Hemingway's Chair

by Michael Palin

  Martin checked the test certificate and the certificate of car insurance and wrote down the registration details of Mrs Harvey-Wardrell’s nine-year-old Daimler on the new licence.

  She looked around the office proprietorially. ‘And when is the grand transformation to take place?’

  ‘The end of January.’

  ‘Well, I can’t wait.’

  ‘We all have to,’ muttered the increasingly militant nursing mother.

  Mrs Harvey-Wardrell chose to ignore this.

  * * *

  Elaine was in the outer office when Martin went through for his lunch. He reached up on to the shelf, took down the plastic container, peeled off the lid and removed a foil-wrapped package, wedged in beside an apple and an overripe tomato.

  Elaine was reading a magazine and marking the page every now and then with a ball-point. Her wide, strong face wore a preoccupied frown.

  Martin had not been alone with her since that day on the sea front. Despite what she had said to him then, he had half-expected Elaine to ring and reinstate the Christmas invitation. But she hadn’t and for the first time in many years Martin and his mother had spent Christmas alone together at Marsh Cottage. They’d had a chicken from the deep freeze.

  A howl of laughter came from Echo Passage. Schoolchildren used it as a short cut into the town. Martin peeled back the foil and took out a shapeless bread roll. ‘How are you, then?’ he asked, with unconvincing nonchalance.

  ‘All right.’

  He nodded at the paper. ‘Quiz?’

  ‘Passes the time.’

  ‘You must know every answer in the world by now.’

  Having examined his roll for optimum point of entry he bit carefully into the combination of ham and cheddar cheese. It was predictable but comforting.

  Elaine laid her biro down and rubbed her eyes.

  ‘What is going on, Martin?’

  ‘Mm?’ Martin grunted, his mouth full.

  ‘I wish you’d tell me. I just wish you’d tell me.’

  ‘What do you want me to tell you?’

  ‘Well, what’s going on here? I suppose I’m meant to have got used to the fact that my workmates get sacked. Now I’m supposed to jump up in the air because we’re being modernised.’

  ‘Look, Elaine.’

  ‘Don’t “Look, Elaine” me, I’m not one of your hired today, fired tomorrow part-timers that Marshall’s screwing in the evening, I am a salaried postal officer with six years’ experience and I expect to be told what is going on in this office!’

  ‘Who’s he screwing in the evening?’ asked Martin with genuine bewilderment.

  ‘God, I thought I knew nothing. Geraldine, of course. It’s obvious, isn’t it. She picks him up after work you know.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t know they were –’

  ‘You mean to say he doesn’t tell you everything over your three-course dinners at the Market Hotel?’

  Martin was aggrieved. ‘We only talk about work.’

  ‘Really?’

  It was almost true. ‘Yes, that’s about it.’

  Elaine looked at him and thrust out her chin. ‘Well, I wish he’d invite me. I might learn a thing or two.’

  Martin tried, unsuccessfully, to catch a shower of crumbs that fell as he took another mouthful. ‘He told us before Christmas the work was going to be done.’

  ‘Like he told us Arthur Gillis had been sacked.’ Elaine picked up an orange drink with the straw already protruding. Then she set it down again. ‘Just telling isn’t enough, Martin. Padge would have had us in there and explained what was going to happen. He’d have treated us like equals. He’d have asked us what we wanted, not told us what we were going to be given. Don’t you see that?’

  ‘Padge never had to explain anything. He never did anything.’

  ‘Well, I’m beginning to think it was better that way,’ she said.

  Elaine sucked fiercely on the straw of her orange drink until it gurgled dry.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on him,’ said Martin. ‘I’ll tell him he has to let people know what’s going on. Trouble is he’s too busy. He’s always got some meeting or other. Trying to drum up business. He talks to people all the time.’

  ‘Like Joe Crispin?’

  ‘Who’s Joe Crispin?’

  ‘He’s a little man with a face like a ferret. He came in this morning looking for Marshall.’

  ‘Oh, him. I didn’t much like him.’

  ‘Nobody does. He’s a builder. And he’s cheap and he’s crooked, and when I came out here for coffee I saw Marshall shaking hands with him as if he’d just agreed to marry his daughter. Talking of which –’ She had got no further when the door to the main office swung open and Geraldine appeared. She gave a quick professional smile, as a nurse might to a couple who must eventually be given bad news.

