The Pretender

by David Belbin

  I noted that phrase ‘final issue’ and my heart sank.

  ‘Is that it, then?’ I asked Tony. ‘Do you plan to close down?’

  ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘We’ll go out with a giant fuck you to the Arts Board: a staggering list of contents, top quality production and an introduction naming names, full of bile. What do you think?’

  In a way it seemed appropriate that my forgeries should indirectly pay for the final issue of the Little Review, but I couldn’t say this.

  ‘I’d have thought you’d want to retire with something more dignified than a fart in the face of the Arts Board.’

  ‘You’re probably right,’ Tony said, ‘but allow me the luxury of imagining it for a while first.’

  I didn’t ask Tony the other question on my mind. What would happen to the office and my flat above? His lease ran until the end of 1994, which would have seen me comfortably to the end of my University career, if I made it that far. I supposed Tony would sell or sublet, but maybe I would be able to hang onto the flat. I was used to living in Soho, in the middle of things, even though my home was meagre and I couldn’t afford to make much use of the West End’s shops, theatres and restaurants. Now and then I got a cheap standby ticket for the theatre, or went along with Tony to a club or gallery. And I never bought books. Rather, I sold review copies for food and still had more than enough to read. All that would stop when the magazine closed down.

  The other thing I’d miss was ‘literary’ London. I sometimes went to book launches and the like.Tony could no longer be bothered with them. The free food and drink were the main appeal, but they also gave me a glimpse of the world I aspired to join, one more glamorous and mysterious than the Little Review’s.

  ‘When do you have to decide by?’ I asked Tony.

  ‘Mercer will be back in London in a week.’

  ‘You mean he’s already gone?’

  ‘Back to New York on a morning flight, yes.’

  My secret was safe for now.

  ‘Going to the Richard Mayfield launch tonight, are you?’ Tony asked, later, seeing the invitation I’d left on top of a pile of submissions. It was a book launch at the Groucho club.The club was only a stone’s throw from our office, but I’d never been inside (you needed to be a member, or to be with one) and was interested in seeing it, especially as such invitations weren’t likely to come my way for much longer.

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I turned him down two or three times. Precocious brat. Talented, though. Be interested to see what you make of him.’

  If Mayfield, with a novel published straight after he left university, was irritatingly precocious, what was I, who had been mistaken for Hemingway and Greene? When Tony left for home, I went upstairs, where I through the complicated business of having a thorough wash with only a small sink in which to do so. By the time I’d dried my hair and ironed my best clothes, the book launch would be under way.

  Or so I thought. I showed up at the time advertised, presented my invitation at the door and was directed to a large room upstairs. I expected my customary clothing (black, black and black) to keep me anonymous. In London, outside the office, I always felt anonymous, more like a ghost than a participant. However, I was one of the first to arrive.As I reached for a glass, a sleek, skinny publicist pounced on me. She was also dressed entirely in black, though I knew the labels inside would shame my basement store bargains.

  ‘Are you The Face?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I’m...’

  ‘Dazed And Confused?’

  ‘All the time,’ I joked. No laugh. ‘Is that a magazine?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. This was already the longest conversation I’d sustained at a literary launch. I generally stood around, deliberately fading into the background, eating canapés, getting mildly drunk on free wine. But the woman didn’t go away.

  ‘I’m from the LR,’ I said.

  ‘London...?’

  ‘Little Review.’

  ‘Oh.’ She glanced at the door with the classic look over the shoulder in search of someone more interesting, more useful.

  This action was not considered rude, Tony told me once. Literature was, after all, a business, and we were the smallest fish in the sea. But hardly anybody had arrived yet, so she returned her attention to me.

  ‘Would you like to meet the author?’ she asked.

  I wanted to say ‘no’, but could hardly say that I was only there for the free food.

  ‘Which is he?’ I asked.

  She pointed towards a bloke in a velvet jacket who couldn’t be much older than I was. Then she took my elbow and guided me towards him.

  ‘Richard, I’d like you to meet Mark Trace, from the Little Magazine. He’s a great admirer of your work.’

