And Then There Was No One

Epilogue

Everything converges at last. In silence Evie and I walked through the lovely, dark, deep woods like Eva Marie Saint and Cary Grant in North by Northwest. Suddenly, when we emerged into open ground, she came to a halt. Glancing in my direction, she took a few timid steps forward and peered over our path’s missing edge; then at once, and more nimbly than I might have expected, considering her age and weight, she nipped back in again. At the same time, we both became aware of a low, distant roar drowning out the beats of our two thumping hearts, the roar of what, at the climax to ‘The Final Problem’, Conan Doyle describes as ‘a tremendous abyss, from which the spray rolls up like the smoke from a burning house’.

‘Why, it’s the Falls,’ Evie croaked. ‘We’re directly above the Reichenbach Falls.’

‘Naturally we are,’ I replied. ‘Where did you think we were?’

‘Yes, but – but – I don’t understand.’

‘What is it you don’t understand?’

Blinking, she looked around her.

‘Where’s the souvenir shop I visited this afternoon? The funny little funicular? Where, to the point, are the railings? Shouldn’t there be railings here?’

‘Oh,’ said I, ‘haven’t you got it? We’re some distance away from all the props of so-called “civilisation”. Think of one of those tricks of perspective which vulgarising mathematicians have such a fondness for. The eye is so fixated on the sheer drop of the Falls it tends not to register that they’re also several hundred yards wide.’

‘Uh huh …’ she mumbled pensively – stop it! – while continuing to back off.

Thus far things had gone my way more smoothly than I had dared hope. No one had observed our quitting the hotel together; nor, along the mountain path, had we passed any rustic busybody who could have borne subsequent witness to our having been out in each other’s company. To cap it all, the moon had begun to rise on schedule. Yet I was still very nervous. I badly needed a cigarette – ‘the only new pleasure modern man has invented in eighteen hundred years,’ wrote the French pornographer and belle-lettriste Pierre Louÿs – and to hell with the alliterative linkage of tobacco and taboo. I had stopped smoking, it’s true, but I remained jammed at the fragile phase when I made certain I always had a full pack, plus a functioning lighter, somewhere about my person. So from my jacket pocket I drew out my new pack of Dunhills, poked a cigarette between my lips and held the lighter up to them. Except that it wasn’t the lighter at all. To my great mortification, it was a tube of Polo Mints, of almost identical shape and size, which I kept in the same pocket, kept there, ironically, I guess the word has to be, for one of those crises when I just had to have a cigarette and then had to disguise the fact that I’d had one.

While Evie muffled a guffaw, I pulled the real lighter out and shakily lit my cigarette at last.

‘May I have one?’ she said.

‘You don’t smoke.’

‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

‘If you put it like that, then I suppose I’m asking you.’

‘Who says I don’t smoke?’

‘Well …’

‘I’ll tell you who. You.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes, you. In those two whodunits of yours. It’s something you made up about me without consulting me first. Like a lot else.’

‘What are you saying? You’re actually a forty-a-day addict?’

‘No,’ she answered wearily, ‘but I do enjoy an occasional ciggie. Are you going to offer me one or not?’

‘Certainly I am,’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid, though, I can’t oblige with Players or Senior Service.’

‘Dunhills were also smoked in the thirties, if that’s the point you’re making.’

‘How would you know? You weren’t even born then.’

‘I looked it up on Wikipedia. When I was researching one of my books.’

I held out the blood-red pack and lit up her cigarette. And, I have to say, unlike the Evadne Mount of my whodunits, she did appear to be at ease with it, horsily exhaling the first intake of smoke through her leathery nostrils before, like an old hand, giving its glowing tip a brief inspection.

‘This, I assume,’ she said, ‘is the condemned woman’s last cigarette.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Come now, let’s not play games with one another. Why else would you bring me here if not to try and kill me? Just like Conan Doyle. The jealous author rids himself of a character who has started to upstage him by hurling him – or, in my case, her – over the Reichenbach Falls.’

‘Pah! You aren’t nearly as famous as Sherlock Holmes.’

‘And just whose fault is that, Gilbert?’

