The Paper Men (14 page)

“How bad was it, then?”

“
Now,
Wilf! Who said anything about it being bad? Believe me, in all sincerity, when the spring runs over and they silently realize their love, huge tears welled into my eyes. They
did
!”

He giggled. I waited for a while, then knelt up. Johnny saw he might miss some fun. He cried out.

“You simply can’t go away, Wilf! You couldn’t get a car over from the harbour before tomorrow and that’s the sabbath, let alone the local saint’s day, which you wouldn’t miss on any account! The litany’s gorgeous—‘God bless us and God bless them and to hell with the Turks.’ General reaction wasn’t too bad, I do assure you. Of course, we know the creatures that simply would do a knife job, don’t we? Lilian and both the Henrys. The young creature on the box said it was
warm-hearted,
a thing he’d never thought to find himself saying of you. There! I’ve made your day, haven’t I?”

“As bad as that. Well, who cares so long as the money’s good?”

“Not you, dear, evidently. Even Lilian saying that when you tried to get warmth into a character it slopped all over the place is water off the duck’s back!”

I fished round for something to say. I think I was trying to be honest.

“After all—you have to write the bad books if you’re going to write the good ones.”

“Work on that, Wilf. At present it sounds like a poor translation from the French. At least you were approved of by Emmy’s young man.”

“What Emmy?”

“Your Emmy. Yours and Liz’s. The young man she went about with for a bit, that
vast
American academic—”

“Tucker! He’s still in Europe?”

“I had quite a
tendre
for him for a while—at least a week. He’s huge, isn’t he? Do you think he could be persuaded to be cruel? But then the trouble with these large Americans, they will keep on showering and using a positively asexual deodorant, unlike our local fishermen—have you sat down wind of them yet? It’s enough to give one an orgasm.”

“What was he doing with Emmy? I mean—where does he get his money from? He’s married to— He had a sabbatical only four years ago—perhaps he’s got the push. Goody goody.”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“That pretty little thing—”

“Helen—I mean, Mary Lou—”

“Right. Aha! So
that’
s where the warmth in
Horses
at
the
Spring
comes from! Yes, she does have something, doesn’t she? So unfair. Well. She’s back in the States. Tucker has a line out to some philanthropist, a billionaire. She’s got a job with him as a secretary or researcher or something.
Something,
I suppose.”

“Halliday!”

“That’s the name.”

—and I was back in the Weisswald, sitting before the view of Mary Lou, truly inspirational.

No
,
Wilf.
Mr
Halliday
is
very
fond
of
ladies.

Billions. Trillions. Mary Lou is interested in astronomy. Quadrillions. Money enough to start the Big Bang. Able to buy Mary Lou not with the lithe limbs of Paris. The girl you meet too late. The girl you have forgotten. That bit of you dissected out, a rare specimen. Able to buy Wilf, track him down, send forth. Run or stay still, in the end he’ll get you. He can stand still and wait for you to arrive. Purchasable purity, sanctity, holiness, beauty incomparable. Oh grieve for her, that circle she had tried to complete with Rick, make him invulnerable, now seen to be brittle and irretrievably broken—

“Wilf?”

“You know, when the circle’s broken and she’s no longer looking inward but can look outward at somebody else she’s probably quite different—probably a fascinating conversationalist and not physically heavy under the influence of his gravity but light as air, flirtatious—”

“You know? You’re in fugue!”

“Halliday.”

“I must say, Wilf—the sun is very strong, isn’t it? Perhaps—”

“What do you know about Halliday?”

“It’s time we got under cover.”

Rick probably left him a note on some enormous bare executive desk, oh acres and acres of it in consideration of the services hereinafter specified of my wife Mary Lou Tucker—

“One billion, I should think.”

“Come along, Wilf. Can’t afford to lose you, can we?”

With that sort of money Rick could afford to have the CIA and the FBI and our own useless lot, let alone the KGB, on my track! It accounted for my justifiable unease in so many places, passports and all that.

“Off with our tiny flippers, Wilf, there’s a dear.”

“Bugger off, Johnny, if you’re capable of it.”

“Now that was horrid.”

“I mean it.”

“I must say, Wilf, apart from my unnatural affection for you, you intrigue me. Why a man ostensibly so indifferent to society should be, if I may coin a phrase, so shit-scared of critical opinion—”

“Well. Aren’t you critical opinion, and if so can you wonder?”

“Rudesby!”

Clearly Halliday was more dangerous than Rick. After all, with his sources of information he didn’t have to guess. He simply knew my biography and could pass it on to that hairy hack Rick Tucker.

“
Who
knows your biography?”

Johnny was standing on the front step of the hotel. He had stopped pulling me by the wrist, though he still had hold of it and he was staring into my face. I shook off his hand.

“Got to shower.”

“The water won’t be on yet, as well you know.”

“Got to lie down.”

Johnny nodded seriously.

“That’s—er, the ticket. Great nature’s second course.
Macbeth,
q.v.”

“Ha et cetera.”

Johnny was still nodding to himself when I got myself away from him.

I was tired from swimming and knew that any clothes I put on would be sticky from salt and then sweat. I sat on the edge of my bed and determined to do nothing. I did not move, I hardly breathed. I did not think or feel. I willed myself into a state of nothingness, of deliberate catatonia like a limpet that the tide has left. I came to out of that state with an anguished click!—perhaps it was audible—like a blind running up and letting in cruel daylight. I was remembering Prescott. I never knew the man himself only his letters and the manuscript he kept plaguing me with. It was bad, hopelessly bad, though there was a good idea buried in it. I told him all that, yet he kept plaguing me for years with requests and ideas. At last I had to ignore him. But the thing was that the central idea in my fourth novel
was
exactly
the
good
one
hidden
in
Prescott’s
awful
manuscript!
Of course, it was properly treated and all that, but still! I swear that when writing
The
Endless
Plain
and ever since I had not even thought of Prescott or the manuscript or the whole trying non-association which is only too familiar in type to any writer once he has got out before the public.

