‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Come now, let’s not play games with one another. Why else would you bring me here if not to try and kill me? Just like Conan Doyle. The jealous author rids himself of a character who has started to upstage him by hurling him – or, in my case, her – over the Reichenbach Falls.’
‘Pah! You aren’t nearly as famous as Sherlock Holmes.’
‘And just whose fault is that, Gilbert?’
I was beginning to have a real problem containing my detestation of her.
‘But it is why you brought me here, isn’t it?’ she went on, unperturbed. ‘To try and kill me?’
‘You keep saying “try”. Why? As even you must realise, in this lonely colonnade of trees there’s nothing – nothing and no one – to prevent me from succeeding.’
‘I might be armed.’
‘I know you’re not.’
‘How so?’
‘You wouldn’t have got through security at Heathrow with a pair of nail-clippers, let alone a pearl-handed pistol, and you’ve certainly had no opportunity of obtaining a gun in Meiringen. Switzerland isn’t some banana republic of despots and sexpots, you know, where a moustachioed moocher in a soiled white suit will happily exchange a second-hand revolver for a few greasy greenbacks.’
She ejaculated again.
‘Despots and sexpots! Greasy greenbacks! God, that’s just so typical of you! There’s not a single reader out there who needs to be told that Switzerland isn’t a banana republic. But you – you don’t think twice about breaking the rhythm of your narrative if it means taking time off to admire one of your own irrelevant metaphors. Who do you think you are? Vladimir Nabokov? A Scotch McNabokov? The Nabokov of Notting Hill? Vlad the Impostor? As dear Cora would have said, puh-lease!’
That stung. ‘They weren’t metaphors, they were alliterations,’ was all I was able lamely to answer.
‘Same difference. They stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs.’
‘Stuck out like a pair of sore thumbs, did they?’ I jeered at her. ‘Poor Evie, no one’s ever going to compliment you on the originality of your metaphors.’
‘The point, Gilbert, is that you’ve always been such a narcissistic writer. Which is why you’ve never had the popular touch, not even when writing whodunits. No one but himself loves a narcissist, or even likes a narcissist – and, I must tell you, Jane and Joe Public know in advance that, because of your overbearing egotism, there’s going to be precious little room left in your books for them.’
‘Oh, the banter! The banter!’ I cried, like Conrad’s Kurtz.
‘Yes, you’re right,’ she remarked with, in the circumstances, such amazing coolness I set to wondering whether she knew something I didn’t. ‘We’re wasting time. Are you going to tell me why you murdered Slavorigin? And don’t bother pretending you didn’t. We’ve come too far along the road, and we’re too close to the end of the plot, for that.’
‘You who know everything,’ I replied, ‘why don’t you tell me?’
She took a last puff on the Dunhill, then flicked the half-smoked cigarette over into the ravine with the sort of effortlessness that comes only with practice.
‘Since you ask, I’m rather inclined to believe it was a crime passionnel. To be more precise, a long-deferred crime passionnel.’
‘Explain.’
‘Naturally,’ she opined – said! said! said! – ‘naturally, when I understood that you and only you could have been the murderer, I started sniffing around for a motive. I immediately ruled out money. I could observe, from the queasy way you circled each other when you were introduced, that you and Slavorigin were more than merely professional literary acquaintances. But no matter how sketchy a picture I had of your shared past – if any – I simply couldn’t conceive of a relationship which would involve your gaining financially from his death. There was of course his prestige as a writer, a prestige you most certainly envied – ah, envy, Gilbert, envy! – although not enough, surely, to provoke you to murder. Which seemed to leave just one motive – sexual jealousy. You had both been at Edinburgh University and at much the same time. Notwithstanding his night at the Carlyle with Meredith, he was homosexual, which it’s obvious you are as well, obvious even if you hadn’t written that disgusting Buenas Noches Buenos Aires book. He was attractive, which you obviously aren’t. And when you and he first met all those years ago, he must have been out-and-out gorgeous, which even then you could obviously never have been. Ergo –’
‘What a witch you are!’ I cried.
‘So I have touched a sore point?’
‘For pity’s sake, no clichés. This isn’t one of your whodunits.’
‘I have, haven’t I?’
She was right. It was too late to lie. Almost forgetting why we were there, although in reality not at all, I decided to tell her about Gustav and me.
Yes, it was in Edinburgh that we first met – at, of all improbable settings, an orgy.
He was sitting alone, in profile from my point of view, curled up on the carpet, his back resting against an unoccupied divan, in uncannily the pose of Flandrin’s Jeune Homme assis au bord de la mer. His naked arms were wrapped around his knees and his head was tilted so far forward, concealing four-fifths of his face, that his eyes were invisible to me. It wasn’t even his body as such but its linear silhouette which attracted my attention, from the nape of his neck and his shiny shoulder-blades down along the perfect curve of his back.
He lazily uncurled himself and steered his gaze straight at me. He was darker than most in the heavily curtained room, with foppishly lank black hair, black eyes, brilliantly white and even teeth, and a wispy burnt bush of chest-hair. We looked into each other’s faces for a moment or two, and I started to wonder if he was wordlessly inviting me to join him when he himself stood up and picked his nimble way through the snake pit between us.
Once at my side, smiling, he said a single word:
‘Gustav.’
At first I wasn’t sure I’d heard right and I asked him to repeat it. He did, this time I understood and answered in kind.
‘Gilbert.’
I at once felt confident enough to raise the stakes.
‘Shall we …?’
He smiled again, but shook his head too and said something that was ridiculous if also, when you think of it, magnificent.
‘Not here.’
‘Not here?’
‘I’m with somebody,’ he explained, turning to look over his own shoulder. Then, smiling still, he patted the two pocketless sides of his naked body.
‘This is terrible. I want to give you my number, but I’ve got nothing to write it on. Or with.’
‘Then just tell me,’ I said. ‘I promise I’ll remember.’
He did, and I did.
‘How terribly, terribly poignant,’ Evie broke in, ‘but could we please get to the other end of the story?’
‘The other end?’
‘When and why you fell out.’
Ignoring her, I continued.
Our first date took place just two days later in a pub that I had never frequented. He arrived before me, but only by literally a couple of minutes, so he insisted. And there was something wonderfully topsy-turvy to me about meeting, fully clothed – to this day, if I close my eyes, I can see his black Saint-Laurent jacket, pale grey slacks, grey-black roll-neck pullover, black untasselled loafers – about meeting a stranger, which he still was, who had been stark naked when I originally set eyes on him. So vivid in my memory was that earlier encounter that, the first thirty minutes we spent together, the spectral afterimage of his nudity had the effect of rendering his clothing all but transparent.