The Paper Men (2 page)

“God, Tucker, you are the most— Do you suppose I throw away—? Well—”

I remembered with sudden unease. It wasn’t that simple.

“What you’ve got there, Tucker, is what’s commonly called fan mail. I don’t get much but what I do get is worth less than a good honest toilet roll. You can take one of those with you if you like.”

“Please, Wilf—”

“And you’ve cut yourself. There’s broken glass in that dustbin.”

He rocked on the stool.

“Shot. …”

It was like hearing a strangled cry for the first time. It was like hearing the word “shot” for the first time.

“Christ!”

I leapt to my feet, took a step and grabbed the table to save myself. My pyjama trousers fell round my ankles. I kicked them off as the ghastly seriousness of the situation flashed in on me. It was a peripeteia to end all peripeteias. From being indignantly in the right I was now monstrously in the wrong.

“Here. Let me see.”

“No, no. I’ll be OK.”

“Nonsense, man—here!”

“Guess I’ll make out.’

I grabbed the belt of his bedrobe, pulled the knot loose, then dragged the whole thing down from his shoulders. A densely hairy chest came into view, then a narrower shrubbery leading down to an even more densely haired nest of privates.

“Where is it, for God’s sake?”

He said nothing but swayed. The bedrobe dragged down his arm from thick upper arm to thick forearm. I nerved myself for the bloody revelation. I got the bedrobe down to his wrist. There was a bruise on it and a scratch. A trickle of blood led down to the back of his hand.

“Tucker, you fool, you’re not hurt at all!”

As if on cue the kitchen door opened, stage left. Elizabeth came in, surveyed Tucker’s hairy nakedness and my discarded pyjama trousers.

“I don’t want to be fussy but it is rather late and extremely difficult to get to sleep or stay there. Could you two men make less noise about it?”

“About what, Liz?”

“About whatever you’re doing.”

“Can’t you see? I shot him. He was at the dustbin, ashcan, trashcan. The badger— Oh God, I can’t explain!”

Elizabeth smiled with terrible sweetness. “I’ve no doubt you will, given a little time, Wilfred.”

“I thought he was a badger. I fired the airgun accidentally, you see—”

“Yes, I do see,” said Elizabeth charmingly. “Well if you are going to continue, please don’t frighten the horses.”

“Liz!”

She bent down and picked up a scrap of paper that had fallen from Tucker somewhere. With one hand up to her hair she turned the paper over, read it silently at first, then aloud.

“
…
longing to be with you. Lucinda.”

She turned the paper over again and sniffed it with delicate connoisseurship. “And who is Lucinda?”

Then, as if she had switched channels, she became the perfect hostess. She had to be assured that Tucker’s now concealed hairiness had not suffered. She indicated that the whole thing was the sort of joke she was used to and enjoyed. Quite soon she left us still sitting at the table. My hangover was back, increased and only made endurable by the depth of fury I felt.

“I wish to God I
had
shot you!”

Tucker nodded submissively, willing to be shot in the cause of scholarship, even conceding my right to do it, marvellous me. He was prepared to concede my wonderful right of control over everything in the wide world except the words I had written or received, which were by their nature, no, by my nature—oh, what the hell? Even now I can remember my hatred of Tucker, apprehension over Liz and anger with impossible, daft Lucinda. Stir into that fury with myself and sheer blazing rage at the farcical improbability and implacability of the Fact. Beyond all the contrivances of paper, manipulations of plot, delineation of character, dénouements and resolutions, there, in that real world, real dustbin, the quite implausible actions of individuals had brought into the light of day a set of circumstances I had thought concealed from the relevant person and finally disposed of. Nor, in all this, had I the comfort of any morality, only immorality.

“Tucker.”

“You were calling me Rick, Wilf.”

‘Listen, Tucker. Tomorrow you were leaving. I mean today. You are never coming back. Never, never, never, never, never.”

“You make me deeply unhappy, Wilf.”

“Go to bed, for God’s sake!”

I put my elbows on the table and my forehead in my hands. All at once a black despair descended on me.

“Go to bed, go away, get out. Leave me alone, alone—”

He answered me out of the depths of his reverent absurdity.

