And Then There Was No One (9 page)

‘Not one of her whodunits?’

‘Good Lord, no. Even she knew better than to push her luck that far. No, it was an early effort that she’d had published privately and let go out of print, a bit Lesbian,
The Urinal of Futility,
can you imagine, all very
simpatico
in its way but just too terrible as prose. I mean to say, I know that at Virago we sometimes had to stretch the definition of classic – all in the good cause – but even so, there are limits.’

She started hunting for a spatula which, it turned out, she’d been using as her cookbook’s bookmark.

‘Well, anyway, as I was saying, it was awkward having to refuse her, in fact it became quite unpleasant, our being friends and everything, but I
was
a publisher, after all, and her work just wasn’t up to snuff.’

‘And yet you still think I ought to read her?’

‘No, no, darling, you’ve completely misunderstood. I think you ought to
meet
her.’

‘Meet her? Why?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Okay, but when?’

‘Soon. I’ll have you both to supper. It’ll be just the three of us. A
tête-à-tête-à-tête.’

So it was that, a fortnight later, I did meet Evadne Mount. Moreover, the moment I watched her stride into Carmen’s living-room, I knew why the meeting had been set up. Evadne Mount was not merely the author of Agatha
Christieish whodunits, four of which I had in the meantime unearthed from my local library’s vaults and read with moderate enjoyment, she herself was a character straight out of their stock barrel. Although the evening was humid, she wore a two-piece, oatmeal-hued outfit in the heaviest and hairiest of Scottish tweeds. Her grey stockings were as thick and tight and unappetising as month-old bandages, and her massive feet were encased in the kind of shoes that I would later describe in
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
as ‘so sensible you felt like consulting them on whether you should cash in your shares in Amalgamated Copper’. Then there was that voice of hers with its breaking-the-sound-barrier boom, a voice to whose uniqueness, in neither of the whodunits in which I cast her as my heroine, would I prove capable of doing justice. In truth, if I had been a totally free agent, and hadn’t had to worry about her own personal reaction once the books were published, I would have written about it, vulgarly but honestly, that it made her sound as though she were farting through a trumpet.

Somewhat to my surprise, though, I too liked her. We at once struck up a rapport. Even if, as soon as we had been introduced, she started calling me by my first name, standing on the absence of ceremony, so to speak, a liberty I myself never take with strangers, I found that on an unexpectedly wide range of conversational subject-matter – the superiority of Mayhem Parva mysteries to anything of the sort written nowadays, the increasing omnipresence of weirdos and
deadbeats in what were once respectable residential areas of London, the charlatanism of almost all contemporary art – our views converged.

While listening to her hold forth, I soon came to the realisation that, as Carmen had foreseen, I definitely could use her as source material for the leading character of my projected whodunit. I even wondered whether it might be possible not merely to
adapt
her but, in a literal sense, to
adopt
her – in short,
to have Evie herself be my sleuth.
Her name, her clothes, the fact that she herself wrote whodunits in a nineteen-thirties style, were just too perfect, for the nostalgist of English eccentricity that I am, to be compromised by the fiction writer’s traditional scruples in such matters (though I was already starting to fantasise how I might actually enhance the anachronistic appeal of those clothes with an accessory that would be distinctive to her, a handbag or a hat, yes, a hat, perhaps a French matelot’s tricorne). Her voice, her galumphing mannerisms, above all her habit, when she, Carmen and I began dishing the latest dirt on the denizens (Evie’s word) of London’s literary scene, of being perpetually reminded of incidents out of her own novels, just as Jane Marple would invoke the trivia of village rumour and gossip when elucidating the ostensibly more recondite set of motivations which lay behind some diabolical metropolitan crime – no, there was no reason at all, it seemed to me, why I couldn’t transpose her, intact, into my own whodunit. Dare I ask her if she would consent to
become the model for my fictional sleuth? Would she be offended? She herself was not too wellknown and, if Carmen was to be believed, financially insecure. Naturally, I would be prepared to offer her a decent percentage of my novel’s advance fee and royalties – 25%, say – no, maybe 20% – plenty of time to work out the details. Moreover, if the book turned out to be the success I hoped it would be, it could well re-boot her own languishing career. What had either she or I to lose?

