your wife. She discovered me.”

Eugen told me that it was his practice to use a small motorbike to follow cars. In this manner he had followed Sonia undiscovered for ten days. The day before yesterday she had not used the driver but had taken the car herself. She took an unfamiliar route and Eugen thought he was finally on to something. She motored out to the country. Somewhere near Dallgow, in a quiet lane, Eugen turned a corner and almost ran into the back of Sonia’s car (our Packard), which was deliberately parked to bring about this result. Eugen braked, skidded and fell off his bike. He tore his clothes, grazed his face and was momentarily stunned. Sonia confronted him, brandished a revolver (it must have been a child’s toy—I had to admire her nerve and aplomb) and demanded to know why he was following her.

He looked down at his cucumber.

“I had to confess a powerful infatuation,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s the best excuse. It always works.” Sonia had gone through his wallet and had found his business cards (here I was thankful for Eugen’s euphemistic job description).

“But I must tell you,” he went on. “Good news. She’s an honest woman. There’s nothing illicit in her life, nothing. She meets her friends, she takes her children to the park. She shops. She plays cards twice a week with other women. That’s all.”

We haggled aimlessly for a while over his fee. He said the damage to his motorbike, clothes, face and self-esteem were barely covered by the unearned portion of his advance. I gave in and returned home somewhat relieved. Sonia never mentioned the incident to me. Why? Did she suspect me? Or was she flattered by Eugen’s subterfuge? Although I was reassured I still harbored illogical worries, even though there was nothing in Sonia’s demeanor or increasingly, round, placid face (Berlin was plumping her up) that could reasonably give me cause for alarm.

Is this the time for a brief tribute to Eddie Simmonette? I owe him so much (mind you, he owes me a fair bit too) and I will never forget his generosity and tolerance, his help and understanding, when I went to him in April 1928 and told him my plans to revise completely certain aspects of The Confessions and reshoot some of the previous year’s scenes.

I was bold—I pushed my luck—only because of that deathbed promise old Duric had extracted from him. But, sentimental reasons aside, there were sound commercial reasons for backing a John Todd film in those days. Anyway, I made my bid because I was fretting about certain sequences of the film and was seeking some means of resolving them.

The plain fact is that by 1928 there was nothing much more to be done with the camera. Every so-called trick and gimmick you see on today’s cinema screens had been discovered before three decades of the century were up. Rapid cutting, multiple exposure, moving cameras, angled shots, back lighting, matte screens, selective soft focus, vignette masks, crane shots, lens diffusion, etc., etc., were all at the director’s disposal. It was as if, to take an analogy, the history of painting had moved from mud daubings on a cave wall to modern abstract expressionism in twenty-five years. We were even experimenting with a kind of 3-D picture in those days and this was one of the new techniques I wanted to employ. A firm in France was producing a type of embossed film that when projected on a screen gave the actors, if not a true three-dimensional effect, at least that of a bas-relief. It was particularly effective in close-up. The film stock was expensive but we had budgeted for it. I planned to use it in the famous cherry-picking incident, which we would film in Chambéry that summer.

All film technique, I am convinced (and as is the case with many of my theories, I am probably alone in adhering to it), originates in dreaming. We could dream slow motion before the moving camera was invented. In our dreams we could cut between parallel action, we assembled montage shots, long before some self-important Russian claimed to show us how. This is where the film derives its particular power. It re-creates on screen what has been going on in our unconscious. I met a famous director once (he shall be nameless) who purported to have been the first man to launch a remote-control camera down a stretched wire and give us for the first time the sensation of flying like a bird. But dreamers, I told him, have been flying this way since the birth of consciousness. Many of my own inventions (the hand-held camera, my soft-focus lens) originated in my dreams. This, then, was the position I found myself in. Let us take another image—a still, burning candle. It is beautiful, it illumines. Now, breathe gently on the flame and observe the flickering, dancing transformation. As I saw it, the director’s role in the film was to be the breath upon the candle flame. I had everything at my disposal in The Confessions to make that flame dance and sparkle—my vision, the actors, technical apparatus and the skills of my collaborators—but I still felt myself balked and restricted by the confinement of the lens and what we could do with it, that fixed immutable rectangle that we had to fill. And then, that spring of ’28, I dreamed about Rousseau and his walk from Geneva to Savoy. I saw him striding through the chilly landscape with the vast backdrop of the mountains behind him. It was as if I stood and watched him walk a mile in front of my eyes.… When I woke I knew that my task in The Confessions was somehow to escape the limitations of the frame.

