The Paper Men (24 page)

“Otherwise you’ll be off again to those publicans and sinners?”

“Oh no. Or rather—you
are
serious?”

“I should be! At times they hurt like hell.”

He looked closely into my face.

“You must be very proud of them.”

That took me aback. He amplified with a grin of quite unclerical teeth.

“After all. There were three crosses.”

I stood there, seeing the room before me as on a screen—the relatives filing away past Emmy, young Douglas now making his goodbye to her, all the shaking of hands and agreeing that people only seemed to meet nowadays at funerals.

But I was left with so much cleared up! Three crosses—the whole spectrum— Not for me the responsibility of goodness, the abject terror of being holy! For me the peace and security of knowing myself a thief! I stood, saying nothing, doing nothing while they all went away. Emmy came and said something to me, I think, but I didn’t catch what. Indeed, I must have sat down at some point but I don’t remember doing it. Mrs Wilson must have cleared the mess away but I never noticed her. It was a kind of catatonia.

Next day Emmy said she’d sell the house as soon as I had, as she put it, “fucked off”. Then she went back to her social work in some middle-class slum or other and I was left to clear my things out of the house. I found I’d left little but the papers that had so annoyed Liz and Capstone Bowers. It occurred to me, I remember, that without pondering the matter I’d probably meant them to annoy. We don’t know much about our current selves, do we?

Rick came and begged me and cursed and yapped. I forbade him the house which is a bit of a joke when you come to consider it. But he hung round, sleeping God knows where and spying on me every now and then round corners. Since my dream I’ve been as certain as your average sane man could be when people are really there and when they aren’t. There’s no doubt at all, Rick is really there and spying on me. He hasn’t the least idea that I have it in my power and what is more in my purpose to heal him. I’ll get him his dream. Wilfred Barclay the great consultant.

Capstone Bowers rang. He didn’t come to the funeral but had the cheek to demand his books and his gun. I hung up on him. I ought to add he’d drunk what used to be my really brilliant cellar and not kept it up.

I’ve spent the time, since Emmy went, in ploughing through some of the piles of paper from the tea chests; but mostly in typing and brooding on this brief account. Yesterday I reread at a sitting the whole thing from Rick at the dustbin down to Douglas at the funeral. The wake. Ha et cetera.

Putting aside repetitions, verbals, slang, omissions, it’s a fair record of the various times the clown’s trousers fell down. At my age there can’t be many more. I do think the best of the lot, the real, theologically witty bit of his clowning, was surely the stigmata awarded for cowardice in the face of the enemy! But St Francis and all the other suggestible creatures didn’t just get it in the hands and feet, they got the wound in the side which finished off Christ or at least certified him dead. I’m missing that one; and there’s hardly time or occasion for a custard pie to provide it. For I intend to disappear again. A car in which one can sleep? Van? Caravan? A begging bowl under an Indian tree? Be your age, Wilf! It is too late for that. I shall disappear into comfort and security!

Which brings us right up to today. I have taken all the papers from the chests and built them into a bonfire down by the river. As I sit at this desk I have only to lift my head and over the typewriter I can see the pile, a positive mountain of mostly white paper waiting there—startlingly white against the dark woods on the other side of the river. When I’ve rounded off this manuscript I shall take a can of paraffin down there, drench the lot and set fire to it—a rite of passage made out of the detritus, the nail clippings, cut hair, the worn-away time, unnecessary correspondence, reviews, theses, financial statements, manuscripts, interlinears, proofs, the paperweight of a whole life!

Then I shall find Rick and give him this small sheaf of papers, all that is necessary, all that will be left, all that means anything to set over against the lying stories, the partial journals and all the rest. It will be a kind of dying. Freedom forsooth, freedom quotha.

I am happy, quietly happy. How can I be happy? Sometimes the experience is like a jewel, exquisite, sparkling, without words. Sometimes it is calm and beyond all my ordinary experience, because of its perfect calmness. I am happy. That’s not reasonable, it’s a fact. Either I have broken away from the intolerance which is impossible, or it has let me go, which is also impossible.

How could I change? But I have changed. Drink, for example. After more than a quarter of a century of trying I have now given up drink for good without trying at all! It may be a perilous thing to write in view of the times the clown’s trousers have fallen down; but I know with absolute, inward certainty that I have drunk my last drink.

Who knows? With intolerance backed right out of the light there is room for an unconvenanted mercy like the one that drives me to give Rick these papers: a mercy by which those unsatisfactory phenomena, Wilfred Townsend Barclay and Richard Linbergh Tucker, may be eternally destroyed. Is that what keeps me happy?

Rick is a hundred yards away across the river, flitting from tree to tree like playing Indians. I shall have an audience for my ritual. Now he is leaning against a tree and peering at me through some instrument or other.

How the devil did Rick L. Tucker manage to get hold of a gu

William Golding was born in Cornwall in 1911 and was educated at Marlborough Grammar School and at Brasenose College, Oxford. Before he became a schoolmaster he was an actor, a lecturer, a small-boat sailor and a musician. A now rare volume,
Poems
, appeared in 1934. In 1940 he joined the Royal Navy and saw action against battleships, and also took part in the pursuit of the
Bismarck
. He finished the war as a Lieutenant in command of a rocket ship, which was off the French coast for the D-Day invasion, and later at the island of Walcheren. After the war he returned to Bishop Wordsworth’s School in Salisbury and was there when his first novel,
Lord of the Flies
, was published in 1954. He gave up teaching in 1961.
Lord of the Flies
was filmed by Peter Brook in 1963. Golding listed his hobbies as music, chess, sailing, archaeology and classical Greek (which he taught himself). Many of these subjects appear in his essay collections
The Hot Gates
and
A Moving Target
. He won the Booker Prize for his novel
Rites of Passage
in 1980, and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983. He was knighted in 1988. He died at his home in the summer of 1993.
The Double Tongue
, a novel left in draft at his death, was published in June 1995.