The Pretender

by David Belbin

  ‘You’ll need to do that too,’ Tony told me, with a sad smile.

  The 499th issue of the Little Review came back from the printers two days before the launch party. It had a black and white photo of Graham Greene on the front with the words, ‘Greene: A Major New Story’ in white lettering, reversed out over a dark Soho street. Tim’s name was also on the cover, listed alphabetically in the ‘new stories and poems by...’ strip at the bottom.

  Tim was first to arrive at the party, which took place in Turret Books on Lamb’s Conduit Street. He’d had a haircut for the occasion. I realised for the first time that he was handsome, in a foppish, almost feminine way. Second to arrive was Magneta McLaren. It was the first time I’d met Magneta, whose bizarre, sententious short stories were published by the LR, Ambit and several other magazines. She was thirtyish and heavily made up in goth style, with a shock of black hair and a gold studded nose. Magneta wore a tight tank-top and blue jeans so full of holes that it was impossible not to notice the absence of underwear. Recognising her from Tony’s description, I introduced myself.

  ‘Where have you been hiding?’ she wanted to know, then pinched my bum with a playful grin. ‘You’re not a fag, are you?’

  As I fumbled for an answer, Tony emerged from the back room, where he had been conducting some kind of negotiation with the bookshop’s owner.

  ‘Magneta, my dearest!’ He managed to extricate her from me, then whispered in my ear, ‘you’d better watch out, Mark, Magneta likes them young. She’ll have your cherry in no time if you let her.’

  ‘Who the hell was that?’ Tim asked, as more people arrived.

  I told him.

  ‘Magneta McLaren!’ Tim was impressed. ‘She was in the Granta “Thirty under Thirty” issue.’

  ‘Do you like her stuff?’

  Tim didn’t answer. He was staring at Magneta’s backside. From what he’d told me, it was years since he’d had a steady girlfriend. Few self-respecting women would sleep with a man who wore cheap clothes, had a lousy job and lived in a dusty bedsit above a secondhand bookshop. When Magneta was obscured by new arrivals, Tim and I talked about the new issue. He’s already read it, cover to cover.

  ‘Just to see what company I’m in.’

  Tim was kind about my Greene review, but reserved his enthusiasm for my forgery.

  ‘That Greene story,’ he said, ‘it feels really fresh, not like something from the fifties at all. You know, when he asked about her mother, and worked out...’

  I listened spellbound as, for five minutes, Tim talked about A Girl He Used To Know. It was one of the most flattering, intense conversations of my life. He had found one or two flaws, but linked the story to aspects of the author’s life that I hadn’t even considered. He picked up a copy of the magazine and quoted my own words at me. It was all I could do not to jump up and down announcing that I’d written the thing myself. Magneta came over with a glass of wine for me.

  ‘I saw you were empty.’ Then she noticed Tim’s rapt interest in her and asked if he wanted another drink.

  ‘Better not yet,’ he said. ‘I’m meant to be reading in a few minutes.’

  All of Magneta’s attentions switched from me to Tim. ‘Oh,’ she said, picking up a copy of issue 499 from the display table. ‘So you’re...’

  A few minutes later, Tony introduced Tim to the thirty or so people who had crowded into the narrow space. He apologised for Graham Greene’s absence, going on to say how he was sure that Graham would have deferred to important new talent like the young man who was about to read.

  ‘As soon as I began Tim’s story,’ he said, oozing sincerity, ‘I knew we had to have him in the Little Review. He’s one of the freshest voices I’ve come across in years. But don’t let me ramble on, listen to him for yourself. Tim Cooper!’

  I hadn’t been to many readings during my nine months in London, so I had little to compare Tim with. I’m pretty sure, though, that he was terrible: hesitant, incoherent at times, stressing words in the wrong place. He had no sense of timing. If I hadn’t already read the story, I’d have thought it was rubbish. As it was, I doubted my judgment. Yet, when he was through, people clapped enthusiastically, as though Tim had completely justified Tony’s introduction of him. Magneta, especially, looked bowled over.

