The Paperchase (8 page)

I FINALLY TOOK POSSESSION
of my new home on a warm June evening slightly more than six weeks after my uncle’s funeral. The ferry had been delayed because of rough weather. Aunt Judith left me at the dock to drive back to Boston.

It was dark by the time I arrived at the house. The taxi driver dropped me off at the side of the road, from where three steps led up to the swinging wooden sign that still said: P
ATRICK
M. M
ARCH
J.D. The driver offered to carry the suitcases all the way up to the door, but I told him not to bother. He climbed back into the car and set off towards Westwich. I could hear the clamour of his engine dying away in the darkness, until the only sounds were the crickets and the restful
boop
of the lighthouse ship miles out in the bay.

It was a mild evening and the moon was bright enough to
cast a faint shadow under the apple trees as I carried my bags over to the veranda and searched on my hands and knees for the envelope that was supposed to be waiting for me.

Mr Diaz, Patrick’s lawyer, had told me he would leave a set of keys under the porch. But there was no sign of them. I cursed myself for not having thought to bring a torch. I had a book of paper matches which flared brightly for a fraction of a second before becoming too painful to hold. The pitch-black crawl space under the porch had trapped a pocket of the day’s humid summer air. It was musty and smelled of wood and paint. I had my chest flat on the ground and was groping blindly around me, between striking matches, with the awful presentiment that something was about to scuttle across my neck. I gave up and crawled back out into the moonlight.

I felt a diffuse sense of rage and regretted having come. At that moment, Platon Bakatin was sleeping soundly on the brand-new mattress I’d bought for his fat Russian arse. I walked once around the house and once around the summer kitchen to see if there was any way into either. There was none. The storm windows had not been taken off since winter and the doors were impregnable. I thought of smashing my way in, but it seemed such a bad way to begin. And I had no way of reaching Mr Diaz without a phone.

The nearest houses were about a mile back the way I had come, so I left my bags and started walking. If I waited any longer, it would be too late to turn up on a stranger’s doorstep and ask to use their phone. I was reminded of the Japanese tourist who had been shot dead when he knocked on a door to ask directions in New Orleans.

Both sides of the road were lined with trees, whose branches blotted out the moonlight. I felt disconnected from myself in the darkness, as though I were swimming through warm ink. I could hear the sounds of my feet on the tarmac, but my body had become invisible, and I was momentarily startled by the unearthly sound of my own whistling. Once I became aware of
it, I tried to shape it into a tune, but it sounded like something someone might whistle in a movie shortly before they get dragged into a bush and disembowelled by a man in a hockey mask. I thought how much futility and false levity is encompassed by the phrase ‘whistling in the dark’.

After walking for about twenty minutes, I came to a shingled cottage set back from the intersection between the road that links Westwich and Pilgrim Point and the turnoff that leads to my uncle’s house. I rapped loudly on the door, and rang the buzzer, my banging growing bolder and more insistent as I became more convinced that there was no one at home. I was ready to set off again when I saw the lights of a car approaching from the direction of Westwich and pulling into the driveway.

I shaded my eyes from the light and called out a greeting as the sound of the engine died away.

The middle-aged woman at the wheel switched off her headlights and got out of the car. I was so busy trying to look neighbourly and non-threatening that I barely noticed her two passengers.

‘Hi,’ I said again. ‘Sorry to bother you like this. I’m Damien March. I’m staying up the road. I’m locked out of my house and I wondered if I could use your phone.’

The woman drew close to me. She was, I learned later, only about five years older than me, but the difference seemed greater, and not only because of the children. She was heavyset, with pale eyes and greying hair, and an expression that seemed to hover between humour and perplexity. She was studying me very hard.

‘Sorry about this,’ I continued, unnerved by her silence and talking loudly. ‘Someone was supposed to leave the keys for me but there’s been a cock-up.’ ‘Cock-up’ was a deliberate Anglicism on my part. I was laying on the Brit stuff thick, as though my English accent was in itself proof that I was a gentleman and had no plans to rob them: a piece of romanticism I must have picked up from my father. But the woman said
nothing, simply peering at my face as though she hoped to read my intentions there. It occurred to me that my accent, far from being reassuring, was just incomprehensible to her.

