The Pretender

by David Belbin

  ‘What did you think of the Sherwin story?’

  ‘Not bad,’ Tony told me. ‘Needs work. You know, I heard Jim reading some of A Commune in 1970. If I looked in my diary, I might have some notes on what it was about.’

  ‘Do you really want me to do some work on the story?’ I asked, still unsure what Tony was thinking.

  ‘Why not?’ Tony asked again. ‘Jim’s dead. It won’t hurt him where he is.The wife’s probably short of money. It’ll give her something to show publishers, and we’ll sell more copies of the magazine, too. But we have to make sure it’s good enough. How fast can you write?’

  ‘Pretty fast,’ I replied.

  ‘Good. Because it’s imperative that the issue goes to press by the end of the week. Now, how shall I rewrite the penultimate paragraph for The Guardian? Let’s see. 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. See what you think of this. Does that sound convincing?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘But you’ll have to explain what “this” is.’

  Tony began to type. ‘This’ was an extract from A Commune, showing that he was still working on the book, twenty years on. The material he sent will appear in the final issue of the Little Review, to be published next month.

  ‘And then as before. What do you think?’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Let’s do it.’

  Only when he’d sent it off did I think of a complication. ‘If you’re selling the archive, then Paul will get the Sherwin letter and the manuscript.’

  ‘He can have them. We’ll print off a second copy of the story for the wife,’ Tony told me. ‘As for the letter...’

  He found Sherwin’s original letter in the drawer and looked at the signature, then at the writing on the envelope.

  ‘Two choices. Either I hand write the extra words in blue-black ink. Or you retype the whole letter on your computer, print it off, and I forge the signature. What do you think?’

  I thought about it. ‘It’s possible the wife will find the original letter on his computer and discover it was changed. Better to hand write the extra note, if you can do it convincingly.’

  ‘I’ll practise,’ Tony told me, with a mischievous grin. He was getting into the game. ‘Go to Ryman’s. Buy me as many different kinds of blue-black ink as they sell.’

  When I returned, Tony showed me his imitation of Sherwin’s writing. He played about with ink until he’d got the right shade. Then, taking a deep breath, he wrote the note onto Sherwin’s original letter. His hand jerked at one moment and I thought that he was going to lose it. But the words, as they appeared, looked convincing. See what you think of this. We watched the ink dry then compared the colour with that of the signature.

  ‘It looks right,’ I told Tony.

  ‘Let’s hope so. Now, we have to get on with your story.’

  ‘I could bring the word processor down and we could work in here.’

  ‘No,’ Tony told me. ‘Mercer may show up any time. The deal’s meant to be signed tomorrow. I don’t want him to see anything suspicious. Let’s move your computer to my flat. We can work on it there.’

  ‘I’ll book a taxi to take it. I’ve got to meet Helen in a few minutes, but I’ll join you there.’

  ‘Bring a change of clothes. You might need to work all night.’

  Thirty-seven

  ‘I thought you’d stood me up,’ Helen said, outside Buckingham Palace, where she’d been watching the Changing of the Guard.

  ‘Sorry,’ I told her. ‘A writer’s died. We need to remake the final issue. What was it like?’

  ‘OK,’ Helen said. ‘What writer? Anyone I’d have heard of?’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said, hooking my arm through hers. ‘A guy from the sixties, James Sherwin.’

  Helen blinked. We began to walk. ‘He wrote Stargazer, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘My mum was keen on that book.’

  ‘Mine too.’

  ‘Where are we going?’ Helen asked.

  ‘I don’t know. Just walking, I guess. What do you want to do?’

  ‘Nothing special,’ Helen said. ‘I like just walking with you.’

  ‘Fine. We’ll stop when we see somewhere we want to go into. What did you do last night?’

  ‘Paul took me to Simpsons-on-the-Strand. I was the youngest person there by years. Come to think of it, Paul was the second youngest person there.’

  We laughed.

  ‘You have to work tonight?’ she asked.

  ‘I’m afraid so. The last issue has to be ready to print by next week.’

