The expression on Burton St Clair’s face suggested he was piqued. Since the publication of Stray Leaves in Autumn he’d become accustomed to wallowing in a warm bath of praise, so this very positive rudeness brought him up short. What’s more, Jude recalled, he had always been extremely vain about his looks. When the photograph blown up behind him had been taken, Burton had had more hair, and it had been shot in such a way as to hide what deficiency there was. Since that time, more of the precious follicles had given up the ghost, and the overhead lighting of Fethering Library only accentuated the thinness on top of his cranium.
The author’s preparedness for public speaking did not include a ready supply of lines to deal with hecklers, so all he said was, ‘Oh, very amusing. Do we actually have any serious questions?’
Of the raised hands, he selected one belonging to a well-groomed woman – no, she would have thought of herself as a ‘lady’ – in her sixties. And with her question, normal fawning was mercifully restored.
‘Mr St Clair …’ she began.
‘Call me “Burton”, please.’
‘Very well … Burton, one thing I can’t help noticing in Stray Leaves in Autumn … and I’ve come across the same thing in your earlier books …’ The author’s good humour was instantly restored – a reader who’d read his previous books was clearly a serious fan ‘… is that you do have a very deep understanding of women characters, you seem to be able to get inside the female brain. Is this something that you’ve had to work on very hard, or is it something that just came naturally?’
‘I’m very glad you asked me that question.’ And he was. It gave him an unrivalled opportunity to demonstrate what an unusually sensitive man he was; to show, in fact, his feminine side. ‘The thing is,’ he went on, ‘I do actually like women … and I’m not sure that that’s a universal masculine characteristic.’ His words prompted sympathetic nods and sighs of regret from his listeners. He then elaborated at some length about how much more empathetic he found female than male company. Burton St Clair drew around himself the mantle of The Perfect Man – caring, appreciative of women’s contributions to life, aware of the shortcomings of his own gender, and yet safely and loyally married. The Fethering audience could not get enough of him, though Jude found herself adding liberal loads of salt to every word he spoke. She had known Al Sinclair too long to be totally taken in by Burton St Clair.
Eventually his disquisition on the natural rapport he felt with women came to an end, and he looked around for another question.
The raised hand he selected belonged to a man in his sixties, dressed in a light tweed jacket and expensively faded pinkish trousers. He had about him the ease of having been to the right schools and university.
‘I was interested, Burton, in what you said about crime fiction …’
‘Ah.’ The author smiled. ‘I’m not really here this evening to talk about crime fiction.’
‘Perhaps not, but your comments on the subject …’ the questioner looked down at some notes he had made ‘… when you said you were not in the business “as a crime writer might be – of killing people simply for the convenience of my plots”.’
‘And I stand by that. Though plot is a significant ingredient in any kind of story-telling, in literary fiction it does not have the primacy that it does in crime fiction.’
‘Are you talking here about Golden Age crime fiction or more contemporary stuff?’
‘Does it make much difference?’ asked Burton St Clair loftily.
‘Oh, so you’re saying all crime fiction is an inferior genre?’
‘I’m not saying “inferior”,’ said Burton, though he clearly was. ‘I’m sure there’s some very fine writing in the crime world, but I just feel that, for me, the crime novel would not offer sufficient space to explore the ideas that I need to pursue in my own work.’
‘Hm,’ said the man with the pink trousers. ‘There is of course quite a history of literary novelists …’ The way he spoke the words implied a level of pretension within the breed ‘… sneering at the works of—’
‘I’m not sneering. Far be it from me to—’
‘John Banville, for instance,’ his interlocutor went on implacably, ‘is well known for writing his crime novels as Benjamin Black and referring to them as “cheap fiction”, when compared to his literary novels. And the CV of Booker Prize-winning Julian Barnes doesn’t draw attention to the Duffy novels he published under the name of Dan Kavan—’
‘I don’t think any of this is really relevant to this evening’s discussion.’
‘Oh, but it is,’ the questioner persisted. His manner was not aggressive, it was infinitely reasonable. He argued with the skill of an experienced debater, someone who had always dealt with words. ‘We’re here to talk about your work and I am particularly interested in the books published – self-published – under the name of Seth Marston which—’
Burton St Clair was clearly rattled now. ‘I’m going to have to cut you off there,’ he interrupted.
‘Are you saying you don’t know the works of Seth Marston?’
‘I’ve never heard the name. We’re here this evening to talk about my novel Stray Leaves in Autumn.’ The author appealed to his audience. ‘Do we have another question on that subject?’
The woman whose raised hand was favoured this time was inordinately tall and expensively blonde, dressed in a slightly fussy pink jacket over an extremely fussy cream blouse. ‘I don’t think we should leave the subject of mystery fiction.’ Her voice had the relaxed refinement of an East Coast American intellectual. ‘The gentleman who spoke before mentioned the Golden Age, and that is a topic on which I have done considerable research, and indeed on which I teach a college course. I’m very interested in the relationship between classic mystery fiction and its so-called “literary” counterparts. I wondered if you, as a—’
‘I’m sorry to interrupt you there,’ said Burton St Clair, who clearly wasn’t sorry at all, ‘but without wishing to sound egotistical, I thought this evening we were meant to be talking about my books rather than those of the Golden Age, however classic they may be.’ Quickly, before the American could come back at him, he pleaded, ‘Now do we have another relevant question?’
One of his worshipful company of ladies came to the rescue. ‘From my reading of Stray Leaves in Autumn, I get the impression that you believe some level of adversity actually strengthens the bonds of love. Is that true?’
‘Oh yes, certainly. And it’s very perceptive of you to pick up on that. Shakespeare tells us “the course of true love never did run smooth”, and I think that there, as in many other areas of life, experience – and not always happy experience – can intensify the emotional reaction to …’
And Burton St Clair was off again, laying bare the depths of his sincerity to the good people of Fethering.
Jude was less convinced by his oratory than most of them. She remembered Megan telling her that, in his years as an aspiring but rejected writer, Al Sinclair had scraped up enough money to have three crime novels vanity-published. She didn’t know that they’d been written under the name of Seth Marston, but it wouldn’t have surprised her. It would have been in character for Burton St Clair to have lied about his early history as a writer.