Beautiful Shadow (90 page)

     During the week, Christa felt increasingly uncomfortable. ‘Opium is a terrific perfume, but after Highsmith announced that Charlotte couldn’t stand it, I decided to have a shower, after which she reminded me, “We have to save water,” ’ says Christa. ‘That indicated to me that whatever I did was wrong for her and the mere mention of the radio play and the rewrite stopped all conversation. Pat vanished into the garden or tried to find Charlotte. Needless to say, the “impossible interview” was never written. Leaving was a relief, I must say. When I drove away from the house, I thought this could easily be the end of our friendship, but soon after Pat wrote to me to tell me that she had had a fantastic time, and that I was one of her best visitors.’
³⁹

     The following month, Barbara Skelton and Mary Ryan, Pat’s old neighbour from Moncourt, came to visit. Highsmith had been a hardened drinker for years – according to Skelton as soon as she got out of bed, Pat would reach for the vodka bottle, marking it so as she knew her limit for that day – but she could not bear boorish drunken behaviour, especially in public. When Mary, obviously the worse for wear, fell as she was trying to ease herself out of the car, Highsmith shouted, ‘ “What will the neighbours think! People just don’t behave like that here. This is a very puritanical country! Suppose one of the neighbours saw you lying in my drive drunk! I risk having my Swiss citizenship annulled.” ’
⁴⁰
According to Skelton, Highsmith said this ‘with sadistic contempt, and set the tone of the visit.’
⁴¹

Highsmith sent off the manuscript of
Ripley Under Water
at the end of October 1990. On 10 December, she wrote in her diary that Liz Calder of Bloomsbury liked the book enormously and at the beginning of 1991, Highsmith was offered a £60,000 advance for the novel, the largest of her career. ‘I was quite surprised,’ she said. ‘I would have been content with one-third of that.’
⁴²
She was faced with an ‘horrendous’ Swiss tax bill,
⁴³
and she had had to ask Diogenes for a substantial amount of the previous year’s earnings in advance in order to cover it. ‘Easy come, easy go,’ she concluded.
⁴⁴

     The new year also brought news of a less pleasing nature: the threat of an American bombing campaign on Iraq following the invasion of Kuwait, a threat which was realised on 17 January. Highsmith was appalled by President Bush’s bully-boy tactics, writing to Patricia Losey that the Gulf War was ‘the most revolting Exercise in Political Hypocrisy in a long while’.
⁴⁵
Highsmith was also left depressed by the deaths of Graham Greene, Max Frisch, and Martha Graham, all of whom died in late March or early April. She had never met Greene, but the two writers had corresponded and after hearing the news, which she confessed made her feel ‘shaken’,
⁴⁶
she visited her local doctor for another chest X-ray. To her relief she was given the all clear.

     She boosted her spirits by taking up oil painting. Daniel Keel had given her a set of oils for her seventieth birthday and she intended to take regular painting lessons from her friend Gudrun Mueller. The two women were supposed to meet up each week, but in fact Pat only had two lessons. ‘I don’t know why,’ says Gudrun. ‘It was very difficult to teach her, to tell her anything. She was shy, hard-headed, and she had her own ideas.’
⁴⁷
Then, at the end of July, together with Charles Latimer and one of her neighbours, she organised a visit by car to Bayreuth to see Wagner’s
Der Ring des Nibelungen
. When Highsmith told Ingeborg Lüscher of her forthcoming visit to Bayreuth, her friend advised her on the rather formal dress code – if she attended the opera wearing her trademark blue jeans, man’s shirt and necktie, then she would stand out, and surely, Ingeborg asked, she wouldn’t want that? Pat told her that she had a wonderful skirt which she had worn to receive the honour, Officier dans l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres. ‘But when she brought it out it was a thick woollen item with an elasticated waist,’ says Ingeborg. ‘And the shoes she intended to wear were ones fit for only a teenager, light blue shoes with little flowers.’
⁴⁸
Highsmith, however, chose not to wear this ensemble, opting instead for a black, pleated skirt which she bought in Locarno. In Bayreuth, she enjoyed a meeting with Wolfgang Wagner and his wife and wrote in a letter to Kingsley of how the highlight of the event was the Rhinemaidens’ river scene. On her return journey, in early August, her female neighbour who was driving the car tried to take a sharp bend in top gear as they were passing down the Albula Pass. ‘
Nicht schnell
!’ shouted Highsmith from the front seat. The road was wet, the speed too high and a split second later the passengers were thrown forwards as the car slammed into an abutment. ‘Thank goodness Pat and her friend were wearing their seatbelts,’ says Charles. ‘Although I wasn’t wearing mine, I was in the back and was thrown forwards hitting the front seats. But it was a miracle we weren’t killed. I think the accident really shook Pat up. It was another intimation of mortality.’
⁴⁹

