The Paper Men (7 page)

Margaret. That was the connection. Directly I remembered, I twinged inside. I had done my best to forget the whole business with Margaret and succeeded pretty well. Only Lucinda was a part of it. I’d asked her advice. I’d told her about the mad, obscene letters I’d written Margaret, the only woman I’d wanted and couldn’t have, the accusations, the curses on her marriage, oh impossible, vile—I must have been mad, literally mad. When I recovered I was desperate to get the letters back—mad all over again.

Lucinda was full of contempt.

“It’s quite simple. The easiest thing in the world. You find a bent solicitor, give him her address and a hundred pounds. Go back after a month and he’ll hand you your letters in a plain envelope. Nothing said. It’s done every day. All finished, my dear little man. What a little man it is, den! God. I ought to charge you thousands for those pics.”

“It would be—illegal.”

“Criminal,” she agreed cheerfully, “but that’s the solicitor’s affair. You’re making a packet out of the film aren’t you?”

“A small packet.”

“If a man with money can’t indulge himself with such services,” said Lucinda with an air of calm reason, “what’s money for?”

“I don’t know a bent solicitor. Mine’s so unbent he’s rigid.”

“There aren’t any unbent solicitors. Only some less bent than others.”

Sitting opposite Rick Tucker, who now had snow and stars behind him, it came over me in a breathtaking swirl of astonishment. More than thirty years before I had indeed gone by long and devious ways to a bent solicitor. I had given him money. I had made myself an accessory after the act for nothing, for less than nothing. When, standing in my flat by the fire that was intended to consume my own disgusting and pitiable letters, I opened the manila envelope I stood dumb for whole minutes. The letters were tied up with pink ribbon. I surfaced then from what must have been months of drunken misconception. They weren’t my letters at all. They were her husband’s, turgid, inarticulate offerings from that stupid house agent; but she loved him and they were preserved like relics. Mine—in a skyhigh pride I had never dreamed that anyone could destroy
my
letters (mad, mad, mad) but she had done just that—charitably too, since she could have turned them over to the law—she had burnt the obscene things as they came. Or worse—had she kept them indeed? Were they now afloat in the world, the wrong world? If so, their disappearance together with the disappearance of her husband’s letters would be a clear lead, I was never free, should never be free from the surfacing of that possibility—

“I hope to God he broke the place up.”

Someone was looking at me—staring.

“Wilf?”

I pulled my eyes away from his, allowed them to track down, his nose, a little broad, the bridge slightly sunken, his long upper lip, the lower one dropped a fraction from it. His napkin came into view, patted his mouth, disappeared again. He was wearing a shirt with white and brown stripes, very broad. We’d have thought them so vulgar when I was his age.

“Is anything wrong?”

I burnt her husband’s letters, of course. I couldn’t even send them back.

I lived in a state of dreadful sanity and apprehension. I took off for South America as if the police were already after me. The thing surfaced for years, disguised in nightmares or strange half-waking dreams, until it had become a faint far-off thing only to be recalled when, as now, my mind was forced to walk backwards.

Odd to think that nothing would have happened without Lucinda. She was the sort of person who ends with hard drugs and charitable people saying she was her own worst enemy, hurting no one but herself. Little they knew or understood the adamantine chain that bound the lesser crime to the greater, led on to it step by step unless you turned and faced the fact instead of running from it. How wrong they would be about Lucinda! We are all members one of another. Ha et cetera.

“Can’t I share the joke?”

“I suppose it’s a joke. On a large scale. I’m drunk. Had too much brandy.”

“Wilf, there’s a strain of, call it diffidence, in you that won’t allow you to see the interest in a biography—”

Amused by the bank clerk, ruefully, jeeringly accepting the follies of Lucinda’s lover—(title for a romance in single syllables)—but the letters, Margaret, my crime—

“Just a note—and of course at this moment in time hopefully we should do no more than agree the parameters—”

Running. Always running, a wing three running in panic lest I should be grabbed by some enormous oaf from the scrum—

“Just a note, Wilf, signed by you and empowering me, particularly in the event of your passing on, I am after all a generation younger—”

Well. He
was
an enormous oaf from the scrum.

