Mrs Cornelius did not turn up, of course. After a couple of days, Sir Ranalf s people established that she had boarded the Cairo Express. Whereupon Seaman returned to his cabin and refused to come out. When he did emerge next day he seemed chastened. Sir Ranalf had visited him in the night and brought him to his senses. Thereafter, he was a far more agreeable man. Indeed, his control over the film was almost too light, even lacklustre, on occasions.
The nude scene was tastefully accomplished by daylight amongst the ruins of Karnak. There were, of course, no witnesses amongst the general public and, moreover, the majority of our crew was banned from participating. As Esmé stripped her silks from her body, her eyes yearning towards me, I must admit I was moved to my deepest masculinity. This display aroused an unexpected lust. The beast leaped to fill my skin; a sensation in its own way more intense than those almost savage days of lovemaking experiment in Cairo. The scene could not have been better and was unquestionably of the most superior artistic merit. Seaman was thoroughly satisfied with our work. Esmé, with good humour and her Erdgeist’s love of nudity and natural freedom, made me understand how I had indeed been unnecessarily stuffy. That night my little girl and I continued our scene unobserved. Free from other eyes, she became uninhibited, inventive.
When, next day, Seaman assembled us near the Sacred Pool and casually required my darling to remove her clothing and seem about to swim, I remained relaxed. There had, I accepted, to be continuity. Karnak, that bastion of a savage intellectualism, of a profoundly pagan art, helped establish in us a new mood. It had grown so hot that most of us were already wearing as little as possible, no more than a pair of shorts, a singlet and our lightest boots. This semi-nudity contributed to a mood of moral looseness which, with the slow pace of Luxor’s days, the high quality of the cocaine and the kif, was extremely seductive. I was young and relatively inexperienced. I do not blame myself for relaxing my standards a little. Perhaps, even by then, I could not have escaped. Now we had lights, so that we could shoot in the shadows of the temples, amongst the great pylons. We laid Esmé out upon a great fallen slab, stretched for sacrifice. And I, the priest of Ra, was supposed to raise my knife over her lovely, screaming head. I discussed this scene with Malcolm Quelch. I had an artistic, as well as an historical, problem. Surely there had been no such sacrifices made at that time? He said there was such a thing as imaginative human licence. I asked him if he meant ‘artistic licence’ and he said he did. He had become extremely off-hand in the past week.
Our days now had a peculiar, hermetic quality. We filmed in enclosures, in alcoves, in ruined chapels, among Karnak’s tall, knowing pillars which had witnessed all human folly, all human greed, all lust and dark, unnatural need. My inhibitions indeed seemed stupid in the presence of all this hot African sensuality. I was giving myself up to the past, to a barbaric civilisation that had grown old, tolerant and yet was still greedy for human feeling, for the thrill of flesh against flesh, the touch of a fingertip upon a nipple, the rush of blood and heat, the gasping desire, the stink of sweat and sex. Watching Esmé spreadeagled and perspiring on that rock I conceived such an almost uncontrollable desire for her I yelled with astonishment when Sir Ranalf s friendly hand fell upon my naked shoulder. ‘Isn’t she lovely, old boy? Such a deliriously natural young lady, don’t you know. Well, we should all know. Those things we do in secret!’ And he chuckled. I was offended. ‘What do you know of my private life?’ At once he became an avuncular tomcat. ‘Only what our little darling has told me,’ he purred. And, of course, it was then I knew she had betrayed me.
My emotion at that realisation is indescribable. Though I hated them both my lust for her had never been greater. Had I always hated her, always mistaken one intense emotion for another? Had I ever loved her? I became horribly confused. That dreadful passion threatened to engulf and activate my entire being. I was grasped by the twin fists of lust and rage.
My Esmé was a whore! She had been fucked so many times she had calluses on her cunt. They aren’t a bad bunch, the soldiers I’m with. Why had she betrayed me? She was my angel. Meyn batayt, meyn doppelgänger. It was my duty to rescue her. Yet I had so many other duties, not least to Art and to Science. To the Future.