I put my proposition to her. She heard me out, calmly and attentively; the sole sign of what I read as growing enthusiasm on her part was some fidgety play with her pince-nez. It would be my intention, I explained, to name my sleuth ‘Evadne Mount’. I would draw inspiration from her facial features, her gestures and clothing, her entire external appearance. I would allow her character to interrupt the storyline at regular intervals with brief little digests of her own whodunits (whose resident amateur detective, Alexis Baddeley, was also an elderly spinster), some of which, those whose twists I’d refrain from divulging, would indeed be her own, others, those whose twists I
would
divulge, I’d devise myself, subject to her approval. Finally, I would give her a Watson in the guise of a archetypally plodding Scotland Yard Inspector yet would also guarantee that it was she not he who solved the crime.

All this, I say, I pitched without any more input from her than a repeated twiddling of her pince-nez and a twitch of
an eyebrow when, just once, she exchanged a bemused glance with Carmen. Then, when I had fallen silent, prior to saying either yes or no she made two requests.

‘Will I,’ she asked, ‘have the right to expropriate those apocryphal plot digests you mention and develop them as full-length plots for any subsequent whodunits I myself might decide to write?’

That request I hadn’t expected. But, even though a trifle wary and making a mental note to consult my agent, I saw no pressing reason not to grant it and, as I told myself, there would be nothing to prevent me from later changing my mind.

Then: ‘Will I have an absolute veto over anything I take exception to in your description of my appearance or the dialogue you attribute to me?’

‘Ah well, no,’ I answered firmly. ‘No absolute right of veto, I’m afraid. I will, of course, let you read in advance everything in the book relating to you, which, as just about everything in the book
will
relate to you, basically means that I’ll be showing you the typescript even before my Faber editor sees it. And I will, as I say, subject all of it to your approval, said approval not to be unreasonably withheld, pardon my legalese. But the final decision as to what does or does not go into my novel must rest with me. Being a novelist yourself,’ I craftily added, ‘you ought to understand why that has to be.’

Turning to Carmen, she said, ‘Tell me what you think.’

‘Darling, you can’t possibly expect me to advise you on something so unheard-of. How would I know how to calculate the risks involved? The ramifications? All I will say is that I’ve known Gilbert for many years and I promise you he’s to be trusted. Not for a single moment would he – Actually,’ she ebulliently interrupted herself, ‘what the hell! I will advise you. Go for it, Evie!’

And she did, opining (yes, like one of her own clichéd creations, she actually did opine) that since, whichever decision she took, it was bound to be a mistake, the essential was to make the right mistake, not the wrong one.

Our gentleman’s agreement was sealed with an old-fashioned handshake and an ice-cold bottle of Veuve Clicquot that I suspect Carmen had been keeping in readiness for just such an outcome. And since I already knew what the title of my whodunit would be, I raised my glass and proposed a toast:

‘To
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd.’

Up to a point, I stuck to my half of the bargain. A written contract, which we both signed without a qualm, followed our supper together and I dutifully emailed Evie, at
[email protected]
, each chapter as I completed it. I made all of the relatively few minor amendments she insisted upon, mainly having to do with references to her weight but once or twice relating to lines of dialogue she felt were inappropriate to both her factual and fictional selves. She also emailed me in her turn a handful of conceits, most of which
I ignored but one I was happy to use, and not simply in compensation for those I wasn’t, that of giving her character the catch-phrase ‘Great Scott Moncrieff!’.

