Hemingway's Chair

by Michael Palin

  He broke off and turned to Geraldine. ‘Don’t write that down.’

  She drew a line through the last sentence.

  Marshall held his hand out. ‘On second thoughts, give me the page.’

  Geraldine tore it off the pad. ‘Don’t you trust me?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t trust anybody. Especially after last night.’ Marshall crunched the paper into a ball and threw it across the room. It landed in the waste paper basket without touching the sides.

  He went on. ‘That roof damage means we can legally have him out by the end of the week and get Stopping’s boys in.’

  ‘Stopping? Is he owt, as they say where I come from?’ Devereux looked across at Geraldine and added, ‘That’s spelt O-W-T. It means is he any fucking good?’

  Marshall shrugged. ‘He’s the Mayor. We promised him some of the action – don’t write that down either, Gerry. In fact don’t write anything down till I tell you.’

  Geraldine tore out another page, screwed it up and sent it arcing into the basket. Devereux nodded approvingly. ‘Not bad for a woman. Do you know a woman that can throw, Nick?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In my experience women can’t generally throw.’

  ‘I’ve always been good at games, Mr Devereux,’ said Geraldine sweetly. ‘Especially when balls are involved.’

  Devereux smiled uncomfortably and crossed his legs. He couldn’t suss out this girl. She looked great and talked like a lorry driver but he’d never met anyone who’d laid a finger on her.

  ‘John?’ Nick was looking at him. ‘Are you with me?’

  ‘Yes?’ said Devereux, abstractedly.

  ‘I said we have good news on the installation. The DTI licence is through. Under development rights there’s no limit on masts under fifteen metres.’

  ‘That’s … er…’

  ‘Forty-five feet. We can start transmitting with half that.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘I’ve been in touch with Telemark. They’re the installation specialists. Norwegian. They can have a mast, two transmission dishes, and three pole antennae in place within three months.’

  ‘That’s soon.’

  ‘It’s important, though, John. We have to stay ahead of the game.’

  ‘I’m not sure the new Post Office companies will be ready to complete by then.’

  Nick shook his head despairingly. ‘They should be planning now. We have, for God’s sake. Anyway, if the Post Office isn’t ready by then we’ll have to look somewhere else.’

  ‘Hey! Careful, Nick. We’re partners, remember. And I’m your employer.’

  Nick smiled. ‘By the way, John, how is your Dutch coming on?’

  Devereux laughed. ‘Dutch! Those bastards speak English better than I do. Mind you, a refresher trip to Amsterdam wouldn’t go amiss.’ He winked at Geraldine, who ignored him.

  Nick Marshall spoke with hardly a pause. ‘Die Engelse boerenlul heeft drie miljoen gulden teveel betaald.’

  Devereux laughed again. ‘What’s that mean? I have two sisters and the fat one fancies you? Sorry! You won’t approve of that, Geraldine.’

  Geraldine smiled and said, ‘It means, “The English asshole has paid three million guilders too much.”’ She paused.

  Devereux looked from one to the other. He gave an uneasy half-smile. Marshall smiled back.

  ‘Not the sort of thing they’re likely to say in English, you see John.’

  Thirty-three

  At about the time that the Manager of Theston post office was meeting with the South East Area Co-ordinator beneath the lifeless prints of podgy galleons and chunky foreshortened Cutty Sarks that dotted the walls of his flat in Atcham, an unusual sight was to be seen at the holiday town of Hopton, six miles due east on the edge of the North Sea.

  Behind the disintegrating pebble-dash façade of the Lifeboat Inn the ex-Assistant Manager of Theston post office was ordering a third round of Devlin’s Old Magic Ale with a whisky chaser. His sky-blue anorak lay unzipped to reveal a v-necked grey and yellow flecked sweater, a white shirt and a grey tie spattered with the initials of his recent employer. His neat and well-pressed trousers were secured by two bicycle clips to a pair of green and maroon paisley-patterned socks.

  He had arrived less than half an hour earlier at this old, tired pub perched precariously on the edge of the crumbling cliffs between Theston and Lowestoft. He had been drinking doggedly since then. Strangers rarely chose this pub and Trevor, the barman, concluded that wherever his anoraked visitor came from, there must be something seriously wrong.

