The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  I had gone straight to Eddie and told him everything. He said I should have come earlier. “I could have handled this, John,” he said sadly. “So much more neatly.” He was annoyed with me for my thoughtlessness. I realized that even after forty years there were aspects of Eddie Simmonette that remained completely opaque to me. And what was worse was that I had inadvertently implicated him too, by asking him to pay O’Hara. O’Hara had been to his house, had seen him and received money from him. He was not too concerned about O’Hara, however. His silence could be relied on. I was the problem.

  Eddie sent me home and told me to settle my affairs in an orderly way, with no unseemly urgency. I sold the house. I said good-bye to Nora Lee (a real retrospective regret, this, but at the time I could think of nothing but my safety). Ten days after Smee’s death I was on the plane to London.

  I followed Eddie’s instructions faithfully. I traveled to Paris, where I hired a car, and drove across several borders (ostensibly scouting for locations). Ultimately, after further trail covering, I arrived on this island and moved into Eddie’s villa. He gave me a selection of three houses he owned in the Mediterranean basin where I could hide up. I chose this island (the others were in Turkey and Beirut). It was almost unknown then; it had none of the vague notoriety it nowadays possesses. And so my exile began. Only Eddie knew where I was. He kept distantly, discreetly in touch; kept me reassured about the continuing absence of suspicion. Some months after I had arrived, Mrs. Smee went to the police, her memory jogged about my fight with her husband and our mutual threats (something tells me Mrs. Smee was not too unhappy to lose Monroe). A mediocre description of me was issued, but as Mrs. Smee claimed not to remember my name the investigation did not get very far. Eddie told me to give it a couple of years. Let everything blow over. I stayed put, quite happy in a strange sort of way. Eddie visited me sometimes on his yacht. He was my only contact with my old life. He tried to persuade me to come back. But I said no.

  So why did I stay on and on? Guilt, fear, peace, seclusion, indolence, old age, apathy, the strange contentment I spoke of. All of these were true. But at the back of my mind I was profoundly frightened of being found out. Also, I have to say this: I was never wholly convinced that Smee had died. O’Hara’s killing technique seemed dubious to me. What if it had only sent him into some kind of deep unconsciousness, a coma? And what if he had been thrown clear of the tumbling car and the shock of hitting the water had revived him? You may laugh at my fears—I did too, most of the time. But these thoughts come back to haunt you. You lie alone in your bed at night and your mind is prey to stranger fantasies than these. I stayed because I felt safe. I was far away. Enough was enough.

  I catch the bus into the main town and, once there, I start to visit all the tourist hotels. At the third hotel the register yields the name I am looking for. A receptionist directs me to the swimming pool.

  I stand looking over the vast crowded terrace, thick with half-naked people. Beyond the pool is a strip of dirty brown beach, and beyond that a ruined tower on a small rocky island. I pass slowly among the tables, chairs and rows of sunloungers, looking for the face I saw on the bus that day. Eventually, I find him among four hefty middle-aged American couples. The remains of lunch litter the table. Blue smoke of cigars rises in the sunlight. Laughter. Bellies. Straw hats.

  “Hello, Investigator Bonty,” I say.

  Bonty looks round. No recognition at all.

  “Sorry, fella?…” His funny lip. His half lisp.

  “Todd. John James Todd.” I can see his brain turning over.

  “Mr. Todd?… Yeah. Yeah! Got it. Mr. Todd. Good to see you, my God. This is incredible! After all these years.”

  It’s convincing. He stands up.

  “Listen. Hey, guys. Hold on. I want you to meet John James Todd. The movie director.… Martha, you remember.… John … ah, he and I met on a HUAC investigation. When did we subpoena you, John? ’Fifty-four?”

  “ ’Forty-eight, the first time.”

  “Great days. Great days.”

  I am introduced to everybody. I shake seven hands. Smile at smiling faces. Bonty really quite proud.