  ‘Martin, there’s someone to see you.’

  He made a face. ‘I’m having lunch.’

  ‘I told her that, but she insisted. She says,’ and here Geraldine mimed the flourish of a cigarette and mimicked a familiar drawl, ‘you guys know each other.’

  ‘Is she American?’ Martin asked.

  Geraldine’s eyes rose heavenwards. ‘No, she’s Spanish. What do you think?’

  Martin threw a sidelong glance at Elaine. He cleared his throat in what he hoped would sound a businesslike way.

  ‘I’ll come through,’ he said, and laid aside the remains of his cheese and ham roll. Geraldine held the door open for him. Martin went through and surveyed the customers from behind the glass. Geraldine flashed a smile at Elaine, snapped her fingers, whispered, ‘Hasta la vista,’ and followed him through. The heavy door swung shut on Elaine.

  Ruth Kohler was at the end of the counter, beside the parcel scales. She waved at Martin and called out his name. As he moved down the counter towards her he anxiously scanned the queues. No one was showing much interest apart from the new coroner’s wife. She was a woman called Bridget Moss and she’d been eager for everyone in the post office to know that. She was sharp, alert, professionally friendly and a good fifteen years younger than her husband, Eric.

  Ruth looked excited. ‘Can I come round?’ she asked.

  Martin shook his head. ‘It’s not allowed.’

  ‘Can you come out?’

  Martin looked up again. Bridget Moss threw him a bright smile. He knew that sort of smile. It was the sort of smile that said, ‘I’m watching everything.’ Ruth was beginning to laugh. ‘My God, this is like the zoo!’

  Other heads were turning now. The more she tried to suppress it the more hysterical Ruth’s laughter became. ‘And I’ve caught you at feeding time!’

  ‘I’ll come round,’ said Martin severely.

  He found the key and let himself into the public area. Ruth was recovering but was still the focal point of interest.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ She blew her nose, severely, into a crumpled tissue.

  He followed her eyes down to the waistband of his trousers. A flap of cheese had somehow lodged itself there. He brushed it swiftly away and lowered his voice. ‘How can I help you?’ he asked, trying to sound like a bank manager.

  ‘Other way round, Martin. I might be able to help you,’ said Ruth, rather more loudly than Martin might have liked. There were half a dozen people at the writing desk, filling in forms, or licking and applying postage stamps, and Ruth squeezed into a gap in the middle and beckoned Martin over. He tugged at his tie. He felt exposed out here in the public area. Like an engine-driver would sitting with the passengers. Ruth, unfazed, took out from her bag a large brown envelope from which she carefully withdrew a black and white photograph. She laid it on one of the blotters provided for customers. ‘You see that?’

  Martin peered down at it. It was a photograph taken in some sort of store-room or workshop. Various pieces of furniture stood about. ‘What am I meant to be looking at?’

  Ruth pointed to the centre of the photograph. ‘There, against the wall.’

 
; His eye was drawn to a sturdy, wooden armchair built like a garden seat. The base was slatted onto a chunky wooden frame, at each side of which were three vertical supports topped with a wide arm-rest. The chair-back was a plain, slightly-angled arrangement of two verticals and four curved cross-pieces. Leather straps and a broad footrest were attached to it. But the remarkable feature of the chair was that it had only one leg. And that was in the centre. It appeared to be of metal, the shape and thickness of a scaffolding bar, and it protruded some two feet from the base of the chair. Leaning awkwardly against the wall, it looked pathetic, a little like Tiny Tim’s crutches at the Cratchits’ Christmas party.

  Ruth indicated the photograph. ‘Interested?’

  Martin was more aware of a fast-filling post office. ‘Look, maybe I should have a look another time.’

  Ruth ignored this and reached into the envelope again, pausing as she did so, like a magician at a children’s party. ‘Here it is again.’

  This time she produced a larger picture. It was in colour, taken from a magazine, and in the foreground was the same single-legged chair. This time, however, the leg was bolted firmly on to the deck of a ship, which was listing in a high sea of towering navy blue waves and smudgy white foam. An unmistakable figure – broad-shouldered, wearing a white tennis cap, a brown cotton jacket and holding a fishing rod – was sitting in it with his back to the camera.

