Hemingway’s Chair

brain.
    He
woke sharply. The sound of the wind had become violent and hostile. The feel of
the smooth tiled surface of the mantelpiece was cold and heavy against his
forehead but when he tried to pull away from it, he found himself unable to
move.
    Then
quite suddenly he felt the unmistakable pressure of a hand upon his head. It
was a substantial hand. The soft part of it covered the crown of his head and
the long thick fingers stretched down to the nape of his neck. The pressure was
strong and steady and palpable. He felt no fear at its touch, only a sweeping,
encompassing calm. The solid, unequivocal promise of protection. Then he no
longer heard the wind hooting and whooping and howling beyond the house. He
heard only a slow, steady voice, pitched neither high nor low, and the voice
was real, as real as the mantelpiece he clung to and it spoke slowly and
clearly and firmly to him. It was telling him that there was much to do and a
long way to go and that Martin was needed to complete what he himself had never
been able to do.
    Martin
desperately wanted to be able to reach up, to grasp the hand and hold it tight,
but when he did so it was gone, the voice was gone and the sound of the wind
returned.
    Very
slowly he raised his head from the fireplace. His eyes travelled cautiously
upwards. Up, past the cluster of Hemingway postcards that leaned against the
wall at the back of the mantelpiece, up across the art deco face of a clock
that once stood in the foyer of the Palace Hotel, Madrid, and up, finally, to
Hemingway’s photograph on the wall. He shut his eyes. Then, he opened one eye,
very slowly, and checked the right hand. It was where it had always been, held
low by his side, the pencil still projecting loosely from it. He opened his other
eye and let it run, ever so carefully, up the scroll-handled chest of drawers
until it came to rest on the left hand. It, too, was motionless, lightly
clenched on the curling sheaf of handwritten pages that lay on the writing
board.
    ‘It
wasn’t your hand, was it, Papa?’ Martin whispered, and Papa smiled and shook
his head and, as he did so a quite extraordinary thing began to happen. The
whiskery white beard began to disappear from Papa’s jaw. The upper lip sprouted
a ginger moustache and the broad high cheek bones rounded out. The strong,
straight nose grew a bump or two, the eyes became smaller, lighter and merrier.
Finally the hair turned into an unruly shock of red. Pillar-box red, as they
used to say in Theston. And the smile grew wider and the eyes gazed down on him
full of laughter and anticipation as Martin remembered they did on Christmas
mornings when he sat in bed surrounded by the contents of his stocking, and he
knew there would be no front door slamming shut before dawn, no empty mailbag
flung angrily down on the table in the early darkness of winter afternoons. And
the smile grew into a laugh, a long, full, uncomplicated laugh. The laugh that
he had almost forgotten.
    He
so much wanted the laughter to continue, he so much wanted it to go on and on
and never stop, but as he watched he could see that familiar desperation creep
back into the eyes and he knew so well what would follow.
    And
the laughter died and the smile set and the hair turned white and thin again
and the ginger moustache became a beard again, and that was also white. And the
nose widened and straightened and strengthened. The cheek bones once more stood
out broad and high. And the eyes grew darker and wider and all that was left in
them was the fear and the entreating.

Thirty-six
     
     
     
    Following
her night with Martin, and because she had heard nothing
from him, Ruth had taken to walking, on the lengthening evenings, often many
miles from Everend Farm Cottage. She had never been much of an outdoor girl —
she’d always been the studious, bookish, library-ish type, but she had begun to
feel claustrophobic in the cottage. She would pick her way down the muddy farm
track, cross over the lane at the bottom and follow the direction of a
signposted bridle-path. The farmer whose land it used to be had sold out to a
management company and they had grubbed up the hedges and ploughed over the
footpaths. But Ruth had bought herself a pair of green Wellington boots and,
delighted with their invincibility, tramped over the warm, flinty furrows and
through stretches of shallow standing water until she reached a stream. She
followed this for a mile or two until it flowed into a wide estuary.