Hemingway's Chair

by Michael Palin

  Elaine preferred to sit in the garden if she could. In her experience, once inside a pub it was hard to keep a man’s attention. He would find other men and they would start to argue over things that were of very little interest to her, generally football or fishing or cars or the inexorable decline of standards in almost every area except pub conversation.

  Human relationships were what interested Elaine. They were such an endlessly rich and fascinating subject, an all-year-round phenomenon. A twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week phenomenon. Men could talk about passion and elation and despair if they happened within the confines of a league match, but for Elaine such emotions were too important to be squandered by football commentators. She was a romantic. She yearned and felt and sensed with an intensity which she had never yet been able to share. She had had boyfriends and they had said that they loved her, but she knew they loved go-karting and windsurfing just as much, and she wanted to be more than just an exciting evening out. Martin was different from the others. He wasn’t gregarious, and he had no interest in sport.

  Though he was still reserved and uncomfortable in talking about his feelings, she was convinced that beneath it all Martin felt the same way she did, which was why she was attracted to him, why she persevered with the relationship. At least it was a relationship. Until the Christmas before last it had been two people sitting beside each other behind a post office counter. Now he touched her face and sometimes took her hand.

  Elaine watched him conduct some private battle with himself. He thrust his lower lip forward and drew in the muscles tight around his eyes.

  ‘You’re quite pensive.’

  ‘I was thinking about the future,’ he said.

  ‘Well, no wonder you were pensive. Which bit?’ asked Elaine.

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘Of the future.’

  ‘Oh…’ He smiled bleakly. The nearest bit.’

  ‘Am I in it?’

  She knew this would irritate him and she was right. He took a studied sip at his beer and set the glass down before answering her.

  ‘As a matter of fact, no. Just me and a large public company.’

  ‘Beginning with P?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘There aren’t many left to choose from,’ she said.

  Martin smiled ruefully.

  ‘Are you not getting on well together, you and the Post Office?’ she asked him.

  Martin’s frown deepened. A shadow of a breeze came from somewhere and ruffled his fine, soft, red hair. ‘I don’t know. That’s the damn thing. I don’t know. Padge is going in a fortnight and no one’s written to me or got in touch with me. I mean, you’d think they’d have said something.’

  ‘Well, you know what they’re like at Head Office. They’ve got lots on.’

  ‘Too much to bother with us?’ Martin was indignant. ‘We work in a Crown office. Who runs it matters.’ There was real anger in his voice, and it quite aroused Elaine.

  ‘You’ll get it. I know,’ she said.

  ‘You know, but what do they know? I know my job. There’s nothing I don’t know about running a post office. But oh no, that’s not enough any more. Now it’s all management training stuff. I hated that seminar in Ipswich. Role-plays. Making business plans. Couldn’t think of a word to say.’

  To Elaine there was little more exciting than an angry man confessing a weakness. She grasped the remains of her piña colada decisively. ‘Look, let’s finish our drink, go back via Omar’s, get two cod and chips and take them down the harbour. It’s a lovely night.’

  She watched Martin for a moment. The hairs in his nose needed clipping.

  ‘Kiss me,’ she said.

  Martin glanced quickly round the garden.

  ‘Not here.’

  ‘No, here.’ She pointed to the soft white skin at the bottom of her neck. ‘Here.’

  She thrust her chin high and pushed herself towards him.

  ‘I still think they should have confirmed it. They would in any other business.’ He leaned across and put his lips lightly on the side of her neck. It smelt soapy.

  Elaine sighed. ‘Be nice if you could do that without having to look round first.’

  ‘I’ve got to be conscious of my public role. Specially when I’m Manager.’

  ‘It would be nice to have a drink from our own bar in our own living room without having to come out here every Thursday.’

  Martin nodded to himself. ‘I think I’ll contact the union. Check the legal position.’

  Elaine reached in her handbag and brought out a bottle of cologne.

  ‘I’m thirty next year, Martin.’

  ‘There must be prior requirement of notification,’ he said.

