Hemingway's Chair Page 6

  Never-ending Love from Everend,

  Ruthie.

  She took a sip of coffee. It was lukewarm. She didn’t like it lukewarm and she didn’t like drinking it on her own. Coffee break at the English faculty was when everyone got together and grumbled about funds and gossiped about absent colleagues. It was a noisy sociable time, as opposed to classes, which were just noisy. Here she drank in silence, which was beginning to be much less attractive than she had expected. A cottage in England had always featured in her dreams of contentment but at this precise moment she would have exchanged all the green fields and oak-fringed lanes of Suffolk for an hour in Quakerbridge Shopping Mall.

  Ruth shared a house in uptown Trenton with Suzy Weiss and Beth Lucas, one a fellow Assistant Professor, the other a TV weather-girl. Her apartment was known affectionately as the Jungle, on account of Ruth’s propensity for plants that crawled, climbed, entwined and otherwise romped about the place.

  When she was in it, it seemed quite ordinary. Convenient for the faculty but close to the city. The generous expanse of stripped pine floor and tall south-facing windows only just made up for the dust and noise from the traffic below.

  Still, it was hers now. And hers alone. No longer rented. Why then had she left so soon after buying it? Because she prided herself on being a free spirit, belonging to no one, and the idea of a sabbatical year in Europe was a way of proving it?

  She stood up purposefully, hummed to herself, and went out of the small, brick-floored kitchen and into the leathery low-beamed parlour. She hadn’t lit a fire, and the room, with its barely detectable, omnipresent whiff of damp, was not yet welcoming. She crossed to the desk at which she worked, a scrubbed pine bargain which she had bought at a local antique shop, and switched on the radio. Some gloomy piece of Mahler droned into the room. She tried the talk radio, but it was a phone-in about death. She switched the radio off, reached for an envelope, addressed it, stamped it, sealed her letter inside and reached for a cigarette.

  Besides these occasional bouts of homesickness there was another reason why she felt so irritatingly out of sorts. It was to do with her work. Hemingway’s women, her chosen field of study, did not seem particularly relevant to rural England. Hemingway, Anglophile though he might have been, liked to meet his English friends as far away from England as possible. Though he had created many memorable English characters, they were always to be found in France or Italy or Spain or Africa. The England of winding lanes and pubs and tea-shops was too cosy for Mr H. As she lit up, inhaled gratefully and flicked out the match, she could not help thinking that perhaps this whole adventure had been a mistake and that she should have taken her year off in Paris or Venice or even Havana. Anywhere but this pretty, passionless place.

  Eight

  ‘I don’t like all this,’ complained Harold Meredith. He tapped on the double-strength shatter-proof glass of the anti-bandit screen. ‘Can you hear me in there?’

  ‘’fraid so, Mr Meredith,’ Martin assured him.

  In less than a month since Nick Marshall’s appointment the first signs of change had appeared at Theston post office. Already the old-style weighing machines had gone, replaced by digital scales which gave exact weight and cost almost instantly. Bar-codes were appearing on everything from recorded delivery forms to pension books, and Marshall had introduced decoders, speeding up transactions and saving time at the stock-taking end of the day. Now a brand new counter-to-ceiling security screen had replaced its scratched and yellowing predecessor.

  Martin was cautiously approving. For all his initial reservations, he was flattered that Marshall saw him as an ally in his fight to improve Theston’s status. It was a refreshing change from the years with Padge who moaned and grumbled but had stoutly refused to join the union or reply to any of the questionnaires they sent out.

  All Martin wanted was for those at the top to stop fiddling around with a system that worked perfectly well, to stop treating the Post Office as a political football and to accept that it was, as Marshall had said, ‘part of national life’ and would stay that way for a long, long time.

  ‘How am I going to give you the book?’ asked Harold Meredith.

  ‘Just drop it down in the tray.’

  ‘I can’t, there’s something over it.’

  ‘I’m going to move that for you.’ Martin slid back the protective cover. ‘There you are.’

  Reluctantly, as if parting from a loved one for the last time, Mr Meredith let his pension book slip down into the stainless-steel retainer. Martin slid back the cover, almost catching Meredith’s still-outstretched hand.

