Ticks and Crosses by Frederic Raphael

Author:Frederic Raphael [Frederic Raphael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781847777478
Publisher: Carcanet Press Ltd.
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

We were playing tennis (Conti, Beetle, Stee and I ) when Kara called down that Reuter’s were on the line. I ran in (why do I always run to the telephone?) and the guy said, ‘Mr Raphael, we’ve just had a report in…’ My panting pride at being called by Reuter’s yielded to alarm: had something happened to Paul? I had warned him about Yugoslavia. The report was from Montreux, Switzerland: Vladimir Nabokov died on Saturday, in hospital. He had been ill for eighteen months with an ‘internal disease’. Reuter’s wanted a few words about him. Has it come to this: I am a dispenser of one-line obits? ‘He was the greatest writer of the twentieth century,’ I said, ‘not to have received the Nobel Prize, and probably as great as most of those who did.’ Thank you, Mr Raphael, and how did I like to be described? ‘Oh, novelist and critic, if that’s the best authentication.’ Did I perhaps have some anecdote about V.N.? Should I have mentioned N.’s polite obsession with the lesbian couple who kept the little librairie down the road from his hotel? Or that Hollywood producer’s willingness to play to N.’s presumed paedophilia by pandering his own six-year-old son?

I made no note of what I distinctly remember: I asked the man from Toronto why he had called me particularly. He said that Madame Nabokov had told him that I and her husband had had a remarkable rapport. I had met him only once, and had not dared to contact him again, even when I happened to be in Montreux. What a fool, possibly!

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