The Pretender (21 page)

This was a question I often asked myself. In a way, I didn’t want my facility for forgery to last. I wanted my writing to become itself, not a copy.

‘Perhaps it’s like having a photographic memory,’ Tony went on, ‘something a few people have when they’re young, but which quickly fades in adulthood. You never know. Could be it’s a skill you’ll always possess. The only way to find out would be to locate other people who’ve shared the same skill. But if others existed, then, by the very nature of the thing, we wouldn’t know who they were.’

The phone rang, interrupting our conversation. Tony answered.

‘Paul, how are you? Yes, tomorrow is fine. I’ll sign the papers today, so that we can meet at your solicitors when you return. Have a good trip.’

He put the phone down, then told me, with a sly smile, ‘According to Paul Mercer, I should get my seventy-five thousand tomorrow.’

We went over the Sherwin story one more time, then Tony printed off two copies: one for the typesetters, one for Sonia Sherwin. Before leaving, I went and bought the day’s broadsheets. We wanted to read the Sherwin obituaries.Tony’s was the best informed. The paper had added tributes from JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock. Elsewhere,
The Independent
wrote that Sherwin was one of the most original British novelists to emerge since the war.
The Times
was more niggardly, describing Sherwin as a sixties casualty who ‘had the good grace to disappear, rather than continue trading on his inflated reputation. He will be remembered, if at all, for the minor curiosity that is
I, Singer
, a book often begun but seldom finished by a generation of aspirant dropouts.’ The
Daily Telegraph
didn’t cover Sherwin’s death at all, giving all their space to two ex-army men and a senior figure from the British Medical Council.

Reading these obituaries, I worried again about how my story would affect posterity’s view of Sherwin. But Tony told me I was wrong.

‘Interest in writers tends to wane when they die. Their books turn up cheap in the secondhand shops. Nobody wants to write about them. Most sink back into the obscurity they came from. Few rise again. We’re helping to keep Jim in the public eye. Don’t feel guilty about it.’

I noticed that Sherwin had become ‘Jim’ again. In death, Tony was able to reclaim the old friend whose work he’d discovered. Tony called a taxi. We loaded the computer, then rode to Soho, dropping the story off to be typeset on the way. The final issue was ready to go to press.

‘Paul’s spending the night in Scotland,’ Tony told me, as I struggled upstairs with my trusty Amstrad. ‘His young wife will be all alone. Just in case you wanted to know.’

I was in a chipper mood when I collected Helen, wearing the clothes she’d helped me choose (and mostly paid for). My beard was trimmed, my hair washed. I was anxious to keep Helen to her half promise of the afternoon before. But Helen, while affectionate, seemed ill at ease. She was dressed young, in jeans, trainers, and a sliver of a silk top concealed beneath the khaki combat jacket that half the young women in London seemed to wear that year. Yet her face was lined with concerns she didn’t share with me. Our conversation was aimless, arbitrary, as though we were both putting off the real point of our evening.

After the meal we walked, arms tentatively linked, along the Charing Cross Road. Some of its secondhand bookshops were still open, even though it was after ten. Helen insisted on going in to Any Amount of Books, where she asked for a copy of User, Sherwin’s book of short stories.

‘Sorry. We had one, but it went earlier today. The book’s still in paperback, I think.’

It was, and I had my mother’s copy back at the office, but I didn’t mention this to Helen, any more than I mentioned the Sherwin story about to appear in our final issue. I was beginning to doubt what had grown between us that week, to see how little, really, we had in common. Helen was a married woman from another country. I was a callow youth, inexperienced, a virgin. What happened later was bound to disappoint her and might humiliate me. My half plan, to ask her to leave Paul, to stay here with me, seemed ridiculous. What would Helen want with a penniless nineteen year old who had no proper home or job?

We were near the office. I would be more at ease there than in a hotel room paid for by Paul. Also, If Helen refused to come up, I would know there was no chance. I would see her to the door of her hotel then walk back.

‘We’re right by my flat,’ I said. ‘Let’s go there.’

Helen didn’t look at me. ‘It’s not much further to the hotel,’ she said.

‘You spend most of your life in hotels,’ I told her. ‘Come to the flat. There’s a bottle of whisky in the office.’

‘There’s a mini-bar in the room,’ Helen told me. ‘I’d feel more comfortable there, Mark. Please.’

