TWELVE

Holmes Plays Soirée Games

Colonel McKenzie, late of the Indian Army, was, in the publishing industry of modern London, something of a throwback to an earlier time – not a throwback clear to the nineteenth century, perhaps, but back to the nineteen-thirties or so, to that era when books were still read by editors, not marketing committees, and when publishing companies were family affairs and not divisions of creativity-crushing conglomerates. Colonel McKenzie, ninety-two years old, slim, rose at the far end of Alexis Gray’s sitting room, lifted his long arms, and attempted – amidst the tinkle of glasses and twitter of voices – to gain the attention of the lovely women with glasses in their hands who were drooped over furniture about the room, and the attention of the intense men in their dark suits who were earnestly informing each other of things surely not fully appreciated by the hoi polloi. On the two terraces overlooking Regent’s Park could be seen snatches of colourful dresses amidst the sober navy and grey of pant legs. Colonel McKenzie genially persisted. Someone now began tapping the rim of a wine glass with a dessert fork, trying to assist Colonel McKenzie in attracting the general attention to the front of the room. Slowly, people pushed in from the terraces. Some of the young men looked very flushed.

From the moment of my arrival in this penthouse overlooking Regent’s Park, I had been surprised by one thing after another. First, by the fact that the purpose of this soirée was to announce the publication of a new book by Alexis Gray. Second, that so many people had been invited to what I had imagined would be a small family affair. Third, that nearly every woman in view was enticing (I later learnt the rather curious reason for this). Fourth, that Holmes fit very well into the group in his dark blue suit with a faint stripe, and his white shirt, and burgundy-and-blue tie. His distinctive profile – his slenderness, his blade nose, his rigid posture – might have been remarked at certain moments by some people, but on the whole Holmes looked like any bookish Londoner who might be at a book-announcement gathering.

‘I am very proud to announce,’ said Colonel McKenzie, ‘that on Monday next our firm will publish a new and ground-breaking book by our own Mr Alexis Gray.’

The crowd clapped, and someone shouted, ‘Hear, hear!’

‘The book,’ cried the Colonel, holding up a copy, ‘is a brilliant piece of literary criticism entitled The End of the Shakespeare Dream. It demonstrates that the Shakespearean plays were written not by Shakespeare but by Francis Bacon, and that is why we expect it to cause not merely a stir, but an explosion of outrage and interest.’

‘The more stir, the more sales,’ said a gentleman standing near me.

‘The more outrage the more publicity,’ said another.

‘What is most unusual for a literary essay such as this,’ pronounced Colonel McKenzie, grandly, ‘is that film rights have already been sold to Hollywood . . .’

‘Bravo!’

‘Apparently,’ said Colonel McKenzie, looking suddenly a bit bewildered and bemused, ‘they are turning it into fiction, a James Bond sort of thing.’

‘I thought it was fiction!’ cried a voice, and this comment elicited a burst of laughter from the crowd.

‘Come, Tommy!’ said Alexis Gray, pointing at the speaker. ‘The greatest fiction ever foisted on the world was William Shakespeare – other than God, of course.’ Alexis looked rather splendid in his dark coat and dazzling shirt, and with his blond hair shining in the light of the fireplace mirror behind him.

‘Alexis – be a good boy,’ called one of the women near me, a blonde with ringlets at her cheek.

‘Why should he be,’ said a gorgeous brunette, ‘when he gets so famous by being a bad one?’

‘He is a very superficial person,’ said the blonde.

‘That is his charm,’ said the brunette.

‘I suppose you are right,’ sighed the blonde. ‘But we’ve heard all these tired arguments before. I can’t really imagine his book amounts to much.’

‘It doesn’t need to,’ said the other. ‘They sell better when they don’t.’

Lotte Linger appeared, slipping lightly through a gap in the crowd. ‘Oh, it is all quite silly, this argument about authorship. I tell Alexis that the plays of Shakespeare were not written by Shakespeare but by another man of the same name, and this makes him furious.’ She laughed. She looked lovelier than either of the other two women, though she was sixty and they were in their late twenties.

‘Then you believe in Shakespeare?’ asked the brunette.

‘I might as well believe in Shakespeare as in a phantom – and all the rest are but phantoms. And, after all, the plays are the plays, whether written by William or a phantom.’

