The Pretender

by David Belbin

  ‘The fifties was the time. The blacks were just arriving. Everything was new. Sex. Reefer. Coffee bars.The sixties were a sod, by comparison. The phoneys moved in and the hoi polloi joined up. Things settled down a bit in the seventies. Creeping decrepitude ever since.’

  I listened without comment. The fifties and sixties meant little to me, only what I’d gleaned from novels. The seventies were my first decade on earth, though I didn’t like to remind Tony of this.

  I quickly became Tony’s confidante, but I wasn’t his only ‘helper’. He referred to most of his other acolytes as ‘hangers on’. They were twenty- or thirty-somethings of indistinct class, generally shabby dressers, who would offer to take the post or volunteer to review books but rarely did anything useful like hoover or make the tea. Tony warned me that there was one individual who I should never allow to post rejected manuscripts. He suspected him of stealing the stamps off the envelopes and throwing the manuscripts away: ‘caused me no end of trouble — half the writers assumed I’d hung onto their stuff in order to use it’.

  I learnt to arrive before midday, at which time Tony would often disappear to the Colony Club or one of the other haunts of Soho’s daytime drinkers. He let me read manuscripts for him — any that might be of use would join the tottering pile on his desk. Otherwise I would scribble one of Tony’s stock phrases at the bottom, then seal up the reject in its stamped, self-addressed envelope. The phrases ran from sorry, not for us (complete crap) to nearly, but not quite there yet (shows a bit of promise) to very good, but we’ve taken too much on at the moment (a writer who was perfectly competent, or better, but who Tony didn’t like). He would sometimes write agonised notes to writers who were evidently his friends. These said something like tempted to use this, but would be at least two years. This last was true, he told me, one afternoon, pointing at the tea chest to the left of his desk, which was full to overflowing.

  ‘That’s the stuff I’ve accepted, but haven’t got round to using yet.’

  When I handed him my Graham Greene review, he affected shock.

  ‘My dear boy, people take review copies to sell. If I really want a book reviewed I give the number of words and a deadline. You should have taken it to one of the places on Charing Cross Road: Henry Pordes or Any Amount of Books.’

  Despite this caveat,Tony read my review, marking cuts, correcting the grammar and pointing out places where my point could be clearer, or more succinct. I could see what made him a good editor. The five minutes of attention he gave to my review were more valuable than all the feedback I’d had from the tutor who’d set and marked my undergraduate essays over the previous two terms.

  ‘Here,’ he said, handing the review back, ‘get it down to five hundred words and I’ll try and fit it into the issue after next. If you’re interested in Greene, by the way...’ He wandered over to the dusty shelves that covered one wall of the room, each one overflowing with books of every hue, in no discernible order. He knew exactly what he was looking for, and where to find it. ‘Here. You might want to read this. There could be an interesting article in it.’

  He handed me a cheap paperback, published in the 50s, called To Beg, I Am Ashamed by Sheila Cousins. Its subtitle was The Autobiography of a Prostitute.

  ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Is there a Greene connection?’

  ‘Read it first. See what you think. Then I’ll tell you.’

  The LR was a welcome haven, for the house share in Tottenham was becoming unbearable. We were all on the verge of being thrown out. One afternoon in Soho I told Tony that I was badly behind with my rent.

  ‘I suppose you could live above the shop here,’ he said. ‘I hardly use the place any more.There’s only a sink, but you can get a whore’s bath in it, and I expect they still have showers at the university.Want a look?’

  He took me to the second floor of the building, up the narrow stairs I’d see him climb on days he needed a place to sleep off the drink.There were two rooms. The biggish one had a double bed, a sink, and, behind a shabby curtain, a toilet. The small one was full of tea chests and box files.

  ‘The Little Review’s archive,’ Tony explained. ‘You can clear it up if you want more space. Well, what do you think?’

  ‘It’s fantastic,’ I, who had always dreamed of living in Soho, said. ‘How much rent would you want?’

