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.