The Pretender

by David Belbin

  As soon as the forgery was proved, other, previously suppressed, doubts began to circulate. Some of the typical Hemingway ‘mistakes’ in each story seemed a little studied. Literary critics remarked that the writing in the ‘previously unknown’ piece verged on parody.

  Madame Devonier got a good price for a faked manuscript. Different Ways Of Getting Drunk was published in The New York Review Of Books. Anybody who wanted could do their own comparisons. In due course, at least three men came forward as the ‘author of the great Hemingway hoax’. All claimed to have spent the summer of 1971 in Paris. Madame Devonier refuted each one.

  Paul Mercer had no choice but to throw himself at the mercy of the Texas university. He had been completely taken in, he said. In his defence, all he could offer was that he had found the stories in the way he described, then had them authenticated by experts whose opinion he had no reason to doubt. Nobody questioned this account. Nevertheless, Mercer’s reputation took a big knock. If, as I suspected, he had stolen the cream of the Little Review archive before setting fire to the office, he would have even more trouble selling it. From then on, nobody was going to buy a manuscript from him unless its provenance was perfect.

  Forty-six

  When Tony finished talking, I was too ashamed to speak.

  ‘Well?’

  I tried to say ‘I’m sorry’, but Sonia gave me a stare of such ferocity, I wished I could shrink and hide inside my clothes. Tony and I didn’t as much as glance at each other. Heads bowed, we waited for her verdict.

  Tony’s explanation had been craven, pleading the magazine’s imminent demise as an excuse, if not a justification. I couldn’t tell how much sense this made to Sonia. It made little to me.The Sherwin story had helped sales. Yet, while the last issue had sold out, it was always likely to sell out. Tony couldn’t afford to print extra copies, or order a reprint. Until the insurance money came through, he was broke. Neither of us had profited from my Sherwin forgery. We hadn’t done this one for money. We’d forged for the thrill of it. Because we could.

  ‘You said the magazine published another of Mark’s faked stories,’ Sonia said. ‘Was the writer of that one dead, too?’

  ‘No.’ Tony told her about the Graham Greene story. ‘But Graham guessed someone was pulling my leg. It amused him, I think.’

  ‘Do you think James would have been amused? Is that your defence?’

  ‘There’s no defence,’ I said. ‘We were in the wrong. I’m sorry.’

  She ignored me.

  ‘How do you think it will look?’ she asked Tony, ‘when you own up? You’re a respected poet, James admired your work. You should be receiving honours, appearing at literary festivals, winning prizes. Instead, you’ll be notorious for betraying a friend.The invitations won’t come. You’ll be a pariah.’

  Tony’s face was pallid. The gravity of his situation was starting to sink in. She turned to me.

  ‘You must have some respect for literature, to be working for a magazine like Tony’s when you’re so young. And you must be talented, to convince so many people. You’re not original, but maybe that would have come, with maturity. What did you plan to do with your life?’

  ‘I wanted to write,’ I admitted. ‘Novels.’ Then I added, truthfully, ‘Your husband was my hero.’

  ‘Didn’t you realise? Once this gets out, any literary career you might have had will be over before it’s begun.’

  ‘There must be a way I can make amends,’ I pleaded. I thought of telling her about the Hemingway stories and how I was planning to expose them. But I’d be digging myself into an even deeper hole. Best not to mention Dahl either.

  ‘I’ve been trying to decide what Jim would have wanted,’ Sonia said.‘He liked you,Tony. He respected you. If he’d written anything he thought was worthy of your magazine, he’d have sent it to you. He was reckless about money. It wouldn’t have bothered him that he could have made a small fortune publishing it elsewhere. But it would have disturbed him to see you utterly humiliated, destroyed.’

  ‘I’ll do anything...’ Tony began.

  ‘Yes,’ Sonia interrupted, ‘you will. But, for the moment, you’ll keep quiet. I don’t want a word of this to leak out.’

