And Then There Was No One

Chapter Seven

The restaurant in which we all dined together that evening,* situated six or seven kilometres out of town, was housed inside a pseudo-Palladian pavilion set down in a paradisal, many-acred park. In the dining room itself were more gilt-framed mirrors, ugly ormolu mantelpiece clocks and heavy velveteen curtains than I had ever seen together in any interior. All in all, it was one of those pretentious establishments in which, by a curious paradox, the extortionate prices paid by their clients, prices we could only guess at as the menu gave no indication of what they might be, are also part of what is being paid for.

Sweet and schoolboyish in a sober pinstriped suit which wasn’t, but looked at though it were, two sizes too large for him, Düttmann was already there when I arrived just behind Hugh Spaulding, with whom I’d shared the first of a small fleet of laid-on taxis. About a minute into the ten-minute ride, Hugh had begun a conversation with me that was still ongoing when our driver pulled up in the pavilion’s treelined driveway, which meant that we were obliged to continue talking outside in the cold for a while longer before entering. It turned out that he was in grave financial difficulties.

‘Gilbert,’ he said to me, a pungent aroma of peppermints on his breath, ‘I’ll come clean right off. You know I’m Irish, etc?’

‘Of course.’

‘But what you probably didn’t know is that I haven’t lived in Ireland for the last fifteen years.’

‘No, actually I didn’t. I suppose I just assumed –’

‘The thing is, etc, the taxman didn’t know it either.’

‘Aha, I see. And now –’

‘I know, I know!’

‘I’m sorry. You know what?’

‘What you’re going to say. And you’d be right. The Inland Revenue – the British Inland Revenue, etc – has just found out, etc, etc, that I’ve been resident in this country – I mean, in England – for fifteen years and now they’re chasing me for back taxes, ten years of back taxes.’

‘Not fifteen?’ I asked maybe a bit callously, but I was distracted by his verbal twitch of tacking ‘etc’ onto every other phrase.

‘Ten’s the legal limit, thank God for small mercies.’

‘But can’t you argue that you already paid Irish taxes?’

‘Are you deliberately not getting it, Gilbert?’ he answered testily, lighting a cigarette in defiance of the (even if one had no German) manifest ‘No Smoking’ sign on the glass partition which separated us from the driver. ‘You’re a writer yourself. Surely you’ve heard that creative artists like us are exempt from income tax in Ireland. I haven’t paid a penny in years.’

‘H’m. That’s bad.’ (I started to have an idea where all of this was leading.)

‘Too right it’s bad. It’s worse than you think.’

‘Oh?’

‘I haven’t got it. The old thrillers, etc, etc, aren’t selling so well any more. Last one brought me in £784 in royalties. I used to get twenty times that.’

‘I’m really sorry, Hugh. I had no idea you –’

‘I know, I know! You thought, once a bestseller, always a bestseller. Well, I tell you, it doesn’t always work like that, etc, etc, as you’ll discover for yourself one day. No, no, no,’ he hastily corrected himself, ‘you’ll be all right. You’re bound to be all right so long as you keep churning out your Agatha Christie imitations. There’ll always be readers for stuff like yours, even if it isn’t the real McCoy.’

I was about to disabuse him, to inform him that cod-Christiana, especially if it has been produced by a writer to whose reputation the label of postmodernism has been attached, is no infallible recipe for bestsellers, when he bluntly came to the point.

‘The thing is, your being an old friend of mine [?], in the same line of business, except you’re doing much better than me, I thought you might be able to help me over the hump, etc. As one writer to another, like.’

‘How much do you need?’ I asked quietly.

‘Well …’ I sensed him manfully squaring up. ‘Ten thousand would keep the bastards at bay.’

‘Ten thousand? Ten thousand pounds?!’

His face crumpled up like an empty brown paper bag.

‘Look, if that’s too much, what about seven-and-a-half? Or seven? Even seven would give me a bit of a breathing space.’

The taxi was now parked directly in front of the entrance to the pavilion. We both got out. Puffing, fanning himself with a magazine he must have picked up from the reception desk – the taxi, like everything else in this cold country, had been overheated and his own cigarette smoke hadn’t helped – Hugh adroitly barred my way in, treating me to a long and remarkably frank account of how he had frittered away his earnings.

‘Well, will you help me out?’

‘It’s not that I won’t, Hugh. I can’t.’

I laboriously spelt out to him why not. I cannot claim any originality for my catalogue of excuses, save that they were all true. I told him, for example, that even if my books had done reasonably well, none of them had come close to being a bestseller. That I lived a carelessly unthrifty life myself, basically surviving from one advance to the next. That I had a number of crippling monthly outgoings – because of my Blockley cottage, I paid two sets of utility bills, two council tax bills, etc, etc (as he would say). As for my royalties, fairish as they now tended to be, particularly in Germany, I added, an admission which slightly weakened my case, but demonstrated, as it was intended to, that I wasn’t lying to him, don’t forget that my agent takes fifteen per cent of them and the taxman thirty to forty per cent of what’s left. And, as there was of course a mortgage on my Notting Hill flat, and I was, well, getting on, any loose cash which swum into my ken I had to put aside to reduce that mortgage to a size I could live with, so that even if I did have ten thousand pounds to spare, which I didn’t, I couldn’t afford to lend it to him.

