The Pretender (23 page)

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told her.

‘You must tell me everything. We never had secrets before.’

Her English had become more sophisticated than my French, so we spoke in my language. When I was done, she clapped her hands.

‘I think it will work, if I help you. But I don’t understand why you’re so determined to expose your own forgeries.’

Hesitantly, I told her the rest of it, up to and including the point where the office burnt down while I slept with Helen. Francine was not in the least shocked.

‘You think they planned it all, that her husband stole the documents?’

‘Not all the documents,’ I said. ‘Maybe a few of the most valuable ones — things that he can sell to collectors who won’t mind their not being able to show them in public. Or he’ll save them for a few years, then sell after Tony’s dead.’

‘He whored his own wife for papers worth a few thousand pounds! Didn’t you say he was a rich man?’

‘“Rich people stay that way by holding onto their money”, Tony says. Anyhow, I don’t know if Helen was in on it. We’d become very close. She knew how I felt about her. I think she was starting to feel that way about me. Maybe Paul used her, the way he used...’

Even as I said this, I knew how pathetic it sounded. I remembered Helen was keen we went to her hotel room, not the office, on the night of my birthday.

‘You poor romantic,’ Francine said, stroking my hair.

‘I’m over her now,’ I assured her.

She kissed me on the cheek.Then she told me she had to go. We arranged to meet again the following day.

When Francine was gone, I got out some paper. The sheets looked the same as the sheets I’d typed my first Hemingway stories on. They had a similar, brittle feel, but were of English manufacture, and only twenty years old.

I’d determined to give up forgery after the Sherwin story. Yet it seemed that, whenever I stopped, a burning necessity arose, sucking me back in. I had already drafted what I was going to type. The forgery had to be as good as the others, if not better. But I needn’t feel any guilt, or fear. This time, I was planning to get caught.

The address on the receipt was easy to find.The old lady was still alive, and at home. She invited us up to her cramped apartment. Francine did the bulk of the talking, giggling as if playing the part of a favourite granddaughter, disarming Madame Devonier. Without her, I suspect, the discussion that followed would have been much less
complaisant
.

Madame Devonier was eighty-three but her mind was still sharp. She’d heard of the Hemingway stories, seen the
Paris Match
article. It amused her to know that the stories were forgeries, typed on the machine she had sold to me. But she couldn’t understand why I wanted to give the machine back. Francine said my behaviour was an example of the peculiar British sense of humour. Then she explained. Madame laughed a lot and opened the bottle of wine we’d brought with us. Once it became clear that she stood to make some money out of our plan, she became positively enthusiastic. As we drank the wine, Madame Devonier rehearsed the story she would tell, asking questions now and then. Relaxing into her role, she began adding details of her own that would increase the tale’s authenticity. Francine and I played the part of journalists, taking it in turns to quiz her.

Later that afternoon, a little drunk and still excited by our visit to Madame Devonier, Francine and I returned to my hotel room, for reasons we hadn’t discussed. There was no foreplay or seduction, not unless you count my taking Francine’s hand as we climbed the stairs. We were doing the inevitable. She was more experienced than me, but not very much so. I was grateful, as we undressed, that I had already been with Helen and had some idea of what to do. But there was no need to worry. Francine and I were easy with each other: passionate and friendly. Neither of us behaved as though our lives depended on this one act.

Afterwards, I would have promised to move back to Paris there and then, had Francine agreed to be my girlfriend. Only she already had a boyfriend, of whom she didn’t speak, and had to return home for dinner at seven to parents who wouldn’t abide me. Next day, she had to go to school. I had to go back to England. I had no more chance of a future with her than I had with Helen.

That evening, when I returned with the typewriter, I worried that Madame Devonier might have changed her mind. But she hadn’t. I heaved the typewriter into her spare room, cleaned it carefully to avoid fingerprints, then watched as the old lady covered it in dust, swept from the top of an old wardrobe.

The meeting with Sonia Sherwin was to take place in her hotel suite the day after my return from France. In the taxi, on our way there, Tony gave me a belated warning about the Hemingway plan.

‘Paul Mercer did well out of your Hemingway forgeries. But you weren’t going to sell them. You haven’t lost anything... yet. By exposing that the stories were faked, you may expose yourself. You want to be a writer, but you’re risking your reputation before you start.’

‘Mercer can’t bring me into it without revealing how he really got the stories.’

‘He’s cleverer than you give him credit for. A man like Mercer is good at revenge. He might sit on your secret for years, then decide to expose you just when you’re making a name for yourself.’

‘It’s a risk I’m willing to take.’

Sonia Sherwin was an elegant American woman with dark, Italianate features. She was forty but looked five years younger. Sonia wore black, confidently allowing the odd fleck of grey to highlight her dark hair. With her aristocratic air, the widow could have been a smaller, older version of Helen Mercer. She talked about James Sherwin as though she were describing a historical figure, rather than a husband.

‘When I first met him, he’d stopped writing altogether. That novel you published part of, he’d abandoned it years ago.’