I was beginning to have a real problem containing my detestation of her.

‘But it is why you brought me here, isn’t it?’ she went on, unperturbed. ‘To try and kill me?’

‘You keep saying “try”. Why? As even you must realise, in this lonely colonnade of trees there’s nothing – nothing and no one – to prevent me from succeeding.’

‘I might be armed.’

‘I know you’re not.’

‘How so?’

‘You wouldn’t have got through security at Heathrow with a pair of nail-clippers, let alone a pearl-handed pistol, and you’ve certainly had no opportunity of obtaining a gun in Meiringen. Switzerland isn’t some banana republic of despots and sexpots, you know, where a moustachioed moocher in a soiled white suit will happily exchange a second-hand revolver for a few greasy greenbacks.’

She ejaculated again.

‘Despots and sexpots! Greasy greenbacks! God, that’s just so typical of you! There’s not a single reader out there who needs to be told that Switzerland isn’t a banana republic. But you – you don’t think twice about breaking the rhythm of your narrative if it means taking time off to admire one of your own irrelevant metaphors. Who do you think you are? Vladimir Nabokov? A Scotch McNabokov? The Nabokov of Notting Hill? Vlad the Impostor? As dear Cora would have said, puh-lease!’

That stung. ‘They weren’t metaphors, they were alliterations,’ was all I was able lamely to answer.

‘Same difference. They stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs.’

‘Stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs, did they?’ I jeered at her. ‘Poor Evie, no one’s ever going to compliment you on the originality of your metaphors.’

‘The point, Gilbert, is that you’ve always been such a narcissistic writer. Which is why you’ve never had the popular touch, not even when writing whodunits. No one but himself loves a narcissist, or even likes a narcissist – and, I must tell you, Jane and Joe Public know in advance that, because of your overbearing egotism, there’s going to be precious little room left in your books for them.’

‘Oh, the banter! The banter!’ I cried, like Conrad’s Kurtz.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ she remarked with, in the circumstances, such amazing coolness I set to wondering whether she knew something I didn’t. ‘We’re wasting time. Are you going to tell me why you murdered Slavorigin? And don’t bother pretending you didn’t. We’ve come too far along the road, and we’re too close to the end of the plot, for that.’

‘You who know everything,’ I replied, ‘why don’t you tell me?’

She took a last puff on the Dunhill, then flicked the half-smoked cigarette over into the ravine with the sort of effortlessness that comes only with practice.

‘Since you ask, I’m rather inclined to believe it was a crime passionnel. To be more precise, a long-deferred crime passionnel.’

‘Explain.’

‘Naturally,’ she opined – said! said! said! – ‘naturally, when I understood that you and only you could have been the murderer, I started sniffing around for a motive. I immediately ruled out money. I could observe, from the queasy way you circled each other when you were introduced, that you and Slavorigin were more than merely professional literary acquaintances. But no matter how sketchy a picture I had of your shared past – if any – I simply couldn’t conceive of a relationship which would involve your gaining financially from his death. There was of course his prestige as a writer, a prestige you most certainly envied – ah, envy, Gilbert, envy! – although not enough, surely, to provoke you to murder. Which seemed to leave just one motive – sexual jealousy. You had both been at Edinburgh University and at much the same time. Notwithstanding his night at the Carlyle with Meredith, he was homosexual, which it’s obvious you are as well, obvious even if you hadn’t written that disgusting Buenas Noches Buenos Aires book. He was attractive, which you obviously aren’t. And when you and he first met all those years ago, he must have been out-and-out gorgeous, which even then you could obviously never have been. Ergo –’

‘What a witch you are!’ I cried.

‘So I have touched a sore point?’

‘For pity’s sake, no clichés. This isn’t one of your whodunits.’

‘I have, haven’t I?’

She was right. It was too late to lie. Almost forgetting why we were there, although in reality not at all, I decided to tell her about Gustav and me.

Yes, it was in Edinburgh that we first met – at, of all improbable settings, an orgy.

