The Paper Men (3 page)

“Look, it’s all hysteria!”

“I saw them, I tell you, the wounds. God forgive us, we’re not worthy even to speak the word!”

‘Supposing you did see them, what does that prove?”

“There is no ‘Supposing’.”

“People can think themselves into these things. It’s like a false pregnancy—every symptom there but no baby. Remember what I told you about when I was a bank clerk?”

“You are disgusting, Wilfred Barclay.”

“And later on, years later. Look at that hand! I was hypnotized. I mean, I was literally, professionally hypnotized. At a party it was and in my, my—”

“Oh, I, I, my
my—
”

“
Will
you listen? Yes. Egotism. I didn’t think anyone could do such a thing to me. And what happened?”

“I do not wish to talk about it.”

“There, on the back on my hand, my own initials, flaming like scars, inflamed like burns—”

“I will not talk about it!”

(But the man knew. It was his triumph, his power. There was infuriating complacency in his smile.
You
are
very
receptive
to
hypnotic
suggestion,
sir.
Give
Mr
Barclay
a
big
hand,
ladies
and
gentlemen!
)

“Look, dear. You don’t want to talk and I don’t want to hurt you—but you see suggestion can do such things!”

“An old man bleeds for you day after day, year after year. He allows God to dispose of him in two places at once because his charity is too great for the resources of one, poor body—”

The extraordinary woman burst into tears.

After that, of course, we fought no more. It was a sort of truce, I suppose. I treated her with uncomprehending and heavy tact, staying out of her way as far as possible. She herself withdrew and became the perfect hostess like Liz. It’s an awful effect to have on people. I wish women would throw things.

Even so, it might have turned out differently if my attention hadn’t been taken up by another matter. I had to lecture. It’s amusing in a way that a man whose education finished in the fifth should find himself mixed up so with scholars. The truth is that what began with my feeling flattered ended by boring me—and worse. As I say, I was sometimes called to lecture for my country’s good. I did it obediently, at gatherings of academics. You see, though you can accuse Wilfred Barclay of being an ignorant sod with little Latin and less Greek, adept in several broken languages and far more deeply read in bad books than good ones, I have a knack. Academics had to admit that in the last analysis I was what they were about. I repeat there was nothing in it for me but a bit of flattery, a tiny, perhaps absurd, feeling that my country needed me and the occasional interest of an exotic place. It was a long time before the penny dropped. The penny was, of all things, of all people, the badger at the bin, Rick L. Tucker.

At the time of the row about stigmata, with my Italian chum behaving like a gracious lady, I was about to go to Spain. I debated pushing off without seeing her but rashly came to the conclusion that would make things worse. I wish now I had left in the dignity of silence.

“Well, I’ll be going, then.”

She did not turn completely to face me. She turned her head so that her profile was outlined against the worn tapestry. “It is enough.”

“What is?”

“The two of us.”

“Why?”

“It is enough. That’s all.”

I considered a number of inquiries. I meditated admitting the crudity of my response to Padre Pio and offering to go and give the poor old man a chance to convert me when I came back. Time, I thought, time was the great healer.

“When I come back we’ll talk.”

“Go! Go! Go!”

If that was not enough she followed it with a blast of Italian, gutter stuff I think, and of which I only got the general drift of her attitude to me, to Protestants, to men and to the English as I exemplified them.

So I took off for a conference in Seville at the old tobacco factory which chaps who know that sort of thing will remember is where Carmen waggled her hips, though now it’s only a university. Mostly at conferences I keep away until the last day, when it’s my turn to sound like an author. But the professor who had invited me, when asked if they had any Carmens still about said, “Yes, very many,” so I went along, forgetting it would be out of termtime.

There at the podium I would grace later was Rick Tucker, larger than ever and reading from a huge manuscript. A sleepy bunch of professors, lecturers, postgraduate students were all trying their hardest to stay awake and Professor Tucker was making it difficult for them. I sank into a vacant chair at the back of the hall and composed myself to slumber.

