The Pretender (12 page)

I sat down at my computer. I cleared my mind, then set about pretending to be Roald Dahl. It couldn’t be more difficult than becoming James Sherwin, which I’d been working on until then. Dahl’s adult fiction was mainstream, part of a tradition that came out of Somerset Maugham and other upper middle class scribblers. The difficulty was in coming up with a story idea. In my old student house, I’d watched Tales of the Unexpected, a series based on his stories. I knew about twists in the tale, but had no idea how to come up with an original one, like the police investigators eating the leg of lamb that, when frozen, had been the murder weapon.

I wrote a couple of opening sentences, then a complete paragraph that sounded authentic. But no story came. I locked the office and headed off to Charing Cross Road, looking for a secondhand edition of some early Dahl stories. Should I came up with an idea, I would still need a way to forge the MS. I had no idea what make of typewriter Dahl used. All this was weighing on my mind as I turned into Any Amount Of Books and bumped into Tim and Magneta.

The couple were hand in hand and so absorbed in each other they didn’t notice me until I spoke their names. Tim appeared embarrassed.

‘I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch, Mark. It’s just that we...’

‘I understand,’ I said. ‘How’s the writing going?’

‘Fantastic. Magneta persuaded me to give up working in the bookshop. I’ve moved in with her.’

‘Great.’

‘We wanted to have you round...’ Tim began.

‘Come tonight,’ Magneta interrupted. ‘Tim tells me you write. You must bring some of your work. We’d love to hear it.’

‘I don’t know. I...’ But Magneta was already scribbling her address on the back of a paper bag from the herbalist’s up the road.

‘About nine,’ she said. ‘I’ll cook.’

Tim gave me the look of a man in the grip of an irresistible force and they set off. Within an instant they were, again, completely wrapped up in each other.

I found an old copy of Dahl’s
Switch Bitch
in Henry Pordes Books and took it back to the flat to read. Winter was slow in leaving and the flat was very cold. I had lost weight. Maybe a meal out would do me good.

The book I’d bought was a tatty hardback, much read. I could have bought a pristine secondhand paperback for the same money, its pages already discoloured and brittle even though they had never been read. But I had a penchant for used books and hard covers, for reading a book as it first appeared. This one’s original owner would be dead. During the many conversations I’d had while flogging review copies, I’d learnt that book dealers got their best stock by clearing the homes of the recently deceased.

I read and reread the short stories, soaking up the style, the bitter sexuality, hoping for some inspiration. I went to the library and read the obituaries from other newspapers. This was going to be more difficult than I’d first thought. Dahl had been in print well before the
LR
’s first issue. By 1950, when Tony had published a story by him, Dahl already had an agent. His first novel had flopped, but he was well known. Records would exist. A rejected story would have been recycled, sent somewhere else. Dahl was prolific. He was also efficient, a businessman. If he hadn’t kept a copy, his agent would have done. Reading about the many tragedies in Dahl’s life, I began to think better of exploiting his legacy. Maybe I ought to tell Tony that there was nothing to be found.

Magneta’s flat was the top floor of a house in Camden Town, a short tube ride away. I found the house with no difficulty, but the bell was hard to identify. The one I decided upon didn’t appear to work. I shouted her and Tim’s names several times before my friend appeared at a window. Laughing, he threw down a key.

‘Sorry,’ he said, as he opened the door on the second floor, ‘we’re not used to having guests.’

I didn’t know what I might find. It was a long time since I’d visited someone’s home. Tony, despite his friendliness in the office, had never invited me to his place in Highgate. Magneta, from what little I knew of her, was an old fashioned bohemian. I expected dust, heavy drapes and gothic paraphernalia to match her vivid eye-shadow. Instead I found... normality. There were books on shelves, posters on the walls and two modern art prints, framed. The floorboards had been stripped and varnished, with an Indian rug and a gas fire offering warmth. I couldn’t see Magneta, but could smell a rich stew wafting through from the kitchen. The flat reminded me, unbearably, of home, the home that I had left abandoned for more than a year.

‘Are you all right?’ Tim asked, noticing my mood.

‘Fine. Tired, that’s all. I’ve been working hard.’

‘Did you bring some of your writing with you?’

‘No. I’ve nothing really ready. Sorry.’

‘Never mind. Drink?’