He was sitting alone, in profile from my point of view, curled up on the carpet, his back resting against an unoccupied divan, in uncannily the pose of Flandrin’s Jeune Homme assis au bord de la mer. His naked arms were wrapped around his knees and his head was tilted so far forward, concealing four-fifths of his face, that his eyes were invisible to me. It wasn’t even his body as such but its linear silhouette which attracted my attention, from the nape of his neck and his shiny shoulder-blades down along the perfect curve of his back.

He lazily uncurled himself and steered his gaze straight at me. He was darker than most in the heavily curtained room, with foppishly lank black hair, black eyes, brilliantly white and even teeth, and a wispy burnt bush of chest-hair. We looked into each other’s faces for a moment or two, and I started to wonder if he was wordlessly inviting me to join him when he himself stood up and picked his nimble way through the snake pit between us.

Once at my side, smiling, he said a single word:

‘Gustav.’

At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard right and I asked him to repeat it. He did, this time I understood and answered in kind.

‘Gilbert.’

I at once felt confident enough to raise the stakes.

‘Shall we …?’

He smiled again, but shook his head too and said something that was ridiculous if also, when you think of it, magnificent.

‘Not here.’

‘Not here?’

‘I’m with somebody,’ he explained, turning to look over his own shoulder. Then, smiling still, he patted the two pocketless sides of his naked body.

‘This is terrible. I want to give you my number, but I’ve got nothing to write it on. Or with.’

‘Then just tell me,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll remember.’

He did, and I did.

‘How terribly, terribly poignant,’ Evie broke in, ‘but could we please get to the other end of the story?’

‘The other end?’

‘When and why you fell out.’

Ignoring her, I continued.

Our first date took place just two days later in a pub that I had never frequented. He arrived before me, but only by literally a couple of minutes, so he insisted. And there was something wonderfully topsy-turvy to me about meeting, fully clothed – to this day, if I close my eyes, I can see his black Saint-Laurent jacket, pale grey slacks, grey-black roll-neck pullover, black untasselled loafers – about meeting a stranger, which he still was, who had been stark naked when I originally set eyes on him. So vivid in my memory was that earlier encounter that, the first thirty minutes we spent together, the spectral afterimage of his nudity had the effect of rendering his clothing all but transparent.

Evie’s echoing boom again disrupted my reverie.

‘What in God’s name have a Saint-Laurent jacket and a pair of black loafers to do with anything? Get on, won’t you!’

That night we went straight from the pub to his digs, practically without exchanging a word, and became lovers. Three days later, I moved in with him.

Oh, he was adorable! During the sixteen months of our cohabitation Gustav remained such a boy, what the French call a grand gamin, distracted by everything about him, by an interesting-looking ballpoint pen that he would insist on clicking for himself, and clicking again, and again; by a camera, any camera, anyone’s camera; by a slimline pocket calculator; by a fleeting face in the crowd, even one that wasn’t, for how could it be, a patch on his own.

As for his body, every single part of it – his shoulder-blades, the hollows behind his knees, the hairy, aromatic spaces between his toes – became for me an erogenous zone. There should perhaps be another word for ‘we’, a separate grammatical form, when it refers to two people in love. A ‘singular’ we?

Yes, we sometimes bickered, and not always tenderly, each of us boasting a kitty of pet tics that set the other’s teeth on edge. He was driven to silent rage – silent because, for the longest time, he said nothing to me of his exasperation and it was only when I asked what was eating him that he let me have it – driven to rage, I say, by my habit, when wondering whether or not to buy a book, of pawing it in the bookshop for minutes on end before, having at last made up my mind, picking up another copy, an unpawed copy, unpawed by me, to carry off to the sales counter. I felt likewise about his habit of wedging taste-drained wads of chewing-gum on the undersides of chair castors and the paper-lined insides of kitchen-cabinet drawers; also of his forgetting, as if it were the most delightful quirk in the world, where he had parked the Mini whenever we sleepily staggered out of some club at five in the morning.

We shared our lives, I repeat, for sixteen months. Gustav was the first to graduate, in the summer of the following year, with a B.A. in English. But he hung on for several months afterwards in Edinburgh, except for an overnight stay in Sofia for the hundredth birthday of one of his two surviving great-grandfathers. Later that year, in August, we spent a squally fortnight together in blisteringly hot, madly gay Mykonos.

