Suddenly, inside the same jacket pocket into which I had stuffed the soaking napkin balls, my mobile, which I had forgotten to switch off, started ringing, loud enough to cause us both momentarily to lose our stride in the game. Now he no longer stared, he glared at me, more unnervingly than if he had been in possession of both his eyes. (In the land of the seeing, the one-eyed man is somehow still king.) It was all the more awkward in that our compartment had been designated the train’s sole Quiet Coach, one in which the use of mobiles was banned – which is precisely why I chose it – and my telephone’s ring-tone was Tchaikovsky’s Walt-Disneyan ‘Waltz of the Flowers’.
Under his glowering gaze, I retrieved the elegant, hateful, indispensable little object from my pocket, flipped open its lid and put it to my ear.
‘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
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
* 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.