Well before I finished speaking, he had ceased to listen. Hugh was incorrigibly feckless, to be sure, but he was probably no novice in situations of this kind. After only a few words of mine he would have realised he was out of luck. From his vantage point most of what I had just said was redundant.

‘I know, I know! [another tic]’ he snapped at me. ‘Let’s pretend I never asked you.’ And he silently turned away and started to mount the steps into the pavilion. After a moment or two I followed him in.

*

Inside, at the bar, each of us was offered a flute of champagne by a flushed and nervous Düttmann. Hugh swallowed his at one go and grabbed another. I meanwhile asked Düttmann if all the arrangements relating to Slavorigin had proved satisfactory. He fell silent. He asked if I had ever met him. I told him I had and he lapsed into silence again. Then he said:

‘Mr Slavorigin is one of the greats, I know. But he has many peculiarities. Magnificent peculiarities, I grant you, but many none the less.’

I bemusedly agreed with him, then took myself off to the Gents. The palms of my hands were sweating, possibly something I had caught from Hugh.

When I returned ten minutes later, Düttmann had been joined by Meredith, ravishing as ever in a jet-black trouser-suit, Evie, Sanary and Autry, though as yet there was no sign of Slavorigin.

Autry, who was wearing a more formal and less sloppy variation of his usual outfit, his inevitable black string tie held in place by a small and surprisingly stylish clip in the shape of a cow’s skull, stood facing the rest of the company with his two elbows resting behind him on the bar, all the while shifting a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other like some fancy riverboat gambler rotating a coin over, under and around his versatile fingers. From time to time I saw him mutely resist an attempt by Düttmann to have him participate in the discussion in which he, Düttmann, was engaged with Sanary and Evie. I too chose to sit that one out. I could already overhear Sanary, in his maddening element, lecturing them on the subject of some magnificent peculiarity, to borrow Düttmann’s admirable locution, in the movie adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man and I was just not in the mood.† I therefore ended up talking to Meredith, who had, she confessed to me, excused herself a minute before from the same discussion, one which held no interest for her.

Our own conversation was playful but still just a wee bit edgy. Meredith had mellowed. Or perhaps our earlier run-in had been no more than a minor casualty of September 11. At any rate, despite a grating tendency on her part to be busier-than-thou – if I told her I was about to start a new book, then so it seemed was she; if I mentioned that the film rights to my Buenas Noches Buenos Aires were being negotiated as we spoke, she at once had to let me know that she had just done lunch with an extremely hot young Hollywood director, whom she could not possibly name, about the eventuality of her being hired as consultant on a big-budget biopic of Sappho for Nicole Kidman – despite that tendency, I found her, shall I say, a lot more than bearable although even now a little less than likeable.

It was, in fact, while I was chatting to her that, over her left shoulder, I saw him. Flanked by two burly, moustachioed goons, obviously his bodyguards, Slavorigin stepped, shakily, I thought, into the bar. Even after all these years he was charisma incarnate. His gleaming white smile was as agreeable to the eye as the orange glow of an unoccupied taxi in the fading light of a rainy afternoon. His long black hair – this I had only ever seen in gossip-column snapshots – was set in stark relief by a single thick white streak which swept across one side of his squarish head like Susan Sontag’s or Sergei Diaghilev’s (except that in the Russian impresario’s case the white, not the black around it, was its natural shade). He had kept his figure enviably trim and wore a super snakeskin jacket, fastidiously baggy denim jeans and brown suede moccasins.

It so chanced that, as he approached our little group, everyone’s back but mine was turned to him. Putting a finger to his lips, he gestured at me not to give him away. Without having the faintest notion of what he was up to, I complied. He tiptoed over to Meredith, who, as I say, faced away from him, and to my horror clamped both his hands not on her eyes but on her breasts, from behind, and yelled out:

‘Yoo hoo! Guess who!’

She shrieked. Like Cora Rutherford’s in the murder scene of A Mysterious Affair of Style, the stem of her champagne glass snapped in half. Giving Düttmann such a shove in the small of his back he nearly fell over, the two bodyguards made a simultaneous dash forward, their intention presumably to bundle Slavorigin out of the pavilion into some bullet-proof limousine parked in the driveway. Her face a mask of scrunched-up fury, Meredith meanwhile wheeled around as if to berate then castrate the neanderthal galoot who had practically raped her in public. Yet, the instant she saw who it was, she faltered, shuddered, then uttered the single word, ‘Prick!’

Slavorigin, who had yet to acknowledge my presence, treated her to a goatish grin.

‘Merry … Merry …’

‘Don’t call me Merry, you scumbag!’ she cried, while I prudently relieved her of the broken champagne glass.

‘But I don’t understand,’ he went on, now all whiny hurt and puzzlement. ‘What happened to the Meredith I knew that night –’

‘Shut up!’ she shouted so loudly that his minders, who had momentarily scaled back their projected rescue operation, started moving in again.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake go away, you revolting little men!’ Slavorigin barked, dismissing them with a drunken wave of his long feminine fingers. (I had already noticed the silver screw-top of a flask peeping out of the hip pocket of his jeans.)

