And Then There Was No One

Chapter Three

In the early morning grisaille of September 10, just as I was irritably about to ring up the local minicab firm to remind it of my existence, I was collected outside my flat and driven off to the hell-on-earth that is Heathrow.

There I queued for nearly half an hour among a crowd of vacationers at a British Airways Economy check-in counter, only to learn to my fury, for my e-ticket was irresponsibly mum on the matter and I had assumed that the Festival, like most of its kind, would cut corners where its less than A-list guests were concerned, that I had after all been booked into Business Class. Two long hours later, I was finally aboard the plane, waiting for it to taxi out to the runway. Beside me, occupying a single seat, cutely belted in by a single seatbelt, were a pair of cherubic little boys (their parents sat across the aisle), just out of babyhood, identical twins identically dressed, chattering their heads off in American accents – Mid-West was my guess – as though compensating for all those months when neither of them could talk. It was distracting, and continued to be distracting during the flight itself – as always on plane journeys, I’d brought with me a computerised chess set and was forced, in order to give myself a decent chance in spite of the racket, to lower the machine’s own level of skill a notch or two, with the result that its game instantly went off – but I really didn’t mind. The chatter of my two little neighbours was so adorable that, had I not feared arousing parental suspicion, I would have joined in.

At Zurich a jewel-bright sky dazzled the airport’s multiple glass façades. I was met by the Festival’s director, Thomas Düttmann, in his late twenties, hence quite a bit younger than I had expected, preppily bow-tied and tousle-haired, with (like a lot of total strangers, I tend to find) one physical idiosyncrasy that took some getting used to: in his case, a nervous tic in the left eye whose beat accelerated in tandem with what I would later discover were intermittent fits and fevers of excitability. He shook my hand and relieved me of my suddenly inadequate-looking sole piece of luggage, a battered metal valise. At his side stood Hugh Spaulding, who had arrived twenty minutes earlier from Gatwick and struck me as even veinier and more crumpled than I remembered him. He sported (the appropriate verb) a bookmaker’s checked, three-piece, almost parodically Irish tweed suit and a tie patterned with miniature huntsmen hallooing every which way, more than half of them upside-down. Over his right shoulder was slung a drab fawn mac, and a pair of bulging overnight bags sat at his feet. He remembered me too, greeting me with a beery ‘Hello, Gil, long time no see.’ He was smoking, and I accepted a cigarette from him, my first in the four hours of the trip. Then we climbed into a waiting Mercedes, Hugh and I together in the roomy back, Düttmann in the front seat next to the driver, and set out on what was to be the spectacularly scenic route to Meiringen.

Along the way Düttmann told Hugh and me that, like all the Festival’s guests, we were to be put up at the Sherlock Holmes Hilton.

‘It is not, I think, the best hotel in town,’ he said to us over his shoulder. ‘Oh, very nice, but three stars only. Its name, you know, was what you British call the “clincher”. How could we resist the name?’

He explained, superfluously for Hugh but not for me, since I hadn’t been listed in the Festival’s emailed flyer as one of its speaking guests, that I would be ‘on’ that very evening, Hugh the next day after lunch. So far, he said, his eye blinking softly, it had all been a great success. And since we had quite a lot of free time before the evening’s events, possibly we would like, once we had checked in and freshened up, to visit Meiringen’s famous Museum.

‘It is a must. Near the hotel and displaying choice exhibits which will please you both, I am sure.’

Staring moodily out of the window at an unending succession of mountainside chalets – I reckoned he already had a craving for another cigarette – Hugh offered a grunted affirmative, while I, a tactful old pro who knew what was expected of me, said that that sounded a very nice idea.

‘But, Herr Düttman –’

‘Please call me Thomas.’

‘Thomas. I wondered when we’d be able to see the Reichenbach Falls.’

‘Tomorrow afternoon, sir. We shall go together after Mr Spaulding’s talk. A grand excursion has been arranged and the Mayor of our town has consented to make a speech.’

‘Just one thing more. I noticed you referred to this evening’s “events” – events in the plural. Does that mean another writer is also due to give a talk tonight?’

