‘Gilbert,’ he said to me, a pungent aroma of peppermints on his breath, ‘I’ll come clean right off. You know I’m Irish, etc?’
‘Of course.’
‘But what you probably didn’t know is that I haven’t lived in Ireland for the last fifteen years.’
‘No, actually I didn’t. I suppose I just assumed –’
‘The thing is, etc, the taxman didn’t know it either.’
‘Aha, I see. And now –’
‘I know, I know!’
‘I’m sorry. You know what?’
‘What you’re going to say. And you’d be right. The Inland Revenue – the British Inland Revenue, etc – has just found out, etc, etc, that I’ve been resident in this country – I mean, in England – for fifteen years and now they’re chasing me for back taxes, ten years of back taxes.’
‘Not fifteen?’ I asked maybe a bit callously, but I was distracted by his verbal twitch of tacking ‘etc’ onto every other phrase.
‘Ten’s the legal limit, thank God for small mercies.’
‘But can’t you argue that you already paid Irish taxes?’
‘Are you deliberately not getting it, Gilbert?’ he answered testily, lighting a cigarette in defiance of the (even if one had no German) manifest ‘No Smoking’ sign on the glass partition which separated us from the driver. ‘You’re a writer yourself. Surely you’ve heard that creative artists like us are exempt from income tax in Ireland. I haven’t paid a penny in years.’
‘H’m. That’s bad.’ (I started to have an idea where all of this was leading.)
‘Too right it’s bad. It’s worse than you think.’
‘Oh?’
‘I haven’t got it. The old thrillers, etc, etc, aren’t selling so well any more. Last one brought me in £784 in royalties. I used to get twenty times that.’
‘I’m really sorry, Hugh. I had no idea you –’
‘I know, I know! You thought, once a bestseller, always a bestseller. Well, I tell you, it doesn’t always work like that, etc, etc, as you’ll discover for yourself one day. No, no, no,’ he hastily corrected himself, ‘you’ll be all right. You’re bound to be all right so long as you keep churning out your Agatha Christie imitations. There’ll always be readers for stuff like yours, even if it isn’t the real McCoy.’
I was about to disabuse him, to inform him that cod-Christiana, especially if it has been produced by a writer to whose reputation the label of postmodernism has been attached, is no infallible recipe for bestsellers, when he bluntly came to the point.
‘The thing is, your being an old friend of mine [?], in the same line of business, except you’re doing much better than me, I thought you might be able to help me over the hump, etc. As one writer to another, like.’
‘How much do you need?’ I asked quietly.
‘Well …’ I sensed him manfully squaring up. ‘Ten thousand would keep the bastards at bay.’
‘Ten thousand? Ten thousand pounds?!’
His face crumpled up like an empty brown paper bag.
‘Look, if that’s too much, what about seven-and-a-half? Or seven? Even seven would give me a bit of a breathing space.’
The taxi was now parked directly in front of the entrance to the pavilion. We both got out. Puffing, fanning himself with a magazine he must have picked up from the reception desk – the taxi, like everything else in this cold country, had been overheated and his own cigarette smoke hadn’t helped – Hugh adroitly barred my way in, treating me to a long and remarkably frank account of how he had frittered away his earnings.
‘Well, will you help me out?’
‘It’s not that I won’t, Hugh. I can’t.’
I laboriously spelt out to him why not. I cannot claim any originality for my catalogue of excuses, save that they were all true. I told him, for example, that even if my books had done reasonably well, none of them had come close to being a bestseller. That I lived a carelessly unthrifty life myself, basically surviving from one advance to the next. That I had a number of crippling monthly outgoings – because of my Blockley cottage, I paid two sets of utility bills, two council tax bills, etc, etc (as he would say). As for my royalties, fairish as they now tended to be, particularly in Germany, I added, an admission which slightly weakened my case, but demonstrated, as it was intended to, that I wasn’t lying to him, don’t forget that my agent takes fifteen per cent of them and the taxman thirty to forty per cent of what’s left. And, as there was of course a mortgage on my Notting Hill flat, and I was, well, getting on, any loose cash which swum into my ken I had to put aside to reduce that mortgage to a size I could live with, so that even if I did have ten thousand pounds to spare, which I didn’t, I couldn’t afford to lend it to him.
Well before I finished speaking, he had ceased to listen. Hugh was incorrigibly feckless, to be sure, but he was probably no novice in situations of this kind. After only a few words of mine he would have realised he was out of luck. From his vantage point most of what I had just said was redundant.
‘I know, I know! [another tic]’ he snapped at me. ‘Let’s pretend I never asked you.’ And he silently turned away and started to mount the steps into the pavilion. After a moment or two I followed him in.
*
Inside, at the bar, each of us was offered a flute of champagne by a flushed and nervous Düttmann. Hugh swallowed his at one go and grabbed another. I meanwhile asked Düttmann if all the arrangements relating to Slavorigin had proved satisfactory. He fell silent. He asked if I had ever met him. I told him I had and he lapsed into silence again. Then he said:
‘Mr Slavorigin is one of the greats, I know. But he has many peculiarities. Magnificent peculiarities, I grant you, but many none the less.’
I bemusedly agreed with him, then took myself off to the Gents. The palms of my hands were sweating, possibly something I had caught from Hugh.
When I returned ten minutes later, Düttmann had been joined by Meredith, ravishing as ever in a jet-black trouser-suit, Evie, Sanary and Autry, though as yet there was no sign of Slavorigin.
Autry, who was wearing a more formal and less sloppy variation of his usual outfit, his inevitable black string tie held in place by a small and surprisingly stylish clip in the shape of a cow’s skull, stood facing the rest of the company with his two elbows resting behind him on the bar, all the while shifting a toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other like some fancy riverboat gambler rotating a coin over, under and around his versatile fingers. From time to time I saw him mutely resist an attempt by Düttmann to have him participate in the discussion in which he, Düttmann, was engaged with Sanary and Evie. I too chose to sit that one out. I could already overhear Sanary, in his maddening element, lecturing them on the subject of some magnificent peculiarity, to borrow Düttmann’s admirable locution, in the movie adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man and I was just not in the mood.† I therefore ended up talking to Meredith, who had, she confessed to me, excused herself a minute before from the same discussion, one which held no interest for her.
Our own conversation was playful but still just a wee bit edgy. Meredith had mellowed. Or perhaps our earlier run-in had been no more than a minor casualty of September 11. At any rate, despite a grating tendency on her part to be busier-than-thou – if I told her I was about to start a new book, then so it seemed was she; if I mentioned that the film rights to my Buenas Noches Buenos Aires were being negotiated as we spoke, she at once had to let me know that she had just done lunch with an extremely hot young Hollywood director, whom she could not possibly name, about the eventuality of her being hired as consultant on a big-budget biopic of Sappho for Nicole Kidman – despite that tendency, I found her, shall I say, a lot more than bearable although even now a little less than likeable.