The solution to this problem came so swiftly that I was baffled that it had not struck anyone before. If I could not extend the dimensions of the camera lens and thereby extend the dimensions of the screen, I would simply multiply the options available to me: I would use three cameras, five cameras, synchronize their images and project them on a corresponding number of adjacent screens. I had a sudden vision of my cinema of the future. We would sit the audience in a round amphitheater, hemmed in by a circular screen. Jean Jacques’s walk could span 360 degrees.…

But this was far away. I sat down with my cameraman, Horst Immelman, to work out the practicalities (there is not much to say about Horst—in his forties, genial, efficient, an artisan deluxe). We quickly realized that the best we could achieve was the linking up of three cameras, otherwise synchronization, image adjustment and continuity would prove nightmarishly complicated. Horst thought a prototype could be rigged up in a month. I went to Eddie to convince him we should use it. He at once saw the immense advantages the device would bring, but pointed out that we would have to adapt the world’s cinemas too, if it was to be worthwhile. It was a fair point. In the end it was decided that I would shoot some scenes with the Tri-Kamera (as it was now known) and—this was Eddie’s idea—Realismus would adapt key cinemas for premiere, trade and publicity screenings. He enthused about my invention but for the wrong reason. He saw it as a spectacular publicity stunt and was indifferent to the aesthetic potential. We—Horst and I—went away with a revised budget and shooting schedule. I would refilm two scenes—Rousseau’s walk to Savoy and his first meeting Mme. de Warens—and use the Tri-Kamera on two new ones: the cherry-picking incident and Rousseau’s forlorn departure from Les Charmettes and arrival in Paris. If the device worked, and public response was favorable, we would look at expanding the Tri-Kamera sequences in Parts II and III.

And so we were set to go again. The rest of the year lay before me, planned and funded. Spring and summer in Geneva, Annecy and Chambéry. The autumn taken up with shooting the Tri-Kamera scenes. Winter, back in Spandau for interiors. My new delivery date was July 1, 1929. Part II would commence in the autumn of that year.

Before we left for France I asked Doon to marry me but, typically, with my usual impulsive stupidity, chose entirely the wrong moment. I was at her apartment; we had just made love. I got dressed to go out and buy some cigarettes. As I took my coat and hat from the stand in the hall I saw an unfamiliar paisley-patterned fine-wool scarf hanging there. I picked it up and smelled it. Hair oil and cigars … I replaced it and went out. Somehow I purchased cigarettes.

Mavrocordato.

Mavrocordato had been to the apartment. I could see the scarf round his thick neck. I issued a series of instructions to myself as I walked back from the tobacconist’s kiosk, all to do with calmness, logic, dispassion, self-respect, but I promptly forgot them all as I stepped back inside.

Doon called, “Hurry up with those cigarettes!”

I took Mavrocordato’s scarf off the hook and put it in my pocket. I went into the bedroom and tossed a packet of cigarettes onto the bed. Doon sat up to reach them, exposing her breasts as she leaned forward. I dangled the scarf in front of her. She looked up.

“Mavrocordato’s been here, hasn’t he?”

“Yes.” She was candid, unshaken.

I felt my eyes heavy with tears. “He forgot his scarf. You should be more careful.”

“No, it’s not.”

“What?”

“Not his scarf. The plumber who came on Monday—no, Tuesday—left it.”

“The plumber …”

“Well done.”

“But you did say Mavrocordato had been here.”

“Yes.”

I felt all my anger turn in midair like a boomerang and head back towards me.

“What the hell for?” I asked. “I mean, what bloody right does he have … ? What about my feelings, for God’s sake?”

“We had a chat. Christ, I was married to him, you know.”

I sat down on the bed and took her hand.

“Doon, I want you to marry me. I beg you. Let’s get married.”

“No. I don’t want to get married again. Once was enough. Not to anyone. Not even you.”

She freed her hand from mine, lit her cigarette and lay back in the bed.

“Why should we get married? Aren’t you happy?”

“Of course I am. That’s why.”

“Well, let’s leave it at that.”

“I forbid you to see that … that big hairy shit again.”

“No, you don’t. I like him. I’ll see him if I want to. You don’t need to be there. For God’s sake, don’t be stupid, Jamie. Anyway, you’re married already.”

