The Pretender (18 page)

‘Best thing that could happen to you,’ he said.‘Doing a literature degree is stifling for a writer — all those influences to shake off, all that close analysis and academic bollocks. You’d never be able to write an unselfconscious word.’

This made sense to me. For the first time, I had doubts about returning to my course.

‘What did you do at university?’ I asked.

‘Me? Oh, I read PPE.’

I somehow guessed that this meant he’d been to Oxford or Cambridge, which explained where he got the connections to be published at twenty-three. I had no idea what PPE stood for.

‘What writers do you like?’ I asked.The natural question.

He rattled off a few names, the great and trendy, and I nodded half heartedly.‘You know who I really rate?’ he asked, ‘the one I’d like to emulate, if I had half his ability?’

‘No. Who?’

‘James Sherwin.’

And from that point, of course, we were off, for he knew almost as much about James Sherwin as I did. Moreover, we both knew things the other didn’t. I, for instance, was able to quote from a letter which Sherwin had written the month before. Richard knew a story about Sherwin’s unfinished novel
A Commune
which might explain why it had never been finished.

‘Story goes that there was a real commune on the island where Sherwin lived. That’s where he got the idea. But while he was writing the book, somebody got murdered, or committed suicide, I don’t know which. And Sherwin got spooked.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

‘I don’t recall. I must have read it somewhere.’

We were still talking when the party emptied. Richard gathered up two opened but unfinished bottles of wine and we took them back to my room above the magazine.

‘This is great!’ he said, seeing my word processor propped on its rickety table by the bed. ‘The ideal place for a writer. What are you working on?’

I hesitated. I couldn’t tell him that I was writing my own version of the novel we had been discussing earlier.

‘Nothing much,’ I muttered. ‘Exercise, scraps of autobiography, trying to find my voice, if you like.’

‘That’s creative writing class bullshit,’ Mayfield told me, swigging from one bottle and handing me the other, which was to obliterate my memory of the remainder of the evening. ‘Nobody
finds their own voice
. They steal somebody else’s and improve on it. Believe me.’

I did.The conversation continued at full pelt for a couple of hours, after which Richard staggered out for the last tube. I thought it was the beginning of a lasting friendship, one which would nurture me as a writer, but, as things turned out, I haven’t spoken to him since.

The following week, experts from auction houses looked over the material in the
LR
’s archive. Men in old fashioned suits gave cautious appraisals. To my surprise, it appeared that Paul Mercer’s offer was on the generous side.

‘This kind of thing is notoriously difficult to estimate,’ said the literary manuscripts man from Sotheby’s. ‘You might be looking at fifty thousand.’

A draft agreement arrived from America. If Tony signed it, the archive and all new material received in the final months of the magazine would become Paul’s property as soon as the last issue was published.

‘I know you don’t trust him,’ Tony told me,‘but it’s a very good offer.’

What was the catch? Paul either knew or strongly suspected that I’d forged the Dahl and Hemingway stories. He might even have guessed about Greene. Was he expecting me to do more forgeries to add to the value of his collection? If so, it wouldn’t work. Now other people had seen the archive, I couldn’t add fresh, valuable material, even if I were so inclined.

‘About the flat,’ Tony went on. ‘I’ll try to sublet the office without the flat above — I know you like living here. I can’t promise, but whoever rents the office might want to keep you on because you’re useful for security.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I lied. ‘I can always find somewhere.’

We went back to work on the final issue. I was writing a short history of the magazine that would appear in the review section, alongside an attempt to sell off as many back issues as possible.The issue was very nearly full. Most of the contents had been typeset. If James Sherwin himself had sent a new story we’d have been pushed to fit it in. The Dahl family hadn’t responded to the set of proofs Tony had sent them. Doubtless it was too soon after the author’s death for such considerations. According to Tony, this was fine.

‘If they say nothing, we go ahead with the story. If they refuse to let us publish, we’re screwed.’

