The Paper Men (19 page)

“They aren’t mine sir.”

There was a long pause after that as I digested it. Of course. Halliday had them in the Barclay foundation. They as well as Mary Lou were part of the deal. The lord giveth and the lord taketh away, cursed be the name of him whatever one he chooses. Who knows his place? Who can affront, outface, attack, overthrow him? We can do nothing but strike his ministers in the forehead with a stone and hope it sinks in.

“Wilf, you were going to say a piece.”

“Ah yes. This lecture. It’s about rites of passage.
You
know about them, Rick, I’m talking to myself. For example a rite of passage is when you find that instead of fishing round for tintacks—thumb tacks you’d call them—in some saucer of mum’s, ashtray, paten, rich trifle on the mantelpiece or overmantel as toffs say you can walk into a shop and buy a whole packet. Then you know what you’ve done. You’ve become a householder. Another one comes when you kill something deliberately, a dog perhaps. Reminds me, what do you drink?”

“Anything, I guess.”

“Bourbon? They tell me bourbon’s come back in. Vodka? Whisky? I stick to wine myself.”

“I’d like that, Wilf.”

“When you have a vision of the universal wrath, intolerance—well hell, Rick, it isn’t a vision the way they get painted here and there, say in Italy, it’s real like a rock and you know it’s for ever like diamonds. That’s a rite of passage.”

“Yes, Wilf.”

“You recording?”

“I guess so.”

“Clever little thing! I feel like some coffee. Could you go and get me some coffee, Rick? Just to show the machine how much you venerate the old man?”

He rushed off with the kind of eagerness a child might show when after being rebuked he is assured that the sun has come out again. I sat and stared at the machine. I made funny noises at it since the camera function wasn’t taking any notice of faces. Rick came back with a small tray and coffee for two.

“We’ll have some wine first, Rick old friend.”

“Whatever you say, Wilf.”

“Just fill one of the saucers with wine, Rick.”

“Sir?”

“Well, whatever did you think I needed coffee for? To drink? Of course, come to think of it, tea would have done just as well.”

Rick put the tray down on the table. His eyes were bulging again. He sank into the chair across the table from me.

“This is a rite, son. After a rite nothing is ever the same again. You can go to bed and get up again and go on doing that till hell’s blue and nothing changes. This is different, isn’t it? Let’s see where we are? You will get authorization, like I said. But what assurance have I that you will keep your side of the bargain? So you’ll do anything. Just to prove it—just a friendly test, Rick. Take one of the saucers and put some Dôle in it.”

I waited, interested. He did nothing.

“Come, lad. You’ve been following me and recording me and pestering me and, yes, tempting me and persecuting me and buying and selling me all for the purpose of your lout literature. Are you going to fail now? Why—think of the chapter on Wilf’s accent!”

He was breathing hard.

“Yeah.”

“What do you mean, ‘yeah’?”

“Your Limey accent.”

“Too, too crude, Rick. Like I said, I’m satellite.”

“No, sir, I don’t mean now, I mean way back.”

“A fat lot you know about it!”

“I got an ear. Had an ear. That was why I did phonetics. I was real good. I
am
real good. But there’s no future— Well. My prof said to get a sample of you for the archive. I was working my way through college and I couldn’t be there. A friend of mind did the job. He got it fixed up, a recorder under the guest chair in the Faculty Club. Later on I couldn’t believe in you when I heard you. Those diphthongs! And the tones—my God they were near enough Chinese.”

“I was listened to in complete silence and with great respect!”

“No, sir. Not what you said but the way you said it. Then later—
what
you said.”

He was standing up, gripping the edge of the table and leaning forward.

“They made a kinda party piece out of that record, Wilf. When I got my dee fill they played it at the party. No, sir, it was not my doing so don’t blame me. I’m just telling you, sir. In fact that party was the first time I listened to what you were saying, ‘stead of picking out phonemes. I was real sick of phonemes by then.”

I found I had been standing too. I sat down, heavily.

“That’s vicious. That’s really vicious!”

