Mrs. Hemingway (20 page)

Yes, she thought, London sounded very nice indeed. The broadcaster's English accent had given her a vision of an apartment in Mayfair: bombs blasting off above her, getting down the copy for a story, perhaps in bathrobe and gas mask.

Martha left him in her office. In the living room she tried again for the wireless but he caught up with her and turned it off at the dial.

“I hate being cautious and good and settled,” she said to him, wondering why it was so hot in this room, why the house never cooled down. “This luxury,” she said, looking around at the settled misery of their possessions. “This bolt-hole! Don't you tire of it?”

Ernest brought his scarred leg up to the chair. “This is what war does, Marty, it maims; it kills. You think you're going to find something different, as if you're special. But you won't.”

“Balls! When we first met, you said I should go to war.”

“And you've done it now. Bravo!”

She went over to the window: outside, the cane fields glowed in the Cuban dusk. “I think you're holed up where you're comfortable,” she said to the glass. Her own reflection in the window was indistinct and faint. “I think you're scared of leaving.”

“Are you calling me a coward?”

“What I am saying is I am unhappy here. I don't want to live as if wrapped in mothballs.”

“Martha Gellhorn,” Ernest laughed savagely. “War re-porter and masochist. You've got no fucking clue, girl.”

Martha opened the front door and went outside to the broad stone steps. She needed air. They'd had this argument over and over. It was her own fault, perhaps, for ever thinking she was going to get the response she wanted. Outside, their cats lay waiting for pigeons. An orchid extended its thin mauve neck. Birdsong went on mindlessly. All around her, Cuba ripened.

Ernest came out to the veranda with a drink. He handed it to her without a word and then sat down on the cane lounger. There was a wheezing sound, then a snapping, and the chair collapsed into nothing more than kindling. With his knees thrust up around his ears he looked like a child. His face looked thunderous, until he saw her laughing.

“Piece of good-for-nothing junk,” he said, and he picked up a bit of the chair and threw it to the garden to the comical screeching of a cat. Martha laughed again. “Now tell me why you'd want to be anywhere else?” Ernest said, gesturing at the Finca—their sumptuous ruin.

He sat down by her; his T-shirt smelled of the cocktail. “What can I do for you, Marty?” His words were gentle now. Poor Ernest. He had never loved another more than he himself was loved.

She put her arm around him. “Let's go to Europe.”

“I'm an old man.”

“You're forty-four. You'd flourish again.”

“It'll be cold. The food will be terrible. I'll be used up and no good.”

He took a sip from her drink and handed it back.

“You'd be of use to me.”

“I can't be your maid, Marty. I can't be your governess.”

“Then be a reporter again.”

“
I don't want to
, Martha. If you stay here we could start a family. Try for a daughter.”

The thought of children only made her flinch. Last year, she had terminated another pregnancy. Ernest tried to persuade her to keep it, having gotten it in his head that it would be a girl. But she told him she'd be no good as a mother. She had not been—and never would be, she felt—in the mood for mothering. “Not that again. Please.”

Ernest scooted in front of her and put his hands on her knees. Please, she thought, let him not be loving. She could handle him as boorish and bullying, but not gentle and meek. “Rabbit. I know we've worn each other down. I know we haven't been the best version of ourselves always, but God never promised an easy life to two writers trying to live together. Rabbit, please.”

Martha looked at his soft pleading face but held her nerve. She took a big draft of the drink. The gin was flat and strong. “I have to go.”

“Fine.” He stood up. “Take your weltschmerz and go find the pulse of misery elsewhere. The war will look as fucking miserable as it always has, you spoiled little bitch.”

So here it was: Ernest's return to fine form.

He picked up his drink and went into the house, kicking the rest of the collapsed chair over the stoop. “You writer bitch!” he said from the house, his voice loud with vehemence. “You can make your own damn way to England, then!”

Martha unpicked a curl of soap from the diamonds of her engagement ring and flicked it over the side. She watched two birds nesting in the tree above and downed the drink in one. The rapid night fell on Cuba. Not for her the life of the writer's wife. She was off to war.