Those nights, when Tony went home in the evening, I felt at sea. The little world I’d created for myself was coming to an end and I didn’t know where I was going next. I wanted to throw myself into being a writer, but knew I wasn’t ready. I didn’t want to return to university, at least not to my old course. I was coming to the conclusion that studying literature only made me self-conscious about my own writing. Literary history might be useful for my career as a forger but that, too, was over. I’d got away with it, I thought, by working instinctively and by being lucky. Luck such as I’d had couldn’t last.

I was still writing my Sherwin story. I had to write. How else could I occupy the long evenings when I had no money, no real friends? Yet I had no faith in the story unfolding, no hope that it would lead anywhere but deeper into itself, into the nothingness that was pretending to write as another man.

Spring arrived, but my attic room remained cold, requiring at least one bar of the electric fire to be on all the time. I was writing obsessively, venturing out little, not eating enough. Now and then, Tony would drag me out for a bite, but his lunches were mostly liquid. I was returning from a trip to the post office when I found a young woman in the office. Hearing me approach, she stood and gave me a confident, American smile. I saw an attractive, rich, married young woman with expensively layered hair. For a moment, she didn’t recognise me, but I would never mistake her.

‘Helen,’ I said, keeping my cool. ‘What brings you here?’

‘Mark,’ she said, kissing me on the cheek. ‘You look older.’

I had grown my first beard, a fine fuzz of ginger hair to hide the adolescent acne that still plagued me. I was a week away from my twentieth birthday and gaunt from eating too little. I had, without yet realising it, started to become attractive to women my own age, as well as to Tony’s licentious friends. I had developed a ‘starving artist in his garret’ look that appealed to a certain kind of romantic, though romantic was never a word I’d use to describe Helen Mercer.

‘So do you,’ I replied, then realised this wasn’t always a compliment for a woman, so added ‘better than ever’, which was equally true. The sullenness and frustrated air she’d had about her in Paris were gone. I tried not to look at the expensive bands on the third finger of her left hand, supposing they were the key to her transformation.

‘Thanks,’ she said, then added, as if we were close friends. ‘We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.’

‘Where’s Tony?’

‘He and Paul have gone out to talk business. Tony was sure you’d be back soon, so I said I’d wait for you.’

‘But Tony doesn’t know that I know you,’ I pointed out.

‘Nevertheless, he said you’d be happy to show me the sights. He thought we’d get on,’ she told me with a full smile.

‘How long are you here for?’ I asked.

‘A few days. Paul wants to tie up some deals. We might look at a property in Chelsea, if I decide I like London more than New York. Will you show me round?’

Despite having lived in London for a year and a half, I’d hardly been to any of the tourist attractions. It wasn’t that they didn’t interest me so much as I didn’t want to admit to myself that they interested me. I lived here. I wasn’t a tourist. And I couldn’t afford to visit most of them. Accompanying Helen, however, would make me a guide, a host.

‘I wanted to apologise about the way we left Paris,’ she told me, as we set out into Soho. ‘I tried to get in touch with you soon after, but you were gone.’

‘I had to leave in a hurry myself,’ I told her, giving a brief account of my expulsion. Helen grimaced as she laughed.

‘And I tried to persuade you to seduce her. I feel to blame. You must forgive me for that, too.’

I forgave her. Who would not forgive a beautiful woman when she was slipping her arm through his?

‘Paul’s nearly wrapped up the Hemingway deal,’ she told me. ‘He asked me to give you this, an advance of a thousand pounds.’

She handed me a handsome, pigskin wallet, stuffed with more twenty pound notes than I’d ever seen before.

‘I chose the wallet,’ Helen said.‘It’s a gift. Do you like it?’

‘It’s... wonderful.’ I kissed her on the cheek, as she had kissed me earlier.

‘It’s so good to see you again. You wouldn’t believe how few people I know who are my own age.’

‘Me too,’ I said. Had Paul told her that I’d lied about my age, that I was three years younger than she was, rather than one? Probably. It didn’t matter. We were much closer in age than Helen and her husband. We were in London on a beautiful spring day and I had a thousand pounds in my wallet.

Over the next few days, we went to galleries, parks and shops. Helen tried on endless tops, dresses and shoes. She insisted on buying a jacket and shirt for me: a reward for my escort duties. I bought myself a new pair of shoes with my ‘advance’.

