And Then There Was No One

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘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.

  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 Slav
origin 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.