The Thief of Time

  ‘Thought of making a movie about the war, you know,’ he said. ‘Afraid of trivializing it though. What do you think?’

  ‘I expect there is a lot that has yet to be said about it. It might take a hundred years to get to the heart of the matter.’

  ‘Yes, but we’re not going to be here in a hundred years, are we?’

  ‘You probably won’t, no.’

  ‘And so we have to start somewhere, yes?’ he asked, leaning forward and smiling so widely now that I was afraid his cheeks would crack. ‘It’s something I’m thinking of anyway,’ he said eventually, leaning back and waving his hand dismissively. ‘Maybe I’ll do it. Maybe not. There is so much time and so many ideas and I am still so young. I am a lucky man, Mr Zéla.’

  ‘Matthieu, please.’

  ‘And I expect you would like to get lucky too, am I right?’

  At that moment I saw a movement behind him and two young girls emerged from the house, wearing what I took to be the latest style in bathing wear and hats to cover their hair. They wore swimming goggles across their eyes and all in all they were so covered up as to be laughable. They strode past us without a word, although the first girl, the shorter – in black – laid a hand gently on Chaplin’s shoulder as she passed him. For his part, he ignored them except to stroke his shoulder gently after her touch and stare directly into my eyes with possibly the most disturbing smile I had ever seen until then, a smile of such collusion and manipulation that it made me shudder. I heard a splash behind me and the kinetic silence of two swimmers lost beneath the surface, gliding smoothly to the other side of the pool. Chaplin brought his drink to his mouth and took a long swallow, licking his lips in appreciation afterwards.

  ‘There are a lot of advantages to being in this industry at this time, Mr Zéla. Matthieu. A lot of ... joyful things can come to a wise investor.’ He leaned forward and the smile finally vanished now as he took my hand. ‘But make no mistake,’ he added. ‘Timing is everything. And the time is now!’

  We dined in Chaplin’s kitchen that evening, the four of us, eating toasted sandwiches which he made himself and drinking cocktails afterwards in the lounge. The help had been dismissed for the evening and it seemed that our host enjoyed taking control of the kitchen and the fully stocked frigidaire before him, for he spent an awful lot of time judging exactly the right ingredients for the rather simple sandwiches that he was preparing.

  Constance Delaney was the older of the two sisters by four years and the evening that we met was three full weeks before her twenty-second birthday. Although I am not usually attracted to extremely young women – my ideal partner (at least since I myself turned forty) has tended to be in the thirty to forty age group – Constance had my attention from the moment she stepped out of the pool and took off her goggles and cap to reveal a black bobbed hairstyle which was quite the style then and the most beautiful eyes I had seen in a century. They were wide, with ovals of chocolate brown swimming in the centre, and when she looked to the side without turning her head, the sheets of white ice which flowed in to take their place transfixed me. She had changed into trousers and a linen shirt – an unusual enough outfit for a woman then – although her younger sister Amelia, who was by Chaplin’s side all through the evening and I dare say the night afterwards, was the more obviously feminine of the two, her baby doll dress being only one of the presents with which I later learned her brief romance with celebrity had enriched her.

  ‘What did you do in London, Mr Zéla?’ asked Constance, biting into the olive from her Martini as I protested that she must call me by my given name or we could not be friends. ‘Before the war, I mean?’

  ‘I lived a lot before the war,’ I admitted. ‘But it’s the strangest thing. These last four years seem to have taken me over so enormously that the past before it fades away like a childhood memory. People remind me of events that took place around the turn of the century and I can hardly remember them. It’s almost as if they all took place in a different life. Does that seem strange to you?’

  ‘Not at all. I only have the news reports to go on, of course, but it seems to have been ...’ She searched for the right word and my heart was held by her as I watched her think, knowing that she wanted to find the exact phrase or say nothing at all. She was aware of the effect of that time on those who were part of it.

  ‘Beyond anything that I could comprehend,’ she settled on eventually with a shrug. ‘Silly of me to try to think up words for such a terrible thing. Here. In California, of all places.’