Then the bombshell dropped. (Cue a heavily ironic sigh of relief from Evie.) First, without a word to me – to be fair, our relationship by then was fast deteriorating and I already suspected him of several infidelities, although none that couldn’t have been forgiven in the fullness of time – without a word to me, he packed his things and moved out. Next, I read – I read, Reader, in the Times Literary Supplement! – a review of his first novel, a novel about whose existence, about the very fact that he had written a novel at all, I knew nothing, nothing! (In the one conversation we had had, on the telephone, in the immediate aftermath of his departure, he let slip that he had taken three proof copies of the new novel to distribute to his wealthy Bulgarian relatives, to earn himself some moral air miles, as he put it, there being an inheritance in the offing, so he could surely have laid hands on a fourth to give to me.) I knew absolutely nothing of a 244-page work of fiction most of which he must have been writing during those sixteen months. But where? In the University Library? On the never too busy first floor of the Arts Café? In our own flat when I was asleep?

If that weren’t evidence enough that this high-falutin’ first novel of his, Dark Jade – a copy of which I had to buy for myself in Waterstones – had been deliberately written behind my back, there was also the fact that it was undisguisedly autobiographical and that the character of Robert, the hero’s clingy, shabby, talentless lover, was just as undisguisedly based – rather, debased – on me. Added to which, there’s not a single mention of my name, not one, in the index of A Biography of Myself!

‘So,’ said Evie, ‘my hunch was right. Revenge for a sexual humiliation. Adair or Ardor …’

A faint odour of goat droppings emanated from deep in the bracken.

‘No, you’re wrong,’ I answered. ‘It wasn’t sexual humiliation. A long time ago I learned how to put that kind of setback behind me. The book itself was the humiliation, the book and his having written it and published it without warning me, exposing to the world my private little squalors and meannesses, causing me to look an ass before I’d had the time to launch my own career as a writer.

‘Oh, Evie,’ I cried, and I could hear myself grinding my teeth, ‘how often I prayed that he would die of Aids, that he would pass away alone, incontinent, disfigured, a wrinkly sleeping-bag of piss and shit! Well, it didn’t happen like that – the creep was always lucky in love – at cards, too. He broke my heart and now at long last, thirty years later, I’ve broken his, literally. But basta. We’ve talked enough.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ Evie went unflappably on, curse her, ‘that his humiliation of you may actually have been responsible for your own literary success, such as it is?’

‘What’s this you’re saying now?’

‘That perhaps you became a writer yourself out of your need to compete with him.’

‘More dollar-book Freud. I tell you, nothing, neither forevisions nor extenuations, nothing can erode the craving for vengeance and the bliss of having at last exacted it. What joy it was actually to watch that arrow pierce his chest. So much more gratifying, now I think of it, than if he really had died of Aids at a stranger’s hand. A stranger’s cock.’

‘There you go again. Can’t resist it, can you, the verbal quip? Even in circumstances as extreme as these.’

‘I’m glad you realise they are extreme,’ I answered drily. ‘And yes, you are right, Evie. I did bring you here to kill you. And it’s your own advice I’m going to follow, the advice I attributed to you in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd. Remember? In the book’s penultimate chapter I had you hold forth on how to commit a successful murder. Since you patently don’t remember, let me quote you, so to speak: “If you really want to kill somebody and walk away scot-free, then just do it. Do it by pushing your victim off a cliff or else stabbing him in the back on a pitch-black night and burying the knife under a tree, any tree, any one of a thousand trees. Don’t forget to wear gloves and be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you. Above all, eschew the fancy stuff. Keep it simple, boring and perfect. It may be all too simple, boring and perfect for us writers of mystery fiction, but it’s the kind of crime whose perpetrator is likeliest to get away with it.”

‘Evie, I’m going to take a leaf out of your own book. My own book, I should say. I’m going to take that excellent advice of yours and eschew the fancy stuff. I’m even going to adopt the first of those two specific options you offer – pushing the victim off a cliff. The Falls are a bonus.’