     She travelled to London in September for publication of
Ripley Under Water
and stayed in Hazlitt’s Hotel on Frith Street, where the famous essayist had died in 1830. ‘I collected her there for an evening on the town,’ says Liz Calder, ‘and she had discovered that so crooked were the floors that her whisky bottle slid of its own accord down the top of her chest of drawers and she was catching it with glee as it flew off the edge. She kept repeating this trick a bit like Pooh and his balloon. She had a childlike pleasure in simple things.’
⁵⁰

     Although critics did not rave about the book, those who were fans thanked her for another chance to encounter Tom Ripley. James Campbell, writing in the
Times Literary Supplement
, said that he welcomed the novel, but judged it to be ‘a less complex novel than
The Talented Mr Ripley
or
Ripley Under Ground
, and slighter than all the previous four – rather like a one-hour television drama next to a feature film’.
⁵¹
Hugo Barnacle, in the
Independent
, observed, ‘Highsmith’s plots have always had an impoverished air, but with the woollier psychology as well the effect is more awkward than usual. The reader falls back on the agreeable unpretentiousness of the writing and the irresistible brand of dark escapism, which more or less defy critical approach, let alone reproach.’
⁵²

     After nine days in Tegna, Highsmith was off again, this time on a publicity tour of Germany, accompanied by Kingsley. They took in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Berlin, spending two days in each. She returned home to further red tape – taxes, the worry of death duties, doctors’ appointments and details about her will. She toyed with the idea of turning her Tegna house into a Swiss-style Yaddo foundation for writers and artists so as to avoid the 48 per cent estate tax. Looking back on the year, she told Marc Brandel that it had been ‘rough’ and ‘boring’; she had ‘accomplished little, despite effort. Rotten atmosphere for working, alas.’
⁵³

     Pat was still troubled by the blocked artery in her left leg. She had suffered pain for months, particularly when walking. When she made an appointment to see her doctor in London, in December, she wrote in her diary of her fears that she might have to undergo a bypass, but after the examination, in mid-January, the doctor was doubtful whether she should have any invasive treatment whatsoever. The risks of surgery might prove too much for her, he said, and advised that she might have to live with the pain. Further tests, however, were scheduled for 20 January at the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead. The day before, Heather Chasen hosted a birthday tea party for her at her mews house in central London. ‘I think she enjoyed herself and she was pleased that I’d made the effort to entertain her,’ says Heather. ‘I remember we talked about the nature of consciousness, something she was very interested in. She was ill, but she didn’t talk about that. Some people are very keen on talking about their operations and ailments, but she wasn’t like that at all.’
⁵⁴
On the morning of the operation, Pat recorded in her notebook that she had enjoyed a cup of Nescafé at Hazlitt’s before being driven to the hospital where she spent two hours on the operating table. It was decided to perform an angioplasty, or what Highsmith called ‘ye olde pipe-cleaner method’.
⁵⁵
Under a local anaesthetic, surgeons widened the left femoral artery from a diameter of one to six millimetres, an operation doctors considered successful. ‘Well, you’re lucky,’ said the doctor a few days later, following a check-up. ‘I feel lucky,’ Highsmith replied.
⁵⁶

