Hemingway’s Chair

brusquely, by thirty seconds of why he should have married someone like
me.
    Thoroughly
sobered up by now I flee back to Filibeg. There is a note under the door from
Tam O’Shanter apologising for her behaviour and asking me to be sure to knock
on her door before going to bed as she would like to explain everything. There
was a cross after her name.
    I checked the
closet for Sporrans, closed my window against golfers, locked the door and went
to bed with Ernest and Pauline. He snored.
    Next morning
at breakfast glaciers once more covered the face of the earth and it was
impossible to make eye contact with anyone but the waitress! Then, quite by
chance, the way the English do these things, the little barrister who’d made
the first move of all came up to me as I was packing up the car, and said how
nice it had been to meet me. His name was Roger Morton-Smith. He lived in
London, was recently divorced, and was travelling with his new lady. She was in
antiques, unusual things, nothing run of the mill (Kate, her name was). She was
‘used to dealing with Americans’ and they would love me to come and see them
and maybe stay over in London at New Year. Then they swept off in a powder-blue
Mercedes leaving me basking in a glow of vicarious affluence.
    I was a little
wary of visiting, but after a week’s work in Oxford (not enough!) I took up
their offer and we had lunch and I told them what I was working on and they
showed me some pretty nice stuff. Clarice Cliff art deco, oak bookcases,
Japanese screens. They think all Americans are oil millionaires and I fear I
was quite a disappointment. However, a couple of weeks later, in the mail, come
details of something ‘right up my street’.
    My little
heart leaps only to fall in pieces to the ground when I see that what they have
for me is some goddamn chair in which EH tried unsuccessfully to reduce the
world’s marlin population and which they would sell me for ONLY eleven hundred
dollars (though the big institutions could pay a lot more!) Well, I was about
to write back and say i’ll buy it for firewood... when I remembered. My fan!
Girls... he is absolutely hooked —
     
    The
telephone rang. It was still new enough for the sound to take her by surprise.
As she got up she noticed how suddenly darkness had come. She felt carefully
beneath the shade of the rickety table lamp and found the switch. With the
other hand she lifted the phone.
    ‘Hello.’
    ‘Is
that Miss Kohler?’ It was a man’s voice.
    ‘Ruth
Kohler, yes.’
    There
was a pause. Not a heavy breather, prayed Ruth. Not already, it’s Martin
Sproale.’
    ‘I’m
sorry?’
    ‘Martin,
from the post office.’
    ‘Oh,
Martin. Yes.’ With one hand she pulled the phone to her, with the other she
extracted the last cigarette from a pack of Camel Lights. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been
working. My mind is still in 1928.’
    ’ A
Farewell to Arms. '
    ‘That’s
right.’
    ‘Father’s
suicide.’
    ‘Yes,
indeed.’
    ‘Did
you know that he changed the ending of the book after his father’s death?’
    Ruth
transferred the phone to her shoulder and reached for a box of matches. ‘Well,
that’s pretty well known. Hemingway claims he rewrote the last page thirty-nine
times.’
    ‘Catherine
and the boy were not going to die. Their death was his way of coming to terms
with his father’s suicide.’
    ‘Well,
it depends which way you look at it, Martin. I think the women around him at
that time were exerting a much stronger influence on his writing than the men.’
There was a silence at the other end of the line. She struck a match, lit her
cigarette and waited. When the voice came again it sounded a little thicker.
‘I’m ringing about the chair.’
    Ruth
laughed and apologised. ‘I’m sorry about all that. Bursting into the post
office like an hysteric.’
    ‘That’s
okay.’
    ‘It
just struck me as funny, you know, and I knew you’d appreciate it.’
    ‘Funny?’
    ‘Well,
to sell a thing like that for over a thousand dollars.’
    Martin’s
voice corrected her. ‘Seven hundred and fifty pounds.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I
don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s unbelievable. To have the chance to sit in
a chair he sat in, leaned on, fished from, every day for two months.’
    Ruth
pulled hard on her cigarette. ‘Well, for a thousand bucks I’d want himself
sitting in it.’
    There
was a pause.
    ‘I’m
sorry,’ she said. ‘Just a bad joke.’
    ‘I
know you hate him,’ he