The Pretender

by David Belbin

  Seeing me approach, Mercer dragged himself away from the elderly poet he’d been chatting up.

  ‘Do we have something to discuss, Mark?’ Mercer’s tone was mildly aggressive.

  ‘You know we do,’ I said, then added, provoking him. ‘How’s Helen?’

  ‘She’s busy furnishing the townhouse we’ve just bought in the Village.’

  ‘You must give me your new address,’ I said to him.

  Paul eyed me coldly. ‘What do you want, Mark?’

  ‘Tony tells me that you sold the Hemingway stories, several months ago.’

  ‘Yes, that’s true.’

  ‘You lied to me.’

  ‘You lied to me about finding them,’ Paul pointed out. ‘Selling those fake manuscripts could have ruined my reputation.’

  ‘Instead, it made you.’

  ‘In a way,’ Paul admitted. ‘But not in the way I would have chosen. All that publicity was very embarrassing for Helen.’

  ‘We never agreed what your percentage was,’ I told him, businesslike.

  ‘No, we didn’t,’ Paul said. ‘As far as I’m concerned, I found those stories. There are plenty of people who’ll remember Helen and me trawling through the flea-market, looking in old copies of Paris Match. Our story stands up. Whereas your story — what is it, exactly? That you found the stories, as you told Helen? No proof. That you faked the stories and I took them from you? Again, no proof. And even if you were able to prove that you forged those stories, you couldn’t establish that I knew about them, because I didn’t. My reputation as a dealer would hardly suffer. Your reputation as — whatever you think you are — would be ruined.’

  ‘But I could prove that you didn’t pay me for the stories,’ I argued.

  ‘Oh but I did,’ Paul said.‘You accepted a thousand pounds. I didn’t ask for a receipt, so you may have avoided paying tax on it, but I have a very good witness who’ll tell any court that you not only took the money, but you also accepted various goods in kind that were paid for from my credit card account. You did well out of me, Mark. Now, let it drop.’

  My face burned. But I wouldn’t leave it.

  ‘What do you know about the fire?’ I asked, and as soon as these crass words were out of my mouth, I regretted them.

  ‘I know you were lucky,’ Paul told me. ‘Lucky that all evidence of your forgeries went up in smoke, lucky that Graham Greene died when he did, lucky you weren’t in the building when it happened. Where were you, Mark?’

  I didn’t answer this, but I didn’t have to. Paul Mercer was the sort of man who only asked questions to which he already knew the answer. He knew I’d fucked his wife and he didn’t care. Maybe he had even persuaded Helen to seduce me, but I couldn’t countenance that, not then.

  ‘If you stay in this game,’ Paul lectured me, ‘our paths will probably cross again. So remember this. You can’t beat me. Whereas I know enough to destroy you.’ He gave me a broad smile and turned round. ‘Hey, Tony! Good to see you. Nice service, but I’ve got to run. I really liked that last issue you did. You went out in style, gotta give you that.’

  We watched him scuttle away.

  ‘What did the widow want?’ I asked Tony.

  ‘I don’t know. I’m meeting her again later in the week, after she’s seen both sets of Jim’s publishers.’

  ‘You don’t think she suspects?’

  ‘Suspicion doesn’t come into it. She either knows, or she doesn’t know.’

  Next day, I went to the British Library, where I found a facsimile edition of the recently discovered Paris Hemingway stories. My original few pages had been expanded into an expensive hardback, newly published by a university press. It had a scholarly introduction, extensive footnotes and my variant text for Out Of Season. Skimming the pages, I found it hard to believe I’d been so obsessed with the macho Hemingway, when I could have spent my time in Paris retracing the steps of Beckett or Joyce. Saul Bellow, I’d since discovered, had written most of his best novel there. I was over Hemingway, but my fakes were part of the canon. The reviews I’d seen had been respectful, convinced that Paul Mercer had made an important find. His reputation as a manuscript dealer rested on these two stories. Nothing would give me greater delight than to fuck him up.

