Beautiful Shadow (93 page)

     Vivien had assumed that Highsmith had finalised the deal. However, when Vivien visited Pat at home six weeks before she died, Pat called her into her bedroom. ‘She had back pain, was lying down on the bed and as she got up to go to the bathroom, she said to me, “While I’m gone, look at that will on the desk,” ’ says Vivien. ‘She said she was afraid that she wouldn’t have the energy to rewrite it. I asked her why she wanted to change it and she told me that she had decided to leave her papers to the Swiss Archives. I said, “Are you kidding? Are you telling me you haven’t done that?” She said, “No – because it would take so much time to write it all out by hand.” I said, “You don’t write it out by hand – you go to a lawyer and the lawyer does it.” But she didn’t want to pay the lawyer – that was why. I told her I would take it home and type it out, which I did. We went through the will together and she showed me the paragraphs – there were two – which had to be changed about the executors and the archives. If she was going to leave her literary papers to an institution in the United States she would have chosen Kingsley, but as it was Switzerland she decided on Daniel Keel.’
⁵³
Feeling weak and tired, on 12 January Highsmith wrote to Kingsley for the last time to tell her friend of her change of plans and the fact that Daniel Keel, whom she described as being ‘very helpful . . . He’s my “Vermittler” or go-between (not agent) on all this,’
⁵⁴
had, with her permission, taken away a number of her drawings and paintings which he promised to gather together to form a book; the handsome volume,
Zeichnungen
, was duly published by Diogenes after her death.

     After the departure of Bruno Sager, Highsmith was cared for by a twenty-year-old girl who left after only a month. Her friends visited regularly and Ingeborg Lüscher gave Pat soothing massages, which she enjoyed, remarkable for a woman who did not usually like to be touched. ‘I was very gentle because she was only bones in the end,’ says Ingeborg. ‘She did not want to talk about dying with me, but in the last two weeks of her life, we became especially close. She had this way of looking at me, something which went beyond words. For me it was important not to look away, but to maintain eye contact. She was telling me, “Look, I’m dying, maybe this is the last time that I will see you. I’m dying, I’m dying.” She wanted support, but a wordless support.’
⁵⁵
During the last weeks of her life she started vomiting blood and her skin turned yellow – the latter a sign that she needed to have another transfusion – but she said she felt little pain. ‘I would have expected her to be more afraid,’ says Vivien. ‘In the six weeks before she died, Pat didn’t seem that depressed. It was funny – she was so often in an emotional turmoil over something that happened halfway around the world, but she was calm before she died. There was a tranquillity about her. She seemed to be quite peaceful, and as lucid as could be.’
⁵⁶

     On 1 February, she made her final will, nominating Daniel Keel as her literary executor, whom she also named, together with Vivien De Bernardi and Frieda Sommer, as one of the testamentary executors. She instructed that if her literary papers were sold to the Swiss Literary Archives, the proceeds of the sale should go to Yaddo, the beneficiary of the rest of her estate. The next evening, she felt so drained of energy she could no longer get out of bed to go to the bathroom. She called Bert and Julia Diethelm, telling them, ‘ “I’m completely hopeless and I’m in a very bad way.” ’
⁵⁷
The couple arrived to find Highsmith in bed, ‘which she had never done before as she had always received us fully dressed,’ says Bert. ‘Now she really was at the end, I thought.’
⁵⁸
Bert and Julia led her gently into their car, where Highsmith gave Julia a hug, and then drove her to hospital in Locarno.

     That day, Highsmith had been due to meet Marylin Scowden to sort out her financial affairs, but, feeling unwell, she had cancelled the meeting. ‘We knew that she wasn’t going to live that much longer, and I told her that we really had to meet,’ says Marylin, who visited her in hospital on 3 February, and who was the last person amongst her friends to see Highsmith alive. ‘It was terrible. She was just nothing. Her legs were hurting so badly and she asked me to rub her leg, which was amazing because normally she wouldn’t let anybody touch her. When I did touch her I realised there was nothing there – it was just bone. Although I tried to stay, she wouldn’t let me. I believed what the doctors said, that she would be home soon, and so I left.’
⁵⁹
Vivien phoned and asked Pat if she would like her to visit, but she refused saying that the day would be taken up by tests. At 6.30 on the morning of 4 February 1995, Highsmith died, alone. ‘I regret leaving her very much,’ says Marylin, ‘but I wonder whether she knew what was coming; maybe she wanted to be alone.’
⁶⁰
Vivien was shocked when she heard the news, early on that Saturday morning, as Marylin had told her how bright she had seemed the night before. ‘It’s no fun dying or being sick,’ says Vivien, ‘but all things considered I would say it was one of the lesser traumas of her life.’
⁶¹

Epilogue

On the morning of 6 February, in accordance with her wishes, Highsmith was cremated. Her friends chose a simple white blouse for her from which the lace had been removed. A dozen mourners gathered at the hospital in the mortuary room where Pat lay in an open casket, before driving to the cemetery in Bellinzona. There, Highsmith’s friends followed the funeral car on foot as it made its way slowly to the crematorium. ‘It was a cold day and sad, but also very simple and I remember thinking Pat would have been pleased by this and pleased by the small number of mourners, all people who had known and loved her,’ says Vivien De Bernardi, who spoke briefly at the service. ‘I felt it was exactly the way Pat would have wanted it.’
¹

