The Pretender (8 page)

Most of the writing was humdrum, but now and then the story became gripping, and characters were introduced with telling details. Sheila portrays herself as an intelligent woman who can attract quite distinguished men.Towards the end, she meets an intellectual, a government scientist who falls for her but is put off when he meets a ‘dreadful old woman’ who he guesses is Sheila’s mother.

On his face sat the inhuman solemnity of the stage specialist. Behind every sentence he uttered you felt the weight of an unseen shelf of books.

The tone, the precision of the language, the cadences of the prose and the intelligence of the observation, all of them sounded like Greene — the early Greene, of
England Made Me
anyway. Could Greene have written it under a pseudonym? Why would he bother? By 1953, which was the first publication date given inside the Corgi edition, he was a famous, world renowned author. He didn’t need to write a tacky best seller. I noticed, though, that the back of the paperback was taken up by a rave quotation from a distinguished literary magazine,
Time and Tide
. ‘I found it deeply interesting, adding to the sum of human knowledge’, the review concluded.Who would get a book like this reviewed in
Time and Tide
, a magazine that Greene regularly wrote for, if not Greene himself?

‘What did you think?’ Tony asked, when I handed back the book.

‘There was less about prostitution than I expected,’ I told Tony. ‘But it held my interest. One thing’s for sure. It wasn’t written by a woman. Did Greene tell you who it was by?’

‘Most people reckon it was written by Cecil Barr.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Wrote a series of racy best sellers in the twenties and thirties,’ Tony said, slipping into his gossipy lecture mode. ‘His real name was Jack Kahane. He founded the Obelisk Press in Paris. Kahane published people like Henry Miller — writers who English language publishers were far too scared to put out because of the obscenity laws.’

‘Did you ever come across him?’ I asked.

Tony shook his head. ‘He died in 1939.’

‘But the book wasn’t published until 1950.’

‘That was in the UK. I’ve looked into this. The Obelisk press did a hardback edition in 1938.’

‘So this Kahane definitely wrote it.’

‘No, Kahane didn’t write autobiography. His forte was silly novels. According to Graham, the prostitute book was written by a friend of his, Ronald something. The prostitute was real enough. Both he and Ronald had her. Ronald got a commission to write a book. But he had great trouble coming up with the whole thing and — though he never admitted it, as far as I know — Graham helped him out. The intrigue appealed to him, and the subject matter, of course. He was very circumspect about his dealings with prostitutes. This was an opportunity to make some use of the material.’

‘If it was written in the thirties, that makes complete sense,’ I told Tony, and recounted the clues I had already spotted. ‘Can we prove it? Maybe there’s an article about it to be had for the magazine.’

‘Maybe,’ Tony said, ‘but only after Graham snuffs it. He fell out with Ronald, as I recall, and I doubt he’d want to give the book free publicity.’

‘Did he tell you which bits he wrote?’

‘This was more than thirty years ago,’ Tony told me. ‘If I’d kept a diary, I’d be quids in, but gossip like that, you only got over a few drinks — more than a few. I can’t be sure of any of the details.’

He poured himself another scotch, as though it were medicine that might cure his memory, then ruminated: ‘Wish I’d got another story out of Graham back then.’

Within a few weeks, I began to run the
LR
office, a job I loved. It was unpaid but not without remuneration — a rent-free room in Soho was worth a lot, while bookshops on the Charing Cross Road gave me a quarter of the cover price of any review copy I took in. I wrote to Francine, giving her my new address and boasting about my part-time job. She would never have heard of the
LR
, but I had to tell someone, and there was nobody else. She wrote back within a week, asking if I had ‘someone special’. (Francine seemed to have a different boyfriend every letter. ‘He is not as nice as you,’ she would always say.)

I was meeting writers, answering calls from publishers, building up a network of contacts that would one day be of inestimable use, or so I hoped. I was finding out the way things worked. Instead of studying for my first year exams, I spent whole days looking through the archives, putting the house in order, as Tony had requested, in lieu of rent. My first task was to ensure that we had a complete run of the magazine. When this task was complete (only two issues were missing), I began to delve into the box files full of correspondence and old manuscripts.