  “God, I remember your case. Brayfield—Christ, you got to that asshole like no other subversive. It was fantastic.” He starts telling his friends about Brayfield and me.

  “… and then he says—this is in open court, Washington, D.C., for Christ’s sake!—‘Sure, I’ll name a dangerous lunatic who is trying to destroy the Constitution of the U.S.A.’ ‘Who?’ says the chairman. ‘Representative Brayfield,’ says John here.” Wild laughter and applause. “I tell you, Brayfield practically shit himself, he was so mad.… John, sit down please. What are you drinking? Can you believe this for a coincidence? I’d never have recognized you. Gone native, eh, John?”

  “Could I have a word, in private? Just for a moment.”

  “Excuse us, folks. Be right back.”

  We walk to the low wall that separates us from the thin beach.

  I say, “Very good. You can drop the act now. Where’s Smee?”

  “Who?”

  “Smee. The man who gave you the dossier. HUAC Investigator Smee, you know.”

  “Smee … Oh, yeah. He’s dead.”

  “He’s here. On this island.”

  “John, are you feeling OK? Smee’s dead. He drove off a cliff in Carmel somewhere, years ago.”

  “He’s here, and you know it. You’re after me, working with him.”

  “John, come and have a drink. You been away too long. That HUAC shit’s over now.”

  “Don’t lie to me, Bonty. Was it you or Smee asking questions about me?”

  “John, this ain’t so amusing.” He frowns. “In fact you’re getting to be a pain inna ass.”

  “But I know. There’s no point in pretending.”

  “What are you? Crazy? Some kind of paranoid nut?”

  I back off. “Forget it. Sorry to bother you. Say good-bye for me.” I leave him standing there looking at me, hands on his hips.

  It’s four in the afternoon by the time I arrive back at the village. I feel grubby and exhausted. But what’s worse is the confusion squirming inside me. I feel uneasy, frightened. I feel old. I can’t cope with what’s going on. Bonty’s right. Eddie’s right. Smee must be dead, surely … I can’t even ratiocinate. Who, what, where, when?

  I try the café. Ernesto isn’t there, as usual. Lazy bastard! I walk down the track to my villa. Outside the front door three men are waiting. I sigh audibly with relief when I see they are locals, old men. Oddly, they are all dressed in dusty black suits.

  “Gentlemen, can I help you?” I say.

  They hem me in. Brown, gray-mustachioed, seamed faces. They start shouting. Pointing fingers. They talk in some fast glottal patois that I cannot understand. I feel a spray of spittle from their angry mouths. I can understand nothing except one word: “Emilia … Emilia … Emilia …”

  Jesus Christ! Her husband and his brothers. I never expected them to be so ancient. No wonder Emilia was interested in me. Then one of the old codgers spits in my face. Another thwacks me heavily across the shoulders with his walking stick. I swing a punch at the spitter. He has gray greasy hair. I hope it’s her husband. I catch him in the throat. He falls back, hawking and gagging. I’m always game for a fight. Then my legs are kicked out from under me. I fall down.

  “Bastards!” I yell, suddenly frightened. These old fellows wear prodigious boots.

  I hear a woman’s scream. Cries of “Police! Stop it!” Emilia, I think. Bless you.

  The old men back off. I shake my head and look up. Ulrike. She switches to German. Those harsh relentless consonants work like a whip. Suddenly cowed, the cuckold and his sidekicks shuffle off. Greasy hair turns and shouts at me. Revenge, no doubt.

  Ulrike helps me up. I tell her it’s an absurd misunderstanding. She takes me into the house and looks after me. A cup of coffee. Some sticking plaster on a grazed knuckle.

  “You shouldn’t be fighting at
your age,” she says. She’s right. I feel terrible, jumpy, as if all my organs are overheating and malfunctioning. Lung popping. Heart shudder. Stomach heave. Like an old jalopy about to break down once and for all.

  I stand up and take her hand.

  “Here,” I say. “Come and see this.” I take her into my study. There, I pull the cardboard boxes filled with papers and documents aside and reveal the stack of dull-silver canisters.

