The Pretender

by David Belbin

  ‘Mom decided that all she wanted was to travel. She started getting into all sorts of spiritual shit. One time she came over to my school and tried to persuade me to drop out, go and live with her in an ashram. But I wanted education. I knew I needed something for myself because I couldn’t rely on anyone else. Then, when I was fourteen, Mom went away and didn’t come back. Sam supported me until I was eighteen, even though he didn’t have to. He’d divorced Mom when I was sixteen. She’d abandoned both of us.

  ‘After that, I was on my own. I moved to New York and was doing university courses, waiting tables, living in a hovel, when I bumped into Paul. Paul was separated, coming out of his fourth marriage. He was in rough shape, but he wanted to help. He offered me a home. He certainly didn’t set out to seduce me. Still, one day it happened. We got together. His wife found out and set the police on us. So we decided to leave the country until Paul’s divorce was final and I turned twenty-one. We’d been on the run six months when we met you.’

  ‘I still find it hard to think of you as a couple,’ I told her, cautiously. ‘I mean, you were introduced to me as Paul’s daughter.’

  ‘We had no choice but to lie. Paul had to stump up for two bedroom suites wherever we stayed in case his wife’s private detectives tracked us down. As far as the law was concerned, Paul was still my foster father, because Sam never adopted me. It was a vindictive divorce. His ex wanted to really rub his face in the dirt, create a scandal.’

  It was a scandal, I thought, but I restricted myself to a question.

  ‘Can you really be happy, married to a man twice your age?’

  Helen gave me a smile that was almost patronising. ‘In Paris, I told you about some of the guys I’d been out with. They were scumbags, users. Yes, there are nice things about younger guys, but there are nice things about older guys, too. Not least that they have more money, more experience. And Paul’s a modern man. If I want to have a fling, I’m free to. We agreed that from the start.’

  ‘And what if the guy you’re with wants more than a fling?’ I asked.

  Helen didn’t answer this, so I put my life into her hands. I kissed her.

  She let my lips touch hers, but she didn’t kiss back and, after a moment, I pulled away.

  ‘Mark,’ she said,‘you’re my only real friend. Don’t let’s spoil that for...’

  She didn’t need to fill in the rest of the sentence. I wasn’t after a fling. I wanted to go to bed with her more than I wanted almost anything else, but I wanted much more than that. All I said was ‘I care about you.’

  ‘I care about you, too,’ she said, and kissed me on the lips. It was more than a peck, but no more of a kiss than I’d allowed myself. She was making us even.

  ‘Can you show me the British Library now?’ she asked.

  Thirty-five

  As the week came to an end I saw less of Helen. She and Paul went to look at houses, though Helen said all they needed was an apartment.

  ‘Paul’s got this idea about us having children soon,’ she told me, casually. ‘I could imagine what that would be like — he’d still be going round the world all the time, doing deals, while I’d be at home looking after our brats in some dump where I don’t know anybody. No thanks.’

  There was work to be done on the magazine, too: checking proofs, chasing ads. Several of our regulars were putting in ‘so long, it’s been nice to know you’ notices. It remained to be seen how many of these ads would be paid for. Tony was well aware that once the magazine was declared dead, he would have great difficulty getting his invoices paid. I had to take corrected copy to the printers, where I collected a new set of rejection slips. Most ‘writers’ who submitted work to magazines didn’t buy the journals they wanted to be in. If they did, good magazines would turn a handsome profit, rather than requiring Arts Board grants. Submissions would continue to arrive for years after the LR closed. Those that enclosed a stamped, self addressed envelopes would receive the following:

  The Little Review ceased publication with its five hundredth issue in April, 1991. Thank you for your interest and support over the years. The Editor wishes you well with your future writing. Back issues are still available. See the enclosed list.

  The deal with Paul Mercer was more or less complete and a for rent sign had appeared outside the office window. The owner of the porn shop downstairs had already been for a good look around, though he kept his intentions hazy.

  ‘I don’t know how I feel about this place becoming a peep show or a knocking shop,’ Tony said.‘It would certainly ruin my chances of their mounting a blue plaque outside after I kick the bucket.’

  We had a double blow. Both letters arrived in the same post. Roald Dahl’s agent absolutely refused to allow his story to be published until he had had time to examine the manuscript and Dahl’s records.

  ‘Hardly surprising,’ Tony said, after showing me the letter. ‘If they’re willing for it to be published, they might as well sell it somewhere that pays real money. Shame.’

  But the next letter was completely unexpected. It was postmarked Greece. ‘Sherwin?’ I asked, as I handed Tony the letter, but he shook his head. ‘Not his handwriting.’ It was from James Sherwin’s wife, Sonia.

  Dear Mr Bracken,

  I write with sad news. James had a heart attack and died five days ago. We buried him yesterday in the small olive grove above our home. I know that you were old friends and he would have wanted you to be the first to know.

  In sorting through my husband’s recent correspondence, I see that you wrote asking for a piece for your five hundredth issue. Did he send you something? I can find no copy of his reply to you and James was always very secretive about his writing. If he did, I would be grateful to receive a copy. I am his literary executor.

