A Reliable Narrator was published to a set of reviews, not only in Britain, that most writers would die for. Which is undoubtedly why its author was invited to Meiringen by the organisers of its first Sherlock Holmes Festival. (Why he agreed to go is another question.) And which is also when my own part in his story begins.
* The ‘g’ of his surname, hard in Bulgarian, was eventually palatalised by the wear and tear of English usage.
† It was dedicated to the Scottish (gay) poet Edwin Morgan, ‘my spectral mentor’.
‡ Plus, published by Granta, an unrewarding and most cruelly selective autobiographical fragment, A Biography of Myself – composed, significantly, in the third person – and a theatrical squib, Enter Godot, staged at the 1993 Edinburgh Festival but never revived.
§ ‘It is too often forgotten,’ read another passage, ‘that the cultural glory of the contemporary United States has always been its high, not its populist, art.’ And he singled out for praise the poets Stevens, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Marianne Moore, etc, and the novelists Hemingway, Faulkner, Salinger, Gaddis, etc, if less so the ‘much-overrated’ Fitzgerald.
¶ Even so, he regarded these as exceptions. The Hollywood movies which he truly adored, and which he dated meticulously as belonging to a three-decade Golden Age that stretched from 1929 to 1959, were almost all, so he tendentiously asserted, made by European immigrants, cultural and political refugees: i.e. Lubitsch, Lang, Hitchcock, Siodmak, Curtiz, Ulmer, Preminger, etc. And I recall how he enjoyed teasing his fellow film-buff students at Edinburgh with the (in fact, true) statement that he had never bothered to catch up with either Godfather I or II. ‘The Mafia as Borgias, no thanks!’ he would sneer. Or ‘Why should I go see a film in which Marlon Brando hams it up as a big dumb thug with cottonwool in his cheeks?’
|| The subject of the original had been a small earthquake in Chile.
** Emphasis mine. In the original the aside is rendered all the more provocative by the omission of italics.
†† Trees and newspapers, after all, form two successive generations of the same dynasty, the latter being the literate offspring of the bluff, inarticulate former, like college-educated children of peasant stock.
Chapter One
It was while commuting homeward on the 11.03 from Moreton-in-Marsh to London Paddington one foggy Monday forenoon in early September that I received on my mobile phone the call that was to change everything. Since the previous December I had been renting a pretty weekend cottage in the Gloucestershire village of Blockley. The cottage, Waterside by name, sat sandwiched between my landlady’s grand house and a lively though apparently unlived-in little stream that could be depended on, in anything approaching a downpour, to overflow its timid banks. I would journey down to Moreton on Friday afternoons – on, by what was for me a delightful windfall of a coincidence, the 4.50 from Paddington (yes, really) – then make the same trip in reverse three days later. My train, in both directions, was invariably late, but seldom long enough to put me to serious inconvenience.*
So there I was, snugly settled in a first-class compartment, reading, with a view to writing an eventual review for the Spectator, a fat, virtuosically executed novel by one of that new breed of American wunderkinder who, I would be lying if I denied it, are positively bloated with talent but who are also just too fucking pleased with themselves – its title, The Theory of Colonic Irrigation, should tell you all you need to know about the sort of thing it was. Since I was already aware that this was a book destined to be jettisoned as soon as my review had been delivered, I was in the process of pencilling some cramped, crabbed notes in the margins of its own pages when, at the Oxford stop, a single, rather extraordinary passenger boarded my nearly empty compartment. He stood for a minute in the doorway as though searching for a friendly or just a familiar face, then for a reason known only to himself sat down in the seat directly opposite mine.
As long as we tarried in Oxford, I felt an obscure compulsion to keep both my eyes trained on the text in front of me and even forebore, for the duration, from dabbing at my smarting nose – I was on the mend from a protracted head cold – with the third of four paper napkins which I had filched for that purpose from the buffet-bar where I had earlier bought a cup of muddy coffee. (The first two snot-saturated napkins were stuffed away in the clammy depths of my jacket pocket.) At long last the train started to glide out of the station, a plummy Indian voice on the loudspeaker alerted the latest intake of passengers to the sandwiches, pastries and light refreshments available to them, and even if I don’t recall having had the sensation, one I am especially prone to, of being spied upon by some unseen observer, I could no longer resist peeking at my fellow-traveller over the top of the novel, as thick and doughy as a wholemeal loaf, that I held in my hands.
I was being spied upon. The man who had sat down opposite me had, I noted uneasily, a livid complexion, a shock of white hair, an unalluring black patch over his left eye which lent him the corny charisma of the Demon King in a provincial pantomime and an unpatched right eye which was staring straight at me. No milquetoast in an awkward situation, I immediately proceeded to stare back, to the point of insolence. As I did, I found myself qualifying my crude first impression. Swimming into sharper focus, he turned out to be less fleshily flamboyant than the description above must have made him sound. His complexion was of the wind-and-weatherbeaten type the English refer to as ‘ruddy’, his hair, if untidy enough, had nevertheless submitted to the recent attentions of a comb, his eyepatch was just an eyepatch. As he was also wearing a rough, fibrous three-piece suit with outsized trouser turn-ups and complicatedly laced-up hiking-boots, I had him pegged for some maverick Oxford classics don, although whether he was loved or feared by his, I guessed, handful of students was beyond my powers of impromptu on-the-spot speculation.
None of which alters the fact that he was still staring at me. He had no reading matter of his own, none visible on his person, at any rate, no scuffed leather briefcase containing papers with which he might have whiled away the trip by consulting or marking. He had nothing to do, in short, but stare at me. Which he went on doing until it was no longer funny. Did he recognise me? Unlikely. One advantage, I thought grimly, of being only a semi-wellknown writer is that you can travel incognito on public transport. No, not grimly. No hackneyed adverbs, please. I thought, I just thought. Did he confuse me with David Hockney, to whom I bear a superficial resemblance (blond hair, prominent horn-rimmed glasses)? Since I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep up for very much longer our ping-pong game of stare and counterstare, something would soon have to give.
Suddenly, inside the same jacket pocket into which I had stuffed the soaking napkin balls, my mobile, which I had forgotten to switch off, started ringing, loud enough to cause us both momentarily to lose our stride in the game. Now he no longer stared, he glared at me, more unnervingly than if he had been in possession of both his eyes. (In the land of the seeing, the one-eyed man is somehow still king.) It was all the more awkward in that our compartment had been designated the train’s sole Quiet Coach, one in which the use of mobiles was banned – which is precisely why I chose it – and my telephone’s ring-tone was Tchaikovsky’s Walt-Disneyan ‘Waltz of the Flowers’.
Under his glowering gaze, I retrieved the elegant, hateful, indispensable little object from my pocket, flipped open its lid and put it to my ear.