  “You can have it,” I say. “You and Tobias. Take it away, show it, do what you like.”

  “What is it?”

  “The Confessions.”

  What takes me down to the beach that evening? I don’t know. I felt like a swim. Naked, I thought, in the sea, just like Big Sur. My back and legs were hurting where those old buggers had hit me. I imagined floating, my weight suspended in salty water. Cool. Relief.

  I feel something has ended, or is about to end. Or else something new is about to begin. I go carefully through the pine trees. The path to the beach, although well worn, is narrow and meanders perilously close to the cliff edge on some occasions.

  As I go I think about something I read once, about a certain kind of ant—a stink ant that lives on the floor of the West African rain forest. This ant goes about its ant business on the ground in an unremarkable way. It does not know the curious and bizarre fate nature has in store for it. For in this forest there is a particular type of arboreal fungus that flourishes at the top of the great forest trees. At certain times this fungus releases its millions of spores into the air. They blow here and there, driven by the softest breezes, eventually coming to rest somewhere on the ground. Some of these spores fall, by the law of averages, onto animals and reptiles and some on crawling insects. They are quite harmless except for one species: our stink ant. This one minute fungus spore falls on the stink ant and is absorbed into its ant system. It drives the ant mad. Remember the stink ant’s habitat is the ground, but the lethal poison of the fungus spore engenders in it the sudden desire to climb. So the stink ant, for the first and last time in its life, leaves the ground and begins to ascend. It climbs up and up, higher and higher, until it can climb no more. There, at the very top of the tree, it sinks its mandibles into the ultimate twig—fast, immovable—and abruptly dies. Inside the dead ant the fungus peacefully grows, nourished by ant meat, warmed by the sunlight at the top of the tree. The ant is consumed and a new fungus is born.

  Sometimes I look back on my life and I feel like a maddened stink ant driven on by my one random fungus spore. Today, I sense, the time has come to sink my mandibles into the bark at the top of the tree.

  * Last Walk finally opened in New York in 1961. It was unpicketed. A few months earlier President Kennedy had crossed an American Legion picket to watch a screening of Spartacus, script by ex–Hollywood Ten Dalton Trumbo. I owe JFK a vote of thanks.

  21

  John James Todd on the Beach

  The sun shines warmly on the beach. The rush and roar of the little Mediterranean breakers is ideally soothing. I abandon the thought of swimming. I sit down in the sun (easy, boy, easy now) and try to relax.

  Hamish died last week of throat cancer. Mercifully swiftly. I forgot to tell you—in fact I chose not to; it might have spoiled this story. His solicitor wrote to me, saying that Hamish’s last wishes were that I should be sent some papers he had written on prime-number theory and an unfinished monograph on Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Kurt Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Poor Hamish, I suppose he went a little mad before he died. It can happen easily, I know. I walk up and down the beach and shed a few tears for him. Hamish and his quantum mechanics. Hamish and his maths. I had been recalcitrant material for him; he had been trying to make me “see” things clearly for decades—since we were at school together—and I had blundered along, heedless, saying yes and at once forgetting.

  I look back at my life, my threescore years and ten, and think, yes, I would like there to be an underlying order to these seven decades of reality. I would like some sense, some meaning. But if I understand Hamish correctly, everything has changed, this century. The search for “truth” can never be the same. Science, which used to attempt to enumerate all the cogs in the Great Machine, has abandoned that endeavor now. Life at its basic level, the quantum physicists tell us, is deeply paradoxical and fundamentally uncertain. There are no hidden variables, there is no secret agenda for the universe.…

