Hemingway’s Chair

it.’

Eleven
     
     
     
    The
letter lay open on top of a stackof scribbled notes
Ruth had been making on Pauline Pfeiffer, the second Mrs Hemingway.
     
    Marsh
Cottage, North Theston
    Saturday
    Dear
Ruth,
    I
hope you don’t mind being addressed this way but I never really caught your second
name. I was probably bowled over by the fact that I had met another Hemingway
aficionado! Though I am by no means a scholar I have acquired quite a bit of
information about our mutual friend and someone suggested that this might be of
use to you in compiling your book. I enjoyed meeting you and if you would care
to meet up again and discuss it, I would be more than happy. The Market Hotel
does tea. Four o’clock on ioth December would be very good for me. Drop me a
line at the above address (not at the post office).
    Yours
sincerely,
    Martin J.
Sproale.
     
    She
had received the letter almost a month ago and, feeling guilty that she had
treated him curtly at the fair, Ruth had accepted. Four o’clock on 10th
December had then seemed a long way off. Now it was only an hour away.
    She
rubbed her eyes and stared at the little blue and silver screen. She had been
working hard these past few weeks and had grown more used to the cold east
winds. The lack of company had also bothered her less as, having completed the
difficult early chapters on Ernest’s relationship with his mother, she had
taken on the company of Hadley and Ezra and Scott and Zelda and Gertrude Stein
and James Joyce and Sylvia Beach and all that crowd that seemed to have had
such an effortlessly exciting time in Paris in the early 1920s. And now a new,
attractive, immensely eligible and thoroughly dangerous addition had arrived on
the scene in the shape of the young, well-to-do fashion journalist Pauline
Pfeiffer.
    Finding
out how, when and why Pauline proved irresistible to Hemingway, a married man
with a baby son, was now Ruth’s task. Armed with letters, hotel registers,
newspaper cuttings, street maps and her own intuition she had been pursuing the
pair across Paris for several days, along boulevards and into gardens and
through galleries. She had trailed them from salons to bars and from
restaurants to night clubs like a hired investigator in a divorce suit. What
she was discovering was sad, because she liked Hadley, the current Mrs
Hemingway, and had grown fond of their little son Bumby. But it was exciting
too, for the ways in which a woman attracted and held on to a man was an
endless source of fascination for Ruth.
    But
right now she had to leave Pauline waiting for Ernest in a bedroom in the Venetia
Hotel in Montparnasse, and make her way to the Market Hotel in Theston to meet
a barely articulate post office clerk who hero-worshipped the old bastard. She
switched off her laptop. Hemingway had a lot to answer for.
    Though
she was on time her host was already there. He looked better dressed than she
remembered. He was wearing grey flannel trousers and a brown tweed jacket with
strange suede pads across the shoulders. His hair was short and neatly brushed.
His face shone in the light of an ornate table lamp that reared up beside him
in a corner of the residents’ lounge. It occurred to her, with an twinge of
irritation, that he must have made an effort for her.
    He
stood quickly as she came in. She apologised for being on time, and he
apologised for being early.
    ‘I
came straight from work,’ he explained.
    ‘You
work Saturdays?’ she asked.
    ‘Only
in the morning. But today we had some extra training to do.’
    ‘You’ve
been working out?’
    ‘Not
that sort of training. Computer training.’
    ‘You’re
keen.’
    Martin
gave a short laugh. ‘We had no option.’
    ‘How’d
it go?’
    ‘Well,
you know, it’s not so bad for me. It’s harder for the older ones, learning from
scratch. But... well, you’ve got to move with the times.’
    Ruth,
settling herself in an armchair, looked quickly around. ‘Unlike this place.’
    Martin
grinned uncomfortably. Most of the tables were occupied. A lot of tea was being
taken. There were some loud voices. He tugged at the knot of his tie. He was
very hot.
    ‘I
hope this place is okay with you,’ said Martin, knowing he’d made a mistake.
    ‘I
like it here,’ she lied, it’s busy.’
    Martin
nodded. Busy with the wrong people. It was an expensive place, much patronised
by the County set. He himself had already been patronised by Mrs
Harvey-Wardrell. He had been in the foyer as she arrived.