Hemingway's Chair

by Michael Palin

  Martin and Elaine were eating TV dinners and watching Inspector Morse. Martin was glad they made programmes as good as that because it meant they could be in each other’s company without the need to talk. Talking wasn’t comfortable between them any more. Elaine wouldn’t let Nick Marshall be mentioned, indeed any talk of work produced a bitter response.

  Martin looked over at her. Elaine’s attention was rapt. She was leaning forward, frowning at the television. He found her concentration appealing. She clutched herself at the elbows and her back was now so straight and long that it would not have taken much for him to free her sweater from the trouser band and feel the smooth soft skin and run his fingers round the line of her waist.

  Then the music came and the commercials began and she stood up, holding the remains of a sticky lasagne. ‘I can’t eat all this, d’you want it?’

  ‘No thanks. I think I’d better be getting back.’

  Martin got up. In the kitchen Elaine scraped the contents of the foil container on to a saucer and dropped the container into the waste bin. ‘Back to your Mr Hemingway,’ she said.

  Martin said nothing. He picked up his tray and carried it through.

  ‘What’s it like having a rival for his affections?’ she said as he came into the kitchen.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘That Ruth woman. She was all over you at the fair.’

  Martin stamped the waste bin open with his foot and dropped his cartons in. He shrugged. ‘She’s too high-powered for me. She’s one of those scholars. Probably writing a five-volume thesis on his left toenail.’

  ‘She’s writing about his women isn’t she? That’s what she told Dad.’ Elaine lifted the kettle, found it empty and ran some water into it.

  ‘Did he have a lot of women?’ she asked.

  ‘Papa?’

  ‘No, clever Dick, Hemingway.’

  Martin laughed. ‘I meant Hemingway. That’s what he liked to be called. Papa. He hated his name. Hated Ernest.’

  Elaine wasn’t amused. ‘Well, did he?’

  ‘Did he what?’

  ‘Have all these women?’ She looked up challengingly.

  ‘Oh yes. No shortage. They used to fall at his feet. Ingrid Bergman, Marlene Dietrich, Ava Gardner. He was married four times. Mind you, a lot of it was talk. He used to say he’d slept with Mata Hari the first time he came to Europe. Then someone pointed out that she’d already have been dead a year.’ Martin smiled affectionately at the thought. ‘He did like to exaggerate.’

  Elaine unhooked a mug which she’d bought on last year’s holiday. It demonstrated the difficulties of capturing Ventnor on a small curved piece of china.

  ‘You know a lot about him.’

  Martin nodded. ‘That’s true.’

  Elaine unscrewed the top from a jar of coffee and dug a spoon in. ‘That American could use your help to write her book.’

  Martin shook his head. ‘She won’t need me.’

  Elaine snapped the lid back on. ‘Why not? You know all there is to know about him. Excuse me.’ She squeezed past him to switch on the kettle. He felt the brush of her breasts against his back. ‘Maybe it’s what you need. Someone with a shared interest. Someone who isn’t always moaning at you.’

  The kettle began to hiss and rumble.

  ‘I don’t want anyone else.’

  Elaine turned her large, bright hazel eyes on him.

  ‘Then prove it.’

  Eleven

  The letter lay open on top of a stack of scribbled notes Ruth had been making on Pauline Pfeiffer, the second Mrs Hemingway.

  Marsh Cottage, North Theston

  Saturday

  Dear Ruth,

  I hope you don’t mind being addressed this way but I never really caught your second name. I was probably bowled over by the fact that I had met another Hemingway aficionado! Though I am by no means a scholar I have acquired quite a bit of information about our mutual friend and someone suggested that this might be of use to you in compiling your book. I enjoyed meeting you and if you would care to meet up again and discuss it, I would be more than happy. The Market Hotel does tea. Four o’clock on 10th December would be very good for me. Drop me a line at the above address (not at the post office).

  Yours sincerely,

  Martin J. Sproale.

  She had received the letter almost a month ago and, feeling guilty that she had treated him curtly at the fair, Ruth had accepted. Four o’clock on 10th December had then seemed a long way off. Now it was only an hour away.

