Read by Louisa Gummer
She was 25 when they first met, and working as his typist. He was 45 and had not yet written his best work. Because she had just quit her job as a nurse he asked her, mischievously, ‘tell me about the last wishes of the dying?’ Each time she gave a different answer.
He was childless and she wasn't interested in motherhood, and that meant they lived a large life - too large for his health, some might argue. At 60 he came to her unable to say what the matter was. She told him to lie down on the sunbed in the garden of their country home while she called a doctor. He died with the smell of herbs on the breeze.
After his death, book after book was written about him. She inherited his whole estate – the country house, his library, the rights to his work, his papers and letters. All the biographers came to court her for his records, which remained in their house.
Their visits all followed a similar pattern: they would call to set up an appointment. If they were obviously serious they would be allowed to visit. She would receive them, serve them tea, talk to them about their lives and their work, and then show them up to his old office. For them, she kept it as it had been. His letters, notebooks and drafts were kept in so many manila folders in a handful of cardboard boxes. These would be waiting for them on his desk. At the end of all their fussing through, if they wished, they would make another appointment to interview her.
Each biographer came in the hope that they would find some note, some trinket that the others had missed. This log of memory, they hoped, would make this new biography a greater insight into the character of the man than the last. One spent a chapter inventing hidden meanings in the birthday cards sent by his distant relatives. Another unsympathetic academic noticed with glee that he'd sent the same poetry to his mistress in Europe as he had to her. (I could have told him that, she thought, I typed them up). She felt terrible explaining to a very young literary critic that the Post-it the woman had found, which she believed unlocked the true meaning of the penultimate scene of the author’s masterwork, was in his lawyer’s handwriting, and must have become mixed up with her late lover’s things.
Each one attributed more and more significance to his or her tiny detail, even though in reality each biographer had been talented. So the one before, and the one before, and the one before that, had each snagged the most important and most telling artifact that still remained unprocessed, true to his purpose. In each biography the man remained essentially the same. He did not change. As in life – the woman thinks. His character was so curiously unbending to his own fortunes, despite his famed sensitivity.
But she, on the other hand, was the character that grew, that was transfigured in each book. From an unassuming ingénue turned sophisticate, laid low with grief, to an ever-scheming woman, still profiting off her one-time beauty through the control of his legacy. To his greatest muse, to his greatest mistake. Each biographer’s interpretation depended so much, she thought, not on the formal interview she gave but on his experience of the tea she held with each visitor on the verandah of the house.
True devotees of the great man read each book, each time hoping for a new perspective on their hero. Instead, they delved deeper into her.
As she grew older the visitors thinned out. Eventually she too died, and her relatives cleared out her things. They found she had written a novel of extraordinary beauty. A whirlwind of rumours swept through the literary world. Could she have held something of his back, and passed it off as her own?
‘Preposterous,’ her editor, posthumously acquired, countered. ‘Its settings and themes date it precisely to the last years of her life.’
‘But could, no wait,’ - the lit blogs tittered – ‘his later writing actually have been – hers!?’
‘’Clearly she did more than simply type for him when he was alive!’ said her fresh, eager fans.
They were dismissed by his spokespeople in the academy, with counter-allegations that she had borrowed more from his style than was apparent to the casual reader. People with no obvious allegiance intervened.
She was not coy, an obituary said, she claimed any credit she deserved, and imitated no one. But in a different paper an old school friend disagreed, ending his remembrances, cryptically, with: ‘She had an inner defeatedness’.
Archivists, academics, and true-life yarn spinners all clamoured to review his documents once again – and hers too. But the estate had quickly been sold, the library and offices packed up and shipped to a Turkish university, and its container had been infuriatingly mislaid in Rotterdam.
Her novel held no clues. It was not a thinly fictionalized memoir, but an act of pure imagination. ‘My last wish,’ her niece tearfully read from her will at a press conference, ‘is that one thing be preserved, exactly as I ask it.’ In this case it was the title of the book, which bore no obvious relation to its contents.
She had called it The Biographers.
(c) Simone Haysom, 2015
Simone Haysom is based in Cape Town and London. She recently received a Miles Morland Writing Award and is working on a book of narrative non-fiction about a murder trial and alleged police frame up. Her fiction has been published in the literary magazine Prufrock, and her non fiction is being translated into French for ulyces.co.
Louisa Gummer is a Liars' League regular. Her recent voiceover work includes the "Vine in 1914" strand on BBC Radio 2, seducing Harry Enfield on a radio ad, guiding visitors around Stockholm's Moderna Museet, and giving instructions inside an MRI scanner!
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