The Pretender (11 page)

My tutor was in his office. The resigned cordiality with which he let me in suggested that he’d been expecting me. My file was on his desk. The university was run in such a ramshackle, anonymous way that it hadn’t occurred to me until then that I even possessed a file.

‘You’ve got no excuses, Mark,’ he said. ‘Your attendance at lectures has been the worst in the year.’

Nobody had told me how, once the numbers began to fall, lecturers routinely passed round an attendance list. That was what happened when you failed to make friends in your year.

‘You’ve missed three out of your twenty tutorials with me and you’ve often come under prepared.’

There was no denying this.

‘You walked out of your most important exam an hour early, having failed to complete the paper. Nobody’s going to be generous in their marking when they hear stories like that.’

I hung my head. I had thought myself unnoticed, virtually anonymous, but all the time people had been making notes on me. There was no coming back, that was what my tutor was telling me.

‘What surprises me,’ the tutor went on, ‘is that you came with such good references. Excellent A level grades. You’re described as loving literature, as having a vocation to be a novelist. Is that what you’ve been doing these last few months, writing a novel?’

I shook my head. I didn’t have the energy to lie. Anyway, he might ask to see it.

‘Your mother’s a librarian, it says here. How’s she going to take this news?’

In disbelief, I looked at his expression. Was he taking the piss? But why should the University know that my mother had been dead for nearly a year? I hadn’t told them.

‘Are you all right, Mark? Pull yourself together, lad.’

The tutor handed me a tissue because I was blubbing like a baby.

Later I was told that, given my bereavement, I would be allowed to return and retake my exams the following year. If I passed, I could continue my degree as if nothing had happened (though I would, for the first time in my life, be older than most of the people in my year). Presuming that I managed to support myself in London during my year off, I could even drop in on the lectures I’d missed.

My mother had helped me again. Although she had been dead for ten months, her absence affected me more than I would admit to myself. I was in a numb state that partly explains the way I behaved. I didn’t think of myself as an adolescent, still less as an orphan. But I was both. Maybe I still am.

I returned to Soho chastened, yet relieved. I wasn’t ready to be a student. There were things I had to do first, not least restoring the
Little Revie
w to its former fortunes. If the Mercers didn’t come through with some money, I would have to get a job, but that decision was way off in the future.

I told Tony that I was taking a year off from university and would like to spend more time on the magazine.

‘Is that possible?’ he asked, but didn’t hint that he knew the real reason. ‘I’ll tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll see if I can scrape up some work for you.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I can sign on in the summer.’

‘You’ll need to do that too,’ Tony told me, with a sad smile.

The 499th issue of the
Little Review
came back from the printers two days before the launch party. It had a black and white photo of Graham Greene on the front with the words, ‘Greene: A Major New Story’ in white lettering, reversed out over a dark Soho street. Tim’s name was also on the cover, listed alphabetically in the ‘new stories and poems by...’ strip at the bottom.

Tim was first to arrive at the party, which took place in Turret Books on Lamb’s Conduit Street. He’d had a haircut for the occasion. I realised for the first time that he was handsome, in a foppish, almost feminine way. Second to arrive was Magneta McLaren. It was the first time I’d met Magneta, whose bizarre, sententious short stories were published by the
LR
,
Ambit
and several other magazines. She was thirtyish and heavily made up in goth style, with a shock of black hair and a gold studded nose. Magneta wore a tight tank-top and blue jeans so full of holes that it was impossible not to notice the absence of underwear. Recognising her from Tony’s description, I introduced myself.

‘Where have you been hiding?’ she wanted to know, then pinched my bum with a playful grin. ‘You’re not a fag, are you?’

As I fumbled for an answer, Tony emerged from the back room, where he had been conducting some kind of negotiation with the bookshop’s owner.

‘Magneta, my dearest!’ He managed to extricate her from me, then whispered in my ear, ‘you’d better watch out, Mark, Magneta likes them young. She’ll have your cherry in no time if you let her.’

‘Who the hell was that?’ Tim asked, as more people arrived.

I told him.

‘Magneta McLaren!’ Tim was impressed. ‘She was in the
Granta
“Thirty under Thirty” issue.’

‘Do you like her stuff?’