  She rubbed her eyes and stared at the little blue and silver screen. She had been working hard these past few weeks and had grown more used to the cold east winds. The lack of company had also bothered her less as, having completed the difficult early chapters on Ernest’s relationship with his mother, she had taken on the company of Hadley and Ezra and Scott and Zelda and Gertrude Stein and James Joyce and Sylvia Beach and all that crowd that seemed to have had such an effortlessly exciting time in Paris in the early 1920s. And now a new, attractive, immensely eligible and thoroughly dangerous addition had arrived on the scene in the shape of the young, well-to-do fashion journalist Pauline Pfeiffer.

  Finding out how, when and why Pauline proved irresistible to Hemingway, a married man with a baby son, was now Ruth’s task. Armed with letters, hotel registers, newspaper cuttings, street maps and her own intuition she had been pursuing the pair across Paris for several days, along boulevards and into gardens and through galleries. She had trailed them from salons to bars and restaurants to night clubs like a hired investigator in a divorce suit. What she was discovering was sad, because she liked Hadley, the current Mrs Hemingway, and had grown fond of their little son Bumby. But it was exciting too, for the ways in which a woman attracted and held on to a man was an endless source of fascination for Ruth.

  But right now she had to leave Pauline waiting for Ernest in a bedroom in the Venetia Hotel in Montparnasse, and make her way to the Market Hotel in Theston to meet a barely articulate post office clerk who hero-worshipped the old bastard. She switched off her laptop. Hemingway had a lot to answer for.

  * * *

  Though she was on time her host was already there. He looked better dressed than she remembered. He was wearing grey flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with strange suede pads across the shoulders. His hair was short and neatly brushed. His face shone in the light of an ornate table lamp that reared up beside him in a corner of the residents’ lounge. It occurred to her, with an twinge of irritation, that he must have made an effort for her.

  He stood quickly as she came in. She apologised for being on time, and he apologised for being early.

  ‘I came straight from work,’ he explained.

  ‘You work Saturdays?’ she asked.

  ‘Only in the morning. But today we had some extra training to do.’

  ‘You’ve been working out?’

  ‘Not that sort of training. Computer training.’

  ‘You’re keen.’

  Martin gave a short laugh. ‘We had no option.’

  ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘Well, you know, it’s not so bad for me. It’s harder for the older ones, learning from scratch. But … well, you’ve got to move with the times.’

  Ruth, settling herself in an armchair, looked quickly around. ‘Unlike this place.’

  Martin grinned uncomfortably. Most of the tables were occupied. A lot of tea was being taken. There were some loud voices. He tugged at the knot of his tie. He was very hot.

  ‘I hope this place is okay with you,’ said Martin, knowing he’d made a mistake.

  ‘I like it here,’ she lied. ‘It’s busy.’

  Martin nodded. Busy with the wrong people. It was an expensive place, much patronised by the County set. He himself had already been patronised by Mrs Harvey-Wardrell. He had been in the foyer as she arrived. Hearing her voice approaching from the street outside, he had swiftly turned his attention to an illuminated display of Doulton china w
hich occupied the corner furthest from the door.

  ‘I’ve a disabled person in the car,’ she announced to the hotel in general. ‘I shall require some assistance.’

  There was a pause. Her entrance seemed to have created much the same effect as that of a lone gunman. All the staff had taken cover.

  ‘Hello?’

  Martin had shrunk closer to the cabinet. He had stared with extraordinary intensity at the china display, hoping that by some epic feat of concentration he might actually be able to translocate himself into one of the soup tureens. But it was no good.

  ‘I say! You … You over there!’

  Martin knew there was no escape.

  ‘You,’ she called. ‘Porter!’ He turned to see the towering, all-too-familiar figure swathed in cascades of fur and leather.

  When she recognised him there had been a momentary apology, but he had still ended up having to grasp the front end of a wheelchair and carry a corpulent banker up the two or three steps to the front door. The man, who had a kindly smile concealed inside a strawberry-red face, had pressed a pound upon him. Martin had slipped it quickly into the box for the blind.