  ‘You know what I mean.’ She dabbed the scent below her ears and around her neck. ‘Don’t you, Martin?’

  Martin looked up warily. ‘You wouldn’t want to be married to an Assistant Manager.’

  ‘No, you’re right.’ She leaned across and kissed his cheek. ‘But I wouldn’t mind being married to a Manager.’

  Two

  By the time Martin got home that night he felt slightly ill. Fish was not Omar’s speciality and it was always tainted with a hint of shish kebab. He parked his bike in the shed, let himself into the house, shut the door on the smouldering remains of a sunset and made his way up the stairs. His mother appeared in the hallway, accompanied by the sound of television.

  ‘Is that you?’ she called.

  ‘No, it’s the Duke of Kent.’

  She seemed satisfied and went back into the living room. Kathleen Sproale was approaching sixty. She had a long, sad face, greying hair and deep-set brown eyes. She had been a domestic science teacher at the local girls’ school, but when her husband had died, suddenly, nineteen years ago, she had retreated from the world. Now she stayed mainly at the cottage, earning a little from curtain-making and sewing the odd wedding dress.

  Martin pushed open the door to his room. Once upon a time he’d thought of locking it but his mother was the only other person who ever went into it and she didn’t seem to mind. Elaine had been there once or twice. Her visits had not been a success.

  Martin shut the door.

  He pulled open his Italian army first-aid cabinet, Milan, circa 1917. He reached along the crowded shelf for a bottle of grappa. He had two of them, but he chose the dark and pungent Amarone. Having poured himself a shot, he raised his glass to the huge black and white photograph, carefully mounted on board, that took up most of one wall from the mantelpiece to the ceiling.

  ‘Salute, Papa.’

  Ernest Hemingway looked back at Martin. He wasn’t drinking. He was writing. More accurately, he was pausing in the act of writing. He was standing up, the way he preferred to work. His left arm rested on an angled wooden writing board that lay on top of a chest of drawers with scroll handles. Beneath the lightly clenched fist were several loose sheets of foolscap typewriter paper covered in his handwriting. In his right hand, held just below the waist, he loosely clasped a pencil. He wore a thick check sports shirt with flaps over both breast-pockets. His face was still powerful. It was framed in white, above by wavy hair brushed forward to disguise baldness, and below by a well-trimmed beard, growing with a leftward lean. About the eyes there was a look of age and sadness. Or so it seemed to Martin.

  Of the many photographs in his possession (Hemingway with fish, elephants, typewriters, bottles, film stars, children, soldiers, guns, bullfighters) it was the only one in which the Great Man seemed not to be performing or posing. Instead he had the almost deliberately vulnerable gaze of one who wants not so much to be looked at as understood, who is, after a lifetime of running the show himself, appealing to someone out there to witness the reality of what happens when a legend becomes ill and old and lonely. This was why this particular photograph had pride of place in Martin’s room. It allowed him in, permitted Martin to feel that he could have been of some use to his hero – not just another onlooker sharing him with the world
but, just possibly, the only one who really understood him.

  Martin never used to read stories much at school, his talents, such as they were, tending towards the science subjects, and the curriculum tending to keep it that way. He was not good enough at anything to enjoy the camaraderie of sport (though he had been official scorer for the cricket XI) so he had grown to envy the boys who were. They seemed to have more fun. They seemed to know more about everything that was important, like how to make friends. And hardly any of them did science. In his first year in the sixth form he took a decision and enrolled himself on a General Studies course, in which there was an English option.

  The book they were given to study was Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martin was seventeen. That was when his father died. He was taken out of school for three weeks just as the course was beginning. But he took the book home with him and began to read it and, as he did so, the power of its writing shut out his grief. He followed Robert Jordan across the mountains and valleys of Spain. Jordan’s ‘red, black, killing’ anger was an outlet for the anger Martin felt at his own loss. Hemingway’s hero became, for a while, the only man he could trust. From that time on he had devoured everything Hemingway had written: ten novels, over sixty short stories. Then, much later, came the desire to read about the author himself. And in the letters and the thick biographies of Carlos Baker (which he liked) and Kenneth S. Lynn (which he loathed) and those of Myers, Reynolds, Mellow, Anthony Burgess and others he discovered that to all intents and purposes Ernest Hemingway and Robert Jordan were one and the same person. This only increased his appetite for the man.