He shook his head. Immediately following my reading there would be a special screening of Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, a film with ‘the immense British actor Basil Rathbone’, which neither of us was obliged to attend. ‘Indeed,’ he added, ‘I am afraid you will be obliged not to attend for, while it is being shown, we plan a dinner for all our guests in a fine restaurant, followed by some nightclub dancing.’

I replied that I had seen the film, and it was evident that Hugh, who had ceased to contribute much to the conversation, cared only for a fag.

‘Has the Mystery Guest arrived?’ I asked.

‘Not yet. We have not been informed exactly when he [so it was a he] is due. But we have organised a formal reception in his honour tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock in the Kunsthalle. Our Mayor will again be in attendance.’

‘And Umberto Eco?’

The tic again.

‘Unfortunately, he could not be among us. An illness in the family, I believe.’

‘H’m,’ I muttered to myself as our car squeezed through the mountains. ‘He’s not at all superstitious, I see.’

‘What’s that you say, Mr Adair?’

‘Oh, nothing,’ I replied.

*

The Sherlock Holmes Hilton turned out to be far more gemütlich than Düttmann’s bet-hedging phraseology had intimated. Although not inspiring when we first glimpsed it on the drive which led up to its forecourt – an anonymous-looking, not especially lofty skyscraper that I guessed had once been an apartment complex – it had an airy, high-ceilinged lobby that, in Britain, would certainly have earned it a fourth star. And, as comic relief, the reception desk was manned by a prissy middle-aged queen who at once trained his Gaydar eye on me when opening my passport at my name and birthdate in order to copy them into the register.

Also to my pleasant surprise, my room was actually a suite, its furniture pale and beigey, smelling immaculately of lavender soap and flowers. From its tiny balcony was visible, in one direction, the town of Meiringen itself and the mountains beyond; in the other, just about, the Reichenbach Falls. It had, moreover, that absolute essential, a deep full-length bathtub, in which I hurriedly showered before rejoining Düttmann and Spaulding downstairs for our visit to the Museum.

The only drawback as I could see at short notice, but it was one I had anticipated, was the bed. It was of the Continental bolster-and-duvet type, and I also anticipated an ordeal of tossing and turning even before I managed to fall asleep, as my blind limbs tried to find just that posture that would allow them to make sense of their surroundings during the night. Incidentally, on each of its two rock-hard bolsters – it was a double bed – a gift-wrapped sweet had been laid. When I unwrapped one of them, I found a small meringue inside it. I at once thought ‘meringue’ and ‘Meiringen’ and how coincidentally close to anagrams of one another they were. It was no coincidence. According to the tourist booklet I leafed through before I finally quit the room, meringues had been invented in Meiringen. I live and learn.

The Sherlock Holmes Museum, too, was less dowdy, less provincial, than in my perhaps cynical and mean-spirited fashion I had expected. It was housed in the crypt of a deconsecrated English church right in the centre of the town, a town whose very Swiss stereotypicality I found conducive to reverie (even if the early-autumn absence of snow on its rooftops lent the whole compact little community the inconsolable air of a flock of freshly shorn sheep). There was, moreover, in the church’s grassed-over grounds, a full-size bronze sculpture of Holmes reclining on a bronze park bench puffing bronze smoke from his bronze meerschaum; and affixed to the wall behind him was an oblong London-style street plaque which read: Conan Doyle Place, Borough of Meiringen.

Oddly, the Museum itself had been left unattended, its rackety little box-office empty. Anybody could walk in, so we did. And it was indeed worth a visit, even if it wasn’t a patch on its double, the official London exhibit at 221b Baker Street.

The main attraction was a mocked-up replica of the cluttered living-room of Holmes and Watson’s digs. Nothing had been forgotten: stuffy late nineteenth-century furnishings; conventional Victorian portraiture; a wall-full of framed snapshots of mostly ghostly oval photos of mostly ghostly oval faces; a sturdy étagère made of Japanese birchwood; the mahogany desk at which one visualised Watson writing up his case histories; a bust, incongruously, of Conan Doyle himself; Holmes’s violin, music-stand, pipes and pipe-rack (although not a hint of the picturesque paraphernalia of his cocaine addiction); a cartoonishly oversized magnifying-glass; a deerstalker cap (does Conan Doyle ever mention Sherlock wearing one? Must check up on that); a blood-tipped arrow (why?) on a half-moon table which had been shoved up against one of the walls; a luridly jacketed copy of His Last Bow lying as carelessly on the same table-top as if abandoned unread next to a faded edition of the Daily Telegraph dating from the teens of the twentieth century; a cryptogram we had neither the time nor inclination to set our minds to; and an evocative miscellany of small and stylish personal effects.

