As the conversation drew to an end, and Düttmann settled the bill, I was suddenly distracted by an irridescent soap bubble that wafted by my left ear and threatened to pop on the tip of my nose. Then another, and another, then a big fat one, then lots of delicately dainty little ones bumping and bursting against each other: it went on for so long I almost began to wonder if it could be some new, charming and as yet unrecorded species of weather. Turning my head to track it to its source, I noticed at another of the café’s terrace tables, but as far away from us as it was possible to be, the cherubic twins from the flight. Each of them, ignoring the glass of orangeade which stood on the table before him, was blowing a rash of pixilated burps and borborygmi out through a minute eye-glass on a stick. As on the plane, their parents sat apart, intently discussing some matter of import. They too left their coffees untouched and, from time to time, one of them would good-humouredly swat a bubble. Were they in Meiringen, I wondered, for the Sherlock Holmes Festival? It didn’t appear likely. But what other reason could there be?
*
Back in my room, I relaxed for an hour in the tub, before pulling the plug to let the slowly receding bathwater perform a soapy striptease over my recumbent nakedness. Then, feeling much refreshed, I strolled down to the Künsthalle, which was only a ten-minute walk from the hotel, and in its bar met up with Düttmann, Hugh, looking sprucer but with something on his mind, Sanary, who had changed into another, almost identical black blazer, the taciturn G. Autry, who, wearing jeans, a hyper-virile denim jacket and a shapeless Stetson hat in spite of being unrelated to singing cowboy Gene, addressed the one word ‘Hi’ to me, a few hovering members of the Festival’s youthful ‘creative team’ who, I couldn’t help noticing, outnumbered us guests three to one, and Meredith van Demarest.
I take no pleasure in coming clean – as I failed to do, deliberately, I suppose, when I first mentioned her name in this memoir – but, physically, Meredith was a stunner. Like all of us, she wasn’t as young as she used to be – in her mid-forties, most likely – and there was a slightly brassy quality to her slick long blond hair and a glazed Valley vacuousness to her face, which was also blond if you know what I mean. But there could be no denying the fact that that face was almost boringly perfect in form and feature, with its pale tan complexion, sharply highlighted cheekbones and two unexpectedly pitch-black eyebrows. (Was her hair dyed or was it her eyebrows?) Or that her figure caused the long since obsolete, now politically incorrect, expression ‘vital statistics’ to swim up to the surface of one’s memory. She was also tall, far taller than me and, as I watched her swan through the bar of the Kunsthalle towards us, I thought of a blowsily voluptuous B-movie actress whose initials she shared, Mamie van Doren, with the crucial difference that Meredith was an academic, not a film star, a fact which somehow rendered her all the more eyeball-distendingly sexy. As for her behavioural charm, it was, I repeat, of the drawly, eyelash-batting type which is always called ‘disarming’ but which instantly puts me on my guard.
‘Gilbert …’ she said softly. ‘After all these years …’
‘Meredith.’
‘So how are you?’
‘Oh, you know. How is anybody these days?’
‘Mmmm.’
She turned to Düttmann, who took her dry martini off a waiter’s tray and passed it over to her.
‘Thank you so much. You probably didn’t know this, Tommy, but Gilbert and I are old acquaintances.’ (Her ‘probably’ she pronounced as a drawn-out ‘praaahhhly’.)
‘Really? You and – no, I confess I did not know that.’
‘We first met several years ago. Antibes. The French Riviera. How long ago would it have been, Gilbert?’
I had been straining to read what was written on a curiously shaped brooch – of a snake swallowing its own rear end – pinned onto one of the lapels of her grey slim-waisted cotton jacket, and it was only after I had at last made out the words (I think) ‘For All The Women of America’ that I replied to her question.
‘Actually, Meredith, if you think about it, it’s an easy enough calculation. You recall, it was just after September 11. A matter of days after, if I’m not mistaken. So: September 15, 2001, let’s say, to September 10, 2011. A decade almost to the day.’
‘And what a decade it was,’ observed our host.
Meredith smiled. Perfect teeth, natch.
‘You must understand, though, Tommy, that that first meeting of ours was not a success.’
‘No?’