Martha leaves the Ritz and heads back to the Champs-Élysées. Was that it? Was that her grand removal from the Hemingway camp? This morning she had imagined her liberation as glorious as the Parisians' today. Instead, as she heads west to the Tuileries, what keeps coming back to her is that poem, spooling over the side of the bureau like the loop of a dream. A poem for Mary, whoever she is. Why did Ernest have to do it like this? This big strapping man stomping about the city—and yet he couldn't seem to spend a week, a day, even an hour on his own. Between divorcing his ex-wife and marrying her he'd left thirteen days; it seemed he was a man who couldn't bear being alone.

At the Tuileries the flower beds are empty, the plants probably eaten. A scorched tank still smokes. Martha stops at the park café for lunch where she spoons down a bowl of thin broth and orders a coffee, though when it arrives she realizes it's not coffee but toasted chicory and a few grains of saccharine. As she sits outside in the bright light she lets this morning's full derangement slowly become clear: in the same day that he was begging her to stay, he was writing love poems to his mistress. It really shouldn't surprise her, since Ernest without a woman would be a writer in want of a wife. But she feels betrayed by Mary's unexpected entrance, as if her carefully rehearsed script has been snatched by a troop of fools intent on making this day a farce.

Martha had heard a rumor in London that Ernest might be
entertaining
someone at the Dorchester, but she had put it down to wartime nooky and thought nothing of it. After all, she has had her own fair share of indiscretions since Havana. She thinks of those yellow tulips in the London hospital. Perhaps they'd been a gift from her—from Mary Welsh. Or is it Walsh? But for Ernest to be writing poetry—and love poetry at that—it must be quite serious indeed. Martha almost admires him: what a feat, she thinks, to want to marry every woman he fucks. He is so good at being in love that Ernest Hemingway makes a rotten husband.

Martha smokes a cigarette to mask the coffee. It tastes as if liquefied from bark. She watches the world go by. The Parisians all look so happy, but Martha feels a rueful spectator to the memories of the past. She remembers how many times she and Ernest had gotten blind on gin and coconuts in Havana; how they had spent one night inventing a dance called the Hem-Horn Step, the both of them too drunk to remember the moves each time they attempted it. She remembers how, after a terrible time with the writing, Ernest had taken her out on
Pilar
, and, looking out over the sea, he had said, “This, Marty, is the only thing that matters.” And he coaxed her out of a misery so peculiar and so vague that only writing could cause it—and only another writer could understand it. That afternoon he named each tuna he hooked after every reviewer they'd both come to hate. And that night they roasted the cream of the New York critics on their barbecue back at the Finca.

Most of all, as she finishes up her K-ration cigarette, Martha remembers his love for her. Perhaps it had only been her own ambivalence that had made his love so sharp and so angry. “I love you like a fucking dope”—how he had seemed to spit out those words, just an hour ago at the Ritz, as if he were in some part disgusted with himself.

And now it's all ending, Martha thinks, with a shock she hasn't yet felt about the end of her marriage. Everything bad is coming to a close, but so is everything good, and she feels wretched and bleak. Oh, Ernest! Why, she thought, did he have to do this to her as well? But there could never be two people at the close of his marriage. No, she thinks, a little bitterly: it always had to end on a three-card winner.

 • • • 

As Martha walks from the park her hand is shaken vigorously and she collects a hundred embraces when they see her correspondent's badge. De Gaulle is due at three and already people are gathering on the boulevard with a bottle of calvados or plum liquor. She'll need to get her story quickly before the boulevard is flooded with drunks and jubilants.

Since her D-day stunt Martha has been in hot water with her boss at
Collier's
. To sweeten him up she's decided to give him a light piece on Paris fashion. That is what Americans want to hear from Europe: not the state of the Jews, or the work of the Resistance, but what has happened to the French hemline. Well, she thinks, let them have it. In any case, she needs her work to take her mind off Ernest. Whenever she has been sunk with worry of one kind or another, it has always been reporting that has proved the most effective anesthetic.
Travail: opium unique
—this has always been her motto.

