And Then There Was No One (12 page)

‘The plot of the Novel – I mean the novel-within-my-novel – is of no importance. Or, if I may put that more candidly, I haven’t yet decided what it’s going to be, and it would only complicate matters anyway. I assure you, though, this is very much less of a barrier to your comprehension of the book as a whole than it may seem. All you need to know for the moment is that its title is
Apocalypso.

‘Of greater importance are the Footnotes. To start with, they mainly consist, as you would expect, of strictly informative annotations concerning the real names, places and events that are threaded through
Apocalypso
itself. Even at this early stage, however, the Reader notes a recurring tendency on G.’s part to confess that he took certain creative decisions – setting its opening section in a theatrical milieu, perhaps, and choosing a heterosexual protagonist – precisely
because they belied his own public image as a homosexual theatre hater and baiter. It’s also in the Footnotes that he reprints, like so many literary outtakes, a number of arresting metaphors that he admits to having reluctantly cut from the definitive draft. In fact, as the Reader gradually becomes aware, in a disorienting reversal of conventional practice, they are written in a denser and more overwrought style than the body of the text.

‘Gradually, too, as they come to usurp more and more space on the page, the Reader discovers from the Footnotes that G., a much-lauded, best-selling, Booker-Prize-winning author, had earlier written an unpardonable book, a satirical denunciation of the culture and society of the contemporary United States whose closing chapter mercilessly debunked what he called “the burlesque cult of September 11”.

‘Even before the publication of that book, G. had had a handful of detractors like wolfhounds snapping at his heels. Now, because of it, there is actually a price on his head. A reclusive Texan billionaire, founder and funder of a nationwide network of ultra-patriotic, ultra-hawkish organisations, has offered the reward of a hundred million dollars to anybody prepared to “terminate”, to use his word, this arch-enemy of his beloved America. Since the threat could scarcely be more serious, G. at once goes to ground.

‘He spends the next several months being shuttled from one safe house to another, from Watford to Hendon, from Leighton Buzzard to Welwyn Garden City. From these
havens he issues frequent public statements in justification of his book. He plays endless games of Scrabble with his minders. He turns briefly to the Cross, but realises that it offers, for the unconditional freethinker he has always been, a hopelessly inadequate crutch. And it’s when he has finally been driven close to suicidal despair by his nightmarish plight that a solution is proposed to him by an anonymous agent, known only as “Q”, from M16.

‘“There exists,’ says “Q” to G., ‘but one means by which we can guarantee to prevent you from being murdered.”

‘“Which is?”

‘“We murder you first.”

‘The logic, though maybe not immediately obvious, is nevertheless elementary. If the world were persuaded to believe – let us say, by an official statement of embarrassed regret from the British government – that G. has
already
been murdered, the Texas billionaire would undoubtedly call off his fatwa. G.’s facial features would then be remodelled by plastic surgery, he would be secretly transported out of England and assume a different identity in a different country.

‘At first horrified by the prospect, G. eventually resigns himself to his fate.

‘With his new face, and a new name to match, he moves into a well-appointed ranch-house, an
estancia,
the Villa Borgese, two hundred kilometres north of Buenos Aires. There, emancipated from the perpetual suspense of his peripatetic
life in England, he lives contentedly enough for the first few months, reading, zapping the TV, pottering in the Villa’s lushly overrun gardens. Except that there has, of course, been one imperative condition to his acceptance of this new existence of his. He has been forbidden to write, even more so to publish, a single word. His style is so instantly distinguishable from any other that, even under a pseudonym, he would sooner or later be tracked down.

‘G.
is
a writer, however. He was born a writer, he will die a writer. Writing for him is not merely a profession, not merely a vocation, it’s a natural, now almost physiological function, one he cannot for ever deny himself. And, one day, when he feels he can no longer tolerate such enforced autism, he conceives of a scheme, an absurdly grandiose scheme, whereby he may actually succeed in trumping fate. It’s true, he owns to himself, that, even before the catastrophe had struck, his reputation was no longer what it had been. Reviewers and readers alike had wearied of magical realism, and their disaffection had been reflected in his once fabulous sales. So what, is his febrile thought, what if he were to exploit his predicament to do what he perhaps ought to have done a long time before – reinvent that too famous style of his?

