Now what, I wondered, did she mean by that? Was she still holding a grudge about my reprehensible failure to contact her after the publication of The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and before that of A Mysterious Affair of Style? Was this the prelude to our long-awaited and, by me, long-dreaded showdown? Since the air around my discourteous treatment of her would sooner or later have to be cleared, better I take the initiative.
‘I say, Evie,’ I boldly began, then at once stalled. ‘But first tell me your news. Are you writing a new book?’
Slyly scrutinising me for a moment or two, she expounded – no, she said:
‘I’ve just finished my latest.’
‘Dare I ask what it’s about?’
‘Why, certainly, my dear. You know me, I’ve never been coy about my work. It’s set in an exclusive boys’ public school, the victim is its universally despised Latin master, stabbed through his Adam’s apple with the tip of a propelling-pencil, and all the usual suspects are present and correct. Except that not one of those suspects is older than fifteen and the murderer himself turns out to be, in accordance with the Detection Club rule that he or she should always be the least likely, the littlest of them all, an evil rosy-cheeked eight-year-old. I’m thinking of calling it Eeny-Meeny-Murder-Mo, a title I’ve stolen from your Mysterious Affair of Style. I trust you have no objection?’
I winced. The moment of truth could no longer be delayed. If I tried changing the subject a second time, I would be twice the coward I already felt myself to be. I had irrationally convinced myself that, just so long as Evie never actually enunciated the title of that second whodunit of mine, there was a chance, a vanishingly small chance, to be sure, but one worth taking nevertheless, that she was ignorant of its existence. Since she clearly was anything but, I would have to bite the bullet.
‘Evie,’ I began again, ‘I think it’s time we talked.’
‘About what?’ she said.
‘About A Mysterious Affair of Style.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘Yes. It was unforgivably rude of me not to get in touch with you when it came out. What am I saying? Even before it came out. I ought to have been in contact with you when I was actually writing the thing. Can I assume you did nevertheless receive your percentage of the advance and royalties?’
‘Yes, I did. For which, many thanks.’
‘Well, I’m pleased to hear that. Yet the truth is that I had not only a financial but a moral obligation towards you. And there, I acknowledge, I let you down miserably.’
‘My dear Gilbert, there’s no need for you to –’
‘Let me finish, please. I took liberties with your image without consulting you first, as I was obliged, contractually obliged, to do. I insist I was as careful as I could be. I trust you noticed, for example, that not one of the casual racist and anti-Semitic gibes that pepper the two books, just as they do Agatha Christie’s, was spouted by your character. But it’s quite true, I should have obtained your authorisation to write a sequel to The Act of Roger Murgatroyd, and I didn’t. And then, in A Mysterious Affair, my having you wager Trubshawe that you’d solve the crime before he did and, if he lost the bet, his having to marry you –’
‘Ah yes, Trubshawe,’ she interrupted me with a heavy sigh. ‘My darling Eustace.’
‘That too was unforgivable. Yet I wouldn’t want you to think it was because I was afraid you might object. Naturally, if you had objected, I’d have scrubbed it without a second thought. I simply didn’t ring you up, don’t ask me why, when the idea popped into my head and, once I had actually written the chapter, well, I suppose I genuinely assumed you’d be tickled by it.’
‘Oh, I was, I was. Tickled pink,’ she replied. ‘Why shouldn’t Eustace and I have tied the knot? Ours was a marriage made in heaven. Pardon the clitch.’
‘Clitch?’
‘Cliché, Gilbert, cliché. One of those nasty things you never stop putting in my mouth.’
‘Touché – or, rather, tootch,’ I answered with a rueful smile that brought a grin to her pasty features.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t affronted by your matchmaking. The less so as it all worked out most satisfactorily. However,’ she went on blithely, as I tried to figure out what she meant by ‘worked out most satisfactorily’, ‘however, I do have a bone to pick with you. A bonelet, really.’
I waited in a state of mute apprehension to hear what she was about to come out with now.
First, she noisily cleared her throat. Then:
‘As you of all people must know, I’m a very private person. I’m not prone to making public knowledge of any distressed state I might be in, except on that one occasion, of course, with Eustace in the Ritz bar when I owned up to my loneliness. But no – no, I was hurt, genuinely hurt.’
‘By something I did?’
‘Yes, Gilbert, by something you did.’
‘Well, but what?’ I asked.
‘If you must know, I was hurt by The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.’
Delaying a moment or two before answering, I let run through my mind a few of the reasons she might conceivably have had for being hurt, for God’s sake, by this new book of mine, but I couldn’t find a single plausible one and finally said:
‘I’m sorry, Evie, you really have lost me. If I thought you didn’t like the book, well, naturally I’d be disappointed, but, after all, it’s a risk every writer faces even with his closest friends. And, to be perfectly frank with you, I flatter myself I’m much less susceptible to criticism than most. It’s – well, take this scarf of mine.* If you told me you didn’t like it, my response would be that I was sorry but that I didn’t buy it to please you. And it’s the same with my books.’
‘Your scarf I do like. Armani, isn’t it?’ She fingered it, tentatively twisting it sideways to check the label. ‘I’m right, as usual. Matter of fact, I like the scarf quite a lot more than the book.’
‘Ah …’
‘It isn’t so much the tome itself, you understand,’ she said, adjusting her pince-nez, ‘as what you might call its ilk.’
As what I might call ‘its ilk’?!! There are words, and ‘tome’ and ‘ilk’ are two of them, that for me instantly disqualify a writer from serious consideration. No matter. Let’s hear what she has to say.
‘What’s wrong with the ilk?’
‘An anthology of apocryphal Sherlock Holmes stories? Such a cheap commonplace idea. You realise that bookshops are swarming with them these days? Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud. Sherlock Holmes and Mata Hari. All of them tosh. I call him – the bogus Holmes – Schlock Holmes, ha ha! And, I must say, Gilbert, I would have expected something more original of you, even when you’re wearing your pasticheur’s hat.’
‘That’s all very well, Evie,’ I replied coldly, ‘and insisting as I do that I know better than anybody, friend or critic alike, what the defects of my books are, I honestly don’t mind that you didn’t care for it. But you still haven’t explained why you were hurt.’
There being no ashtray within immediate reach, I let my cigarette butt drop to the floor, as I had already noticed several others doing, and stubbed it out under my shoe.
Evie glanced down at the squashed butt with deep disapproval etched on her countenance – I mean, she looked at it disapprovingly – and said, ‘You know, Gilbert, leaving a cigarette end on somebody else’s floor is like using somebody else’s loo and not flushing the toilet.’