Unfortunately for her, though, which is why I prefixed the preceding paragraph with the qualifier ‘up to a point’, I am less of a writer than, supremely, a rewriter. Writing, I contend, makes a book possible; only rewriting is capable of making it good. For three months after I had delivered my text to Faber, I tirelessly polished it, a process, as ever with me, primarily of excision, ellipsis and elimination, of paring, cropping, thinning out, trimming off and cutting away. But I also seized the opportunity to develop certain internal relationships necessary to what I shall grandly call the narrative’s combinatoric structure.
‡

One of these relationships, inspired by Carmen’s revelation of Evie’s long unobtainable and apparently unreadable Lesbian apologia,
The Urinal of Futility,
involved Evie herself and the stage and screen star Cora Rutherford. Cora was an invented character, of course, named after the actress Margaret Rutherford who (to Agatha Christie’s private vexation) had been hopelessly miscast as Miss Marple in a cycle of film adaptations from the sixties. And, in my revised storyline, she – Cora, that is, not Margaret Rutherford – and Evie were described as having once, during their carefree youth, shared ‘a small cold flat and a big warm bed in
Bloomsbury’, before maturing, in Evie’s case, into self-elected spinsterdom and, in Cora’s, into serial heterosexual monogamy.

It wouldn’t exactly be fair to say that I never had any intention of letting Evie, as agreed, vet these late additions. But time pressed, Faber fretted, the printers clamoured, as printers have immemorially done, for the typescript, and my fear was that, if she were to take umbrage and actually demand that I edit them out again, the book’s pre-Christmas publication date, so crucial to its Boxing Day setting, would be compromised. So I never did email them to her. (It happens.)

The book written, our correspondence ceased altogether. Which also meant that, as the date of publication loomed, I was assailed by a sentiment of foreboding that few writers of fiction can ever have known: would Evie take exception to the very novel of which she was the principal character? I actually asked myself whether she would go as far as to injunct the book, whatever that precisely entailed. Or whether she could.

That November
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
came out in Britain to wonderful reviews and pretty good sales. Three months previously, in the late summer, Jochen’s translation,
Mord auf ffolkes Manor,
had been published in Germany, where it became a modest bestseller, never ascending to the top of the top-ten thermometer but for several weeks hovering satisfactorily around sixth or seventh place. Meanwhile,
a pair of complimentary copies, both inscribed by me, were dispatched to Evie’s address in Chelsea.

Then nothing. There came no response of any kind. No call, no letter, no email and, needless to say, no legal proceedings either. Evie appeared not to have tried exploiting the success of my book to arrange to have her out-of-print backlist republished. Nor, as she intimated she might, did she ever advise me that it was her intention to borrow one of my counterfeit plotlets to make of it the premise of some new whodunit of her own. To be sure, I might myself have re-opened the lines of communication; yet I was still too nervous to take the initiative of reviving our relationship, such as it had been, and anyway told myself that the ball was in her court. As the weeks passed, my anxieties ebbed without abating altogether.

Delighted with the reception of
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd,
Walter Donohue, my phlegmatic, soft-spoken editor at Faber, then solicited a sequel. Reluctant at first, I finally agreed to write, for a reason which I justified in its dedication, a second Evadne Mount whodunit,
A Mysterious Affair
of Style.
This time I didn’t once consult her – despite going so far as to have her fictional persona propose marriage to Trubshawe, a narrative development I was especially pleased with, as a twist that had not, like most twists in most whodunits, been preprogrammed into the genre’s genes. I could not help thinking, though, that she might have something rather different to say about it. But, again, I heard nothing.

All of which, dear Reader, should explain why, when I saw Evie rise to her feet in the back row of that lecture hall in Meiringen, my feelings were mixed, to put it mildly, to put it very mildly indeed.

The Q & A over, the room echoed with a communal exhalation of breath, followed by leg stretchings, finger-joint crackings and cigarette-lighter clickings. I inserted my notes between the pages of the copy from which I had read aloud. Folding up his own sheaf of notes, Jochen offered me all the standard reassurances after a public talk of this kind – how well it had gone, how gratifying were both the number and quality of the audience’s questions. I only half-listened to him, distracted as I was by the already forming queue of dedication-seekers anxious for me to inscribe their copies of
Die unveröffentlichte Fallsammlung von Sherlock Holmes
and other, earlier translated books of mine which had absolutely nothing to do with what Nabokov somewhere describes as ‘a hawk-nosed, lanky, rather likeable private detective’ and weren’t, many of them, even mystery novels. (But one learns not to be picky in these matters. A book sold is a royalty earned.) I was also distracted by my attempts to ascertain what Evie was up to. My field of vision was
obscured by diversionary activity, however, and I failed to spot her.

