The Paperchase (4 page)

Serena and I made no plans; we did not discuss our future. We lived each moment together as though nothing could impinge on our happiness. And then on my last night in London, she met me at the dock. The yellow moon was snagged in the rigging of a tea-clipper.

‘I would stay if you asked me,’ I told her.

Her stiff bonnet shaded her face. ‘I think you and I both know’, she said coldly, ‘that I’m not the kind of girl who
asks
for anything.’

When I said farewell, she showed no emotion, but promised to write to me.

The torturers of the Ottoman Caliphate pride themselves on prolonging a man’s suffering by impaling him on a sword in such a way as to cause no mortal injury. I felt this pain then: as though a rapier had been run expertly through my innards. I stayed in my cabin and wept for two days.

I have to be truthful, some part of me was glad to be separated from her: the same part that exults in solitude and the smoky light of a solitary winter evening. It has always been easier to follow this unilateral instinct, and I can see now that the pattern of my life (I am writing this alone, in an empty house, in silence) owes everything to it.

I arrived in Bombay after a journey of six weeks to find letters from Serena that had preceded me on the outward voyage of a faster ship.
Her tone was warm but there was no mention of the intimacies we had enjoyed. She offered me her cordial regards.

I was poised on the edge of a strange continent, wondering inwardly whether to go on or go back. But as the weeks and miles had passed between us, the draw of my beloved had grown correspondingly weaker. At the very least, I reasoned, I must fulfil the minimum requirements of my contracted service.

I travelled by train to the eastern city of Madras to take up my post. It was a diagonal journey across the width of the subcontinent. I could see from the outset two Indias. The India I saw by day was full of the familiar reassurances of a life I knew well, but the India of dusk, of orange light settling across the flat plains behind the western ghats, the silhouettes of the spiky palmyras, was like another continent, vast and indifferent to our presence.

Those of my countrymen with whom I was stationed were uncongenial company. Belonging for the most part to the middle-ranking classes, they were willing to undergo the rigours of life in the tropics because the recompense was a pantomime of social advancement. They held dismal dinner parties where we sweltered in formal attire and ate approximations of our national dishes. Pig-sticking, whist and sleeping with prostitutes constituted the whole of their interest in their new surroundings. Sedulous in prosecuting the smallest details of their offices, they lacked the perspicacity to see the comedy of British rule in India. Ours was the folly of the cockerel who takes credit for sunrise; the vanity of the swimmer in the Thames who claims he controls the tides because they rise and fall as he does.

A map of India hung above my commode. I fell ill with malaria and in my fevered dreams confounded the shape of the country with the musky triangle of my forsworn lover.

THE PASSAGE ENDED
more suddenly than it had begun: a full stop after the last sentence and then nothing. I read it twice more on the flight, wondering who the unnamed ‘I’ was supposed to be. The character reminded me of a redoubtable Victorian explorer – a Burton, or a Livingstone – but he also resembled Patrick in various ways: the compulsive need for solitude, the self-advertising eggheadedness. He was an emotional retard too, which made me think of my father.

As prose, it wasn’t my cup of tea. The high style leaves me cold – invocations to the muses and all that stagey dialogue. Was ‘pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair’ supposed to be a turn-on? It sounded like a description of the fur on a chimpanzee.

One small detail pleased me especially, though: that unfinished monograph. When I was at school I did a project on the
life cycle of the house fly. I was flattered to think that this fact had somehow stuck in Patrick’s brain. House fly, sand fly – it came to the same thing.

What struck me most about the story was Miss Eden. It seemed possible that she was a real person, a fancy-dress version of a woman Patrick had once been in love with. Her reply on the dock when the narrator makes his mealymouthed offer to stay and marry her – that sounded like something someone might have really said.

Compared with the little that was revealed about her – that she’s beautiful, passionate, and brave enough to defy convention – the hero came off pretty badly. It’s not clear why he’s so wedded to the idea of leaving for India. Doesn’t he see the risks Serena’s taken for his sake? He won’t stay unless she demands it, which is almost as odd and anachronistic as her making the first move in the seduction. There was something disingenuous about the narrator: this old chap who is haunted by a memory of a woman he says he wanted, but whom he gave up in favour of his job; a man who makes a foolish decision and can’t admit it, who passes the buck on to the Almighty. There was something pathetic and very human, too, about his making a mistake and then disclaiming all responsibility for it.