  May I ask you one final favour? Could you inform the media of James’ death? I will write to his publishers. I expect that I will have to visit London soon and there ought to be some kind of memorial service. For the moment, however, I can’t face these things.

  Yours sincerely,

  Sonia Sherwin

  As I watched Tony mourn his old friend, my mind began to race. The thoughts I had did me no credit at all.

  ‘Are you going to call the papers?’ I asked, when he lifted his head.

  ‘Tomorrow will do,’ Tony said. ‘A day will give me time to work on an obituary.’

  Tony was often asked to write prepared obituaries, but he was superstitious, and would only write about people after they had died.

  ‘I’m going to the Colony to get pissed,’ he told me. ‘We’ll hold the space left by Dahl for a tribute to James. It won’t sell as well, but he deserves it. Shut the office if you want. There’s bugger all to do here now anyway.’

  With that, he left, and I locked up, returning to my upstairs room to examine the story I’d been writing for months.

  There were fifteen thousand words: three times the length of the average LR short story. Maybe I could fillet something decent out of them. I knew how much space there was and I knew which were the best pages of what I’d written. If I compressed those, I could make a reasonable stab at Sherwin. And I had a huge advantage. Sherwin used the same cheap word processor and printer that I did. Once I printed my work off, there was no way that the world’s greatest forgery expert could tell the difference between my pages and ones printed in Greece. I was meant to do this.

  Tony knew that Sherwin had sent no story. There was no way I could ‘discover’ one in the archives. I would have to tell Tony about my forgeries, which would mean coming clean about Dahl, and Greene, and possibly Hemingway, too. I wrote and rewrote the Sherwin passage, trying to ignore my dilemma. Once I did think about it, however, I realised something: I needed to tell Tony. I had to tell someone and I wanted to get the whole thing off my chest before he finalised the deal with Paul Mercer. Moreover, I wanted Tony to approve what I’d done.

  Thirty-six

  For nearly twenty years, James Sherwin has been one of the miss
ing men of English Literature. Now he is lost forever. I vividly recall reading what was to be his first published short story, ‘Silent Gunner’. It arrived on my desk in 1964, part of the ever growing post-bag of the small magazine I edited. Finding a talented author you’d never heard of was then — still is — a delightful surprise. I invited Jim to lunch, expecting someone my own age, finding instead a freckle-faced twenty-three year old who took his writing as seriously as only a very young man can.

  He was an orphan, his parents having died in the war (father in Egypt, mother in a London air raid). For the next ten years, Jim was passed around between relatives. He was also an autodidact who left school at fifteen and worked menial jobs (park keeper, street-sweeper, bricklayer) that allowed him time to think and write.

  Jim wrote in no recognisable tradition. He used to talk about Hemingway and Borges, but his favourite books were Bleak House and Vanity Fair. For all the mysterious edginess of his prose, he was a storyteller at heart, and success came quickly. His work in magazines was noticed and written about even before his first novel, the semi-autobiographical I, Singer was published in ’67. Then, at 26, he became — albeit briefly — a celebrity, feted by John Lennon and Mick Jagger, dating models and movie stars, gushingly reviewed wherever he was published. It was enough to turn anybody’s head. James ceased being Jim, turning himself into a legend. James immersed himself in the subculture of sex, drugs and rock and roll. Now and then he would clear his head with trips to a remote Greek island, where he could be anonymous, recover and write.

  Fame did his writing no favours. All but one of the nine stories featured in his second book, User, were written before this great success. It didn’t matter. The book’s publication both confirmed his reputation and raised expectations.

  However, James, always a slow writer, was drying up. His third and final book, Stargazer was a novella of fewer than thirty thousand words. Like I, Singer, it told of a young man’s disenchantment with the material world. Where the singer sought refuge in surrealism, sex and wild antics, the star gazer opted for mysticism, an ascetic life, becoming first a drop out, then a recluse. This was 1970. Sales and reviews were less good than for I, Singer, but still healthy. James embarked on a reading tour of universities — first in Britain, then in the USA, where he befriended writers such as Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan. Rather than read from his earlier books, Sherwin would perform passages from a work in progress, A Commune.

  The rest was silence. Sherwin retreated to the island of Karenos, where acolytes would try to track him down, usually failing. He wrote, farmed a little and meditated. A letter would come every few months. In the early ones, he talked about writing, but that soon stopped. Eventually, the letters slowed down to a trickle. Six years ago, he mentioned that he had married: ‘a sweet American girl who wants to get me writing again’. But despite Sonia’s encouragement, A Commune never appeared. When I wrote to him recently, asking for a piece for the Little Review’s final issue, James wrote back ‘Sonia bought me this computer in the hope that it would get me writing again, but all I seem to write on it are replies to prissy American doctoral students telling them to fuck off. Most days though, I sit down at the damned machine, try.’

  James’s death, of a heart attack, a few weeks after his fifty-third birthday, is a great loss. He was young still and might yet have finished the masterpiece many expected of him. Even so, he gave us two novels and ten enigmatic, exciting stories as good as anything written since the war. He is survived by his wife Sonia.They had no children.

  ‘What do you think?’ Tony asked me, after I’d read the obituary.