  ‘That’s why I never use any,’ said Chaplin, laughing loudly as he poured more drinks, even for Amelia who had barely touched hers. ‘Movies are just for the imagination, you see. Not for real life. The silence makes the mind work better. It may be that -’

  ‘Then why do you use so much of that infernal music?’ asked Constance quickly, cutting off his monologue. Chaplin stared at her. ‘I mean honestly, Charlie,’ she added with a laugh, ‘I love your little films as much as anyone but do we really need those awful piano rags that accompany them? Whenever I go, I curse myself for forgetting to bring some cotton wool along for my ears. Remind me, Mr Zéla,’ she added, touching my knee gently, ‘the next time that you take me to a movie theatre.’

  ‘He told you to call him Matthieu,’ said Chaplin indignantly, his voice raised a decibel or two above everyone else’s. ‘And you need that music to reflect the characters and the plots. Fast for action, dirges for misery. You know it exactly. You can sense mood. The music conjures up the emotions as valuably as the performances or the direction. Without the music -’

  ‘Charlie is a wonderful composer,’ said Amelia quietly and Chaplin barely missed a beat.

  ‘Kind of you to say, my dear,’ he said, his voice so much louder and overpowering than hers that she all but disappeared beneath it. ‘But my movies are an all round creation. Writing, directing, acting, composing. It’s all part of something which I create out of my own mind. That’s why I’ve had such trouble in the past, trying to wrest control over what I do. Without control, Matthieu, over everything, there is nothing at all. You wouldn’t ask Booth Tarkington to write a novel and have someone else give him the chapter titles, now would you?’

  ‘No, but you might ask someone to design the lettering on the cover,’ said Constance and I couldn’t help but smile. It occurred to me how much she disliked her sister’s lover and how incapable he was of responding to her barbs, as if he was unaccustomed to women who did not want anything from him. Amelia may have been besotted with the man but it was clear that Constance was in charge and could whisk her away at any time.

  ‘If it was my book, I’d design it myself,’ said Chaplin, looking towards me with a smile as he sought to edge her away from the conversation and maintain an alliance with me against her, a foolish plan of complicity against a woman of Constance’s humour.

  ‘Oh, good heavens!’ she cried then and I jumped as she let out a roar of laughter that echoed around the room. ‘Don’t tell me you draw too!’

  I continued to see Constance on a daily basis after that and it was she who convinced me not to invest in Chaplin, whose knowledge of his craft had impressed me almost as much as his self-obsession had bored me.

  ‘I’ve heard him talking about his plans before,’ she told me. ‘When he gets very drunk, that is, and starts in on his Alexander the Great philosophy. Conquer the world before you’re thirty and all that. Too late for him, of course. I dare say he will one day start out on his own, but any investors he brings in will get milked dry. Charlie isn’t interested in anyone who isn’t as famous as he is, you see. Celebrity is the only thing that interests him. I’m sure a psychologist could make something of it, you know. He’ll take every cent you own and he may even make you a lot of money in return but you’ll have no control over what he does with it. You’ll simply be a glorified bank, Matthieu. Chaplin’s Savings and Loan, that’s all.’

  To my relief, Charlie didn’t ask me to invest in his ideas anyway, a
lthough I dare say he would have accepted any offers I might have made. We continued to be friends during that year, but it was a slightly distant friendship, linked as it was through Amelia, whom Constance refused to let out of her sight for very long.

  ‘The man’s a lech,’ she told me. ‘It’s one young thing after another. I’m amazed he’s kept up with her this long. I want to be there when he throws her aside though. She’ll be eighteen soon and he’ll want to be rid of her then.’

  My feelings for Constance had grown considerably, to the point where I believed I had fallen in love with her. For her part, she linked her romantic life exclusively to me but showed no great interest in mutual declarations of affection. Passionate cries of ‘I love you’ from me would most often be followed by an ‘Aren’t you sweet?’ or a ‘How kind of you to say’ from her. It wasn’t that she was cold – indeed, she could be extremely affectionate in showing delight at my arrival to take her to dinner or to a show – it was simply that she was suspicious of amorous declarations or any form of public affection. I started to spend most nights at her apartment and considered giving up my house, which was far too large for my needs anyway, in order to move in with her but she urged me to hold on to it, just in case.