  ‘Tomorrow’s my last night before we go back to New York.’

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Helen told me. ‘Paul’s got to go to Scotland. He’s negotiating to buy some Robert Louis Stevenson papers. He tried to persuade me to go with him but it’s cold up there. I’d prefer to be here, with you. Let me buy you dinner tomorrow night to thank you for showing me round these last few days.’

  ‘I’d love that,’ I said.

  We discussed where to eat and arranged to meet at her hotel. Our wandering had somehow brought us back to Soho.

  ‘You’re so lucky,’ Helen said,‘living in the heart of things.’

  ‘It’s not as romantic as it seems,’ I told her. ‘A bit of a hovel, really.’

  ‘I’ve never seen your room,’ Helen said, leaning into me as she spoke. ‘Will you show me?’

  ‘If you like,’ I said, trying to remember what kind of state I’d left it in.

  ‘Will Tony be there?’

  ‘No. He’s gone home for the day.’ And I was meant to be with him soon, but I didn’t tell Helen this. She followed me up to the office, then held onto my arm as we climbed the rickety stairs to my tiny flat.

  ‘It’s so small!’ she said. ‘Is this where you do your writing?’

  ‘Mostly. I sometimes use the office, but, at night, when the heat’s off, it’s easier to get this room warm.’

  ‘What do you use? A typewriter?’

  ‘Pen and ink,’ I lied, not wanting to explain where my computer had gone. But Helen had moved on to something else. She bounced on my three-quarter sized bed.

  ‘A big bed for such a small room.’

  ‘Tony used to use it for his assignations.’

  ‘Tony, but not you?’

  Scarcely knowing how to reply, I stood at the window. I pointed to a building two doors down.

  ‘Graham Greene used to meet a prostitute called Pepe in that room.There’s a story about it in the last issue but one.’

  ‘And you?’ Helen asked again. Her hand stroked my back. ‘Do you ever..?’

  I put my arm around her shoulders and she didn’t flinch from my touch.

  ‘I know some of the working girls. They say hello, but that’s all. I’ve been waiting...’

  ‘I know you have,’ Helen said, and her touch changed. Her hand started to slide into the back of my jeans. Gently, I turned her towards me. We kissed.

  It wasn’t like the enthusiastic but inexperienced kisses I’d shared with Francine. It was a carnal kiss. Our bodies rubbed against each other so hungrily, I thought we might make love then and there. But we didn’t.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ Helen told me, breathlessly. ‘Paul’s expecting me. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  With that, she hurried out, not even giving me time to say goodbye. It seemed that Tony, this morning, had been right about Helen, as about so many other things. She was mine for the taking.

  When I got to Highgate I found that Tony had set up my computer in the living room. He had a pot of coffee on the go.

  ‘By the time the obituaries appear in the morning, we’ve got to have a convincing Sherwin story ready,’ he told me.


  The news of Sherwin’s death had only just broken in the media. The BBC’s Ceefax service had two sentences saying that Greek authorities had confirmed the death of British born author James Sherwin, at the age of fifty-three. As we worked into the evening, Tony put on the Radio Four programme Kaleidoscope, which ran a brief item about Sherwin’s death.

  ‘It’s almost twenty years since he disappeared from the literary scene, but author James Sherwin, whose death was announced today, casts a long shadow. Twenty-four years since his only full length novel I, Singer, Sherwin’s many fans are still awaiting a successor. Now that he’s dead, the question is: will his readers have to wait forever?’

  Two Sherwin ‘scholars’ debated this issue (they had no idea) then moved on to place James Sherwin’s place in history. The first said that he deserved to be talked about in the same breath as Borges or Kafka. The other thought he’d been overrated, perhaps because he published so little, when he was so young.

  ‘There’s bound to be a flood of posthumous publications, and then we’ll see. My guess is that the Sherwin bubble will burst and he’ll soon be little more than a sixties footnote...’

  ‘Should we be doing this?’ I asked Tony, as the item ended.