  ‘She meant Little Review,’ I corrected once the publicist had floated away.

  ‘A great admirer, eh?’ Richard Mayfield had long, curly hair and a frilly shirt beneath his scarlet smoking jacket. ‘Such a great admirer that you bastards never published me.’

  The intensity of the bitterness in his voice took me aback.

  ‘I’ve only been working there for nine months,’ I said. ‘I don’t recall any of your stuff coming through.’

  ‘I stopped sending it out once I got a publishing contract,’ Richard told me.Then he offered me his hand and I shook it. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘These things make me edgy. I don’t know what I’m doing here.’

  He went silent and I realised that I had to make conversation. What to say? I hadn’t read any of his books and certainly wasn’t going to confront him with what Tony had said about him.

  ‘Tony reckons that nobody serious writes anything interesting before they’re thirty,’ I said, and immediately worried that even this might sound insulting.

  ‘So I have to wait another seven years before he’ll publish me?’ Mayfield asked, his tone inquisitorial.

  ‘I hope he’s wrong,’ I said. ‘Otherwise I’ve got over a decade to go.’

  ‘What do you do there?’ the author asked.

  ‘Editorial assistant. Archivist. Dogsbody. That kind of thing.’

  ‘Published anything?’

  ‘A couple of reviews.’

  ‘And you’re... what, twenty?’

  ‘In a few weeks.’

  ‘Come to many of these beanos?’

  ‘Only for the free wine.’

  The author smiled. ‘A man after my own heart. Come on. Drain that and have another. I need to be pissed before I can read in front of people.’

  As we refilled our drinks, the hordes arrived. We were quickly separated. Richard Mayfield gave a brief reading, which was well received, but impossible to concentrate on. The room was full of people who seemed to know each other. I recognised a few but not to talk to. After a few minutes, I realised that Richard was equally out of his depth. We gravitated towards each other. He asked how come I was working for the LR and I told him about being kicked out of university.

  ‘Best thing that could happen to you,’ he said.‘Doing a literature degree is stifling for a writer — all those influences to shake off, all that close analysis and academic bollocks. You’d never be able to write an unselfconscious word.’

  This made sense to me. For the first time, I had doubts about returning to my course.

  ‘What did you do at university?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? Oh, I read PPE.’

  I somehow guessed that this meant he’d been to Oxford or Cambridge, which explained where he got the connections to be published at twenty-three. I had no idea what PPE stood for.

  ‘What writers do you like?’ I asked.The natural question.

  He rattled off a few names, the great and trendy, and I nodded half heartedly.‘You know who I really rate?’ he asked, ‘the one I’d like to emulate, if I had half his ability?’

  ‘No. Who?’

  ‘James Sherwin.’

  And from that point, of course, we were off, for he knew almost as much about James Sherwin as I did. More
over, we both knew things the other didn’t. I, for instance, was able to quote from a letter which Sherwin had written the month before. Richard knew a story about Sherwin’s unfinished novel A Commune which might explain why it had never been finished.

  ‘Story goes that there was a real commune on the island where Sherwin lived. That’s where he got the idea. But while he was writing the book, somebody got murdered, or committed suicide, I don’t know which. And Sherwin got spooked.’

  ‘Where did you hear that?’

  ‘I don’t recall. I must have read it somewhere.’

  We were still talking when the party emptied. Richard gathered up two opened but unfinished bottles of wine and we took them back to my room above the magazine.

  ‘This is great!’ he said, seeing my word processor propped on its rickety table by the bed. ‘The ideal place for a writer. What are you working on?’

  I hesitated. I couldn’t tell him that I was writing my own version of the novel we had been discussing earlier.

  ‘Nothing much,’ I muttered. ‘Exercise, scraps of autobiography, trying to find my voice, if you like.’

  ‘That’s creative writing class bullshit,’ Mayfield told me, swigging from one bottle and handing me the other, which was to obliterate my memory of the remainder of the evening. ‘Nobody finds their own voice. They steal somebody else’s and improve on it. Believe me.’