  ‘Is this because of Aids?’ Meredith stared enquiringly up at him.

  Martin swiftly passed his checker over the bar-code. It pinged appreciatively.

  ‘No, no, it’s just to make us feel a little bit safer.’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Blood-crazed pensioners, Mr Meredith,’ called out John Parr, leaning over. ‘People with a score to settle.’

  Martin cast his eye over the docket for date and signature. Harold Meredith watched suspiciously.

  ‘It’s this new man, isn’t it?’

  Martin reached for his wooden-handled date stamp and thumped it down, first on the docket and then on the counterfoil. Since Marshall had told him of digital scanners that could read a pension card, check details on a database, mark the transaction and automatically count out the sum to be paid, Martin had been unusually sensitive to the laboriousness of the process.

  ‘Armed raids on post offices increased twenty-five per cent last year, Mr Meredith.’

  He tore the docket from the counterfoil and, sliding open the till at his right-hand side, began to count out the money.

  ‘How many armed raids did you have in Theston?’ asked Mr Meredith.

  ‘That’s not the point.’ Martin laid a fifty-pound note, three five-pound notes and ninety pence into the tray together with the book. ‘It could happen any time.’ He slid the cover back.

  ‘What do I do now?’ asked Meredith.

  ‘Take the money.’

  ‘Is it electrocuted?’

  ‘Only the fifty-pound note.’

  ‘I don’t want a fifty-pound note. What am I going to do with a fifty-pound note?’

  Martin withdrew the note wearily. ‘It makes it easier for us, that’s all.’

  Martin replaced the note with a twenty, two tens and two fives.

  ‘What would I do with a fifty-pound note, old boy? I’m too old to buy wedding rings.’ He chortled with laughter. ‘Eh?’

  Martin gave a weak smile. ‘My mind was elsewhere.’

  ‘What? I can’t hear you through this thing.’

  John Parr watched him go. He grinned. Martin clipped the fifty-pound note back with the others and slid his till shut. John Parr sniffed, twitched, blinked and leaned across to him. ‘Now you know why they put those screens up, Mart. It’s to stop us shooting the customers.’

  Nine

  After much persistence Ruth had felt the first flickerings of a friendship with Mrs Wellbeing. It turned out her name was Rose. She’d married Ted Wellbeing quite late in life after nursing him through a long illness. Ruth had begun by regarding her as prudish and censorious and Rose, as it turned out, had jumped to the conclusion that Ruth must have been a scarlet woman, hiding out from some scandalous love affair. The shared relief in finding each other wrong helped them to a sort of friendship. Rose Wellbeing determined that Ruth should meet someone. She didn’t think it was right that an attractive thirty-five-year-old should still be unattached. She began by bringing her the local paper with interesting events ringed. These included folk evenings and dressmaking classes and even Mothers’ Union meetings: ‘You could say you were a mother.’ Ruth resisted, as politely as she could.

  Theston Fair seemed the perfect answer. By ancient tradition the first Saturday in November was set aside for this annual festival which celebrated Queen Victoria’s granting of a borough charter in November 1893. As this ye
ar was centenary year it was to be celebrated with even greater enthusiasm than usual. It was, Rose assured her, an occasion not to be missed, one that would offer Ruth a chance to observe the locals without being too conspicuous. Even so, she woke up on the appointed day feeling apprehensive. As she selected an outfit she realised that although she had many friends back in America, she hadn’t had to make them. They mostly came with the job. And they were nearly all women. She was not entirely comfortable with men. They were so unpredictable. Friends, pals and buddies one minute and urgent, demanding appetites the next. Her analyst told her this was as much to do with her as them, that her equally demanding appetites led her unerringly to the wrong men.

  She smiled at this thought as she checked herself in the bathroom mirror. Dark, olive skin (mother’s side), hair black and thick, bunched back over her ears and desperately needing attention, eyes deep green and staring back at her with a disturbing intensity, nose narrow and rugged like a headland running down into the sea, mouth wide, lips thin, chin rather fine (father’s side). Neck average and unremarkable, shoulders carrying on where the face left off, angular and rocky, breasts slim and neat and even. Sometimes it excited her, this dark and secretive body, but most of the time she saw it as something to be covered quickly. To be unloaded away from bright light, like exposed film.

