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.
About the Author
Gilbert Adair published novels, essays, translations, children
’s books and poetry. He also wrote screenplays, including The Dreamers from his own novel for Bernardo Bertolucci. He died in 2011.
Copyright
First published in 2009
by Faber & Faber Limited
Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA
This ebook edition first published in 2014
All rights reserved
© Gilbert Adair, 2009
Cover illustration by Tavis Coburn
Cover design by Faber
The right of Gilbert Adair to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly
ISBN 978–0–571–31978–7
And Then There Was No One Page 20
