In a separate enclosure the members of the Town Council, with the notable exception of Frank Rudge, jostled with the likes of Alan Randall and Norman Brownjohn for a view of the proceedings. Ernie Padgett sat hunched forward on a chair at the front with his big, massively coiffured wife Brenda standing beside him, her hand lightly resting on his shoulder. Frank Rudge claimed to have been suffering from chest pain and had stayed at home, as had Kathleen Sproale, who hated any sort of occasion. Harold Meredith and Quentin Rawlings had been denied official invitations, and they stood, grim-faced, up on the hill with the public.
It was to that hill that Marshall now looked, having consulted his watch, for first signs of the arrival of the Ministerial party. A sizeable crowd lined the route. Foremost amongst them was Elaine, standing with her mother and Mary Perrick and Shirley Barker from the post office. Seeing them provoked in him a sharp and profound sense of irritation at the whole charade of the last year. If only the Government had had the courage of its convictions the Privatisation Bill would have been in place a year ago and he would not have had to waste nine months of his life pretending to work in a post office. The calibre of those he had been dealing with had not given him great hope for the future. The Elaine Rudges and the Shirley Barkers. Either they wanted to be screwed or they wanted help with the crossword. They were completely uninterested in the wider issues. Ask them how you might change their lives for the better and they would suggest getting engaged or buying a new lawnmower. Small town Britain had been a great disappointment to Nick Marshall. Still, soon he would be out of here, rightly acknowledged as a man of universal vision. Christ had spent time in the wilderness. He had spent time in Theston.
He looked out to sea. The mist had cleared, and the sun was now taking on the higher cloud. The company yacht rode splendidly out in the deeper water alongside the pier. It was a fine ship, a symbol of what could be achieved by those blessed with vision and foresight and daring. Glenson was right. The businessmen it had brought over were far more important to the future of telecommunications than the Minister of Technology or the Mayor of Theston. He smiled quietly to himself. He’d already held informal talks, as they say, with the Dutch boys. They liked him. Liked his style. Liked the fact that he’d bothered to learn the language. Once this link was up and running Devereux and Vickers wouldn’t see him for dust.
There was a stirring in the crowd now and he looked back towards the hill. A police car came into view and at a discreet distance behind it a black Ford Granada. TV crews shouldered their equipment in readiness.
Dennis Donnelly, the Minister, was the new name on the political scene. The coming man. He had only recently been plucked from the bowels of the Heritage Department and some said his promotion to Technology was only the first step in a rapid upward progress through the ranks of government. Donnelly was a man of principle. His principle was to support the Prime Minister in whatever he did and whoever he was, until such time as he himself had acquired enough power to withdraw that support and become Prime Minister himself. Donnelly had many advantages. He was still young, only thirty-eight, he was not particularly intelligent and he had never once slept with anyone but his wife. The only cloud on the horizon was that she had slept with lots of people and, despite his stern words, had shown no sign of desisting. She was probably at it now. Whilst he was in Suffolk heralding the dawn of a telecommunications revolution, she was probably being pinioned to the floor by some huge black telephone engineer. Dennis Donnelly put these unsavoury thoughts from his mind as he stepped out of his limousine and started to smile. He was greeted by Ken Stopping in one of his last mayoral duties, and taken down the line to shake hands. They all liked the Minister. He seemed a straight-talking type, greeting everyone like a long-lost friend.
Stopping’s speech of welcome was short and unmemorable, severely hampered by his inability to say the word ‘telecommunications’.
Then Maurice Vickers stepped forward. His lazy eye gleamed somewhere off to the left as he spoke of opportunities grasped and horizons widened and new dawns risen for a Post Office soon to be free of commercial restraints.
He skilfully avoided any controversial issues such as the total destruction of the traditional post office, and Nick, whose legs were aching now with the waiting, was greatly relieved when Vickers climaxed in suitably apocalyptic style and the great moment came for the eager Minister to be placed in front of a video camera and his likeness transmitted by telephone line to a voice-activated computer in Zandvoort. This would, all being well, send live pictures simultaneously to a dozen major financial centres on the continent of Europe and beyond.
