Hemingway’s Chair

Martin. ‘Let’s face it. We both bloody know that should be the
centre of the town. That’s why they put it there in the first place. We’ve got
to make sure it stays that way, eh?’ As Marshall spoke, a minor series of
convulsions seemed to affect the right-hand corner of his mouth as if there
were some fundamental tension between his thoughts and his words.
    ‘I’ll
go along with that. Oh yes,’ Martin replied, not liking to stare.
    Marshall
put his hand out. He appeared to have the mouth problem under control. Martin
shook his hand, awkwardly.
    ‘Good
man. I can’t do much without your help.’
    Martin
felt his self-confidence growing. ‘Count on it,’ he said. The perfect parting
line, he thought, except that when he went for the door handle he stuck his
fingers in an ashtray.
    ‘It’s
the one underneath.’
    ‘Oh!
Right. Thank you. And thanks for the drink.’ Martin squeezed the door handle.
    ‘No,
pull it down.’
    ‘Ah!’
Martin laughed desperately. He tugged at the door.
    ‘You’ve
got your elbow on the window lock. Now try.’
    Martin
was hot, but the air was cool when he eventually got out of the car. When
Marshall had driven off he stood and looked across at the building in which
he’d spent half his life. Marsh Cottage, windswept and isolated, was a place he
would always associate with his father’s illness and death. North Square was
home.

Seven
     
     
     
    Ruth
Kohler curled her feet around the leg of the old kitchen
table, its surface lightly corrugated by decades of washing and scrubbing, and
read what she had written.
     
    Dear Beth and
Suzy,
    The
countryside here is very beautiful, though large swathes of it lie in my log
basket (my English is coming on, don’t you think?) waiting to keep me alive.
It’s only October but I have already consumed two small woods. You might have
thought central heating, like family planning, was pretty much a universal item
in the First World, but I assure you it has not reached Everend Farm Cottage.
Indeed the twentieth century as a whole has not made much impact on Everend
Farm Cottage. Electricity is coaxed nervously in through a hole in the wall, a
‘Calor-gas’ boiler explodes with atomic force, brighter than a thousand suns
one minute, a black hole the next. There is a telephone up at the farm, and I
guess the nearest fax machine is in Paris. How romantic, I hear you say, and
you’re probably right. Hemingway would doubtless have written his best work
here, and the bird life is wonderful. Duck, partridge, pheasant. Everything he
liked to kill.
    I
have spent most of the last three weeks on a title.
    The
Hemingway Project is a good name for a grant application, but a bummer
for a book. I finally came up with one I like. Admiring Ernest. It’s
from Dashiell Hammett’s line about him, you know the one — ‘Ernest has never
been able to write a woman. He only puts them in books to admire him.’
    It
may sound a tad playful for a university press so I’ll have to attach some
suitably dry subtitle: Admiring Ernest: Contradictions, Correlations and
Gender Roles in the Life and Work of E. H ., that sort of thing.
    What
do you think? I like it. It has fashionable irony and hopefully will lull those
macho reviewers into a false sense of security. Reviewers? Who am I kidding?!
    I
bought a car! Nothing exotic. It’s called a Cherry (no wonder they don’t sell
them in Trenton!) despite being bright yellow. It’s perky and has a funny
little thing called a gear-stick! The countryside is very gentle and not at all
impressive until you get to the sea which, I’m told, is eating up the land at
the rate of a foot a year. Nice to know that, by the time I leave, England will
be a foot shorter! There are villages hidden away all over the place, and the
nearest town is Theston. Untidy but everyone very friendly. The church is beautiful and ancient and has a rood-screen that’s older than Atlantis and I’m quite
seriously thinking of believing in God again. Well, at least for a year.
    What
more can I tell you? My little laptop sits in the alcove (south-facing) winking
at me greenly. There are cats up at the farm, and one fat marmalade fellow has
been eyeing me up with a view to making friends. I am trying to encourage
things to grow inside the house as fast as they grow outside but my green
fingers have turned blue in the cold and I may have to lure in a hawthorn hedge
or the corner of a sugar-beet field. As to human contact, well, not a lot