Thirsting for a coffee, we gave the museum shop a miss.* Instead we repaired, as Holmes would have put it, to a nearby café, where I at once recognised Sanary already scrutinising our approach from one of its white terrace tables. In front of him was an exotic pink cocktail, which he was stirring with a swizzle stick, and a rolled-up copy of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

‘I fancy I know where you’ve been,’ he said to Düttmann before the latter had time to make the introductions. ‘The Museum, n’est-ce pas?’

He boorishly pretended to take a moment or two to recall who I was, gave Hugh an expansive handshake, congratulated him on his novels, which I found hard to believe he had ever read, and gestured for us to join him.

I asked him what he was drinking.

‘It’s called a Pink Negro. Vermouth, curaçao, pomegranate juice and a dash of Angastura bitters. Sounds horrible, I know, but the name enchanted me.’

Then, being a man possessed of no small talk whatsoever, he plunged directly into just the kind of learned literary chat I wasn’t ready for, interesting as I knew it would almost certainly be.

To give you a sampling: our conversation having turned to Graham Greene, a writer for whom he, Sanary, had no time or patience (‘Only the British could ever have regarded him as Nobelisable’), Hugh, who seemed to have decided up to that point that he was out of his depth, suddenly spoke up.

‘No, no, old boy, you’re wrong there. I don’t like to be caught pulling rank, etc, etc, but if it’s true only the British thought he should have won the Nobel Prize, it’s because only the British are capable of appreciating his genius. You say he didn’t have a personal style, etc, but what you don’t get is that he had the kind of style that doesn’t call attention to itself.’

‘Pah!’ snorted Sanary. ‘It doesn’t exist, this “style” that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s just a threadbare old alibi you Brits employ to justify the insipidity and impersonality of your writers. I imagine that, for you, Somerset Maugham had a “style that doesn’t call attention to itself”. Am I right? Or J. B. Priestley, for Peter’s sake.’†

Hugh mulled this over for a few seconds.

‘At least you won’t deny Greene had a super gift for dialogue. Ever see The Third Man?’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘Good film, wouldn’t you say?’

‘Yes,’ Sanary cautiously replied, ‘it’s a good film. Not the masterpiece the British seem to think it is, but, I agree, very entertaining.’

‘Well, you remember, etc, etc, it had this big speech about Switzerland? On the Ferris Wheel?’

I was about to interrupt, to point out to Hugh, in spite of being on his side of the fence, that if film scholars were to be credited the speech he was visibly about to recite was now known not to have been Greene’s contribution at all, when I was pipped at the post by Sanary himself.

‘“In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Am I right?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

‘Actually, my dear Spaulding, that speech was written by Orson Welles, not Greene. Not to mention that it was already a plagiarism from James McNeill Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. And I have to tell you, witty as it is, it does suggest that neither Whistler nor Welles knew very much about my country.’

We were all puzzled by this assertion, Düttmann included.

‘Everybody thinks cuckoo clocks are Swiss,’ Sanary went on. ‘They’re not. Oh, we Swiss are happy enough to fob them off on ignorant and credulous tourists. But in reality they come from the Tyrol. The Austrian Alps? So you see, my friends, it wasn’t Switzerland with its five hundred years of democracy which produced the cuckoo clock. It was Austria, the land of Adolf Hitler.’

‘What does that prove?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘Just as the speech in the film proved nothing.’

That was Sanary all over, an infuriating if always beguiling know-all. Except that he also had the unhelpful habit of not knowing when to stop.

‘At least,’ he said, barely drawing breath, ‘at least Welles had the decency to make mention of democracy and brotherly love. Now Hitchcock – he was much worse.’

I looked at him quizzically.