‘Hold it there!’ she exclaimed. ‘Surely you can see how wrong that would be?’

‘Of course I can see it’s “wrong”! I’m not an idiot.’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘What, then?’

‘Don’t you realise you simply cannot kill a fictional character? When Conan Doyle attempted to do away with Sherlock Holmes, his readers were so incensed he was forced to bring him back to life.’

‘Neat, Evie,’ I said, ‘very neat. As you would say. But please don’t get it into those little grey cells of yours that I too may later change my mind. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, when you go over, you stay over.’

That truly was enough talk. A tremor of excitement tickling my spine, I started to advance towards her. From the look on her face, a look conventionally expressive of not much more than mild bemusement, I deduced that, despite her having voluntarily introduced the subject herself, and despite everything we had both said since, she still found it hard to credit that I was actually prepared to murder her. It was only when I had got close enough to catch a whiff of her halitosis that she took a first – if not at all panicky – backward glance as though trusting that there might even then be a way out of the situation she had got herself into. Whatever was its cause, her serenity suited me fine. Yet I really couldn’t afford to give her the time to come up with a last-minute escape-route, if such existed, the more so as I wasn’t about to begin grappling with her à la Holmes and Moriarty. If it was going to be done, it had to be done at one go.

My heartbeats drowning out the roar of the Falls, thunderous as those were, lowering my forehead like a bull squaring up to a matador, I abruptly charged at her and butted her hard between her Alpine breasts. She shrieked. She started waving her arms as if in preparation for flight. Then she fell straight back, head first, over the edge of the cliff.

I myself at once peered over. I watched her drift down, down, down, as if in soundless, weightless slow motion, circling about herself like an overweight ballerina on points or like the Falling Man in his heartbreakingly nonchalant drop from whichever one it was of the Twin Towers. It felt as though an eternity elapsed before she disappeared beneath the torrent.

I stood for a few minutes, breathing thickly, a stitch in my chest such as I hadn’t known since my adolescence. Trembling, I drew out my pack of Dunhills. But in my haste, before I had succeeded in removing one, I caused a half-dozen more to spill out onto the grass, one after the other, like tiny white bombs from an aircraft’s belly-button, as seen in so much grainy newsreel footage. That wouldn’t do. What had Evie, my Evie, said? ‘Be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you.’ I hurriedly picked them up and stuffed them back any old how into the pack. Except for the last one, which I lit and inhaled so deeply I thought I would faint. Slowly, slowly, my heart stopped racing. I’d done it.

Unusually, I lit and smoked a second cigarette, if this time only halfway along. As with the first, I squashed underfoot what was left of it and popped the butt into my trouser pocket. I glanced at my watch. Seven-twenty. The whole beastly business had taken only forty minutes, twenty for the stroll from the hotel, twenty more for the deed to be done. Where would Evie’s corpse eventually wash up? And when? Or would it have become so mangled on the river’s bouldery bed that the only part of her to survive the fall, and the Falls, would be her shattered pince-nez, dangling bathetically from some muddy bouquet of reeds? That wasn’t my concern, frankly. Wherever and whenever the old bat’s body surfaced, I would be far away, probably back in Notting Hill, as surprised as the rest of the world to read of her disappearance. And if some newspaper solicited an interview with me, a not unlikely eventuality considering how our names had been conjoined by my pair of whodunits (but were they and she and I that famous?), then why not? I’ll do anything to sell a book.

It was time I hastened back to the hotel and discreetly rejoined my fellow guests. Would it be politic, I wondered, if I myself were to raise the alarm – after, oh, an hour or so – by alerting the company to Evie’s absence? Or should I entrust that duty to Düttmann, say, and confine myself to subtly prompting him if need be? Or else simply say nothing? Better play that one by ear.

And it was when I was just on the point of retracing my steps through the forest, but hadn’t yet backed off from the Falls, that to my horror I saw a hand worming its way up over the edge of the abyss. It crept forward finger by finger like some unnameable spidery thing, but it was a hand nevertheless, an elderly person’s liver-spotted hand, knuckles slimy with moss, declivities between the fingers crusted with wet gravel. Paralysed, I felt my face go grey and, if I hadn’t clapped my two hands over my mouth, I would have thrown up on the spot.