  ‘No rent,’ Tony said. ‘You can be night watchman. Sort out the box room while you’re here and help keep me organised, the way you have been doing. Oh,’ he added, and paused, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘and, if I get lucky during the day, the bed still belongs to me. OK?’

  Tony never did ‘get lucky’ any more, though some of his old friends, on finding that I’d moved in, assumed he had. Maybe he did have a kind of crush on me — sex enters most motives, as I had already discovered — but I came to think of Tony as a friend, and even, at times, as a surrogate father.

  Fifteen

  In Soho, I lived out a fantasy. Many nights I walked the streets, which were most real in the early hours, when there were no tourists. I soon found myself on first name turns with strippers and prostitutes, though conversation was as far as it went: I couldn’t lose my virginity to a woman who wanted money in return. As I walked around, I kept making notes, dreaming of the great Soho novel I would one day write. It would be a coming-of-age-in-the-city novel — not a confessional memoir like this, but a sprawling epic, loaded with history, mystery and insight.

  The university was within walking distance. My little flat had no stove, so I subsisted on sandwiches, fruit and pot noodles. I’d never been very interested in food, but if I ran out, or was desperate for something hot and filling, there were plenty of cheap Chinese restaurants around. Pollo, a few streets away, served good pasta so cheaply that even I could occasionally afford to eat there.

  I read voraciously from Tony’s shelves as well as the university library. Few of the novels I read were connected with my course.A degree was merely my excuse for being in London. One of the few non-fiction books I read was To Beg, I Am Ashamed, the prostitute memoir that Tony lent me. It took me a while to get through, as I kept putting it down, distracted by the more enticing prospect of reading all of Graham Greene’s novels, in the order that he wrote them. It was in the fifties, I thought, that he was in his prime. Every novel was even better than the previous one, peaking with The Quiet American and Our Man In Havana. The prostitute memoir was also published in the fifties. Despite its risqué title, I found the story dull, and easy to put aside. I took to reading it only late at night, when I had finished one book and it was too late to start another.

  The book’s cover was a silhouetted woman who reminded me more of an underwear advert than the women who worked modern day Soho.The prose was often pedestrian and the story was surprisingly short on salacious detail. Yet I read on, intrigued by the clue that Tony had given me. It was a tale of decline, featuring a weak mother, a missing father, chances not taken and bad luck at every turn. The narrative was populated with seedy men, some of whom could have come from a novel by Greene or Jean Rhys, a thirties writer who my mother liked a lot.

  One aspect struck me almost at once.The book claimed to be by ‘Sheila Cousins’ (at one point, the narrator marries a man called Cousins, who she follows to the far east, one of Greene’s favourite locations). Nevertheless, I had read enough books by women to know, almost certainly, that this was written by a man. It was nothing I could put my finger on, just the tone, the choice of detail. It was more than the absence of self pity, the matter of fact attitude to sex. The narrator had none of Jean Rhys’s fragility. I realised that for a man to write as a woman was one of the hardest things to pull off. For me to convincingly imitate a female novelist, as I had imitated Hemingway, would be impossible.

  A few details in To Beg, I Am Ashamed made me think Greene might be responsible for it. Greene’s England Made Me, written in 1934, had references to selling tea. One of the characters in the novel sent postcards much like the ones sent by “Sheil
a’s” husband, Cousins, when he was in the far east, where he dealt in tea. Sheila drifted in and out of prostitution after her failure to sell vacuum cleaners, a career that Greene used for characters in both England Made Me and Our Man In Havana, which was written in the fifties. But it was only at the end of the story that she found she had no choice but to remain a prostitute. Then one got the details of the street life, from the three pound punters in Piccadilly (where Sheila worked) to the shilling scrubbers of King’s Cross. Greene’s regular visits to prostitutes could have been the source of this material.

  Most of the writing was humdrum, but now and then the story became gripping, and characters were introduced with telling details. Sheila portrays herself as an intelligent woman who can attract quite distinguished men.Towards the end, she meets an intellectual, a government scientist who falls for her but is put off when he meets a ‘dreadful old woman’ who he guesses is Sheila’s mother.

