“Your opinion is the one I’m after.” Then he began to flatter me. I was the only one who could relieve him of his uncertainty as to how good it was. My nose for literary quality was better than anyone else’s, whether the work was written in English or in French.
“You have all the right instincts,” he concluded. “This is very different from my other work, Edward. The manuscript could mean a new beginning for me. How long will it take you to read it?”
“I don’t know. A few hours, I suppose.”
“Fine. I’ll come by to get you this evening for a drink. In the meantime I’ll go out for a walk.”
It began creeping over me on page three—the slow-dawning feeling of horror. By the end of the first chapter I was fully enmeshed in a nightmare. The novel had a tragic heroine, a young Arab girl. Her name was Farida, but I knew instantly who she really was. My Yasmina. Her eyes, her body, her tattoos, her laugh, the rags always slipping off her shoulder. Jealousy and rage attended every page, and the further I delved into the story, of Farida’s seduction by a European, the more a black pain surged up from the very depths of my being. The creature within me was howling in agony.
It was too much to bear! With lovingly explicit descriptions of passion, Nicolas spread before the reader the intimate rites of initiation into a physical love so powerful and so cruel it bordered on the sordid, but somehow without losing a redeeming poignancy.
Farida’s—Yasmina’s—seducer, I knew, was Nicolas. It had to be. No one else could have invented this story. The evidence was overwhelming. Yasmina had been working as a maid in his house. He had gotten her pregnant. He was responsible for her death. Nicolas. No one else. Not me.
I raised my eyes from the manuscript and stared into a darkening corner of my office. For thirty years I had been consumed by guilt—a guilt that had sapped my will, my virility, my love of life itself. And for no reason. I understood the blind rage of Esau, deprived by deceit of the “birthright that had been his. All Esau was left with was impotent rage at what the handsome and clever Jacob had taken from him.
The countless affronts accumulated over all those years had led to this greatest of all defilements: Nicolas had pillaged the dearest memory of my youth, Yasmina, and his manuscript, though stunningly beautiful, desecrated all that I had held most precious.
I had to read to the end. Wretchedly, I gripped each page with white knuckles while it seared itself onto my mortal soul. Had Nicolas been standing before me I know I would have killed him on the spot, ripped out his vital organs with my own hands.
Then at last I finished. The blind rage subsided. From the same deep well of my suffering came the conviction that I must restrain myself from physical violence, forced though I had been to watch while my youthful illusions were dashed unmercifully. The throb of hate and the ache for vengeance gained in depth and focus what they lost in virulence.
The tenor of my thoughts turned Machiavellian, subtlety distilled, calm.
The revelation that Nicolas was responsible for Yasmina’s death exposed the true nature of all that resentment I had felt for him, all those years. Thirty years. By locating the source I also found the strength to channel it. As I look back now I see how necessary this act of discipline was. Do we not all inhabit a world of murders uncommitted, assassinations thwarted only by threat of justice? Were it otherwise, stories of spouses shooting each other would be routine, tales of butlers slitting the throats of their employers not even merit mention in a newspaper.
Physical violence was not possible. I was no longer a young man, and thank God for that. The callow young imbecile who had buried his passions in Egyptian catacombs had become a mature man of the world—blasé, experienced, and dangerous. A man capable of avenging himself without having to justify his reasons. I resolved to deal ruthlessly and in proportion with the wrongs I had suffered. How exactly, I had as yet absolutely no idea. I did know that I needed to strike Nicolas at his most vulnerable spot: the very manuscript I was reading.
The swirl of my emotions had not blinded me to the fact that it was indeed Nicolas’s chef d’oeuvre, and that very likely it would give him what he craved: a new life. It would establish the name Nicolas Fabry among the first ranks of world-class writers. The subject was moving, new, the style more controlled and forceful than in his earlier works. Somehow Nicolas had succeeded in soaring above his past and given life, true and sincere life, to the wonderstruck adolescent he had always pretended not to be. He had flung off the mask of indifference and revealed himself in all his glory.
From that moment on, I was hypnotized by one goal: to use his novel as the means of my revenge.
In the months that followed, I inhabited a somnambulistic state, immersed in a private world. How fortunate it was that I had ingrained habits; they permitted one part of me to lead an apparently normal life, while its double, imprisoned for so long, was plotting its escape.
The second Doris left the office, I sprinted over to the photocopier and, unobserved, made a copy of the manuscript. The act calmed me, gave me the feeling I had begun to do something, so that by the time Nicolas came to fetch me I was my usual phlegmatic self. I saw with what anxiety he looked at me, and I immediately reassured him.
“It is a tour de force,” I said simply.
His expression of doubt and worry was transformed into one of elation. He spirited me off to the Savoy for dinner and, I must admit, treated me royally the entire evening. Later that night he caught a flight back to Paris, clutching his precious manuscript under his arm.