  I did.The conversation continued at full pelt for a couple of hours, after which Richard staggered out for the last tube. I thought it was the beginning of a lasting friendship, one which would nurture me as a writer, but, as things turned out, I haven’t spoken to him since.

  Thirty-three

  The following week, experts from auction houses looked over the material in the LR’s archive. Men in old fashioned suits gave cautious appraisals. To my surprise, it appeared that Paul Mercer’s offer was on the generous side.

  ‘This kind of thing is notoriously difficult to estimate,’ said the literary manuscripts man from Sotheby’s. ‘You might be looking at fifty thousand.’

  A draft agreement arrived from America. If Tony signed it, the archive and all new material received in the final months of the magazine would become Paul’s property as soon as the last issue was published.

  ‘I know you don’t trust him,’ Tony told me,‘but it’s a very good offer.’

  What was the catch? Paul either knew or strongly suspected that I’d forged the Dahl and Hemingway stories. He might even have guessed about Greene. Was he expecting me to do more forgeries to add to the value of his collection? If so, it wouldn’t work. Now other people had seen the archive, I couldn’t add fresh, valuable material, even if I were so inclined.

  ‘About the flat,’ Tony went on. ‘I’ll try to sublet the office without the flat above — I know you like living here. I can’t promise, but whoever rents the office might want to keep you on because you’re useful for security.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I lied. ‘I can always find somewhere.’

  We went back to work on the final issue. I was writing a short history of the magazine that would appear in the review section, alongside an attempt to sell off as many back issues as possible.The issue was very nearly full. Most of the contents had been typeset. If James Sherwin himself had sent a new story we’d have been pushed to fit it in. The Dahl family hadn’t responded to the set of proofs Tony had sent them. Doubtless it was too soon after the author’s death for such considerations. According to Tony, this was fine.

  ‘If they say nothing, we go ahead with the story. If they refuse to let us publish, we’re screwed.’

  Those nights, when Tony went home in the evening, I felt at sea. The little world I’d created for myself was coming to an end and I didn’t know where I was going next. I wanted to throw myself into being a writer, but knew I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to return to university, at least not to my old course. I was coming to the conclusion that studying literature only made me self-conscious about my own writing. Literary history might be useful for my career as a forger but that, too, was over. I’d got away with it, I thought, by working instinctively and by being lucky. Luck such as I’d had couldn’t last.

  I was still writing my Sherwin story. I had to write. How else could I occupy the long evenings when I had no money, no real friends? Yet I had no faith in the story unfolding, no hope that it would lead anywhere but deeper into itself, into the nothingness that was pretending to write as another man.

  Thirty-four

  Spring arrived, but my attic room remained cold, requiring at least one bar of the electric fire to be on all the time. I was writing obsessively, venturing out little, not eating enough. Now and then, Tony would drag me out for a bite, but his lunches were mostly liquid. I was returning from a trip to the post office when I found a young woman in the office. Hearing me approach, she stood and gave me a confident, American smile. I saw an attractive, rich, married young woman with expensively layered hair. For a moment, she didn’t recognise me, but I would never mistake her.

  ‘Helen,’ I said, keeping my cool. ‘What brings you here?’

  ‘Mark,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek. ‘You look older.’

  I had grown my first beard, a fine fuzz of ginger hair to hide the adolescent acne that still plagued me. I was a week away from my twentieth birthday and gaunt from eating too little. I had, without yet realising it, started to become attractive to women my own age, as well as to Tony’s licentious friends. I had developed a ‘starving artist in his garret’ look that appealed to a certain kind of romantic, though romantic was never a word I’d use to describe Helen Mercer.

  ‘So do you,’ I replied, then realised this wasn’t always a compliment for a woman, so added ‘better than ever’, which was equally true. The sullenness and frustrated air she’d had about her in Paris were gone. I tried not to look at the expensive bands on the third finger of her left hand, supposing they were the key to her transformation.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, then added, as if we were close friends. ‘We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’

  ‘Where’s Tony?’