Of course, it’s possible that the narrator was going to come to his senses, jack in his job in India, and go back to the woman who loved him. But Patrick’s narrator seemed to be one of those people who are in love with the idea of love. I wondered if he would have written about Miss Eden in the same way if they had been living together for ten years and the pungent shag tobacco of her nether hair was turning up on his face soap.

Overall, I didn’t know what to make of it. Notes for a novel? A short story? A meaningless five-finger exercise? Or something else entirely?

Once when I was eight Patrick and I fell out over a game of Frisbee. My grandfather had given him a tin for cigarette
butts that hung from a stake on the lawn. It was an ugly thing Grandpa had salvaged from the dump. My cousins had the idea of seeing who could knock it off with a Frisbee. No one could hit it and the game was losing its momentum when Patrick arrived, put fifty dollars in the tin and squatted behind the target like a catcher at home plate.

He would have been thirty-six, tall and dashing, every inch the successful writer. It had been a while since the
Peanut
Gatherers,
but not yet an inexplicably long time. His hair was collar length, sort of late Beatles. He was tanned, solid, not yet balding, not yet jowly. He would have had owlish dark glasses, a T-shirt, black corduroys. Lydia was with him. The extravagant gesture with the money was probably intended to impress her.

We, the children, went insane with greed, flinging the Frisbee desperately at the tin from the line we had made with our shirts twenty or thirty yards away. The moment when I threw the Frisbee and knocked the butt-tin off the stake has a special exhibition space dedicated to it in my mental museum. I can enter it at will and poke around the related exhibits: the basketball boots I wore that summer, my brother’s huge black swimming goggles that made him look like a pioneer aviator, the dried-up minnow from a pair my cousin kicked on to a sandbar and let me keep. But the mainstay of this gallery is a recording of the moment when the Frisbee struck the can with a
thunk!
From various angles, I can watch my cousins charge forward to ransack its contents while I, out of my wits with greed and overexcitement, fall sobbing to the grass. Patrick scoops up the money before anyone else can get to it and insists that he knocked off the butt-tin as he caught the Frisbee behind it. A replay of the action contradicts him: he is a foot away from the can as the Frisbee strikes it, again, and again, and again.

To appease me, Patrick constructed a paper chase that led to some wholly unimpressive bribe. But the paper chase itself was a revelation. We insisted he create more. Once, each clue
yielded a fragment of a map, drawn in brown ink and aged with the soot of a candle flame. Others were based on pictures, or riddles. ‘You’ve looked north, you’ve looked south, Now look for the clue in the genius’s mouth’ led memorably to a wad of paper that Patrick could barely conceal in his cheek for giggling.

Vivian and I even made paper chases for each other: ordeals of fifty clues that involved climbing trees and struggling through thickets of brambles. The pleasure was all in the anticipation. The treasure – candy, a book, a baseball glove – was discovered with a sense of deflation. My brother said he wished there was a paper chase where the reward was a paper chase. To me, that thought was nightmarish, as unacceptable as infinity or the endlessly repeating music of a fevered dream.

I couldn’t persuade myself that what I had found in Patrick’s notebook was meaningless. It seemed like a clue, if not one that would lead tidily to a Tootsie roll or a Three Musketeers bar. For a while, it fascinated me. I made various resolutions to find out more and went as far as ringing up the London Library until the inertia of my old routine drew me back in. The memory of Ionia grew very faint.

I doubt I would have thought about the story again, but two weeks after I got back, my father left a message on my answering machine asking me to call him. I was surprised. We had hardly exchanged a dozen words during my visit, which seemed to suit both of us, and I kept him waiting a few days on principle. When I finally rang him, he told me, in a more than usually resonant voice, that I was the chief beneficiary of Patrick’s will.

PATRICK HADN’T FORGOTTEN
the rest of his family: on the contrary, his will had been drawn up with a thoroughness that made me think it was the final instrument of his anger against them. Patrick had the paranoiac’s gift of investing everything with significance. His other legacies were small and sardonic: a pasta machine for an overweight sister (Judith); the complete works of Frederick Rolfe for an illiterate and vulgar niece (Tricia); a mechanical penny-bank for my father, whom Patrick had always considered covetous. He had amended the document constantly, according to his persecution mania, and whom he considered to be his current enemies.

It seemed improbable that he would choose me to be his chief beneficiary. I felt a little like that horse that Caligula appointed to the Senate. But there was a crazy logic to it, too.
In a way, I was the only person he could have chosen. The inheritance was mine by default. There was no one else.