‘Come come, Gilbert, I refuse to believe you haven’t read Truffaut’s book of interviews with Hitchcock.’

‘Yes, of course I have.’

‘Indeed, you must have done. You parodied it, did you not, in your novel A Mysterious Affair of Style. Well, don’t you remember what Hitch said about Secret Agent, his adaptation of Maugham’s Ashenden stories?’

Already tiring of his oneupmanship, I shook my head.

‘I quote [but how did he quote? Did he have a photographic memory?]: “One of the interesting aspects of the picture is that the action takes place in Switzerland. I said to myself, ‘What do they have in Switzerland?’ They have milk chocolate, they have the Alps, they have village dances, and they have lakes. All of these natural ingredients were woven into the picture.”

‘Mais quel con! Natural ingredients? Milk chocolate? Village dances? Village dances?? And Truffaut, cet autre con, instead of suggesting, oh ever so politely, ever so deferentially, that one might have the right to expect a filmmaker of Hitchcock’s stature either to invert or, better still, avoid outright such whiskery old clichés, can only reply, imbécile that he is, “That’s why the spies have their headquarters in a chocolate factory!” And this is what the French affect to think of as advanced theory? What a couple of blockheads! No? No? True? Faux?’

Then, before I knew how it happened, his monologue had turned again – for Sanary there existed no such thing as a non sequitur – to a trio of musical themes, from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un Chant Montagnard Français and Casella’s Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano, all three of which he hummed for us there and then to demonstrate how the composer Bernard Herrmann had purloined them for a few of his best-known scores for Hitchcock’s films. To listen to him, the history of art, of all the arts, was nothing but an unending charge-sheet of theft and countertheft.‡

He mentioned too, now almost as an afterthought, that not the least of the many logical absurdities in North by Northwest, one of the three films, incidentally, whose soundtrack scores he had exposed as second-hand, were the green and improbably symmetrical woods that Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint traverse on their way to the monumental kitsch of Mount Rushmore.

‘I took it upon myself to investigate,’ he declared. ‘There are no such woods,’ adding cavalierly, ‘not, of course, that that matters a jot.’

Düttman, meanwhile, was delighted not just that his eminent guests had taken no time at all to live up to their reputations for argumentative opinionation but also, somewhat contradictorily, that they were all getting on so well together.

As the conversation drew to an end, and Düttmann settled the bill, I was suddenly distracted by an irridescent soap bubble that wafted by my left ear and threatened to pop on the tip of my nose. Then another, and another, then a big fat one, then lots of delicately dainty little ones bumping and bursting against each other: it went on for so long I almost began to wonder if it could be some new, charming and as yet unrecorded species of weather. Turning my head to track it to its source, I noticed at another of the café’s terrace tables, but as far away from us as it was possible to be, the cherubic twins from the flight. Each of them, ignoring the glass of orangeade which stood on the table before him, was blowing a rash of pixilated burps and borborygmi out through a minute eye-glass on a stick. As on the plane, their parents sat apart, intently discussing some matter of import. They too left their coffees untouched and, from time to time, one of them would good-humouredly swat a bubble. Were they in Meiringen, I wondered, for the Sherlock Holmes Festival? It didn’t appear likely. But what other reason could there be?

*

Back in my room, I relaxed for an hour in the tub, before pulling the plug to let the slowly receding bathwater perform a soapy striptease over my recumbent nakedness. Then, feeling much refreshed, I strolled down to the Künsthalle, which was only a ten-minute walk from the hotel, and in its bar met up with Düttmann, Hugh, looking sprucer but with something on his mind, Sanary, who had changed into another, almost identical black blazer, the taciturn G. Autry, who, wearing jeans, a hyper-virile denim jacket and a shapeless Stetson hat in spite of being unrelated to singing cowboy Gene, addressed the one word ‘Hi’ to me, a few hovering members of the Festival’s youthful ‘creative team’ who, I couldn’t help noticing, outnumbered us guests three to one, and Meredith van Demarest.