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Whatever I do, however good it is, we’ll be messing with his reputation.’

  ‘James didn’t give a fig what happened after he was dead,’ Tony assured me. ‘He didn’t believe in a personal afterlife and a literary afterlife wouldn’t have interested him either. He’d have enjoyed the joke.’

  Tony showed me some notes he’d made at the last reading he saw Sherwin give. The details were scant. James read a passage about hippies living in caves on an island. Broad comedy at first, unusual for him. Hints of more characteristic darkness towards the end.

  ‘It’s too dangerous,’ I told Tony. ‘The stuff I’ve already written is based on so little information. Somebody might have taped his readings. In America, they almost certainly did. We’ll be caught out.’

  ‘Yet you tell me you’ve been trying to write the book he wrote.’

  ‘Or would have written,’ I explained to Tony. ‘I thought he’d given up writing altogether. But what I wrote was an exercise, for myself, not for publication. The part I showed you is the best bit.’

  We agreed to look at my piece together, seeing what worked and what didn’t. It was an absorbing process. We examined each paragraph in detail, line by line, word by word. The only thing Tony left alone was the punctuation. I found it easy to imitate any writer’s punctuation habits. I knew all about Sherwin’s over-use of colons, his misuse of commas, his chaotic way with italics, his preference for the dash over parentheses.

  Examining my story with Tony, I felt like I was learning more than ever before. His questions were very simple. ‘Why would he use that word? What’s he trying to say here?’ We examined the story as though it were by Sherwin himself and we, his editors, were trying to decipher his wishes.

  ‘Have you done this before?’ I asked Tony at one point. ‘Did you go over the two stories of Sherwin’s that you published with him?’

  ‘Not as closely as this,’ Tony said. ‘But, yes. I asked some questions. Jim made a few minor changes as a result. Great writers rarely mind being edited. All they want is for their work to be as good as possible.’

  We worked for hours, losing track of time. Now and then I had a breakthrough. A sentence or two disappeared. A paragraph was moved to a different place. A new line of dialogue lifted the story, giving hints of a meaning that shifted the ground in a typically elliptical way. I worked in a reference to living in caves, which anyone who remembered Sherwin’s readings of nineteen years before might notice and say — ah, yes, it comes back to me now. By the early hours of the morning, we were as near as we were going to get.

  ‘I suggest we sleep on it,’ Tony said, pouring us both a large scotch. ‘See how it looks in the morning.’

  He made me up a bed on the sofa, then retired. It took me a while to get off. I was exhilarated by the work I’d done. It was the most demanding forgery I’d done, written in the full knowledge that what I wrote would be subjected to endless scrutiny. Yet, thanks to Tony’s help, I felt confident.

  ‘It’s a funny thing,’ Tony said to me at midday, when I was halfway through my second mug of tea. ‘You hear of paintings being forged all the time, but never literature. Why? I’ve been wondering. Because there’s so little demand? Hardly. Because it’s hard to do convincingly? Surely not. Experts are easy to fool. Think of the Hitler diaries and the nobs who were taken in by them. I think it’s because writing great literature requires both enormous skill and immense talent. Painting skills are easily picked up. You can get by on a little talent and a lot of application. The painter is valued for originality, for innovation. Copying somebody else’s innovations is relatively easy. But literature has to remake itself all the time.The writer himself often falls short of the mark. Every now and then an obscure academic tries to make a name for himself by attributing some long lost poem or play to Shakespeare. He may be right. We’ll never know. But people don’t want to believe the attribution because the piece simply isn’t good enough.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’ I asked. ‘You want me to forge Shakespeare?’

  ‘No. You’ve been careful to do twentieth century writers, forging in an area where it’s still possible to create a patina of reality in the manuscripts. You’re able to mimic the minds of men who are nearly your contemporaries. That’s the clever thing. I don’t understand how you do it. Talent, sure, but it’s a special skill, too. Lots of writers copy others. But you become them. It’s a kind of genius. I wonder how long you’ll be able to do it.’