‘Where once his sentences had been luxuriantly long and serpentine, they would now become short and staccato. Where once his prose had been silvered by ripe, and some had said overripe, imagery, it would now be dry and lapidary.
Where once his pacing had been leisurely, it would now be rapid-fire. Of everything he had once done he would now do the opposite. Not only would such a contrarian strategy permit him to continue writing, even (why not?) publishing, not only would it maintain the secret of his true identity, it might even be his regeneration as an artist.

‘And so it proved. Obliged, like the author of an anonymous letter, to camouflage his own all too distinctive
écriture,
he ruthlessly pruned his prose, focusing solely, even monomaniacally, on the stark self-sufficiency of the external world and thereby mining his way to a shining new simplicity.

‘In the very last of the Footnotes, while informing the Reader how he also arranged, the better to cover his tracks, for
Apocalypso
to be published first in German translation and only afterwards in English, G. unexpectedly switches, quite literally in mid-sentence, to the present tense. He has just spotted a snow-white monoplane flying to and fro above the Villa Borgese. Later, on the same afternoon, having bicycled down into a nearby village to pick up supplies, he hears from local tradespeople that two American-accented strangers have been making enquiries about its tenant.

‘And there both Novel and Footnotes end.

‘There is, however, a brief Afterword. In this Afterword G. writes, still in the present tense, of the arrival at the
estancia
of the two Americans, of their cod-Pinteresque conversation with him and of his dawning realisation that their intention is indeed to kill him. Sinister yet at the same time unnervingly
polite and accommodating, they allow him to complete the annotated edition of
Apocalypso
by writing, precisely, the Afterword the reader is in the process of reading. And G. himself takes the further opportunity of expressing his satisfaction that there is henceforth nothing to stop
Apocalypso
from being published at last under his own name.

‘In the Afterword’s closing paragraph G. recounts the very last minutes of his earthly existence. Considering all the precautions he took – changing his name, having his face surgically altered, living a loner’s life in an obscure Argentinian province, publishing, and in German, a book which bore not the slightest resemblance to any work of fiction he had ever previously written – how, he asks his Nemeses, did they nevertheless contrive to track him down?

“‘Why, sir,” one of them smilingly replies, as though the response were self-evident, “it was your style. That style of yours is quite unmistakable.”

‘Et voilà!’
concluded Slavorigin with all the corny panache of a professional conjuror.

His bravura performance, which I have to say it was, prompted still more applause from virtually the entire dining room, in which, as I had failed to realise, so raptly attentive had I myself been to his storytelling, hardly a word had been exchanged for twenty minutes or so. At our own table, on the other hand, the reaction was, shall we say, mixed. From neither Meredith nor Autry, for example, could be detected any sign of enthusiasm at all.

After responding to Düttmann’s ‘Bravo!’ with a charming little bow, Slavorigin addressed the former.

‘So, Merry,’ he asked her in a voice that had turned slurry again, something it hadn’t been during his filibuster, ‘what did you think?’

‘You know what I think!’ she snapped back at him.

‘No, I don’t. How could I?’

‘You know how repulsive I found
Out of a Clear Blue Sky.
Okay, a lot of bad stuff has happened since then and maybe we’ve all come to feel differently about things, I know I have, but even so, even so, for you to be so fucking callous and conceited as to return to your offence, an offence some of us might just have been willing to forgive, to return to it like a dog to its doo-doos, no, no, that I can’t take!’

The whole room fell deathly quiet. I felt Evie’s eyes on all of us and on me above all.

‘And what offence is that?’

‘The “poetry of September 11”! For Christ’s sake, those were real people who died in the Towers! Those were real people who leapt to their certain deaths one after the other! “Like globs of wax dripping from two tall twin candles”! That’s what you wrote, isn’t it? Globs of wax? It’s disgusting.’

‘Do try not to misquote me. What I wrote was “globules of wax”.’

‘How dare you make poetry, so-called poetry, out of human agony! How dare you say “They’re only Americans, after all”!’