  Meanwhile he began to fill his room with memorabilia. Theston was not a collector’s paradise. The best he could find were either replicas – the collection of Hem-style hats behind the door; or approximations – a bullfight poster, Pamplona 1971, genuine but fifty years too late; a Corona Number 3 portable typewriter, not the exact model Hemingway used, but a later one, barely changed. He also acquired a First World War gas mask of Italian design, a billhook (possibly Cuban), a punch bag, a kudu horn trophy, a German army belt of the kind worn by Hem in later life.

  ‘I’ve made some tea. D’you want a cup?’ It was his mother calling. Reminding him of the rituals of life outside. ‘I’ve put it in the kitchen, Martin!’

  Martin shook his head sadly. Tea-drinkers, mothers, post office administrators, would-be fiancées. Little people with little minds. When would they realise that only through confrontation with danger could life be lived to the full? On the other hand he was thirsty after all that salt and vinegar.

  He finished the grappa, slammed down the glass, threw a punch at the light switch and went out.

  ‘Coming,’ he called.

  Three

  Mr Padgett’s ‘occasion of importance’ came round on a Friday, a dark day of storm warnings and squally showers that set the bowlines cracking against the masts of bobbing yachts and the north cone swinging in the wind outside the coastguard station. More than two hundred people squeezed into Theston church hall. It was mid-September by now and the town had been reclaimed from the summer visitors. The season had been a good one and the shopkeepers and landladies had grumbled at the hours of work, but quietly put away a bit of money, though they would never admit it to each other. So there were a few smiling faces beneath the balloons and the bunting, and conversation was excited by the weather.

  A rich voice boomed out behind him. ‘Grand turn-out, Sproale.’

  It was Lord Muncaster, who didn’t often come into the post office, but always turned out at town do’s like this, dispensing feudal benevolence though it was no secret that only three months ago he had done a markedly un-feudal business deal, selling his Jacobean house to an Anglo-Saudi insurance company and renting it back from them, right under the nose of English Heritage.

  ‘I must say these are the most damned decent set of people. I mean this is the backbone of England, I honestly think…’ He gazed out over the throng, his warm and generous eyes watering with the kind of hazy sentimentality that affects only the truly out of touch.

  Martin muttered something deferential and moved swiftly away. His main aim was to remain in visual contact with the three visitors from Head Office. He recognised two of them, his local boss and his area boss, but not the third. They stayed in a group together, all three in sober suits, blending uneasily with the heterogeneous town crowd. They were currently making heavy weather of a conversation with Padge, who was coughing badly in the hot smoky atmosphere. It was clear from their faces that none of them knew, or probably cared, what their retiring Manager was saying. Elaine came up and squeezed Martin’s hand.

  ‘Ooh, you’re hot.’

  Martin pulled away sharply.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to surprise you.’ She leaned in close. He could smell something on her breath. Something stronger than Bulgarian red or white.

  ‘There’s gin in the kitchen,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve had some of it. Oh, help! I’m sorry.’ Stepping back to gauge the effect of her information she’d snagged her heel in a trouser turn-up and a freshly filled glass of Balkan Cabernet had splashed Alan Randall, the newsagent and confectioner. Randall gave a short angry cry. He was a dapper middle-aged bachelor who looked younger than he was, thanks to hard work and a sun-bed. Appearances were important to him and, though the well-pressed navy blue blazer took the brunt of the spill, a small wine slick was spreading visibly across the dove-grey Terylene on his left thigh.

  ‘I’ll fetch a cloth.’

  ‘Salt!’ hissed Randall.

  Elaine made for the kitchen, hot with embarrassment.

