And Then There Was No One

Chapter Six

The Q & A over, the room echoed with a communal exhalation of breath, followed by leg stretchings, finger-joint crackings and cigarette-lighter clickings. I inserted my notes between the pages of the copy from which I had read aloud. Folding up his own sheaf of notes, Jochen offered me all the standard reassurances after a public talk of this kind – how well it had gone, how gratifying were both the number and quality of the audience’s questions. I only half-listened to him, distracted as I was by the already forming queue of dedication-seekers anxious for me to inscribe their copies of Die unveröffentlichte Fallsammlung von Sherlock Holmes and other, earlier translated books of mine which had absolutely nothing to do with what Nabokov somewhere describes as ‘a hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likeable private detective’ and weren’t, many of them, even mystery novels. (But one learns not to be picky in these matters. A book sold is a royalty earned.) I was also distracted by my attempts to ascertain what Evie was up to. My field of vision was obscured by diversionary activity, however, and I failed to spot her.

The last of my courtiers having borne off her inscribed copy – ‘To Hildegard With Best Wishes From Gilbert Adair’ – I was finally free to accept a Gauloise from Jochen and a glass of white wine from one of three circulating trays. And there, all of a sudden, she was. Elbowing a path through my fellow writers – I saw Sanary glare at her as his own glass, one he happened to be holding up to the light, was all but knocked out of his hand – she waddled towards me in her crimson suit, for all the world like the Red Queen, twirling her trademark tricorne hat around a chubby forefinger. But wait, hadn’t that hat been one of my inventions? I tried to remember if she had been wearing it at Carmen’s dinner party. Or had she since decided to adopt a few of the manners and mannerisms which I had given her namesake in my book? But she was almost upon me now, so I stepped down off the dais and walked forward to meet her.

‘Holy Rwanda!’ she exclaimed. ‘Or would you prefer “Great Scott Moncrieff!”?’

I laughed lightly. We shook hands, and I continued to hold hers in mine.

‘Evie! Evie, Evie, Evie. I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you. But why didn’t you let me know you were attending the Festival? Or are you by any chance,’ I asked, ‘the famous Mystery Guest?’

‘Me?’ she boomed out, just as I had always had her do in my books, again causing heads to turn, and it instantly dawned on me that the snort I had heard during the Q & A must have been hers. ‘I’m not nearly famous, or mysterious, enough. No, my coming here was one of those last-minute decisions. I arrived just in time to be too late, ha ha! Arrived this very afternoon, as a matter of fact. I missed the opening gala, missed all the speeches, missed practically everything, except of course your reading. As you can imagine, Gilbert, yours was one event I was determined not to miss.’

Now what, I wondered, did she mean by that? Was she still holding a grudge about my reprehensible failure to contact her after the publication of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and before that of A Mysterious Affair of Style? Was this the prelude to our long-awaited and, by me, long-dreaded showdown? Since the air around my discourteous treatment of her would sooner or later have to be cleared, better I take the initiative.

‘I say, Evie,’ I boldly began, then at once stalled. ‘But first tell me your news. Are you writing a new book?’

Slyly scrutinising me for a moment or two, she expounded – no, she said:

‘I’ve just finished my latest.’

‘Dare I ask what it’s about?’

‘Why, certainly, my dear. You know me, I’ve never been coy about my work. It’s set in an exclusive boys’ public school, the victim is its universally despised Latin master, stabbed through his Adam’s apple with the tip of a propelling-pencil, and all the usual suspects are present and correct. Except that not one of those suspects is older than fifteen and the murderer himself turns out to be, in accordance with the Detection Club rule that he or she should always be the least likely, the littlest of them all, an evil rosy-cheeked eight-year-old. I’m thinking of calling it Eeny-Meeny-Murder-Mo, a title I’ve stolen from your Mysterious Affair of Style. I trust you have no objection?’

I winced. The moment of truth could no longer be delayed. If I tried changing the subject a second time, I would be twice the coward I already felt myself to be. I had irrationally convinced myself that, just so long as Evie never actually enunciated the title of that second whodunit of mine, there was a chance, a vanishingly small chance, to be sure, but one worth taking nevertheless, that she was ignorant of its existence. Since she clearly was anything but, I would have to bite the bullet.

‘Evie,’ I began again, ‘I think it’s time we talked.’

‘About what?’ she said.