Drawing support from a clump of bracken it had blindly caught hold of, the thing, the hand, was now joined by its twin. I wanted to die. I wanted to run away, back, forward, right, left, it didn’t matter, just away – but I couldn’t. I could only mutely look on as the two hands were followed by a head – Evie’s head! It was like the climax to one of those splatter movies when, after being pummelled, garrotted, filleted, set alight and blown to invisible smithereens, the terminally mangled villain succeeds yet again in pulling himself together and running ever more amok. Her hair dishevelled, her eyes blinking convulsively behind her clouded-over pince-nez – yes, she was still wearing them! – Evie laboriously dragged her fat, sodden body onto the path and lay there for a few minutes, belly up, puffing and panting like a giant beached sea-cow. Then she slowly got to her feet and stood facing me.

I recovered at last a semblance of my voice.

‘This can’t be happening!’ I spluttered. ‘You’re dead!’

‘Oh no, I’m not,’ she replied, extracting a sliver of wet fern from between the two most prominent of her false front teeth.

‘But you must be!’

‘I tell you I’m not.’

‘But how could you have survived that fall? How could you not have drowned?’

She looked at me with more contempt on her face than I have ever seen on any set of human features, then let loose a bitter, hoarse, peculiarly horrid laugh.

‘Because I’m a cardboard character!’ she cried. ‘I’m made of cardboard – and cardboard floats!’

‘What?!’

‘How does it feel to be hoist on your own petard, Gilbert? For all your much-vaunted, much-flaunted “affection” for the genre, you’ve remained such an elitist that you simply cannot help patronising not just whodunits themselves but those who write them and those who read them. You used me as your protagonist, not once but twice, yet instead of taking the trouble to flesh me out, physically and psychologically, you allowed yourself to fall back, again and again, on the crudest of stereotypes. Even my so-called trademark tricorne hat you pinched from Marianne Moore! And if any critic picked up on that crudeness, why, you would airily retort that it was all part and parcel of your postmodern pastiche of Agatha Christie!

‘You made yourself absolutely critic-proof, didn’t you? If the writing was brilliant, it was yours; if it was bad, it was poor old Agatha’s. Neat, very neat. Except that, in your case, it wasn’t out of postmodern playfulness so much as laziness and sheer downright incompetence that you fabricated a character as shallow and two-dimensional as I am. You may have described me as plump, even just a few sentences ago as fat, but we both know that I’m as thin and flimsy as the paper I’m printed on.

‘And that was also your undoing. Poetic justice, Gilbert. When I landed at the foot of the Falls, I merely bobbed along on the surface of the current like the page of a book – like this page, if you will, of this very book – until I got ensnarled in a conveniently overhanging branch. Disentangling myself, I crept and crawled and clawed my way back up the cliff. Oh, I won’t deny it was frightening at times, but there wasn’t a chance of its ever proving fatal. You can’t drown paper. Or cardboard. Or me.’

‘You’re not just a witch,’ I screamed at her, ‘you’re a bitch! A real f**king c**t! Eeyow!’

Blood started spurting from my martyred mouth. It felt as though I had just stuffed a thicket of nettles down my throat and it took me a moment to understand that what had shredded it could only have been – I repeat, this cannot be happening! – it could only have been that mouthful of asterisks! Asterisks that belonged to Evie’s style, not mine!

‘That’ll teach you to be foul-mouthed in the presence of a lady,’ she crowed at me. ‘And what it also proves is that I’m now by far the stronger of us two. It’s only by exploiting me as your heroine that you’ve enjoyed any real public success. Gilbert Adair the postmodernist? What a joke! What a farce! What you don’t seem to realise, Gilbert, is that this is 2011. Postmodernism is dead, it’s so last century, it’s as hopelessly passé as Agatha Christie herself. Nobody gives two hoots about self-referentiality any longer, just as nobody gives two hoots, or even a single hoot, about you. Your books are out of sight, out of sound, out of fashion and out of print, but you just won’t let go, will you? You just won’t give up. Even now, even in this very chapter, even with this very conceit – the author failing to kill off his own best-loved character – you’re hoping to seem more postmodern than Borges or Burgess, Barth, Barthes or Barthelme. Botheration, now you’ve got me doing it! But it won’t work, Gilbert. Nothing, I repeat, nothing will ever again work for you without me. Your need of me is a lot greater than my need of you.’