‘Esmé?’ I moved to where she lay, chained and ready for sacrifice. ‘Sir Ranalf has confessed.’ I turned to still the cameras. This was not, I said quietly, a scene for the public view.
Her voice was a little sleepy, as if she had been dozing while waiting for the take. ‘But you told me it was all right, Dimka.’
Now, of course, I understood my own thoughtlessness. For all her exotic past my little girl was not trained in the ways of the larger world. I had protected her for too long. I softened. ‘I had not meant - ‘
‘Really, my dear Childe Max! As a man of the world!’ It was Sir Ranalf who had taken advantage of us. My respect for the man vanished in an instant. I turned. ‘How could you?’
‘My dear little knight-errant, don’t be cross! We’re all innocent bucolic lads and lasses here together, enjoying a little bit of pagan pleasure for the short years we are upon this Earth. What harm was meant, sweet Orpheus? These are games, no more! Natural games, you know, as between little boys and girls. Between chums and chumesses, eh? Yum, yum!’ And he placed his warm fingers on my arm to pat it. ‘No secret nastiness was intended. We are not the humdrum sort enchained and limited by awful, useless emotions of jealousy and possessiveness, surely? I had you down, dear Sir Galahad, for a Shelleyan like myself. A worshipper of all that is natural.’
Again, I was made to feel both inhumane and unsophisticated. An intolerable bigot. I blushed and cleared my throat, ‘I had not quite understood,’ I said. ‘It was a shock - ‘
‘Of course it was! I’m so very deeply sorry, dear, old pal. I thought all this was happening with your consent. I knew - ‘
‘Whereas I did not!’ But, hard as I strove for sophisticated acceptance, I was close to tears. So many different emotions flooded through me.
‘You will of course remember your professional commitment.’
I could not answer at once. My groin flashed white-hot. Seaman now joined us, followed by Quelch, who was now forever at the director’s shoulder. Perhaps as Mrs Cornelius had done a little earlier, I looked to Quelch for sympathy but he returned my glance with the same shifty warmth I interpreted as continuing embarrassment at my witnessing his Eastertime fellatial diversion. And Seaman seemed entirely without energy. His ‘Can I help?’ was almost timid.
‘We need you to persuade our baffled chum that what we demand is within the bounds of artistic good taste.’ Sir Ranalf was affable. ‘Really, there are pictures hanging in perfectly respectable Birmingham villas more suggestive than our little scene.’
‘It’s a question of conviction,’ said Seaman. ‘We need to startle them.’
‘We need to persuade the audience, you see, of the absolute authority of our mise-en-scène.’
As they talked we smoked a little kif and I began to understand what they were driving at. I recalled that I had read how many Egyptians went naked during festivals and special periods of worship. But not, surely, in such circumstances? I looked to Quelch who spread his hands. ‘I think, as I said earlier, that some licence . . .’
‘But, of course, it would help if you, too, could get a little closer to nature, to the olden times. Don’t you agree, Herr Seaman? Dear Maxie should divest himself of his own little kilt and perhaps substitute a tasteful ceremonial apron?’
I, of course, refused. At this rate what would be the difference, I asked, between our film and a piece of commercial pornography?
‘They have nothing in common,’ Sir Ranalf assured me in some outrage. ‘Our great moral work will stand as one of the milestones in the history of dramatic representation. It will be the Hamlet, the Pinero, the Birth of a Nation of its time. Because we dared, dear Maxie. Because we dared . . .’