With the comical deference of emissaries taking undulatory leave of a monarch, Thomson and Thompson, as I had begun to think of them, slowly, silently backed off, and he turned to face Meredith again.

‘That night, that heavenly night, at the Carlyle …’

‘Will you SHUT UP!’

‘What? Where’s that famous von Demarest sense of self-disparaging humour?’

‘Look, if you don’t … I’m going to have to leave. Right now. I mean it.’

‘Please, please, Miss Demarest,’ said Düttmann frantically, ‘I’m certain there’s no call for –’

‘I’m sorry, but I really don’t see how I can stay.’

‘But you mu–’

‘Of course, of course you must stay!’ Slavorigin cut in. ‘I apologise. I’m not sure why I should, but I do. Sorry, sorry, sorry. But I’d just like to add that you look so unbelievably scrumptious tonight I feel like – All right, all right! I won’t say another word. Oh dear. Nobody loves Gustav.’

Then, abruptly, to Düttmann:

‘Say, who do you have to fuck to get a drink around here?’

‘Oh, but the drinks are free of charge.’

Slavorigin smiled, a lovely melting smile, I do admit.

‘You’re adorable. Everybody’s adorable. Everybody but me. I’m a rotter. Well, Tommy,’ he said, squeezing Düttmann’s hand as it proffered him a glass of champagne, ‘aren’t you going to introduce me to your friends?’

‘Of course. I think’ – poor Düttmann looked helplessly in my direction – ‘I think you already know Gilbert Adair.’

‘Ah, Gilbert.’ Slavorigin smiled at me with the phony raffish bonhomie I remembered of old. ‘How are you? God, don’t you ever age? To tell you the truth, I’ve thought a lot about you these past two years.’

This was news to me.

‘You have?’

‘In captivity, you see’ – he sniggered – ‘makes me sound like a panda – in captivity I live on a diet of thrillers. I waded through Agatha Christie – hadn’t looked at them since I was a boy – and when I’d read all of hers, well, naturally, like most of your readers, I guess, I had to make do with yours. Clever contraptions, both of them. You really caught the cardboard quality of her characters. Anyway, they helped pass the time.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Got good reviews, too, I noticed. Deserved to.’

‘Thanks again.’

‘Also a couple of stinkers.’

‘Just one, I think. In the Guardian. Michael Dibdin.’

‘Who died not long afterwards. Spooooky … Still, I do seem to recall there was another. In one of the Sundays. No?’

‘No.’

A silence followed this ersatz jocularity, Düttmann uncertain whether or not he should proceed with the introductions. Observing him with amusement, Slavorigin said:

‘Pinter should be here.’

‘You mean,’ said Düttmann tentatively, ‘he would make the party go with a swing?’

Both Slavorigin and I burst into loud laughter. He gently caressed Düttmann’s blush-red cheek.

‘You know, you really are adorable. Where have you been all my life?’

‘In Meiringen,’ was Düttmann’s naive and winning reply.

Slavorigin laughed again.

‘What I meant, Tommy my darling, was that Pinter should be here with a notepad, taking down all these pregnant pauses.’

‘Ah.’

‘But go on, do your hostess thing. Present me to the other guests.’

Düttmann introduced Slavorigin first to Autry, who shook hands with him but did not speak, continuing instead to transfer his toothpick from one side of his insolent mouth to the other. Then to Hugh, whose thrillers Slavorigin claimed, like Sanary, and all very extraordinarily to me, to have read and enjoyed, and he might well have done, as he cited the title of one of them, Murder Under Par, of whose existence I was unaware. A beaming Hugh suggested that they have ‘a private little conversazione together’, to which Slavorigin, restless eyes already elsewhere, answered, ‘Absolutely!’

The next introduction was to Sanary, which engendered this exchange:

DUTTMANN [to Slavorigin]: May I present Pierre Sanary?

SANARY [extending a hand]: How do you do?

SLAVORIGIN [shaking it]: I’m very well, thank you. You?

SANARY [withdrawing his hand]: I have nothing to complain of.

SLAVORIGIN [withdrawing his]: Good.

DUTTMANN [to Slavorigin with perceptible relief]: Last but not least, I’d like you to meet an uninvited but nevertheless welcome guest of our Festival, Evadne Mount.

EVIE [coyly rebuking him]: Actually, it’s Evadne Trubshawe.

‘Dame Evadne Mount!’ Slavorigin cried. ‘Well, well, well! You’re one of my heroines.’

‘How very nice of you to say so,’ she answered with the simper she seemed to hold in reserve exclusively for compliments. ‘But I’m not a Dame yet, you know.’

‘Any day now, dear lady, any day now. I cannot tell you with what interest I’ve followed your career. Criminology, you know, is my hobby, my violin d’Ingres, as the French say. And I was supine, simply supine, with admiration for the brilliance with which you solved that dastardly crime at ffolkes Manor. Even better, the poisoning of poor Cora Rutherford at – Ealing, was it?’

‘Elstree.’

‘Elstree, of course. Your reasoning – ah!’ Pinching a hollow moue with the tips of his thumb and index finger, he bestowed on them both a big slurpy kiss. ‘Mmmph, what a masterpiece! Only you could have deduced a murderer’s identity from the style of his film. If ever I decide to write a whodunit, I may well ask you to let me use that case as its plot. All names changed, of course.’