Chapter 8
That very night I began translating Il faut aimer into English. I knew exactly how I was going to go about it. My plan was to be as faithful as possible to the original, and to leave the setting and plot virtually untouched. I would, however, push the date of the action back twenty years, a process that meant culling any language that sounded, in English at any rate, too contemporary. I retained the names of the principal characters and of course didn’t in the slightest tinker with their psychology or manner of expression. The only real liberty I took was, here and there, to work in some of the vocabulary and cadences of a writer by the name of C. Irving Brown—for reasons I shall explain. These additions were small, but very telling.
For two weeks, toiling feverishly through the night, I slowly brought Nicolas’s ravishing love story to the English language, feeling that as I did so I was doing much more than merely translating; I was stealing Nicolas’s phrases one by one, extracting them with indescribable pleasure. Though I slept barely an hour or two at most, I felt no fatigue. I was driven by the idea that I must pay Nicolas back in kind for what he had stolen from me and reclaim the spirit of which he had dispossessed me all these years. Acts of revenge are never tiring.
In retrospect, it seems incredible to me that these preliminaries were undertaken with such calm and so automatically, because before reading the manuscript I had not consciously formulated any concrete plan of action. But when the thought had become conscious, I realized that I had already gathered most of the ingredients I would need.
The first, I had found years earlier. When I bought Turner Press I had directed that all unused and unusable stock be stored in a warehouse, and among that stock were several reams of virgin paper. Archibald’s inventory report indicated they were being kept “for old time’s sake,” and when I looked closely at them I could see why—the paper was of a quality that hadn’t been used in trade presses for years. There wasn’t much of it. I recalled Archibald’s having told me that there wasn’t enough for even a small print run.
Why I decided to keep the paper rather than simply burning it for taking up valuable space, I do not know. Perhaps out of some vague, superstitious loyalty.
I found the second ingredient in an old building into which I had moved the business after Archibald’s death. In the basement I discovered a dusty old trunk, and inside the trunk a collection of binding materials: marbled paper for endpapers, blank stock for use as flyleaves, blue bind
ing canvas, cotton, and linen thread for sewing the signatures. More remnants of days past. Again, I kept them.
The third ingredient came a bit later.
Everyone has his hobbies, and for some many years mine has been collecting old literary reviews, particularly those that featured prewar writers. One day, while scanning a magazine called the Sorcerer’s Review, I found a very impressive short story entitled “Whilst Albion Slept,” written in the late 1930s by a C. Irving Brown. The name meant nothing to me. No one I asked seemed to have ever heard of him. Intrigued, I began to investigate this nearly anonymous writer, even though I knew nothing about him—whether he was from London or Liverpool, whether he’d been to college or not, whether he’d written other books. Absolutely nothing. All I had to go on was that one short piece. My intuition told me it showed signs of a significant talent. At the beginning of my hunt I was fairly confident that I should be able to locate him or other examples of his work without difficulty.
I was mistaken. No C. Irving Brown was listed in the catalog of the British Library, and his name appeared on no list of authors and no other prewar literary review. As for the Sorcerer’s Review, it had disappeared altogether.
I was about to give up when an elderly book collector I happened to chat with gave me the address of a writer’s association that, he believed, still had the archives of the review in question. I went over immediately, asked to see these archives, and there—mirabile dictu—found the only extant proof of C. Irving Brown’s existence. In a musty old folder, hidden among a number of business documents, was a calling card on which was printed
C. IRVING BROWN
133 Dickens Road
IPSWICH
I felt the joy a detective feels when finally he cracks a case. The game was afoot! I jumped in my car and sped over to Ipswich. Disappointment awaited. The name “Brown” appeared on none of the dozens of decrepit mailboxes located in the entryway of a singularly charmless apartment building.
My investigation came to a close at Ipswich City Hall, where I had gone to make a last-ditch inquiry with the registrar of births and deaths. What little he had been able to tell me seemed definitive enough.
“Chatterton Irving Brown, born February 23rd, 1917, died on June 1st, 1940, at Dunkirk. He was unmarried and childless.”
“What about his parents?”
“Both deceased.”
Such a shame, I thought. For all his promise, C. Irving Brown would not be immortalized by the Turner Press. Anyway, soon I began to forget all about him. It was shortly after reading Nicolas’s manuscript that his name resurfaced.
The manner in which these disparate elements might work together occurred to me with the full force of an epiphany while driving home after my dinner at the Savoy with Nicolas. Lo, an answer had appeared unto me, and it was a demonically clever one. I would summon the spirit of the dead C. Irving Brown to exorcize from my soul forever the specter of Nicolas Fabry.
The minute I got home I began to construct, step by jubilant step, my plan.
I had a usable author. What I needed now was a publisher. In the days that followed I traipsed all over London learning what I could about publishing houses destroyed during the Blitz. I was after a small one, modest but literary, which had not published anything after its fiery demise. Naturally, I employed the greatest discretion. The very last thing I wanted to do was attract attention, even Doris’s. I acted entirely on my own and delegated nothing.
Haunting the pubs along Fleet Street, I sought out the older veterans of English publishing, buying whiskeys to loosen their tongues but being careful not to arouse their suspicions. They were only too delighted to be given the chance to ramble on and on about the good old days, particularly to someone who hadn’t known them and couldn’t contradict their versions.