  I held one trump card Paul Mercer didn’t know about. But I couldn’t decide how to play my hand. I didn’t want to claim credit for my forgeries. I wanted to discredit Paul Mercer as a dealer in valuable manuscripts.

  That evening, I tried to explain all this to Tony, who was in unusually good spirits. As we talked, I hit upon the answer.

  ‘I know exactly what to do,’ I told my friend.

  ‘And are you going to tell me?’ Tony asked.

  ‘I won’t involve you. But I’ll need to go to France, in a week or so. I lost my bank card in the fire and I’m waiting for a new one. Can you lend me some cash for a plane ticket?’

  ‘No problem,’ Tony said. ‘The bank has increased my overdraft limit now I have an insurance payout on the way.’

  ‘I thought the offices weren’t insured?’

  ‘The buildings were insured, but by the owners. I only had a lease. The office contents were never insured. However, after agreeing a price with Mercer, I insured the archive. Once I knew what it was worth I’d’ve been mad not to.’

  ‘Astute,’ I said. Tony could be flaky in his personal life, but never where the magazine was concerned. ‘How much do you need?’ He offered me a generous amount. It would take me a few days to get a new passport. That was OK, because there was something I needed to do first.

  Forty-two

  ‘Are you going to explain why you need the typewriter all of a sudden?’

  Out of breath, I didn’t reply. I’d written to Francine and she’d collected the machine from the friend’s house where it was stashed. I’d met her taxi and was carrying the machine up to my hotel room in the seventh arrondissement.

  At sixteen Francine was the beauty I’d anticipated when she was fourteen. She had lost all of her gawkiness. Once I’d put the machine down, I wanted nothing more than to take up where her father had interrupted us in the summer of ’89. But she wanted to talk about the typewriter.

  ‘You’re going to do another forgery, aren’t you? Do you still have any of the right paper?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I told her.

  ‘You must tell me everything. We never had secrets before.’

  Her English had become more sophisticated than my French, so we spoke in my language. When I was done, she clapped her hands.

  ‘I think it will work, if I help you. But I don’t understand why you’re so determined to expose your own forgeries.’

  Hesitantly, I told her the rest of it, up to and including the point where the office burnt down while I slept with Helen. Francine was not in the least shocked.

  ‘You think they planned it all, that her husband stole the documents?’

  ‘Not all the documents,’ I said. ‘Maybe a few of the most valuable ones — things that he can sell to collectors who won’t mind their not being able to show them in public. Or he’ll save them for a few years, then sell after Tony’s dead.’

  ‘He whored his own wife for papers worth a few thousand pounds! Didn’t you say he was a rich man?’

  ‘“Rich people stay that way by holding onto their money”, Tony says. Anyhow, I don’t know if Helen was in on it. We’d become very close. She knew how I felt about her. I think she was starting to feel that way about me. Maybe Paul used her, the way he used...’

  Even as I said this, I knew how pathetic it sounded. I remembered Helen was keen we went to her hotel room, not the office, on the night of my birthday.

  ‘You poor romantic,’ Francine said, stroking my hair.

  ‘I’m over her now,’ I assured her.

  She kissed me on the cheek.Then she told me she had to go. We arranged to meet again the following day.

  When Francine was gone, I got out some paper. The sheets looked the same as t
he sheets I’d typed my first Hemingway stories on. They had a similar, brittle feel, but were of English manufacture, and only twenty years old.

  I’d determined to give up forgery after the Sherwin story. Yet it seemed that, whenever I stopped, a burning necessity arose, sucking me back in. I had already drafted what I was going to type. The forgery had to be as good as the others, if not better. But I needn’t feel any guilt, or fear. This time, I was planning to get caught.

  Forty-three

  The address on the receipt was easy to find.The old lady was still alive, and at home. She invited us up to her cramped apartment. Francine did the bulk of the talking, giggling as if playing the part of a favourite granddaughter, disarming Madame Devonier. Without her, I suspect, the discussion that followed would have been much less complaisant.