Tim didn’t answer. He was staring at Magneta’s backside. From what he’d told me, it was years since he’d had a steady girlfriend. Few self-respecting women would sleep with a man who wore cheap clothes, had a lousy job and lived in a dusty bedsit above a secondhand bookshop. When Magneta was obscured by new arrivals, Tim and I talked about the new issue. He’s already read it, cover to cover.

‘Just to see what company I’m in.’

Tim was kind about my Greene review, but reserved his enthusiasm for my forgery.

‘That Greene story,’ he said, ‘it feels really fresh, not like something from the fifties at all. You know, when he asked about her mother, and worked out...’

I listened spellbound as, for five minutes, Tim talked about
A Girl He Used To Know
. It was one of the most flattering, intense conversations of my life. He had found one or two flaws, but linked the story to aspects of the author’s life that I hadn’t even considered. He picked up a copy of the magazine and quoted my own words at me. It was all I could do not to jump up and down announcing that I’d written the thing myself. Magneta came over with a glass of wine for me.

‘I saw you were empty.’ Then she noticed Tim’s rapt interest in her and asked if he wanted another drink.

‘Better not yet,’ he said. ‘I’m meant to be reading in a few minutes.’

All of Magneta’s attentions switched from me to Tim. ‘Oh,’ she said, picking up a copy of issue 499 from the display table. ‘So you’re...’

A few minutes later, Tony introduced Tim to the thirty or so people who had crowded into the narrow space. He apologised for Graham Greene’s absence, going on to say how he was sure that Graham would have deferred to important new talent like the young man who was about to read.

‘As soon as I began Tim’s story,’ he said, oozing sincerity, ‘I knew we had to have him in the
Little Review
. He’s one of the freshest voices I’ve come across in years. But don’t let me ramble on, listen to him for yourself. Tim Cooper!’

I hadn’t been to many readings during my nine months in London, so I had little to compare Tim with. I’m pretty sure, though, that he was terrible: hesitant, incoherent at times, stressing words in the wrong place. He had no sense of timing. If I hadn’t already read the story, I’d have thought it was rubbish. As it was, I doubted my judgment. Yet, when he was through, people clapped enthusiastically, as though Tim had completely justified Tony’s introduction of him. Magneta, especially, looked bowled over.

‘What did you think?’ Tim asked me.

‘You sounded somewhat... nervous.’

‘I was scared shitless. I should have got drunk first, I couldn’t have been worse. Nobody laughed at the jokes, did you notice?’

‘They’re an odd audience,’ I said, looking round, and they were. Badly dressed, anorexic or overweight. Most were getting on a bit and drinking as though prohibition was about to be introduced. We were the only guests in their twenties. It was hardly the Literary London I’d dreamt about. According to Tim, that was happening half a mile away, where magazine writers ten years my senior snorted cocaine in the toilets of a trendy club, then babbled about the novels they had already been commissioned to write. I’d read about these people and knew where to find them. I also knew that they wouldn’t be interested in me — at least, not until I was ‘someone’.

People wanted to talk to Tim, so I drifted away,pleased that my new friend was enjoying his success, but wishing there were publishing people present for Tony to introduce him to. The days when agents and publishers would scour the
LR
for new talent were long gone, but you never knew — somebody influential might buy the issue for the Greene story, come across Tim’s piece and fall for it.

I had another glass of wine and brushed against Magneta. Alcohol has always affected me quickly. Now that I was intoxicated, Magneta looked even more attractive.

‘I liked your friend’s story,’ she said.

‘Yes, me too.’

‘I like your friend,’ she went on, with a charitable shrug, making it plain I wasn’t in with a chance. Tim joined us. A few words of praise from Magneta and he started gushing. To distract myself, I began to collect glasses. The booze had run out, so the crowd was rapidly thinning. I took two handfuls of glasses to the tiny kitchen. Then I rejoined the party and looked for Tim. He appeared to have already gone, which was strange. I noticed that Magneta had left, too.

‘I think she persuaded your friend to walk her home,’ Tony told me, as he began to clear up.