Chapter 36

I hesitate to make promises

1992–1995

‘Now I’ve an idea for a novel set in Zuerich, if I can pull it together,’ Highsmith wrote to Liz Calder on 19 March 1992. ‘Zuerich can be a violent town.’
¹
Initially, Highsmith plotted out the bare bones of what she envisaged as a novel of suspense – the discovery of a young gay man lying dead in his boyfriend’s bed; the search by police of the Zurich apartment and the supposition that the killer entered through a balcony window; and the investigation of the two prime suspects, both homosexual men. Yet, soon after outlining these details, Highsmith changed tack, deciding instead to relegate crime to the fringes of the novel. It may open with a shocking description of the stabbing and murder of Petey Ritter, the twenty-year-old boyfriend of Rickie Markwalder, but the book, if it can be classified at all, is essentially a romance, as is suggested by its title,
Small g: a Summer Idyll
. Most of the action is centred around a Zurich bar, Jakob’s Bierstube-Restaurant, categorised in guidebooks ‘with a “small g” – meaning a partially gay clientele but not entirely’.
²
Highsmith plucked the term from a diary in her possession, ‘Metro Man ’92’, a pocket-sized volume marketed at gay men. The book contained graphic photographs of naked men and featured a guide to the gay scene in a number of cities, including Zurich. Under the heading, ‘Codes in this book’, the diary lists ‘G’ as, ‘Gay: male homosexuals mainly or only’ and ‘g’ as, ‘Partly gay’.

     Highsmith’s description of Jakob’s was based on a bar near the home of her friend Frieda Sommer, who lived in Dorfstrasse, Zurich. ‘It was low-ceilinged and dark, with a bar/drinking section in the front and a few tables for eating in the back,’ remembers Vivien De Bernardi.
³
Pat took the central character of Rickie Markwalder, a forty-six-year-old graphic designer who is told by his doctor that he is HIV-positive so as to scare him into practising safe sex, from a fifty-two year-old acquaintance who lived near Frieda, describing the real-life commercial artist as ‘well-meaning, generous, popular at the pub’.
⁴
Although the storyline of Rickie’s fake HIV status strikes an unconvincing note, apparently Highsmith based the deliberate misdiagnosis on the experience of Frieda’s friend. ‘I remember Frieda telling me about him [her friend] when we went for lunch to the little restaurant that was small g in the novel,’ says Vivien De Bernardi. ‘I was astounded by the fact that his doctor gave him a misdiagnosis just to scare him.’
⁵

     After the opening chapter in which Petey Ritter’s murder is described, Highsmith fast-forwards six months to the summer. Rickie Markwalder is getting on with his life, working on his designs, and socialising at Jakob’s, the regular haunt of Renate Hagnauer, a club-footed couturier, her young apprentice and tenant, Luisa Zimmermann, and the ‘mentally retarded’
⁶
Willi Biber, whom Renate uses as her henchman. Rickie and Luisa grow closer after the graphic designer gives her a scarf which once belonged to Petey, whom Luisa loved, yet the platonic relationship is derided by Renate, who is at once fascinated and repelled by homosexuals. Both Rickie and Luisa also find themselves attracted to the figure of Teddie Stevenson, a young aspiring writer whom they both meet at Jakob’s. Yet Renate, growing increasingly possessive of her young charge, orders Willi to beat up Teddie, whom she thinks is gay, and one night the hulking giant follows the boy out of the bar and attacks him with a piece of metal, leaving him injured. Teddie and Luisa enjoy a couple of dates together, but Luisa also finds herself feeling a strong attraction for Dorrie Wyss, a young freelance window dresser. As Luisa tries to assert her independence, her friends dream up a plot to free her from her tyrannical employer and landlady, a plan outlined by Rickie: ‘ “She finds Dorrie in bed with you one night . . . Opens your room door, for instance. A shriek of horror. Renate – she’s bound to fire you. Or she may have a real heart attack!” ’
⁷
Renate duly discovers Luisa and Dorrie in bed together, but as Dorrie rushes towards the door the club-footed couturier falls down the stairs to her death. Finally, it is revealed Luisa is the sole beneficiary of Renate’s will; she continues to sleep with both Teddie and Dorrie and the novel ends with a plea for greater sexual fluidity.