The Pretender

by David Belbin

  The answer only hit me as I was walking through Soho, more intent on my lunch than literary forgery. In the window of Any Amount of Books was a first edition of one of my mum’s favourite novels, Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. Greene had started me thinking about faking a living writer. He had contributed a story to the Little Review, typing it up in the office while waiting for his female friend to be free. If he had typed up one, why not two?

  There was a problem with forging Greene. He was still alive. But, recent reports indicated that he had a poor memory. The previous year, a novella of his, written to be filmed thirty years ago, had been found in a drawer in Hollywood. It had been published, to wide acclaim, as The Tenth Man. Greene said he had no recollection of writing it. (‘He was taking a lot of Benzedrine at the time,’ Tony commented.) The Tenth Man wasn’t the only example of his dredging up forgotten work from the far past. One of his late seventies novels, The Human Factor, was something he’d started in the early sixties, then abandoned.

  Since then, the novels had dried up. His last book, the one I reviewed, was a selection of his letters to the press. He was about to publish a thin collection of stories, The Last Word, which, the accompanying press release said, contained work written between the nineteen twenties and nineteen eighties. Two of the stories in it had been published in the fifties and not seen since. Why would anyone doubt the credibility of another previously unpublished story from that era?

  Back in my room, I was slowly clearing out the box room to make space for my own stuff. There were boxes full of what Tony called the LR archive, but there was also plenty of rubbish. Amongst the debris I’d found a broken toaster, an early electric kettle and an old typewriter. I’d thrown out the first two but kept the latter, because it reminded me of the typewriter I’d left behind in Paris. Now it occurred to me that this might be the typewriter that Greene used to write his stories on all those years ago.The typeface looked similar to the manuscript in the archive. The typewriter ribbon was useless, but I would track down an old one somehow, if I managed to come up with a convincing story.

  That night, as the Soho streets grew noisy beneath me, I sat at Tony’s desk, as Greene had done thirty odd years before, and began to write.

  Twenty

  When I tried to come up with ideas for stories of my own I found it impossible. Yet, when I impersonated Graham Greene, it was hard to hold back my imagination. That didn’t mean I could write a convincing forgery. Much of what I’d read was set abroad. Too risky to write about a place I’d never visited. One wrong detail and I would be exposed.

  I remembered a line from Meyer’s biography of Hemingway: the truth about a man is what he hides. Tony had passed on a similar piece of advice, given by a friend who’d spied during the war: if you want to know a person’s weakness, find out what he lies about. What did Greene lie about? Cheating on his wife? Hardly. His affairs were common knowledge. But going to prostitutes was seedier. That was something he might disguise in his fiction. Major Jones in The Comedians confesses to the narrator that he’s never had a woman he hadn’t paid for. How often did Greene pay for it?

  I began a story about a prostitute. I wouldn’t include it here, even if I could.When you look at a forgery, knowing it to be a forgery, its faults are bound to be immediately apparent. Whereas if you read it wanting to believe or, better, needing to believe, that’s a different matter, as the success of my Hemingway forgery showed.

  In A Girl He Used To Know, Sedgeworth, a forty-something jeweller with a dying, disabled wife, sees a young prostitute in Soho and, although he’s never used a prostitute before, feels compelled to sleep with her. The prostitute, who calls herself Eve, commutes from Nottwich, the fictional city that Greene based on Nottingham. Nottwich first appeared in the thirties novel A Gun For Sale and is mentioned in Our Man In Havana, which was written during the period when my story was set. Nottingham was where Greene started out as a journalist, before getting a job on The Times. He hated the place, but his few months there gave Greene his only taste of working class life. It was an experience that seemed to have stuck with him. In my story, Sedgeworth had lived in Nottwich for a short time when he was starting out, giving him a connecting point with Eve.