  ‘He and Paul have gone out to talk business. Tony was sure you’d be back soon, so I said I’d wait for you.’

  ‘But Tony doesn’t know that I know you,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Nevertheless, he said you’d be happy to show me the sights. He thought we’d get on,’ she told me with a full smile.

  ‘How long are you here for?’ I asked.

  ‘A few days. Paul wants to tie up some deals. We might look at a property in Chelsea, if I decide I like London more than New York. Will you show me round?’

  Despite having lived in London for a year and a half, I’d hardly been to any of the tourist attractions. It wasn’t that they didn’t interest me so much as I didn’t want to admit to myself that they interested me. I lived here. I wasn’t a tourist. And I couldn’t afford to visit most of them. Accompanying Helen, however, would make me a guide, a host.

  ‘I wanted to apologise about the way we left Paris,’ she told me, as we set out into Soho. ‘I tried to get in touch with you soon after, but you were gone.’

  ‘I had to leave in a hurry myself,’ I told her, giving a brief account of my expulsion. Helen grimaced as she laughed.

  ‘And I tried to persuade you to seduce her. I feel to blame. You must forgive me for that, too.’

  I forgave her. Who would not forgive a beautiful woman when she was slipping her arm through his?

  ‘Paul’s nearly wrapped up the Hemingway deal,’ she told me. ‘He asked me to give you this, an advance of a thousand pounds.’

  She handed me a handsome, pigskin wallet, stuffed with more twenty pound notes than I’d ever seen before.

  ‘I chose the wallet,’ Helen said.‘It’s a gift. Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s... wonderful.’ I kissed her on the cheek, as she had kissed me earlier.

  ‘It’s so good to see you again. You wouldn’t believe how few peo
ple I know who are my own age.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said. Had Paul told her that I’d lied about my age, that I was three years younger than she was, rather than one? Probably. It didn’t matter. We were much closer in age than Helen and her husband. We were in London on a beautiful spring day and I had a thousand pounds in my wallet.

  Over the next few days, we went to galleries, parks and shops. Helen tried on endless tops, dresses and shoes. She insisted on buying a jacket and shirt for me: a reward for my escort duties. I bought myself a new pair of shoes with my ‘advance’.

  During these days, I didn’t see Paul at all. I saw little of Tony, either, though I gathered that the archive deal was going ahead. Ridiculous though I knew it was, I found myself falling for Helen all over again. She was the first woman I’d ever really wanted. Her marriage only made me want her more. For what did Paul have that I didn’t? Money. And he owed me a lot of that. He was fat and old, while I was young and good looking. Talented, too, I told myself. I would win out.

  If I had been in love with London before, it was with a cramped, historic, archaic, literary London, a city I created more from my imagination than from what I saw around me. Now, on warm days at the beginning of spring, before the worst of the tourist rush began, with Helen gushing about how there was no place in the world like this and she ought to know, she’d been everywhere, I fell for the whole, unwieldy city in a big way.

  I’d never talked to any friend as much as I talked to Helen that week. I told her my whole life story, bar the forgeries. After I’d told her about my mother, she told me about hers. It was a sad story and I got it in snatches while we were walking through town or sitting in restaurants, pubs and parks. Helen kept closing up, but I would ask another question and another until, slowly, it all came out.

  Helen’s mother had her when she was very young. Helen’s father was a journalist who used to work with Paul Mercer on a New York listings magazine. The marriage lasted two years and Helen couldn’t remember a thing about him.

  ‘I haven’t seen my dad since the day he walked out on Mom. Paul picked up the pieces. Paul was the only dad I ever got along with, but I hardly remember those days either. I was five when Mom left him. She moved in with this artist who was hot at the time. I don’t even remember his second name. He means nothing now. My mother moved from man to man, always thinking the next one would give her what she wanted. The third one she married was a banker called Sam. He sent me away to school. I was brought up by nuns, can you believe that? Mom and Sam had an open marriage, so it lasted a little longer. But they fought because Sam wanted kids and Mom had had enough of that with me.