‘About A Mysterious Affair of Style.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes. It was unforgivably rude of me not to get in touch with you when it came out. What am I saying? Even before it came out. I ought to have been in contact with you when I was actually writing the thing. Can I assume you did nevertheless receive your percentage of the advance and royalties?’

‘Yes, I did. For which, many thanks.’

‘Well, I’m pleased to hear that. Yet the truth is that I had not only a financial but a moral obligation towards you. And there, I acknowledge, I let you down miserably.’

‘My dear Gilbert, there’s no need for you to –’

‘Let me finish, please. I took liberties with your image without consulting you first, as I was obliged, contractually obliged, to do. I insist I was as careful as I could be. I trust you noticed, for example, that not one of the casual racist and anti-Semitic gibes that pepper the two books, just as they do Agatha Christie’s, was spouted by your character. But it’s quite true, I should have obtained your authorisation to write a sequel to The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, and I didn’t. And then, in A Mysterious Affair, my having you wager Trubshawe that you’d solve the crime before he did and, if he lost the bet, his having to marry you –’

‘Ah yes, Trubshawe,’ she interrupted me with a heavy sigh. ‘My darling Eustace.’

‘That too was unforgivable. Yet I wouldn’t want you to think it was because I was afraid you might object. Naturally, if you had objected, I’d have scrubbed it without a second thought. I simply didn’t ring you up, don’t ask me why, when the idea popped into my head and, once I had actually written the chapter, well, I suppose I genuinely assumed you’d be tickled by it.’

‘Oh, I was, I was. Tickled pink,’ she replied. ‘Why shouldn’t Eustace and I have tied the knot? Ours was a marriage made in heaven. Pardon the clitch.’

‘Clitch?’

‘Cliché, Gilbert, cliché. One of those nasty things you never stop putting in my mouth.’

‘Touché – or, rather, tootch,’ I answered with a rueful smile that brought a grin to her pasty features.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t affronted by your matchmaking. The less so as it all worked out most satisfactorily. However,’ she went on blithely, as I tried to figure out what she meant by ‘worked out most satisfactorily’, ‘however, I do have a bone to pick with you. A bonelet, really.’

I waited in a state of mute apprehension to hear what she was about to come out with now.

First, she noisily cleared her throat. Then:

‘As you of all people must know, I’m a very private person. I’m not prone to making public knowledge of any distressed state I might be in, except on that one occasion, of course, with Eustace in the Ritz bar when I owned up to my loneliness. But no – no, I was hurt, genuinely hurt.’

‘By something I did?’

‘Yes, Gilbert, by something you did.’

‘Well, but what?’ I asked.

‘If you must know, I was hurt by The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.’

Delaying a moment or two before answering, I let run through my mind a few of the reasons she might conceivably have had for being hurt, for God’s sake, by this new book of mine, but I couldn’t find a single plausible one and finally said:

‘I’m sorry, Evie, you really have lost me. If I thought you didn’t like the book, well, naturally I’d be disappointed, but, after all, it’s a risk every writer faces even with his closest friends. And, to be perfectly frank with you, I flatter myself I’m much less susceptible to criticism than most. It’s – well, take this scarf of mine.* If you told me you didn’t like it, my response would be that I was sorry but that I didn’t buy it to please you. And it’s the same with my books.’

‘Your scarf I do like. Armani, isn’t it?’ She fingered it, tentatively twisting it sideways to check the label. ‘I’m right, as usual. Matter of fact, I like the scarf quite a lot more than the book.’

‘Ah …’

‘It isn’t so much the tome itself, you understand,’ she said, adjusting her pince-nez, ‘as what you might call its ilk.’

As what I might call ‘its ilk’?!! There are words, and ‘tome’ and ‘ilk’ are two of them, that for me instantly disqualify a writer from serious consideration. No matter. Let’s hear what she has to say.

‘What’s wrong with the ilk?’

‘An anthology of apocryphal Sherlock Holmes stories? Such a cheap commonplace idea. You realise that bookshops are swarming with them these days? Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud. Sherlock Holmes and Mata Hari. All of them tosh. I call him – the bogus Holmes – Schlock Holmes, ha ha! And, I must say, Gilbert, I would have expected something more original of you, even when you’re wearing your pasticheur’s hat.’

‘That’s all very well, Evie,’ I replied coldly, ‘and insisting as I do that I know better than anybody, friend or critic alike, what the defects of my books are, I honestly don’t mind that you didn’t care for it. But you still haven’t explained why you were hurt.’