  There is something about Eve that keeps drawing the jeweller back. She is not a classic beauty: her jaw is too square, her shoulders a little too wide. She is not sexy or glamorous enough to work the classier sections of the metropolis. Sedgeworth, she says, is her favourite client. They talk easily and become affectionate. He finds himself falling in love with her. He even tells Eve about his dying wife, who, he says, probably suspects that he is seeing someone, but would never ask. Eve tells him that she does not intend to be a prostitute forever. She wants to open a dress shop, one that also rents outfits to those who don’t want, or can’t afford to buy. Sedgeworth offers to be her guarantor. After some hesitation, Eve agrees. At this point, she tells him her real name, Hannah.

  Sedgeworth plans to set Hannah up as a respectable, independent woman of business. When his wife dies, after a suitable interval he will be in a position to marry her, but only if she will have him. In the meantime, Hannah will escape prostitution, and he will remain her lover.

  Hannah tells Sedgeworth that she never knew her father, who died before she was born. One day she would like him to meet her mother, who she is very close to. It would be safest to introduce him as her backer, rather than her lover, as her mother has no idea what she really does in London. Later, when his wife dies, the couple can say that their romantic relationship began shortly afterwards. Sedgeworth agrees to this charade.

  I already had too much plot for a short story, I realised, though not enough for a novel. People would assume that this was why Greene didn’t proceed with the piece. After working out the ending, I pared the piece down and practised Greene’s metaphors. Greene’s wife, Vivien, used to go through his work, removing what she called ‘tigers in the woodpile’, that is, overblown imagery that cheapened the story. I did the same.

  There were other details I had to get right. I found a ribbon that more or less fitted the old typewriter, though it slipped occasionally.There were plenty of blank sheets of manuscript paper scattered among the papers in the archive, and it was easy enough to find a dozen that seemed to match. Indeed, I was left with a number of spares, which I would put to good use in due course.

  Only when I was very sure of what I had written did I get out the old typewriter. I copied the piece out, making the odd improvement as I went along, taking care to use the same layout as Greene in the genuine story I’d seen.

  When I was done, I left my story spread out by a window for a couple of days, hoping the sun would age it. Ten days after I’d begun, I read the story again. Finding no errors, I took a deep breath, then went down to show it to Tony.

  ‘Where was this?’ he asked as he glanced at the MS.

  ‘In an unmarked box-file upstairs.’

  ‘Which issue was it in?’

  ‘It was never published. I checked the index.’ (An index of the LR’s first two hundred issues had been published in the 60s.)

  Tony took the story to read on the old leather armchair in the corner, shifting a pile of books so that he could sit there. I dealt with the minor correspondence, making as little noise as possible. From time to time, I glanced in his direction. Had I got the ending right? As the shop opens, Sedgeworth’s wife suddenly dies. He is free to be with his mistress. But when he turns up, unexpectedly, to tell Hannah the news, her mother is there on a visit. Hannah introduces Sedgeworth as her sponsor. The mother, who is Sedgeworth’s age but beaten down and dishevelled, is warm with him and exhibits no suspicion of his motives. Sedgeworth is sure she will accept his marrying Hannah. He can’t wait to get his mistress alone so that he can tell her his news.

  But it’s the mother who manages to get Sedgeworth alone. While Hannah is downstairs, seeing a customer, her mother hugs Sedgeworth, and tells her how grateful she is to him. But how, she wants
to know, did he find out about Hannah? James Sedgeworth has no idea what she means. I didn’t know how to contact you, Jim, the mother tells him. How did you know she was yours?

  Sedgeworth at last understands. Hannah’s mother is a factory girl he had a brief fling with twenty-three years earlier. Her daughter is also his. Perhaps the filial resemblance is the reason for his tremendous attraction to her.

  ‘You were always a gent’, the mother tells him, as he bluffs his way through the situation.

  James and Hannah see the mother to the train back to Nottwich. As they leave St Pancras, James Sedgeworth tells Hannah that his wife needs constant attention. He will not be able to visit his lover for a long time. He wants her to see other men. Hannah is hurt and confused. Sedgeworth leaves her at the station, in tears. In the last line, he returns to his empty house.