That please did it. In silence, we walked along the Strand. When we got to the hotel, the doormen in their top hats and Victorian coats were enough to intimidate me.

‘I don’t belong in there,’ I told Helen.

‘You must come in,’ she said, insistently.

‘No. Let’s say goodbye here,’ I told her.

‘I don’t want to say goodbye,’ she said, then kissed me fully on the mouth.

I wavered and she took my hand, guiding me towards the glass door that glided open for us. We crossed the lobby and were in the lift, alone, kissing again. Helen’s hands were all over me.Too eager. She had become the awkward one.

How many times since have I replayed in my head what happened next? The room is huge, with two beds, which is a relief because it allows me to think that Helen and Paul don’t sleep in the same bed, that they haven’t had sex in either one. Helen gets a bottle of champagne from the mini-bar and I’m all for opening it right away but Helen tells me to wait. So we kiss and caress and completely undress. Horniness makes me commandeering or maybe it’s that Helen is so submissive I feel able to thrust myself on her but she’s experienced and knows how to stop me from entering her and it’s just starting to occur to me that maybe this is some enormous set up and Paul is going to walk in at any moment freshly arrived from Scotland and shoot me or something like that when I hear Big Ben in the distance, chiming midnight and Helen is out from under me, removing the champagne from the fridge.As the last chime sounds, the glasses are full and, resplendently naked, she holds one out to me and says ‘Happy Birthday’.

I am twenty years old. My birthday is something I’ve avoided thinking about since Helen told me she’d be gone by today and she will be gone but right now she’s here, giving me champagne kisses, telling me it’s time for my present, and I’m amazed that she’s remembered, after all it’s been nearly two years and I ask her what my present is, although I already know.

Afterwards, Helen pours the last of the chilled champagne, tells me I must take a bath with her. We get into the large, freestanding bath, filled with bubbles that begin to overflow onto the tiles below, and we sip champagne while washing each other. Now that I’m sated with sex, brilliant sex, Helen no longer seems older than me. She is only very beautiful, and vulnerable. And later, when we are holding each other in bed, I try to talk to Helen about the future, and leaving her husband. But she puts her finger to my lips and we begin to make love for a second time that threatens to last forever, yet doesn’t.

Then Helen is sleeping, but I’m not. I’m wide awake. I want to shout, and sing, and I pull out my notebook and fill it with nonsense, all about Helen. Then I try to sleep, but can’t. It’s gone four in the morning. Helen’s made no promises to me. We’ve not discussed the future. Maybe it would be best if I go. Only, when I try to leave the bed, her arm reaches over and squeezes my shoulder, as if asking me to stay.

‘Are you all right?’ she murmurs.

‘I’m fine, but I can’t sleep.’

‘Talk to me then,’ she says, though her eyes aren’t open.

I know what I want to say, but I can’t. Helen wouldn’t leave Paul for me. Looking at her, I’m not even sure that I’d want her to. I have no idea where I’m going next. The magazine’s over and I’ve lost interest in returning to university. I’ve still got most of the money Helen gave me. Maybe it’s time to travel. I’m not ready to write yet, so what I need to do is have experiences, gather material.

‘Why did you try to buy that book, earlier?’ I ask her.

‘What book?’ She’s not really awake.

‘
User
.’

‘Paul rang earlier. He wanted me to find him a copy.’

Her husband’s name sends a chill through me. ‘Did he say why?’ I ask, but she’s gone back to sleep. I wash and dress. Helen doesn’t stir again. I kiss the nape of her neck, then let myself out of the room.

Downstairs, the doorman does not wish me ‘goodnight’ as I leave. Maybe he thinks I’m a gigolo who’s been servicing a wealthy guest.This thought amuses me and I get an idea for a story that I’ll start to write as soon as I get home.

Only that isn’t possible for, as I walk through Leicester Square at five in the morning, I’m conscious of commotion, sirens, large vehicles trying to move through narrow alleys. There’s a fire engine jammed between the Chinese super market and the triple X video store. I see a ladder rammed up the outer wall of the office. A policeman tells me to get back and I tell him that I live there, on the top floor. His attitude changes.

‘Anybody else likely to be inside?’

‘Not at night, no.’