Soon after, Tony left with one of his old boyfriends. It seemed he, like Magneta, was on a promise. Alone, I carried unsold copies of the magazine back to the
LR
office, walking hunchbacked, unnoticed, through wide, emptying streets, reflecting on the rewards that my career in forgery had reaped so far. I’d felt invisible all my life. I thought that writing was a way of making myself real, but so far it had only made me more invisible.

By faking the Greene story, I might have helped to keep the
LR
going. But that was a selfish act, not an achievement to be proud of. It meant I had a roof over my head and something to occupy my days.

Suppose — just suppose — I’d published the story under my own name, and Tony had accepted, published it? Maybe I’d have been the one who Magneta McLaren took home that night. And everything that followed might have been prevented.

Much of the next month was spent squashing magazines into pale brown jiffy bags and hauling large piles down to the post office. A few weeks later I saw the bookshop returns figure for issue 499. There were none. We’d upped our print run to 4,000 and the issue had still sold out. Subs were up too. If we got a similar sale for the 500th issue, the
LR
’s future was secure and it wouldn’t matter if I never saw a penny for the Hemingway stories that Paul Mercer had apparently made so much money from. I put that problem to the back of my mind.The important thing was that, if I passed my retakes, I could return to university the following autumn, knowing that my year off had not been wasted.

I had another challenge to face before I returned to academic work. Tony needed a story as the centrepiece for the five hundredth issue, which was going to be a double size, anniversary edition.

‘The best ever!’ Tony announced to anyone who visited the office. ‘Jim Ballard’s promised a story. Spike Milligan and Ted Hughes are doing poems. Bill Burroughs says he’ll come up with something.’

In other words, none of the above had actually delivered their material yet.

‘I’ve even written to James Sherwin,’ Tony told me.

‘Really?’ Since finishing the Greene, I’d been working on a story that was a kind of homage to Sherwin, drafting and redrafting it on my cheap word processor. What a coup it would be if Tony came up with the real thing!

‘No reply as yet. Now, what have you got for me?’

I was silent.

‘You’ve been trawling through the archives, I take it?’

‘I haven’t gone through the really early stuff yet,’ I said. ‘It’s in a bit of a mess.’

‘Seen this?’

He held up an obituary of Roald Dahl from that day’s paper. ‘I published him just after he started out. 1950, it must have been.’

‘I hadn’t noticed that,’ I said.

‘Don’t suppose we put his name on the cover. He wasn’t my kind of writer. But I could tell he had something. I very nearly used another story by him, shortly afterwards. I can’t recall why I didn’t, it’s so long ago.’

When Tony went out to lunch, I read the obituary. After a series of awful tragedies in his life, Roald Dahl had become one of the century’s most successful children’s authors. His previous work for adults was quite different. I hadn’t read him for ten years, but remembered his style as plain but witty. There was a darkness in his work that appealed to children. The same thing looked immature in his adult work, or so I thought at the time. Had an old Dahl story survived in the archives? From what I’d seen,Tony had been more organised in the fifties than he was now. We might get lucky. But it was unlikely. Putting aside the pile of manuscripts to deal with, I dug out the magazine containing the one Dahl story the
LR
published, from early 1950. Then I went into the box room.

One end of the room contained neatly stacked files, the fruits of my endeavours so far. The other held half a dozen decrepit tea chests, piled high with the detritus of the magazine’s first twenty years. I had barely explored these, beyond digging out the Graham Greene manuscript whose lay-out I had copied for
A Girl He Used To Know
. The chests were, at least, labelled. With difficulty, I lifted the chest containing 1962-66 and put it on the ground. Then I sat on it while I explored the first box, 1947-1951. Here were the original manuscripts of all the stories, articles and poems Tony had published. This was the most valuable box, I supposed, Tony’s nest egg, destined, perhaps, for the University of Iowa, or Texas. I ought to have worn gloves as I looked at them.

Tony’s handwriting as a young man was more rounded, less spidery than now. His organisation was better, too. The original manuscripts, together with the correspondence from each issue, were contained in clearly labelled foolscap envelopes. It didn’t take me long to find the Dahl story, together with a letter from the author. But that was it. I went through the envelopes containing later issues. Tony had kept very little relating to work not published. If Dahl had written to him, offering another story, the letter was long gone. But so what? The story might have existed. It could still exist, if I wrote it.