  This was a question I often asked myself. In a way, I didn’t want my facility for forgery to last. I wanted my writing to become itself, not a copy.

  ‘Perhaps it’s like having a photographic memory,’ Tony went on, ‘something a few people have when they’re young, but which quickly fades in adulthood. You never know. Could be it’s a skill you’ll always possess. The only way to find out would be to locate other people who’ve shared the same skill. But if others existed, then, by the very nature of the thing, we wouldn’t know who they were.’

  The phone rang, interrupting our conversation. Tony answered.

  ‘Paul, how are you? Yes, tomorrow is fine. I’ll sign the papers today, so that we can meet at your solicitors when you return. Have a good trip.’

  He put the phone down, then told me, with a sly smile, ‘According to Paul Mercer, I should get my seventy-five thousand tomorrow.’

  We went over the Sherwin story one more time, then Tony printed off two copies: one for the typesetters, one for Sonia Sherwin. Before leaving, I went and bought the day’s broadsheets. We wanted to read the Sherwin obituaries.Tony’s was the best informed. The paper had added tributes from JG Ballard and Michael Moorcock. Elsewhere, The Independent wrote that Sherwin was one of the most original British novelists to emerge since the war. The Times was more niggardly, describing Sherwin as a sixties casualty who ‘had the good grace to disappear, rather than continue trading on his inflated reputation. He will be remembered, if at all, for the minor curiosity that is I, Singer, a book often begun but seldom finished by a generation of aspirant dropouts.’ The Daily Telegraph didn’t cover Sherwin’s death at all, giving all their space to two ex-army men and a senior figure from the British Medical Council.

  Reading these obituaries, I worried again about how my story would affect posterity’s view of Sherwin. But Tony told me I was wrong.

  ‘Interest in writers tends to wane when they die. Their books turn up cheap in the secondhand shops. Nobody wants to write about them. Most sink back into the obscurity they came from. Few rise again. We’re helping to keep Jim in the public eye. Don’t feel guilty about it.’

  I noticed that Sherwin had become ‘Jim’ again. In death, Tony was able to reclaim the old friend whose work he’d dis
covered. Tony called a taxi. We loaded the computer, then rode to Soho, dropping the story off to be typeset on the way. The final issue was ready to go to press.

  ‘Paul’s spending the night in Scotland,’ Tony told me, as I struggled upstairs with my trusty Amstrad. ‘His young wife will be all alone. Just in case you wanted to know.’

  Thirty-eight

  I was in a chipper mood when I collected Helen, wearing the clothes she’d helped me choose (and mostly paid for). My beard was trimmed, my hair washed. I was anxious to keep Helen to her half promise of the afternoon before. But Helen, while affectionate, seemed ill at ease. She was dressed young, in jeans, trainers, and a sliver of a silk top concealed beneath the khaki combat jacket that half the young women in London seemed to wear that year. Yet her face was lined with concerns she didn’t share with me. Our conversation was aimless, arbitrary, as though we were both putting off the real point of our evening.

  After the meal we walked, arms tentatively linked, along the Charing Cross Road. Some of its secondhand bookshops were still open, even though it was after ten. Helen insisted on going in to Any Amount of Books, where she asked for a copy of User, Sherwin’s book of short stories.

  ‘Sorry. We had one, but it went earlier today. The book’s still in paperback, I think.’

  It was, and I had my mother’s copy back at the office, but I didn’t mention this to Helen, any more than I mentioned the Sherwin story about to appear in our final issue. I was beginning to doubt what had grown between us that week, to see how little, really, we had in common. Helen was a married woman from another country. I was a callow youth, inexperienced, a virgin. What happened later was bound to disappoint her and might humiliate me. My half plan, to ask her to leave Paul, to stay here with me, seemed ridiculous. What would Helen want with a penniless nineteen year old who had no proper home or job?

  We were near the office. I would be more at ease there than in a hotel room paid for by Paul. Also, If Helen refused to come up, I would know there was no chance. I would see her to the door of her hotel then walk back.