Suddenly she turned her head and looked at the boy beside her. A young woman in her late teens was eyeing me from a few paces behind him as intently as her mother had.

The boy asked me to repeat myself.

I was confused. I looked from one to another as I told them again that I was locked out and needed to use a phone.

The boy rested some groceries on his knee to free one of his hands and gestured to his mother. He shook his head as he mimed a hand fitting a key into a lock.

I pointed at my ear. ‘You’re deaf?’ I said.

The woman nodded again, and then pointed first at herself and then at her daughter, who was unloading more groceries from the back of the station wagon and placing them on the driveway. It was only a small thing, but I was struck by the elegance and fluidity of her pointing, especially as she was a large, not particularly graceful-looking woman.

‘I need to use the phone,’ I said slowly, making a phone shape with the thumb and little finger of my right hand.

The woman smiled warmly and indicated that I should follow her into the house.

It seemed slightly odd to me that the family had a phone at all, but they did. It was coupled to a keyboard and had a screen for receiving typed messages.

Mr Diaz was effusively apologetic. He said that by ‘porch’ he had meant the tiny gingerbread entrance that faced the road – the opposite side to where I’d been searching. He offered to drive over and help me look for the keys, but I told him I was quite sure I’d be able to find them now. In that case, he said, he would drop by the following day to make sure I was safely in.

While we were talking, my neighbours were packing their shopping away into the cupboards around the kitchen. It was disorienting to be suddenly welcomed into the bustle of a
family. The long, low-ceilinged room I was in was split into two sections by a breakfast bar. On one side was the kitchen, with its reassuring clutter, and on the other was a dining table and a hutch for crockery. The boy had gone into a room that gave off the main area. I could see the back of his head silhouetted by the flickering light of a television set. He had the volume turned up to just below the point where it would cause distortion.

The mother put a glass of iced tea in my hand, and went to speak to her son. I thought for a moment that she was going to ask him to turn down the sound. Instead, his head emerged from the doorway at a slight angle.

‘Mom says you can stay and eat,’ he said, as I hung up the phone. He had a milk moustache around his mouth.

His mother was frying some Italian sausages and the smell of them was making me salivate. I hadn’t eaten properly since the flight and was tempted to stay, but I couldn’t face an hour or so of polite incomprehension and improvised sign language.

I pointed at my watch and mimed a flying plane and then falling asleep on my own folded hands. Before I left, I wrote down my name and address on a piece of paper as a kind of introduction. The woman did the same. My new neighbours were Harriet Fernshaw and her children Nathan and Theresa.

While Nathan’s hearing was unimpaired, Terry was as deaf as her mother. I could see mother and daughter framed in the kitchen window when I looked back from the driveway. It was eerie to watch them communicating wordlessly, flicking their hands in movements that resembled the gestures which accompany speech, but were speech in its entirety to them. A spoken language I might learn, but theirs seemed like a mystery that would exclude me for ever.

The keys were exactly where Mr Diaz had said they would be. I fitted them into the door with enormous, exhausted relief. I had anticipated getting into the house quite differently: ceremoniously taking possession of it, room by room. Instead, I was almost too tired to drag my luggage into the kitchen.
The house was stuffy and dusty from weeks of standing unoccupied. My appetite had all but vanished, so I just drank a glass of water from a tap in the kitchen and stumbled upstairs to one of the guest bedrooms. I remember consciously deciding not to go to bed in my uncle’s old room because it didn’t seem right, but after that sleep overtook me so fast, it was like being knocked down by a wave.

I WOKE UP SUDDENLY
in a pitch-black bedroom with no idea of the time and a tinny ringing noise going off in my ears. My first thought was that I had overslept and would have to get dressed quickly to make it to work for my night shift. But the sound was not coming from my own room, and there was a smell in the air that reminded me I was in unfamiliar territory. I dragged myself out of bed and stumbled across the landing. The phosphorescence on the illuminated dial of my uncle’s clock radio betrayed the source of the noise. The cheap fake plastic set had been playing an hour’s worth of Golden Oldies to the empty house at 5 a.m. each morning since the day my uncle died. I snapped it off and sank on to Patrick’s narrow single bed.