‘Be careful what you do with that,’ Tony told me. ‘I’m planning to sell the best stuff to American Universities. They’re filthy with money, and desperate for authentic papers that have been touched with genius. Don’t damage anything.’

‘Are old manuscripts really worth that much?’ I asked, naively.

‘Depends,’ Tony told me. ‘If the MS is exactly as published, then it has to be someone really top notch — Joyce, say, or Eliot. But if it’s substantially different... here, look at this.’

He handed me the latest
Times Literary Supplement
, folded open at the Random Notes section. I read the following.

Scholars have long debated the fate of the Hemingway manuscripts that were stolen from his wife on a train in Paris in 1922. The thief snatched a briefcase containing every piece of fiction Papa Hemingway had written up to that date. After discovering the loss, Papa was forced to rewrite what he could remember. Serious Hemingway scholars would kill to find these manuscripts, which provide a missing link in the writer’s development. Now, out of the blue, one of these stories seems to have turned up in a Paris flea market.

An American businessman was in Paris with his young wife, a Hemingway fan, when they found the story concealed in an old copy of the magazine
Paris Match
. With it was a page from another story, never published. On their return to New York, they had the pages examined by forgery experts and Hemingway scholars. Both groups pronounced themselves ‘at least 90% certain’ that these manuscripts are genuine. The rare papers go up for auction next month. Meanwhile, visitors to Paris will be scouring the flea markets in Clichy, where the Hemingway papers were found, to see if the other missing work (several stories, a novel) is also there. Early estimates say that the newly discovered manuscript could go for as much as two million dollars.

‘Two million,’ Tony said, as he put on his jacket to go out for lunch. ‘If I ever run out of funds, the contents of that box room are my nest egg.’

Shocked, I nearly told Tony the truth, but didn’t know where to begin. I was wary that I might lose my mentor’s respect. But I was also proud. My Hemingway forgeries, even the original I thought so weak, had been accepted as 90% genuine.

And so began my accidental career as a forger.

When Tony had gone out to lunch and I’d had some time to absorb the situation, I decided to go to the London Library, at the back of Piccadilly. I didn’t know who the American businessman and his wife were. Perhaps Paul had married again or the
TLS
had confused his relationship with Helen. I was sure of one thing. The stories had to be the ones I had written fifteen months before. I already knew the heart of the matter: Helen had betrayed me. How could she and Paul do such a sleazy thing? They had stolen the stories, gone looking for more, then got out of Paris, leaving me to deal with the police. I didn’t belong to the London Library, but Tony did, and he’d shown me around. It was a private library from an age when trust was a given. Their security was so lax, I doubted anybody would challenge my presence. So it proved. I covered a table with recent newspapers. The Hemingway manuscripts started out as a human interest story. All of the accounts began with how Hemingway came to lose the manuscript case. Then, slowly, another tale began to emerge. I followed it at second hand, for the story had first appeared in the
New York Post
, a tabloid that the library didn’t take. The details were sketchy at best, for the protagonists weren’t giving interviews. It was easy to see why.

Paul and Helen hadn’t lied to me, but they had misled me. Helen wasn’t Paul’s daughter. She was his stepdaughter, the daughter of his second wife. He’d adopted Helen when she was two years old, shortly after marrying her mother. That marriage lasted only three years, but the adoption was never rescinded.

According to the papers, after the divorce, Helen and Paul did not see each other for thirteen years, though Paul contributed to the cost of Helen’s upbringing. When she was eighteen, Helen went to university in New York, where Paul (separated from his fourth wife) lived. There — so they had told one paper, though it beggared belief — they fell in love.

Paul’s estranged wife discovered they were involved and put a detective onto them. As far as the law was concerned, Paul and Helen were committing incest. The couple had no choice but to run. They fled to Europe, where they planned to stay in hiding until Helen was twenty-one, which was just after our last meeting. As soon as she came of age and Paul’s divorce was final, Helen revoked the adoption and married Paul.

No wonder Helen wasn’t interested in me. No wonder she couldn’t wait to be twenty-one. Back in Paris, I would have been shocked by the relationship, but London had made me more cosmopolitan. The successful writers who stopped by the
LR
offices often had second wives half their ages, while Tony’s wealthy gay friends could be found with boys my age or younger. Helen was now nearly twenty-two. Her husband was a little younger than I’d first thought: forty-seven.