“I understand, Wilf. It’s the Burden.”

At last the kitchen door closed. Sheer self-pity was filling the dark hollows behind my eyelids with water. Lucinda, Elizabeth, Tucker, the book that was going so badly—the water spilled into my palms the way the blood had trickled out of Tucker. In the trees the dawn chorus was in full, joyous swing.

Presently I opened my eyes. Yes, of course I should have known. The evidence had been staring me in the face. It stood by the sink, the bottle I had opened that I couldn’t persuade anyone to drink. It was empty. By its side stood another one. That was empty too.

Immediately my hangover became desperate. I hunted about for pills, stole some of Liz’s that had been effective before. By the back door the dustbin fell over. Furiously I staggered out. A black-and-white creature with a bristly back was running along by the river bank, making for the mill dam where it could cross into the woods opposite us. The dustbin, ashcan, trashcan,
poubelle,
the evidence, the incriminator, lay on its side with a trail of household rubbish, refuse, cartons, bottles, bits of meat, eggshells strewn from it all the way along the wake of the badger; and in the mess, scribbled, typed, printed, black-and-white and coloured—paper, paper, paper!

It was too much. The village festival, that weekly collecting of all our yesterdays, must look after itself. I crept, as I thought, softly through the house. I opened the door of “our” bedroom, in blinding daylight. Elizabeth turned over.

“I’m not asleep.”

“Look, Liz—”

“‘Longing to be with you. Lucinda.’”

I was too miserable to speak. I gathered the eiderdown from my bed and found my way, half-blind, to the hole I sometimes call my study. The dawn chorus had died away and I knew that the sounds of Monday morning would begin long before my head was anywhere near rescued from ruin. It was at that—well, not moment but
juncture
—that I realized something not so much with a start as with a convulsion. There were torn photographs in the dustbin as well.
Why
had I gone through those boxes to rid myself of old shames, my past, and dumped them in the dustbin instead of burning them?
Why
had I told Tucker?
Why
was he such a dedicated, such a determined, single-minded fool? Somewhere in all that spilt rubbish, crumpled, torn, smeared with jam or fat—now there was no knowing who in the household, our daily, or out there, the dustmen, or milkman—or lying in a badger’s stomach or its sett: the point was that Rick L. Tucker and a badger with their dawn antics had put me in danger of losing my wife and my dignity at the same time. The assiduity and humble determination that had seemed comic at first now seemed to threaten me like a disease. It was as if all paper had become sticky by nature so that whether it was lard or marmalade you could never rid yourself of the stuff, once committed to it. It was flypaper and I was the fly. It was the Venus Flytrap, the Sundew. It was those footsteps in the sands of time that I now saw I preferred not to leave behind me.

“And who is Lucinda?”

That was the beginning of the end of my marriage to Liz. Never marry a woman nearly ten years younger than yourself. It took years, what with the state of the law as touching divorce. We were and are and always shall be profoundly connected, not in love or hate, nor in the trite compromise of a
love/hate
relationship.
Whatever it was, the thing was there, to be enjoyed, fought against and suffered. We were entirely unsuitable for each other and for making anything but a dissonance. As long as Liz stayed healthy she was integrated and moral. I lived in the simple conviction, I now see, that I could only remain integrated by immorality. This immorality carried in it the necessity of concealment—though who knows now what Liz knew or suspected? That dirty piece of paper was a catalyst. If I had been sufficiently aware, I might have seen in its appearance from the dustbin the corner of a pattern that was to prove itself universal. Lucinda pre-dated my marriage to Liz and at the time of the dustbin I was involved with a girl successfully concealed. Irony? The Eye of Osiris?

Caught in the kitchen with Rick L. Tucker and the piece of paper, I was led to do the one thing to which I was wholly unaccustomed; that is, I made a clean breast of everything. Contrary to all expectations (particularly as illustrated by novels), Elizabeth understood but did not forgive. On mature reflection (old man sitting in the sun), I think she only wanted the excuse. Our rows were fiercer than duels. We were sophisticated but uncivilized. I went and stayed at the sleazier of my clubs, telling her that she was welcome to the house, garden, paddocks, horses, cars, boat, limited company,
anything,
but I couldn’t stand it any more. The club had a strict limit for the number of consecutive nights you could sleep there. So when I went home to be forgiven, I found she had gone off herself. She had left a note saying that I was welcome to the house, garden, paddock, horses, cars, boat, limited company,
anything,
but she couldn’t stand it any more.