During these days, I didn’t see Paul at all. I saw little of Tony, either, though I gathered that the archive deal was going ahead. Ridiculous though I knew it was, I found myself falling for Helen all over again. She was the first woman I’d ever really wanted. Her marriage only made me want her more. For what did Paul have that I didn’t? Money. And he owed me a lot of that. He was fat and old, while I was young and good looking. Talented, too, I told myself. I would win out.

If I had been in love with London before, it was with a cramped, historic, archaic, literary London, a city I created more from my imagination than from what I saw around me. Now, on warm days at the beginning of spring, before the worst of the tourist rush began, with Helen gushing about how there was no place in the world like this and she ought to know, she’d been everywhere, I fell for the whole, unwieldy city in a big way.

I’d never talked to any friend as much as I talked to Helen that week. I told her my whole life story, bar the forgeries. After I’d told her about my mother, she told me about hers. It was a sad story and I got it in snatches while we were walking through town or sitting in restaurants, pubs and parks. Helen kept closing up, but I would ask another question and another until, slowly, it all came out.

Helen’s mother had her when she was very young. Helen’s father was a journalist who used to work with Paul Mercer on a New York listings magazine. The marriage lasted two years and Helen couldn’t remember a thing about him.

‘I haven’t seen my dad since the day he walked out on Mom. Paul picked up the pieces. Paul was the only dad I ever got along with, but I hardly remember those days either. I was five when Mom left him. She moved in with this artist who was hot at the time. I don’t even remember his second name. He means nothing now. My mother moved from man to man, always thinking the next one would give her what she wanted. The third one she married was a banker called Sam. He sent me away to school. I was brought up by nuns, can you believe that? Mom and Sam had an open marriage, so it lasted a little longer. But they fought because Sam wanted kids and Mom had had enough of that with me.

‘Mom decided that all she wanted was to travel. She started getting into all sorts of spiritual shit. One time she came over to my school and tried to persuade me to drop out, go and live with her in an ashram. But I wanted education. I knew I needed something for myself because I couldn’t rely on anyone else. Then, when I was fourteen, Mom went away and didn’t come back. Sam supported me until I was eighteen, even though he didn’t have to. He’d divorced Mom when I was sixteen. She’d abandoned both of us.

‘After that, I was on my own. I moved to New York and was doing university courses, waiting tables, living in a hovel, when I bumped into Paul. Paul was separated, coming out of his fourth marriage. He was in rough shape, but he wanted to help. He offered me a home. He certainly didn’t set out to seduce me. Still, one day it happened. We got together. His wife found out and set the police on us. So we decided to leave the country until Paul’s divorce was final and I turned twenty-one. We’d been on the run six months when we met you.’

‘I still find it hard to think of you as a couple,’ I told her, cautiously. ‘I mean, you were introduced to me as Paul’s daughter.’

‘We had no choice but to lie. Paul had to stump up for two bedroom suites wherever we stayed in case his wife’s private detectives tracked us down. As far as the law was concerned, Paul was still my foster father, because Sam never adopted me. It was a vindictive divorce. His ex wanted to really rub his face in the dirt, create a scandal.’

It was a scandal, I thought, but I restricted myself to a question.

‘Can you really be happy, married to a man twice your age?’

Helen gave me a smile that was almost patronising. ‘In Paris, I told you about some of the guys I’d been out with. They were scumbags, users. Yes, there are nice things about younger guys, but there are nice things about older guys, too. Not least that they have more money, more experience. And Paul’s a modern man. If I want to have a fling, I’m free to. We agreed that from the start.’

‘And what if the guy you’re with wants more than a fling?’ I asked.

Helen didn’t answer this, so I put my life into her hands. I kissed her.

She let my lips touch hers, but she didn’t kiss back and, after a moment, I pulled away.

‘Mark,’ she said,‘you’re my only real friend. Don’t let’s spoil that for...’

She didn’t need to fill in the rest of the sentence. I wasn’t after a fling. I wanted to go to bed with her more than I wanted almost anything else, but I wanted much more than that. All I said was ‘I care about you.’