Evie’s echoing boom again disrupted my reverie.
‘What in God’s name have a Saint-Laurent jacket and a pair of black loafers to do with anything? Get on, won’t you!’
That night we went straight from the pub to his digs, practically without exchanging a word, and became lovers. Three days later, I moved in with him.
Oh, he was adorable! During the sixteen months of our cohabitation Gustav remained such a boy, what the French call a grand gamin, distracted by everything about him, by an interesting-looking ballpoint pen that he would insist on clicking for himself, and clicking again, and again; by a camera, any camera, anyone’s camera; by a slimline pocket calculator; by a fleeting face in the crowd, even one that wasn’t, for how could it be, a patch on his own.
As for his body, every single part of it – his shoulder-blades, the hollows behind his knees, the hairy, aromatic spaces between his toes – became for me an erogenous zone. There should perhaps be another word for ‘we’, a separate grammatical form, when it refers to two people in love. A ‘singular’ we?
Yes, we sometimes bickered, and not always tenderly, each of us boasting a kitty of pet tics that set the other’s teeth on edge. He was driven to silent rage – silent because, for the longest time, he said nothing to me of his exasperation and it was only when I asked what was eating him that he let me have it – driven to rage, I say, by my habit, when wondering whether or not to buy a book, of pawing it in the bookshop for minutes on end before, having at last made up my mind, picking up another copy, an unpawed copy, unpawed by me, to carry off to the sales counter. I felt likewise about his habit of wedging taste-drained wads of chewing-gum on the undersides of chair castors and the paper-lined insides of kitchen-cabinet drawers; also of his forgetting, as if it were the most delightful quirk in the world, where he had parked the Mini whenever we sleepily staggered out of some club at five in the morning.
We shared our lives, I repeat, for sixteen months. Gustav was the first to graduate, in the summer of the following year, with a B.A. in English. But he hung on for several months afterwards in Edinburgh, except for an overnight stay in Sofia for the hundredth birthday of one of his two surviving great-grandfathers. Later that year, in August, we spent a squally fortnight together in blisteringly hot, madly gay Mykonos.
Then the bombshell dropped. (Cue a heavily ironic sigh of relief from Evie.) First, without a word to me – to be fair, our relationship by then was fast deteriorating and I already suspected him of several infidelities, although none that couldn’t have been forgiven in the fullness of time – without a word to me, he packed his things and moved out. Next, I read – I read, Reader, in the Times Literary Supplement! – a review of his first novel, a novel about whose existence, about the very fact that he had written a novel at all, I knew nothing, nothing! (In the one conversation we had had, on the telephone, in the immediate aftermath of his departure, he let slip that he had taken three proof copies of the new novel to distribute to his wealthy Bulgarian relatives, to earn himself some moral air miles, as he put it, there being an inheritance in the offing, so he could surely have laid hands on a fourth to give to me.) I knew absolutely nothing of a 244-page work of fiction most of which he must have been writing during those sixteen months. But where? In the University Library? On the never too busy first floor of the Arts Café? In our own flat when I was asleep?
If that weren’t evidence enough that this high-falutin’ first novel of his, Dark Jade – a copy of which I had to buy for myself in Waterstones – had been deliberately written behind my back, there was also the fact that it was undisguisedly autobiographical and that the character of Robert, the hero’s clingy, shabby, talentless lover, was just as undisguisedly based – rather, debased – on me. Added to which, there’s not a single mention of my name, not one, in the index of A Biography of Myself!
‘So,’ said Evie, ‘my hunch was right. Revenge for a sexual humiliation. Adair or Ardor …’
A faint odour of goat droppings emanated from deep in the bracken.
‘No, you’re wrong,’ I answered. ‘It wasn’t sexual humiliation. A long time ago I learned how to put that kind of setback behind me. The book itself was the humiliation, the book and his having written it and published it without warning me, exposing to the world my private little squalors and meannesses, causing me to look an ass before I’d had the time to launch my own career as a writer.
‘Oh, Evie,’ I cried, and I could hear myself grinding my teeth, ‘how often I prayed that he would die of Aids, that he would pass away alone, incontinent, disfigured, a wrinkly sleeping-bag of piss and shit! Well, it didn’t happen like that – the creep was always lucky in love – at cards, too. He broke my heart and now at long last, thirty years later, I’ve broken his, literally. But basta. We’ve talked enough.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ Evie went unflappably on, curse her, ‘that his humiliation of you may actually have been responsible for your own literary success, such as it is?’
‘What’s this you’re saying now?’
‘That perhaps you became a writer yourself out of your need to compete with him.’
‘More dollar-book Freud. I tell you, nothing, neither forevisions nor extenuations, nothing can erode the craving for vengeance and the bliss of having at last exacted it. What joy it was actually to watch that arrow pierce his chest. So much more gratifying, now I think of it, than if he really had died of Aids at a stranger’s hand. A stranger’s cock.’
‘There you go again. Can’t resist it, can you, the verbal quip? Even in circumstances as extreme as these.’
‘I’m glad you realise they are extreme,’ I answered drily. ‘And yes, you are right, Evie. I did bring you here to kill you. And it’s your own advice I’m going to follow, the advice I attributed to you in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd. Remember? In the book’s penultimate chapter I had you hold forth on how to commit a successful murder. Since you patently don’t remember, let me quote you, so to speak: “If you really want to kill somebody and walk away scot-free, then just do it. Do it by pushing your victim off a cliff or else stabbing him in the back on a pitch-black night and burying the knife under a tree, any tree, any one of a thousand trees. Don’t forget to wear gloves and be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you. Above all, eschew the fancy stuff. Keep it simple, boring and perfect. It may be all too simple, boring and perfect for us writers of mystery fiction, but it’s the kind of crime whose perpetrator is likeliest to get away with it.”
‘Evie, I’m going to take a leaf out of your own book. My own book, I should say. I’m going to take that excellent advice of yours and eschew the fancy stuff. I’m even going to adopt the first of those two specific options you offer – pushing the victim off a cliff. The Falls are a bonus.’
‘Hold it there!’ she exclaimed. ‘Surely you can see how wrong that would be?’
‘Of course I can see it’s “wrong”! I’m not an idiot.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘What, then?’
‘Don’t you realise you simply cannot kill a fictional character? When Conan Doyle attempted to do away with Sherlock Holmes, his readers were so incensed he was forced to bring him back to life.’
‘Neat, Evie,’ I said, ‘very neat. As you would say. But please don’t get it into those little grey cells of yours that I too may later change my mind. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, when you go over, you stay over.’