Hemingway’s Chair

corner of
the magazine. He enjoyed the young man’s passion and he knew the limitations of
a post office salary.
    ‘I
have to look hard for surprises for you. And there aren’t any bargains at that
level.’ He reached up with; his left hand and eased a protruding early
Victorian edition of Tristram Shandy back into place.
    ‘And
the Star... ?’
    ‘Fifty.’
    Martin
whistled.
    Arnold
Julian spoke softly without looking at Martin. ‘The two of them for a hundred?’
    ‘Well...
I’ll see what I can do. I’ll have to think of a way. I’d hoped to have a bit
more money to spare, but it looks as if I shall have to wait. Will you hang on
to them?’
    ‘I’ll
do my best.’
    Martin
nodded his thanks and made quite quickly for the door, to cover his
disappointment.
    ‘There
is another collector interested.’
    Martin
stopped, hand on the latch. ‘There’s someone else?’
    ‘Enquiries
have been made. I doubled the price and they went away.’
    ‘What
was he after?’
    ‘She.
A lady. American. Anything Hemingway.’
    ‘American?’
    Julian
nodded. ‘Unmistakably.’
    ‘Was
she going to come back?’
    ‘It
was implied.’
    ‘Right.
Well. Thank you.’
    There
wasn’t much more he could say. He’d never had a rival, not in this part of the
world. Not for Hemingway. Dealers crossed the country for Hardy and Wordsworth
and George Orwell and even A. A. Milne, but not the Master. Trust the
Americans. As he pedalled home clouds swept in from nowhere and it was raining
well before he reached the house.
     
    Papa
called them his ‘black ass’ moods. Deep depressions into which he sank at many
times in his life. Martin empathised as best he could but the sad truth was
that even on the worst days at the post office, even when he had pensioners
queuing out into the street, or even the time he had discovered that the books
were two hundred and fifty-three pounds short on balance day, he had never felt
a glimmer of ‘that gigantic bloody emptiness’ that Hemingway had once described
in a letter to his fellow writer John Dos Passos. But on this particular
Saturday, as the rain blew against his window and the clouds sank lower and
greyer over the fields, he was ruefully surprised to find that a feeling of
‘black ass’-ness was not far off.
    It
didn’t seem at all fair when he thought about it. His life was unspectacular,
he knew that, but he was careful and thorough and conscientious and demanded
little of others. Now, suddenly, this was judged not to he enough. He loved
Theston post office and he loved Hemingway and now it seemed he had a rival for
both of them.
    Martin
pulled open the door of the old wardrobe that had once stood in his parents’
room. He selected one of his two thick American sports shirts, bought direct
mail from L. L. Bean of Maine two summers ago. He pulled it on over his vest.
It was big and woollen with tortoise-shell buttons and studs at the pocket tops.
He tucked as much of it as he could into the top of his trousers, then walked
across to the cabinet with the red cross on the front and took out a
half-bottle of vodka and, from a cupboard below, a glass and some tonic water.
Moving his chair across to the field-table, acquired from a sale of 1950s
African safari equipment, he sat down at the Corona Portable Number 3 to write
about what he felt. These were the best moments, these moments at the
typewriter. With a blank sheet of foolscap and a glass of something strong he
knew he was just the way the Master had been, so often.
    Martin’s
hands hovered over the dark, round-headed keys, but his mind was paralysed.
Outside he heard the soft croaking call of brent-geese heading for the estuary.
He glanced at his watch. Four forty-five. At any moment his mother would call
up and tell him tea was ready. As far as his mother was concerned, the day was
made up of a series of closely observed times. Breakfast time, lunchtime,
teatime, time for a biscuit, time for a bath, time for bed. Perhaps it came
from having been a teacher. Or having been married to a postman.
    Martin
made a superhuman effort to concentrate, closing his eyes and thinking himself
on to the hot, breezy porch of the Finca Vigia, Hemingway’s home in Cuba, or
the grand sitting room of a suite in the Palace Hotel, Madrid, or in a corner
of Harry’s Bar or the Gritti in Venice, but nothing came into his mind besides
the rain on the windows of a warm, sweaty bedroom in Suffolk. He drank some
vodka and felt better. Then he