  ‘Hemingway,’ breathed Martin.

  Ruth nodded and smiled with a touch of pride. She held the black and white photograph alongside it, then turned it over. ‘Now you’ll understand what you’re looking at,’ she said.

  On the back of the black and white photograph was a gummed label, which bore a description in the big, bold, slightly ornate lettering of an elderly typewriter. ‘Fishing chair,’ he read, ‘as used by Ernest Hemingway, Cabo Blanco, Peru, April 1956, whilst shooting action footage for the feature film of The Old Man and the Sea.’

  Martin stared at the photographs again. He felt oddly nervous. ‘Where is this chair?’ he asked Ruth.

  ‘It’s in London.’

  Martin looked from Ruth back to the photograph. He moistened his lips.

  ‘It’s yours if you want it,’ she said.

  ‘Mine?’ he asked, huskily.

  ‘There is a catch. You’ll need seven hundred and fifty pounds.’

  Martin felt his heart thumping. He glanced quickly around. At the counter three of the four positions were open and occupied. At one, Nick Marshall was enmeshed with a frail elderly lady and a lot of stamps. At another, Geraldine was patiently explaining some knotty point about Benefits to an unhappy young man whom Martin vaguely recognised from the garage, and next to her Mary Perrick, holding a fistful of notes and frequently dabbing her finger in the wet sponge, was laboriously counting out a savings withdrawal. The fourth bore a ‘Position Closed’ sign. The queues had lengthened now and heads turned quite openly towards him. He knew from experience that no matter how friendly customers might appear none of them ever saw a ‘Position Closed’ sign as anything other than a deliberate act of defiance on the part of the workforce.

  Martin looked back again at the photograph. At Hemingway and his broad back against the chair and his huge bare foot revealed on a makeshift rest.

  ‘We’re too busy now. Can I talk to you later?’

  ‘Look,’ Ruth slipped the photographs back in the envelope and handed it to him. ‘Take it, check it out and let me know. I think it’s pretty neat, don’t you? It would certainly go with the typewriter.’

  Martin shook his head gloomily. ‘It’s not the sort of thing I can afford.’

  ‘Nor me,’ she said. ‘But true fans find a way.’

  She smiled, waved and was gone.

  As he turned to go back behind the counter Martin noticed that Elaine had taken down the ‘Closed’ sign at his position and was already serving a line of grateful customers. He checked the Newmark electric wall clock, ascertained that he still had fifteen minutes of his lunch break left, unlocked the door and went back into the staff room. He lifted the flap of the envelope, brushed the crumbs from his sandwiches off the table, laid the photographs out and for quite a while gazed from one to the other.

  Ten minutes later, Ruth reappeared in the post office, jumped the queue and pushed a note across to Elaine.

  ‘I’m sorry, would you mind giving that to Martin? I have a telephone now. Tell him Ruth said to call.’

  Sixteen

  Dearest Beth and Suzy,

  It’s the time of goodwill here, and life is hell. But I am getting used to it. England is a comfortable, dull place where the bad things aren’t as bad and the good things aren’t as good as they are at home. People are ‘awfully kind’ and very decent and I feel safe and cared for the way I would in some awfully kind and very decent private hospital.

  Christmas was sweet if a little weird. I picked out a place called the Bridge House Hotel, which is in the Cotswold Hills, west of London. Unlike any other hotel in the world the Bridge House has no reception, no check-in, no name on the door, no nothing. Not even a bell to ring, just a nice Merchant-Ivory hallway which smelt of polish and dried flowers. I guess I stood there admiring the polish for upwards of five minutes. Then someone tall and silent shows me up to a nice, chintzy little room on the second floor which is called not 4 or 12 or even Presidential Suite. It’s called ‘Filibeg’. (To save you looking it up in Funk and Wagnall’s a filibeg is another name for a kilt.) Why call a room ‘Filibeg’? The answer’s obvious if you think about it. The owner’s father’s brother lived in Aberdeen.