But I was still unconvinced of any authentic reason to undress. The chance that
my father’s ‘hygienic’ operation might be detected and the obvious appalling conclusions drawn was, I must admit, my chief fear. Again Malcolm Quelch was commissioned to take me aside to mention certain precedents in certain paintings, the great myths of fertility and rebirth we hoped to examine through our film. In another part of the temple he helped me light another calming pipe and soothed me with his scholarship, his talk of high aspiration, of the world’s attention. ‘This could be your guarantee of immortality.’ He helped with a match to coax a flame. The kif was especially pungent and I think now that he had made what was known as a cocktail, perhaps with opium and something else. It had the effect of bringing me back to my deep self, my fundamental beliefs, my sense of self-worth. This would, he murmured, be merely the means to an end. When The Follies of a Pharaoh made me world-famous every other reward would fall into my lap. At this point I became convinced, yet still insisted I must have my own little changing-space, a curtain drawn across a corner of the ruin. Quelch agreed. He helped me as, a little unsteadily, I disrobed. Then, in ‘ritual apron’ and the rest of my rather gorgeous costume, I presented myself again upon the set.
I had not expected to find another figure standing with Steeton in the shadows of the pylons. An enormous bulbous negress, a gauzy veil scarcely hiding her huge lips and flat nose, blinked extraordinarily long eyelashes, like a cow’s. From the way she met my glance she clearly believed herself attractive. Was she some sort of nurse brought to give proper decorum to the scene? Eventually Sir Ranalf came over to murmur that this was a ‘very highly placed personage who could finance all our ambitions’. I was dreamy by now from the pipe and I smiled and bowed to the negress, whose response was to withdraw almost coquettishly into the deeper shadows. It did not for a second occur to me who or what she might actually be.
Her own first glimpse of the woman seemed to startle Esmé, who moved cautiously on the slab, as if testing her bonds. But then she looked to me and seemed reassured. I guessed from her manner that she had already encountered the negress with Sir Ranalf at one of the ‘meetings’ I had innocently encouraged her to attend.
My anger surged back. I stepped forward, calling out to Seaman. ‘Can we start them rolling, soon, Mr Director? I have other duties, you know, besides acting the leading part and writing the scenario.’
Seaman scuttled towards the camera and placed his hand on the poker-faced Greek who stood ready to turn the crank. Checking lights and angles in only a fraction of his normal time he nodded to me with a shout of ‘Action’.
Knife in hand, I advance towards my treacherous child. O, how I have worked for her, lived for her, suffered such agonies for her. And this is to be my reward! Reminded of my own folly, of the fruitless idealism that tried to turn a dungheap weed into a perfect rose, now all I wish is to ravage her, to terrify her until she begs for my forgiveness. I long to hurt her in every fibre of her being as I had never hurt her before. I am not proud of these feelings, but they are any man’s normal emotions in the circumstances and I have never been one to resist the truth. The drugs brought a drumming to my ears. It was as if the bodies of a huge crowd pressed close around me, their humid breath upon my back, their dreamy eyes upon my every action. They were willing me to take vengeance, to take vengeance for them, for every act of betrayal Woman ever served on Man since Eve betrayed Adam, since God expelled them from the Garden.
Seaman’s voice grows suddenly animated, as it does only when he knows he has a singular shot. ‘That’s it! That’s wonderful! You go towards her. You love her. You hate her. You want to kill her. You want to save her. She is yours. She is everyone’s. You are expected to sacrifice her. That’s right. You raise the knife. Good. But your hand stays. You cannot move. You cannot bring yourself to kill her - not before you have ravaged her. Yes. You will rape her. You will take her. You are heedless of her cries. Of her struggles. This is what she offered you. What she owes you. This is the debt you will now claim - and then appease the gods with her blood.’
Bile rose in my mouth. I was terrified, certain I must vomit, yet I was completely committed to the scene, knowing what an incredible sensation it would create on screen. I flung my body on hers. Peering into her terrified eyes, I realised that she too was drugged and was genuinely afraid of something. I pulled back. I leaned to spit into the sand at the base of the rock.
‘Cut!’ cried Seaman.
