‘Who gives a shit about Tennyson? Remember what Adorno said –’ Meredith rejoined the conversation before being immediately interrupted.
‘Why must one always quote Adorno to me? “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, right? But there has been plenty of poetry after Auschwitz, poetry and prose and drama and ballet and film and music. What moronic presumption, attempting to dictate to the future how it can or cannot behave. Are we to mourn in perpetuity? Till the end of time? It’s intolerable! The Holocaust has become a religion, an old-time, Old Testament religion of hellfire and damnation, a religion whose Original Sin is the Final Solution. Well, I for one refuse any longer to atone for an offence I never committed.’
With a trembling hand he drew a cigarette from Hugh’s half-open pack of Marlboros and lit it from the small bronze edelweiss-shaped candle that was our table’s centrepiece.
‘Anyway, I wasn’t even the first.’
‘The first what?’ I asked.
‘The first to extract poetry from September 11. Although, to be fair, the poem in question was written some forty years before the event itself occurred and a minor adjustment – oh, no more than three or four words – must be made first.’
‘What is this poem you’re referring to?’
‘Come, Gilbert, have you forgotten the opening quatrain of Nabokov’s Pale Fire?
‘I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
‘By the false azure in the window pane –’
‘As I say, all it needs is a minor adjustment.
‘I was the shadow of the hijacked plane
‘By the false azure in the window slain –’
‘Stop him, somebody!’ Meredith cried out.
‘I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I
‘Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.’
An ugly, sarcastic grin disfigured the lower half of his still beautiful face.
‘“The smudge of ashen fluff”. How vividly prescient of sly old VN, don’t you agree?’
Hurling her napkin onto the table, exactly as I remembered her doing at that little straw-roofed, sun-dappled beach restaurant in Antibes, Meredith stood up and, without a word of apology to Düttmann, or to the rest of us for that matter, stalked out of the dining room. I caught Evie’s eye. There was a momentary drop in tension as if our table had struck an air pocket.
Although he had undoubtedly won the argument, quite literally seen Meredith off, Slavorigin didn’t at that moment have the air or aura of a victor. He had a killjoy’s mean and petulant expression on his face and I suspect, given his natural and of course now long-frustrated gregarity, and despite his well-documented relish for controversy, he had not on this occasion actively sought to provoke a squabble, thereby spoiling the evening for everyone, and had hoped instead that the résumé of his new novel would have prompted such warmth and sincerity of praise it would remain uncontaminated by the lingering rancour of old enmities. His vanity as a writer, a creative artist, an aesthete, as he had just defined himself, had been badly wounded and for once, in public, he cut an almost pitiful figure.
It was to me he spoke next.
‘Gilbert, what did you think of it?’
‘I liked it a lot. I particularly admired the way you write, or plan to write, on a theme which is very close to you, even autobiographical, yet you manage to distance yourself from that theme through the novel’s form and also, I presume, its language.’
‘Autobiographical, eh? Perhaps. Except that I haven’t been murdered.’
For a brief instant the word ‘yet’ seemed to hover between us.
‘Mrs Trubshawe?’ he said to Evie.
‘Oh, delightful, quite delightful!’ she trilled. ‘If a bit over my head, you know.’
‘Sanary?’ (Hugh’s opinion, probably to Hugh’s own relief, seemed not to interest him.) ‘Is this yet another of my “borrowings” in your view?’
‘No comment,’ Sanary silkily answered him. ‘But please,’ he added, ‘don’t take that personally. It’s my nature. Rather, it’s my nationality. Like all of my compatriots, I was born neutral. If I offered you an opinion, I would instantly cease to be Swiss.’
‘In other words, blah blah blah.’
He finally turned to Autry.
‘What about you, laughing boy? Have you nothing to say?’
‘Well, okay, I’ll tell you,’ Autry eventually replied, removing the toothpick from his mouth. ‘I read your book. Out of a Clear Blue Sky? Yeah, I read it all right. We all did. And, you know what, I felt a lot of hatred in that book, a lot of hatred. What they call self-hatred.’
‘Self-hatred?!’ echoed a stupefied Slavorigin.
‘That’s what I said. For me it was a book by somebody who really loves America, but hates himself for loving it.’
Although I myself thought this to be pure dollar-book Freud, I overheard Sanary whisper to Evie, ‘Nom d’un nom! I think he is – how you say? – right.’
*
After dinner we were all, Meredith excepted, chauffeured back into town and, as had been promised by Düttmann, on to its one and only disco. A disco, I call it, but it was no ordinary disco. By coincidence, considering the setting of Slavorigin’s new novel, what was danced there, by men and women, by men and men, also by women and women, was the horniest dance in the world, the Argentinian tango.
We commandeered a ringside table, ordered what everybody else seemed to have ordered, Bacardi-and-Cokes all round, and settled down to enjoy as we could the smoky spectacle.
But even before we were served our drinks, an almost hiplessly slim young stranger, not effeminate though obviously gay, wearing a white vest that clung wetly to his breastplate of a chest and a pair of chinos so loose about the waist we could read the brand name of his white underpants, approached our table and asked Slavorigin if he cared to dance. Thomson and Thompson were having a quiet drink at the bar, but their charge turned to the rest of us as if we had some sort of right to mind. We, or some of us, managed to eke out glassy smiles of benediction and, hands clasped, they strode onto the floor.
God, they were good! Slavorigin really did know how to dance. I watched him as he and his partner clamped themselves onto each other’s now electrically taut, now sensual and yielding torso. I watched how, his head tossed back, he would brusquely stamp his feet in a ferocious tango tantrum while his partner raised a single black boot behind him, casting a furtive glance at its heel as though in fear that he might have trod on something unmentionable. I watched too how, glissando after glissando, every joint and pivot of their bodies would click magnetically together, before terminating in a perfectly timed four-legged splits.
When, still hand in hand, they walked back off the floor, Slavorigin whispered in the ear of the sweaty young stranger, who began smiling and nodding, just smiling and nodding. Then, as they were about to reach our table, they abruptly unclasped hands and went their separate ways. Watching his partner disappear into the crowd, Slavorigin reclaimed his seat beside us, his long legs sprawling sexily under the table.
I myself slipped unobtrusively away half an hour later, and I have no idea when the evening ended for the others.