Hemingway’s Chair

photographs out and for
quite a while gazed from one to the other.
    Ten
minutes later, Ruth reappeared in the post office, jumped the queue and pushed
a note across to Elaine.
    ‘I’m
sorry, would you mind giving that to Martin? I have a telephone now. Tell him
Ruth said to call.’

Sixteen
     
     
     
    Dearest Beth and Suzy,
    It’s the time
of goodwill here, and life ishell. But I am getting used to it. England is a comfortable, dull place where the bad things
aren’t as bad and the good things aren’t as good as they are at home. People
are ‘awfully kind’ and very decent and I feel safe and cared for the way I
would in some awfully kind and very decent private hospital.
    Christmas was
sweet if a little weird. I picked out a place called the Bridge House Hotel,
which is in the Cotswold Hills, west of London. Unlike any other hotel in the
world the Bridge House has no reception, no check-in, no name on the door, no
nothing. Not even a bell to ring, just a nice Merchant-Ivory hallway which
smelt of polish and dried flowers. I guess I stood there admiring the polish
for upwards of five minutes. Then someone tall and silent shows me up to a
nice, chintzy little room on the second floor which is called not 4 or 12. or
even Presidential Suite. It’s called ‘Filibeg’. (To save you looking it up in
Funk and Wagnall’s a filibeg is another name for a kilt.) Why call a room
‘Filibeg’? The answer’s obvious if you think about it. The owner’s father’s
brother lived in Aberdeen.
    Come the
evening other human beings appeared in the bar, but they either knew each other
or ignored each other. Four couples, one party of three with an elderly
relative and two single women. The women throw me quick, shy smiles and the men
quick, shy smiles followed by something more appraising.
    On Christmas
Day about half of them went to church, but I explained I was of the Chosen and
went instead for a long walk by the river with the lady from ‘Tam O’Shanter’
(Scottish cap with a broad, circular flat top). She was nice and polite and
civilised and we discussed the metaphysical poets, but all I really wanted to
do was get back to see if there had been any further developments with the
couple in ‘Sporran’ (an ornamental pouch of leather and/or fur worn hanging in
front of the kilt) whom I’d heard fighting like bantams in the middle of the
night. At Christmas dinner there was a sort of institutional jollity — the sort
of good time you have when you feel obliged to have a good time. I sat next to
Miss Tam O’Shanter and it was all very proper and decent. Until the next
evening, the evening of what they call Boxing Day. Well, I don’t know if it’s
just that they all know they’re moving on next morning, but suddenly there is
electricity in the air.
    A small
sharp-faced barrister offered to buy me a drink seconds before his wife
arrived, then withdrew the offer. A golfer with teeth out of a fashion
catalogue and a room temperature IQ who had ignored me for twenty-four hours,
began emitting signals that were so embarrassingly blatant that at least two of
his children turned to look at me as well. Mr Sporran was particularly
attentive. He insisted I join him and his wife for dinner. I insisted on
bringing Miss Tam O’Shanter and we all squeezed on to a comer table. We could
have moved to a bigger one, but I soon got the idea that the squeezing was
quite important to him.
    He was tall
and rather elegant in a run-down sort of way and his wife was a square-faced,
heavy-jawed, hey-ho sort, and despite the night-time noises had no bruises
about her person that I could see.
    Anyway —
plenty of thigh contact from Mr Sporran and I couldn’t move out of range
without making similar thigh contact with Miss Tam O’Shanter on the other side.
She became a little flushed and drank a lot of water.
    Mr Sporran had
little trouble swinging our conversation round to his favourite topic. That the
way you ate was the way you made love. Instant effect. Miss T. stops eating
altogether. Mr and Mrs Sporran romp lustily through double portions of black
forest cherry cake and I take chaste nibbles at my creme brulee and try
to remember not to lick my lips. After dinner Miss Tam O’Shanter bolts
upstairs. Outside, taking much-needed gulps of English winter, I find the
golfer, alone on a garden seat, sobbing. Impossible to avoid him, so I have to
listen for nearly forty minutes to how much he hates his wife. Followed, a
little