  This did not distress Trevor, indeed it rather cheered him up. He had lost track of the times he himself had drunk to forget, and as a barman he was grateful to those who took their sadness quietly and caused him no trouble.

  Trevor was in his mid-forties. He was a philosophical man. Life had been a series of failures and each one he had accepted more philosophically than the last. His job here was perfect. A failure working amongst failures in a pub that was slipping slowly into the sea. He pressed a measure of Bells into a whisky tumbler and set it on the bar alongside the beer.

  He took the money. ‘Everything all right?’ he asked unhopefully.

  Martin nodded and did not look up.

  ‘I tell you,’ said Trevor, taking a cigarette out from behind his ear, ‘if you could lay all the problems I’ve had in my life end to end, they’d stretch from here to bloody Lowestoft.’ He struck a match and lit the cigarette. ‘But I don’t let them worry me. Quite the contrary.’

  Martin took the beer and drank deeply. Trevor noticed.

  ‘I draw inspiration from them. You know what Jesus said. “Come unto me all ye that are heavy laden and I will give you rest.” Well, I like that,’ he said, dropping the dead match into a chipped ashtray. ‘But then I’m more heavily laden than most.’ Out of the corner of his eye he saw Martin dispose of the Scotch in one swallow. Classic symptoms.

  Trevor sighed heavily. ‘It’s nothing to feel bad about. Failure. It’s meant to be. Whatever’s happened to you has happened to somebody else at some time so you might as well just accept it.’ He pulled on his cigarette, taking the smoke gratefully into his one remaining lung. ‘Otherwise what do you do? Kill yourself.’

  Martin slowly lifted his head. Through the numbing haze of alcohol there shone a sudden shaft of light. A ray of hope. A beacon in the darkness, an answer among questions, a something in the nothingness. A hovering, beckoning embraceable Holy Grail that would cleanse all his wounds and wipe away all his tears.

  Killing himself was so startlingly clear and simple a solution that Martin felt a powerful surge of elation. He looked with new and grateful eyes on the grim surroundings of the Lifeboat Inn. He took in the bristle tiles on the floor and the flock wallpaper on the walls and the formica tops of the tables. The sounds of sharp cackled laughter, boozy argument, and droning television commentary merged into an indistinct cosiness. The smell of tobacco, beer and HP sauce fused into a cheap, familiar fug.

  He could think himself in Sloppy Joe’s in Key West or the Café des Amateurs on the Rue Mouffetard. Hem had loved bars. Bars provided almost everything Papa had needed. A drink, a glass, a table to write on, an audience to talk to, an opponent, a lover, an argument, a story.

  Having made up his mind to kill himself, Martin was suffused with such fondness for the place that he decided one final pint would not go amiss. He consumed it with gratitude, and Trevor took quiet, if misguided, pride in the fact that his simple wisdom had saved another lost soul.

  * * *

  Martin peed for a long time, ran his hands under a thin trickle of cold water, held them for quite a while under a condom machine until he realised it was not the hot air dryer, found the hot air dryer, failed to make it work, wiped his hands on his trousers and made his way unsteadily out into the crisp fresh air.

  As his bicycle bumped and rattled across the car park and on to the main road he felt himself a heavyweight at last. A potent, uncontai
nable force about to be released from trivial rounds and common tasks to play a final, apocalyptic role. He blatantly gave no hand signals as he turned left, flagrantly ignored a red traffic light and rode quite shamelessly across the path of an oncoming bus.

  Martin found himself, still alive, on a road he was not familiar with. It wound inland from Hopton between fields and farms. He put his head down and cycled fast and emphatically along the wrong side of the road.

  After a minute or two it became clear that he had chosen for his last great gesture of defiance a thoroughfare entirely devoid of traffic. He pulled up alongside a five-barred gate, out of breath and no longer clear as to where he was or why he was where he was. Wherever it was. He waited, panting, for his head to swim back into focus. As it did so, something caught his eye, off to the left in the field on to which the gate opened.