My uncle’s room was the largest of all the bedrooms. The
summer Vivian and I painted the exterior, Patrick had done up his own room. He painted it a deep shade of blue he had concocted himself. He goaded the incredulous sales clerk at the hardware store in Westwich into adding squirt after squirt of red paint. The boy’s hands had paused on the levers. ‘More?’ My uncle grabbed the lever himself and pumped red paint into the mixture in order to obtain the shade he wanted.

I felt slightly intrusive here among Patrick’s most personal possessions. The Afghan rug with the Harvard motto that my grandmother had crocheted for him when he won his place at law school; the shelves of books; his woodcut of the crucifixion; the religious figurines; the icon above his bed that he’d smuggled out of Leningrad in a tea towel. It was probably worthless, but the story of its provenance made it seem priceless to me.

There was a stack of books reaching up almost to the top of the bedside table. I picked up the first volume – a trashy biography of Frank Sinatra. Beneath it was a book on Moroccan cookery.

I got out of bed and wandered through the rooms on the upper floor. The study seemed chilly. A window in front of the desk was half open. It didn’t really strike me as odd at the time. I just assumed someone had left it open to air the study.

I sat down at the desk. The sea from the window was a leaden smear. The skull and the row of green files had gone, leaving a faint outline in the dust on the desk. I searched carefully through the drawers and found nothing, except a batch of fruity love letters in sprawling feminine handwriting. It seemed slightly indecent to read them, but I couldn’t help glancing at a couple.

I was disappointed not to find any more of Patrick’s writing, but consoled myself that something would turn up.

I lay on my bed not sleeping for the next hour. The windows on two sides of the room began to glow with clear seaside light. I began to think it was a lovely room to wake up in. Its wooden floor and walls were painted a pale lime green. There
was a green ashtray in a cast-iron stand a few yards from the bed; a greenish commode by the window that Patrick had stripped of paint; a marble-topped stand which held a pitcher and bowl with a floral design; strange allegorical woodcuts on the walls. In another old-fashioned touch, the lumpy bed had bolsters instead of pillows.

But the prettiness of the room – like the house itself – was of a very fragile kind. It had been arranged for people to pass through fairly quickly, not for them to stay and make a life there. Anyone who stayed longer than a few minutes would begin to notice small mistakes and inconveniences. The orange anglepoise lamp on the dressing table was jarringly out of place; the bed sagged; the door on the commode was broken; in the bottom of the pitcher was a large dead spider, its legs shrivelled up round its body – it looked like a tiny grappling iron, left behind by a tiny prisoner.

And still, it was the inconsistencies and lapses of good taste that reminded me most of Patrick. Where he had tried to create an atmosphere of soothing Victorian calm, he had only managed to emphasise his eccentricities. In this room, some of the details were mysterious – why the lamp, which must have been brought from another room and forgotten? But together, the many indications of disuse spoke of a solitary life. I began to feel sorry for him. This was a guest bedroom, after all, that had never held any guests. It was like the roped-off bedrooms at Hampton Court; any sense of life beyond the furniture was wholly illusory.

I had managed to sleep all night on an empty stomach, but now that I was awake, my hunger was becoming impossible to ignore. I even had that extra sensitivity to smell that comes when you haven’t eaten in a while. I noticed the mustiness in the air, and the way the slight dampness brought out the smell of the timber.

I went downstairs and attempted to make some breakfast. Now, anyone living alone begins to cut comers. You adapt to shortcomings you can’t be bothered to fix. Sometimes, you
only notice when guests arrive and you have to explain the bathroom door only closes if you pull it like so; that a certain drawer won’t shut unless you lift it when you slide it in; you have to jiggle the handle of the toilet to get the cistern to fill. But Patrick’s house was only comparable for inconvenience with living in a museum.