Martha finds an assistant in one of the fashion houses. Behind the glass he hangs flags around mannequins dressed in fur and brocade, buttons and lace. It's as if Paris is an exotic bird next to London, where she saw no fabric on sale—no buttons, no lace, no beads. When she knocks on the window, the man jumps and palms his hand over his heart. Paris is still jumpy. He eyes the badge on her arm.

He leaves his mannequin sunbathing half-nude in the August light. Martha offers him her best smile and then goes in for the kill. “So what were the Krauts like as customers, Monsieur?”

He instantly bridles. “I am only the window man,” he says. He watches the boulevard nervously as if he fears the mob might turn on him. Martha tells herself to go gently: all she has to do is find out what ladies did with their rayon rations.

“What could women buy, Monsieur?”

The man gives a guarded summary of their shortages—no metal hooks, no eyes, no leather for soles. He tells her about the craze for enormous hats because they could be made from scraps and leftovers. She thinks she has enough down to spin something together, a little froufrou article that her boss will love. Martha thanks him and starts to make her way back to her hotel, where, for an hour, she will forget the mess of marriage to Ernest and she will sit at her typewriter and just
write
. She might start her piece with a portrait of the couturier's, then give the panorama of the city itself: the booksellers down at the Seine, the rich women in their palanquins, the
semelles en bois
that made every Parisian sound like a two-legged horse. Keep it simple, she tells herself.

A hundred yards away, Martha realizes she has forgotten to take the man's name. She jogs back to the fashion house, but from a distance, Martha sees he is talking to someone else outside the store. Another reporter.

This is irksome.
Collier's
will only want her story if it's an exclusive. She's about to march over to this journalist to tell her to quit it but she stops short. There is something familiar about this woman, who is her own age and has blonde hair curled close to her scalp. She's very neat in blazer and shirt, though the suit can't hide her full chest. Perhaps Martha knows her from Madrid; perhaps she was a fellow resident at the Hotel Florida and they have breakfasted together over orange halves.

Martha watches this reporter from behind a newspaper kiosk. No, Martha thinks, changing her mind, she is someone from the New York office of the
Post
or the
Times
. The shop man's
froideur
has all but gone under this woman's warmer attentions—there can be no question who has snagged the better interview. He even laughs. At the end of the interview the journalist hands over her card and introduces herself in French. The shock of the name makes Martha go cold. It's her. It's the woman of Ernest's poem.

 • • • 

Mary Welsh hardly looks a war reporter. Her breasts are unshaped by a bra and she has big soft blonde curls that are not well kept from her face by bobby pins. When she listens, she tilts her head sympathetically—she is probably used to soft-soaping people for the gossip columns or women's pages. She is attractive, Martha thinks, to a degree.

An overweight American reporter comes to talk to her just as she is putting her notepad away. Mary looks delighted to see him, whoever he is. They talk on the boulevard corner, their faces close and intimate in the crowd.

“Do you want to buy something?”

Martha looks blankly at the newspaper seller. “What?” He asks her again if Madame would like to buy a newspaper. “No.”

Martha has nowhere else to hide aside from the kiosk. And so, with little forethought as to what she will actually say, she strides over to Mary Welsh. It is an ambush. But it is also unplanned. “Mary?” she says, but she can't be heard. Horns sound where a crowd has gathered, and people are shouting that the general is arriving. A policeman blows his whistle, trying to keep some sort of order. “Mary!” she is forced to say again.

“Yes?” The woman looks at her with a blank expression.

The fat man blinks. His face is pink and wet in the heat.

“I'm Martha. Martha Gellhorn.”

The man's eyes glitter with something like fear; she's glad her name can still do this. He gives Mary's arm a squeeze. “See you tomorrow.” The way he says it, it's as if he's wishing her luck, as if Mary is entering battle. Martha wonders if Ernest's relationship with this woman is common knowledge; perhaps she is the only one in their circle of reporters who has been left in the dark. She would hate to be thought of as a chump by any of them. The man nods at her before walking away and for moments the two women watch him go.