What jerked me awake was the sound of my own name in Tucker’s peculiarly toneless American. His head was down, and he was reading from the manuscript, and he was on about my relative clauses. He had counted them, apparently, book by book. He had made a graph, and if they consulted appendix twenty-seven among the goodies handed to them by the grace of the conference organizers, they would be able to find his graph there and follow his deductions. Here and there among the audience I saw heads nod, then jerk up again. A few females appeared to be taking notes. A male head fell back in front of me and a faint snore came from it. Prof. Tucker, still toneless, was now pointing out the significant difference between his graph and the one constructed by a Japanese Professor Hiroshige (that was what he sounded like), for Professor Hiroshige, it appeared, had not done his homework, to our surprise, and had also been guilty of the gross error of confusing my compound sentences with my complex ones. In fact Professor Hiroshige should get lost and leave the field to the acknowledged expert, who had heard from the author’s own lips that he did not tolerate so overly broad an interpretation in his iconography of the absolute, or words to that effect.

I sat there, amused, and having my ego massaged gently, when Rick Tucker, while turning a page, chanced to glance up at his audience. It was the dustbin all over again. It was
glug
or
gulp.
From that moment his voice faded and his colour deepened. Listening intently, I could tell why. He was drawing his chin back into his collar. He was not the sort of man who finds it possible to depart from the text before him. The stream of typed words drew him along inexorably to where, in my hearing, he did not want to go. He claimed, I heard him mutter, a deep personal relationship with me and (what a more experienced academic would not have wished to have, knowing the slipperiness of that slope) my verbal agreement with everything he was now telling his listless audience. Then, perhaps faced by some even more outrageous statement of our alleged intimacy, he tried to ad lib, turned two pages at once, then dropped the whole manuscript from the desk so that it glided and fluttered this way and that across the floor. It woke the audience and during that brief interlude I made an unseen exit. Next day I performed the party piece I was paid for and raked the audience for a sign of Rick, hoping to show him what could be done in the way of ad libbing round a man who claimed a deep personal relationship with me but he was nowhere to be found. I wonder why? Such sensitivity was not like him. Then the whole thing slipped from my mind because when I went back to Italy things took a steep dive into the absurd and I got the shock I was not prepared for. It was a mixture of quaintness, meanness and majestic lunacy. I was prepared to be dignified but forgiving about the plane not being met by a car; but the gate was shut, barred and locked. A green canvas wagon tilt just by the gate covered several suitcases all carefully, you might say lovingly, packed with my personal effects. How the servants must have sniggered. I sat in the taxi, a folder containing all the guff from the conference on the seat by me, and wondered where to go. It was an Italian comeuppance.

Fortunately
Coldharbour
kept on selling, as it still does, to say nothing of
All
We
Like
Sheep,
and money was no problem. Neither, at that time, was invention, for I saw, leafing through the papers from the conference, that I had no need of it. Here, then, is what turns that whole mixed episode—my Italian connection, Padre Pio, stigmata, Rick L. Tucker with his graph of my relative clauses—into what I now see to have become the central strand of my life. For, sitting that evening in a hotel bedroom, the papers were all I had to read and I read the lot.

Coldharbour
was a one-off. But the books that followed hadn’t been bad either. There were things, mantic moments, certainties, if you like, whole episodes that had blazed, hurt, been suffered for—and they were wasted. I had written them, I saw, for nobody but myself, who had never reread them. The conference had operated in the light of certain beliefs. One was that you can understand wholeness by tearing it into separate pieces. Another was that there is nothing new. The question to be asked when reading one book is, what other books does it come from? I will not say that this was a blinding light—indeed, what are academics to do?—but I did see what an economical way there was for me to write my next book. I did it there and then, living by the shores of Lake Trasimene. I did not need to invent, to dive, suffer, endure that obscurely necessary anguish in the pursuit of the—unreadable. There, hanging in the fringes of the Apennines, my ex-chum’s family history rendered invention irrelevant. So I wrote
The
Birds
of
Prey
in next to no time, with no more than five per cent of myself—not the top five per cent either—sent it to my agent, together with some poste restante addresses, and drove off in a hire car.

