‘Hello?’ I whispered.
It was my literary agent, Carole Blake – Carole who, after all, could be said to work for me, who retained fifteen percent of my royalties, yet by whom I was still, so many years since I joined the agency, ever so slightly intimidated.
‘Ah, Carole,’ I said. ‘Listen, can I ring you when I get home? I’m on a train and I’m not really supposed to be making phone calls. Or taking them.’
But the call wasn’t one that could be postponed. The very next day she was flying to New York on agenting business and needed an immediate yes-or-no reponse.
What she had to tell me was this. To commemorate the twentieth anniversary of its Sherlock Holmes Museum, whose doors were first opened to the public in 1991, the Swiss town of Meiringen, in the heart of the Bernese Oberland, its main claim on the attention of the tourist industry being the proximity of the Reichenbach Falls,† had organised a Sherlock Holmes Festival to which erudite Sherlockians had been invited from all over the world. Since my own most recent work of fiction was The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, and since my German publisher, Martin Hielscher,‡ had realised at the eleventh hour that my presence at such an event might be crucial to the book’s successful launch, she asked if I would be willing to fly to Switzerland three days hence, all arrangements made and all expenses paid.
Ordinarily I would have at once refused. Not only have I come to loathe travelling to Europe and further afield, from a fear less of flying than of airports, but I flee all fairs, festivals and literary dos. Even under the sole pressure of Carole’s steely entreaties, I would at least have hemmed and hawed before no doubt eventually caving in. Yet now I had Cyclops to contend with, along with my head cold.
‘Oh, Carole, I don’t know,’ I whispered back, holding the mobile in my left hand and cupping the right over my mouth as though I were about to sneeze. ‘I mean, I’ll do my little forty-five-minute stint and then what? It feels like so much hassle for so little result. Besides, as you can probably hear, I’m just getting over a bad cold.’
‘Gilbert,’ said Carole, who enjoyed the advantage over me of not being obliged to lower her voice, ‘I do think that if Martin – Martin, who has really got behind you – believes your attendance will prove a boost to sales, you yourself could unselfishly put up with a little hassle.’
There then came the knockdown argument to which no writer has ever been capable of responding.
‘Or don’t you want your books to sell?’
Without speaking, meanwhile, the Demon King gave the vibrating window between us three impatient taps with the colossally thick, hairy knuckles of his right hand, drawing my attention to the words ‘Quiet Coach’ stencilled on its pane.
I frantically nodded at him, asked Carole if I might have an hour or two to think it over, was told not, then at last helplessly agreed.
‘Oh, very well. Tell them to go ahead and make the arrangements.’
Adding a barely audible ‘Bye’, I snapped the mobile shut, made a silently apologetic gesture to my still unappeased vis-à-vis (who was to vanish from my life, as equally from this memoir of it, the instant we arrived at Paddington, leaving as little trace of his intervention in either as a burst soap bubble), and slouched down behind The Theory of Colonic Irrigation while the train tranquilly unzipped the country’s flies from Oxford to London.
* Ever since Mussolini got the trains running on time the British have behaved as though there were something inherently Fascistic about a competently managed railway network.
† Over which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, desirous of ridding himself once and for all of what had become a beaky, brilliant albatross around his neck, chose to have Holmes, in the story titled ‘The Final Problem’, plunge to his death in the grip of his arch-enemy Professor Moriarty.
‡ Of the Munich-based house Beck.
Chapter Two
Back in my Notting Hill pied-à-terre, I checked my email, not a convenience of the cottage in Blockley, and found that I had been preceded by two separate communications from Meiringen.
The first of these was in the way of a round-robin flyer for the Festival, which had hopes of becoming, I learned, a regular and even annual event. The second specifically targeted me. I was thanked for ‘gracing our festival with your august self’ and afforded the information I needed regarding the airline company I was to fly with, the reference number of my e-ticket, by whom I would be met at Zurich airport, and the like. Also what was expected of me personally. There would be a presentation by my translator Jochen Schimmang, himself a prizewinning novelist and by now a dear friend of mine, followed by a reading by me of one of the tales from my collection. (Knowing what was coming, I had already, on the train, mentally selected the shortest of them, ‘The Giant Rat of Sumatra’, alluded to by Holmes in ‘The Sussex Vampire’ as ‘a story for which the world is not yet prepared’.) The evening would end with a public Q & A session, one that risked being ‘stormy’, I was gleefully warned, in view of the high quota of Holmes fanatics expected to attend and, for many of them, the near-sacreligious liberties taken by my book.
I printed out both emails, slipped into my suitcase the one I’d be required to show at Heathrow and took the other off to study over a coffee in a Catalan delicatessen I frequented, the Salvador Deli, across the street from me in Portobello Road.
It was three pages long. Down the left-hand side of its first page zigzagged a faux-slapdash formation of four picture-postcard views of Meiringen: a chalet decked with multi-coloured pennants; cows grazing on a gently tilting meadow; a bluish-white Alplet; and, on a dizzyingly narrow ledge overhanging the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes and Moriarty locked in hand-to-hand combat. Another column of images bordered the right-hand side, consisting this time of photographic portraits of the Conan Doyle specialists who had signed up for the Festival presumably well before I myself was asked. In fact, I was so belated an invitee that my own name went unlisted, and I couldn’t help wondering whether, as is often the case with events planned long in advance, some more illustrious guest than I had dropped out at the last minute.
Of my five fellow speakers there were three with whom I was, to varying degrees, on nodding terms.
I knew Hugh Spaulding, a jocose, heavy-drinking, chain-smoking Dubliner, a former sportswriter on the Irish Times, who was the first to have been astonished by the small fortune he had made, and no sooner made had gambled away on ‘the nags’, out of a cycle of thick-ear thrillers each of which was set in a different professional sporting milieu. These thrillers all had titles so formulaic as to verge on provocation: e.g. An Offside Murder, Death in the Scrum, Killer Mid-On, Bullseye! and To Live and Die on the Centre Court, a novel in which the No 1 Seed is poisoned, in full view of thousands of spectators, during the fourth-set tie-break of a Wimbledon final. Tennis being the sole sport of interest to me, this latter book was the only one of his I had ever read. It was, though, enough for us to converse upon when I met him, a crumpled codger, now a self-confessedly impecunious has-been, with a can of lager in one hand and a minute battery-operated fan in the other, a fan whose open plastic rotor buzzed less than an inch away from his very veiny nose, at a mutual friend’s birthday party one exceptionally warm August evening in a fairy-lit garden in Putney.
Hugh, I suppose, wasn’t ‘my kind of person’. But, as in sex, so also in the most superficial friendships, one finds oneself on occasion inexplicably drawn to somebody who isn’t at all one’s type. In any event, I rather liked him, and his book, and looked forward to catching up with him again.