  ‘You must forgive Mark,’ he said. ‘He’s very young and he was only trying to help.’

  ‘Not too young to go to prison,’ she said. ‘Leave him with me. You can go home now.’

  ‘But, what...?’

  ‘You’ll find out in due course.’

  As he left the room, with his back to Sonia, Tony gave one of his hopeless shrugs. He flashed a sympathetic smile in my direction. There was still a little mischief in it. He thought we were getting off lightly.

  When we were alone, Sonia at last turned to me. I tried to meet her long, hard gaze, but couldn’t. She was so frostily beautiful, so scary, and I was so guilty. My eyes drifted to the small coffee table beside her.The computer disks containing her husband’s last few pages lay on it, underlining my outrageous behaviour. I could hardly begin to imagine the mind of a writer who would only allow his very best work to be published. I would never have that kind of integrity, or dignity.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ I asked.

  She told me.

  Forty-seven

  Three weeks after my meeting with Sonia Sherwin, I was back in the small living room of my house in Leam. Magneta, tired by her pregnancy, had gone to bed. Tim and I were finishing off a second bottle of wine.

  ‘We’ll miss you,’ Tim said, ‘but it does sound exciting.’

  ‘It’s too good an opportunity to turn down,’ I said, trying to sound enthusiastic. ‘But I hope I can make it back in time for the christening.’

  Living with Tony had become uncomfortable. He was the only person I was allowed to tell about my ‘punishment’. But neither of us wanted to talk about it. At first, I’d kept my head down and revised for my first year retakes. While I waited for the results I realised that, with the magazine gone, we had less and less in common. So I came to Leam.

  Tim and I discussed the Hemingway forgeries, news of which had been all over the broadsheets. I couldn’t tell Tim that I was responsible for them. If I revealed that much, he would work out the rest.

  ‘I remember you telling me about Mercer,’ Tim said. ‘He was the guy who was going to buy the Little Review archive before the fire.’

  ‘The one whose wife I was sleeping with on the night of the fire.’

  ‘Jeez. You never told us who she was before.’

  I was drunk, or I wouldn’t have let my guard slip. I badly wanted to tell Tim how I really got to know Helen, how I’d wanted her and obsessed over her long before I knew she was Mercer’s mistress. But once I started it would be difficult to know where to stop. ‘Come on,’ Tim said. ‘Spill the beans.’

  Since Magneta wasn’t there, I could describe my seduction without becoming embarrassed. Even so, I kept the account brief, emphasising Helen’s ‘open marriage’, trying to come over more used than user. Whatever words I used, it still sounded like a tacky episode.

  ‘When I saw Mercer at Sherwin’s funeral, he knew. But I find it hard to believe he set the situation up. I think the fire was a coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t believe in coincidences,’ Tim said.

  ‘We’ll only know for certain if those manuscripts appear on the market,’ I told him. ‘I’ll bet they don’t. Mercer’s survived two scandals. Even if he did steal some of the archive, I can’t see him risking a third.’

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Tim told me. ‘Some people are addicted to risk.’

  I returned to Highgate to collect my stuff and say goodbye. I still had some of the cash Tony had loaned me for the Paris escapade, but Tony insisted on giving me a large sum in traveller’s cheques as well.

  ‘You don’t want to be completely reliant on Sonia Sherwin.’

  ‘I don’t have much choice. She’s got me by the balls.’

  ‘Both of us,’ Tony said, then rose, creakily, from
his armchair. ‘I want to show you a couple of things.’

  He handed me a letter from Roald Dahl’s agent. This venerable gent stated that he could find no trace of Dahl ever having written a story called The Woman Who Married Herself. ‘It’s pretty good but there’s something not right about it,’ the agent wrote.‘The main problem is that there is no record of Dahl having sent a story of this title to his typist. Dahl himself never learned to type and this has rather too many errors for it to be the work of a professional typist.’

  ‘You reckoned without that information,’ Tony said.