Middle-age was leaving me and something more advanced was approaching and I didn’t much like the look of it. Memory, for example. Now and then it was patchy where it used to be good. I forgot my ex-chum with great rapidity and the book,
The
Birds
of
Prey,
even faster. My friends had become acquaintances. Since no one writes letters any more, they soon ceased to be even that.

So I drove. In what must have been about two years—I think two years, but I’m bad at dates and times and ages, my own included—I learnt the main road system of Europe and further afield than that. I learnt the high roads, motorways, the autoroutes, autostradas, autobahns, autoputs from Finland to Cadiz. In the days when it was still possible I drove the whole coast of North Africa and a bit of the west. But mostly it was Europe. I hired cars. Now and then, if I needed to write, I bought a typewriter. I kept a journal in longhand but found if I leafed through it the thing was terribly boring and made me feel faintly sick. But I always kept it even if only one sentence for a day. It was a compulsion, like having to avoid the cracks between paving stones. The relatively cheap but also efficient milieu of the motorway in every country, its spiritual emptiness, its pretence of shifting you to another place while all the time keeping you motionless on the same concrete waste—that kind of internationalism became my way of life, my homeland if you like. I never achieved the very young girl of the lustful imagination and hardly missed her. “Time, unnoticed, did its dusty work.” There had been years when women had looked first then been told who I was. Now, on the rare occasions when I found myself socially among people, women were told who I was and looked afterwards. It was a curious repeat of or variation on the early years after my first book,
Coldharbour
, and before I met Liz. In those days I drove for two years in the States—Nabokov country, you might call it—selling my lectures on the academic merry-go-round. Later I drove in South America—well, never mind that. Now, however, it was Europe and extensions. I had a hobby, by the way, a hobby with no genesis, just like a book, the hunting of stained glass for no reason at all, just fun, nothing written down. I just like looking. I am in fact an authority on the stuff, though nobody knows so. I can date most glass to a decade, or at least defend my dating, though I’ve never tried. This eccentric enjoyment has turned me into something of a church fancier. You will have the darkest suspicions of me, what with Padre Pio and churches, but I have to make it plain that though I have spent many hours in, for example, Chartres cathedral, there is nothing religious about my interest in churches. It was art, the way of preventing light from entering a building when you don’t want it there. Also churches are most often dark, cool places and ideal for recovering from a hangover. I suppose I ought to mention that I drank a lot now and then and at least more than “some” most of the time;

Stemming from
The
Birds
of
Prey,
or at least from the film of it, I wrote some travel articles and a few short stories which are exercises in how to cheat the public. The stories were for the glossies. They relied almost entirely on the exoticism of the places where I collected news, money and mail from my postes restantes. They were descriptively brilliant, with the minimum of event and character, but all
garnished,
as the French might say, with national costume long after national costume had ceased to be found anywhere but at folk festivals. I had ceased when my Italian chum severed our connection to make an effort to be pleasant to women. I cultivated what you might call universal indifference. Sometimes the thought and feeling of life would merge into a wave of astonishment that made me exclaim silently inside myself,
this
cannot
be
you!
But it was; and I now see that on the edge of sixty years old I had reduced myself to what would think least and feel least. I was eyes and appetite. I flew as an answer to any question. It was the motor roads all over again. If I wondered where I was going, I flew somewhere. If someone tried to arrange an interview, I flew away. If I had been too filthy drunk in one place, I flew to another. If the view from the bar or café became boring, why, someone had said something about the gorge of the Brahmaputra, so I would fly to Calcutta.