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 re
asoning – 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 pl
ease, 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.
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