  A couple of hours later, she was in Theston. Wearing her black beret and black boots and a baseball jacket over freshly ironed black Levi’s, she locked up the yellow Cherry in the temporary car park on Victoria Hill, and made her way towards the festivities.

  * * *

  Everyone in Theston, or so it seemed, either visited or worked at the Fair. Stalls selling everything from railway signs to organic cheeses sprouted along the pavements of High Street and Market Street. There were sideshows along the sea front. There was a fairground in Jubilee Park and kite-flying competitions on Victoria Hill.

  Quentin Rawlings, who had once been a Reuter’s man in Paris, and whose published work was now confined to short, angry pieces in the East Suffolk Advertiser, could be seen in the garden of his overgrown Victorian house, clad in beret and Breton fisherman’s sweater, running the boulodrome and celebrating what he called a day of Gallic Xenophobia.

  Alan Randall, purveyor, by his own admission, of the last remaining hand-made chocolates in Theston, provided the Punch and Judy show. This year he was engaged in a fierce wrangle with the Blood Transfusion Service, who had seen fit to park their trailer in the school playground, which he regarded as his own private auditorium.

  The Sea Scouts gave resuscitation displays in the church hall and there was an Army recruiting caravan in the British Home Stores car park.

  At the church of St Michael and All Angels, Barry Burrell, the vicar, left Harold Meredith to guard its priceless collection of fourteenth-century treasures (plate, chalice, both mentioned in Pevsner along with the rood-screen), whilst he threw himself into organising the Cricketing Christians, who traditionally played forty overs of beach cricket come rain or shine, with trusties from the local prison.

  But North Square remained the nucleus of the day’s activities. Here were located the prime sites occupied by the most celebrated businesses – the Rudges’ nearly-new clothes stall; Dr and Mrs Cardwell’s home-made wine kiosk; and Maureen Rawlings’s Spice Bazaar.

  A stage had been set up at the bottom of the post office steps where a jazz band played during the day and the Keith Stackpole Experience played by night. It was towards this throbbing centre that Ruth Kohler was remorselessly drawn.

  What was happening around her seemed most un-English. Everyone appeared to be talking to each other. Despite the cold, grey weather, the atmosphere of jollity and involvement was pervasive and yet she had no idea how to connect with it all. She would have given anything for a quick Bloody Mary, but the pubs she passed were full of noisy male laughter and didn’t seem welcoming, so she settled for a coffee instead. She was looking hesitantly in at the door of the Theston Tea Shoppe, when she heard a voice.

  ‘Are you going in?’

  She turned to see who had spoken and found herself face to face with a youngish man, pale-skinned, with soft reddish hair and a round, unmemorable face. He was breathless and quite pink. She apologised and moved to one side.

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t seem to make up my mind.’

  His pinkness deepened, alarmingly, leaving Ruth to assume some unintentional gaffe on her part.

  ‘You were in the post office?’ he blurted out.

  ‘Yes, I … er … I’ve been to the post office,’ she admitted.

  ‘I work there.’

  ‘Oh really.’

  ‘Yes … Behind the counter.’

  ‘Ah.’

  This was a conversation he seemed to need more than she did, but it was the only one on offer so Ruth stayed with it as best she could.

  ‘I like English post offices, they’re kind of relaxed.’

  ‘They certainly are in a town like this. We get to know everyone. They all know us.’

  There was a pause. Unlike an English post office, the man who had accosted her seemed far from relaxed. He ran his tongue over his lips, wrinkled his nose and threw darting glances off into the crowd. He gave off a sense of thwarted intimacy and it occurred to her that he might have mistaken her for someone else.

  ‘Are you looking for somebody?’

  ‘Me? Oh … er … no, I just have to take something to those friends over there.’

  ‘Well, look, don’t let me hold you up.’