‘Always happy to oblige, Mr Slavorigin.’

‘Gustav, call me Gustav. Or Gussie,’ he added with a flourish of his forelock, and I couldn’t help noticing that, the longer he talked to Evie, the swishier he became. ‘Not Gus, you understand, no, no, I won’t have Gus. But Gussie’s nice. Like Gussie Moran, whoever she was. But what was I saying?’ he mumbled, his eyes straining to focus on Evie. ‘Oh yes, Cora Rutherford. I must tell you, Evadne – may I call you Evadne? – your success in bringing her murderer to book was soooh important to me. I was a very great admirer of Cora Rutherford.’

‘Were you?’ exclaimed Evie. ‘Ah, but I don’t suppose you ever saw her on stage? I always say that nobody who saw her only on the films knew the real Cora.’

‘How right you are. But the fact is, I did. I did see her on stage. Just once, when I was a boy, a mere slip of a boy. In Private Lives.’

He turned to me. ‘It’s a play by Noël Coward.’ Then he returned to Evie.

‘She was divine. Of course, if I put a gun at my own back and compel myself to be brutally honest, she was also a teensy-weensy bit too old for the part. Yet she had such star quality, you know, she made everybody else look too young. But what am I thinking of?’

He slipped his hand inside his snakeskin jacket and pulled out an exquisite art déco wallet in pale grey suede. From inside that he took a squared-off wad of folded-up newspaper which he then unfolded in front of us.

‘Her performance was such a formative revelation for me,’ he said, holding up a wrinkled page of newsprint, ‘that I clipped this ad out of the paper and I’ve worn it next to my heart ever since.’

Craning to see for myself, I felt as if I had just had a glistening ice cube forced down my throat. There it was, yellowing but still perfectly legible, an advertisement for the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue: ‘Rex Harrison and Cora Rutherford in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. Second Record-Breaking Year!’ And that second record-breaking year into the play’s run was 1958.

I was, to use one of my favourite words, discombobulated. I must give this one, I said to myself, serious thought. Considering that Slavorigin was born in 1955, it meant that he would have been taken to see Coward’s brittle little trifle at the age of three, which, preposterous as that notion already was, couldn’t in any case have been true since, at least according to his many profiles, interviews, A Biography of Myself, etc, when his family quit Sofia to resettle in London, he himself was four years old. So he definitely did not watch Cora Rutherford performing on stage in 1958! Whereupon, just as I was mentally adding that lie to the ever-expanding inventory of his well-established economies with the facts of his own life, I also mentally slapped my hand on my brow when it occurred to me that, by 1958, Cora Rutherford had lain twelve years in her grave in Highgate Cemetery, having been murdered on the set of If Ever They Find Me Dead, a film shot at Elstree circa 1945 or 1946. Another lie, to which – but, wait, am I crazy or what? Cora was a fictional character – a character invented by me for The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and subsequently killed off by me in A Mysterious Affair of Style! I would surely have swooned had I not half-heard, from the eely black vortex into which I felt myself slide, Düttmann’s voice whispering to me:

‘Mr Adair, are you all right?’

‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. The champagne … I’m virtually teetotal, you know. I oughtn’t to have …’

‘Not to worry. We are going into dinner now. You will feel better when you have eaten something hot.’

I walked into the dining room side by side with Düttmann, who was still anxiously gripping my elbow. Immediately ahead of us, arm in arm, were Slavorigin and Evie. He was telling her that he couldn’t remember the name of the Sunday newspaper in which one of my whodunits had been very unfavourably reviewed and she, lowering her voice, said something which certainly sounded to me like ‘P. D. James in the Sunday Sundial’. A few minutes later, as we stood round the table waiting to be advised by one of Düttmann’s assistants where we were to be seated – there were no place settings – he proposed that they meet up again in London and asked for her telephone number, which he at once entered into his BlackBerry. This time I did clearly hear her answer. The number was Flaxman 3521.

He studied it on the BlackBerry’s microscopic screen.

‘I don’t get it,’ he said to Evie. ‘Haven’t you a flat in Albany?’

‘As though!’ she replied, mangling her colloquialisms as usual. ‘That was just another of Gilbert’s fabrications.’

‘Ah yes, I remember. In A Mysterious Affair of Style. Didn’t he describe it as “the Albany”? A strange solecism for someone so fond of calling himself a perfectionist.’

This I couldn’t let pass, the more so as they appeared to be no longer troubled as to whether they were overheard or not.

‘I knew quite well,’ I said, ‘that it should be referred to as “Albany”, just “Albany”. If I called it “the Albany” in the book, it’s only because I didn’t want to confuse the reader, who might have thought that Evie lived in the real Albany. I mean, the Albany in upstate New York.’

‘As though!’ sneered Slavorigin.

*

At dinner he completely dominated the conversation.

Oh, it was understandable that so world-famous an author should find himself fussed over as he was from the moment we entered the dining room. He was pointed out, not all that discreetly either, by more than one of our fellow diners and, even before we were all seated, an impetuous and enterprising adolescent girl in crotch-high shorts got up from her own crowded table, flounced over to ours and asked Slavorigin if he would consent to be photographed with her. He naturally did consent – I saw the minders stiffen at the tiny wallside table for two they were sharing – she handed a digital camera, along with basic instructions, to Sanary and flung her bare arms about a leering Slavorigin’s neck. Later, when we started giving our orders to the maître d’, he requested, loud enough for the whole room to hear, a rare cheeseburger and a side-order of not French but freedom fries, a witticism that earned him a little round of applause.

