Hemingway’s Chair

been there once or twice. Her visits had not been a
success.
    Martin
shut the door.
    He
pulled open his Italian army first-aid cabinet, Milan, circa 1917. He reached
along the crowded shelf for a bottle of grappa. He had two of them, but he
chose the dark and pungent Amarone. Having poured himself a shot, he raised his
glass to the huge black and white photograph, carefully mounted on board, that
took up most of one wall from the mantelpiece to the ceiling.
    ‘ Salute ,
Papa.’
    Ernest
Hemingway looked back at Martin. He wasn’t drinking. He was writing. More
accurately, he was pausing in the act of writing. He was standing up, the way
he preferred to work. His left arm rested on an angled wooden writing board
that lay on top of a chest of drawers with scroll handles. Beneath the lightly
clenched fist were several loose sheets of foolscap typewriter paper covered in
his handwriting. In his right hand, held just below the waist, he loosely
clasped a pencil. He wore a thick check sports shirt with flaps over both
breast-pockets. His face was still powerful. It was framed in white, above by
wavy hair brushed forward to disguise baldness, and below by a well-trimmed
beard, growing with a leftward lean. About the eyes there was a look of age and
sadness. Or so it seemed to Martin.
    Of
the many photographs in his possession (Hemingway with fish, elephants,
typewriters, bottles, film stars, children, soldiers, guns, bullfighters) it
was the only one in which the Great Man seemed not to be performing or posing.
Instead he had the almost deliberately vulnerable gaze of one who wants not so
much to be looked at as understood, who is, after a lifetime of running the
show himself, appealing to someone out there to witness the reality of what
happens when a legend becomes ill and old and lonely. This was why this
particular photograph had pride of place in Martin’s room. It allowed him in,
permitted Martin to feel that he could have been of some use to his hero — not
just another onlooker I sharing him with the world but, just possibly, the]
only one who really understood him.
    Martin
never used to read stories much at school,! his talents, such as they were,
tending towards the] science subjects, and the curriculum tending to keep it *
that way. He was not good enough at anything to ' enjoy the camaraderie of
sport (though he had been! official scorer for the cricket XI) so he had grown
to envy the boys who were. They seemed to have more 4 fun. They seemed to know
more about everything ] that was important, like how to make friends. And |
hardly any of them did science. In his first year in the sixth form he took a
decision and enrolled himself on a General Studies course, in which there was
an English option.
    The
book they were given to study was Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. Martin was seventeen. That was when his father died. He was taken out of school
for three weeks just as the course was beginning. But he took the book home
with him and began to read it and, as he did so, the power of its writing shut
out his grief. He followed Robert Jordan across the mountains and valleys of
Spain. Jordan’s ‘red, black, killing’ anger was an outlet for the anger Martin
felt at his own loss. Hemingway’s hero became, for a while, the only man he
could trust. From that time on he had devoured everything Hemingway had
written: ten novels, over sixty short stories. Then, much later, came the
desire to read about the author himself. And in the letters and the thick
biographies of Carlos Baker (which he liked) and Kenneth S. Lynn (which he
loathed) and those of Myers, Reynolds, Mellow, Anthony Burgess and others he
discovered that to all intents and purposes Ernest Hemingway and Robert Jordan
were one and the same person. This only increased his appetite for the man.
    Meanwhile
he began to fill his room with memorabilia. Theston was not a collector’s
paradise. The best he could find were either replicas — the collection of
Hem-style hats behind the door; or approximations — a bullfight poster,
Pamplona 1971, genuine but fifty years too late; a Corona Number 3 portable
typewriter, not the exact model Hemingway used, but a later one, barely
changed. He also acquired a First World War gas mask of Italian design, a
billhook (possibly Cuban), a punch bag, a kudu horn trophy, a German army belt
of the kind worn by Hem in later life.
    ‘I’ve
made some tea. D’you want a cup?’ It was his mother calling. Reminding