I replied that I had seen the film, and it was evident that Hugh, who had ceased to contribute much to the conversation, cared only for a fag.
‘Has the Mystery Guest arrived?’ I asked.
‘Not yet. We have not been informed exactly when he [so it was a he] is due. But we have organised a formal reception in his honour tomorrow morning at eleven o’clock in the Kunsthalle. Our Mayor will again be in attendance.’
‘And Umberto Eco?’
The tic again.
‘Unfortunately, he could not be among us. An illness in the family, I believe.’
‘H’m,’ I muttered to myself as our car squeezed through the mountains. ‘He’s not at all superstitious, I see.’
‘What’s that you say, Mr Adair?’
‘Oh, nothing,’ I replied.
*
The Sherlock Holmes Hilton turned out to be far more gemütlich than Düttmann’s bet-hedging phraseology had intimated. Although not inspiring when we first glimpsed it on the drive which led up to its forecourt – an anonymous-looking, not especially lofty skyscraper that I guessed had once been an apartment complex – it had an airy, high-ceilinged lobby that, in Britain, would certainly have earned it a fourth star. And, as comic relief, the reception desk was manned by a prissy middle-aged queen who at once trained his Gaydar eye on me when opening my passport at my name and birthdate in order to copy them into the register.
Also to my pleasant surprise, my room was actually a suite, its furniture pale and beigey, smelling immaculately of lavender soap and flowers. From its tiny balcony was visible, in one direction, the town of Meiringen itself and the mountains beyond; in the other, just about, the Reichenbach Falls. It had, moreover, that absolute essential, a deep full-length bathtub, in which I hurriedly showered before rejoining Düttmann and Spaulding downstairs for our visit to the Museum.
The only drawback as I could see at short notice, but it was one I had anticipated, was the bed. It was of the Continental bolster-and-duvet type, and I also anticipated an ordeal of tossing and turning even before I managed to fall asleep, as my blind limbs tried to find just that posture that would allow them to make sense of their surroundings during the night. Incidentally, on each of its two rock-hard bolsters – it was a double bed – a gift-wrapped sweet had been laid. When I unwrapped one of them, I found a small meringue inside it. I at once thought ‘meringue’ and ‘Meiringen’ and how coincidentally close to anagrams of one another they were. It was no coincidence. According to the tourist booklet I leafed through before I finally quit the room, meringues had been invented in Meiringen. I live and learn.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum, too, was less dowdy, less provincial, than in my perhaps cynical and mean-spirited fashion I had expected. It was housed in the crypt of a deconsecrated English church right in the centre of the town, a town whose very Swiss stereotypicality I found conducive to reverie (even if the early-autumn absence of snow on its rooftops lent the whole compact little community the inconsolable air of a flock of freshly shorn sheep). There was, moreover, in the church’s grassed-over grounds, a full-size bronze sculpture of Holmes reclining on a bronze park bench puffing bronze smoke from his bronze meerschaum; and affixed to the wall behind him was an oblong London-style street plaque which read: Conan Doyle Place, Borough of Meiringen.
Oddly, the Museum itself had been left unattended, its rackety little box-office empty. Anybody could walk in, so we did. And it was indeed worth a visit, even if it wasn’t a patch on its double, the official London exhibit at 221b Baker Street.
The main attraction was a mocked-up replica of the cluttered living-room of Holmes and Watson’s digs. Nothing had been forgotten: stuffy late nineteenth-century furnishings; conventional Victorian portraiture; a wall-full of framed snapshots of mostly ghostly oval photos of mostly ghostly oval faces; a sturdy étagère made of Japanese birchwood; the mahogany desk at which one visualised Watson writing up his case histories; a bust, incongruously, of Conan Doyle himself; Holmes’s violin, music-stand, pipes and pipe-rack (although not a hint of the picturesque paraphernalia of his cocaine addiction); a cartoonishly oversized magnifying-glass; a deerstalker cap (does Conan Doyle ever mention Sherlock wearing one? Must check up on that); a blood-tipped arrow (why?) on a half-moon table which had been shoved up against one of the walls; a luridly jacketed copy of His Last Bow lying as carelessly on the same table-top as if abandoned unread next to a faded edition of the Daily Telegraph dating from the teens of the twentieth century; a cryptogram we had neither the time nor inclination to set our minds to; and an evocative miscellany of small and stylish personal effects.
Thirsting for a coffee, we gave the museum shop a miss.* Instead we repaired, as Holmes would have put it, to a nearby café, where I at once recognised Sanary already scrutinising our approach from one of its white terrace tables. In front of him was an exotic pink cocktail, which he was stirring with a swizzle stick, and a rolled-up copy of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.
‘I fancy I know where you’ve been,’ he said to Düttmann before the latter had time to make the introductions. ‘The Museum, n’est-ce pas?’
He boorishly pretended to take a moment or two to recall who I was, gave Hugh an expansive handshake, congratulated him on his novels, which I found hard to believe he had ever read, and gestured for us to join him.
I asked him what he was drinking.
‘It’s called a Pink Negro. Vermouth, curaçao, pomegranate juice and a dash of Angastura bitters. Sounds horrible, I know, but the name enchanted me.’
Then, being a man possessed of no small talk whatsoever, he plunged directly into just the kind of learned literary chat I wasn’t ready for, interesting as I knew it would almost certainly be.
To give you a sampling: our conversation having turned to Graham Greene, a writer for whom he, Sanary, had no time or patience (‘Only the British could ever have regarded him as Nobelisable’), Hugh, who seemed to have decided up to that point that he was out of his depth, suddenly spoke up.
‘No, no, old boy, you’re wrong there. I don’t like to be caught pulling rank, etc, etc, but if it’s true only the British thought he should have won the Nobel Prize, it’s because only the British are capable of appreciating his genius. You say he didn’t have a personal style, etc, but what you don’t get is that he had the kind of style that doesn’t call attention to itself.’
‘Pah!’ snorted Sanary. ‘It doesn’t exist, this “style” that doesn’t call attention to itself. It’s just a threadbare old alibi you Brits employ to justify the insipidity and impersonality of your writers. I imagine that, for you, Somerset Maugham had a “style that doesn’t call attention to itself”. Am I right? Or J. B. Priestley, for Peter’s sake.’†
Hugh mulled this over for a few seconds.
‘At least you won’t deny Greene had a super gift for dialogue. Ever see The Third Man?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Good film, wouldn’t you say?’
‘Yes,’ Sanary cautiously replied, ‘it’s a good film. Not the masterpiece the British seem to think it is, but, I agree, very entertaining.’
‘Well, you remember, etc, etc, it had this big speech about Switzerland? On the Ferris Wheel?’