  On his face sat the inhuman solemnity of the stage specialist. Behind every sentence he uttered you felt the weight of an unseen shelf of books.

  The tone, the precision of the language, the cadences of the prose and the intelligence of the observation, all of them sounded like Greene — the early Greene, of England Made Me anyway. Could Greene have written it under a pseudonym? Why would he bother? By 1953, which was the first publication date given inside the Corgi edition, he was a famous, world renowned author. He didn’t need to write a tacky best seller. I noticed, though, that the back of the paperback was taken up by a rave quotation from a distinguished literary magazine, Time and Tide. ‘I found it deeply interesting, adding to the sum of human knowledge’, the review concluded.Who would get a book like this reviewed in Time and Tide, a magazine that Greene regularly wrote for, if not Greene himself?

  ‘What did you think?’ Tony asked, when I handed back the book.

  ‘There was less about prostitution than I expected,’ I told Tony. ‘But it held my interest. One thing’s for sure. It wasn’t written by a woman. Did Greene tell you who it was by?’

  ‘Most people reckon it was written by Cecil Barr.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘Wrote a series of racy best sellers in the twenties and thirties,’ Tony said, slipping into his gossipy lecture mode. ‘His real name was Jack Kahane. He founded the Obelisk Press in Paris. Kahane published people like Henry Miller — writers who English language publishers were far too scared to put out because of the obscenity laws.’

  ‘Did you ever come across him?’ I asked.

  Tony shook his head. ‘He died in 1939.’

  ‘But the book wasn’t published until 1950.’

  ‘That was in the UK. I’ve looked into this. The Obelisk press did a hardback edition in 1938.’

  ‘So this Kahane definitely wrote it.’

  ‘No, Kahane didn’t write autobiography. His forte was silly novels. According to Graham, the prostitute book was written by a friend of his, Ronald something. The prostitute was real enough. Both he and Ronald had her. Ronald got a commission to write a book. But he had great trouble coming up with the whole thing and — though he never admitted it, as far as I know — Graham helped him out. The intrigue appealed to him, and the subject matter, of course. He was very circumspect about his dealings with prostitutes. This was an opportunity to make some use of the material.’

  ‘If it was written in the thirties, that makes complete sense,’ I told Tony, and recounted the clues I had already spotted. ‘Can we prove it? Maybe there’s an article about it to be had for the magazine.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Tony said, ‘but only after Graham snuffs it. He fell out with Ronald, as I recall, and I doubt he’d want to give the book free publicity.’

  ‘Did he tell you which bits he wrote?’

  ‘This was more than thirty years ago,’ Tony told me. ‘If I’d kept a diary, I’d be quids in, but gossip like that, you only got over a few drinks — more than a few. I can’t be sure of any of the details.’

  He poured himself another scotch, as though it were medicine that might cure his memory, then ruminated: ‘Wish I’d got another story out of Graham back then.’

  Sixteen

  Within a few weeks, I began to run the LR office, a job I loved. It was unpaid but not without remuneration — a rent-free room in Soho was worth a lot, while bookshops on the Charing Cross Road gave me a quarter of the cover price of any review copy I took in. I wrote to Francine, giving her my new address and boasting about my part-time job. She would never have heard of the LR, but I had to tell someone, and there was nobody else. She wrote back within a week, asking if I had ‘someone special’. (Francine seemed to have a different boyfriend every letter. ‘He is not as nice as you,’ she would always say.)

  I was meeting writers, answering calls from publishers, building up a network of contacts that would one day be of inestimable use, or so I hoped. I was finding out the way things worked. Instead of studying for my first year exams, I spent whole days looking through the archives, putting the house in order, as Tony had requested, in lieu of rent. My first task was to ensure that we had a complete run of the magazine. When this task was complete (only two issues were missing), I began to delve into the box files full of correspondence and old manuscripts.

