EVIE [coyly rebuking him]: Actually, it’s Evadne Trubshawe.
‘Dame Evadne Mount!’ Slavorigin cried. ‘Well, well, well! You’re one of my heroines.’
‘How very nice of you to say so,’ she answered with the simper she seemed to hold in reserve exclusively for compliments. ‘But I’m not a Dame yet, you know.’
‘Any day now, dear lady, any day now. I cannot tell you with what interest I’ve followed your career. Criminology, you know, is my hobby, my violin d’Ingres, as the French say. And I was supine, simply supine, with admiration for the brilliance with which you solved that dastardly crime at ffolkes Manor. Even better, the poisoning of poor Cora Rutherford at – Ealing, was it?’
‘Elstree.’
‘Elstree, of course. Your reasoning – ah!’ Pinching a hollow moue with the tips of his thumb and index finger, he bestowed on them both a big slurpy kiss. ‘Mmmph, what a masterpiece! Only you could have deduced a murderer’s identity from the style of his film. If ever I decide to write a whodunit, I may well ask you to let me use that case as its plot. All names changed, of course.’
‘Always happy to oblige, Mr Slavorigin.’
‘Gustav, call me Gustav. Or Gussie,’ he added with a flourish of his forelock, and I couldn’t help noticing that, the longer he talked to Evie, the swishier he became. ‘Not Gus, you understand, no, no, I won’t have Gus. But Gussie’s nice. Like Gussie Moran, whoever she was. But what was I saying?’ he mumbled, his eyes straining to focus on Evie. ‘Oh yes, Cora Rutherford. I must tell you, Evadne – may I call you Evadne? – your success in bringing her murderer to book was soooh important to me. I was a very great admirer of Cora Rutherford.’
‘Were you?’ exclaimed Evie. ‘Ah, but I don’t suppose you ever saw her on stage? I always say that nobody who saw her only on the films knew the real Cora.’
‘How right you are. But the fact is, I did. I did see her on stage. Just once, when I was a boy, a mere slip of a boy. In Private Lives.’
He turned to me. ‘It’s a play by Noël Coward.’ Then he returned to Evie.
‘She was divine. Of course, if I put a gun at my own back and compel myself to be brutally honest, she was also a teensy-weensy bit too old for the part. Yet she had such star quality, you know, she made everybody else look too young. But what am I thinking of?’
He slipped his hand inside his snakeskin jacket and pulled out an exquisite art déco wallet in pale grey suede. From inside that he took a squared-off wad of folded-up newspaper which he then unfolded in front of us.
‘Her performance was such a formative revelation for me,’ he said, holding up a wrinkled page of newsprint, ‘that I clipped this ad out of the paper and I’ve worn it next to my heart ever since.’
Craning to see for myself, I felt as if I had just had a glistening ice cube forced down my throat. There it was, yellowing but still perfectly legible, an advertisement for the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue: ‘Rex Harrison and Cora Rutherford in Noël Coward’s Private Lives. Second Record-Breaking Year!’ And that second record-breaking year into the play’s run was 1958.
I was, to use one of my favourite words, discombobulated. I must give this one, I said to myself, serious thought. Considering that Slavorigin was born in 1955, it meant that he would have been taken to see Coward’s brittle little trifle at the age of three, which, preposterous as that notion already was, couldn’t in any case have been true since, at least according to his many profiles, interviews, A Biography of Myself, etc, when his family quit Sofia to resettle in London, he himself was four years old. So he definitely did not watch Cora Rutherford performing on stage in 1958! Whereupon, just as I was mentally adding that lie to the ever-expanding inventory of his well-established economies with the facts of his own life, I also mentally slapped my hand on my brow when it occurred to me that, by 1958, Cora Rutherford had lain twelve years in her grave in Highgate Cemetery, having been murdered on the set of If Ever They Find Me Dead, a film shot at Elstree circa 1945 or 1946. Another lie, to which – but, wait, am I crazy or what? Cora was a fictional character – a character invented by me for The Act of Roger Murgatroyd and subsequently killed off by me in A Mysterious Affair of Style! I would surely have swooned had I not half-heard, from the eely black vortex into which I felt myself slide, Düttmann’s voice whispering to me:
‘Mr Adair, are you all right?’
‘Yes, yes, I’m fine. The champagne … I’m virtually teetotal, you know. I oughtn’t to have …’
‘Not to worry. We are going into dinner now. You will feel better when you have eaten something hot.’
I walked into the dining room side by side with Düttmann, who was still anxiously gripping my elbow. Immediately ahead of us, arm in arm, were Slavorigin and Evie. He was telling her that he couldn’t remember the name of the Sunday newspaper in which one of my whodunits had been very unfavourably reviewed and she, lowering her voice, said something which certainly sounded to me like ‘P. D. James in the Sunday Sundial’. A few minutes later, as we stood round the table waiting to be advised by one of Düttmann’s assistants where we were to be seated – there were no place settings – he proposed that they meet up again in London and asked for her telephone number, which he at once entered into his BlackBerry. This time I did clearly hear her answer. The number was Flaxman 3521.
He studied it on the BlackBerry’s microscopic screen.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said to Evie. ‘Haven’t you a flat in Albany?’
‘As though!’ she replied, mangling her colloquialisms as usual. ‘That was just another of Gilbert’s fabrications.’
‘Ah yes, I remember. In A Mysterious Affair of Style. Didn’t he describe it as “the Albany”? A strange solecism for someone so fond of calling himself a perfectionist.’
This I couldn’t let pass, the more so as they appeared to be no longer troubled as to whether they were overheard or not.
‘I knew quite well,’ I said, ‘that it should be referred to as “Albany”, just “Albany”. If I called it “the Albany” in the book, it’s only because I didn’t want to confuse the reader, who might have thought that Evie lived in the real Albany. I mean, the Albany in upstate New York.’
‘As though!’ sneered Slavorigin.
*
At dinner he completely dominated the conversation.
Oh, it was understandable that so world-famous an author should find himself fussed over as he was from the moment we entered the dining room. He was pointed out, not all that discreetly either, by more than one of our fellow diners and, even before we were all seated, an impetuous and enterprising adolescent girl in crotch-high shorts got up from her own crowded table, flounced over to ours and asked Slavorigin if he would consent to be photographed with her. He naturally did consent – I saw the minders stiffen at the tiny wallside table for two they were sharing – she handed a digital camera, along with basic instructions, to Sanary and flung her bare arms about a leering Slavorigin’s neck. Later, when we started giving our orders to the maître d’, he requested, loud enough for the whole room to hear, a rare cheeseburger and a side-order of not French but freedom fries, a witticism that earned him a little round of applause.
It was during the meal itself, however, encouraged by an obsequious Düttmann, that he allowed nobody else to get a word in edgewise. To be honest, it was less his own fault than Düttmann’s, who, unused to relaxing among a group of more or less equally distinguished off-duty writers, managed to transform what should have been a convivial get-together into an excuse to quiz the most distinguished of us all. It was like sitting in on a journalist’s celebrity interview. Or on a dress rehearsal for the onstage discussion with Slavorigin that was scheduled to take place the following evening.