It was during the meal itself, however, encouraged by an obsequious Düttmann, that he allowed nobody else to get a word in edgewise. To be honest, it was less his own fault than Düttmann’s, who, unused to relaxing among a group of more or less equally distinguished off-duty writers, managed to transform what should have been a convivial get-together into an excuse to quiz the most distinguished of us all. It was like sitting in on a journalist’s celebrity interview. Or on a dress rehearsal for the onstage discussion with Slavorigin that was scheduled to take place the following evening.

‘Do you use a Mac or a PC?’ ‘A Mac.’ ‘What exactly does Dark Jade mean?’ ‘It’s a title. Titles don’t have to mean anything.’ ‘Which modern writer has most influenced you? Nabokov, perhaps?’ ‘Ah, celui-là, non! Nabokov can’t see the wood for the trees and too often he can’t even see the trees for the mazy corrugation of their barks. It’s as though he tried to corner the market in adjectival ethereality. Just riffle through Lolita. Glossy, furry, honey-colored, honey-hued, honey-brown, leggy, slender, opalescent, russet, tingling, dreamy, biscuity, pearl-gray, hazy, flurry, dimpled, luminous, moist, silky, downy, shimmering, iridescent, gauzy, fragrant, coltish, nacreous, glistening, fuzzy, leafy, shady, rosy, dolorous, burnished, quivering, plumbacious, stippled, and so on, and so forth. Do you know what that fabled style of his has always reminded me of? Fancy-schmancy restaurantese. Not a tomato that isn’t sun-dried and honey-roasted! Not a scallop that isn’t hand-dived and truffle-scented! The man must have shat marshmallows.’ ‘How incredibly funny and outrageous. But tell me please, in your internal exile have you ever given up hope? ‘Ah, Tommy, mein Lieber, hope is as hard to give up as smoking.’

Düttmann finally enquired whether he was at work on a new novel. Slavorigin, now more than a little sozzled – he had also been taking a suspicious number of trips to the lavatory, accompanied by either Thomson or Thompson, it’s true – answered that, yes, he was. ‘Has it already got a title?’ ‘Not quite. I’m currently torn between The Smell of the Lamp – too Jamesian, perhaps? – and The Vanishing Bookmark – too Chestertonian? Or even Moon Drop. You get the allusion, I trust? In Latin virus lunare, a vaporous droplet shed by the moon on certain herbs under the influence of an incantation.’ ‘These,’ said Düttmann, prudently sidestepping the issue, ‘are all first-rank titles.’ ‘Thank you. That must be why it’s proving so hard to choose one over the other.’ ‘And may we ask what it’s about?’ ‘Certainly. Would you [addressing all of us] really care to hear?’ Nobody around the table dared to say no.

Now, it may have struck the reader that, throughout this memoir, I have been pretty rude about Gustav Slavorigin, even though, objectively speaking, and you needn’t take only my word for it, he was a truly awful person. But I am willing to admit that, drunk and all, possibly even drugged to the eyeballs, when he actually did proceed to relate the plot of his new novel to us he held everybody at our table and several others in the seemingly bilingual dining room as spellbound as Wilde when reciting one of his apologues at the Café Royal.

‘The book,’ he began, ‘consists of three separate sections:

‘A Foreword;

‘The Novel, plus Footnoted Annotations;

‘An Afterword.

‘In the Foreword the Author – let us call him G. – details the publishing history of the Novel itself. It was first brought out, he writes, by a small German-Swiss house based in Zurich, Epoca, as a work originally written in the German language and signed by the pseudonymous “D. J. Kadare” – no relation, needless to say, of the Albanian novelist and Nobelist-in-waiting Ismail. The following year, it was published in English by Faber & Faber as though it were a translation from the German. It then started to appear in various other European countries, translated not from the English original but from the German translation. G., however, declines to explain why these subterfuges were necessary.

‘He describes, instead, still rather enigmatically, his own personal need now to write an annotated version of this Novel, one which he realises is unlikely ever to be read by anybody but himself, at least in his own lifetime. It is, he insists, no mere authorial vanity which impels him to do so but a profound compulsion to commit to print the motive which had prompted him to launch upon such a book in the first place.

‘The plot of the Novel – I mean the novel-within-my-novel – is of no importance. Or, if I may put that more candidly, I haven’t yet decided what it’s going to be, and it would only complicate matters anyway. I assure you, though, this is very much less of a barrier to your comprehension of the book as a whole than it may seem. All you need to know for the moment is that its title is Apocalypso.

‘Of greater importance are the Footnotes. To start with, they mainly consist, as you would expect, of strictly informative annotations concerning the real names, places and events that are threaded through Apocalypso itself. Even at this early stage, however, the Reader notes a recurring tendency on G.’s part to confess that he took certain creative decisions – setting its opening section in a theatrical milieu, perhaps, and choosing a heterosexual protagonist – precisely because they belied his own public image as a homosexual theatre hater and baiter. It’s also in the Footnotes that he reprints, like so many literary outtakes, a number of arresting metaphors that he admits to having reluctantly cut from the definitive draft. In fact, as the Reader gradually becomes aware, in a disorienting reversal of conventional practice, they are written in a denser and more overwrought style than the body of the text.