‘Please.’ Should I have brought a bottle of wine? I wasn’t used to domesticity of any kind, wasn’t expecting it from Tim. Yet there he was, in clean clothes, neat hair, pouring wine from a box into a proper wine glass. And here was Magneta, hair as wild as before, make-up less so, wearing a loose sweater and woollen leggings.

‘I hope you’re hungry,’ she said. ‘It’s ready.’

Magneta had made a lentil stew, with celery, mushrooms, carrot, potato and bits of chorizo floating round in it. Before we ate, she dripped olive oil and sherry vinegar over our portions. It was delicious.

‘Something I picked up in Spain,’ she said, when I praised the dish.

Magneta had lived in Andalusia for a couple of years. It was all tied up with a love affair that went wrong, I gathered, so didn’t press her further. Instead I complimented her on the flat.

‘We love it. Pity we’ve got to move out at the end of the year.’

The building, she told me, had been sold months ago. Magneta managed to obtain a cheap, short term lease because she knew the new owner, who was about to restore the place.

‘I’ll find somewhere else,’ she said, ‘but not as nice for the price.’

I wondered what she lived on, given that Tim was no longer working, but she got in her answer before my question.

‘I suppose I’ll have to come up with something pervy to pay the rent. What do you reckon, Tim darling?
I Was A Teenage Love Slave
? Mark, would you like to see my oeuvre?’

She pointed to a shelf that contained half a dozen erotic novels, the sort of thin, tacky paperbacks found on the top shelves of newsagents who didn’t normally sell books.

‘These are all by you?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

The authors were women who sounded as thought they all had big hair. Danielle Colby. Celia Hampton.

‘Who makes up the names?’

‘The publishers do.’

‘Do they take you long to write?’

Magneta looked vaguely insulted. ‘Believe it or not, there’s a certain amount of talent involved. You have to be able to tell a story, get inside the head of the sort of people who read these things... and write good sex, of course.’

‘Who reads them?’ I wanted to know. ‘Housewives?’

‘Theoretically. The publishers did some audience research showing that almost as many men read them as women.’

At random, I opened
Love on the Line
. The opening chapter was a description of a woman rubbing up against a man on the underground. He isn’t sure if it’s deliberate. Then she reaches inside his raincoat and unzips his fly.

‘Take one if you want,’ Magneta interrupted my reading.

‘No thanks.’ I didn’t want to read anything that reminded me of my lack of a sex life. But I was beginning to get an inkling of an idea for a short story.

Magneta told me how she’d got into writing the novels through a friend of Tony’s.

‘When I’m doing my own writing, a three thousand word short story takes me forever. A novel seems like an impossible dream. But with this crap I manage forty thousand words in a month. A fortnight, if I really need to.’

‘Think you could do it?’ Tim asked me.

I shook my head. Maybe I could write formula fiction, if I had to, but I doubted I could write about sex convincingly. In the Greene forgery, I’d been careful not to describe the narrator’s sessions with the prostitute.

‘You?’ I asked Tim.

‘I’d try anything, as long as it involved writing. I may have to, soon. We need another place and rents are going through the roof.’

‘We don’t have to live in London,’ Magneta said. ‘It might be better for both of us to live somewhere quieter, cheaper for a while.’

‘I don’t fancy an unheated stone cottage in Andalusia in winter, ’Tim said. ‘That was Magneta’s last suggestion.’

‘How about an end terrace in Lancashire?’ I said.

‘Why do you say that?’ Magneta asked.

I explained how I came to have a small house going to waste in Leam. I said that, if the two of them looked after the place and took care of the bills while they were there, then they could have the house for as long as they wanted.

Magneta was enthusiastic. Tim was unsure. ‘You’re being too generous, Mark. You’re a student.We’d be exploiting you.’

‘The house has been empty since the September before last,’ I pointed out.

Tim and Magneta discussed whether being out of London would hurt their literary careers, coming to the conclusion that neither of them had enough of a career for it to make any difference. Then Magneta asked what I was doing for Christmas.

‘Not much,’ I said, remembering the previous, bleak Christmas I’d spent alone in a student house.

‘Then why don’t we spend it together, in your house? You can show us what we need to know about the house and the area. If we all agree that it’s a good idea when we’re sober, then we’ll get everything sorted out then.’