We would try another take, he said, later. Perhaps tomorrow, when we had seen the rushes. I apologised for my condition. The heat was proving too much for me again. Sir Ranalf was solicitous. ‘We must get you back to the boat, dear little chummy. You were wonderful. It must have drained so much out of you. But this is how we will make our film not merely good, you know, but great.’
I remained for the rest of the evening and the night in my cabin, sleeping and dreaming. The image of my chained fiancée recurred frequently and with it that same swamping, horrible lust, a kind of bleakness. Then I would recall the image of that huge negress. What was she? A princess of the ruling blood? Some royal shame? Or a mere brothel-keeper? She had seemed to approve of me. The pale delicacy of my spreadeagled child and the engulfing embrace of the negress merged in a single sudden sensation gripped my genitals and caused me to wake gasping for breath, crying out. I was alone in my cabin as it rocked gently on the water. Outside, far away, came the call of a jackal to its mate. The dreams did not stop. I had soaked my sheets.
Next morning I was aroused by a cheerful Quelch. ‘Come along to the viewing-room, dear boy. You did wonderfully. It’s all developed and ready to watch.’
Still bleary from the opium, I allowed him to help me wash and get my clothes on. Then I followed on padding feet through the hot, yellow daylight to the stern where the company was already seated in semi-darkness waiting for Seaman’s projector to roll. The rushes appeared, flickered, focused and gave us very suddenly three powerful minutes. Now I saw why everyone was so excited. They were incredible shots. All my fierce lust and rage and hatred had been captured. Esmé’s terror had been genuine. There had never been scenes to rival these in the power of their emotional statement! I was at once perturbed and proud. Surely this ravishment would do for me what Valentino’s tango did for him. ‘And yet,’ said Sir Ranalf, after they had all congratulated us, ‘we still have a little way to go before our movie reaches its perfect peak!’ I said I thought we had reached the pinnacle. But he laughed heartily. ‘No, dear, dear chum, we have hardly begun to climb! Isn’t that so, Professor Quelch?’
‘Indeed. We are still, as it were, in the foothills of the ecstatic element of our film. The metaphysical element, shall we say. After all we are seeking to record the insubstantial, the indescribable!’
The English have always had a singular admiration for the insubstantial in everything but religion. Their composers and their painters, their fashionable writers, they are all so happy to substitute mysticism for experience. It is not quite the same thing as our Russian ‘soul’. However, I was convinced. The scenes possessed artistic and intellectual authority. I began to feel quite proud of what everyone but myself and Esmé described as my acting.
‘And, too, remember we have Dame Commerce to placate,’ added Sir Ranalf, shaking his head at the crudeness of our world. I wondered if he referred to the negress. ‘We must ensure that we have enough properly sentimental scenes as well as, I think, a few more “fun scenes”. To give substance to our spectrum, you know. To show that no aspect of human life is left unexamined. This afternoon, Maxie, my good fellow, I want you to consider, perhaps, ripping aside your ritual apron as you advance on the helpless vampire. It will not be photographed directly, of course, but it will help with the ambience, will it not, Mr Seaman?’
Seaman nodded silently from where he sat huddled in his chair. He had achieved the best scene of his career, yet for some reason he was discontented.
I refused Sir Ranalf’s suggestion. ‘I have to consider my reputation,’ I said. ‘I am not sure the engineering world would trust
a man who showed his bare bottom to the kinema public.’
They laughed at this. The public would receive only a hint! Of course, I would have a perfect right to see the rushes. I would note how subtle the shots would be.
In spite of my deep desire to continue with the film, I could not bring myself to agree. Paramount in my mind was my need to get our footage safely back to America and edit it properly. Only if it won the approval of America would it be a true success. The more intimate scenes would not appear in the United States version but their rumour would attract millions. It was also probably true that the rest of the world would not respond prudishly to such natural portraits which were almost necessary for a film’s success, in France, for instance. Yet what held me back was the dilemma of my shame - or rather my father’s shame - my missing foreskin, removed for hygienic reasons almost before I was sentient. Again, with good grace, I refused to accept their logic.