The two women laughed: Lotte had brought them both into the fold, and the three women now shared a vision.

‘Where is Bart?’ I asked.

‘One never knows about him,’ said Lotte. ‘Brussels, I think. He is supposed to turn up. I hope soon. Grandpa is becoming sleepy and grumpy, and Bart is his keeper.’

She glanced towards Grandpa Gray and it seemed to me she shuddered, almost imperceptibly. He was sitting in a corner, a bunched figure wearing a tuxedo, holding a . . .

‘What is he holding?’ I asked.

‘I do hope it isn’t loaded,’ said Lotte. ‘You have heard of angry old men with shotguns, haven’t you, Mr Wilson?’

‘I’m not sure I have,’ I said. ‘But what is the poor old fellow angry about?’

‘It has been my experience,’ she replied, ‘that anger needs no reason. Why was Iago angry? Why was Richard?’

‘Because he had a humpback?’ said the brunette. ‘Do you know, Ms Linger, you were in the first Shakespearean play I ever saw. You were wonderful! Our school group went to see Anthony and Cleopatra. That was almost two decades ago. I was nine, and so impressed.’

‘Thank you, my dear. A half a compliment is better than none,’ said Lotte, and she laughed.

‘Oh!’ said the brunette, putting her hand over her mouth.

Four young men had formed a scrum around Marianne, and when finally I located her I could not easily get to her. By and by, however, she broke out of the huddle of admirers, spotted me across the room, and sought me out. She touched my sleeve most fetchingly. For a moment I imagined she really preferred my company to that of all the glitterati and literati and younger people in the room. But scarcely had we greeted each other when Alexis came over, looking splendid, with a drink in his hand and a redhead on his arm. The redhead looked very Irish and ripe, and reticently gentle.

Alexis looked at Marianne and me. ‘Well, you two look very much a couple,’ said he.

‘I think so too,’ said Marianne.

One of the young men who had huddled around Marianne now pressed his way into our group. He had a handsome head, a big smile, a muscular body. He looked like an athlete who had been stuffed into a £1,000 suit. He wore a grey ascot. ‘I notice there are no ugly women here, Alexis,’ said he. ‘Is that by design?’

‘No, it is by nature,’ replied Alexis. ‘In nature there are no ugly women, or men. If you think you see an ugly person, tell me, and in a while I will find out her beauties, or his. What the world calls a true beauty is merely someone who is beautiful from more angles than most of us are. I will find beauty in a fat girl, a crippled army sergeant, or a starving dog. Every creature on this earth is beautiful from some angle – though sometimes, admittedly, patience is required to find the angle.’ He paused, smiled. ‘And I am very impatient. I confess, my guest list is based on my impatience.’

By eleven o’clock many of the guests had left. I chatted for a while with Sir Hugh, and asked him what he thought about his stepson’s thesis that Francis Bacon had written the plays of Shakespeare. He leant towards me. ‘Utter nonsense. I often wonder, Wilson, what is it in human nature that makes men conjure up conspiracy theories that cast doubt on obvious truths? That is the puzzle I should like answered.’

‘I have often thought,’ said I, ‘that in the case of Shakespeare some people just don’t want to believe that a country boy could be so smart.’

‘Could be, could be.’

‘Others, perhaps, don’t dare believe that a man could write so magnificently in apparently so offhand a manner, without puffing up his achievement – not even worrying, apparently, about whether his plays were published. To the generality of mankind, who take themselves and their tiny achievements so very seriously, such an attitude seems almost incomprehensible.’

‘It does, it does,’ agreed Sir Hugh.

‘But I believe that the very fact that Shakespeare did not take his work so terribly seriously may be one of the reasons he pulled it off so brilliantly. It is generally true, is it not, that the most graceful of people are those who think least about themselves?’

‘I think you have something there, Wilson.’

Alexis lifted a bottle. ‘May I pour you another drink?’

I held out my glass.

‘Who is your friend, really,’ asked Alexis.

‘You mean Sherlock Holmes?’ I said.

‘Come now, Mr Wilson. Surely you don’t expect us to believe he is the Mr Sherlock Holmes – that would be the story of the century if it were true.’