Had
I remembered? Was it wholly the work of the unconscious that Liz didn’t believe I suffered from, or had I stolen the idea deliberately at some point? As far as I knew, Prescott had never succeeded in publishing the MS he sent me, though by now he had enough books to his name and was probably as well known as I am. Would he remember and make a point of it in some interview? It seemed to me, as the afternoon turned into a somewhat cooler evening, that there was not a single absurd, humiliating or quasi-criminal act in my life that did not come back to sting and burn me.

When at last I went downstairs, since there was only the one hotel in the place it was inevitable Johnny should be waiting for me.

“Ouzo, Wilf, to take the look of anguish off your face.”

“God forbid. I keep my own
galoni
in the bar. It’s drinkable. Minos.”

“I must say, my dear, it can only be those famous wanderings of yours that keep your figure even reasonably within bounds the way you positively
rape
the bottle.”

“Famous?”

“You and Ambrose Bierce. Quote, where is Wilfred Barclay whose recent novel
Horses
at
the
Spring,
unquote.”

“Oh shut up. If it comes to that, what are you writing yourself?”

“Little me? A huge picture book for the rainbow people. About Sappho, of course. I’m undecided whether to call it
Ladies
of
Lesvos
or
Burning
Sappho.
I wish someone had really burned the wretched girl. There’s nothing known about her, nothing at all. Besides it’s nominally history and I’m not feeling creative.”

“That your best one-liner to date.”

“Funny or not, whenever I turn to the thing I get in such a pet!”

“You’re not a classical scholar.”

“I’m an erotic scholar. You wouldn’t believe the information I’ve managed to amass from my women chums, to say nothing of guesswork. You’ll swear, I know, not to pinch the idea, but what do you suppose neolithic ladies used those dinky little carvings of the earth mother for? I’ve even embarked on bogus philology—rather like canting heraldry—and claim that ‘Lesbos’ is derived from ‘Olisbos’, classical Greek for what the ads call a Sex Aid. How do you get on in your wanderings, Wilf? Still in the missionary position?”

“How do you?”

“One doesn’t ask for permanence.”

He fell silent and during that silence I drifted off into a dreary brood only to surface when I heard Johnny speak again.

“
Why
are you deadly sick of all this?”

He was eager again and scanning the various visible areas of my face for information. It came to me that his next move would be to tell Rick where I was. Come to that, he could sell the information to the press or any or all of the bloody media.

“Where is he now?”

“Who, Wilf?”

“My—my would-be biographer.”

“Aren’t you the lucky thing? Displaying one’s all! Nobody has offered to write my life, alas. I shall have to do it myself, such a thankless task, a sort of literary masturbation which, say what you will—”

“In my case—”

“Yes, yes, I know. You are about to proclaim your
complete
heterosexuality like silly young Keats. Do you remember? I think it’s in ‘Lamia’. Dear, dear Wilf! You must have it as an epigraph for your Collected Works. Let me see—yes.

What a vulgarian! One can see why it got itself called the ‘Cockney School’.”

My
galoni
had appeared and I started drinking. Those memories were like worms eating into the flesh, Rick pursuing, worms eating, and monstrous Halliday brooding over all. I thought to myself that the strain was building up in me because I’d stopped writing and should instantly start on another book, but the trouble was my head was empty of all but these thoughts triggered by John St John John who was continuing to talk whether I listened or not.

“Beware of the worm—”

I came to with a dreadful start.
He
had said that, not I! Of course, I’ve worked out since then that while I was brooding in what I thought was silence I must have muttered something about the worm; but at the time it was terrifying as necromancy. It seemed to me that everyone in the world but I could see, had some sort of access, and only I was trapped in myself, ignorant, bounded by my own skin with none of the antennae
They
seemed to have in order to reach out and touch my secret self.

“What worm?”

“—that flies in the night in the howling storm—wasn’t Britten divinely
clever
? I do envy composers, don’t you? Like mathematicians. They don’t have to have any politics and that sort of thing, just sit up there on a cloud.”

“What worm?”

“My dear boy. They are eating you alive. Shall I give you a complete diagnosis?”

“No.”

“You see, you are what biologists used to call exoskeletal. Most people are what they called endoskeletal, have their bones inside. But you, my dear, for some reason known only to God, as they say of anonymous bodies, have spent your life inventing a skeleton on the outside. Like crabs and lobsters. That’s terrible, you see, because the worms get inside and, oh my aunt Jemima, they have the place to themselves. So my advice, seeing you’re going to make me a loan and
noblesse
oblige
et cetera, is to get rid of the armour, the exoskeleton, the carapace, before it’s too late.”

“Any suggestions?”

“You could try, let me see, religion, sex, adoption, good works—I think sex is the best in the circumstances. After all, even lobsters get together, though I must confess I don’t see how, quite. It’s probably the extraordinary onanism that One Above allows to go on unblasted provided it’s under water.”

“Salmon and suchlike.”

“Just so. You’ve been reading that little verse I wrote for the
TLS.
‘For man is a funniful fish, a mere fish but a queer fish, a holy roly poly fish, very particular where his milt (the queerest flesh of the fish) is spilt.’ And so on. Good, don’t you think?”