  The idea of a modern author who couldn’t type staggered me. I managed a hollow laugh. To think that I had gone to all that trouble to borrow a typewriter which its owner never learned how to use. Tony gave one of his wry smiles and changed the subject.

  ‘How long do you think it’ll take you to do?’ he asked.

  ‘It’ll take as long as it takes.Tim and Magneta want me to be godfather to their baby, but I don’t suppose I’ll have finished by the time it’s born. I don’t even know if Sonia Sherwin will let me come back for the christening. At least the university don’t seem bothered about my taking another year out.’

  ‘I wish I could be there to help you.’

  ‘I’ll write to you, if she lets me.’

  Tony nodded, a distracted look in his eyes. I stood.

  ‘I’d better get to the airport.’

  ‘I’ll pay for a taxi,’Tony said, lifting himself once more from the armchair, supporting himself with the cane that he had begun to use all the time. He phoned for a cab. ‘Before you go, there’s something I have to show you.You may hate me for this, but I’ll hate myself more if I let you go without telling you what really happened.’

  I followed him down to the basement. There, he showed me a multitude of manuscripts and envelopes. They were in cardboard boxes and plastic bags rather than the old tea chests I had methodically sorted through. Nevertheless, I knew exactly what they were.

  ‘You? You stole the archive, not Paul Mercer!’

  ‘Can you forgive me for deceiving you?’

  Back upstairs, in his dusty flat, Tony confessed that he had painstakingly planned and executed the Soho fire himself, tracking my pursuit of Helen until he was sure I would be out all night. At his signal, an acquaintance of the equally well insured porn store owner set alight the shop below the office. Both beneficiaries had unimpeachable alibis.

  ‘I knew Paul Mercer would find a way to rip me off over the archive, but the insurance company wouldn’t.’

  Tony had taken home most of the best stuff and planned to sell it privately, piecemeal, over the next few years. He’d worked out how to make his retirement plan pay up twice. Devious old sod.

  ‘Without Mercer’s offer, I couldn’t have insured the archive for anything like as much. He did me a favour, in a sense.’

  ‘I wish you’d found a way to take his money off him, too.’

  ‘Don’t harbour grudges,’ Tony advised me. ‘You got your revenge by exposing the fake Hemingways. Mercer’s no worse a shark than plenty of others out there.’

  The taxi sounded its horn.

  ‘Write to me if you can,’ Tony begged. ‘I’ll be lonely.’

  ‘You’ll enjoy retirement,’ I said. ‘Time to catch up with loads of people.’

  ‘Editors who have ceased to edit soon lose most of their friends,’ he told me.‘But we’ll stay friends, won’t we? Despite it all.’

  ‘Despite it all,’ I repeated, and hugged him goodbye.

  Forty-eight

  Ghosts aren’t real, rational people know that. They’re in our heads. A trick of memory. I’ve never believed in ghosts. But now I am one.

  In her Bloomsbury hotel, after Tony had left, Sonia told me that Sherwin’s books have never sold as well as his reputation might suggest. His royalties have dwindled since the 70s. They barely provided enough for one person to get by on. Sonia spent all of her savings supporting Sherwin. Now she wants a larger inheritance.

  Before I left London I wrote to Francine. I longed to tell her the truth. Instead I told her the same tale I’d given Tim and Magneta. Tony had been commissioned to write the authorised biography of James Sherwin. I was flying to Greece to collect material for him.

  At Athens airport I caught a bus to the port of Piraeus. The bus had no air conditioning and the heat was stifling. Piraeus was worse. I spent hours sweltering, clinging to scraps of shade. There were no longer any direct ferries to Karenos. There was, however, one ferry a day that would take me to its nearest neighbour. After a long voyage I had to wait another day for the final leg of my journey. I was to catch the supply boat that, twice a week, took provisions to Karenos.

  All of this waiting around gave me plenty of time to think about what I was doing. I used to believe that there was a profound infallibility about the way the world recognised great writing. But if Tony has taught me one thing about the literary world, it is this: luck and timing are far more important than talent. Once successful writers reach a certain status, people applaud anything they’ve touched, regardless of its quality.