I take no pleasure in coming clean – as I failed to do, deliberately, I suppose, when I first mentioned her name in this memoir – but, physically, Meredith was a stunner. Like all of us, she wasn’t as young as she used to be – in her mid-forties, most likely – and there was a slightly brassy quality to her slick long blond hair and a glazed Valley vacuousness to her face, which was also blond if you know what I mean. But there could be no denying the fact that that face was almost boringly perfect in form and feature, with its pale tan complexion, sharply highlighted cheekbones and two unexpectedly pitch-black eyebrows. (Was her hair dyed or was it her eyebrows?) Or that her figure caused the long since obsolete, now politically incorrect, expression ‘vital statistics’ to swim up to the surface of one’s memory. She was also tall, far taller than me and, as I watched her swan through the bar of the Kunsthalle towards us, I thought of a blowsily voluptuous B-movie actress whose initials she shared, Mamie van Doren, with the crucial difference that Meredith was an academic, not a film star, a fact which somehow rendered her all the more eyeball-distendingly sexy. As for her behavioural charm, it was, I repeat, of the drawly, eyelash-batting type which is always called ‘disarming’ but which instantly puts me on my guard.

‘Gilbert …’ she said softly. ‘After all these years …’

‘Meredith.’

‘So how are you?’

‘Oh, you know. How is anybody these days?’

‘Mmmm.’

She turned to Düttmann, who took her dry martini off a waiter’s tray and passed it over to her.

‘Thank you so much. You probably didn’t know this, Tommy, but Gilbert and I are old acquaintances.’ (Her ‘probably’ she pronounced as a drawn-out ‘praaahhhly’.)

‘Really? You and – no, I confess I did not know that.’

‘We first met several years ago. Antibes. The French Riviera. How long ago would it have been, Gilbert?’

I had been straining to read what was written on a curiously shaped brooch – of a snake swallowing its own rear end – pinned onto one of the lapels of her grey slim-waisted cotton jacket, and it was only after I had at last made out the words (I think) ‘For All The Women of America’ that I replied to her question.

‘Actually, Meredith, if you think about it, it’s an easy enough calculation. You recall, it was just after September 11. A matter of days after, if I’m not mistaken. So: September 15, 2001, let’s say, to September 10, 2011. A decade almost to the day.’

‘And what a decade it was,’ observed our host.

Meredith smiled. Perfect teeth, natch.

‘You must understand, though, Tommy, that that first meeting of ours was not a success.’

‘No?’

‘No. We definitely didn’t hit it off. I have no desire to reopen old wounds but, as Gilbert rightly remembers, it was just after 9/11 and we were all good, patriotic, united Americans then, and to hell with our ideological quarrels. And no wonder. We thought it was the end of the world, and we wanted a President who would tuck us into our beds with a promise that the bogey man wouldn’t come and murder us in the night. It sounds kind of puerile now, even babyish, but it was real scary back then and I’m afraid Gilbert just didn’t get it. I can’t blame him any more – nobody who wasn’t American could have got it – and it was a long time ago and some of the things he said then, things that seemed obnoxious to me, have since come to make better sense – though if something’s true now it doesn’t necessarily mean it was always true, right? Anyway, even though it took us longer than all of you to see through that asshole President of ours, we finally did. My God, we finally did! As another President once said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.’

I was half-expecting Sanary to inform us that the original of the Lincoln quote could actually be traced back to Chaucer, say, or The Faerie Queen; but, if he had such a notion, he was given no opportunity to share it. One of the ‘creative team’ discreetly raising a wrist, and a purple Swatch wristwatch, to Düttmann’s eyes, the latter requested us all to please finish our drinks and proceed to the lecture hall, where we were awaited by an expectant full house.

* Slightly to my regret, for I never tire of watching how bored tourists, most of whom have lost or else never mastered the art of meaningfully engaging with an exhibition of cultural artefacts in a museum setting, suddenly come alive again in the adjacent souvenir shop, purchasing the tawdriest trinkets and postcards with a gleeful gusto which contrasts conspicuously with the listless respect they have just shown inside the galleries themselves. Shopping is the only real, fully functioning culture left to us.

† Sanary’s English was very good but thankfully not quite perfect.

‡ For a comprehensive inventory of these Herrmannian borrowings, see Sanary’s article ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Hitchcock’, Sight and Sound, volume 18, issue 4, April 2008.