     As is the custom in Switzerland, Highsmith’s house in Tegna was sealed, but as Marylin Scowden was staying in the property, the authorities decided to place what they thought might be of value into one room, which was then declared off-limits. Their choice of items was bizarre – the dining-room table, complete with the mess of objects sitting on its surface, including a tiny promotional box of Lindt chocolates and a fruit cake, and a leather-bound set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. After the authorities had disappeared, Marylin opened the closet door and found a literary treasure trove – a cupboard full of Highsmith’s manuscripts. ‘When I heard that story I realised how much I missed her, as that was exactly the kind of thing I would have called to have told her about,’ says Vivien. ‘I would loved to have phoned her and said, “You know what they’ve sealed – they’ve sealed your Encyclopaedia Britannica.” Pat would have loved it.’
²
Before its contents were cleared, Diogenes authorised film-maker Philippe Kohly to enter the house so as to make a documentary about Highsmith’s life and work, after which Daniel Keel and Anna von Planta began the task of sorting through the literary remains. The files, says von Planta, Highsmith’s editor at Diogenes since 1985, ‘are so massive that when spread out they are 150 feet in length.’
³
In addition to the standard obituaries which traced the course of Highsmith’s life,
The Times
devoted one of its leaders to her. ‘Crime need not be a second-class genre of literature,’ ran the headline. The piece called for a reassessment of her work, tracing how she reinvented the crime novel as a ‘whydunit, in which an interest in the criminal and criminal psychology replaces the puzzle.’
⁴
This was far from her only achievement. She would be remembered for the creation of Ripley, one of the most intriguing characters in modern literature; for her kinship with Nietzsche, Dostoevsky and the masters of existentialism and for the unsettling moral uncertainty which permeated her novels. The director and novelist Michael Tolkin, writing in the
Los Angeles Times
, said that Highsmith was America’s ‘best expatriate since Henry James’,
⁵
and later articulated his debt to her, a legacy inherited by a number of contemporary writers and film-makers. ‘She was one of the best writers in the world . . . she was . . . the last turn of the dial to unlock my novels. I don’t think I could have written
The Player
without her.’
⁶

     The week after her death, final copies of
Small g
arrived at Bloomsbury’s office in Soho, and it was published at the beginning of March. ‘I wished she could have seen it, but she had said she liked the cover,’ says Liz Calder.
⁷
Grey Gowrie, in the
Daily Telegraph
, wrote that the book was a ‘delight’, classifying it as a fascinating coda to Highsmith’s main body of work;
⁸
Geoffrey Elborn, in the
Guardian
thought that the novel possessed a ‘serenity rarely found in Highsmith’s world’
⁹
; and William Trevor in the
Independent on Sunday
analysed it as a transgressive fairy tale – ‘there’s no living happily ever after. That was never the Highsmith style. Truth was her business.’
¹⁰
Lorna Sage, in the
Observer
, enjoyed the novel for a similar reason to William Trevor, noting how Highsmith disturbed the sterile, ordered environment of Switzerland by the introduction of ambiguity. ‘In this latest novel she imagined a new generation of golden boys and girls who would escape the gingerbread house of either/or.’
¹¹

     Yet some critics regarded the publication as a mistake. The reviewer from the
Sunday Times
commented on how the novel seemed to lack ‘the author’s usual trademark, the undercurrent of menace, of fear, of cruelty,’
¹²
and Rose Wild, in
The Times
, felt frustrated by the decision of the ‘high priestess of the nasty’ to turn soft. ‘Highsmith’s homosexuality has only been obliquely present in her previous fiction,’ she wrote. ‘It is hard to put aside the suspicion that she finally decided to let rip with a real message here. It is disappointing that it is such a starry-eyed view.’
¹³
There were those who went even further. Michael Dobbs, in the
Sunday Telegraph
believed that the book ‘makes a sad epitaph for such a renowned writer’
¹⁴
and Brian Glanville, one of Highsmith’s friends, classified the novel as ‘an oyster without grit . . .
Small g
. . . is a dreary piece of book-making. I wish it had not appeared.’
¹⁵

Highsmith’s memorial service was held in Tegna’s small church, with its ‘pastel frescoes and flying cherubs’
¹⁶
on the afternoon of Saturday 11 March, carnival day in the village. The building was packed with a German television camera crew; ‘black-clad villagers’ and fans;
¹⁷
and a number of close friends, including Kingsley and Frieda Sommer, although Ellen Hill decided not to attend, saying, ‘ “I had difficulties with Miss Highsmith at the end.” ’
¹⁸
Her publishers – from Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Germany, but none from America – addressed themselves to the question of Highsmith’s extraordinary abilities as a writer and Vivien De Bernardi stood up and spoke of what Pat meant to her as a friend. ‘Because of her isolation, her mind was not contaminated by fashion, convention or inhibition,’ she said. ‘She was like a wild horse that no one could tame . . . Visits with Pat were like cleaning one’s glasses . . . Referring to some of the saccharine phrases used to describe her after her death, my son said, “She had a
caratteraccio
and that’s why we liked her!” It’s true. She was sometimes a difficult friend, fascinating, wild and wonderful. And her loss has left a gaping hole in the middle of the lives of those of us who cared deeply about her.’
¹⁹
At the end of the service, on a cloudless early spring day, Kingsley carried the urn containing her friend’s ashes out of the church; she walked through the small cemetery and placed it in a recess within a wall of remembrance, where it was sealed. ‘Then a man placed a picture of Highsmith and her cat in front of the recess,’ recalls Tanja Howarth. ‘As he was in tears, I asked him whether he was a relation. “No,” he said. “I just read all her books.” ’
²⁰