  Martin was aware of a throat loudly cleared, followed by a general hushing and shushing. As usually happens in the presence of a large unruly crowd, the message took a while to reach the peripheries of the room. By that time the current Mayor, a builder called Ken Stopping, had heaved back his broad shoulders, adjusted a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and embarked, with the help of an ominous stack of index cards, on a thorough and ponderous eulogy.

  ‘… for many years…’

  ‘Sssh!’ Someone hissed loudly in at the door of the kitchen from which fragments of Elaine’s plangent account of the wine incident emerged to vie with Stopping’s barely audible bass rumble.

  ‘… and I dare say Padge would agree…’

  ‘Hear! Hear!’ from those who heard, and a little later from those who didn’t.

  As Stopping carefully picked his way through the career of the retiring Postmaster, a certain restlessness could be observed around the room. No one was really listening. Stopping’s remarks were so judicious that he might well have been speaking of anyone over the age of sixty who had lived in Theston all their life. Even Mrs Padgett looked bored. Dr Cardwell, young, keen and once a runner-up in the Suffolk Wine-Taster of the Year competition, yawned shamelessly. Barry Burrell, the vicar, equally young and keen, found himself staring quite hard at the long, well-displayed thighs of Maureen Rawlings, a novelist, recently arrived in the town, as she in turn rose on tiptoe for a better view of the clean-limbed pertness of the youngest of the men from Post Office Headquarters.

  Maureen’s husband, Quentin, an occasional journalist, tugged at his wildly disordered hair and stared about him sourly. Cuthbert Habershon, the solicitor and district coroner, head thrown back, seemed utterly absorbed in the ceiling, as if seeking divine assurance that his own retirement, now only fourteen weeks away, would not involve a speech from Ken Stopping. At last Martin caught the eye of one of the suits from Head Office, and smiled at him as comfortably and conspiratorially as he thought was appropriate. He certainly didn’t want to appear to be assuming anything. He would be ready when the time came. The man, whose hair was greying, smiled back warmly and Martin looked quickly away. He felt the heat and eased himself towards the bar.

  Mr Meredith was there, shakily refilling his wine glass.

  ‘I knew his father,’ he said, for no particular reason.

  At that point
there was another outbreak of shushing, and a renewal of interest among those closest to the Mayor.

  ‘… garden shed … green fingers … all of us…’

  The group broke to one side. Stopping looked anxiously at the door and after a moment that seemed like an eternity, Norman Brownjohn from the hardware store wheeled in the present from the people of Theston – a gleaming new Arcrop Major lightweight alloy barrow containing a hundred pounds worth of garden tools. Not Martin’s idea, for he knew Padgett to be a lot less fit than he ever let on. A Zimmer frame might have been more use.

  But there was undeniable warmth in the chorus of ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’, and by the time Padge had been persuaded to speak there were, at last, a few handkerchiefs out.

  Padge fought to focus. He breathed in cautiously, didn’t cough and felt relieved.

  ‘Well, I don’t know what to say…’ he began.

  ‘First time in your life, Padge!’ a woman shouted from the back.

  ‘Ssh!’

  ‘I’ve been looking forward to this day for forty-eight years, and now it’s here I wish it had never happened.’

  It seemed as if Padge had surprised himself with that one, and those close to him could see his eyes fill. A low hum of ‘aah’s suggested appreciation but an implied preference for the jokes.

  ‘Not that I shall be short of things to do. I’ve got roses –’

  ‘And Rosie’s got yours!’ came loudly from one of the off-licence crowd. Groans and laughter.

  ‘And I’ve got my vegetables … and I’ve got Brenda.’

  ‘And in that order!’ Brenda Padgett shouted lustily, as the place dissolved into waves of grateful laughter.

  Padge stopped, took a deep breath and went on. ‘But there’ll be nothing to replace the warmth and friendliness I’ve met at the post office. On both sides of the counter.’

  ‘Hear! Hear!’

  ‘We get called all sorts of names, especially closing at lunchtime on a Saturday, but I couldn’t have had a more hardworking and cheerful staff.’