  ‘What did you think?’ Tim asked me.

  ‘You sounded somewhat... nervous.’

  ‘I was scared shitless. I should have got drunk first, I couldn’t have been worse. Nobody laughed at the jokes, did you notice?’

  ‘They’re an odd audience,’ I said, looking round, and they were. Badly dressed, anorexic or overweight. Most were getting on a bit and drinking as though prohibition was about to be introduced. We were the only guests in their twenties. It was hardly the Literary London I’d dreamt about. According to Tim, that was happening half a mile away, where magazine writers ten years my senior snorted cocaine in the toilets of a trendy club, then babbled about the novels they had already been commissioned to write. I’d read about these people and knew where to find them. I also knew that they wouldn’t be interested in me — at least, not until I was ‘someone’.

  People wanted to talk to Tim, so I drifted away,pleased that my new friend was enjoying his success, but wishing there were publishing people present for Tony to introduce him to. The days when agents and publishers would scour the LR for new talent were long gone, but you never knew — somebody influential might buy the issue for the Greene story, come across Tim’s piece and fall for it.

  I had another glass of wine and brushed against Magneta. Alcohol has always affected me quickly. Now that I was intoxicated, Magneta looked even more attractive.

  ‘I liked your friend’s story,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, me too.’

  ‘I like your friend,’ she went on, with a charitable shrug, making it plain I wasn’t in with a chance. Tim joined us. A few words of praise from Magneta and he started gushing. To distract myself, I began to collect glasses. The booze had run out, so the crowd was rapidly thinning. I took two handfuls of glasses to the tiny kitchen. Then I rejoined the party and looked for Tim. He appeared to have already gone, which was strange. I noticed that Magneta had left, too.

  ‘I think she persuaded your friend to walk her home,’ Tony told me, as he began to clear up.

  Soon after, Tony left with one of his old boyfriends. It seemed he, like Magneta, was on a promise. Alone, I carried unsold copies of the magazine back to the LR office, walking hunchbacked, unnoticed, through wide, emptying streets, reflecting on the rewards that my career in forgery had reaped so far. I’d felt invisible all my life. I thought that writing was a way of making myself real, but so far it had only made me more invisible.

  By faking the Greene story, I might have helped to keep the LR going. But that was a selfish act, not an achievement to be proud of. It meant I had a roof over my head and something to occupy my days.

  Suppose — just suppose — I’d published the story under my own name, and Tony had accepted, published it? Maybe I’d have been the one who Magneta McLaren took home that night. And everything that followed might have been prevented.

  Twenty-three

  Much of the next month was spent squashing magazines into pale brown jiffy bags and hauling large piles down to the post office. A few weeks later I saw the bookshop returns figure for issue 499. There were none. We’d upped our print run to 4,000 and the issue had still sold out. Subs were up too. If we got a similar sale for the 500th issue, the LR’s future was secure and it wouldn’t matter if I never saw a penny for the Hemingway stories that Paul Mercer had apparently made so much money from. I put that problem to the back of my mind.The important thing was that, if I passed my retakes, I could return to university the following autumn, knowing that my year off had not been wasted.

  I had another challenge to face before I returned to academic work. Tony needed a story as the centrepiece for the five hundredth issue, which was going to be a double size, anniversary edition
.

  ‘The best ever!’ Tony announced to anyone who visited the office. ‘Jim Ballard’s promised a story. Spike Milligan and Ted Hughes are doing poems. Bill Burroughs says he’ll come up with something.’

  In other words, none of the above had actually delivered their material yet.

  ‘I’ve even written to James Sherwin,’ Tony told me.

  ‘Really?’ Since finishing the Greene, I’d been working on a story that was a kind of homage to Sherwin, drafting and redrafting it on my cheap word processor. What a coup it would be if Tony came up with the real thing!

  ‘No reply as yet. Now, what have you got for me?’

  I was silent.

  ‘You’ve been trawling through the archives, I take it?’

  ‘I haven’t gone through the really early stuff yet,’ I said. ‘It’s in a bit of a mess.’