  ‘Be careful what you do with that,’ Tony told me. ‘I’m planning to sell the best stuff to American Universities. They’re filthy with money, and desperate for authentic papers that have been touched with genius. Don’t damage anything.’

  ‘Are old manuscripts really worth that much?’ I asked, naively.

  ‘Depends,’ Tony told me. ‘If the MS is exactly as published, then it has to be someone really top notch — Joyce, say, or Eliot. But if it’s substantially different... here, look at this.’

  He handed me the latest Times Literary Supplement, folded open at the Random Notes section. I read the following.

  Scholars have long debated the fate of the Hemingway manuscripts that were stolen from his wife on a train in Paris in 1922. The thief snatched a briefcase containing every piece of fiction Papa Hemingway had written up to that date. After discovering the loss, Papa was forced to rewrite what he could remember. Serious Hemingway scholars would kill to find these manuscripts, which provide a missing link in the writer’s development. Now, out of the blue, one of these stories seems to have turned up in a Paris flea market.

  An American businessman was in Paris with his young wife, a Hemingway fan, when they found the story concealed in an old copy of the magazine Paris Match. With it was a page from another story, never published. On their return to New York, they had the pages examined by forgery experts and Hemingway scholars. Both groups pronounced themselves ‘at least 90% certain’ that these manuscripts are genuine. The rare papers go up for auction next month. Meanwhile, visitors to Paris will be scouring the flea markets in Clichy, where the Hemingway papers were found, to see if the other missing work (several stories, a novel) is also there. Early estimates say that the newly discovered manuscript could go for as much as two million dollars.

  ‘Two million,’ Tony said, as he put on his jacket to go out for lunch. ‘If I ever run out of funds, the contents of that box room are my nest egg.’

  Shocked, I nearly told Tony the truth, but didn’t know where to begin. I was wary that I might lose my mentor’s respect. But I was also proud. My Hemingway forgeries, even the original I thought so weak, had been accepted as 90% genuine.

  And so began my accidental career as a forger.

  Seventeen

  When Tony had gone out to lunch and I’d had some time to absorb the situation, I decided to go to the London Library, at the back of Piccadilly. I didn’t know who the American businessman and his wife were. Perhaps Paul had married again or the TLS had confused his relationship with Helen. I was sure of one thing. The stories had to be the ones I had written fifteen months before. I already knew the heart of the matter: Helen had betrayed me. How could she and Paul do such a sleazy thing? They had stol
en the stories, gone looking for more, then got out of Paris, leaving me to deal with the police. I didn’t belong to the London Library, but Tony did, and he’d shown me around. It was a private library from an age when trust was a given. Their security was so lax, I doubted anybody would challenge my presence. So it proved. I covered a table with recent newspapers. The Hemingway manuscripts started out as a human interest story. All of the accounts began with how Hemingway came to lose the manuscript case. Then, slowly, another tale began to emerge. I followed it at second hand, for the story had first appeared in the New York Post, a tabloid that the library didn’t take. The details were sketchy at best, for the protagonists weren’t giving interviews. It was easy to see why.

  Paul and Helen hadn’t lied to me, but they had misled me. Helen wasn’t Paul’s daughter. She was his stepdaughter, the daughter of his second wife. He’d adopted Helen when she was two years old, shortly after marrying her mother. That marriage lasted only three years, but the adoption was never rescinded.

  According to the papers, after the divorce, Helen and Paul did not see each other for thirteen years, though Paul contributed to the cost of Helen’s upbringing. When she was eighteen, Helen went to university in New York, where Paul (separated from his fourth wife) lived. There — so they had told one paper, though it beggared belief — they fell in love.

  Paul’s estranged wife discovered they were involved and put a detective onto them. As far as the law was concerned, Paul and Helen were committing incest. The couple had no choice but to run. They fled to Europe, where they planned to stay in hiding until Helen was twenty-one, which was just after our last meeting. As soon as she came of age and Paul’s divorce was final, Helen revoked the adoption and married Paul.