Why can’t we be content with the way things are? Is it a basic human failing, this constant need to improve your life?… Is there a deep atavistic dream, which we all cherish, that however settled and content our life seems to be, it can with more effort be a little bit better? Chimeras, mirages, illusions—not to be trusted. Why did I keep pushing Doon this way? Why did I keep pushing myself? Everything was fine until I unilaterally decided it could be better. That night I kept on at her, pleading the case for matrimony with keening insistence. It became very boring for her. We snapped at each other, we argued. Then I apologized and tried to calm down, but the evening was ruined. My tone had been wheedling, selfish. Doon was right, damn her; my arguments could get no forensic purchase.

Shortly after that abortive proposal, I came home one night at about half past eight. Sonia was in the kitchen talking to Lily. I went upstairs without greeting her. It must have been about half past nine. In the upstairs corridor I saw Vincent peering through the half-opened door to the boys’ bedroom.

“Get to bed.” I warned.

“Daddy, Hereford won’t talk to me.”

“He’s a sensible boy. He’s gone to sleep.”

I ushered Vincent back into the room and helped him into bed. Then I went over to Hereford’s cot. He was lying on his back, one arm thrown high, two glistening streams of snot trailing from his nostrils. I took out my handkerchief to wipe his lip clean. The instant I touched him I knew he was dead. He was barely warm. I picked him up and his head fell back. A curious gurgling sound came from his throat. I kissed his face, the tears running freely from my eyes, and laid him back down again. I went over to Vincent, got him out of bed and led him from the room.

Hereford’s cold had lingered on, turned into a bad cough, gone away and returned again. He did not seem to mind. To him, I suppose, it was just another couple of orifices—nose and mouth—excreting in concert with his nether ones. He was three years old.

VILLA LUXE, June 23, 1972

What can I say about Hereford? I think, I believe, I sincerely believe that everything might have been different had he lived. But I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure of anything. Hamish would agree with that conclusion. All I’m left with is a sentimental aggregate of fond recollections and wishful thinking. I know only that I loved that small boy in a different way from my other children. There was something in me that responded to his anarchic clumsy presence no matter how irritated and preoccupied I was. And then he was gone.

Is this the sort of occasion when a human life (mine) takes a quantum leap? One of those sudden jumps, an abrupt discontinuity that changes everything? Nothing was quite the same after Hereford died; the world had a different tinge and texture. From where do we get this funny idea that order, causality, sense and continuity should necessarily prevail in the world in which we humans live and breath? Yes, I thought, I can see how this place is governed by chance and random change, having just been the victim of a particularly brutal one. I can understand now how visions of discontinuity and plurality fit my experience better than ideas of order and deliberateness. We don’t know anything for certain. We can’t determine anything. We function solely on terms of hopeful probability. It worked this way before; maybe it will again. But don’t count on it.

I go into the main town, the port, to see Eddie’s lawyer about getting the pool filled. The central square is shabbily elegant, paved with white stone and lined with mature fragrant oleanders. The yellowing stucco buildings around it have tall windows with shutters and wrought-iron balconies. At one end there is an amusing baroque statue of two heavily armed, plumed soldiers wrestling with the flag of liberty.

Everywhere the tourists mill about. Inside his hot office the lawyer is diplomatic. He procrastinates. He apologizes. What can he do? Perhaps at the end of the tourist season …

I leave and join gaudy visitors to our island. I find my favorite café overlooking the harbor and after waiting no more than ten minutes I secure a seat. I eat some ice cream—pistachio, always pistachio—and drink a coffee. I think about Ulrike. She’s a charming girl. The tan she has now suits her. She exudes health and a settled happy confidence in her life or work. I try to picture her boyfriend, the cineast. I see a beard, a checked shirt, a name like Rudi or Rolf. Everything seems fine, Ulrike, but tread carefully. Remember the Uncertainty Principle. It governs the molecules we’re made up of. A little of it is going to penetrate our human world. If a fig tree root can make it through a solid concrete wall, what is going to stop the Uncertainty Principle? Look at my life—lived in unswerving devotion to its capricious edicts.

I stop. I’m getting depressed. I look up and at that moment a tourist bus goes by. And there at a window pointing at the attractions of our picturesque harbor is a man I know. An American. The bus passes; my sudden fear sizzles on, like spit on a hot skillet. Reassurance is slow to return. Relax, I say to myself, it could be a coincidence. It must be. It might not even be him at all. He never saw you, and anyway, nobody knows you are here.