Nick felt a curious and unexpected frisson of pride as the Minister stepped forward. He heard the applause of the crowd roll round the harbour and he knew that most of it was for him. They didn’t know it yet, but soon they would. Soon the name of Nick Marshall would be as well known as Marconi or Alexander Graham Bell, or even Bill Gates. Certainly it would be far, far better known than that of Dennis Donnelly.
The Minister settled himself at the microphone with shameless ease. He spoke with plausible spontaneity, glancing skilfully but carefully at the text his civil servants had prepared for him.
‘I am delighted and proud to be here in Theston today to inaugurate an installation which will open up a new era in telecommunications. This will be the model for hundreds of similar installations up and down our beautiful coastline.’ He made a quick mental note to sack whoever it was in the department who had inserted the word ‘beautiful’. ‘I am assured that when this operation is complete there will be a link with Europe, both by cable and satellite, which will be capable of handling two hundred megabits of information per minute.’
This impressively meaningless statistic echoed metallically around the harbour and was greeted with polite, if self-conscious applause.
Ruth heard the applause on her car radio as she pulled off the A45 beyond Ipswich and began to negotiate the series of roundabouts that led to the Theston road.
Elaine heard the applause on the hill but did not join in. She wondered if she had been the only one to notice the activity on the gleaming white yacht that rode out beyond the harbour in the first rays of the midday sun. It appeared that there was a figure on board, moving some heavy object towards the stern. Something about the way the figure moved troubled her.
Elaine was not the only one watching what was happening on the Nordkom IV. As the applause died, Geraldine Cotton, forced to stand in a tight charcoal-grey two-piece suit amongst the ranks of minor local celebrities, knew that in a very few moments Martin would have lifted the cover on the teak-strip deck and revealed the brass-topped shaft into which deep-sea fishing seats were secured.
Most other spectators were watching the Minister and marvelling at his youth and relative beauty.
‘The construction of this centre is a tribute to all those involved,’ Donnelly went on. ‘The Post Office engineers, the technical team, the construction workers, the vision of the Mayor and council of the borough of Theston and of course our friends across the water.’ He paused, expecting applause, but none came. He would get them on the next paragraph, marked, in the margin, ‘Direct appeal to the public’. He took his voice up an octave and tried hard to make his eyes water, as he had seen Meryl Streep do so often and so well. ‘Let us not forget that today, as the eyes of the world are upon us, we are here to celebrate a British achievement. A triumph of British ingenuity and British foresight. This truly is our chance to show that Britain can lead the world into the new era of international communications. With pleasure and pride I declare Theston International Telecommunications Transmission Centre open.’
Then a lot of different things happened. The Minister pulled a blue cord which drew a curtain back from a plaque bearing his name and the intertwined logos of Nordkom BV and Post Office Counter Services Ltd. The television crews swung round to focus on the new mast, Theston School Band struck up ‘Rule Britannia’, and out to sea a bright orange maroon soare
d into the air above Nordkom IV. As heads craned skywards, there came the throaty roar of powerful engines starting and, before anyone knew what was happening, the pristine seventy-five-foot vessel swung in a tight half-circle and headed out to sea. There rose from its stern the silvery line of a cable. Then another similar line sliced up beside it through the light swell. Together they rose above the surface of the water as the engines throttled forward to the shrieking pitch of a power boat. The cables tightened, the engines roared and, almost in slow motion, the communications mast rocked, leaned and with a sickening crack ripped away from the pier, toppled into the sea and disappeared beneath the grey-green waves.
The cables strained, snapped and twisted viciously across the water. The yacht sprang forward, shot through the waves and out to sea. A moment later, on satellite video links in major financial markets on the continent of Europe and beyond, the flashing white hull of Nordkom IV could be seen to make contact with the solid clinker-built fishing boat Lady Mary, and rear up and out of the water, high and spinning like a child’s top before it landed and exploded in a bright yellow star burst.
By the time the Air–Sea Rescue helicopter flew over the area two lifeboats were already on the scene. Wreckage of the Nordkom IV was scattered over a wide area. The fisherman from the Lady Mary, by the name of Derek Adland, had been found, still alive, in the water. When he was brought ashore he could remember little. He repeated, over and over again, that the boat had come straight towards him, that it had made no attempt to take avoiding action. He could only conclude that whoever was at the wheel was out to kill him.