  ‘It reads well,’ I said, thinking. ‘Shouldn’t it have a bit more on his parents, background, that sort of thing?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Tony told me. ‘I could look all that stuff up.’

  ‘No need,’ I said. ‘I’ve been researching Sherwin.’

  I told Tony everything he needed, and more. He made notes, then typed the changes into the computer.

  ‘I didn’t know you’d become such an expert,’ he said. ‘I’ll print this off and fax it to The Guardian,’ he said.

  ‘Wait,’ I told him. ‘There’s something you need to see first.’

  I handed him the story I’d been working on.

  ‘What is it?’ Tony asked, glancing at the MS. ‘Trying to get another of your friend’s stories in the magazine?’

  Half the stuff we got from new writers — including Tim — was done on one of these Amstrads, with their slightly blurred dot matrix printouts.

  ‘It’s the same printer as James Sherwin used,’ I said.

  ‘I remember,’ Tony told me, taking the manuscript from me, reading the title. A Commune: extract from a work in progress. His eyes widened. ‘When did this arrive?’

  I considered lying. I could say that it had come in the post with one of those envelope destroyed labels and no accompanying note, that I’d only just worked out what it was. But I’d lied too much already. ‘It didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe you found it in the archive,’ Tony suggested, his voice unusually quiet. ‘Something you missed earlier.’

  ‘No,’ I told him. ‘I wrote it myself.’

  ‘Ah.’ Tony sat back, put his feet up on the desk and, ignoring me, began to read. I couldn’t watch him, so I stared out of the window. The weather was warming up. Men were wearing jackets instead of coats. The girl from the CD shop down the road, whom I sometimes fantasised about, had on a short sleeved T-shirt. I watched her rearranging the two for ten pounds boxes on the stall outside the shop and remembered what my mother told me about A Commune, how it was meant to be the definitive account of how the sixties’ dream went sour. How could I write about the sixties? I wasn’t born until 1971.

  Forty minutes later, Tony finished.

  ‘How long did this take you?’

  ‘A long time.’

  ‘Longer than the others?’ he asked, bluntly.

  ‘Yes.’ Had he known before, or did he work it out while reading?

  I’d expected a big scene, but Tony was subdued. I couldn’t tell if he was disappointed in me. ‘Where did you learn to do this?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a long story.’

  ‘I don’t have anywhere I have to be.’

  I told him — hesitantly at first, starting with Dickens in school, finishing with breaking into Dahl’s writing hut. As I recounted this last story, Tony burst into laughter and I knew that, however wrong I might have been, I was forgiven.

  ‘The irony is,’ he said when he’d recovered, ‘that’s the best one. Oh dear...’ His eyes had watered. He wiped them, then said, ‘what am I going to tell Graham?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘He suspected, you know.That was what first made me suspicious. I didn’t read out all of his letter to you. Let me find it.’

  He unlocked the top drawer of his desk, found the Greene letter and handed it to me. I read the familiar words, then got to the paragraph that Tony hadn’t included when he read it aloud.

  From the photocopy, this looks right, but I have no recollection whatsoever of writing it. Was I overdoing the benzedrine at the time? The style’s rather ragged, and that might explain it. Or is it possible somebody’s pulling a fast one on you? If I remember correctly, St. Pancras was railway offices at the time, not closed down, which seems an odd mistake for me to make. Publish by all means, if you think it’s good enough. I’m afraid I’m not up to doing a rewrite at the moment.

  I handed the letter back.

  ‘I wasn’t a hundred percent sure,’ Tony told me. ‘It seemed far too good for a nineteen year old, and the story was a godsend, so I wasn’t inclined to challenge it. Then Roald Dahl died and I decided to set you a test.’

  ‘You knew I’d faked the Dahl story?’

  Tony gave me one of his supercilious looks. ‘You didn’t know Dahl. He wouldn’t have left even a bad story lying around for forty years. He’d have recycled it. That’s what writers do.’


  ‘There’s somebody you haven’t mentioned,’ I said, meaning Sherwin, but Tony started talking about Paul Mercer instead.

  ‘I couldn’t understand why he’d alighted on me and was overpaying for the archives. Then I discovered that he was the man who’d sold those Hemingway papers. And I put two and two together. You were in Paris when those stories were discovered. Ergo, Mercer got them from you. Mercer found me thanks to you.’

  ‘I wrote to him,’ I explained. ‘I wanted to know what had happened to the money from the stories. Last week he told me that they still weren’t sold.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Tony told me. ‘The man’s a con artist. I don’t know what his game is and I doubt that I’ll see the seventy-five thousand he’s promised me. I’m interested to find out, that’s all. Have you slept with his wife yet?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Why not? Don’t tell me she’s faithful to him.’

  ‘No. I mean, she doesn’t have to be. It’s just...’

  ‘You’ve got her to yourself most days. What are you waiting for? You should take every opportunity that presents itself, otherwise you’ll end up with nothing but regrets.’

  It was hard to explain that Helen preferred me as a friend. Tony couldn’t understand how any man could fail to be completely controlled by his cock. I mumbled something then said what was really on my mind.