The last of my courtiers having borne off her inscribed copy – ‘To Hildegard With Best Wishes From Gilbert Adair’ – I was finally free to accept a Gauloise from Jochen and a glass of white wine from one of three circulating trays. And there, all of a sudden, she was. Elbowing a path through my fellow writers – I saw Sanary glare at her as his own glass, one he happened to be holding up to the light, was all but knocked out of his hand – she waddled towards me in her crimson suit, for all the world like the Red Queen, twirling her trademark tricorne hat around a chubby forefinger. But wait, hadn’t that hat been one of my inventions? I tried to remember if she had been wearing it at Carmen’s dinner party. Or had she since decided to adopt a few of the manners and mannerisms which I had given her namesake in my book? But she was almost upon me now, so I stepped down off the dais and walked forward to meet her.

‘Holy Rwanda!’ she exclaimed. ‘Or would you prefer “Great Scott Moncrieff!”?’

I laughed lightly. We shook hands, and I continued to hold hers in mine.

‘Evie! Evie, Evie, Evie. I cannot tell you how glad I am to see you. But why didn’t you let me know you were attending the Festival? Or are you by any chance,’ I asked, ‘the famous Mystery Guest?’

‘Me?’ she boomed out, just as I had always had her do in my books, again causing heads to turn, and it instantly dawned on me that the snort I had heard during the Q & A must have been hers. ‘I’m not nearly famous, or mysterious, enough. No, my coming here was one of those last-minute decisions. I arrived just in time to be too late, ha ha! Arrived this very afternoon, as a matter of fact. I missed the opening gala, missed all the speeches, missed practically everything, except of course your reading. As you can imagine, Gilbert, yours was one event I was determined not to miss.’

Now what, I wondered, did she mean by that? Was she still holding a grudge about my reprehensible failure to contact her after the publication of
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd
and before that of
A Mysterious Affair of Style?
Was this the prelude to our long-awaited and, by me, long-dreaded showdown? Since the air around my discourteous treatment of her would sooner or later have to be cleared, better I take the initiative.

‘I say, Evie,’ I boldly began, then at once stalled. ‘But first tell me
your
news. Are you writing a new book?’

Slyly scrutinising me for a moment or two, she expounded – no, she said:

‘I’ve just finished my latest.’

‘Dare I ask what it’s about?’

‘Why, certainly, my dear. You know me, I’ve never been coy about my work. It’s set in an exclusive boys’ public
school, the victim is its universally despised Latin master, stabbed through his Adam’s apple with the tip of a propelling-pencil, and all the usual suspects are present and correct. Except that not one of those suspects is older than fifteen and the murderer himself turns out to be, in accordance with the Detection Club rule that he or she should always be the least likely, the littlest of them all, an evil rosy-cheeked eight-year-old. I’m thinking of calling it
Eeny-Meeny-Murder-Mo,
a title I’ve stolen from your
Mysterious Affair of Style.
I trust you have no objection?’

I winced. The moment of truth could no longer be delayed. If I tried changing the subject a second time, I would be twice the coward I already felt myself to be. I had irrationally convinced myself that, just so long as Evie never actually enunciated the title of that second whodunit of mine, there was a chance, a vanishingly small chance, to be sure, but one worth taking nevertheless, that she was ignorant of its existence. Since she clearly was anything but, I would have to bite the bullet.

‘Evie,’ I began again, ‘I think it’s time we talked.’

‘About what?’ she said.

‘About
A Mysterious Affair of Style.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘Yes. It was unforgivably rude of me not to get in touch with you when it came out. What am I saying? Even before it came out. I ought to have been in contact with you when I was actually writing the thing. Can I assume you did
nevertheless receive your percentage of the advance and royalties?’