“Rick. You do me the honour of including me among kings, presidents, multiple murderers, telly personalities—”

He caught on in what for him was a flash.

“Also Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Hawthorne and—” here his voice sank in a kind of awe, “White Melville!”

“I’m not American. A defect, of course. However, Elizabeth used to say—”

“Yes, Wilf? Go on!”

Her nastiest thrust; because like all deeply wounding marital broadsides there was a truth in it that only she could know. She told me (sitting the other side of the scrubbed kitchen table, all very homey), she told me that given half a chance I would act the genius, the great man—

That’s what you always wanted, Wilf—God, don’t I know  it?—particularly before any pretty girl who’s fool enough to come  near you and take you at your own valuation, the sacré monster  outside the accepted rules, a national treasure, the point about  you being words that the world would not willingly let die  whereas what you write is—

“Popular.”

“It’s a common misconception, Wilf.”

“That my work’s popular?”

“Hell, no. I mean that what’s popular is—”

“—inferior.”

“I didn’t mean—I wanted her side of the story.”

Her jeer had been the work of a scalpel. It was one of the many things that had kept me running, that made me shun that offer and that more and more made me hide myself away, because apart from other considerations it proved to—to whom? her? me?—that I sought no fame, struck no attitudes.

“What did you mean by ‘her side of the story’?”

“I understood, Wilf, sir. The need for freedom. Why even with Mary Lou, between you and me—”

“Her side of the story.”

“She was real nasty about some time you, like she said, ‘shot off’ to South America. She was having trouble with Emily. I forget which country in South America. When would that be?”

It was strange. I was seeing a process. It was not an intellectual concept, it was felt as well as seen, feared as well as grasped. It was simple, trite. It was universal. It was just one thing coming out of another—oh, just that, no more—Margaret, the letters, Lucinda, my fright, my running and running, one thing after another—

South America.

What year indeed? What would he turn up, dull and indefatigable, treading through my past life with his huge feet, shoving his nose down to that old, cold trail? A really modern biography without the subject’s consent. Cheap printing in Singapore, ten million pulp copies from a backstreet factory in Macao. No control, sold over or under every counter. How they would laugh at Wilf Barclay, masturbating round South America in sheer fright of police and fear of women. Barclay got his fear of the clap from way down by his feet and Lucinda’s idea that a night on the town was for her to be had against the dockyard wall by a dockie and, if possible, by the dockie’s mate. And Barclay’s heroic encounter with a revolution—three days spent shivering in a cellar; and so driving in a panic towards safety! He would turn it up.

Dead.

How closely would they look? How worthy was I of being dug round? Worth it to Rick, evidently, who could find no one better, no one behind whom the pseudo-scholars were not queueing up in our dreadful explosion of reconstituted rubbish. He would have access to more mechanisms than Boswell, not just paper, not just tapes, videos, discs, crystals with their hideous, merciless memories, but others, sniffers, squinters, reconstitutors, mechanisms doubtless that listened in a room and heard echoes of every word, saw shadows of every image that were trapped on the walls, like Capstone Bowers’s gun.

Dead.

Of course. In South America, never mind where, even now there would be a record. That Indian—or perhaps not. It was so dark and I only had sidelights because of getting away and my determination was to say if necessary that he walked right across the road into my headlights—Was there any way in which they could find out that in panicky forgetfulness I had been driving along that dirt road as in England, on the left-hand side? They say if you stop, the other Indians will kill you. It was an occasion to be pushed back down and down and away and at last hardly believed in,
not
believed in, though never forgotten. It was near-enough jungle, and anyway it was an Indian, probably and quite possibly he wasn’t killed or even injured much, might have been an animal. Then I’d driven fast through a ford so that water had cascaded clean over the roof. Who could examine that river for bloodstains? Will all the waters, ha et cetera, and unlike her I didn’t really
know
anything. Nudged a shadow and the slight shock, the rutted road, the cry, a bird or something. If there was a record—such and such an Indian found, well, dead—I’d told no one, not even myself, only gone over it later, over and over—How could I have gone back after ploughing through the ford? Go back again? Put myself in the hands of some louts in uniform and all to explain that I
might
have, wasn’t sure—the language was the difficulty, of course. My Spanish wouldn’t be up to it. I’d end by accusing myself through sheer inability to cope with the subjunctive.