‘Gradually, too, as they come to usurp more and more space on the page, the Reader discovers from the Footnotes that G., a much-lauded, best-selling, Booker-Prize-winning author, had earlier written an unpardonable book, a satirical denunciation of the culture and society of the contemporary United States whose closing chapter mercilessly debunked what he called “the burlesque cult of September 11”.

‘Even before the publication of that book, G. had had a handful of detractors like wolfhounds snapping at his heels. Now, because of it, there is actually a price on his head. A reclusive Texan billionaire, founder and funder of a nationwide network of ultra-patriotic, ultra-hawkish organisations, has offered the reward of a hundred million dollars to anybody prepared to “terminate”, to use his word, this arch-enemy of his beloved America. Since the threat could scarcely be more serious, G. at once goes to ground.

‘He spends the next several months being shuttled from one safe house to another, from Watford to Hendon, from Leighton Buzzard to Welwyn Garden City. From these havens he issues frequent public statements in justification of his book. He plays endless games of Scrabble with his minders. He turns briefly to the Cross, but realises that it offers, for the unconditional freethinker he has always been, a hopelessly inadequate crutch. And it’s when he has finally been driven close to suicidal despair by his nightmarish plight that a solution is proposed to him by an anonymous agent, known only as “Q”, from M16.

‘“There exists,’ says “Q” to G., ‘but one means by which we can guarantee to prevent you from being murdered.”

‘“Which is?”

‘“We murder you first.”

‘The logic, though maybe not immediately obvious, is nevertheless elementary. If the world were persuaded to believe – let us say, by an official statement of embarrassed regret from the British government – that G. has already been murdered, the Texas billionaire would undoubtedly call off his fatwa. G.’s facial features would then be remodelled by plastic surgery, he would be secretly transported out of England and assume a different identity in a different country.

‘At first horrified by the prospect, G. eventually resigns himself to his fate.

‘With his new face, and a new name to match, he moves into a well-appointed ranch-house, an estancia, the Villa Borgese, two hundred kilometres north of Buenos Aires. There, emancipated from the perpetual suspense of his peripatetic life in England, he lives contentedly enough for the first few months, reading, zapping the TV, pottering in the Villa’s lushly overrun gardens. Except that there has, of course, been one imperative condition to his acceptance of this new existence of his. He has been forbidden to write, even more so to publish, a single word. His style is so instantly distinguishable from any other that, even under a pseudonym, he would sooner or later be tracked down.

‘G. is a writer, however. He was born a writer, he will die a writer. Writing for him is not merely a profession, not merely a vocation, it’s a natural, now almost physiological function, one he cannot for ever deny himself. And, one day, when he feels he can no longer tolerate such enforced autism, he conceives of a scheme, an absurdly grandiose scheme, whereby he may actually succeed in trumping fate. It’s true, he owns to himself, that, even before the catastrophe had struck, his reputation was no longer what it had been. Reviewers and readers alike had wearied of magical realism, and their disaffection had been reflected in his once fabulous sales. So what, is his febrile thought, what if he were to exploit his predicament to do what he perhaps ought to have done a long time before – reinvent that too famous style of his?

‘Where once his sentences had been luxuriantly long and serpentine, they would now become short and staccato. Where once his prose had been silvered by ripe, and some had said overripe, imagery, it would now be dry and lapidary. Where once his pacing had been leisurely, it would now be rapid-fire. Of everything he had once done he would now do the opposite. Not only would such a contrarian strategy permit him to continue writing, even (why not?) publishing, not only would it maintain the secret of his true identity, it might even be his regeneration as an artist.

‘And so it proved. Obliged, like the author of an anonymous letter, to camouflage his own all too distinctive écriture, he ruthlessly pruned his prose, focusing solely, even monomaniacally, on the stark self-sufficiency of the external world and thereby mining his way to a shining new simplicity.

‘In the very last of the Footnotes, while informing the Reader how he also arranged, the better to cover his tracks, for Apocalypso to be published first in German translation and only afterwards in English, G. unexpectedly switches, quite literally in mid-sentence, to the present tense. He has just spotted a snow-white monoplane flying to and fro above the Villa Borgese. Later, on the same afternoon, having bicycled down into a nearby village to pick up supplies, he hears from local tradespeople that two American-accented strangers have been making enquiries about its tenant.

‘And there both Novel and Footnotes end.

‘There is, however, a brief Afterword. In this Afterword G. writes, still in the present tense, of the arrival at the estancia of the two Americans, of their cod-Pinteresque conversation with him and of his dawning realisation that their intention is indeed to kill him. Sinister yet at the same time unnervingly polite and accommodating, they allow him to complete the annotated edition of Apocalypso by writing, precisely, the Afterword the reader is in the process of reading. And G. himself takes the further opportunity of expressing his satisfaction that there is henceforth nothing to stop Apocalypso from being published at last under his own name.

