Hemingway's Chair

by Michael Palin

  He felt a sudden swelling of pride. ‘I broke the law last night, Papa.’ He grinned modestly. ‘I broke the law. Not an easy breaking of the law either.’ His head warmed with the tequila. ‘A fucking difficult breaking of the law. I climbed up scaffolding fifty feet high in an overcoat to break the law. I climbed up scaffolding fifty feet high in an overcoat in a force eight gale to break the law ! You may laugh, but I could have fucking killed myself!’

  Martin began to laugh uncontrollably. ‘I could have fucking killed myself, Hem.’

  Slowly he recovered. He finished the tequila and took another.

  ‘Look at us. Just look at us, Hem. Why do we do such fucking stupid things? Why do we have to go looking for trouble?’ He jabbed his hand at the photograph. ‘It’s all your fault. I didn’t go looking for it. I was happy. I had a job with prospects. I had –’ his voice tailed off, ‘all sorts of things.’

  Martin stood suddenly and awkwardly. He kicked the table leg as he moved out past it and the helmet hit the floor with a thud and rolled away. He froze. His mother woke at the slightest sound. She’d probably have been lying awake listening to the wind anyway. She always lay awake when the weather was bad. He held his breath and was relaxing it when he heard a door open and a voice sound across the landing. ‘Are you all right, Martin?’

  Martin collapsed into a chair. He tittered to himself. ‘Yes, I’m all right, Mother. I’m dressed as Ernest Hemingway, I’ve had two neat tequilas and I’ve just knocked an American army helmet off the fucking table.’

  ‘Martin? Are you sure you’re all right?’ she called again.

  This time he shouted. ‘Yes, I’m all right.’ He got up and went to the door. ‘Something rolled off the bed!’

  There was a pause, then he heard her door shut. He stood motionless for a while, arm out against the door. Then he shook his head and turned back into the room. He took another shot of tequila and swung round to the photograph. ‘Mothers!’ He looked up and shook his head. ‘You hated yours, didn’t you, Hem? You hated her because she drove your father to suicide. Isn’t that what it was all about? That bitch Grace. Mm?’ He paused. His head began to spin. He steadied himself on the mantelpiece and took a long, deep breath. ‘I’m sorry. These are very personal questions, but I … I need to know a little more about you. I feel there are things you’ve been keeping from me. Like failure. I want to know what to do about failure, Papa. Because you failed, didn’t you? In the end, you failed. You failed in style. You blew your brains out on your own front porch. Double-barrelled English shotgun pressed so hard against your face you blew away most of your head. Early morning. The time you loved. The time you wrote best. The time you wrote about so fucking beautifully.’

  Martin felt a sudden, irresistible wave of self-pity which hit him like the crash of the gale against the windows. Though there were no tears he could shed at the moment, Martin knew he had hit bottom.

  His eyes met Papa’s. ‘We’re so alike, aren’t we? So alike.’ He spread his arms out, slowly, feeling the length of the mantelpiece. Then he raised his head and stared into the unblinking, enigmatic eyes above him. ‘I used to think that you were everything I wasn’t and I was everything you weren’t. But the great thing is –’ He stopped. The room swung viciously. ‘The great thing is we are one and the same, Papa. Failures.’

  Thirty-five

  Martin bowed his head and his fingers lightly clasped each end of the mantelshelf. For a while the only sound he could hear was the wild coming and going urgency of the wind, which flapped and slapped at the windows and sang in the chimney. His eyes closed and the alcohol warmed his blood and beguiled his brain.

  He woke sharply. The sound of the wind had become violent and hostile. The feel of the smooth tiled surface of the mantelpiece was cold and heavy against his forehead but when he tried to pull away from it, he found himself unable to move.

  Then quite suddenly he felt the unmistakable pressure of a hand upon his head. It was a substantial hand. The soft part of it covered the crown of his head and the long thick fingers stretched down to the nape of his neck. The pressure was strong and steady and palpable. He felt no fear at its touch, only a sweeping, encompassing calm. The solid, unequivocal promise of protection. Then he no longer heard the wind hooting and whooping and howling beyond the house. He heard only a slow, steady voice, pitched neither high nor low, and the voice was real, as real as the mantelpiece he clung to and it spoke slowly and clearly and firmly to him. It was telling him that there was much to do and a long way to go and that Martin was needed to complete what he himself had never been able to do.