  The light was flat and waning but there was unmistakably something there. He looked again. Then out of the shade it came. A magnificent long-backed, short-legged, thick-shouldered Friesian bull. Martin felt a head-burning rush of appalled excitement. He had watched bulls before. He had hung on gates and thought about what it must take to be a matador. Uncountable times he had felt the sweat break out on his palms as he contemplated illustration number forty-three in Carlos Baker’s biography: ‘Ernest (in white pants) in the “amateurs”, Pamplona, 1925.’ There was Papa, in the bullring, unprotected, skipping like a schoolboy round the swinging, jabbing, treacherously curved horns, whilst Spaniards rushed about and screamed and shouted and pointed. Now, in a field on the Suffolk coast, Martin was seized with the conviction that at last the moment had come for him to experience that thing which terrified him most. How neat, how perfect, how absolutely right that he should perish this way.

  A wind had freshened from the north-west and clouds were piling in – angry, grey and low. He licked his lips and took a long, deep breath of farmy air. He began to climb the gate. It swung as he mounted it and he noticed that it could easily have been opened by slipping a length of loose red twine over the gatepost. He vaulted over and dropped onto the rich springy turf. Closer-to, the bull was a truly awesome creature. In fact it was massive. Far bigger than it had looked from the other side of the gate. It stood about two hundred yards away, flicking its tail and swinging its great heavy head in a gesture that suddenly brought to mind his father trying to shake sea-water from his ear after bathing. Martin could hear the wind now, catching at the scrappy branches of a dead elm, rustling at the hawthorn hedge. He edged a bit closer, eyes fixed on the bull.

  How would it charge? Pawing the earth first or suddenly and without warning? How would the impact be? A mighty thundering weight, living daylights smashed out of him, followed by blackness and oblivion? Perhaps he would be tossed. He had seen pictures of gored matadors, flung through the air like blown litter. Perhaps he would hit the ground, his back broken, his body limp and helpless, his eyes waiting to be gouged out by vengeful cloven hooves.

  Martin moved closer still. Then, for a moment, his courage failed him. Perhaps it was enough just to be in the same field as the prodigious beast. One of those that Papa had described as being ‘afraid of nothing on earth’. Perhaps that was enough. Just to have been there. It was certainly quite something to tell people. A lot of people would never even have got this far. Oh, no. He could certainly leave it at that without any fear of being thought to have let anyone down. Certainly not. But then something took hold of him, some spectacular madness, some final lunging desire to have done with it all. He found himself running forward, waving his arms and screaming at the top of his voice.

  He must have covered ten or eleven yards when out of the corner of his eye he saw that he and the bull were not alone. In the opposite corner of the field there were at least a dozen more huge creatures watching and waiting. Martin stopped screaming abruptly. A chill frisson, a sudden, sharp awareness of the possibility of real fear, pierced his alcohol-shrouded senses. But it was too late. The bull ahead of him turned, tossed its colossal head and began to charge.

  Martin stood stupefied. It was charging away from him. And as it did so, all the other bulls turned and charged away as well, thundering as fast as they could to the furthest corner of the field. At the same time he heard a shout from the gate. ‘What you bloody think you bloody playing at?’

  Martin turned in the direction of the voice, feeling now like the bull he had just disturbed. A mud-streaked Land Rover had drawn up by the gate and a small, angry man with a face the colour of a nasty wound stood there. A young, curly-headed boy was beside him.

  The farmer’s face was ugly with rage.

  ‘Afternoon,’ said Martin hoarsely.

  ‘What in bloody buggeration are you bloody doing in there, you bloody bugger?’

  The little boy, who can’t have been more than six or seven, giggled.

  ‘I … er … I thought that one of the bulls was about to get loose. I was trying to keep it in the field,’ tried Martin.

  ‘What bulls?’

  Martin indicated the cowering herd in a corner of the field.

  ‘Where in God’s name were you brought up?’ retorted the farmer, ferociously. ‘Bulls have bloody balls, you silly bastard.’

  He regarded Martin with frank contempt. ‘I suppose you wouldn’t know what those are.’

  The curly-headed boy giggled again. The farmer pointed angrily into the field.