‘In the Afterword’s closing paragraph G. recounts the very last minutes of his earthly existence. Considering all the precautions he took – changing his name, having his face surgically altered, living a loner’s life in an obscure Argentinian province, publishing, and in German, a book which bore not the slightest resemblance to any work of fiction he had ever previously written – how, he asks his Nemeses, did they nevertheless contrive to track him down?

“‘Why, sir,” one of them smilingly replies, as though the response were self-evident, “it was your style. That style of yours is quite unmistakable.”

‘Et voilà!’ concluded Slavorigin with all the corny panache of a professional conjuror.

His bravura performance, which I have to say it was, prompted still more applause from virtually the entire dining room, in which, as I had failed to realise, so raptly attentive had I myself been to his storytelling, hardly a word had been exchanged for twenty minutes or so. At our own table, on the other hand, the reaction was, shall we say, mixed. From neither Meredith nor Autry, for example, could be detected any sign of enthusiasm at all.

After responding to Düttmann’s ‘Bravo!’ with a charming little bow, Slavorigin addressed the former.

‘So, Merry,’ he asked her in a voice that had turned slurry again, something it hadn’t been during his filibuster, ‘what did you think?’

‘You know what I think!’ she snapped back at him.

‘No, I don’t. How could I?’

‘You know how repulsive I found Out of a Clear Blue Sky. Okay, a lot of bad stuff has happened since then and maybe we’ve all come to feel differently about things, I know I have, but even so, even so, for you to be so fucking callous and conceited as to return to your offence, an offence some of us might just have been willing to forgive, to return to it like a dog to its doo-doos, no, no, that I can’t take!’

The whole room fell deathly quiet. I felt Evie’s eyes on all of us and on me above all.

‘And what offence is that?’

‘The “poetry of September 11”! For Christ’s sake, those were real people who died in the Towers! Those were real people who leapt to their certain deaths one after the other! “Like globs of wax dripping from two tall twin candles”! That’s what you wrote, isn’t it? Globs of wax? It’s disgusting.’

‘Do try not to misquote me. What I wrote was “globules of wax”.’

‘How dare you make poetry, so-called poetry, out of human agony! How dare you say “They’re only Americans, after all”!’

‘No hypocrisy, please, Meredith,’ he said. ‘When you open your LA Times and you see a headline, assuming the LA Times even bothers to publish such a headline, about some genocidal massacre in Serbia or Sudan, let’s be honest now, don’t you yawn and think, “Oh well, they’re only Serbians or Sudanese” and at once turn the page?’

‘Of course I don’t!’

‘Quite right, you don’t. You don’t even have to. You don’t have to think anything at all. For you Americans indifference to the suffering of others has become so instinctive it’s not even a tic.’

‘You really are a scumbag.’

‘I may be a scumbag,’ answered Slavorigin, a hard and dangerous glitter in his eyes. ‘I’m also an artist, an aesthete. You talk of making poetry out of human agony. Tell me, how long do you suppose Tennyson waited before writing “The Charge of the Light Brigade”?’

Since Meredith made no reply, he swept the table with a glance.

‘No? Nobody? Spaulding? How long?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ Hugh said with a soft belch.

‘Guess.’

‘I dunno. Obviously not long, etc, etc, or you wouldn’t be asking the question. A year? Six months?’

‘Minutes!’ Slavorigin all but shrieked at us. ‘According to his grandson, Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” a matter of minutes after reading a reporter’s account of the massacre in The Times. He waited minutes, I waited five years. A day will dawn,’ he continued tipsily, ‘a day will dawn when the poetry of September 11 has become a cliché. I’m just ahead of my time as usual.’

‘Who gives a shit about Tennyson? Remember what Adorno said –’ Meredith rejoined the conversation before being immediately interrupted.

‘Why must one always quote Adorno to me? “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, right? But there has been plenty of poetry after Auschwitz, poetry and prose and drama and ballet and film and music. What moronic presumption, attempting to dictate to the future how it can or cannot behave. Are we to mourn in perpetuity? Till the end of time? It’s intolerable! The Holocaust has become a religion, an old-time, Old Testament religion of hellfire and damnation, a religion whose Original Sin is the Final Solution. Well, I for one refuse any longer to atone for an offence I never committed.’

With a trembling hand he drew a cigarette from Hugh’s half-open pack of Marlboros and lit it from the small bronze edelweiss-shaped candle that was our table’s centrepiece.

‘Anyway, I wasn’t even the first.’

‘The first what?’ I asked.

‘The first to extract poetry from September 11. Although, to be fair, the poem in question was written some forty years before the event itself occurred and a minor adjustment – oh, no more than three or four words – must be made first.’

‘What is this poem you’re referring to?’

‘Come, Gilbert, have you forgotten the opening quatrain of Nabokov’s Pale Fire?

‘I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

‘By the false azure in the window pane –’

‘As I say, all it needs is a minor adjustment.

‘I was the shadow of the hijacked plane

‘By the false azure in the window slain –’

‘Stop him, somebody!’ Meredith cried out.

‘I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I

‘Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.’

An ugly, sarcastic grin disfigured the lower half of his still beautiful face.

‘“The smudge of ashen fluff”. How vividly prescient of sly old VN, don’t you agree?’

