Hemingway’s Chair

Grey
herons rose lazily from the reeds and at a certain time each evening a flock of
brent-geese flew in, low and in perfect formation, to land with growling cries
and skidding splashes on a nearby inlet.
    The
more Ruth walked and thought, and the longer Martin’s silence went on, the more
convinced she became that the old pattern was re-establishing itself. Her
voracity, his retreat — something spoiled once again.
    She
ran and reran the events of that evening in her mind, trying to answer the
question of what had taken place. Who exactly were the two people involved? Had
she been with shy Martin or the gruffly confident stranger whom Martin could
become? Had he been making love to the fastidious intellectual Ruth Kohler or
the unapologetic adulterer Jane Mason? Had his lover been Ruth Kohler for whom
sex was so complicated, or Jane Mason, to whom it came so easily?
    The
inescapable fact remained that on that night she had deliberately ceased to
play the role of the Pauline Pfeiffer she so admired and had chosen to be the
woman who had helped destroy Pauline’s marriage. Was all this not just
confirmation of her own inability to enjoy a physical relationship unless some
risk of danger and destruction was involved? The more she thought about it the
more something quite fundamental troubled her.
    She
had hitherto always gone along with the prevalent feminist view that men were
by and large the more destructive agents in this world — the warriors, the
fighters, the rioters, the gangsters, the strippers of rain forest and the
droppers of bombs, and that women, more concerned to protect and preserve what
they had brought into the world, were by and large the more constructive.
    Did
not the fact that she had slipped so easily into the role of a woman she knew
to be destructive, simply mean that she, Ruth, could be equally destructive,
and that the capacity to be destructive was in essence no weaker in women than
men?
    One
evening, a week after she had last seen Martin slipping out of her door,
long-legged, blue-anoraked red-bobbled into the pre-dawn silence, something
crystallised in her mind and she hurried back through the fields. By the time
she reached the cottage, the sun had gone and the familiar rolling grey clouds
were approaching from the west. She tugged her boots off impatiently and, not
waiting to pull off her coat, reached for the light switch and sat down at her
writing table. She pulled the neat pile of manuscript pages towards her and
started leafing through them.
    What
she had feared was true. The more she read of her chapters on Pauline, the less
they made sense. The more she looked at the period of their marriage the more
she could see that her assumption of Pauline’s productive, wholesome and wholly
beneficial artistic influence on her husband could not be borne out by the
facts.
    In
the years between A Farewell to Arms and For Whom the Bell Tolls ,
all of them spent married to Pauline, Hemingway had written a succession of
books and stories many of which were regarded as inferior stuff. The
much-praised A Farewell to Arms was written, it was true, as they basked
in the heat of first love, but the book itself was an evocation of an earlier
love affair, with another woman in another place. For Whom the Bell Tolls ,
the next great novel he wrote eleven years later, was dedicated to Martha
Gellhorn, the woman for whom he finally left Pauline.
    Darkness
fell and her eyes grew tired as she flicked through the sheets — some two
hundred or so — which covered this period. The conclusion was inescapable.
    Ruth
had assembled a case that was skewed, inadequate, simplistic. She must take the
evidence and rearrange it. It was a formidable task and time was running out.
It was now nearly April and her book was supposed to be completed by the
beginning of July. New research would have to be done, perhaps a third of the
text rewritten.
    She
sat back and lit a cigarette. She stared out of the window into a dark black
night and her gaunt reflection in the glass. She rubbed her eyes, reached for
the first Scotch of the day and made a decision that seemed to solve many
problems.
     
    The
next day, Ruth’s canary yellow Datsun could be seen negotiating the rutted
surface of Marsh Lane on its way to Martin’s house. Inside, Ruth took one hand
from the steering wheel to steady the bouncing, lurching fishing chair that was
her excuse for breaking the silence. It was a warm, still Sunday afternoon.
Kathleen