  Martin desperately wanted to be able to reach up, to grasp the hand and hold it tight, but when he did so it was gone, the voice was gone and the sound of the wind returned.

  Very slowly he raised his head from the fireplace. His eyes travelled cautiously upwards. Up, past the cluster of Hemingway postcards that leaned against the wall at the back of the mantelpiece, up across the art deco face of a clock that once stood in the foyer of the Palace Hotel, Madrid, and up, finally, to Hemingway’s photograph on the wall. He shut his eyes. Then, he opened one eye, very slowly, and checked the right hand. It was where it had always been, held low by his side, the pencil still projecting loosely from it. He opened his other eye and let it run, ever so carefully, up the scroll-handled chest of drawers until it came to rest on the left hand. It, too, was motionless, lightly clenched on the curling sheaf of handwritten pages that lay on the writing board.

  ‘It wasn’t your hand, was it, Papa?’ Martin whispered, and Papa smiled and shook his head and, as he did so a quite extraordinary thing began to happen. The whiskery white beard began to disappear from Papa’s jaw. The upper lip sprouted a ginger moustache and the broad high cheek bones rounded out. The strong, straight nose grew a bump or two, the eyes became smaller, lighter and merrier. Finally the hair turned into an unruly shock of red. Pillar-box red, as they used to say in Theston. And the smile grew wider and the eyes gazed down on him full of laughter and anticipation as Martin remembered they did on Christmas mornings when he sat in bed surrounded by the contents of his stocking, and he knew there would be no front door slamming shut before dawn, no empty mailbag flung angrily down on the table in the early darkness of winter afternoons. And the smile grew into a laugh, a long, full, uncomplicated laugh. The laugh that he had almost forgotten.

  He so much wanted the laughter to continue, he so much wanted it to go on and on and never stop, but as he watched he could see that familiar desperation creep back into the eyes and he knew so well what would follow.

  And the laughter died and the smile set and the hair turned white and thin again and the ginger moustache became a beard again, and that was also white. And the nose widened and straightened and strengthened. The cheek bones once more stood out broad and high. And the eyes grew darker and wider and all that was left in them was the fear and the entreating.

  Thirty-six

  Following her night with Martin, and because she had heard nothing from him, Ruth had taken to walking, on the lengthening evenings, often many miles from Everend Farm Cottage. She had never been much of an outdoor girl – she’d always been the studious, bookish, library-ish type, but she had begun to feel claustrophobic in the cottage. She would pick her way down the muddy farm track, cross over the lane at the bottom and follow the direction of a signposted bridle-path. The farmer whose land it used to be had sold out to a management company and they had grubbed up the hedges and ploughed over the footpaths. But Ruth had bought herself a pair of green wellington boots and, delighted with their invincibility, tramped over the warm, flinty furrows and through stretches of shallow standing water until she reached a stream. She followed this for a mile or two until it flowed into a wide estuary. Grey herons rose lazily from the reeds and at a certain time each evening a flock of brent-geese flew in, low and in perfect formation, to land with growling cries and skidding splashes on a nearby inlet.

  The more Ruth walked and tho
ught, and the longer Martin’s silence went on, the more convinced she became that the old pattern was re-establishing itself. Her voracity, his retreat – something spoiled once again.

  She ran and reran the events of that evening in her mind, trying to answer the question of what had taken place. Who exactly were the two people involved? Had she been with shy Martin or the gruffly confident stranger whom Martin could become? Had he been making love to the fastidious intellectual Ruth Kohler or the unapologetic adulterer Jane Mason? Had his lover been Ruth Kohler for whom sex was so complicated, or Jane Mason, to whom it came so easily?

  The inescapable fact remained that on that night she had deliberately ceased to play the role of the Pauline Pfeiffer she so admired and had chosen to be the woman who had helped destroy Pauline’s marriage. Was all this not just confirmation of her own inability to enjoy a physical relationship unless some risk of danger and destruction was involved? The more she thought about it the more something quite fundamental troubled her.