“No, sir. Apart from the sounds it wouldn’t have been funny except for the coincidence. You were going on about the British social system—said the British were Greeks and the Americans Romans. You went on about the ‘Spartan incorruptibility’ of the civil service. You gave examples of their perfect devotion, like traditionally conservative civil servants organizing the nationalization of industry for the socialists. Only of course when he played the tape at my party we’d just heard the way your civil service was full of Philby and those guys. Laugh? People were falling about. They were real sore, too. Your civil service hadn’t just dropped you in the shit. They’d dropped
us
! You and your Limey accent!”

I found to my surprise that I was gripping my side of the table the way he was gripping his.

“That was most unwise of you, Rick, if you’ll forgive my elaborate Limey way of putting things. You let yourself go, didn’t you? Now we know, don’t we?”

The fire began to die down in him. He was deflating, returning to that state which I now saw not to be vacant, ignorant or servile but inscrutable. We were learning.

“You’ve shot your bolt, son. Wine in the saucer if you would be so kind.”

He still waited.

Tucker.
Tucker
the
fucker.

“No wine in the saucer, no authorized biography. No letters from MacNeice, Charley Snow, Pamela, oh a whole chest full of goodies! Variant readings. The original MS of
All
We
Like
Sheep
which differs so radically from the published version. Photographs, journals dating right back to Wilf’s schooldays, the happiest days of your life, Tucker, when you get your claws into it—a placated Halliday. You will be able to get off your knees. The pearly gates will open. A modest fame.”

“Scholarship—”

“Balls.”

Heavily he reached out his hand, heavily poured Dôle into one of the little saucers.

“Put it on the floor.”

For the first time in my life I saw eyes literally fill with blood. There were blood vessels in the corners and they engorged. I thought for a moment that they might burst. Then he laughed with a kind of crack and I laughed with him. I shouted yap yap at him and he shouted it back and we laughed and he put the saucer down on the floor laughing and he got on his knees having caught on and understood what was required of him. I could hear him lap it up.

“Good dog, Rick, good dog!”

He leapt to his feet and hurled the saucer in my face but I knew Who I was and the saucer passed by my ear. It hit a curtain and fell to the floor. The pile of the carpet was thick enough to receive it gently. The saucer didn’t even break but rolled round in diminishing circles then fell over the right way up. Tucker collapsed in the chair. He deflated further than I have ever seen, seeming to come in on every side so that his very clothes hung on him like sails that have lost the wind. He put his face in his hands. Only then could I see that he had begun to shudder like a man in deep shock. A dog. He sat there, leaning forward, face in hands, elbows on the polished table.

I turned my attention back to the intolerance and insolently interrogated it.

How’s
that
?

Water was coming through between his fingers. Sometimes single drops fell straight down on the polish but sometimes they would be included in the sobbing and through a shake they would be flicked out into the air and thus come halfway across to my side. His weeping became noisy. I have never heard a sound from as deep down and as hard to get out, like bone breaking up. It took the will of his body away so that he slumped, his elbows sliding back off the table, hands open on either side, cheek flat.

“Can you hear me in there?”

His hands slid off the table too. I could imagine his arms hanging straight down, knuckles perhaps on the floor, like an ape’s.

“I said, ‘Can you hear me in there?’”

“I can hear you.”

“Right. Let’s get round to business.”

He heaved himself up so that he was sitting, hunched. He didn’t look at me. All the same I could look at him. His face was streaming wet, eyes red, but no longer with engorgement. It was more like smears.

“Must we now? I guess I want to sleep or something.”

“Have another drink.”

He shuddered.

“No, no!”

I looked at my paper again.

“I shall make you my literary executor, probably in association with my agent and either Liz or Emmy—Emmy, perhaps. I shall authorize you to write my biography while I am still alive but with reservations I have not yet detailed.”

Rick yawned. He really did!

“Pay attention, son!”

“Sorry.”

“After I have taken legal advice on the proper form of the document you will sign, I shall communicate with you again, appointing a place for us to meet. Is that all clear?”

He nodded.

“Well, there we are then. Remember me to Helen if and when you see her again. Give Halliday my best wishes as from one banker to another. I imagine he has a bank.”

