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 bould
ery 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.
And Then There Was No One Page 19