  ‘Seen this?’

  He held up an obituary of Roald Dahl from that day’s paper. ‘I published him just after he started out. 1950, it must have been.’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed that,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t suppose we put his name on the cover. He wasn’t my kind of writer. But I could tell he had something. I very nearly used another story by him, shortly afterwards. I can’t recall why I didn’t, it’s so long ago.’

  When Tony went out to lunch, I read the obituary. After a series of awful tragedies in his life, Roald Dahl had become one of the century’s most successful children’s authors. His previous work for adults was quite different. I hadn’t read him for ten years, but remembered his style as plain but witty. There was a darkness in his work that appealed to children. The same thing looked immature in his adult work, or so I thought at the time. Had an old Dahl story survived in the archives? From what I’d seen,Tony had been more organised in the fifties than he was now. We might get lucky. But it was unlikely. Putting aside the pile of manuscripts to deal with, I dug out the magazine containing the one Dahl story the LR published, from early 1950. Then I went into the box room.

  One end of the room contained neatly stacked files, the fruits of my endeavours so far. The other held half a dozen decrepit tea chests, piled high with the detritus of the magazine’s first twenty years. I had barely explored these, beyond digging out the Graham Greene manuscript whose lay-out I had copied for A Girl He Used To Know. The chests were, at least, labelled. With difficulty, I lifted the chest containing 1962-66 and put it on the ground. Then I sat on it while I explored the first box, 1947-1951. Here were the original manuscripts of all the stories, articles and poems Tony had published. This was the most valuable box, I supposed, Tony’s nest egg, destined, perhaps, for the University of Iowa, or Texas. I ought to have worn gloves as I looked at them.

  Tony’s handwriting as a young man was more rounded, less spidery than now. His organisation was better, too. The original manuscripts, together with the correspondence from each issue, were contained in clearly labelled foolscap envelopes. It didn’t take me long to find the Dahl story, together with a letter from the author. But that was it. I went through the envelopes containing later issues. Tony had kept very little relating to work not published. If Dahl had written to him, offering another story, the letter was long gone. But so what? The story might have existed. It could still exist, if I wrote it.

  I sat down at my computer. I cleared my mind, then set about pretending to be Roald Dahl. It couldn’t be more difficult than becoming James Sherwin, which I’d been working on until then. Dahl’s adult fiction was mainstream, part of a tradition that came out of Somerset Maugham and other upper middle class scribblers. The difficulty was in coming up with a story idea. In my old student house, I’d watched Tales of the Unexpected, a series based on his stories. I knew about twists in the tale, but had no idea how to come up with an original one, like the police investigators eating the leg of lamb that, when frozen, had been the murder weapon.

  I wrote a couple of opening sentences, then a complete paragraph that sounded authentic. But no story came. I locked the office and headed off to Charing Cross Road, looking for a secondhand edition of some early Dahl stories. Should I came up with an idea, I would still need a way to forge the MS. I had no idea what make of typewriter Dahl used. All this was weighing on my mind as I turned into Any Amount Of Books and bumped into Tim and Magneta.

  The couple were hand in hand and so absorbed in each other they didn’t notice me until I spoke their names. Tim appeared embarrassed.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, Mark. It’s just that we...’

  ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘How’s the writing going?’

  ‘Fantastic. Magneta persuaded me to give up working in the bookshop. I’ve moved in with her.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘We wanted to have you round...’ Tim began.

  ‘Come tonight,’ Magneta interrupted. ‘Tim tells me you write. You must bring some of your work. We’d love to hear it.’

  ‘I don’t know. I...’ But Magneta was already scribbling her address on the back of a paper bag from the herbalist’s up the road.

  ‘About nine,’ she said. ‘I’ll cook.’

  Tim gave me the look of a man in the grip of an irresistible force and they set off. Within an instant they were, again, completely wrapped up in each other.

  I found an old copy of Dahl’s Switch Bitch in Henry Pordes Books and took it back to the flat to read. Winter was slow in leaving and the flat was very cold. I had lost weight. Maybe a meal out would do me good.

