Hemingway’s Chair

concentrated on the typewriter once more and set
his mind to recording just how things were with him, clear and spare. The way a
writer should.
    But
now there were voices downstairs, blurred and distracting. He drained the vodka
and readjusted the paper in the typewriter and tried again. Nothing happened.
There was a fundamental problem. He didn’t feel bad any more, because the more
he considered how bad he felt, the closer he felt to Papa. The closer he felt,
the better he felt, and the less there was to write. He tried once more, but
this time he was interrupted by a tentative knock on the door, followed by an
equally tentative voice, calling his name.
    ‘Martin?
Martin... are you there?’
    ‘Who
is it?’
    ‘Elaine.’
     
    There
had been a time, after she and Martin had become more than just fellow postal
officers, that Elaine visited Marsh Cottage regularly. Often she would do no
more than sit in the kitchen and drink a coffee with Martin and Kathleen. But
sometimes when his mother had settled down to watch television in the front
room they would have the kitchen to themselves. Martin would rummage around and
produce an ageing bottle of sweet sherry and they’d drink, a little formally at
first, and start talking at the same time and then apologising and talking
again in odd dislocated phrases until Kathleen came in to make herself a
nightcap and it was time for Elaine to go.
    It
had really begun about eighteen months ago. Jack Blyth, the estate agent’s son,
had passed his law exams and decided that Elaine Rudge, adoring as she was,
wasn’t enough to keep him in a place like Theston. He was offered a job at his
uncle’s law firm in Chester and took the first train out. After a year with one
man, Elaine found herself once again looking around. On dull days at the post
office she had always felt Martin’s presence, but she now began to experience
quite a strong physical attraction when he reached across her for a date stamp
or a game licence. She was pretty sure he’d never been with a woman. Some of
her girlfriends used to giggle about him, as if being thirty-five and still
living with his mother could only mean one thing, but Elaine felt there was
more to him than that. As soon as she began to show him she was interested she
caught him taking sidelong glances at her and accidentally on purpose brushing
the tips of her fingers when she handed over her bags of change. He took to
reading her their horoscopes in the morning paper. One day he came in with an
astrology book which said that people born under their two stars, Capricorn and
Libra, were completely incompatible and he’d gone very pink and that had been
the first time they had really laughed together.
    Nothing
happened between them until the evening she was first invited up into his room.
It was Easter Monday and they’d spent the day walking the coast; path almost as
far as Hopton. He’d always maintained that his room was far too much of a mess
to take a lady anywhere near but, as they neared Marsh Cottage on the way back,
he’d admitted that the real reason was I more complicated and that she’d
probably laugh at him if he told her. She didn’t laugh when she saw the room.
She was just relieved he wasn’t a train-spotter or a serial killer. What struck
her most was that it was the room of a different man from the one she knew. Not
someone shy and quiet and hesitant but a man of worldliness and display. He
must have had well over a hundred books, many in beautiful hardback editions.
Elsewhere there was a harpoon, a stack of jazz records, a typewriter, ashtrays
from Parisian cafes, boxing gloves, African masks. On one wall was a huge
scarlet and gold bull-fight poster. On another was the biggest photograph she’d
ever seen of anybody. She had asked him why anyone would want to live in a room
with such a sad picture.
    Martin
had been shy at first, stumblingly trying to explain, but then, to her
ever-increasing surprise, he’d brought out a bottle of vodka and poured them
both a drink. That calmed him down. He told her who the man was and what he
felt about him. She’d never heard Martin talk like that before. They drank more
vodka and she slipped off her shoes and curled up on the low sofa, beneath the
brooding gaze and swirling cape of the bullfighter, and Martin insisted they
drink a toast to every one of the man’s novels — all ten of them. This had
seemed a pleasantly silly thing to do, but they’d only got through a