‘Yes, I did. For which, many thanks.’

‘Well, I’m pleased to hear that. Yet the truth is that I had not only a financial but a moral obligation towards you. And there, I acknowledge, I let you down miserably.’

‘My dear Gilbert, there’s no need for you to –’

‘Let me finish, please. I took liberties with your image without consulting you first, as I was obliged, contractually obliged, to do. I insist I was as careful as I could be. I trust you noticed, for example, that not one of the casual racist and anti-Semitic gibes that pepper the two books, just as they do Agatha Christie’s, was spouted by your character. But it’s quite true, I should have obtained your authorisation to write a sequel to
The Act of Roger Murgatroyd,
and I didn’t. And then, in
A Mysterious Affair,
my having you wager Trubshawe that you’d solve the crime before he did and, if he lost the bet, his having to marry you –’

‘Ah yes, Trubshawe,’ she interrupted me with a heavy sigh. ‘My darling Eustace.’

‘That too was unforgivable. Yet I wouldn’t want you to think it was because I was afraid you might object. Naturally, if you
had
objected, I’d have scrubbed it without a second thought. I simply didn’t ring you up, don’t ask me why, when the idea popped into my head and, once I had actually written the chapter, well, I suppose I genuinely assumed you’d be tickled by it.’

‘Oh, I was, I was. Tickled pink,’ she replied. ‘Why shouldn’t Eustace and I have tied the knot? Ours was a marriage made in heaven. Pardon the clitch.’

‘Clitch?’

‘Cliché, Gilbert, cliché. One of those nasty things you never stop putting in my mouth.’

‘Touché
– or, rather, tootch,’ I answered with a rueful smile that brought a grin to her pasty features.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I wasn’t affronted by your matchmaking. The less so as it all worked out most satisfactorily. However,’ she went on blithely, as I tried to figure out what she meant by ‘worked out most satisfactorily’, ‘however, I do have a bone to pick with you. A bonelet, really.’

I waited in a state of mute apprehension to hear what she was about to come out with now.

First, she noisily cleared her throat. Then:

‘As you of all people must know, I’m a very private person. I’m not prone to making public knowledge of any distressed state I might be in, except on that one occasion, of course, with Eustace in the Ritz bar when I owned up to my loneliness. But no – no, I
was
hurt, genuinely hurt.’

‘By something I did?’

‘Yes, Gilbert, by something you did.’

‘Well, but what?’ I asked.

‘If you must know, I was hurt by
The Unpublished Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes.’

Delaying a moment or two before answering, I let run
through my mind a few of the reasons she might conceivably have had for being hurt, for God’s sake, by this new book of mine, but I couldn’t find a single plausible one and finally said:

‘I’m sorry, Evie, you really have lost me. If I thought you didn’t like the book, well, naturally I’d be disappointed, but, after all, it’s a risk every writer faces even with his closest friends. And, to be perfectly frank with you, I flatter myself I’m much less susceptible to criticism than most. It’s – well, take this scarf of mine.
*
If you told me you didn’t like it, my response would be that I was sorry but that I didn’t buy it to please you. And it’s the same with my books.’

‘Your scarf I do like. Armani, isn’t it?’ She fingered it, tentatively twisting it sideways to check the label. ‘I’m right, as usual. Matter of fact, I like the scarf quite a lot more than the book.’

‘Ah …’

‘It isn’t so much the tome itself, you understand,’ she said, adjusting her pince-nez, ‘as what you might call its ilk.’

As what
I
might call ‘its ilk’?!! There are words, and ‘tome’ and ‘ilk’ are two of them, that for me instantly disqualify a writer from serious consideration. No matter. Let’s hear what she has to say.

‘What’s wrong with the ilk?’

‘An anthology of apocryphal Sherlock Holmes stories? Such a cheap commonplace idea. You realise that bookshops
are swarming with them these days? Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud. Sherlock Holmes and Mata Hari. All of them tosh. I call him – the bogus Holmes –
Schlock
Holmes, ha ha! And, I must say, Gilbert, I would have expected something more original of you, even when you’re wearing your pasticheur’s hat.’