  None of my forgeries are wonderful pieces of writing. I got better as I went on, exercising whatever tiny muscle of talent I possess, but that was not the reason for my stories’ success. They were believed because they appeared in the right place at the right time. They were believed because their readers wanted to believe.

  Back in London, Sonia Sherwin told me how, because my Sherwin forgery had been so warmly received, she was being offered large sums of money for her husband’s final novel. But the offers were conditional. Publishers wanted to see more before forking out. Sonia had nothing else to show them. There was much anticipation, the publishers told Sonia. The cheque was waiting. How long would it take her to edit her husband’s papers? Sonia said that she would return to Karenos and consider the matter, only selling the manuscript when the time was right.

  In the years before he burnt the manuscript, James Sherwin allowed his wife to read a few sections of A Commune. Her recollections, however, are garbled and unreliable. That’s why she needs me to make the story up. In London, I warned Sonia that any book I wrote was likely to damage Sherwin’s reputation. No matter, she said. Sonia, it turns out, is a practical woman. Her scruples are outweighed by need. And greed, some would say, but I am not in a position to criticise.

  During the long wait for the Karenos supply boat, I began to doubt that I retained the ability to step inside another writer’s style. I doubted whether any writer could pull off the vast forgery that Sonia requires of me. I used to believe there was something sacred about the creative process. I thought that real writers knew divine secrets. I hoped that, if I worked hard enough, these secrets would be revealed to me. I can’t afford to think like that any more. I’m on the lookout for shortcuts.

  When the boat arrived, I followed Sonia Sherwin’s instructions. As soon as the old craft was secured to the harbour, I identified myself. Enormous seagulls squawked loudly overhead. There was no breeze. Despite the temperature, the boatman wore a black donkey jacket and a navy blue cap with a decorative pleat over the peak. His face was tanned and lined. I was motioned to wait nearby, in the full sun. I asked him about return times, thinking ahead to when my godchild is born, but did not get a clear reply. I have since discovered that George is a loyal friend of Sonia’s. He will not take me off the island unless she tells him to. No matter. Should I find a means to escape, I have decided not to take it. I will keep my word and perform my penance.

  It’s easy to see why Sherwin made this place his home. There are no near neighbours.The days are long and peaceful. Most afternoons, a gentle breeze wafts through the pines, making the heat bearable. When I want a break, there is good swimming at the bottom of the hill. A man can lose himself here.

  Sonia does not rush me. A complete novel, as she knows all too well, is tougher to write than an extract or a short story. Sonia answers my questions. She shows me around the isla
nd. She cooks simple meals. Mostly, she leaves me alone, with nothing to do but write.

  James Sherwin was in his fifties when he died. I am only twenty, although, some days, I feel much older. I have Sherwin’s library, and his collected works. But I don’t have his wisdom or his talent. I don’t have his experience. I sit in Sherwin’s book lined study for hours on end. When I’m stuck for words, I play tricks on myself to make the inspiration flow. Sherwin’s computer is identical to the one I lost in the fire. I imagine myself back in my Soho garret, forging my favourite writer for love, with no thought of publication. I try to summon up the innocence I once had.

  A Commune was to be Sherwin’s epic. But he was economical. Only one novel lasted more than fifty thousand words. I might get away with sixty. At the rate I’m going, that will take forever. I have a few thousand faked words to build on. These act as a touchstone for the rest. Every day I delete most of what I write, then edit away the previous day’s work for good measure. When I can’t get any further I turn to this memoir. I need to remind myself who I am, or used to be. Only his voice creeps into mine as mine creeps into his, until I can’t tell which is which. Sherwin’s ghost is always here, looking over my shoulder. He mocks me, the perpetual pretender, impersonating a man whose shoes he can never hope to fill.

  Most days, though, I sit down at the damned machine, try.