I liked Heather enormously. We became good friends in only a few days. She was an avid and intelligent filmgoer. She had seen Julie and The Divorce several times, and I am sure she found me a refreshing diversion from the stolid Thompson. While I waited for the bank’s decision we spent a lot of time in each other’s company. We talked endlessly. We went for walks with little Innes and Emmeline. I recounted anecdotes of my filming experiences, of the great directors and film stars I had known — A. E. Groth and Fritz Lang, Nazimova, Gast, Emil Jannings and Pola Negri and many others. She was entranced. I told her about myself, my dreams, about The Confessions, my marriage to Sonia, my long affair with Doon. Heather learned a lot about me very quickly. On many afternoons we would motor into Edinburgh and go to matinees of any films we could find and discuss them avidly in tearooms filled with well-dressed old ladies in hats. Heather not only liked me but she was, I think, a little in awe of me. It is a dangerous impression to give any man, let alone a chronic impulsive like me with only minimal control over his emotions.
One morning, a Wednesday or Thursday towards the end of April, I was standing in Thompson’s living room. There was a fire burning in the grate, the room was warm and I was alone in the house with Heather. Thompson was at work. The children were playing with friends nearby. There was an hour until lunch. A faint but delicious smell of roasting meat came from the kitchen, where Heather was busy supervising the cook. I poured myself a schooner of dry sherry and drank two large mouthfuls from it. That first drink of the day … I looked at myself in the mirror. I was wearing an old tweed suit, sand-brown, a cream shirt with a soft collar and a bottle-green knitted silk tie. I thought, in that alcohol rush, that I looked astonishingly handsome. Dreamily, I pushed my dark hair around. With a finger I nudged a lock over my forehead. I tell you, I had a pleasant narcissistic erection two full minutes before Heather came into the room.
“Sherry?” she said, hurrying in from the kitchen. “Have another.”
“Thanks.” Sometimes you can get drunk on one mouthful. Normally I can hold my liquor, but that morning I was already delightfully bleary.
Heather refilled my glass. She wore a pale-blue dress with a pseudo-sailor’s collar. Its V neck stopped, I imagined, an inch above the crease between her breasts.
“Gosh, I’m dying for this,” she said. “That cook, really — it’s just mutton.”
She clinked her glass against mine.
“Here’s how,” she said.
“Cheerio.”
We toasted. We drank. I was already moving in for the kiss as she lowered her glass from her lips. I tasted sherry. Her lips were cool. Her breasts flattened against my chest. Timidly, our tongues touched. For a second I experienced that moment of unforgettable elation — a stillness, a deep calm at the center of everything.
Then she was pushing me away. Fiercely. She stepped back. She looked frightened, as if I was threatening her with something awful.
“I wish you hadn’t done that,” she said in a sad resentful voice. “It wasn’t kind of you.”
“Heather …” I put my hand on her shoulder. She knocked it away.
“You’ve spoiled everything now.” She seemed calm, there were no tears. “Why didn’t you think, John? Why didn’t you think?”
I almost wished she were weeping. I was profoundly unsettled by her solemn gloom.
“Because I never do,” I said honestly.
“You should have chosen not to,” she said. “I had. Couldn’t you see I’d made that choice? Sometimes to choose not to do something is as important as …” She faltered, but I had the gist of her reasoning. The left turning or the right? Down which avenue of possibilities will you travel? We want to do the best, but there is always a course of action that gives you the worst of all possible worlds. I seemed to have a knack for picking it out.
We never kissed or touched again. And we lost what we had before I embarked ourselves on those impulsive seconds. My kissing Heather opened no door for us, it merely canceled the alternatives and left us both impoverished. What I envy most in people is their ability to use restraint and denial in a positive way. To live and be happy with the negative, the route not chosen. In the scale of my life’s enormous disappointments, my three-second kiss with Heather has to be regarded as insignificant, but it proved to be a small and lasting regret, like a grumbling appendix, nagging, nagging.
My next blunder was not of the same order. It cost me dearly, its ramifications were massive, but I forgave myself immediately. Any man in my position would have done the same.
I went to the dentist, Thompson’s dentist, a nice man in Barnton, to have a tooth filled. This was two days after my — what? — my brush with Heather and three or four days before the crucial meeting at the bank. I sat down in the waiting room and picked up a copy of the Daily Herald that was lying there. The paper, along with every other publication in Britain, was full of news about the impending coronation. I flicked through it. I stopped abruptly on one page because I thought I saw a photograph of Sonia, but it turned out to be of Mrs. Wallis Simpson. Then, down below, my eye was caught by a headline: TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE THIRD BATTLE OF YPRES. Now, here was a face I recognized. I read on.
As part of our series commemorating this great battle we invite old soldiers to share their memories. This week the distinguished film director Mr. Leo Druce, currently at work on Court Films’ Great Alfred, recounts his part in the battle.
The piece was headed “Bombing the Ridge at Frezenburg.” I read on.
We went over the top at dawn. Our objective was the first German trench line on the notorious and deadly Frezenburg Ridge. I was leader of the bombing section in D Company, 13th (Public School) Service Battalion of the South Oxfordshire Light Infantry. The Hun machine guns did not open up until we were halfway across the perilous quagmire that was no-man’s-land. All hell broke loose. Bullets buzzed through the air like maddened bees, only these insects carried a fatal sting. I saw our platoon commander go down, shot through the heart, as he stopped to aid a wounded comrade. Before he died he waved us on and shouted, “On you go, lads!” We struggled on through the merciless hail of bullets. Then, on my right, there was an enormous explosion as my close friend the Hon. Maitland Bookbinder literally disintegrated as his sack of bombs exploded. The fields of Flanders had become a charnel house flowing with English blood. We pressed on gallantly, men falling like flies all around. Fortunately the tremendous barrage from our guns had cleared enormous gaps in the Hun wire.…
Leo Druce duly threw all his bombs. Modestly, he “did not pause to see what dread effect those mighty detonations had.” Then on his way back — to rearm himself, naturally — he was flattened by an explosion and came round with a “searing pain” in his left leg. Somehow he managed to crawl back to the lines, where he fell unconscious from pain and loss of blood. When he woke up in a casualty-clearing station he knew “the battle was over for me. But I Was proud to have played my part in one of the bitterest, bravest conflicts that the modern world has seen.”
There were further banalities about “our men who fought like lions” and not allowing the gallant fallen to go unremembered. At that point I was summoned into the surgery. I never felt a thing. I was in the grip of a frying, sputtering rage. As the dentist pumped away on his drill I was composing my letter to the editor of the Daily Herald. I wrote it that evening and posted it the next day. Unfortunately I have lost the original clipping but have preserved a draft among my papers.