  Madame Devonier was eighty-three but her mind was still sharp. She’d heard of the Hemingway stories, seen the Paris Match article. It amused her to know that the stories were forgeries, typed on the machine she had sold to me. But she couldn’t understand why I wanted to give the machine back. Francine said my behaviour was an example of the peculiar British sense of humour. Then she explained. Madame laughed a lot and opened the bottle of wine we’d brought with us. Once it became clear that she stood to make some money out of our plan, she became positively enthusiastic. As we drank the wine, Madame Devonier rehearsed the story she would tell, asking questions now and then. Relaxing into her role, she began adding details of her own that would increase the tale’s authenticity. Francine and I played the part of journalists, taking it in turns to quiz her.

  Later that afternoon, a little drunk and still excited by our visit to Madame Devonier, Francine and I returned to my hotel room, for reasons we hadn’t discussed. There was no foreplay or seduction, not unless you count my taking Francine’s hand as we climbed the stairs. We were doing the inevitable. She was more experienced than me, but not very much so. I was grateful, as we undressed, that I had already been with Helen and had some idea of what to do. But there was no need to worry. Francine and I were easy with each other: passionate and friendly. Neither of us behaved as though our lives depended on this one act.

  Afterwards, I would have promised to move back to Paris there and then, had Francine agreed to be my girlfriend. Only she already had a boyfriend, of whom she didn’t speak, and had to return home for dinner at seven to parents who wouldn’t abide me. Next day, she had to go to school. I had to go back to England. I had no more chance of a future with her than I had with Helen.

  That evening, when I returned with the typewriter, I worried that Madame Devonier might have changed her mind. But she hadn’t. I heaved the typewriter into her spare room, cleaned it carefully to avoid fingerprints, then watched as the old lady covered it in dust, swept from the top of an old wardrobe.

  Forty-four

  The meeting with Sonia Sherwin was to take place in her hotel suite the day after my return from France. In the taxi, on our way there, Tony gave me a belated warning about the Hemingway plan.

  ‘Paul Mercer did well out of your Hemingway forgeries. But you weren’t going to sell them. You haven’t lost anything... yet. By exposing that the stories were faked, you may expose yourself. You want to be a writer, but you’re risking your reputation before you start.’

  ‘Mercer can’t bring me into it without revealing how he really got the stories.’

  ‘He’s cleverer than you give him credit for. A man like Mercer is good at revenge. He might sit on your secret for years, then decide to expose you just when you’re making a name for yourself.’

  ‘It’s a risk I’m willing to take.’

  Sonia Sherwin was an elegant American woman with dark, Italianate features. She was forty but looked five years younger. Sonia wore black, confidently allowing the odd fleck of grey to highlight her dark hair. With her aristocratic air, the widow could have been a smaller, older version of Helen Mercer. She talked about James Sherwin as though she were describing a historical figure, rather than a husband.

  ‘When I first met him, he’d stopped writing altogether. That novel you published part of, he’d abandoned it years ago.’

  Her words were addressed to Tony. I sat to his side, trying to work out whether she’d sussed us. So far, we seemed to be in the clear.

  ‘Pity,’ Tony said.

  ‘As I told you in my letter, I am Jim’s literary executor. He left very strict instructions on what was to be preserved. There are barely enough good unpublished or uncollected pieces to fill a slim book. Jim didn’t want to rehash anything that would harm his reputation.’

  ‘I’m sure that wouldn’t happen,’ Tony murmured.

  ‘My husband used to speak about the terrible Hemingway stuff that got published decades after he died. Jim wasn’t satisfied by most of his output, even when he was at his peak. He destroyed nearly everything he wrote in the last twenty years.’

  ‘Nearly everything?’ Tony said, sounding alarmed. I wondered if the Hemingway comment was a sly dig. Probably not. The poor quality of Hemingway’s late work was one reason why the recent discovery of early material from his nascent, vital years had been greeted with such excitement.

  ‘His publishers have been on to me, Tony. They’d given up on A Commune years ago. The contract was cancelled. But they love what you published. They say if they put something out quickly it will sell in vast quantities. They think Jim must have been getting ready to finish the thing. They don’t understand why I’m reluctant to hand everything over. But I expect you do.’