Eventually I succeeded in compiling a list of all the publishers that had disappeared between 1940 and 1945, noting the kinds of books they did. Then I went through all the secondhand bookstores in London, checking and cross-checking their collections. It was tedious and exacting work.
By the end of three weeks’ hard labor I had settled on a publishing house. Founded in 1937, Marble Arch Press had published only a few titles, and the print runs were very small, consisting mostly of works by promising young writers destined never to make a career of their writing. Bombing during the Blitz had decimated its offices, along with all the files and accounts, and it never recovered. Its sole owner and publisher, Philip Ramsay, had been killed late in the war during the Allies’ Sicilian campaign.
All this suited my needs perfectly, but it was the manner in which Marble Arch had published books that guided my choice. The paper, casing material, and flyleaves were identical to the ones I already had in my possession.
Marble Arch Press had a very modest operating budget, and to save money Ramsay had used the services of several different printers, never establishing long-term relations with any one in particular. It was necessary to dig up a few books the press had published for examination, so I called on specialty bookshops around London, concentrating my efforts in Bloomsbury. In less than a fortnight I had uncovered three works. It was child’s play to take them apart and analyze their assemblage.
Now began the real work. The summer internship I had spent working at a printer’s shop twenty years ago on the advice of Archibald Turner proved enormously useful, for it had familiarized me with typesetting and printing. Even after all those years I had not forgotten about the monotypes that set up individual characters, or the linotypes that compose entire lines. Back then, though I couldn’t pretend to compete with those professionals capable of typesetting 10,000 characters an hour, I had acquitted myself well.
The various printers used by Marble Arch Press worked with linotypes. This meant I needed to get my hands on some old equipment. After several weeks’ search, I came across a small advertisement for a press in a professional review. The heirs of a recently deceased printer from Chester by the name of Peter Thy-man were selling off exactly what I was looking for. Thyman’s business had ended in bankruptcy, and the heirs had been forced to assume his debt. For a very modest sum they let me cart off a small press that did quarto printing and a linotype machine manufactured by Harris Intertype. They also threw in a complete set of classical Didot fonts, traditionally used in books published in England before 1939. I paid for everything in cash.
This gave me everything I needed to print my forgery. I transported my spoils to the garage of my summer house in Dorchester, there to do the deed.
I prepared for every contingency, devoted to each and every detail such punctilious attention as to border on manic obsessiveness. My perfectionism energized me, filled me with such malicious joy that I greeted every day with eager anticipation.
After some trial and error I managed to break down the composition of the natural glues prewar binders had used, then manufactured several flasks of the stuff. I also reconstituted ink from linseed oil, whose odor I remembered the instant I smelled it. Soon my garage was filled with everything required to print a dozen copies of a novel, roughly three hundred printed pages in length, bearing the name, colophon, and distinctive markings of Marble Arch Press.
I had allotted myself six months to get everything ready. Given how clean Nicolas’s original manuscript was, I knew that Editions Millagard would probably bring the book out on a rushed schedule to qualify it for the next Goncourt Prize. I had to be ready. Timing was critical. Normally, since I had a multibook contract with Millagard, I was permitted to begin translation work on Nicolas’s novels so that they might appear nearly simultaneously in English and in French, but this time Nicolas had insisted I wait until after the book’s official French publication date. I didn’t protest, since it gave me that much more time.
Employing the same perfectionist logic, I learned to compose several pages of linotype, line by line, until I found the leading to match the original. By now I was familiar with everything about Marble Arch Press books—house
style, composition regularities, layout, location of ornaments, even their pagination.
So involved did I become with Philip Ramsay’s old press that I almost completely ignored the Turner Press, and was forced to delegate most of the day-to-day operations to others. I still went to the office, of course, so as not to cause alarm, but my concentration was less than optimal. I knew this would be so. I also knew that as soon as my project was complete I would return to the Turner Press with redoubled enthusiasm and energy.
When all the preparatory work had been completed, I obtained a medical recommendation from my personal physician, Dr. Gorham, to refrain for reasons of health from all business activity. Getting this recommendation was not difficult. I may not have felt tired, but I looked an absolute wreck. Turner Press would simply have to get along without me for a couple of weeks.
With the well wishes of my staff (Doris with tears in her eyes), off I went to my country house and set to work immediately on the laborious process of typesetting Nicolas’s novel. The work began to take form, and my technique improved. Naturally I couldn’t go nearly as fast as an experienced typesetter, and with a magnifying glass I inspected every word after printing it. The detail involved did not diminish my ardor for the work. It was the same ardor I had felt during the war in those Dorchester bomb shelters, where we printed counterfeit orders for our colleagues behind enemy lines.
From the first half-title to the last line of The Need to Love (I had settled on this as the title of my translation), my attention never wandered. On the contrary, the whole experience enlarged my consciousness. Still, when I composed the final page, I must say it was with a certain sense of relief.
All that remained was to compose the traditional “Printed in Great Britain, by Peter Thyman Ltd., Chester.” Prewar copyright laws were such that I was not compelled to mention either the publication date or the registration number. All I put was “First Edition, 1939.”
Death by Publication Page 9