‘That is precisely why the story is so easily kept secret,’ said I. ‘The truth is never believed. The result is that Holmes’s anonymity is preserved – as he prefers. But I fear when Dr Coleman publishes his articles, detailing how he resuscitated my friend, it will be quite impossible to keep the story quiet. I understand Coleman is preparing papers for The Journal of the American Medical Association, and The Lancet.’

Alexis Gray looked bemused.

At that moment Marianne took my arm and drew me out on to the terrace. She and I discussed a number of topics, including a café we both knew on the Rue de Bac, while gazing out over the soft dark of Regent’s Park. But by and by the murmur in the room behind us changed tone, and we saw that Bart had arrived. He looked rumpled in brown corduroys and blue wool sweater and hiking shoes. His necklace of blue stones peeked out from under his white shirt collar.

‘Welcome back from Brussels,’ said Alexis. ‘How was the journey?’

‘Long,’ said Bart. His shoulders were slightly rounded, and his darting glance leapt about the room. A smile played about his lips, uncertainly, as he shook his brother’s hand and congratulated him. ‘I hope you sell a million copies, Alexis,’ he said, as he pulled a mint from his pocket, popped it into his mouth. Then he turned and greeted his mother, and kissed her on the cheek, and hugged her. He gave Marianne only the barest nod. He offered a perfunctory Hello, Sir Hugh to his stepfather, then hurried towards Grandpa Gray and knelt down beside the old man, patted his hand with true affection, took the shotgun away from him, and spoke to him softly.

Marianne led me back out on to the terrace and there we were joined, a few moments later, by the lovely Lotte Linger, who proved to be the perfect conversationalist. Whatever topic a person served up, Lotte would volley it like a happy tennis player, and if you switched balls on her, she would go with the new one – her roles in Shakespeare, the weather in the Channel Islands, the food in northern Italy, the quintessence of Ibsenism. Lightly and deftly she would volley and patiently await your return, and sometimes put a little spin on it to make things interesting. But despite her vast experience of the world, and her fame, she never tried to put you down with a slam. I tried to elicit information from her that might help Holmes in his quest for the letter, but I had little success.

We three strolled back into the main sitting room and there was Holmes standing next to the fireplace conversing with Bart Gray. As we entered the room I heard Holmes say, ‘Logic is the lowest form of thought.’

Bart looked startled. ‘You, who claim to be Sherlock Holmes, would say that? Whoever you may be, you are quite wrong to call the nature of logic in any way low.’

‘It is merely straight-line thinking,’ said Holmes. ‘It lacks the imaginative curves of higher thought.’

‘I don’t understand you,’ said Bart.

‘A small logical problem may demonstrate my point,’ said Holmes. ‘Have you seven five-pound notes?’

‘I think I do.’ Bart slipped out a wallet and brought out some bills. ‘Sorry, only five.’

‘That will do,’ said Holmes. ‘Lay them face up on the table. That’s right. Now, the problem is to place four of these notes so that each touches every other, but touches only at one point.’

Bart quickly laid three notes flat on the table to form a triangle, corners touching. He then took the fourth, bent it in the middle so it stood on edge, and placed it in the middle of the triangle with one corner touching the meeting point of two of the flat notes, and the other corner touching the middle of the third. ‘Nothing difficult in that problem,’ he said.

‘Your solution is logically infallible, but imaginatively flawed,’ said Holmes. ‘You have limited yourself to straight-line thinking, and failed to imagine what your solution might lead to.’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘My meaning will dawn on you eventually,’ said Holmes, and he quickly leant and plucked something from Bart Gray’s sweater. He held the something up to the light. ‘One seldom finds heather in Brussels,’ he said.

A shadow of doubt floated across Bart Gray’s face.

Sir Hugh Blake pushed forward towards Holmes, his face piled with smiles. ‘Mr Holmes, I almost forgot. Your briar pipe arrived at Widcombe Manor this morning, a beautiful piece made by the incomparable Mr Sedley of Hexham. I forgot to bring it along, but I shall send it to you in a few days.’

‘Thank you, Sir Hugh,’ said Holmes. ‘It is a gift I shall cherish.’

Holmes extended a hand to Alexis and congratulated him once more on the forthcoming book, and thanked him for the evening.

I did the same.

Marianne hurried up to me. ‘Can we meet for lunch next Thursday? I’m staying in London till the end of the week.’

‘Delighted,’ I said.

A moment later Holmes and I were out in the dark, walking briskly towards home.