  Tony put down the story.

  ‘I don’t remember this at all,’ he said, shaking his head.

  ‘Perhaps he didn’t show it to you?’ I ventured.

  ‘No. He used to talk to me about Pepe, that was the girl’s name. Why shouldn’t he show me the story? Unless he changed his mind about it. This is a brilliant find, Mark, but I’m going to have to contact Graham before we schedule it. I’ll get it photocopied tonight, write him a note.’

  Tony smiled and settled down to reread the story. I went back up to my room with a sense of anticlimax. I was meant to be studying for the exams that started the next day. The typewriter I’d written the story on was still by my bed. I returned it to the box room, replacing it with the Amstrad word processor my mum had bought me for my sixteenth birthday. I half expected Tony to come in at any moment, tell me the Greene story was a fake, and throw me out of the flat. But he didn’t. The next day, he told me he’d written to Greene.

  ‘Fingers crossed,’ he said. I was sure I’d made a huge mistake, one that Greene would quickly expose.

  Twenty-one

  My first year exams were a disaster. I hadn’t taken them seriously, being far too wrapped up in working for the LR and preparing the Graham Greene story. The exams didn’t count towards the final degree mark.You only had to pass to get through to the next year. So I’d slacked. I’d long since stopped attending lectures, but I’d gone to most tutorials. I’d studied one of the core texts at A level and felt I knew it inside out. But A level was two years ago and I had never got to grips with old English, or Malory. I was a hot shot at Twentieth Century stuff — hadn’t I convinced experts that I was Ernest Hemingway? But we didn’t get to the modern era until the Third Year. I hadn’t put in the donkey work on the syllabus. I left my last, three hour exam an hour early, because I couldn’t think of a single thing more to write. The prospect of failure terrified me.

  When I got back to Soho, Tony handed me a letter that had come in the second post. It was postmarked New York. The handwriting was a scrawl, but I recognised its author, and went upstairs to read it, much to Tony’s amusement.

  Helen Mercer was replying to my letter, which had been addressed to her husband. She pointed out that she and Paul had had no way of finding me until now. Helen was, she said, coming to London to see me ‘as soon as proves possible’. There was no mention of money, nor of whether Paul would accompany her.

  Graham Greene also replied quickly.Tony read his letter to me. In it, Greene said that he had been ill since a trip to Dublin the previous year, and was about to move from Antibes to an apartment in a small village called Corseaux, which had good views of Lake Geneva and the Alps.

  ‘Doesn’t say why he needs to move,’ Tony commented.

  ‘Probably to be by a hospital. It must be more serious than he says, poor sod. Listen to this’.

  Thank you for sending A Girl He Used To Know. I have no recollection of writing this story, though I do, of course, recall the circumstances that gave rise to it. Pity it’s too late to put it in The Last Word. Whatever happened to poor Pepe? All in all, not a bad inversion of the Greek myth. Use it if you think it’s up to scratch and thank you for the invitation. I regret that ill health does not allow me to visit London — or elsewhere — as I would like. All good wishes, yours ever, Graham.

  He had returned the photocopied typescript with two minor amendments, improving the style in one place, removing an unnecessary comma in another. Tony was cock-a-hoop. I restricted myself to a gratified smile.

  ‘We’ll carry it in the next issue, pull that story by what’s-his-name.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ I said. ‘I promised Tim his story would be in issue 499. Wouldn’t it be better to hold the Greene for the five hundredth issue?’

  Tony gave me a wary look, but didn’t argue about dropping Tim’s story.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘We need the sales that the Greene will give us now.With luck, you’ll find something else in the archives that we can use in number five hundred. And I’ll write to a few of our regulars, ask for a special contribution. I’ll print extra pages, pull half of the review section, whatever’s necessary. But I want it out soon.’ His eyes brightened, and he added, ‘we’ll have a launch party.That’ll show we mean business. It’s years since we had a launch party.’