“Quite a few.”

“Tell him to keep up the good work. A wit, your Mr Halliday. Or have I said that before?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Total recall, Rick. Well. I imagine that’s all. Unless of course, you have any queries?”

“Yes, sir—Wilf. How long do you estimate? Time is—”

“Precious. Not mine, it isn’t. However, in your case I suppose— Well. It might be a week or two or a month—or two. Not longer. What difference can it make to you? You have no settled employment, ex-professor.”

“And you did say, Wilf, you mentioned reservations.”

“Ah yes. They only refer to the biography, you know. Nothing to worry about.”

He looked at me, miserably and warily.

“I’d like to know, Wilf, if it’s all the same to you.”

“That’s reasonable, Rick, and I thought that perhaps you would want to know them before you committed yourself. I’ll mention the principal one so that you can think it over. I shall give you a full and free account of my life without concealment and you can write what you like about that. But you will also give a clear account of the time you offered me Mary Lou and of the time you offered Halliday Mary Lou and had the offer accepted. In fact the biography will be a duet, Rick. We’ll show the world what we are—paper men, you can call us. How about that for a title? Think Rick—all the people who get lice like you in their hair, all the people spied on, followed, lied about, all the people offered up to the great public—we’ll be revenged, Rick, I’ll be revenged on the whole lot of them, ha et cetera. In this very room, my son—Mary Lou and me and you off to sleep, seduce the old sod, ‘Rick Tucker, who I am sure will entertain you’, did you forge that too, from the old poet whose boots you probably licked just to say you knew him? It’s a trade, my son. Me for you. My life for yours. Don’t say you won’t do it. You have to do it there’s nothing else you can do you have to lick the platter clean like the saucer down there the flying saucer Christ you can’t even throw straight. Now you know. Sod off and come when I call you. I’ll whistle.”

So we were silent again. I had time to reflect that a really
manly
man of Rick’s size would pick me up and chuck me over the balcony down to smash. But Rick was a paper man. There was no strength in him. I was safe, had been deceived. He wasn’t strong or hot or warm. He wasn’t a murderer. He was a suicide if anything but I doubted even that. Suicide is a sickness in health and Rick was wholly sane. It was his one—no, he
had
a crack. Marrakesh.

But the man was standing up. He was inflating I saw. Was he going to be what Johnny would call “cruel” and do me a mischief? I found to my surprise that I did not care. I watched him, eye to eye, perhaps for the last time I thought. I held him with the power of the human eye over a beast. So at last he looked down and turned to the door. Then when he had reached it instead of going straight out as I had thought he would, he turned suddenly, swelled. He clenched his fists and yelled at me.

“You mother-fucking bastard!”

Then he was gone.

Well, well, I thought! There are moments when one’s pets surprise one. Sometimes they are almost human. You’d swear they know what you’re talking about. Dear Fido! Of course they never bite. They merely growl in fun and seize master’s hand with hurtless jaws. Besides, it’s company.

I sat back and looked round the sitting-room in which we had held our kind of joust with paper lances, or at most old-fashioned biros. The saucer still lay on the carpet. I let it lie with a feeling that it had ceased to be just a saucer. It was now like all those objects which have received
mana,
power. Probably it
was
a flying saucer, visiting. What the hell. Then again what about the drops of water on the table? Some of them were smeared I saw and the rest drying with a tiny line of whatever salts they contained already showing round each. Probably in magic there was great virtue in such drops. Virgin tears? If you can find the tears of a grown man, my son, gather them up at the full moon and they are a sovran remedy against boredom, flatulence, world-weariness: and are one in the eye for old intolerance who thereby is getting its own back.

I poured myself some Dôle. I looked at it and somehow seemed not to want to drink it which was absurd. The moment he had disappeared I had become more aware of the steel string and now it seemed to be not merely tight but cutting into my chest. I forgot Rick and concentrated on the string which by magic now ceased to be length with little breadth but widened into a band, then into a strap. I felt as if it were tightening all over me, even my head, my head. Then I was shuddering and yelling and fingering my flies like a kid in a kindergarten.