  Mrs Harvey-Wardrell and her party were now sitting at a window table being fussed over by Gordon Parrish the waiter. Martin knew all about Gordon Parrish. He was something of a legend with the below-stairs people. He was a fully paid-up anarchist and loathed just about everybody he served. He was forever boasting of peeing in the soup and putting sheep droppings in the muesli. He’d been had up several times for exposure and once, it was rumoured, for interfering with cattle, but he fawned so successfully on rich guests at the Market Hotel that many of them regarded him as the family retainer they never had and rewarded him generously.

  ‘Now, Gordon,’ he could hear Mrs Harvey-Wardrell confiding from four tables away, ‘these are two of my absolutely oldest friends – Freddie was with Hambros for many years, and there is no one in the art world Diana does not know – so we don’t want any of your ghastly trippers’ teas. Could you find us something a little special?’

  Gordon, who had once slipped a condom in a cassoulet, bowed and scraped and rubbed his hands and promised that he would find them something very special and Martin didn’t doubt that he would.

  ‘Do you know all these people?’ Ruth asked Martin.

  He nodded. ‘Most of them. They all have to come in the post office.’

  Ruth stole another look at the roomful of tweedy men and ample-bosomed matrons. ‘It’s like a scene out of The Lady Vanishes.’

  ‘It’s city money, a lot of it. They all want to play country squires for the weekend. Then on Mondays they go back to selling futures.’

  Ruth leaned down and picked up her voluminous black leather bag with silver studs. A present from a Moroccan she’d once known fleetingly. She reached inside for her cigarettes. ‘Mind if I smoke?’

  A look of alarm appeared on Martin’s face. He swivelled himself round in his chair. ‘I think there’s some sort of rule in here.’

  Ruth smiled as sweetly as she could manage and put the pack back in her bag. ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘We are a cursed breed.’

  Martin smiled uncomfortably.

  Sarah, the new waitress, came across to them. She was pink-cheeked and unhurried, with bright, wandering eyes and a black dress drawn tight across her bottom. ‘Tea for two?’ she asked.

  Martin nodded and looked across to Ruth. ‘Tea?’

  ‘Could I have coffee?’ Ruth asked.

  Sarah scribbled ‘coffee’ on her pad and asked, ‘D’you still want the tea?’

  Ruth looked confused.

  Sarah heaved a sigh and repeated her question. ‘D’you want your coffee with the tea?’

  ‘I would like my coffee with the coffee, if that’s possible.’

  Now Sarah looked confused.

  Ruth turned helplessly to Martin. ‘Is drinking tea a legal requirement here?’

  Martin stepped in, explained the differences between tea you drink and tea you eat and Ruth was grateful and Sarah went away.

  A gleeful cry wafted across from the Harvey-Wardrell table: ‘Smoked salmon, how perfect!’

  ‘Scottish?’ asked Freddie from his wheelchair.

  ‘Loch Tay, southern end,’ confirmed Gordon.

  It could have been from Mogadishu for all he knew, but in twenty years he’d learnt to say what they wanted to hear.

  Soon Ruth and Martin found themselves engaged on a major logistical exercise. Balancing the array of cups and saucers, plates, jugs, cake-stands and pots of hot water on the table was difficult enough. Quite another skill was required to transfer the profusion of delicacies from hand to mouth without leaving a trail of debris along the way.

  All this concentrated their minds and offered a convenient distraction from the real reason for their meeting. Then Sarah brought the bill, which lay a little too long on the table before Martin claimed it, and it seemed as if they would just get up and go and that would be that. Martin was beginning to feel a touch of panic.

  Ruth wasn’t sure what was going on either, or who was supposed to make the first move. All she knew was that she desperately needed a cigarette. She leaned across to Martin. ‘Is there a bar in here?’

  * * *

  ‘The spirit of Hemingway cannot be invoked in an English tea-room,’ pronounced Ruth as a double vodka began to take effect. ‘I think we can now confirm that with some authority.’

  ‘Have you … have you been an admirer of his … for long?’ Martin asked her, tentatively.

  Ruth exhaled copiously. Though she might not admit it, his eager awkwardness was calming her down. ‘Put it this way, Martin, I’m not a fan. I just know an awful lot about him. And the more you know about Ernest Hemingway, the less of a fan you become.’ She allowed herself a thick, smoky laugh.

  Martin decided it was time to stand up and be counted. ‘I can’t agree with that,’ he said.

