And Then There Was No One полностью

I was about to interrupt, to point out to Hugh, in spite of being on his side of the fence, that if film scholars were to be credited the speech he was visibly about to recite was now known not to have been Greene’s contribution at all, when I was pipped at the post by Sanary himself.

‘“In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Am I right?’

‘Yeah, that’s it.’

‘Actually, my dear Spaulding, that speech was written by Orson Welles, not Greene. Not to mention that it was already a plagiarism from James McNeill Whistler’s The Gentle Art of Making Enemies. And I have to tell you, witty as it is, it does suggest that neither Whistler nor Welles knew very much about my country.’

We were all puzzled by this assertion, Düttmann included.

‘Everybody thinks cuckoo clocks are Swiss,’ Sanary went on. ‘They’re not. Oh, we Swiss are happy enough to fob them off on ignorant and credulous tourists. But in reality they come from the Tyrol. The Austrian Alps? So you see, my friends, it wasn’t Switzerland with its five hundred years of democracy which produced the cuckoo clock. It was Austria, the land of Adolf Hitler.’

‘What does that prove?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘Just as the speech in the film proved nothing.’

That was Sanary all over, an infuriating if always beguiling know-all. Except that he also had the unhelpful habit of not knowing when to stop.

‘At least,’ he said, barely drawing breath, ‘at least Welles had the decency to make mention of democracy and brotherly love. Now Hitchcock – he was much worse.’

I looked at him quizzically.

‘Come come, Gilbert, I refuse to believe you haven’t read Truffaut’s book of interviews with Hitchcock.’

‘Yes, of course I have.’

‘Indeed, you must have done. You parodied it, did you not, in your novel A Mysterious Affair of Style. Well, don’t you remember what Hitch said about Secret Agent, his adaptation of Maugham’s Ashenden stories?’

Already tiring of his oneupmanship, I shook my head.

‘I quote [but how did he quote? Did he have a photographic memory?]: “One of the interesting aspects of the picture is that the action takes place in Switzerland. I said to myself, ‘What do they have in Switzerland?’ They have milk chocolate, they have the Alps, they have village dances, and they have lakes. All of these natural ingredients were woven into the picture.”

‘Mais quel con! Natural ingredients? Milk chocolate? Village dances? Village dances?? And Truffaut, cet autre con, instead of suggesting, oh ever so politely, ever so deferentially, that one might have the right to expect a filmmaker of Hitchcock’s stature either to invert or, better still, avoid outright such whiskery old clichés, can only reply, imbécile that he is, “That’s why the spies have their headquarters in a chocolate factory!” And this is what the French affect to think of as advanced theory? What a couple of blockheads! No? No? True? Faux?’

Then, before I knew how it happened, his monologue had turned again – for Sanary there existed no such thing as a non sequitur – to a trio of musical themes, from Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi, d’Indy’s Symphonie sur un Chant Montagnard Français and Casella’s Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano, all three of which he hummed for us there and then to demonstrate how the composer Bernard Herrmann had purloined them for a few of his best-known scores for Hitchcock’s films. To listen to him, the history of art, of all the arts, was nothing but an unending charge-sheet of theft and countertheft.‡

He mentioned too, now almost as an afterthought, that not the least of the many logical absurdities in North by Northwest, one of the three films, incidentally, whose soundtrack scores he had exposed as second-hand, were the green and improbably symmetrical woods that Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint traverse on their way to the monumental kitsch of Mount Rushmore.

‘I took it upon myself to investigate,’ he declared. ‘There are no such woods,’ adding cavalierly, ‘not, of course, that that matters a jot.’

Düttman, meanwhile, was delighted not just that his eminent guests had taken no time at all to live up to their reputations for argumentative opinionation but also, somewhat contradictorily, that they were all getting on so well together.