The Paperchase (3 page)

But my father seemed to think otherwise. I could hear his voice booming over the garden as I walked back up to the house.

‘I would never use the word “failure” of anyone,’ he was saying. ‘I don’t consider that to apply to him at all. He lacked purpose. You know what he lacked? You really want to know what he lacked? He lacked hunger.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Judith. ‘It just makes me so sad to think of him here on his own. I’d get so lonesome. Do you think we let him down?’

‘None of
us
let him down,’ my father said.

I had my shoes in my hand. The spiky lawn was prickling the soles of my bare feet. ‘Post-mortem?’ I said, cheerily.

A wary look came over my father’s face, but he said nothing.

I caught the ferry back to the mainland that evening. I almost regretted leaving when I looked behind us and saw the lights of the harbour being eclipsed by the black edge of the horizon. I felt like I was saying goodbye to it for ever. I decided then that that was the reason I had come. That had been the meaning of my climacteric. The last person in my family that meant anything to me had died. There was no one left for me in this country of a quarter of a billion people. I was heading back to my poky flat on my own draughty island and I would be staying there until my three-score years and ten were up. So long, New World.

It suddenly got very cold. I went below to get out of the wind and on one of the lower decks I bumped into Patrick’s Latvian roommate from law school, Edgar Huvas, who mistook
me for Vivian. I remembered him vaguely from his summer visits. He had a photographic memory and an obsession with women’s necks, and looked like the Pillsbury doughboy. He had never been invited back after an incident in a clam bar where he tried to lick the waitress’s neck as she leaned over to take his plate.

I offered him a lift to Providence, thinking I could use the company and that maybe he had anecdotes about Patrick’s law-school days, but he fell asleep after ten minutes and only woke when I pulled up at the bus station. He shook my hand limply. ‘Thanks, Vivian,’ he said. I couldn’t be bothered to correct him. He took the carrier bag containing the books he had just stolen from Patrick’s library and ambled off to buy his ticket. I watched him leave. I thought about stopping in New Haven for a pizza, but in the end decided to see if I could catch an earlier flight to London, so I drove nonstop to Newark.

I was starving by the time we took off. I ate and enjoyed the in-flight meal: all of it – wrinkly roll, jaundiced salad, and trifle. I wondered if that was a sign of age. Once upon a time just the smell of aeroplane food had made me want to puke.

After the meal the cabin crew dimmed the lights for our three-hour parody of a good night’s sleep. The rushing Atlantic wind outside the aircraft made me feel chilly so I got my jacket from the overhead rack and took out the clanking box of pencils and the pair of notebooks I had picked up about a thousand miles before.

Flicking through them, I saw that only one was completely blank. The other was about a third used. Patrick had started writing in the back of it. It began in bursts: notes at first, a word, a squiggle, a crossing-out, then sentences and whole paragraphs which ran through the book in reverse like pages of Arabic. It looked as though Patrick had intended to write a line or two and then been hijacked by an onrush of inspiration. About three pages in, it began to flow pretty much uninterruptedly. The angle of the handwriting altered where the
velocity and pressure of the pen had increased – the way an animal running compresses its body for speed. Letters blurred together, words were skipped; some of the paragraphs sprouted thought balloons as though Patrick were marking places that he wanted to return to and amplify.

It was only a fragment: the beginning of a love story written in a pastiche of nineteenth-century prose, but beneath the formal pseudo-Victorian writing, I seemed to catch the inflections of a real voice – one that I hadn’t heard for almost twenty years. ‘More than fifty years have passed’, it began, ‘since the day I arrived in the capital by post-chaise, and watched the Thames, shirred like a matron’s bustle, foaming into ribbons of lace beneath the arches of London Bridge.’

M
ORE THAN
fifty years have passed since the day I arrived in the capital by post-chaise and watched the Thames, shirred like a matron’s bustle, foaming into ribbons of lace beneath the arches of London Bridge. Old age, while dimming every useful faculty, has left the colours of that memory untouched. In the late afternoon light, the river shone as though gilded with the same aureate brush that seemed poised to draw the lineaments of my own future.

It was ten years after the Mutiny, the old East India Company had been wound up, and a new generation of gentlemen administrators were selected by competitive examinations to carry on its work. Some of them were bindlestiffs, slack-jawed second sons of country parsons who were doomed to wither like earthworms in the tropics. Others were cads of the old school: straitened Beau Brummel types, without the
money to be malcontents. They oozed upwards in the service, their heads pomaded with smarm, their sharp elbows working like paddles on a riverboat. But a few young men were drawn by a sense of duty: a word which wasn’t then pronounced as though it savoured of rotten cheese. They believed their vocation was to carry out the Queen’s command, to secure the country’s prosperity, to promote works of public utility among her dominions. Was it sanctimony? Or arrogance? Or wide-eyed hopefulness? Choose wisely and absolve me, reader. I was one of them.

The day following my arrival I walked through the garboil of West End streets to a clerk-infested antechamber on Whitehall. A certain Mr Ricketts came to fetch me before luncheon. As his head peeped around the door, one of his eyes was cast ceilingwards in a manner that might have signified a reflective mood in its owner, were the other not beadily roving up and down my person.