  She had hitherto always gone along with the prevalent feminist view that men were by and large the more destructive agents in this world – the warriors, the fighters, the rioters, the gangsters, the strippers of rain forest and the droppers of bombs, and that women, more concerned to protect and preserve what they had brought into the world, were by and large the more constructive.

  Did not the fact that she had slipped so easily into the role of a woman she knew to be destructive, simply mean that she, Ruth, could be equally destructive, and that the capacity to be destructive was in essence no weaker in women than men?

  One evening, a week after she had last seen Martin slipping out of her door, long-legged, blue-anoraked, red-bobbled into the pre-dawn silence, something crystallised in her mind and she hurried back through the fields. By the time she reached the cottage, the sun had gone and the familiar rolling grey clouds were approaching from the west. She tugged her boots off impatiently and, not waiting to pull off her coat, reached for the light switch and sat down at her writing table. She pulled the neat pile of manuscript pages towards her and started leafing through them.

  What she had feared was true. The more she read of her chapters on Pauline, the less they made sense. The more she looked at the period of their marriage the more she could see that her assumption of Pauline’s productive, wholesome and wholly beneficial artistic influence on her husband could not be borne out by the facts.

  In the years between A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls, all of them spent married to Pauline, Hemingway had written a succession of books and stories many of which were regarded as inferior stuff. The much-praised A Farewell to Arms was written, it was true, as they basked in the heat of first love, but the book itself was an evocation of an earlier love affair, with another woman in another place. For Whom the Bell Tolls, the next great novel he wrote eleven years later, was dedicated to Martha Gellhorn, the woman for whom he finally left Pauline.

  Darkness fell and her eyes grew tired as she flicked through the sheets – some two hundred or so – which covered this period. The conclusion was inescapable.

  Ruth had assembled a case that was skewed, inadequate, simplistic. She must take the evidence and rearrange it. It was a formidable task and time was running out. It was now nearly April and her book was supposed to be completed by the beginning of July. New research would have to be done, perhaps a third of the text rewritten.

  She sat back and lit a cigarette. She stared out of the window into a dark black night and her gaunt reflection in the glass. She rubbed her eyes, reached for the first Scotch of the day and made a decision that seemed to solve many problems.

  * * *

  The next day, Ruth’s canary yellow Datsun could be seen negotiating the rutted surface of Marsh Lane on its way to Martin’s house. Inside, Ruth took one hand from the steering wheel to steady the bouncing, lurching fishing chair that was her excuse for breaking the silence. It was a warm, still Sunday afternoon. Kathleen Sproale was in the garden and watched her draw up. She told Ruth that Martin was out on his bicycle somewhere and wouldn’t be back for some time. Then she straightened up and tapped her trowel on a stone to free the earth from it.

  ‘I’ve just about done now,’ she said, with a quick smile. ‘I’ve no more energy.’

  Her smile was a little brave, it seemed to Ruth.

  ‘You prefer coffee, don’t you,’ said Kathleen, pulling off her gardening gloves and moving towards the house.

  They sat in the kitchen and looked out across the marsh grass and the sedge and the trailing willow trees that swung mournfully in the soft balmy breeze.

  ‘It’s the best time of year, I always think,’ said Mrs Sproale. ‘Spring.’

  ‘I don’t know how you live here in the winter,’ said Ruth. ‘It’s bad enough at Everend Farm, but at least there’s some shelter.’

  ‘I sometimes wonder myself,’ said Kathleen. ‘But Martin’s father always liked it. Didn’t like the town. Said he saw enough of it on his rounds.’

  ‘What did he do? Your husband.’

  ‘He delivered letters. Postman.’

  ‘Martin never talks about him.’

  ‘No. Well, he died when Martin was seventeen.’

  ‘Was he ill?’

  Kathleen nodded. ‘He’d been ill a while.’

  Outside the window a swarm of black and yellow siskins had discovered the bacon rind on the bird table and were mounting a series of darting attacks.

  ‘That must have been a real shock for Martin.’

  Kathleen’s soft watery eyes turned sharply on Ruth, then quickly away. ‘Well, I should think that’s why he doesn’t talk about it.’