  The book I’d bought was a tatty hardback, much read. I could have bought a pristine secondhand paperback for the same money, its pages already discoloured and brittle even though they had never been read. But I had a penchant for used books and hard covers, for reading a book as it first appeared. This one’s original owner would be dead. During the many conversations I’d had while flogging review copies, I’d learnt that book dealers got their best stock by clearing the homes of the recently deceased.

  I read and reread the short stories, soaking up the style, the bitter sexuality, hoping for some inspiration. I went to the library and read the obituaries from other newspapers. This was going to be more difficult than I’d first thought. Dahl had been in print well before the LR’s first issue. By 1950, when Tony had published a story by him, Dahl already had an agent. His first novel had flopped, but he was well known. Records would exist. A rejected story would have been recycled, sent somewhere else. Dahl was prolific. He was also efficient, a businessman. If he hadn’t kept a copy, his agent would have done. Reading about the many tragedies in Dahl’s life, I began to think better of exploiting his legacy. Maybe I ought to tell Tony that there was nothing to be found.

  Magneta’s flat was the top floor of a house in Camden Town, a short tube ride away. I found the house with no difficulty, but the bell was hard to identify. The one I decided upon didn’t appear to work. I shouted her and Tim’s names several times before my friend appeared at a window. Laughing, he threw down a key.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, as he opened the door on the second floor, ‘we’re not used to having guests.’

  I didn’t know what I might find. It was a long time since I’d visited someone’s home. Tony, despite his friendliness in the office, had never invited me to his place in Highgate. Magneta, from what little I knew of her, was an old fashioned bohemian. I expected dust, heavy drapes and gothic paraphernalia to match her vivid eye-shadow. Instead I found... normality. There were books on shelves, posters on the walls and two modern art prints, framed. The floorboards had been stripped and varnished, with an Indian rug and a gas fire offering warmth. I couldn’t see Magneta, but could smell a rich stew wafting through from the kitchen. The flat reminded me, unbearably, of home, the home that I had left abandoned for more than a year.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Tim asked, noticing my mood.

  ‘Fine. Tired, that’s all. I’ve been working hard.’

  ‘Did you bring some of your writing with you?’

  ‘No. I’ve n
othing really ready. Sorry.’

  ‘Never mind. Drink?’

  ‘Please.’ Should I have brought a bottle of wine? I wasn’t used to domesticity of any kind, wasn’t expecting it from Tim. Yet there he was, in clean clothes, neat hair, pouring wine from a box into a proper wine glass. And here was Magneta, hair as wild as before, make-up less so, wearing a loose sweater and woollen leggings.

  ‘I hope you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘It’s ready.’

  Magneta had made a lentil stew, with celery, mushrooms, carrot, potato and bits of chorizo floating round in it. Before we ate, she dripped olive oil and sherry vinegar over our portions. It was delicious.

  ‘Something I picked up in Spain,’ she said, when I praised the dish.

  Magneta had lived in Andalusia for a couple of years. It was all tied up with a love affair that went wrong, I gathered, so didn’t press her further. Instead I complimented her on the flat.

  ‘We love it. Pity we’ve got to move out at the end of the year.’

  The building, she told me, had been sold months ago. Magneta managed to obtain a cheap, short term lease because she knew the new owner, who was about to restore the place.

  ‘I’ll find somewhere else,’ she said, ‘but not as nice for the price.’

  I wondered what she lived on, given that Tim was no longer working, but she got in her answer before my question.

  ‘I suppose I’ll have to come up with something pervy to pay the rent. What do you reckon, Tim darling? I Was A Teenage Love Slave? Mark, would you like to see my oeuvre?’

  She pointed to a shelf that contained half a dozen erotic novels, the sort of thin, tacky paperbacks found on the top shelves of newsagents who didn’t normally sell books.

  ‘These are all by you?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  The authors were women who sounded as thought they all had big hair. Danielle Colby. Celia Hampton.

  ‘Who makes up the names?’

  ‘The publishers do.’

  ‘Do they take you long to write?’