At first, I couldn’t think clearly. I kept visualising Helen in bed with Paul. I might not be shocked, but I was disgusted. Slowly, it sunk in that the sex wasn’t what I should be bothered about. The Hemingway manuscript would set the couple up for the rest of their lives. Unless I exposed them. But how could I do that? I wasn’t able to prove that I wrote the Hemingway stories. If I went public with such a claim, there were only two possibilities: the Mercers could say I was lying and it would be my word against theirs, or they could accept that I was telling the truth, but say I had conned them. Either way, I emerged as the bad guy.

Yet why should the Mercers get a couple of million for my handiwork? Here I was, living in a tiny room, my summer term grant already almost spent, my only substantial possession a house I couldn’t sell or rent. Surely the Mercers should hand over at least some of the proceeds? The newspaper story speculated about how the stories came to be hidden in those magazines in the flea market. I knew the truth.They never were. However, as far as Helen and Paul were concerned, the stories were my discovery. They must be shitting themselves that I would come forward and immerse them in even more scandal.

One of the American newspapers mentioned which New York hotel the Mercers were staying at. Back at the
LR
office, I took some headed note paper and wrote the couple a guarded letter.

You appear to have sold two manuscripts that belong to me, without my permission. I would be grateful if you would contact me at the above address and explain how you will arrange for me to receive the proceeds of this sale.

I could hardly go to a solicitor. My position was too awkward and, anyhow, I had no money. I thought that using the
LR
’s headed paper would impress them. And it did, though not in the way I intended.

The day after I posted my letter to the Mercers,Tony was in one of his ruminative moods. Lately he’d been going out less at lunchtimes, spending more time on the magazine. I assumed this was because the deadline for issue 498 was coming up.

‘Seen a story by Takimoto lying around?’

‘No, I’d have read it if I had.’

‘Seems he sent me one two years ago. I forgot to publish it. Here.’ He handed me a letter from Ken Takimoto, the only author whose every novel had been shortlisted for the Booker prize. Ken pointed out that he had sent Tony a story because he’d received a begging letter saying the
LR
needed to boost circulation if it was to survive, and if Tony wasn’t going to use the damn story, he could make a couple of thousand dollars by placing it in
The New Yorker
.

‘I suppose it must be in my in-tray,’ Tony said, casually indicating the full tea-chest to the left of his desk.

‘Do you want me to take a look?’ I asked.

‘Would you mind? It always depresses me so.’

When he’d gone home, I shut the office and emptied out the tea chest. It was full of papers: letters, CVs, poems, stories, book reviews, memoirs. On each, Tony had carefully scrawled the date of acceptance. Most were from the last year or two. I was discovering what writers tended to refer to as ‘the only trouble with the Little Review’. While we made quick decisions on whether to accept or reject a piece, Tony was poor at scheduling and frequently took on far more material than he could foreseeably use. For instance, I found an accepted story by Tim Cooper, a writer I’d never heard of, with a letter that was over five years old. In searching for the Takimoto, I found a second letter from Cooper, gushing with joy because he’d had the story taken. The enclosed biog showed that he was twenty-two, a recent graduate. He gave his parents’ address because mail at his current residence often went missing.

As I continued going through the pile, I found no Takimoto, but I came across several more letters from Tim Cooper, each detailing a change of address. The letters also contained polite inquiries as to publication date and, finally, an angry plea. His last address was care of a bookshop in Willesden Green. Tony had kept all the letters, but never scheduled the story for publication.

There were similarly petulant or irritated letters from other writers. Had Tony changed his mind about the stories (and, sometimes, poems) but not had the heart to write back? That wasn’t in his character. More likely, they had been displaced by a famous name. Authors like Takimoto contributed to the
LR
because it had helped them out early in their careers. In doing so, they expected rapid publication, which inevitably increased the backlog. Occasionally, an impatient author, stuck on the waiting list, would withdraw his or her story, but there was nowhere else as prestigious for an obscure writer to go, so most held on, frustrated.