The New Confessions (29 page)

But I am jumping ahead.

Was there anyone to meet me at Waverley Station in response to my telegram from London announcing my return home from the war? Answer: no. I walked across George IV Bridge towards the High Street with a thin bitter smile on my face. It was a cold, steel morning in Edinburgh with the usual frigid, scouring wind. I wore a flat felt cap, a secondhand suit of clothes provided for me at a Portsmouth hospital, and an army greatcoat. Once again my unusual status as only an honorary officer had run me foul of established procedure. I did not look like a returning hero. I had imagined myself in my well-cut coat, my jodhpurs, my glossy boots, a jaunty cap. Now I looked as if I had just been turned out of a Salvation Army hostel.

I tramped up the worn spiral stairs to our apartment and beat on the door. Oonagh opened it. It was two and a half years since I had last seen her. She was a little plumper but otherwise unchanged.

“Good God, it’s you!” she said with some surprise. “John James … my, my.”

“Yes, it’s me,” I said avidly, stepping inside.

“Your father said you’d be back today sometime. But there’s no luncheon for you. You’re too late.”

“
I don’t want any fucking luncheon!
”

I threw my cap down on a hall chair.

“Dearie, dearie me. What a fuss!”

I had calmed down by the time my father returned. He looked older, the eyes more deeply set, the wrinkles on his face more emphatic, his cheekbones’ tufts more grizzled. His mood was one of faint embarrassment, clearly perceptible through his halfhearted attempts to go through the correct welcoming motions. For example, he put his hands on my shoulders and said with ghastly theatricality, “Let me look at you!”

He looked.

“You’re older,” he said at last.

“Well, it has been two and a half years. Of course I’m older.” I was exasperated. “You’re older, Oonagh’s older. Everyone’s older.’

“There’s no need for sarcasm, John. It’s a most unpleasant modem tone of voice.” He turned away. “As young people, we deplored sarcasm.”

I ignored the lie.

“Minto made me pay the fee for the whole term, you know.”

“What?”

“When you ran away. I had to pay the fee for the whole term. You might have timed it better.”

Later, when I thought about his reaction, I charitably decided that it was an attempt to cover up the real emotions he was feeling. Thompson, for his part, was entirely candid: he made no effort to disguise his edginess and unease. He had changed more than anyone. He was quite fat now, almost possessing a middle-aged portliness. His features had softened, his cheeks swelling over his jawbone into his chin. He was doing well at the bank and was snug in the pinstriped uniform of his trade.

No one was especially curious about what had befallen me. Thompson had no desire to hear of my adventures—my presence alone was a sufficient rebuke to his sleek prosperity. My father was still too busy, and Oonagh, although a willing listener, was maddeningly unimpressed.

I spent a lot of time with her in the kitchen, as I had as a little boy. Then she had been amused by my stories; now she nodded a lot and made remarks like “Goodness me,” and “Well, I never.” Prison camp made the only impact.

“Terrible things for a family to have had a son in prison. Awful shame.”

Hamish was the only one who showed genuine curiosity. We met shortly into the New Year when he returned to the University, where he was doing postgraduate work in mathematics. He had completed his honors degree two years prematurely.

At his suggestion we arranged to meet in a pub in the Grassmarket. I arrived there a little late. It was dark outside and not much lighter within. There was a feeble, smoky coal fire in the grate and the bar was crowded with men in greatcoats and still wearing their hats. It took me some minutes to spot Hamish. He wore a gray homburg hat and stood at the farthest end of the bar looking up at the ceiling. He had a cigarette in his mouth and a pint of beer in his hand. I checked to see what he was staring at, but the corner of the ceiling that attracted his gaze seemed unexceptionable.

“Malahide,” I said.

He removed his cigarette from his mouth, careful not to let the ash drop. Most of his spots had gone; a few lingered around his ears and at his collar edge. His face, cleared, was terribly scarred by the acne, as he had predicted, stippled with pocks and color changes, the spectrum of pinks.

“Todd! Excellent … excellent!”

We shook hands warmly. He had grown taller; he had a couple of inches on me now. And thin. He smiled, showing his soft uneven teeth. At last, someone really pleased to see me. We found two seats not far from the fire and sat down. I told Hamish most of what had happened to me. He sat quietly and listened. He smoked constantly, keeping the cigarette in his mouth. He was scrupulous about ash falling and would ferry the cigarette to the ashtray—as if it were some fragile crystal phial—with a precautionary palm held beneath it, where it was gently and precisely tapped.

“I kept all your letters,” he said. “Did you keep mine?”

“Yes. They were in my kit. Sent back when I—”

“Good.”

I smiled. “How’s it going? The maths?”

“Incredible,” he said simply. “I can hardly go to sleep at night. The things that are happening.”

He started to explain what he was engaged on. Theories of relativity, I think he said. I could make nothing of it, but I was strangely affected by his passion. I was, for a brief moment, intensely jealous. I envied the strange world he was at home in. I said so, innocuously.

“It’s not so difficult,” he said. “You would understand the concepts. You were good at school.”

“I
was
good.”

“You started it all for me, you know.” He took the cigarette from his mouth and set it delicately down on the tin ashtray.

“I did?”

“Remember? Who invented prime numbers? I could do maths. But I never thought about it, what it all meant.” There was a clear subterranean glow in his sludge-green eyes. I wondered briefly if he was slightly mad—or a kind of genius.

Then he said, shyly, “Astonishing things are happening, John. The most amazing revelations. Everything is changing. Science is changing. We look at the world differently now. We thought we understood how it worked, but we were wrong. So wrong.”

“I see.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

“Grand.” I did not know what to say. “Another pint?”

“Yes, please.”

Hamish and I met once or twice a week, the only moments of interest in an otherwise dull and featureless four months. I mooched around Edinburgh, sat in cheerless pubs, played the odd game of golf. Thompson, to his credit, introduced me to his set of friends—eager young Scots, crammed with ambition, full of getting and spending. I was poor company; after a month or two the invitations died away. For one week I developed a foolish passion for a girl who worked in the millinery department in Jenner’s and I took to following her discreetly in her lunch hour and on her journeys home to Davidson’s Mains.

In the summer we spent our usual two months at Drumlarish. Old Sir Hector was now over eighty, distracted and drooling with impending senility. I spent long afternoons pushing him in his bath chair through the blown gardens, my head probably emptier than his, to and fro, up and down, the wooden wheels of his bath chair crunching the gravel on the garden paths.

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.)