  ‘I don’t want to feel that we’re married already,’ she told me, ‘like there’s no turning back. Knowing you still have your own house gives me a sense of security.’

  I had thought of that too and considered asking her to marry me but I had been down that road so many times already with such mixed success that I was loath to see another union go awry, another friendship destroyed. We spoke of our pasts to each other in some detail, although I made sure not to go back further than about 1900 to begin my romantic life. I have always found it best not to bore people with the details of my ageing process as I suspect that their interest in me would be superseded by their interest in it.

  ‘I’ve never been married,’ I lied to her. ‘There was only one girl I ever really wanted to marry but it didn’t work out.’

  ‘Throw you over for another Joe?’ she asked me and I shook my head.

  ‘She died,’ I said. ‘There was ... some trouble. We were both very young. It was a long time ago.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Constance, looking away, unsure whether I wanted consolation or whether she was even the right person to give it or not. ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Dominique,’ I said quietly. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t like to talk about her. Let’s -’

  ‘And there’s been no one else? You’ve never been in love since?’

  I laughed. ‘Oh, there’ve been others, of course,’ I said. ‘I’ve lost track of the number of people I’ve become involved with, and there’ve been one or two of course that I’ve developed strong feelings for, feelings that could rival those I had for Dominique. You, for example.’

  She nodded and lit another cigarette, looking away as she breathed the smoke out through her nose. I stared at her but her eyes refused to meet mine. ‘How about you?’ I asked her eventually, in order to break the silence. ‘When am I going to hear all about your wonderful past?’

  ‘I thought that a gentleman didn’t want to end up with a woman with a past,’ she said with a smile. ‘Isn’t that what all the young ladies are taught? To keep themselves pure and virginal for their husbands?’

  ‘Believe me, I’m in no position to talk,’ I acknowledged with a smile. ‘You’ve no idea how far back my past goes.’

  ‘I’ve never really got involved with people,’ she told me hesitantly. ‘After my parents died, I was left to look after Amelia and I’ve spent the last few years doing exactly that. I knew a few people here and of course there was this place which was left to us, so it seemed like as good an idea as any to stay on. Then Amelia met Charlie and I seem to have been playing the role of chaperone ever since. Sometimes I fear that, at twenty-two, my best is already behind me. I feel like one of those maiden aunts in those novels that Amelia’s always reading. You know the ones, a young girl goes off to Italy and has her corsets loosened by some Roman god while her prim and proper chaperone stands a few feet behind and goes tut-tut-tut.’

  ‘You’re no maiden aunt,’ I said deliberately. ‘You’re about the most -’

  ‘Please, no gratuitous flattery,’ she said quickly, stubbing her half smoked cigarette out in the ashtray as she stood up and walked over to the window. ‘I don’t have any problems with my self-esteem, thank you.’

  ‘Do you like California?’ I asked her after a long pause. A plan was starting to form in my mind, to take her away from the state and these drab people who were already beginning to bore me. Everywhere I looked, people were obsessed only with celebrity, with moving pictures, with a handful of big names and how you could get to stand close to one at a party.

  ‘What’s not to like?’ she asked indifferently. ‘I have everything I need here. Friends, a place to live, you ...’ she conceded.

  ‘How about we take a trip?’ I asked her. ‘We could go on a cruise. The Caribbean perhaps.’

  ‘Sounds wonderful. Would I get to wear what I wanted and put on no make-up whatsoever? Read, rather than watch?’

  ‘If you wanted,’ I laughed. ‘How about it? We could go tomorrow, you know. Or ten minutes from now.’

  For a moment, she looked as if she was about to agree but then her face grew dark and her shoulders sagged and I knew it wouldn’t be on. In a moment, her whole body represented the word ‘disappointment’. ‘There’s Amelia,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave her.’