There being no ashtray within immediate reach, I let my cigarette butt drop to the floor, as I had already noticed several others doing, and stubbed it out under my shoe.

Evie glanced down at the squashed butt with deep disapproval etched on her countenance – I mean, she looked at it disapprovingly – and said, ‘You know, Gilbert, leaving a cigarette end on somebody else’s floor is like using somebody else’s loo and not flushing the toilet.’

Now I myself flushed. Without bothering to explain that I was merely following a precedent, I picked up the offending little number-two and stuck it into my trouser pocket.

‘Well,’ I asked again, ‘are you going to tell me what it was that hurt you?’

‘Haven’t you guessed? It’s the fact that you wrote two ingenious whodunits of which I was the heroine, they were marketed by Faber as the first two parts of a trilogy and yet, for a reason of your own that I cannot begin to fathom, you elected not to write a third. You dropped me flat without so much as a by-your-leave. And for what, I ask you? A pastiche of Conan Doyle. As though the world needed another.’

To my surprise, I was touched by her admission.

‘Evie,’ I said, not quite, damn it, striking the half-tender, half-ironic tone I was aiming for, ‘if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were jealous.’

‘Please don’t insult me,’ she peevishly replied, ‘by calling me jealous. Eustace once tried pulling that stunt and got what-for for his pains. I used the word “hurt”, and “hurt” is as far as I’m prepared to go. I was hurt because, without warning, without warning me, you cut short a series of whodunits that were already critical and commercial successes. Why, Gilbert, why? I really don’t understand.’

I answered in a measured voice that, if I’d done so, it was for a strictly aesthetic reason. For all my efforts to have the second novel ring as many changes on the first as was organically feasible within the generic conventions I was pastiching, there remained a stubbornly samey something about A Mysterious Affair of Style which long afterwards nagged at me. And not only at me. One reviewer, praising the book, had also expressed disappointment that I had taken an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it’ attitude to the first of the cycle, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.

‘For me,’ I said, ‘another mark of a real writer is that he – or she – fixes things which aren’t broken.’

‘How very aphoristic of you. But I must tell you, Gilbert, even if you cannot, I myself can envisage many new adventures for my namesake to solve, and just as many variations on Agatha’s titles, and I give you advance warning that I shan’t quit this town before I’ve persuaded you to come around to my way of thinking.’

This was beginning to sound faintly alarming. I have never read a word of Stephen King, but I once saw a goodish film version of one of his thrillers, Misery, about a writer writhing helplessly in the castrating clutches of his most devoted fan, and I knew how he felt. I needed rescuing before Evie’s discourse took an even more sinister turn. Peering over at my fellow writers, who were still tribally closeted together, I succeeded in catching Sanary’s eye. Desperately but discreetly, I trained a ‘For Christ’s sake, get me out of this’ face on him; and, after a few agonising moments when he did no more than return my look of beseechment with one of bland bemusement, he finally, indolently disengaged himself and came across to join us.

‘Oh, there you are,’ he said as convivially as he ever managed to say anything to me. ‘Looking for you. Wanted to congratulate you. Excellent performance. Some sharp one-liners. Wasted on that audience, though. Except that I did notice you making a scribbled note after each of your zingers. Do I assume that to mean you were mentally filing them away for subsequent recycling? Wise man. For the writer, nothing counts but print.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I murmured. ‘Nowadays … the Internet … all those blogs …’

‘Nothing to do with us,’ he said. ‘The Internet is an infinite library of goggle-eyed, Google-eyed ignorance and stupidity. If you don’t believe me, Google Tolstoy. Google Dostoevsky.’

‘Google Gogol,’ Evie piped up unexpectedly.

‘Indeed, Google Gogol,’ Sanary said with a giggle, for the first time giving Evie a once-over of sidelong curiosity. ‘Mark my words, the day literature comes to an end, it won’t be because nobody writes any longer but because everybody does. Hey, that’s not bad either.’ And he hurriedly drew a little notepad out of his blazer pocket, extracted a slender silver pencil from its hollow spine and jotted down his off-the-cuff mot.

Vaguely indicating Evie, I asked him, ‘Do you two know each other?’

‘No,’ he said, ‘I have not had that pleasure.’

‘Evadne Mount, Pierre Sanary.’