‘That’s all very well, Evie,’ I replied coldly, ‘and insisting as I do that I know better than anybody, friend or critic alike, what the defects of my books are, I honestly don’t mind that you didn’t care for it. But you still haven’t explained why you were hurt.’

There being no ashtray within immediate reach, I let my cigarette butt drop to the floor, as I had already noticed several others doing, and stubbed it out under my shoe.

Evie glanced down at the squashed butt with deep disapproval etched on her countenance – I mean, she looked at it disapprovingly – and said, ‘You know, Gilbert, leaving a cigarette end on somebody else’s floor is like using somebody else’s loo and not flushing the toilet.’

Now I myself flushed. Without bothering to explain that I was merely following a precedent, I picked up the offending little number-two and stuck it into my trouser pocket.

‘Well,’ I asked again, ‘are you going to tell me what it was that hurt you?’

‘Haven’t you guessed? It’s the fact that you wrote two ingenious whodunits of which I was the heroine, they were marketed by Faber as the first two parts of a trilogy and yet,
for a reason of your own that I cannot begin to fathom, you elected not to write a third. You dropped me flat without so much as a by-your-leave. And for what, I ask you? A pastiche of Conan Doyle. As though the world needed another.’

To my surprise, I was touched by her admission.

‘Evie,’ I said, not quite, damn it, striking the half-tender, half-ironic tone I was aiming for, ‘if I didn’t know you better, I’d say you were jealous.’

‘Please don’t insult me,’ she peevishly replied, ‘by calling me jealous. Eustace once tried pulling that stunt and got what-for for his pains. I used the word “hurt”, and “hurt” is as far as I’m prepared to go. I was hurt because, without warning, without warning
me,
you cut short a series of whodunits that were already critical and commercial successes. Why, Gilbert, why? I really don’t understand.’

I answered in a measured voice that, if I’d done so, it was for a strictly aesthetic reason. For all my efforts to have the second novel ring as many changes on the first as was organically feasible within the generic conventions I was pastiching, there remained a stubbornly samey something about
A Mysterious Affair of Style
which long afterwards nagged at me. And not only at me. One reviewer, praising the book, had also expressed disappointment that I had taken an ‘if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it’ attitude to the first of the cycle, and I couldn’t help agreeing with him.

‘For me,’ I said, ‘another mark of a real writer is that he – or she – fixes things which aren’t broken.’

‘How very aphoristic of you. But I must tell you, Gilbert, even if
you
cannot, I myself can envisage many new adventures for my namesake to solve, and just as many variations on Agatha’s titles, and I give you advance warning that I shan’t quit this town before I’ve persuaded you to come around to my way of thinking.’

This was beginning to sound faintly alarming. I have never read a word of Stephen King, but I once saw a goodish film version of one of his thrillers,
Misery,
about a writer writhing helplessly in the castrating clutches of his most devoted fan, and I knew how he felt. I needed rescuing before Evie’s discourse took an even more sinister turn. Peering over at my fellow writers, who were still tribally closeted together, I succeeded in catching Sanary’s eye. Desperately but discreetly, I trained a ‘For Christ’s sake, get me out of this’ face on him; and, after a few agonising moments when he did no more than return my look of beseechment with one of bland bemusement, he finally, indolently disengaged himself and came across to join us.

‘Oh, there you are,’ he said as convivially as he ever managed to say anything to me. ‘Looking for you. Wanted to congratulate you. Excellent performance. Some sharp one-liners. Wasted on that audience, though. Except that I did notice you making a scribbled note after each of your zingers. Do I assume that to mean you were mentally filing them away for subsequent recycling? Wise man. For the writer, nothing counts but print.’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I murmured. ‘Nowadays … the Internet … all those blogs …’

‘Nothing to do with us,’ he said. ‘The Internet is an infinite library of goggle-eyed, Google-eyed ignorance and stupidity. If you don’t believe me, Google Tolstoy. Google Dostoevsky.’