The fridge – which contained the collection of ice-cream scoops – was purely ornamental. The cooker hadn’t worked for years and had a gloomy aura all its own – like a wrecked car in a forest. The water wheezed and coughed its way out of the taps. All the kitchen implements were of the oldest available kind. Patrick must have either gone out for every meal, or eaten canned food out of the tin.

There was an enormous pile of tinned food in the larder – enough in fact to keep Patrick going through a nuclear winter – but not much that I felt like eating for breakfast. I saw tinned asparagus, tins of cherries, haggis (vegetarian and non-vegetarian varieties), cassoulet, feijoada, along with a box of wine gums that I remembered buying in Wandsworth for Patrick’s fortieth birthday. I found a bag of coffee beans in there too, but not a grinder that I dared use. There were several elegant-looking hand-operated ones, but they smelled of furniture polish and had rusty or broken mechanisms. Knowing Patrick, the one he actually used would be an ugly piece of 1960s junk that he’d bought for fifty cents at a yard sale, but I couldn’t see anything that fitted this description. In the end, I settled for Postum, of which there were three unopened jars, and added instant coffee to my shopping list.

The picture on the tin of feijoada made it look not unlike baked beans, so I decided to eat that. In the absence of a tin-opener, I had to use a corkscrew to punch a hole in the can. It took me about ten minutes to make an opening big enough to pour out the contents, which turned out to be beans and most of the distinguishing characteristics of a pig. By then I was too hungry to care, and sat on the steps of the house with my Postum, my pig’s snout stew and a box of Ritz crackers,
wondering what unnatural instinct had made Patrick turn his own home into such an inhospitable place.

Twenty-eight years earlier, Vivian and I had followed our father up the steps on which I was sitting and been introduced to Patrick for the first time. He towered over us, a taller, swarthier version of my father, his eyes obscured by the sunglasses that he wore habitually, regardless of the weather.

It had been snowing that day. It was the Christmas after my mother died, and we were spending it in America. I suppose my father thought that celebrating it in our customary way in London would just underline her absence.

We were unprepared for the brutal weather. London had been unseasonally warm, but six inches of snow fell in Boston in the hour after we landed: great clouds of it seemed to swarm around the headlights of the other cars. The ferry was delayed for two hours. Vivian and I had no gloves or scarves, so my father bought us some at a drugstore in Hyannis. It was dark when the boat left the harbour; thick and swirling, the snow continued to pour out of the sky and silently extinguish itself in the boat’s black wake. Snow lay along the eaves of our empty guesthouse in Westwich, where the cold cotton sheets looked and felt like snow. Vivian bunched up like an armadillo at the top of his bed to stay warm. I straightened my legs too quickly: it was like standing neckdeep in icy water. My teeth chattered until the bed warmed up. Outside the window, the snow had been scraped into piles; yellow under the street-lamps, they set off the blackness of the Atlantic night.

Early the next morning we drove to Patrick’s. My father struggled with the ignition of the rented car as Vivian and I shivered on its cold vinyl seats. It had started to snow again – tiny flakes of it this time, like salt. By the time we got to Patrick’s house, the path he had cleared across the porch had been dusted over again. His house seemed to disappear into the sky behind it, camouflaged like the black and white of ermine.

My father banged on the door and flapped his arms to keep warm. ‘Cold, huh?’

Patrick appeared. The whole of his nose was swathed in white bandages. Much later, my father explained that he had had an operation to straighten a deviated septum. Along with the dark glasses, the bandages made him look like the Invisible Man. He was easily the most frightening person I’d ever seen in my life.

‘What’s that in your hair?’ he asked.

I said nothing. I was speechless with terror. Vivian was looking at me, his face blotchy white and pink from the cold, swathed in his drugstore hat and muffler.

Patrick bent down and produced a Reese’s peanut butter cup from the air behind my left ear. I burst into tears.

Patrick was mortified. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. It was just a trick.’ He unwrapped the chocolate. ‘Look, it’s candy!’

‘It’s the bandage,’ said my father. ‘He’s frightened of it.’

Patrick touched it. ‘This? Does it look terrible?’