‘Bad news for you, I’m afraid, young man,’ he said, when I had taken my seat in his office.

‘Bad news?’

‘We had you down for a politico in the Rajputana, but rather a rum state of affairs have come to light in the district where you was to have been sent. Smoked out a circle of aspiring mutineers. Seems one of them broke cover about a week before it was supposed to happen. We stamped down hard on it, of course. Hanged some, spared others, blew the ringleaders out of cannons. But all in all, matters stand somewhat ticklish. It’s not the place to break in new blood. We’re of a mind that it would be best for you to hang fire. Cool your heels in London for a couple of months, while we sort out another posting. A young chap like yourself can’t have any objections to that.’

All through this little peroration, his left eye was busily absorbed in the pattern on the ceiling while the right remained fixed upon me. It gave the impression that Mr Ricketts’ mental processes were so valuable, he could only expend 50 per cent of them on anything in his immediate vicinity; the remaining capacity being reserved, presumably, for calculations on behalf of Her Majesty’s government.

I told him that notwithstanding my eagerness to commence my service, I would bow to the wiser counsel of my superiors.

‘Very good,’ he murmured, and as a signal that the interview was at an end, his right eye snapped downwards onto the paper in front of him, while the left continued staring upwards, as though the reserved part of his cerebellum was devising further torments for the contumacious Hindoo regiments.

His counsel had provoked in me an opposite response to the one intended: it inflamed my enthusiasm to embark immediately. But since there was nothing to be done, I took rooms in Dover Street and passed four pleasant months in the capital.

It was during this time that I made the acquaintance of a young woman called Serena Eden. [
Patrick
had
tried
and
rejected
several
equally
unlikely
alternatives
including
Ethel
Younghusband,
Cissy
Spanks
and
Dara
Nightshade,
but
his
final
choice
obviously
pleased
him
–
DM
.]
O was ever human beauty so aptly named! In her name and in the deep, hurt ebony of her lustrous eyes she carried the very echo of lost paradise. Her name was beautiful, but less beautiful than she: she was a fawn, a nymph, an amaranth, a sacred flower.

She was an American from Louisiana and so dark-skinned that unkind speculation murmured of African forebears and a bend sinister in her family crest. It was envy. Her skin was the gold of the Scythians; gold that put gold to shame. And what shall I write of her eyes? Her black eyes, romany black, black of the rarest jade, the slow, inevitable black of death itself before which every man stands powerless.

Her father had sent her to London to complete her education – though it seems unlikely he had in mind the scandalous liaisons with older men, or the appetite for gambling, or the dozen other qualities uncharacteristic of her sex that made her the object of rumour in the circles in which we moved.

It was with some little apprehensiveness that I introduced myself to her during the interval of a comic operetta. I had been relieved of my virginity in a perfunctory encounter with a prostitute in a doorway off
Air Street during one of the long vacations, but my experience of women my own age and class was narrow.

Miss Eden’s sloe-eyed glance initially reduced me to a nervous mumbling, but gradually my confidence asserted itself in sallies of wit. At the commencement of the second act, I pressed her hand and invited her to an exhibition of paintings by my unfortunate friend Doriment, who was then enjoying growing celebrity and showed no signs of the madness that was to unhinge him in his later years.

On the appointed day, I arrived early and spent twenty minutes pacing up and down on the pavement and adjusting my tie in the window of a wine merchant’s facing the gallery. She alighted from her carriage without a chaperone and greeted me with a quip and a kiss.

I escorted her into the exhibition and followed her as though hovering on winged feet. Something fast and urgent swept me along with an exquisite motion.

I cannot remember one word that she and I said to each other, though we were never silent. A deeper communication was conducted with looks, the inclination of a head, the light pressure of her hand, and the air between us seemed to hum with invisible signification like the wires of a telegraph.

Or so I hoped. The counterpart to my elation was a profound doubt that she held my feelings in any but the lightest regard. She loves me; she loves me not: nothing was ever still, it was either budding or dying: the systole and diastole of some distant heart, filling with hope and then being emptied of it. It was divine; it was infernal.

I courted her for weeks. I knew she enjoyed my company, but all the time we sparred with and teased one another, I could not guess if her true feelings went any deeper. I was one of a number of young and not-so-young men, hopefully besieging her with their attentions. They would be camped in the drawing room of the family she lived with, which included a less well-favoured daughter of about Serena’s age called Alice, and compete for the meagre privileges of opening a door for her, carrying her needlework, or reading to her from the newspaper.

Having made some initial progress with her at Doriment’s exhibition, I became embroiled in this interminable siege along with her other suitors, each of whom seemed less concerned with advancing his own cause than ensuring that no one else had the opportunity to advance his.