  Tim came round that evening. I told him about the launch party.

  ‘Tony would like you to read your story. Would you do it?’

  ‘Would I?’ Tim was very excited. He confessed he hadn’t done any work on his novel all year, but the news of impending publication had spurred him into action. ‘I’ve written five thousand words since you appeared last week! I’m usually a slow writer, but I reread what I’d done so far and all of a sudden, it made sense — I know what needs changing, where the book’s going.’

  Tim was fascinated by the LR offices. He was so enthusiastic that I showed him my upstairs quarters, where he spent half an hour digging around in the box room. As he left, Tim offered to help me with the archive work, but I told him that he should spend his free time writing.

  Tim’s friendship affected me greatly. I had found a companion who, while a few years older than me, was still in his twenties. He was the first person I’d met of my own generation who also wanted to be a writer. I felt a little less lonely. I even had another go at my own fiction, although I knew that there was a more pressing need. Tony was counting on me to discover another ‘lost’ story in the archive for the Little Review’s five hundredth edition.

  Twenty-two

  The exam results were posted on a notice board near a lecture theatre I hadn’t been inside since the Autumn term. By the time I found it, there was no crowd, which saved my blushes. I had always been able to coast before. I’d known that I’d done badly, but figured that I would get through and could improve my grades later. It was too late. I’d failed.

  My tutor was in his office. The resigned cordiality with which he let me in suggested that he’d been expecting me. My file was on his desk. The university was run in such a ramshackle, anonymous way that it hadn’t occurred to me until then that I even possessed a file.

  ‘You’ve got no excuses, Mark,’ he said. ‘Your attendance at lectures has been the worst in the year.’

  Nobody had told me how, once the numbers began to fall, lecturers routinely passed round an attendance list. That was what happened when you failed to make friends in your year.

  ‘You’ve missed three out of your twenty tutorials with me and you’ve often come under prepared.’

  There was no denying this.

  ‘You walked out of your most important exam an hour early, having failed to complete the paper. Nobody’s going to be generous in their marking when they hear stories like that.’

  I hung my head. I had thought myself unnoticed, virtually anonymous, but all the time people had been making notes on me. There was no coming back, that was what my tutor was telling me.

  ‘What surprises me,’ the tutor went on, ‘is that you came with such good references. Excellent A level grades. You’re described as loving literature, as having a vocation to be a novelist. Is that what you’v
e been doing these last few months, writing a novel?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t have the energy to lie. Anyway, he might ask to see it.

  ‘Your mother’s a librarian, it says here. How’s she going to take this news?’

  In disbelief, I looked at his expression. Was he taking the piss? But why should the University know that my mother had been dead for nearly a year? I hadn’t told them.

  ‘Are you all right, Mark? Pull yourself together, lad.’

  The tutor handed me a tissue because I was blubbing like a baby.

  Later I was told that, given my bereavement, I would be allowed to return and retake my exams the following year. If I passed, I could continue my degree as if nothing had happened (though I would, for the first time in my life, be older than most of the people in my year). Presuming that I managed to support myself in London during my year off, I could even drop in on the lectures I’d missed.

  My mother had helped me again. Although she had been dead for ten months, her absence affected me more than I would admit to myself. I was in a numb state that partly explains the way I behaved. I didn’t think of myself as an adolescent, still less as an orphan. But I was both. Maybe I still am.

  I returned to Soho chastened, yet relieved. I wasn’t ready to be a student. There were things I had to do first, not least restoring the Little Review to its former fortunes. If the Mercers didn’t come through with some money, I would have to get a job, but that decision was way off in the future.

  I told Tony that I was taking a year off from university and would like to spend more time on the magazine.

  ‘Is that possible?’ he asked, but didn’t hint that he knew the real reason. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can scrape up some work for you.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I can sign on in the summer.’