  ‘Maybe he should go and see somebody. Get some advice.’

  Once again Kathleen’s eyes met hers. She spoke scornfully. ‘A psychiatrist?’

  ‘Well, some kind of therapy. Why not? I was in analysis for a while. It helped.’

  Kathleen’s gaze turned to the bleak flatness outside. She spoke softly, but almost to herself. ‘Didn’t help his father. He was sent from one psychiatrist to another like one of his own parcels.’ She stared hard out of the window. ‘Didn’t hear a bloody word from any of them after he’d gone. Excuse my language, Ruth. None of them had a word to say for themselves.’

  All at once Ruth felt cold. ‘How did he die, Mrs Sproale?’

  Kathleen stayed staring out of the window. She was breathing hard and her mouth was working as if trying to form some difficult word. ‘I don’t tell people that,’ she said eventually.

  ‘It might help if you did.’

  The kitchen clock struck the half-hour. Mrs Sproale turned to Ruth briskly, almost pugnaciously. She brushed the flat of her hand across the table top as if to remove imaginary crumbs. ‘That was seventeen years ago. I’m more worried about his son now.’

  She stood up abruptly, speaking rapidly as she deposited the imaginary crumbs at the sink.

  ‘All that Hemingway nonsense. I used to think it was just harmless but now I think it’s poisoning him. I sometimes want to burn that room of his. All those bits and pieces of someone else’s life. I hear him up there every night now, talking and shouting. I’ve heard him swearing sometimes, and there’s no one else there. Just him.’

  ‘He’s been through a hard year.’

  ‘But whose fault is that?’ To divert her anger Kathleen seized a bundle of cutlery that was draining on the rack. ‘He could have been engaged to Elaine Rudge, he threw that away.’ She began to sort the cutlery vigorously. ‘He could have been Manager of that post office one day, he threw that away. He was everybody’s friend, everyone in Theston knew him. Now he either stays upstairs or he’s out for hours on his bicycle and never tells me where.’

  She heaved a sigh and stood for a moment, leaning her arms on the draining board.

  Ruth turned and looked out over the reclaimed marshland that ran flat to the sand dunes and the sea. A poet could probably deal with that, she thought, but as an academic she found i
t an untidy and arbitrary landscape. Aloof and unfriendly. It reminded her, ominously, of the symbolism in A Farewell to Arms. How Hemingway contrived the book so that all the scenes of death and disaster had happened on the low, flat, land, and all the scenes of love, life and hope were set in the clear air of the mountains. There were no mountains round here.

  There was a noise at the side of the house and Martin appeared at the door. Ruth was shaken by the sight of him. He wore the white tennis hat she recognised. Beneath it protruded a thatch of fine sandy hair. His eyes were red-rimmed and bloodshot and a line of thin stubble ran along his jaw. He wore a shapeless sports shirt and long, baggy check shorts fastened with a length of rope. He seemed bigger than she remembered and shabbier too. Though his slow, deliberate movements betrayed little, the colour that rose quickly to his face indicated his surprise at seeing Ruth. “Lo,’ he nodded, shortly, leaning against the doorway.

  Ruth was uncomfortable, and Kathleen, sensing this, began to busy herself, gathering up the cups from the table.

  ‘I brought the chair,’ said Ruth.

  Martin didn’t seem to take this in. ‘The chair?’ he said, thickly.

  ‘Your chair. It’s in the car,’ Ruth pointed. ‘Only just. Had to take a seat out. Mr Wellbeing helped.’

  Suddenly Martin began to respond. He pushed himself away from the door and looked towards Ruth with a look of disbelief. ‘My chair.’

  Ruth nodded.

  * * *

  Together they eased it from the back of her Datsun and with some difficulty carried it upstairs. His room was strewn untidily with books, papers and bottles. The bed was unmade. Once they had put the chair down, Martin quickly pulled the sheets and blankets up and over the bed and thrust a couple of bottles back into the cabinet. Then he straightened a little awkwardly. As he stood and watched her, it seemed to her that the expression in his eyes was almost the same as the expression in the eyes on the photograph on the wall behind him. Wary, once wise, now a little afraid.