It was while things stood at this impasse that I finally received a communication from Mr Ricketts. He gave me to understand that my eventual posting would not now be to the north of the country, but to one of the districts in the south. I forbore from pointing out the irony of this decision. Alongside two hundred other aspiring administrators, I had sat two weeks of examinations in a hall in Burlington House. (One of the invigilators later informed me, in confidence, that my marks were among the highest ever attained.) [
Patrick
appears
to
have
gone
back
to
this
section
at
a
later
date
and
deleted
the
word
‘among’
–
DM
.] Alone of all the candidates, I had offered papers in Punjabi and Urdu. Now, by the wayward logic that I would find characteristic of my employment in the dominions, I was being despatched to the south of the subcontinent, where my painstakingly acquired languages would be as useful to me as Croat, or the secret tongue of Euskaadi.

Undaunted, I booked my passage, reacquainted myself with Sanskrit grammar and bought primers in Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. I also amassed a small library for the crossing, comprising histories of the region, several volumes on native custom, and a general work on hydrology.

Accordingly, I spent less time in my futile courtship of Miss Eden and was more often to be found at home, studying (or rather, trying to study) my primers. Even then I found myself abstracted, unable to concentrate on anything but learning the endearments in my new languages that I lacked the courage to say in English. In my Telugu grammar, the use of the optative was explained by means of an idiomatic expression that compared a woman’s breath to the scent of persimmons. I copied this out in the original and sent it to Serena with my kindest regards. At least it was a declaration of sorts, if not one she would be able to understand.

The next time I visited her for tea, there were two suitors and myself. I felt disinclined for the witty small talk that passed among that circle for conversation and directed most of my attentions towards Alice, who was a kindly young bluestocking with whom I was to conduct a correspondence two decades later while researching a – needless to say – unfinished monograph on the life cycle of the sand fly.

At the end of the afternoon, I rose to leave. Serena was playing cards with her two besiegers, who were undoubtedly glad to have seen me off. She had made no allusion to the note I had sent her, but as I said goodbye, she shot me a look so full of
something
that I can see her dark eyes now, as though they were imprinted upon my brain as on a daguerreotype. What she meant by that look, however, was as incomprehensible to me as my Telugu note must have been to her.

I had left the house and was walking down the glass-covered portico that led away from its front door when her low voice halted me. She called out my name.

I turned round: the vestigial wings on my ankles gave a flutter and raised me two inches above the pavement.

‘Stop bothering me,’ she said, dark fire flashing from her eyes.

‘Bothering you?’ My voice was the merest whisper. The wings on my heels had become a pair of rusty dumb-bells.

‘I’m very impressionable,’ she said, adding a reprise of the look she had offered me over the playing cards. ‘Please don’t trifle with me.’ My feet had wings once more.

‘I believe that if you had any inkling of my true feelings for you, you would not make that accusation,’ I said.

‘I hardly know you,’ she murmured.

‘That is little to be wondered at. The company here is not congenial to our deeper acquaintance. If you might be persuaded to meet me on more intimate terms … At my rooms, perhaps, for tea?’

‘Yes,’ she said, with a look that has no verbal equivalent in any language known to me, but which contained admixtures of love and
longing, and was sharpened by a sense that she was struggling to overbear the reluctant voice of her conscience.

She came to tea with me on the hottest afternoon of the hottest summer of any I have known in a city I have since come to know well. I had opened every window to its fullest extent and placed vases of iced water around my rooms in a vain attempt to reduce the temperature.

The stiff fabric of my collar and cuffs restricted the flow of blood through my body, causing my suppressed pulse to throb in my neck and wrists. I felt the discomfort of the scold in the pillory, of the innkeeper condemned to the stocks for watering his beer. My tongue clave to the roof of my mouth. The china cup chattered in its saucer as I passed it to her with a trembling hand. She steadied mine with hers, placed the cup on an open dictionary, then led me to my bedroom. I was her first lover.

In all its technical aspects, the act was the same as my initiation in that doorway in Air Street, but then two people may both be said to have spent time in France when one has had rats for company in the donjon of the Chateau d’Yf, while the other has been drinking Sauternes with his feet in a stream at the edge of a field of lavender.

These were not the jejune ecstasies of pimpled youth. We led one another to the winding heart of the eternal rose itself. O Mnemosyne, paint for me once more the fine bone china of her skin that afternoon with its film of perspiration; the wetness of her parted lips; the pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair.

And then?

The time until my departure for India was ebbing like the tide that would float my ship out of its harbour. I surrendered to this larger current. Out of fear? Perhaps. It was impossible for me to stay. I lacked the passionate courage, I lacked the determination to please myself, I lacked the knowledge of my own heart that would have made me a different man and might have granted me a different fate.

In age, I have come to share the fatalism of the Mussulmans, to believe, as they do, that the tortuous paths of each man’s destiny have been inscribed since Creation in the infinite Book of the Almighty. On
its secret pages are written the place of each man’s birth, the travails of his life, the names of his enemies, the number of his children, the manner and the hour appointed for his death. Each year I pass in ignorance the future anniversary of my final day. I offer prayers to the infinite mercy of this Creator, who spares us the knowledge of our destinies, who, in denying us choice, takes upon Himself the authorship of our sins.
Inshallah

That I would be the best scholar of my generation; that I would be distracted by indolence, that I would be parted from my lover, that I would never marry, never raise children – these were preordained, shards of a future that lay in wait for me, to be lifted from the dust year by year and fitted together like an Etruscan jar.