Then the bombshell dropped. (Cue a heavily ironic sigh of relief from Evie.) First, without a word to me – to be fair, our relationship by then was fast deteriorating and I already suspected him of several infidelities, although none that couldn’t have been forgiven in the fullness of time – without a word to me, he packed his things and moved out. Next, I read – I read, Reader, in the Times Literary Supplement! – a review of his first novel, a novel about whose existence, about the very fact that he had written a novel at all, I knew nothing, nothing! (In the one conversation we had had, on the telephone, in the immediate aftermath of his departure, he let slip that he had taken three proof copies of the new novel to distribute to his wealthy Bulgarian relatives, to earn himself some moral air miles, as he put it, there being an inheritance in the offing, so he could surely have laid hands on a fourth to give to me.) I knew absolutely nothing of a 244-page work of fiction most of which he must have been writing during those sixteen months. But where? In the University Library? On the never too busy first floor of the Arts Café? In our own flat when I was asleep?
If that weren’t evidence enough that this high-falutin’ first novel of his, Dark Jade – a copy of which I had to buy for myself in Waterstones – had been deliberately written behind my back, there was also the fact that it was undisguisedly autobiographical and that the character of Robert, the hero’s clingy, shabby, talentless lover, was just as undisguisedly based – rather, debased – on me. Added to which, there’s not a single mention of my name, not one, in the index of A Biography of Myself!
‘So,’ said Evie, ‘my hunch was right. Revenge for a sexual humiliation. Adair or Ardor …’
A faint odour of goat droppings emanated from deep in the bracken.
‘No, you’re wrong,’ I answered. ‘It wasn’t sexual humiliation. A long time ago I learned how to put that kind of setback behind me. The book itself was the humiliation, the book and his having written it and published it without warning me, exposing to the world my private little squalors and meannesses, causing me to look an ass before I’d had the time to launch my own career as a writer.
‘Oh, Evie,’ I cried, and I could hear myself grinding my teeth, ‘how often I prayed that he would die of Aids, that he would pass away alone, incontinent, disfigured, a wrinkly sleeping-bag of piss and shit! Well, it didn’t happen like that – the creep was always lucky in love – at cards, too. He broke my heart and now at long last, thirty years later, I’ve broken his, literally. But basta. We’ve talked enough.’
‘Has it ever occurred to you,’ Evie went unflappably on, curse her, ‘that his humiliation of you may actually have been responsible for your own literary success, such as it is?’
‘What’s this you’re saying now?’
‘That perhaps you became a writer yourself out of your need to compete with him.’
‘More dollar-book Freud. I tell you, nothing, neither forevisions nor extenuations, nothing can erode the craving for vengeance and the bliss of having at last exacted it. What joy it was actually to watch that arrow pierce his chest. So much more gratifying, now I think of it, than if he really had died of Aids at a stranger’s hand. A stranger’s cock.’
‘There you go again. Can’t resist it, can you, the verbal quip? Even in circumstances as extreme as these.’
‘I’m glad you realise they are extreme,’ I answered drily. ‘And yes, you are right, Evie. I did bring you here to kill you. And it’s your own advice I’m going to follow, the advice I attributed to you in The Act of Roger Murgatroyd. Remember? In the book’s penultimate chapter I had you hold forth on how to commit a successful murder. Since you patently don’t remember, let me quote you, so to speak: “If you really want to kill somebody and walk away scot-free, then just do it. Do it by pushing your victim off a cliff or else stabbing him in the back on a pitch-black night and burying the knife under a tree, any tree, any one of a thousand trees. Don’t forget to wear gloves and be sure not to leave any incriminating traces of your presence behind you. Above all, eschew the fancy stuff. Keep it simple, boring and perfect. It may be all too simple, boring and perfect for us writers of mystery fiction, but it’s the kind of crime whose perpetrator is likeliest to get away with it.”
‘Evie, I’m going to take a leaf out of your own book. My own book, I should say. I’m going to take that excellent advice of yours and eschew the fancy stuff. I’m even going to adopt the first of those two specific options you offer – pushing the victim off a cliff. The Falls are a bonus.’
‘Hold it there!’ she exclaimed. ‘Surely you can see how wrong that would be?’
‘Of course I can see it’s “wrong”! I’m not an idiot.’
‘That’s not what I mean.’
‘What, then?’