  She held up a copy of the final edition of the Little Review. This issue had had the largest print run of the magazine’s history, staying on shop shelves for less than two weeks before it completely sold out. Sonia’s voice became cold, toneless.

  ‘I was surprised when this contained an extract from A Commune, especially as I’d watched Jim burn his only copy of the unfinished, handwritten manuscript. It was a huge weight off his mind, he told me at the time.’

  ‘Jim was always a perfectionist,’ Tony murmured. ‘But...’

  He thought better of finishing the sentence. Sonia was reaching into a cheap, brown cardboard box at the side of her chair.

  ‘You were good enough to send me the original print-out of the extract Jim sent you.’ She took some loose leaf pages out of the box, held them up. ‘Mark, would you like a look at the stuff Jim was working on when he died?’

  ‘Very much,’ I said.

  ‘They’re more memoir than fiction, and very fragmentary, not publishable as they stand. I printed them off before I left the island. I wanted a hard copy in case there was anything wrong with the disks. But I haven’t had time to separate the pages.’

  She rested the loose leaf sheets on the carpet, then began to pull a stack of cheap, thin computer paper out of the box.To make such paper A4 in size, you needed to tear narrow strips from each side, every strip punctured where the sheets were held by the roller. Then you must tear the perforated pages apart. Sonia concertinaed the connected sheets in front of us.

  ‘This was the only kind of paper Jim used for his creative work,’ she told me. ‘With single sheets, you have to stand by the printer and feed it in a page at a time. Jim didn’t have the patience for that.’

  ‘Maybe...’ Tony began, but Sonia silenced him with a glare. She picked up the final issue of the Little Review again, opening it at the Sherwin story.

  ‘Jim didn’t write this. I want to know who did.’

  Forty-five

  As Sonia Sherwin was interrogating us, an interrogation of a different kind was taking place across the English channel. Madame Devonier was busy telling journalists about her amazing find. She had rung Paris Match first. Several papers had beat a path to the old lady’s door and listened to her well rehearsed story. Madame Devonier insisted that, for months, she hadn’t realised the famous ‘Hemingway’ stories came from her flat. One day a friend suggested the stories might have been discovered in the old copies of Paris Match sh
e had taken to the flea market two years earlier. Madame Devonier went through the rest of the magazines she kept under the bed in her spare room.

  After her discovery, she didn’t at first consider the old typewriter, which still sat above the wardrobe in the same room. She was too excited by having found the third story, which turned out to be a previously unknown piece, one Hemingway never rewrote. She hoped it would make her rich. But the typeface on the story was worryingly familiar. She occasionally typed letters on the old machine. The last time that the typewriter was used by another person, she realised, would have been twenty years ago, just after she was widowed. That summer, a young American had rented her spare room for a couple of months.

  No, after all this time, she couldn’t remember the young man’s name, but he had borrowed the typewriter, with her permission. It was never used often. She recalled there was some very old paper with it.The lodger finished this paper off and replaced it. He left in a hurry, owing two weeks rent, she remembered that. The old Paris Match magazines were kept in the spare room for visitors to read. He must have stashed his stories amongst them before he left.

  Were the Hemingway stories a deliberate attempt to defraud the finder? Not on her behalf. Maybe on the young American’s. After so many years, who could guess his intentions? It could be that the stories were an exercise he practised to pass the time while he was supposed to be studying French. She recalled that his spoken French was not very good.

  Madame Devonier was too honest a person to profit from a forgery. She didn’t know whether this last story would be worth anything. But even forgeries had a monetary value, she had read somewhere, if they became famous enough. So she had gone to the journalists, seeking advice.

  In the weeks that followed, the university that had bought the Hemingway manuscripts allowed comparison tests to be done. There was no doubt: the ‘new’ Hemingway story was typed on the same typewriter as the other pieces, a Royal, the same brand of machine Hemingway used in the twenties. However, while the first two stories had been typed on paper at least seventy years old, this third one was on paper a good fifty years younger.