Hemingway’s Chair

yet.
Mr Wellbeing (sic!) the farmer is pure Thomas Hardy and barely comprehensible.
His wife a bit of a dragon. I shall have to make an effort to MIX, won’t I?
    Missing you,
and everyone.
    Never-ending
Love from Everend,
    Ruthie.
     
    She
took a sip of coffee. It was lukewarm. She didn’t like it lukewarm and she
didn’t like drinking it on her own. Coffee break at the English faculty was
when everyone got together and grumbled about funds and gossiped about absent
colleagues. It was a noisy sociable time, as opposed to classes, which were
just noisy. Here she drank in silence, which was beginning to be much less
attractive than she had expected. A cottage in England had always featured in
her dreams of contentment but at this precise moment she would have exchanged
all the green fields and oak-fringed lanes of Suffolk for an hour in
Quakerbridge Shopping Mall.
    Ruth
shared a house in uptown Trenton with Suzy Weiss and Beth Lucas, one a fellow
Assistant Professor, the other a TV weather-girl. Her apartment was known
affectionately as the Jungle, on account of Ruth’s propensity for plants that
crawled, climbed, entwined and otherwise romped about the place.
    When
she was in it, it seemed quite ordinary. Convenient for the faculty but close
to the city. The generous expanse of stripped pine floor and tall south-facing
windows only just made up for the dust and noise from the traffic below.
    Still,
it was hers now. And hers alone. No longer rented. Why then had she left so
soon after buying it? Because she prided herself on being a free spirit,
belonging to no one, and the idea of a sabbatical year in Europe was a way of
proving it?
    She
stood up purposefully, hummed to herself, and went out of the small,
brick-floored kitchen and into the leathery low-beamed parlour. She hadn’t lit
a fire, and the room, with its barely detectable, omnipresent whiff of damp,
was not yet welcoming. She crossed to the desk at which she worked, a scrubbed
pine bargain which she had bought at a local antique shop, and switched on the
radio. Some gloomy piece of Mahler droned into the room. She tried the talk
radio, but it was a phone-in about death. She switched the radio off, reached
for an envelope, addressed it, stamped it, sealed her letter inside and reached
for a cigarette.
    Besides
these occasional bouts of homesickness there was another reason why she felt so
irritatingly out of sorts. It was to do with her work. Hemingway’s women, her
chosen field of study, did not seem particularly relevant to rural England.
Hemingway, Anglophile though he might have been, liked to meet his English
friends as far away from England as possible. Though he had created many
memorable English characters, they were always to be found in France or Italy
or Spain or Africa. The England of winding lanes and pubs and tea-shops was too
cosy for Mr H. As she lit up, inhaled gratefully and flicked out the match, she
could not help thinking that perhaps this whole adventure had been a mistake
and that she should have taken her year off in Paris or Venice or even Havana.
Anywhere but this pretty, passionless place.

Eight
     
     
     
    ‘I
don’t like all this,’ complained Harold Meredith. He
tapped on the double-strength shatter-proof glass of the anti-bandit screen.
‘Can you hear me in there?’
    ‘
’fraid so, Mr Meredith,’ Martin assured him.
    In
less than a month since Nick Marshall’s appointment the first signs of change
had appeared at Theston post office. Already the old-style weighing machines
had gone, replaced by digital scales which gave exact weight and cost almost
instantly. Bar-codes were appearing on everything from recorded delivery forms
to pension books, and Marshall had introduced decoders, speeding up
transactions and saving time at the stock-taking end of the day. Now a brand
new counter-to-ceiling security screen had replaced its scratched and yellowing
predecessor.
    Martin
was cautiously approving. For all his initial reservations, he was flattered
that Marshall saw him as an ally in his fight to improve Theston’s status. It
was a refreshing change from the years with Padge who moaned and grumbled but
had stoutly refused to join the union or reply to any of the questionnaires
they sent out.
    All
Martin wanted was for those at the top to stop fiddling around with a system
that worked perfectly well, to stop treating the Post Office as a political
football and to accept that it was, as Marshall had said, ‘part of