  I stop, sniff and look out to sea. This is a mite depressing. Poor old Hamish. God, they’re all dead or dying now. Karl-Heinz, my father, Oonagh, Donald Verulam, Faye, Mungo … on and on. Or lost. Sonia and my children. I haven’t seen them for decades. They stopped writing, steadily. I stopped replying, steadily. Then I used to fantasize that one of them would be curious about me and come and seek me out. Emmeline perhaps … a lean serious girl, I imagined, with a distinct look of my mother. She would have grown suspicious of her mother’s crabbed antipaternal propaganda, unhappy with the name Devize, determined to see the truth for herself, to attempt her own reconciliation.… But why should she? Why should Vincent fill the role I wishfully assigned to him? If only Hereford … Well, it’s pointless now. My loss lingers, a haunting, hurtful regret. But I’m replete with “if onlys.” We’re stuck fast in this being-human game. First prize: mortality. I kick a faded plastic container. It rattles dryly on the pebbles. Like bones.… At least it’s cooler now. Perhaps I could attempt the climb back up.

  Then I hear the clatter of stones from the path in the pinewoods and look up, alarmed. I see a momentary flash of white through the trees and then nothing. Quite far off yet. Silence. Stillness. Suddenly—crazily—I think: SMEE. It is Smee. Then: what nonsense! Deranged fantasies. For God’s sake, get a grip on yourself! It must be Emilia. Or more likely Ulrike and Tobias come to look for me, to thank me for my gift to them. I won’t call out. I’ll just wait and see. Whoever it is will be here in ten minutes.

  I walk up and down the small beach, more composed now. A few midges darn the air. I think of Hamish again and watch the mild waves come in, unfold and collapse. I step down from the dry bank of seaweed onto the strip of sand and pebbles. I look round me. I look at the pebbles at my feet. I plan to select one stone and skim it over the water. Which pebble shall I choose? The beach brims with astonishing potential, each stone teeming with all the possibilities of being a pebble on this particular beach. Rocked and rolled by the waves, rubbed up against its neighbors, draped in glossy seaweed, covered for a while by rank flotsam and jetsam.… I stop and choose. Now this flat pebble will be hurled out to sea.

  I throw, west, towards the setting sun. Skipskipskip—skip skip. Sink. Rather beautiful. The arc of the throw was strong and flat. The stone partook easily of the air and danced briefly on the water.

  There are more noises from the path in the pinewoods. I stand my ground. Up above I hear the human cry of the gulls as they beat their way homewards. I turn and face the sea and watch the waves roll in. I wonder which way my life is going to go now? I have a sudden vision of it as a wave. The little motion in the waters that was my birth, the gradual swelling and building as trough and crest developed, the roar of the breaker as I trundled through the decades. And now here I am on the beach and someone is coming towards me. I consider the possibilities. It couldn’t be Smee, could it? Is it just an old man’s guilt and paranoia? More likely to be a lovelorn Emilia. Or perhaps it’s her greasy husband and his brothers. Then there’s Ulrike, come with news about my retrospective. Or even, the happy fancy strikes me, the American private detective, the one who’s been asking so many questions about me in the neighborhood, sent by Doon to seek me out. Or, less exciting but more plausible, it might simply be one of the island’s lean spectral dogs, picking its way down to the shore to mooch for scraps of food. Six possibilities, then. Six roads my life could take. Six sides to the die. I pause. The moment coagulates; a sense of stasis thickens almost palpably around me. This is my reality, absolute, steady, poised.

  What wil
l become of me? Death at the vengeful hand of Monroe Smee? A fraught encounter with a passionate Emilia? Battered again by her husband and his decrepit thugs? Fame and renown with. Ulrike and her film buff? Reunited with my enigmatic Doon? Or left here, as I am, with a pye-dog for company?

  I don’t know. I care, I know what I’d like to happen, but in the end we never know. I am uncertain, and so is my fate. Well, I’ll go along with that, I think, as I stand on the beach, waiting. The world and its people spin along with me, an infinite aggregate of atoms, all obeying Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. I look back at my life in this gravid tensed moment and I see it clearly now. Above me, two gulls ride high on the thermals heading home. It has been deeply paradoxical and fundamentally uncertain. That’s how I would sum the whole business up, my time on this small planet—deeply paradoxical and fundamentally uncertain.…