‘Glad to meet you,’ she said, extending a hand. ‘Any friend of Gilbert’s is a friend of mine.’

He gazed into her face for a moment without saying a word, then raised her hand to his own face and, to my amazement, for it wasn’t at all his style, brushed his lips against it.

‘Evadne Mount!’ he squealed. ‘Well, sacred blue!’

Now it was my turn to gaze at Sanary. Although I felt still somewhat put out by Evie, she was in many ways dear to me and, despite those silly retro-affectations of hers, I had heroically refrained from lampooning her in either of my whodunits; or, if I had done so, there could be no mistaking the affectionate intent, could there? Yet here was Sanary already making fun of her, so it seemed, at their first encounter. Or was an oblique compliment being paid to both of us at once?

Evie, for her part, was unfazed by, or possibly unaware of, what was for me his inadmissable levity.

‘Why, Monsieur Sanary,’ she simpered, ‘and just what am I supposed to make of that exclamation?’

‘A thousand pardons, Mademoiselle. It was not of my intention to be rude. It is only that I did not know you were here in Meiringen. If I had known it, you may be sure I would have sought you out at once. I am a great admirer of yours – also, naturellement, of Alexis Baddeley.’

‘You are?’

‘Mais oui – but yes. I surprise you?’

‘You do a bit.’

‘Why?’

‘Monsieur Sanary, I won’t dissemble. I know you by reputation, of course, who does not, but I must make an embarrassing confession. I have never been able to read your books, even in translation, even your one thriller. I’m afraid they’re too intellectual, too theoretical, for my little grey cells, as I suspect,’ she couldn’t resist adding, ‘they’d also be for Hercule Poirot’s. My own novels are entertainments, you know, designed to while away an agreeable hour or two. Yours – well, yours, by contrast, are so very cultural.’

‘Poof, Mademoiselle! I too write to entertain. “It is hardly worth writing”, as Raymond Queneau once said – or, as his lipogrammatical clone, Raymond Q. Knowall, is quoted as saying, in the e-less-ese of Georges Perec’s La Disparition, so admirably recreated in equally e-less English-ese as A Void by our mutual friend here – “it is hardly worth writing if it is simply as a soporific.” Very true, no? As for what you call “culture”, whenever I hear that abominable word, I reach for not the pistol but – how you say? – the pinch of the salt.’

This was the limit. Poor Evie, so marinated was she in her own image, an image partly of my doing, she quite failed to realise that she was being mocked. Yet there was no excuse for Sanary’s distasteful send-up of her and if, at that moment, the others had not also suddenly joined us, all of them visibly itching to share some exciting new piece of news, I would certainly have taken him to task, tricky as it would have been without hurting Evie’s feelings.

The exciting news was the long-awaited arrival in Meiringen of the Mystery Guest. While chatting to Meredith about the Hungarian writer Agota Kristof† (arresting name!), on whom, before returning to the States, she intended to pay a visit in Zurich coupled with a pilgrimage to the tiny cemetery in Clarens, near Montreux, in which Nabokov’s remains are interred, Düttmann had received an agitated call on his mobile. Alerted by the queeny desk clerk, whom I imagined all a-quiver, he had at once rushed off to the Sherlock Holmes Hilton. Not, however, before communicating the news to Meredith on condition that she keep it to herself at least until an official announcement had been made to the media: i.e. to the one seedy journalist from the local rag assigned to cover the Festival. Actually, Meredith took so long to overcome her scruples – ‘I really don’t think I ought to tell you who it is. I mean to say, I had it from Tommy in confidence. There could be consequences …’ – that, before she eventually blurted out the Mystery Guest’s identity, the canny Sanary had already deduced it from not much more than the strange fact that seemingly nobody from the Festival had been warned in advance when he was due to arrive either at the airport or at the hotel itself.

It was (you’re ahead of me, Reader) Gustav Slavorigin, who had secretly flown in on a British military plane and made an unscheduled landing on Swiss soil at some hush-hush airfield in the mountains.

Why, I instantly wondered, had Slavorigin accepted the invitation? Had he grown so stir crazy that the prospect of spending forty-eight hours as the guest of honour of an unpretentious but also unprestigious literary festival in the Bernese boondocks struck him as a heaven-sent break from the frustrations of day-in day-out isolation and confinement? Was it, indeed, the event’s very third-ratedness which tempted him, as offering him a chance to be fêted as the literary lion he knew himself to be without the concomitant risk of exposure that he would run at some higher-powered do, assuming there even existed such an event in the world of books?‡ This, for me, was the real mystery of the Mystery Guest.