  Ruth smiled, broke eye contact and turned away. This seemed to precipitate him into some sort of decision. He took a deep breath.

  ‘I saw an address on your envelope.’

  Ruth turned. She felt a rising of the defences.

  ‘I couldn’t help noticing the name,’ he explained.

  ‘The name?’

  ‘I know it’s unprofessional and all that, but it caught my eye.’

  ‘Well, it may be an odd name in England, but it’s pretty common in America.’

  ‘No … no … not your name.’

  At that moment a short, wiry man wearing an old woollen cap approached from across the square, calling out as he came, ‘How about that coffee, Martin? I’ve been out here since eight.’

  The younger man leapt as if stung. ‘Coming, Frank.’ He darted away into the shop. The older man eyed Ruth with unapologetic interest and held out his hand.

  ‘Frank Rudge.’

  His hand was powerful. His fingers were thick and his skin was rough and hard as the bark of a tree.

  ‘Ruth Kohler,’ she said.

  ‘American?’

  She nodded.

  ‘On holiday?’

  ‘Working over here for a year.’

  ‘In Theston?’

  ‘Not far away. I’ve taken a cottage at Everend Farm.’

  ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘I’ve a book to write.’ She smiled. ‘Don’t want any distractions.’

  ‘What sort of book is it?’

  ‘It’s about Ernest Hemingway.’

  Rudge frowned.

  ‘The writer,’ she added. ‘And the women in his life.’

  A sudden, wide grin broke across Frank Rudge’s face, sending his lined and leathery skin in a mass of directions.

  ‘Should write about me next.’ He laughed, though there was a hint of seriousness in there somewhere.

  At that moment the man Ruth had been talking to emerged from the crowded café clutching two polystyrene cups.

  ‘Sorry, Frank.’

  Frank smiled benevolently. ‘You needn’t have hurried.’

  He nodded towards Ruth. ‘Ruth’s living at Everend for a year. Come over here to write a book about Hemingway and his women. I’ll take the coffees.’

  Despite her protest Martin also bought a coffee for Ruth. As she seemed lost, he took her across North Square to see the Rudges’ stall and he introduced her to the family.

  The friendship between the Sproal
es and the Rudges had begun nineteen years ago when Martin’s father died. At that time Frank Rudge was running the Theston branch of the Suffolk Eagles, a charitable organisation which raised money for local projects. They had been generous with help and support for the family and Frank still saw it as his business to keep an eye on Kathleen and Martin. He’d always had a soft spot for Martin’s mother. He had tried to persuade her to move back into Theston, but now he knew her better he respected her wish to be left alone.

  Elaine had known Martin since she was eleven and, though he would never admit it, Frank took quiet pleasure in the fact that they were now seeing each other.

  Martin introduced Ruth, a little awkwardly. Joan Rudge was the way she was with everybody – direct and blunt and unconcealed. She said she’d never heard of Ernest Hemingway, and asked if he was a golfer. She then embarked on the story of her best friend’s holiday in Florida, which Frank interrupted with brutal swiftness. He pointed out that the last thing Ruth wanted to hear about was the country she’d just left, and what she needed to know a little more about was Britain’s glorious heritage.

  The inside of a typical English pub seemed to him the perfect place to start learning. Leaving his wife and daughter to mind the stall, he led Ruth and Martin down Market Street in the direction of the Codrington Arms.

  It was midday by now and the carnival procession had begun to wend its way through the town. To cross the road Frank, Ruth and Martin were obliged to dodge in and out of slowly moving floats upon which shaky tableaux portrayed the great moments of Theston’s history.

  These had been remarkably few and, though Theston High School’s headmaster had creatively embellished the record with bogus sea-battles, fires, plagues, murders and visits from Winston Churchill, much of the historical slack had been taken up by the big companies. Miss NatWest Bank and the Prudential Story gratefully plugged any gaps in the historical imagination.

  All the set pieces were greeted with equal enthusiasm. Proud mothers waved at children dressed as pirates and embarrassed younger brothers wolf-whistled at sisters in fishnet tights pretending to be mermaids. It was noisy, chaotic, bizarre and somehow all very innocent.