Even then we might have come together and continued our necessary wrangle until age and indifference had granted us a mutual sense of humour. But that horsy creature Capstone Bowers appeared on the horizon. Julian sorted it all out in time—the goods and chattels and messuage or whatever it is—and the marriage came to as much of an end as any marriage of that length ever does. The only damaged party, I think, was our poor little Emily. I met Humphrey Capstone Bowers only once, by appointment, at that same sleazy club, the Random. They—we—are an odd lot and connected with paper, from advertising and children’s comics all the way through to pornography. You might say that apart from me our most celebrated member is Anon. Capstone Bowers looked down his nose at the crowd—he must be the last Englishman to wear a monocle—and muttered that he hadn’t seen such a lot, ever. Pressed severely by me, he remarked that we were all
rather
bush.
To give you a completer picture of the man, he shot big game all over the world and targets at Bisley. Towards the end of our brief conversation which we were holding to, as he said, “sort things out”, I was building myself up to the point where I would employ my ample linguistic resources to tell him what I thought of him, when he said with the simplicity of absolute candour, “You know, Barclay, you’re such a shit.” You can see the sort of man he was. I mean.

Well.

Freedom at fifty-three! What nonsense. What
bloody
  nonsense! Freedom was what faced me. My advice is, don’t try it. If you see it coming, run. Or if it tempts you to run, stay put. Believe it or not, my head was full of anticipated sex, and with imagined girls young enough to be my granddaughters, very nearly. That may have been why I didn’t mind Capstone Bowers moving in with Liz one little bit. It was nothing to do with our unbreakable, unbearable connection. Poor little Emily minded. She ran away and had to be fetched back by the police. I could understand her bolting. From what I’ve heard since, even the horses hated Capstone Bowers.

I moved about. I had many acquaintances but few friends. I stayed with one or two of them. One even produced a woman but she proved to be a serious academic and a structuralist to boot. God, I might as well have shacked up with Rick L. Tucker!

I moved to Italy and irony at once took charge, for I chummed up with an Italian woman of near enough my own age and more or less in a pass of the windy Apennines, like the man said. I was fond of her, I suppose, but what kept me there for more than two years was a
piano
nobile
like a museum and servants who hid their sneers. I was so chuffed, I remember—oh Barclay, Barclay, what a snob you are!—I rang Elizabeth and got Emily out to me for a bit. She hated Italy, the place, my Italian chum and, I’m still sorry to say, me. So back she went, and we didn’t meet again for years.

All this time, though I hardly noticed except as a small irritant, Professor Tucker kept sending letters which Elizabeth forwarded because it gave her an excuse to nag me about my papers. They were strewn through the house and increasing daily from one source or another. I ignored the letters. Only when she sent me a cable,
FOR GODS SAKE WILF WHAT AM I TO DO WITH YOUR PAPERS,
did I reply,
BURN THE BLOODY LOT.
But she never did. She took to nailing them up in tea chests and dumping them in the wine cellar. Outside a game reserve or a rifle range Capstone Bowers was such an ignorant sod he never grasped
what they would be worth on the open market or, worse, on the closed one.

My Italian connection came to an end. The fact is that religion, in the shape of Padre Pio, had got to her. Out of curiosity we’d been to one of those dawn masses which always ended in a stampede of the faithful, anxious to get a glimpse of the man’s stigmata before his helpers carried him away out of sight. I was a bit shocked to see that cool, civilized woman scrumming with the rest. She came back to me at last, her veil down and tears streaming behind it. Her voice was deep with a kind of triumphant grief.

“Now, can you doubt?”

That irritated me.

“All I saw was a poor old man being half-carried away from the altar. That was all!”

She said nothing more in the church, but the argument started again in the back of the car on the way “home”. I know now that what was significant about my reaction as well as hers was the fact that we were involved, both of us, and driven to quarrel so bitterly. My driving force was a passionate need for there
not
to be a miracle.