Hurling her napkin onto the table, exactly as I remembered her doing at that little straw-roofed, sun-dappled beach restaurant in Antibes, Meredith stood up and, without a word of apology to Düttmann, or to the rest of us for that matter, stalked out of the dining room. I caught Evie’s eye. There was a momentary drop in tension as if our table had struck an air pocket.

Although he had undoubtedly won the argument, quite literally seen Meredith off, Slavorigin didn’t at that moment have the air or aura of a victor. He had a killjoy’s mean and petulant expression on his face and I suspect, given his natural and of course now long-frustrated gregarity, and despite his well-documented relish for controversy, he had not on this occasion actively sought to provoke a squabble, thereby spoiling the evening for everyone, and had hoped instead that the résumé of his new novel would have prompted such warmth and sincerity of praise it would remain uncontaminated by the lingering rancour of old enmities. His vanity as a writer, a creative artist, an aesthete, as he had just defined himself, had been badly wounded and for once, in public, he cut an almost pitiful figure.

It was to me he spoke next.

‘Gilbert, what did you think of it?’

‘I liked it a lot. I particularly admired the way you write, or plan to write, on a theme which is very close to you, even autobiographical, yet you manage to distance yourself from that theme through the novel’s form and also, I presume, its language.’

‘Autobiographical, eh? Perhaps. Except that I haven’t been murdered.’

For a brief instant the word ‘yet’ seemed to hover between us.

‘Mrs Trubshawe?’ he said to Evie.

‘Oh, delightful, quite delightful!’ she trilled. ‘If a bit over my head, you know.’

‘Sanary?’ (Hugh’s opinion, probably to Hugh’s own relief, seemed not to interest him.) ‘Is this yet another of my “borrowings” in your view?’

‘No comment,’ Sanary silkily answered him. ‘But please,’ he added, ‘don’t take that personally. It’s my nature. Rather, it’s my nationality. Like all of my compatriots, I was born neutral. If I offered you an opinion, I would instantly cease to be Swiss.’

‘In other words, blah blah blah.’

He finally turned to Autry.

‘What about you, laughing boy? Have you nothing to say?’

‘Well, okay, I’ll tell you,’ Autry eventually replied, removing the toothpick from his mouth. ‘I read your book. Out of a Clear Blue Sky? Yeah, I read it all right. We all did. And, you know what, I felt a lot of hatred in that book, a lot of hatred. What they call self-hatred.’

‘Self-hatred?!’ echoed a stupefied Slavorigin.

‘That’s what I said. For me it was a book by somebody who really loves America, but hates himself for loving it.’

Although I myself thought this to be pure dollar-book Freud, I overheard Sanary whisper to Evie, ‘Nom d’un nom! I think he is – how you say? – right.’

*

After dinner we were all, Meredith excepted, chauffeured back into town and, as had been promised by Düttmann, on to its one and only disco. A disco, I call it, but it was no ordinary disco. By coincidence, considering the setting of Slavorigin’s new novel, what was danced there, by men and women, by men and men, also by women and women, was the horniest dance in the world, the Argentinian tango.

We commandeered a ringside table, ordered what everybody else seemed to have ordered, Bacardi-and-Cokes all round, and settled down to enjoy as we could the smoky spectacle.

But even before we were served our drinks, an almost hiplessly slim young stranger, not effeminate though obviously gay, wearing a white vest that clung wetly to his breastplate of a chest and a pair of chinos so loose about the waist we could read the brand name of his white underpants, approached our table and asked Slavorigin if he cared to dance. Thomson and Thompson were having a quiet drink at the bar, but their charge turned to the rest of us as if we had some sort of right to mind. We, or some of us, managed to eke out glassy smiles of benediction and, hands clasped, they strode onto the floor.

God, they were good! Slavorigin really did know how to dance. I watched him as he and his partner clamped themselves onto each other’s now electrically taut, now sensual and yielding torso. I watched how, his head tossed back, he would brusquely stamp his feet in a ferocious tango tantrum while his partner raised a single black boot behind him, casting a furtive glance at its heel as though in fear that he might have trod on something unmentionable. I watched too how, glissando after glissando, every joint and pivot of their bodies would click magnetically together, before terminating in a perfectly timed four-legged splits.

When, still hand in hand, they walked back off the floor, Slavorigin whispered in the ear of the sweaty young stranger, who began smiling and nodding, just smiling and nodding. Then, as they were about to reach our table, they abruptly unclasped hands and went their separate ways. Watching his partner disappear into the crowd, Slavorigin reclaimed his seat beside us, his long legs sprawling sexily under the table.

I myself slipped unobtrusively away half an hour later, and I have no idea when the evening ended for the others.

* Except for Jochen, who had to fly off to Hamburg, where his presence had been requested at another literary festival the very next day.

† Sanary, strangely, had a voice that was both soft and metallic, even piercing at times, and, although I tried not to eavesdrop, I still couldn’t help hearing the essential of this latest bee in his bonnet. In case any reader is curious, it concerned the fact that in Hammett’s novel the eponymous thin man is actually the victim, the victim of the murder on which its plot revolves, and not the detective. Hence the titles of the five film sequels which followed the first adaptation itself – After the Thin Man, Another Thin Man, Shadow of the Thin Man and so on – made no sense whatsoever. For once I already knew that.