  ‘Well, good for you.’

  ‘I think he was a great man,’ said Martin.

  ‘Men usually do.’ She reached for the ashtray. ‘I think he wrote some good books and even better stories. I think at his best he was a great writer, but he could also be cruel, boorish and inconsiderate. I don’t go along with the adoration and the sycophancy.’

  ‘Nor me,’ Martin agreed. ‘I know his faults. But if I could write stories one-tenth as good as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” or “The Short, Happy Life”…’

  Ruth puckered her nose. ‘Why those two?’

  ‘Well, I think they’re just about perfect. There’s not a word I would change.’

  ‘And The Old Man and the Sea?’

  ‘Extraordinary.’

  ‘A Farewell to Arms?’

  ‘Superb.’

  Ruth laughed and drained her glass. ‘You are a fan.’

  ‘You didn’t ask me about Across the River and into the Trees. That was the one everyone hated.’

  ‘Okay. What about Across the River and into the Trees?’

  ‘Outstanding!’

  This time they both laughed. Ruth leaned forward and picked out a dressed olive from a bowl on the bar. ‘I have to admit that if a lot of other people didn’t feel the way you do, I wouldn’t be writing a book about the guy,’ she said.

  Neither of them spoke for a moment.

  ‘What’s your book about?’ asked Martin.

  Ruth pulled the ashtray towards her. ‘Well, it’s about Ernest Hemingway.’ She saw Martin was about to speak and she went quickly on. ‘And Grace and Hadley and Pauline and Martha and Mary Hemingway. And Agnes Von Kurowsky and Duff Twysden and Gertrude Stein and Jane Mason and Adriana Ivancich and all the other women without whom he would not have written the way he did.’

  Ruth stubbed out her cigarette and picked a tiny tobacco strand from the end of her tongue.

  Martin was disappointed. Since the time he left school he had dreamt of the chance to talk about his hero with someone else who knew as much about him as he did. He had never once e
ntertained the possibility of meeting someone who knew him and hated him.

  ‘Same again?’ The barman was pointing at Martin’s glass.

  Martin looked to Ruth. She looked unsure. ‘I have my car.’

  Martin looked sympathetic. ‘I have my bike.’

  ‘Oh, what the hell,’ she said. ‘It’s Christmas. I’ll take a small one.’

  The barman poured two more vodkas. Martin raised his glass. ‘To Ernest. And his women.’

  Ruth grinned ruefully. ‘Tell me,’ she said. ‘How many times did he crash his car?’

  Martin barely took breath. ‘Once in 1930, twice in the Second World War, once in 1953 and once in 1959. July. Burgos. Spain.’

  Ruth rolled her eyes. ‘You are a fan,’ she said again.

  * * *

  Martin had rather understated the hopelessness of the computer training session that had been held earlier in the day. It had been embarrassing from the start. Nick Marshall had asked not one, but three part-timers along. Shirley Barker had been expected. She had been part-time almost as long as Elaine had been full-time. Mary Perrick, Parr’s replacement, was efficient and sensible, but Martin was surprised to see the new employee brought in only that morning. It was Geraldine, the same girl Martin had last seen damp and dishevelled from the tennis court. Today she was in a tight little light grey suit which revealed a little more of her compact, muscular body than he had been aware of on the tennis court. Her honey-blonde hair, fairer than he remembered, was brushed back quite severely from the temples.

  Marshall had announced her briskly. ‘This is Geraldine Cotton. She will be coming in when necessary to fill any gaps over the next few weeks.’

  And that was that. Martin found himself feeling embarrassed, compromised. Geraldine met his eye with a quick smile and then looked away. She seemed to him serious, efficient, over-qualified. Something was not quite right.

  The training itself had been equally uncomfortable. Nick Marshall was not a natural teacher, preferring exhortation to instruction. From the outset he assumed a basic standard of computer literacy and an unquestioning devotion to the new technology. This soon split the class into two, those over fifty and the rest. But at least Shirley Barker knew what a cursor was. Soon it was Arthur Gillis versus the rest. Gillis, who had once been taught to strip down a machine gun blindfold, was lost at the keyboard. He tried to laugh it off.