  Come the evening other human beings appeared in the bar, but they either knew each other or ignored each other. Four couples, one party of three with an elderly relative and two single women. The women throw me quick, shy smiles and the men quick, shy smiles followed by something more appraising.

  On Christmas Day about half of them went to church, but I explained I was of the Chosen and went instead for a long walk by the river with the lady from ‘Tam O’Shanter’ (Scottish cap with a broad, circular flat top). She was nice and polite and civilised and we discussed the metaphysical poets, but all I really wanted to do was get back to see if there had been any further developments with the couple in ‘Sporran’ (an ornamental pouch of leather and/or fur worn hanging in front of the kilt) whom I’d heard fighting like bantams in the middle of the night. At Christmas dinner there was a sort of institutional jollity – the sort of good time you have when you feel obliged to have a good time. I sat next to Miss Tam O’Shanter and it was all very proper and decent Until the next evening, the evening of what they call Boxing Day. Well, I don’t know if it’s just that they all know they’re moving on next morning, but suddenly there is electricity in the air.

  A small sharp-faced barrister offered to buy me a drink seconds before his wife arrived, then withdrew the offer. A golfer with teeth out of a fashion catalogue and a room temperature IQ who had ignored me for twenty-four hours, began emitting signals that were so embarrassingly blatant that at least two of his children turned to look at me as well. Mr Sporran was particularly attentive. He insisted I join him and his wife for dinner. I insisted on bringing Miss Tam O’Shanter and we all squeezed on to a corner table. We could have moved to a bigger one, but I soon got the idea that the squeezing was quite important to him.

  He was tall and rather elegant in a run-down sort of way and his wife was a square-faced, heavy-jawed, hey-ho sort, and despite the night-time noises had no bruises about her person that I could see.

  Anyway – plenty of thigh contact from Mr Sporran and I couldn’t move out of range without making similar thigh contact with Miss Tam O’Shanter on the other side. She became a little flushed and drank a lot of water.

  Mr Sporran had little trouble swinging our conversation round to his favourite topic. That the way you ate was the way you made love. Instant effect. Miss T. stops eating altogether. Mr and Mrs Sporran romp lustily through double portions of black forest cherry cake an
d I take chaste nibbles at my crème brûlée and try to remember not to lick my lips. After dinner Miss Tam O’Shanter bolts upstairs. Outside, taking much-needed gulps of English winter, I find the golfer, alone on a garden seat, sobbing. Impossible to avoid him, so I have to listen for nearly forty minutes to how much he hates his wife. Followed, a little brusquely, by thirty seconds of why he should have married someone like me.

  Thoroughly sobered up by now I flee back to Filibeg. There is a note under the door from Tam O’Shanter apologising for her behaviour and asking me to be sure to knock on her door before going to bed as she would like to explain everything. There was a cross after her name.

  I checked the closet for Sporrans, closed my window against golfers, locked the door and went to bed with Ernest and Pauline. He snored.

  Next morning at breakfast glaciers once more covered the face of the earth and it was impossible to make eye contact with anyone but the waitress! Then, quite by chance, the way the English do these things, the little barrister who’d made the first move of all came up to me as I was packing up the car, and said how nice it had been to meet me. His name was Roger Morton-Smith. He lived in London, was recently divorced, and was travelling with his new lady. She was in antiques, unusual things, nothing run of the mill (Kate, her name was). She was ‘used to dealing with Americans’ and they would love me to come and see them and maybe stay over in London at New Year. Then they swept off in a powder-blue Mercedes leaving me basking in a glow of vicarious affluence.

  I was a little wary of visiting, but after a week’s work in Oxford (not enough!) I took up their offer and we had lunch and I told them what I was working on and they showed me some pretty nice stuff. Clarice Cliff art deco, oak bookcases, Japanese screens. They think all Americans are oil millionaires and I fear I was quite a disappointment. However, a couple of weeks later, in the mail, come details of something ‘right up my street’. My little heart leaps only to fall in pieces to the ground when I see that what they have for me is some goddamn chair in which EH tried unsuccessfully to reduce the world’s marlin population and which they would sell me for ONLY eleven hundred dollars (though the big institutions could pay a lot more!) Well, I was about to write back and say I’ll buy it for firewood … when I remembered. My fan! Girls … he is absolutely hooked –