‘No hypocrisy, please, Meredith,’ he said. ‘When you open your
LA Times
and you see a headline, assuming the
LA Times
even bothers to publish such a headline, about some genocidal massacre in Serbia or Sudan, let’s be honest now, don’t you yawn and think, “Oh well, they’re only Serbians or Sudanese” and at once turn the page?’

‘Of course I don’t!’

‘Quite right, you don’t. You don’t even have to. You don’t have to think anything at all. For you Americans indifference to the suffering of others has become so instinctive it’s not even a tic.’

‘You really are a scumbag.’

‘I may be a scumbag,’ answered Slavorigin, a hard and dangerous glitter in his eyes. ‘I’m also an artist, an aesthete. You talk of making poetry out of human agony. Tell me, how long do you suppose Tennyson waited before writing “The Charge of the Light Brigade”?’

Since Meredith made no reply, he swept the table with a glance.

‘No? Nobody? Spaulding? How long?’

‘Haven’t the foggiest,’ Hugh said with a soft belch.

‘Guess.’

‘I dunno. Obviously not long, etc, etc, or you wouldn’t be asking the question. A year? Six months?’

‘Minutes!’
Slavorigin all but shrieked at us. ‘According to his grandson, Tennyson wrote “The Charge of the Light Brigade” a matter of minutes after reading a reporter’s
account of the massacre in
The Times.
He waited minutes, I waited five years. A day will dawn,’ he continued tipsily, ‘a day will dawn when the poetry of September 11 has become a cliché. I’m just ahead of my time as usual.’

‘Who gives a shit about Tennyson? Remember what Adorno said –’ Meredith rejoined the conversation before being immediately interrupted.

‘Why must one
always
quote Adorno to me? “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, right? But there has been plenty of poetry after Auschwitz, poetry and prose and drama and ballet and film and music. What moronic presumption, attempting to dictate to the future how it can or cannot behave. Are we to mourn in perpetuity? Till the end of time? It’s intolerable! The Holocaust has become a religion, an old-time, Old Testament religion of hellfire and damnation, a religion whose Original Sin is the Final Solution. Well, I for one refuse any longer to atone for an offence I never committed.’

With a trembling hand he drew a cigarette from Hugh’s half-open pack of Marlboros and lit it from the small bronze edelweiss-shaped candle that was our table’s centrepiece.

‘Anyway, I wasn’t even the first.’

‘The first what?’ I asked.

‘The first to extract poetry from September 11. Although, to be fair, the poem in question was written some forty years before the event itself occurred and a minor adjustment – oh, no more than three or four words – must be made first.’

‘What is this poem you’re referring to?’

‘Come, Gilbert, have you forgotten the opening quatrain of Nabokov’s
Pale Fire?

‘I was the shadow of the waxwing slain

‘By the false azure in the window pane –’

‘As I say, all it needs is a minor adjustment.

‘I was the shadow of the hijacked plane

‘By the false azure in the window slain –’

‘Stop him, somebody!’ Meredith cried out.

‘I was the smudge of ashen fluff – and I

‘Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.’

An ugly, sarcastic grin disfigured the lower half of his still beautiful face.

‘“The smudge of ashen fluff”. How vividly prescient of sly old VN, don’t you agree?’

Hurling her napkin onto the table, exactly as I remembered her doing at that little straw-roofed, sun-dappled beach restaurant in Antibes, Meredith stood up and, without a word of apology to Düttmann, or to the rest of us for that matter, stalked out of the dining room. I caught Evie’s eye. There was a momentary drop in tension as if our table had struck an air pocket.

Although he had undoubtedly won the argument, quite literally seen Meredith off, Slavorigin didn’t at that moment have the air or aura of a victor. He had a killjoy’s mean and petulant expression on his face and I suspect, given his natural and of course now long-frustrated gregarity, and
despite his well-documented relish for controversy, he had not on this occasion actively sought to provoke a squabble, thereby spoiling the evening for everyone, and had hoped instead that the résumé of his new novel would have prompted such warmth and sincerity of praise it would remain uncontaminated by the lingering rancour of old enmities. His vanity as a writer, a creative artist, an aesthete, as he had just defined himself, had been badly wounded and for once, in public, he cut an almost pitiful figure.