  ‘Those buggers are bloody bullocks. They haven’t a bollock between them. And I’m not going to get them bloody fed if stupid bloody buggers like you start waving their bloody arms and yelling and putting the fear of bloody God into them.’ Then he stopped and looked at Martin suspiciously. ‘Are you one of those hunt saboteur buggers?’

  Martin shook his head. He ached all over and he could feel the first drops of rain.

  The farmer persisted. ‘You bloody look like one. All bloody scrawny and smooth. Well, you’re all the bloody same you buggers. You can’t be real men, so you get in the bloody way of those who bloody are.’

  Martin reached the gate and a moment later mounted his bike. So urgent was his desire to get away from this place that his foot slipped and the pedal spun round and cracked him hard on the shin. He thrust his left foot down to steady himself and felt it slither away on a lurking patch of bullock ordure. He toppled, quite slowly, into the hedge.

  The curly-headed boy giggled.

  Thirty-four

  Martin woke up with a jolt. He lay, fully clothed, holding his breath, straining to hear a repetition of the sound that had awoken him. It came again, preceded by a shrieking gust of wind. He pulled himself up. His head swam. Without putting the light on he made his way unsteadily to the window and slammed it shut as another gust cracked into the side of the house.

  As he turned he caught himself a hard, disabling blow on the corner of the safari table. He clutched his thigh and sank to the floor cursing.

  He lay there until the pain wore off, then dragged himself across to his bed, leaned against it and reached up to switch on the light.

  What it revealed was not a pretty sight. At least he had remembered to remove his shoes, which lay mud-caked where he had thrown them, beneath the hand basin. His anorak was nowhere to be seen. Maybe he had removed it downstairs. His soiled post office jumper and crumpled shirt had screwed themselves up around his body as he slept. His trousers were creased up along his thighs.

  He remembered arriving back home, damp and dirty. He had gone straight upstairs, telling his mother he wanted an early night. That must have been six thirty or seven. He turned the Ingersoll traveller’s clock towards him. It was two o’clock.

  The wind rose to a scream then fell away again. He clambered to his feet and began to pull off his jumper and his shirt, his still-damp trousers and his underpants until he stood before the mirror naked, save for the paisley-patterned stockings on his feet.

  His body was white and smooth. His shoulders were wide and skinny like a coat hanger. His chest was concave and hairle
ss and his skin freckled a little at the shoulders. His stomach bulged, round and compact, and skimpy reddish brown hair ran down towards his groin. He was quite startled to think that it was this body that had brought Ruth such pleasure only two nights ago. There must have been some mistake.

  He ran water into the basin and doused his head and washed beneath his arms. He dried himself carefully and pulled on a clean pair of underpants. Then he opened his wardrobe and flicked methodically through the hangers.

  He selected a military outfit. Though Papa had never been a soldier he had been in a lot of wars as a reporter or an ambulance driver and Martin felt he would approve of the khaki shirt, serge trousers and combat boots that he took down from the top of his cupboard. To round it all off he clipped around his waist a German army belt which was as close as he could get to the Wehrmacht belt that Hemingway often wore. This one too had ‘Gott Mit Uns’ engraved on the buckle, and he had found it in an army surplus store behind Colchester Barracks.

  On the table he laid a US army helmet of the sort Hem was holding in the photo he had of him with General Barton and Colonel Chance on the Western Front in ’44. He took a bottle of tequila and a glass from the cabinet together with a small bag of sea salt and a hardening week-old lime he had been saving for just such a moment as this.

  He sat down, sliced the lime and put the pieces on a saucer in front of him. Into another saucer he tipped a small pile of the salt. Then he took the tequila and poured a measure into a thick, heavy-bottomed bar glass. He looked up. ‘No going to bed tonight, Papa.’ He raised his glass to the big, sad, grainy figure in the photo on the wall. The half-closed left eye regarded him appraisingly. The big wide open right eye watched and said nothing.

  Martin wetted the back of his hand and spread salt on it. Then he drank the tequila in one and, as soon as he felt the burn, licked the salt, then took a piece of the lime and chewed on it. He felt grateful for the kick of the salt and sharp stab of the lime as it killed the hard unpalatable taste of the alcohol. Martin grimaced then looked up again at Hemingway.