‘That’s not true,’ I moaned, ‘it’s simply not true. I won’t let you say what you just did. My books, my earlier books, they were all widely reviewed, well-reviewed too, very well-reviewed, sometimes out-and-out raves. A Closed Book, for example. A Closed Book was a bestseller in Germany.’

‘The translator probably got more out of it than you put into it.’

‘So was The Dreamers in Italy.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, you’re right, The Dreamers was a bestseller in Italy. But why was that, Gilbert?’

‘Why? Because … because …’

‘Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Your legendary love of words would suddenly appear to be unrequited. Well, I’ll tell you why. Because Bernardo Bertolucci turned it into a film. The good reviews you received for the novel were all thanks to him. The sales likewise. It’s true that when you were a film critic yourself you championed the director as auteur – “autoor”, as Philippe Françaix would put it. According to you, the writer existed merely to serve the director’s every whim, or so you claimed, and you were probably sincere, except that, when it came to your own script, adapted from your own novel, it hurt, it smarted, that it was Bertolucci who got all the attention. Admit it.’

‘I won’t!’ I shouted back, no longer caring how easily I could be overheard. ‘You’re wrong, quite, quite wrong! I was pleased to – I was pleased –’

‘You’re growing weaker,’ said Evie, ‘tragically weaker. You’re beginning to stutter and stammer, and on the pages of your own book too. You know what that means, don’t you? It means that your powers as a writer are waning, they’re slowly, slowly ebbing away. Don’t worry, though, I’m going to take you under my wing.

‘That grotesque notion of yours of writing what you had the unmitigated nerve – at your Q & A, remember – to call “a work of genuine depth and ambition”? As though a thriller were a mere frippery, a piffling piece of hackwork, a trifle tossed off on a wet Sunday afternoon when one has nothing better to do! Well,’ she said, grinning grimly, ‘that’s the first change I mean to make.’

‘No …’ I whimpered.

‘What I see is a whole series of whodunits starring me. There are plenty more Agatha Christie titles you’ll be able to pun on. Evil Under the Sun, for instance. That’s just crying out to be retitled Evie Under the Sun. And then there’s that personal favourite of mine among her books, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans?. All you need do is give that name a tweak or two, Gilbert, and, hey presto, Why Didn’t They Ask Evadne?. Child’s play.

‘Wait, I see things more clearly now. Not just starring me, by me. “By Gilbert Adair and Evadne Mount”. That’s only fair, it seems to me. Hold on, hold on. Even fairer would be “By Evadne Mount and Gilbert Adair”. Ladies first, after all. Age before beauty. Now there’s a compliment, Gilbert. Take it when it’s offered you. Actually, the more I think about it, yes, the more I think about it, fairest of all would be “By Evadne Mount with Additional Dialogue by Gilbert Adair”. Don’t you agree? It’s certainly how I envisage our future modus operandi.’

This was hideous, this was the worst yet. I had always suspected that Evie was mad. Now I knew it. Our future modus operandi? The prospect was unendurable. And that, yes, I could do something about.

While she was gearing up for yet another tirade, I quickly walked over to the edge, took a few seconds to gaze down into the Falls’ azure, into that tremendous abyss ‘from which the spray rolled up like the smoke from a burning house’, and without uttering another word, without even addressing a swift silent prayer to my own Creator, my own Author, my own Autoor, I leapt out into space.

The very last thing I saw in this world was Evie flapping her podgy hands in the air. The very last thing I heard, just before I disappeared beneath the river’s spumy surface, a rash of bubbles rushing up to fill to their brims the inviting sevenfold void of my mouth, nostrils, eyes and ears, was her cry of ‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’, faint and far-off but still too terrifyingly audible.

And then there was no one.