‘It’s not so bad,’ said my father. Something about my father’s deep voice and the way frozen vapour came out of his mouth made me think of smoke pouring from a censer in church.

Vivian quacked: ‘Your nose looks like a big white doorknob.’

My father took my hand and we followed them over the threshold, me grizzling slightly, not so much from fear as from the feeling that I had disgraced myself with my tears.

The house must have been very different then. There would have been much less in it. It seems a trite thing to observe, but Patrick only began collecting things in earnest when he’d given up on human beings. In those days, the eccentricities that eventually made the kitchen useless were so far from conquering it that Patrick was able to cook Christmas dinner for five. The fifth person was Patrick’s girlfriend Lydia. She was frail-looking with a bun of blond hair. She called him Paddy and cracked open walnuts with the heel of her clog.

Together she and Patrick had cut down a tree which they had decorated with ribbons, and candy canes, and Christmas biscuits that were as hard as plywood.

It was a subdued occasion. We ate much of the dinner in silence. I was too young to understand fully, but I think I sensed it was a reconciliation of some sort between Patrick and my father.

My father insisted on going for a walk on the beach after lunch before we opened our presents. Patrick and Lydia sat drinking whisky by the fire.

The sea was grey and foamy, churning up the beach. Even the sand dunes had a grey, damp look, like heaps of aggregate at a building site.

‘I don’t want you to be disappointed if you don’t like what Patrick gives you,’ my father explained. ‘He doesn’t understand small children very well.’

‘But why not, Dad? Why doesn’t he?’ said Vivian.

Something foul and fishy had been deposited by the sea high up on the beach and half covered with sand. We were poking at it with sticks.

‘I want you both to behave very well,’ my father said, ‘so that when you leave Patrick will think to himself: What nice children!, I think I’d like to have some of those myself.’

It was a sensible warning. Patrick gave Vivian and me Harvard sweatshirts that were about eight sizes too big. If I still had mine, I would still be waiting to grow into it. But I heeded my father’s words and said nothing. Vivian couldn’t conceal his disappointment. ‘It’s a wearing present,’ he said. ‘I hate wearing presents.’

‘I love mine,’ I said smugly. ‘Dad, Vivian said he doesn’t like his sweatshirt.’

My father had given Patrick a miner’s helmet with a Davey lamp attached to it. Patrick put it on and mugged at Lydia, mocking the gift.

‘Dad, Uncle Patrick doesn’t like the hat!’ Vivian was thrilled.

‘Give it back, then,’ said my father. ‘You asshole!’ He was smiling. It was the first time I had ever heard him swear. They pretended to wrestle over the hat.

‘Dad, you said —’

‘Come on, give it a rest, Damien,’ my father said. ‘Lighten up.’

I think my lip must have trembled. I was being a tiresome goody-goody, but I was too close to my last fit of tears for me to take the comment in good spirit, and Patrick could see this.

‘Damien’s right,’ he said. ‘A gentleman should never swear or fart.’

‘I stand corrected,’ my father said.

‘Look at the parrot!’ screeched Patrick’s parrot.

Later on, Patrick showed off his toys to us. The board games, some of which he had designed himself, were too grown-up to arouse our interest. But I was captivated by a clockwork train and somehow got it into my head that Patrick had given it to me. My father quickly disabused me of this idea. He pointed out that I didn’t have room in my suitcase. I said I would leave my clothes behind.

‘It’s Patrick’s train,’ my father insisted. ‘And it will remain Patrick’s train.’ Patrick was sheepishly silent. Something he had said had sparked off the whole scene.

I threw a tantrum and was exiled to the summer kitchen until it was time to leave.

The rental car wouldn’t start, so Patrick drove us back to Westwich in his car – a white Triumph convertible with an eight-track tape player and an exhaust loud enough to announce the Last Judgement. He played Latin American pipe music at the highest possible volume to compete with the borborygmus of the engine.

I don’t remember much else about the trip. I was mortified not to keep the train, but in its place I had the inkling of something else: the distinct feeling that I was Patrick’s favourite; a feeling that was as small and steady as a pilot light – a feeling that I had begun to recall since I got the news of his death.