Her words were addressed to Tony. I sat to his side, trying to work out whether she’d sussed us. So far, we seemed to be in the clear.

‘Pity,’ Tony said.

‘As I told you in my letter, I am Jim’s literary executor. He left very strict instructions on what was to be preserved. There are barely enough good unpublished or uncollected pieces to fill a slim book. Jim didn’t want to rehash anything that would harm his reputation.’

‘I’m sure that wouldn’t happen,’ Tony murmured.

‘My husband used to speak about the terrible Hemingway stuff that got published decades after he died. Jim wasn’t satisfied by most of his output, even when he was at his peak. He destroyed nearly everything he wrote in the last twenty years.’

‘Nearly everything?’ Tony said, sounding alarmed. I wondered if the Hemingway comment was a sly dig. Probably not. The poor quality of Hemingway’s late work was one reason why the recent discovery of early material from his nascent, vital years had been greeted with such excitement.

‘His publishers have been on to me, Tony. They’d given up on
A Commune
years ago. The contract was cancelled. But they love what you published. They say if they put something out quickly it will sell in vast quantities. They think Jim must have been getting ready to finish the thing. They don’t understand why I’m reluctant to hand everything over. But I expect you do.’

She held up a copy of the final edition of the
Little Review
. This issue had had the largest print run of the magazine’s history, staying on shop shelves for less than two weeks before it completely sold out. Sonia’s voice became cold, toneless.

‘I was surprised when this contained an extract from
A Commune
, especially as I’d watched Jim burn his only copy of the unfinished, handwritten manuscript. It was a huge weight off his mind, he told me at the time.’

‘Jim was always a perfectionist,’ Tony murmured. ‘But...’

He thought better of finishing the sentence. Sonia was reaching into a cheap, brown cardboard box at the side of her chair.

‘You were good enough to send me the original print-out of the extract Jim sent you.’ She took some loose leaf pages out of the box, held them up. ‘Mark, would you like a look at the stuff Jim was working on when he died?’

‘Very much,’ I said.

‘They’re more memoir than fiction, and very fragmentary, not publishable as they stand. I printed them off before I left the island. I wanted a hard copy in case there was anything wrong with the disks. But I haven’t had time to separate the pages.’

She rested the loose leaf sheets on the carpet, then began to pull a stack of cheap, thin computer paper out of the box.To make such paper A4 in size, you needed to tear narrow strips from each side, every strip punctured where the sheets were held by the roller. Then you must tear the perforated pages apart. Sonia concertinaed the connected sheets in front of us.

‘This was the only kind of paper Jim used for his creative work,’ she told me. ‘With single sheets, you have to stand by the printer and feed it in a page at a time. Jim didn’t have the patience for that.’

‘Maybe...’ Tony began, but Sonia silenced him with a glare. She picked up the final issue of the
Little Review
again, opening it at the Sherwin story.

‘Jim didn’t write this. I want to know who did.’

As Sonia Sherwin was interrogating us, an interrogation of a different kind was taking place across the English channel. Madame Devonier was busy telling journalists about her amazing find. She had rung
Paris Match
first. Several papers had beat a path to the old lady’s door and listened to her well rehearsed story. Madame Devonier insisted that, for months, she hadn’t realised the famous ‘Hemingway’ stories came from her flat. One day a friend suggested the stories might have been discovered in the old copies of
Paris Match
she had taken to the flea market two years earlier. Madame Devonier went through the rest of the magazines she kept under the bed in her spare room.

After her discovery, she didn’t at first consider the old typewriter, which still sat above the wardrobe in the same room. She was too excited by having found the third story, which turned out to be a previously unknown piece, one Hemingway never rewrote. She hoped it would make her rich. But the typeface on the story was worryingly familiar. She occasionally typed letters on the old machine. The last time that the typewriter was used by another person, she realised, would have been twenty years ago, just after she was widowed. That summer, a young American had rented her spare room for a couple of months.

No, after all this time, she couldn’t remember the young man’s name, but he had borrowed the typewriter, with her permission. It was never used often. She recalled there was some very old paper with it.The lodger finished this paper off and replaced it. He left in a hurry, owing two weeks rent, she remembered that. The old
Paris Match
magazines were kept in the spare room for visitors to read. He must have stashed his stories amongst them before he left.

Were the Hemingway stories a deliberate attempt to defraud the finder? Not on her behalf. Maybe on the young American’s. After so many years, who could guess his intentions? It could be that the stories were an exercise he practised to pass the time while he was supposed to be studying French. She recalled that his spoken French was not very good.

Madame Devonier was too honest a person to profit from a forgery. She didn’t know whether this last story would be worth anything. But even forgeries had a monetary value, she had read somewhere, if they became famous enough. So she had gone to the journalists, seeking advice.

In the weeks that followed, the university that had bought the Hemingway manuscripts allowed comparison tests to be done. There was no doubt: the ‘new’ Hemingway story was typed on the same typewriter as the other pieces, a Royal, the same brand of machine Hemingway used in the twenties. However, while the first two stories had been typed on paper at least seventy years old, this third one was on paper a good fifty years younger.

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.

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.