  ‘She’s old enough to look after herself,’ I protested. ‘And she has Charlie, after all.’

  ‘Two statements, Matthieu,’ she said coldly, ‘which you know to be patently untrue.’

  ‘Look, Constance,’ I said, standing up and taking her by the shoulders, ‘you can’t live your life looking out for your sister. You said as much yourself a moment ago, that you were afraid your best years might be behind you. Don’t let that happen, Constance. Why, you were younger than Amelia when you were left to look after her yourself!’

  ‘Yes, and look what a terrible job I did! Almost eighteen years old and the plaything of some rich movie star twice her age who’ll throw her over in a flash the moment it suits him.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘T do.’

  ‘Maybe he loves her.’

  ‘Ilove her, Matthieu, can’t you realise that? I love her and I refuse to leave her to her own devices until I am sure that she can stand on her own two feet. It may not be that long. Once they break, it will be hard for her but she’ll come through it a stronger person. If she can survive that, she’ll survive anything. Believe me, I know.’

  A long silence followed as her words came slowly towards me and developed a life of their own within my mind. I turned to look at her and sat down slowly as she faced me, her body trying to hold its strength together as she fought to hold back her fear of my reaction.

  ‘You and Charlie ...?’ I asked, shaking my head. Such a union hadn’t occurred to me for even a moment. ‘When ...? When was this? Was it recently? Since you’ve known me?’

  ‘Oh, Lord no, it was years ago,’ she said, pouring herself another drink. ‘Well about two years ago anyway if that’s the same thing. I met him at some party. I was a fan, I was bewitched by him. Didn’t care that he was married. Everyone knew he hated Mildred anyway. Foolish to say he seduced me because he didn’t. I wanted him just as badly. And he was very kind to me, I have to give him that. When we were together, he couldn’t do enough for me. He’s actually a wonderful boyfriend, you know. It was just the ... the manner of parting which hurt.’

  I looked at her and raised my eyebrows quizzically. ‘Go on,’ I urged her.

  ‘It’s ridiculous really,’ she laughed, wiping a tear from her eye. ‘And I don’t come out of it looking particularly attractive.’

  ‘Tell me anyway,’ I insisted. She shrugged wearily, as if none of it mattered any more in her romantic exhaust
ions.

  ‘We were at a party at Doug and Mary’s. It was a birthday party, and I was standing in a corner talking with some small time actor from Essanay who’d played roles in The Bank and A Night In The Show, I think. Charlie had fallen out with him over something – God knows what, something trivial no doubt – and hadn’t brought him over to Mutual with him when he switched studios. Anyway, this kid had fallen on difficult times since then and was asking me to help him out, to get him back in Charlie’s good books or whatever, and I was doing everything I could to get rid of him because if there was one thing I could never stand it was people assuming that, because Charlie and I were a couple, I could get them roles in his films. I decided to bring him over to speak to Charlie, leave them together to sort it all out and go talk to someone interesting instead. I found him out by the pool talking with Leopold Godowsky, the concert pianist who I knew Charlie admired enormously, and reintroduced him to this boy, who he shook warmly by the hand and allowed to join in the conversation. He seemed perfectly happy to have him there. I said I was returning inside to the party and Godowsky said that he would join me. I didn’t think anything of it and we simply stood inside and chatted for a few minutes. I told him I had heard him play once in Boston, when I was a child – my father was an enormous fan. He was flattered that I remembered the performance and told me some story about an overweight soprano who drank snake juice to improve her voice, which made me laugh. And that was all there was to it as far as I was concerned. Afterwards, as we drove home, Charlie said nothing at all to me and I could tell that he was angry about something but I was feeling tired and didn’t want to humour him by asking what it was so I pretended to fall asleep until we got there, at which time I went inside and up to bed. I didn’t want to return home to Amelia that night, hoping that whatever quarrel he had with me would have blown over by the morning.

  She was shaking as she told the story, avoiding my eyes, and I wanted to go over and hold her but decided to stay where I was, not wishing to interrupt her telling of this story, something which I suspected she had never done before, not even to Amelia.