The coastguard said nothing at the time. He knew Martin Sproale and he knew Kathleen, and he knew that there had been no one at the wheel when the boats collided. The steering was locked on, the wheel was lashed tight to the floor with a powerful leather strap, found, on closer inspection, to be a German army belt of the type issued to the 1st SS Panzer Corps, circa 1944.
* * *
A few weeks later Ruth was sitting at her laptop at Everend Farm Cottage. It was hot for early September and she had opened all the windows. The smell of late summer drifted in. A wheaty, dusty, pungent smell. She had typed a last chapter-heading two coffees ago. She hated conclusions. They sat there like sirens, luring the scholar onto the rocks of pomposity and complacency. Now let’s have the solution, they seemed to say. Now tell us what it’s all about. The letters chattered up. Silver on blue:
The final event of Hemingway’s life is the one many now consider the most predictable. Such a glib judgement should never diminish the scholar’s duty to examine, from every perspective, the circumstances which led a man, still widely popular, still respected by many close friends, still loved by the woman who had seen him through so much, to take his own life on that brilliant summer’s morning in—
Her concentration was broken by a knock on the door. She turned. This was the time Mrs. Wellbeing usually called, interrupting her with some offering or other—ducks’ eggs perhaps, which Ruth didn’t like, or strawberries, which she did. She rested her cigarette on the side of her new ashtray and went to the door. It wasn’t Mrs. Wellbeing. It was the postman, and he had a letter for her. It had an American stamp on it. She thanked him, exchanged a word or two about the weather—people were talking of another drought—and pushed the door to.
Inside the envelope was a folded page of notepaper. As she opened it a tighter, less scrupulously folded enclosure slipped out. She bent to the floor, retrieved it and began to smooth it out on the table. It was torn from a newspaper. A story spread over the whole page, beneath the headline ‘Key West Celebration Ends On High Note.’ ‘As the Hemingway Days Festival drew to a close after a riotuous week, it was generally agreed that this year’s winner of the Papa Look-Alike competition was the best ever. English newcomer Martin Sproale could have fooled the family.’
To prove it there was a photograph alongside. It was uncanny. The beard, the build, the tight white T-shirt and the creased khaki shorts, the stance, the set of the eye and the jut of the jaw. She knew it so well.
Ruth did not need to read the letter. She laid it on the table and stared out the window of her cottage to the airless, browning fields beyond.
There wasn’t much in it anyway.
‘Ruthie,’ it read simply, ‘Legends never die!’
Also by Michael Palin
Nonfiction
Around the World in Eighty Days
Pole to Pole
Fiction (with Terry Jones)
Ripping Yarns
More Ripping Yarns
Dr. Fegg’s Encyclopeadia of All World Knowledge
Screenplays
The Missionary
Plays
The Weekend
Children’s Books
Small Harry and the Toothache Pills
Limericks
The Mirrorstone
Cyril and the Dinner Party
Cyril and the House of Commons
The goings-on in this story are entirely fictional, and none of the characters, outside of Hemingway’s world, ever existed. The names of the companies mentioned, both solvent and insolvent, are also fictional.
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
HEMINGWAY’S CHAIR. Copyright © 1995 by Michael Palin. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Extracts from Hemingway’s published works, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) © 1940 by Ernest Hemingway, renewed 1968 by Mary Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (1952) © 1952 by Ernest Hemingway, renewed 1980 by Mary Hemingway, and A Moveable Feast (1964) © 1964 by Ernest Hemingway, renewed 1992 by John H. Hemingway, Patrick Hemingway, and Gregory Hemingway, are reproduced by kind permission of Scribner, a division of Simon & Schuster. Extract from Hemingway’s letter to John Dos Passos dated February 13, 1936, on page 27, held at the Alderman Library, University of Virginia, is reproduced by kind permission of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation.
ISBN 0-312-20550-3
First published in Great Britain by Methuen London, an imprint of Reed Consumer Books Ltd.
eISBN 9781466836082
First eBook edition: December 2012
Hemingway's Chair Page 26