Hit and run.

Happens every day somewhere, probably with extenuating circumstances, as in this case, clearly.

“—so, believe me, she did full justice to your genius.”

I surfaced from molten metal.

“Genius?”

“That’s what she meant.”

“Nonsense. Don’t forget I know Liz—oh I know her! She thought I had talent, ingenuity. I hit the jackpot. Someone has to.”

Oh God, oh God, oh God, the process, link by link, we don’t know what will come from this seed, what ghastly foliage and flowers, yet come it does, presenting us with more and more seeds, millions, until the whole of
now,
the universal Now, is nothing but irremediable result.

“If you could only see your way.”

“That’s funny. That’s very, very funny.”

“Just your signature with a sentence or two appointing me your literary executor, no harm, I’d co-operate, of course.”

“I’m a bit drunk. Talk tomorrow.”

“And, you see, I should be authorized to catalogue the papers left in her charge.”

I contemplated his eager, diffident, stubborn face, that of the prospector who had chipped quartz and seen the yellow gleam inside it. My sentence and signature would confirm his staked-out claim. Then the letters, manuscripts, journals, journals right back to school days—

Jeffers is a frightfully good chap and I am keen on being his—it’s marvellous being in the second with him—Jeffers caught a  frightfully good catch off my bowling at first slip—I told him it was a frightfully good catch and he didn’t seem to mind my  speaking to him
— Thank God that kind of farcically misplaced emotion had never pursued me into adulthood to make an even deeper confusion of life!

He was continuing to stare at me.

“So if you could see your way—”

“I’ve seen it, the whole lot, inch by inch.”

There was no doubt of it. Given the least slackening of attention on my part, Rick’s face, or his two faces, would slide apart. Well, why not? He had two faces.

“Of course, Wilf, where you wanted it would remain in confidence.”

With considerable effort I brought his two faces together. I had an idiotic thought that he probably kept a different expression in each face, which was why when you merged them they cancelled each other out.

“How the devil did I get like this? Haven’t drunk much.”

“It’s the altitude.”

“Used to be the lobster. You know. Thingummy.”

“Pickwick.”

“Age and decay. No, Rick, duty and dereliction leads me back to solitude.”

“Shelley.”

I had to respect that, however unwillingly, because I only knew the quotation by a freakish chance. The line was in Shelley’s scraps, not his published works. How the devil? Since my time they’d have published it all, of course, a Shelley factory like the Boswell factory, leave no leaf unturned, never mind what the poor bugger thought about it himself. Death pays all debts. Christ!

“Proper parlour game, isn’t it?”

“Look, Wilf, I could write the whole thing out on this menu. The manager could witness it, you could sign it, then the whole thing would be done.”

“Signed and sealed. We could seal it with the bottom of a brandy glass. S.W.A.L.K. No, that’s different.”

“I’m not following you, sir.”

“Ha! Something you don’t know! Victory!”

“I’ll write on this one. ‘I hereby authorize Professor Rick L. Tucker of the University of Astrakhan, Nebraska—’”

“Getting both feet in the door, aren’t you?”

“There you are, Wilf. Use my pen.”

Rick’s balloon glass still had much brandy in it. I took it, spilled some on the back of the menu. I pressed the foot of the glass into the mess. It left some sort of circle like a seal.

“You needn’t write where the brandy is, Wilf. Write there, on the side where the menu’s dry.”

The whole truth and nothing but the truth. Not even the time plant with its clouds of seed but other plants of this and that, all busily flourishing in the present and pressing on into my future—deeds unknown, but to be resurrected—

“No, Rick, no! I’d rather die than say yes!”

“Wilf—
please!
You don’t know what it would mean to me!”

“Oh yes I do indeed. And what it would mean to me.”