This decided, we celebrated with another drink. My opinion of Magneta had changed totally. She was my new, second-best friend. At the door, she gave me a sloppy kiss.

‘Where exactly is Lancashire?’ she asked.

I walked home, drunk on wine and friendship. When I got back to my tiny, cold flat above the office, I kept my coat buttoned up, switched on my computer and the single bar electric fire and, more confident than I’d ever been before, began to bash out a story.

It had come to me as I was looking at Magneta’s erotic novel. Why would Roald Dahl write a story for the
Little Review
, then put it aside after Tony’s rejection? It had to be because he thought better of it. Not because he’d written a bad story, but because there was something suspect about it, something the world wasn’t ready for. 1950 was long before the Lady Chatterley trial. An author couldn’t use the ‘f ’ word. Overtly sexual material was beyond the pale.

I might not have the experience to write about sex, but I could imagine a story about somebody writing sex under a pseudonym, like Magneta. Dahl would have written the story, sent it off to Tony, then, when it was rejected, thought better of publishing it. The story could anticipate the sour, sexual subject matter of the
Switch Bitch
stories, written in late middle age.The 1950 Dahl would have worried that readers would think he was writing about himself. By late middle age, if Tony was anything to go by, Dahl wouldn’t give a damn.

Dahl didn’t have a particularly idiosyncratic style. He sometimes talked to the reader at the beginning of a story, setting the piece up. That was the hardest note to achieve, but it wasn’t an essential element. When writing as Dahl, I could rush on with the plot. There was no need for detailed description, but my period in Paris came in useful for the setting. Characterisation wasn’t crucial. Narrative was everything. I worked in my knowledge of Jack Kahane’s Obelisk, who published
To Beg, I Am Ashamed
and the racy Cecil Barr novels. Dahl might well have read one of Barr’s novels, made something of it in his fiction.

When I read the pages back, there was a problem. They didn’t sound like Dahl, not for a minute. How could I, who had convincingly forged Hemingway and Greene, have trouble imitating a much lesser author? Even the weakest writer must have a signature style. I wasn’t trying to parody Dahl, drawing attention to his weakest elements. And there was more. Although he was educated in England, Dahl wasn’t English. Both of his parents were Norwegian. He was an inside outsider, capable of viewing the vagaries of British character with a cold, often cruel eye, which made his voice harder to capture than that of Hemingway or Greene.

There was one possible way around the problem. I could imitate Dahl’s first person style. I often found the single viewpoint to be a weakness in first person novels, limiting the action and removing opportunities for suspense. The reader can easily tire of the same voice, finding it monotonous, hectoring, unwelcoming, even smug. But Dahl used it often, so I decided to give this voice a try, pretending to be a Norwegian writing in English. I found a copy of Dahl’s first collection, Someone Like You.This had several stories written in the first person. They were written in the right period, too.These early stories seemed to have more energy about them than the later work. I began again, starting the story in the middle, rather than at the beginning, and my words began to ring true.

My character introduces himself as Edward Timms, a war veteran with a minor shrapnel injury that causes him to limp. He is wealthy, though at first the source of his wealth isn’t clear. Friends assume his money is inherited. Timms has written two novels. They earned him the respect of his peers but didn’t sell in great quantities. Timms tells the reader about Lawrence Hamden. Hamden is the author of the
French Maid
series of erotic novels. Many of Timms’ friends secretly enjoy his work. Now and then one of those friends asks Edwards what he thinks of Hamden. Edward pretends not to have read him.

By now, most readers will have guessed the secret that my narrator is about to reveal. Timms is not independently wealthy. His money comes from writing erotica under the pseudonym Lawrence Hamden. His publisher, Maurice Cranstone, is a middle-aged Mancunian, partially modelled on Jack Kahane. I described the Hamden stories without having read any erotica of the period, but with a working knowledge of the British bedroom farce, which I felt sure Dahl would be familiar with. As I told it, the Hamden novels were awash with mistaken identity, lust crazed lovers, ridiculous impersonations, the sudden return of spouses and adulterers hiding in unlikely places. The running joke of the series was the sexual sophistication of the French as compared to the English. Men were grateful for the smallest favours of the French maid. On occasion, Hamden’s English heroes rescued her from the clutches of the shady con men (usually French) she kept falling for. They were handsomely rewarded, in kind.