The last thing in the world that Patrick wanted was for his family to benefit from his death. One way and another, he had fallen out with all of them, alienating them over the years with stinging letters or cold silences. He suffered from the worst kind of paranoia – the kind that has a firm basis in reality. Of course people talked about him behind his back. Of course people avoided him. Of course people were afraid of him – to have any dealings with him whatsoever was to risk coming into conflict with him. And the most trivial disputes could engender letters so offensive that the insults would be burned on to your consciousness for ever. ‘You have all the attributes of a dog except fidelity,’ he wrote to an ex-girlfriend. He once told my kindly Aunt Judith she was a two-hundred-pound puff adder.

I, in my dull job, neither rich nor poor, three thousand miles of ocean away, barely registered in his consciousness. I just hadn’t had the opportunity to get on his wrong side. I flattered myself that he might have been inspired by some fond memories from fifteen or twenty years earlier, but I knew that most of the arguments in my favour had been negative ones: it wasn’t who I was that mattered to Patrick, but who I wasn’t. Leaving the estate to me was bound to antagonise the whole family.

The terms of the will were strange, I suppose, but it would have been stranger still for them to have been normal. I had only been granted a life estate in Patrick’s house, its contents (apart from the things he’d left to his family), and the ten acres of lawn, marsh and sand dune that it perched on, along Ionia’s eastern shore. It was a condition of the will that the contents of the house were not to be dispersed, and the building itself was to be maintained as it had been in his life. To accomplish this, Patrick had created a trust which would remain the real owner of all his possessions. The trustees would oversee the property, making sure I didn’t do anything that would conflict
with Patrick’s wishes, and looking after the money invested for its maintenance. If they thought I was failing to meet the conditions set down by my uncle, they were to assume control of the property and hand it over to a charity that ran rest homes for old churchmen. If I died intestate (it did strike me as odd that my uncle had made contingency plans for my death as well as his own), the estate reverted to the same charity.

After the initial excitement of the bequest, it was disappointing to realise that it was all hedged about with conditions. It was very typical of my family: I couldn’t see the gift for the strings. Patrick’s money was all tied to the maintenance of the house – which I couldn’t sell. Unless I went to live there, my life would change very little. My inheritance wasn’t going to provide me with an income. The trustees would release money if tiles blew off the roof of the house on Ionia, but not a penny would be available for me to redecorate my flat in Clapham. So that was that. I could forget about the casinos of the Riviera, endowing lectureships, and acquiring a stable of polo ponies. In all my fantasies of sudden wealth, I had imagined that the principal feeling would be one of enormous freedom. But the news of the inheritance hadn’t changed my life at all. My life was exactly the same. The only difference was that now I had an alternative: it came down to a straight choice – my life or Patrick’s.

On one of my first night shifts after the phone call from my father, Wendy asked me to put together an item about a famine in Indonesia. I got the research department to send me over a whole screed of articles about the place.

At two o’clock in the morning, I was sitting in the tea bar reading about the Stone Age tribes who lived in the mountains of New Guinea. One of the articles was lamenting the decline of their culture, and saying that they simply weren’t equipped for the brutal struggle that we accept as twentieth-century living. They were useless workers: after five minutes of digging a ditch, they would just get bored and go off for a smoke and
a cup of tea. They wore penis sheaths and composed epic insult poems in blank verse. They conducted mock battles with one another. The apparent strangeness of their lives started me thinking about the conventions of my own tribe. What would an ethnographer say about me?

I defied nature by working at night. I made myself dyspeptic over fictional deadlines. I hoarded money. I was postponing life until I felt I’d earned enough to deserve it. I was very superstitious, believing my destiny to be controlled by a priestly class called Management. I lived alone.

I realised that although I felt bitter about life, I had experienced only a small corner of it. It was like rubbishing the whole of Indian cuisine on the evidence of the chicken tikka sandwich I’d just bought from the Headlines Tea Bar.

On the tube home, I could feel the decision to leave ripening inside me. The woman opposite me was sniffling from a cold and reading a voluminous guidebook to India. Then, somehow, a moth got into the train through one of the windows. It fluttered along the length of the carriage like a scrap of paper, unnoticed, except by me, and then exited through a window farther down the train into the blackness of the tunnel beyond.

I got home and switched on the television to see the morning news, half expecting my decision to be announced. My shoes had been bothering me on the journey home, so I slipped them off and tipped them out on the carpet, where each one left a tiny pile of golden sand.