Intriguingly, when we started comparing notes, we discovered that, with two exceptions, Evie and Hugh Spaulding, we had all had previous encounters with Slavorigin.

As I wrote earlier, he and I had been contemporaries at Edinburgh University. Sanary, for his part, had written a lengthy, controversial article in the Tribune de Genève, one later reprinted both in Libération and the New York Review of Books, laying out side by side half-a-dozen quite lengthy passages from Wayfarer, a novel I described in this memoir’s Prologue, and half-a-dozen near-identical passages from an obscure Bulgarian novel published in the nineteen-sixties, one little-read but passionately admired by those few who had read it. He also implied that if Wayfarer, ‘translated into thirty languages’ as the blurb of the paperback edition trumpeted, was never published in Sofia, it was not for the reason offered by Slavorigin himself, that he could comfortably write about his native land only if he knew that nobody in it, and in particular his own close relatives, would ever read him, but rather that he was fearful of being caught red-handed in an unforgivable act of plagiarism. Slavorigin threatened to take legal action but, for whatever reason, confined himself in the end to writing a stinging response in, precisely, the New York Review of Books. He accused his assailant not only of feigning a fluency in the Bulgarian language which he didn’t possess – although, in actual fact, Sanary had made no such pretence, having depended for the nitty-gritty details of his exposé on an acquaintance of his, a Bulgarian-born academic in the Department of Slavic Languages at the University of Basel – but also of professional jealousy born of personal talentlessness. Displaying, in his counter-response, a lofty disregard for Slavorigin’s ad hominem insults and insinuations, Sanary made the further point that Wayfarer wasn’t the first occasion on which the Anglo-Bulgarian author had, as he coyly but killingly phrased it, ‘cherry-picked another man’s brains’: A Sensitive Dependence on Initial Causes shared its premise of a suicide’s last day on earth with Le feu follet, a semi-classic novel, conveniently unread beyond the French hexagon, by Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, a dandified tombeur de dames, a Nazi collaborationist and an eventual suicide himself. And since these were unlikely to be the last of his thefts, it would be interesting, he concluded menacingly, to know what some more thorough translingual investigation might still uncover.

Meredith had interviewed Slavorigin for the Paris Review in the immediate wake of the scandal provoked by Out of a Clear Blue Sky. They hadn’t got on. She had thought him odious, and near as dammit said so in print, odious above all for his derisive attitude towards September 11. As for Autry, who had met him around the same period, he stated only, without elaborating on its relevance to his view of the man, that he himself had witnessed the fall of both Towers from the twenty-seventh storey window of his publisher’s office. Finally, unknown to any of us, including me, it transpired that Jochen had actually been the German translator of Slavorigin’s first novel, Dark Jade. He, too, had found him a handful. Why, we asked.

‘Well, as most writers would, I suppose, he wanted me to translate his novel as literally as possible without doing violence to the language I was translating it into. Naturally, I had no problem with that, and so I rendered the title as Dunkle Jade, which in German does mean nothing more than Dark Jade. But Slavorigin wasn’t satisfied. To his English ear, he told me, dunkle was a silly-sounding word. He asked me if it wouldn’t remind German readers, as it reminded him, of dummkopf. I assured him it wouldn’t. He still wasn’t satisfied. And he got his way, his pig-headed way. The book was eventually published as Lust. What a title! Not to mention that it had already been taken by Elfriede Jelinek. The man may be a genius,’ he said calmly, ‘he’s also a dummkopf himself. A fucking buffoon.’

For a writer it always comes as a slight shock to hear his translator pronounce a word he himself has never asked him to translate, especially if it’s one of the f-words. There was a silence. Then Evie, who couldn’t abide silences, spoke up.

‘As somebody once said, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride.’

‘Sure and begorrah!’ exclaimed Hugh. ‘That it is!’

I thought my head would burst.

* I always wear a scarf. It’s an indispensable element of my ‘look’.

† Author of The Notebook, The Proof and The Third Lie, all well worth reading.

‡ For better or worse, and probably better, we writers have no Cannes Festival of our own, no waterfall of a red carpet cascading down the steps of the Palais, no superstar poets, novelists or essayists, no pulchritudinous chick-lit starlets coyly mislaying their bikini tops on the plage.