Now I myself flushed. Without bothering to explain that I was merely following a precedent, I picked up the offending little number-two and stuck it into my trouser pocket.
‘Well,’ I asked again, ‘are you going to tell me what it was that hurt you?’
‘Haven’t you guessed? It’s the fact that you wrote two ingenious whodunits of which I was the heroine, they were marketed by Faber as the first two parts of a trilogy and yet, for a reason of your own that I cannot begin to fathom, you elected not to write a third. You dropped me flat without so much as a by-your-leave. And for what, I ask you? A pastiche of Conan Doyle. As though the world needed another.’
To my surprise, I was touched by her admission.
‘Evie,’ I said, not quite, damn it, striking the half-tender, half-ironic tone I was aiming for, ‘if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were jealous.’
‘Please don’t insult me,’ she peevishly replied, ‘by calling me jealous. Eustace once tried pulling that stunt and got what-for for his pains. I used the word “hurt”, and “hurt” is as far as I’m prepared to go. I was hurt because, without warning, without warning me, you cut short a series of whodunits that were already critical and commercial successes. Why, Gilbert, why? I really don’t understand.’
I answered in a measured voice that, if I’d done so, it was for a strictly aesthetic reason. For all my efforts to have the second novel ring as many changes on the first as was organically feasible within the generic conventions I was pastiching, there remained a stubbornly samey something about A Mysterious Affair of Style which long afterwards nagged at me. And not only at me. One reviewer, praising the book, had also expressed disappointment that I had taken an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it’ attitude to the first of the cycle, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.
‘For me,’ I said, ‘another mark of a real writer is that he – or she – fixes things which aren’t broken.’
‘How very aphoristic of you. But I must tell you, Gilbert, even if you cannot, I myself can envisage many new adventures for my namesake to solve, and just as many variations on Agatha’s titles, and I give you advance warning that I shan’t quit this town before I’ve persuaded you to come around to my way of thinking.’
This was beginning to sound faintly alarming. I have never read a word of Stephen King, but I once saw a goodish film version of one of his thrillers, Misery, about a writer writhing helplessly in the castrating clutches of his most devoted fan, and I knew how he felt. I needed rescuing before Evie’s discourse took an even more sinister turn. Peering over at my fellow writers, who were still tribally closeted together, I succeeded in catching Sanary’s eye. Desperately but discreetly, I trained a ‘For Christ’s sake, get me out of this’ face on him; and, after a few agonising moments when he did no more than return my look of beseechment with one of bland bemusement, he finally, indolently disengaged himself and came across to join us.
‘Oh, there you are,’ he said as convivially as he ever managed to say anything to me. ‘Looking for you. Wanted to congratulate you. Excellent performance. Some sharp one-liners. Wasted on that audience, though. Except that I did notice you making a scribbled note after each of your zingers. Do I assume that to mean you were mentally filing them away for subsequent recycling? Wise man. For the writer, nothing counts but print.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I murmured. ‘Nowadays … the Internet … all those blogs …’
‘Nothing to do with us,’ he said. ‘The Internet is an infinite library of goggle-eyed, Google-eyed ignorance and stupidity. If you don’t believe me, Google Tolstoy. Google Dostoevsky.’
‘Google Gogol,’ Evie piped up unexpectedly.
‘Indeed, Google Gogol,’ Sanary said with a giggle, for the first time giving Evie a once-over of sidelong curiosity. ‘Mark my words, the day literature comes to an end, it won’t be because nobody writes any longer but because everybody does. Hey, that’s not bad either.’ And he hurriedly drew a little notepad out of his blazer pocket, extracted a slender silver pencil from its hollow spine and jotted down his off-the-cuff mot.
Vaguely indicating Evie, I asked him, ‘Do you two know each other?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘I have not had that pleasure.’
‘Evadne Mount, Pierre Sanary.’
‘Glad to meet you,’ she said, extending a hand. ‘Any friend of Gilbert’s is a friend of mine.’
He gazed into her face for a moment without saying a word, then raised her hand to his own face and, to my amazement, for it wasn’t at all his style, brushed his lips against it.
‘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.