‘You’re very lucky,’ he tells me.‘If you’d been asleep upstairs when this lot started, you’d be a goner by now.’

This news has no effect on me, for I am already certain about who was responsible for this fire, someone who knew I would not be home. ‘Insured, are you?’ I shake my head. While I have lost a few paltry possessions, Tony has lost his nest egg, his legacy. He will be devastated.

‘Pity,’ the officer says, before going off to tell the firefighters that nobody’s burning to death inside. I stare in horror when, on the top floor, there’s a sudden conflagration. Flames shoot into the clear, cloudless, Soho sky. A small part of the history of English Literature is consumed, translated into smoke, never to be seen again.

Tony arrived a few minutes after me, frantic with worry that I was trapped inside. I called Helen at the hotel. Reception refused to put me through, saying they had instructions not to disturb her. By the time Tony and I made it back to his Highgate flat, early in the afternoon, there was a message from Paul on the answering machine.

‘Heard what happened.That’s really tough. Can’t talk. Got a flight to catch. Ciao.’

‘I’m a fool,’ Tony said. ‘If only I’d kept the stuff here. But it’s only paper, in the end. You’ve lost everything.’

‘At least I wasn’t hurt,’ I told him, adding, ‘and I’ve still got most of the thousand Paul gave me in the bank.’

‘I’ll help as much as I can,’ Tony told me. ‘Stay here as long as you want.’

I thanked him. Tony was my partner in crime, my surrogate father, but I still had no desire to live with him.

‘I think I’ll go back to Leam for a while,’ I said.

The next day found me there. I hadn’t written ahead to say I was coming. Tim and Magneta had said I was welcome any time. I hoped they really meant it.

Spring arrived later in Leam than London. There were still bluebells in the small flower bed at the front of the cottage. Its front door was newly painted in a rich green. Magneta answered my knock. Her hair was longer and wilder and she had put on weight. She shrieked with delight and hugged me.

‘We were only talking about you this morning,’ she said, ushering me inside. ‘We read about it in the papers.’

‘You read about it?’ I didn’t realise that the fire had been reported.

‘Yes. You were a big fan of his, weren’t you?’

‘Yes. I was. Am.’ Now I thought she meant Sherwin.

‘And so soon after him giving the story to the magazine.’

‘How did you know about that?’ I still thought she meant Sherwin. Magneta looked perplexed.

‘I know because Tim was in the same issue. Mark, you do know what I’m talking about? It’s just been on the radio. Graham Greene’s dead. He died in Switzerland, yesterday. Mark, are you all right?’

My face must have gone pale. Greene had been ill for ages.

He’d died, more or less, of old age. Even so, at that moment, I felt that I’d murdered him.

‘Is this all the stuff you’ve brought?’

‘It is.’ My belongings fitted, with room to spare, into an old flight bag of Tony’s. I was travelling light. ‘Something happened.’

I told Magneta about the fire, how it had destroyed my flat, the archive, even the typewriter that Graham Greene had once written on.

‘Was any of it insured?’

‘I never bothered with insurance. Tony told me when I moved in that contents insurance cost too much. It was one reason he wanted me there.’

‘What about your computer?’

‘Gone.’

‘With all your writing?’

‘That was on discs, but they were in the fire, too.’

‘Oh, Mark. All your work!’

‘It doesn’t matter.’ I found myself telling the story of Hemingway in Paris, how Hadley lost all of his stories on the train, so he had to rewrite them.

‘And in the end, you see, it worked out fine, because the rewritten stories were probably better than the originals.’

Only probably,’ Magneta said. ‘You can rewrite too much. Now we’ll never know. Anyway, as I recall, Hemingway didn’t rewrite everything he lost, not by a long shot. Didn’t a couple of those stories turn up?’

‘In Paris, yes.’

‘I remember. Found by this shady literary dealer who married his foster daughter...’

‘Step daughter. Funnily enough, I know them.’ Hesitantly, because there was so much I had to leave out, I told Magneta how Paul Mercer had been on the verge of buying the
LR
’s archives when the office burnt down.

‘Don’t you find that suspicious?’ Magneta asked when I’d finished.

I found it suspicious.There was nothing about Paul Mercer that wasn’t suspicious. But I couldn’t tell Magneta how I knew that, nor where I was on the night of the fire. It was too embarrassing.