The Paperchase (9 page)

MR DIAZ, PATRICK’S LAWYER
, stopped by at about eight o’clock. Seeing him, I almost did a double take – he was boss-eyed: exactly as Mr Ricketts was in Patrick’s fragmentary story. In every other way, however, he couldn’t have been more
different
from a desiccated imperial administrator. He was a courteous man of around forty with olive skin. His jet-black hair was greying at the temples. The distinctive long vowels of his Boston accent sat oddly, I thought, with his suavely Mediterranean appearance. He refused my offer of a cup of Postum with humour. ‘Promised my wife I wouldn’t touch that stuff. I’ll take a glass of water, though.’

He apologised again for the mix-up over the key. ‘I sent one of my paralegals,’ he said. ‘It was the first time she’d been out to the house.’

I told him it wasn’t his fault.

‘I brought you these,’ he said, handing me the keys to Patrick’s car. ‘We brought it back from the high school and disconnected the battery. You shouldn’t have a problem getting it started. If you do, try scraping out the inside of the leads.’

He sipped his water slowly and looked out over the lawn towards the ocean with his one good eye. ‘Nice spot. How long are you planning to stay out here?’

‘At least the summer, possibly longer.’ It was the answer I’d been giving for months, but after one night and breakfast in my new home, it seemed like foolishness. Practical and well dressed, Mr Diaz was a physical reproach to the vagueness of my plans. I missed all the familiar indignities of work and life in London.

‘Mind if I look around?’ said Mr Diaz.

‘By all means.’ I opened the door for him.

As any visitor would be, he was struck by the mechanical banks arrayed on the shelf around the wall of the kitchen. ‘So these are the famous banks.’

‘Famous?’

‘Your uncle itemised them in the inventory. He gave each one a name.’

There must have been fifty of the little machines. Several were in dubious taste: there was a ginger-haired Irishman who snuffled coins off the snout of a pig; a dicky-bowed black waiter who swallowed his penny off his own pink palm and rolled his eyes gratefully.

‘I guess he just wanted to be thorough.’ Mr Diaz seemed to smile to himself. ‘He was quite a character.’

Quite
a
character.
It made Patrick sound endearingly strange, as though he was odd by choice, instead of the victim of his own compulsions. Among the vitamins in the bathroom was a whole pharmacy of antidepressants. Paranoid, lonely,
chronically
depressed: he was quite a character all right.

I gave Mr Diaz a quick tour. The house charmed him, as it charmed everyone, even though it was becoming obvious to me
that living in it was going to be difficult. I was beginning to feel odd about my whole project, and to think that the principal intention behind my uncle’s will had been to found a museum in memory of him and make me its curator. And with Platon in my flat for at least six months, I couldn’t just get back on the plane and go home. Bolder than Mandingo, indeed.

Mr Diaz’s asymmetrical gaze was scanning the spines of the books in the library. It reminded me again of Mr Ricketts and I asked him if he knew what had happened to the files that had been on Patrick’s desk.

‘Box files,’ he said thoughtfully, rounding out the vowels in a jocular imitation of my accent. ‘I’ll have to ask at the office. Weren’t they on the inventory I sent you?’

I told him I had seen nothing since I had heard the news from my father.

‘I sent one to your address in London. I’ll get you another.’ He said I would have to come into his office in Westwich anyway to sign some of the paperwork relating to the will.

‘I meant to ask you something about that,’ I said. ‘Under the terms of the will, I understand I’m supposed to maintain the house as it was during Patrick’s lifetime. Now, I get that in principle. But in practice, can I alter things to make it more habitable? For instance, it needs a new fridge …’

‘Well, I’m afraid this is one of those “How long is a piece of string?” questions,’ said Mr Diaz. ‘I don’t see getting a new refrigerator as problematical, or moving a painting from one wall to another. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you wanted to put in a new bathroom. You’d have to persuade the trustees that it doesn’t conflict with the letter or the spirit of your uncle’s directions. Any alterations to the fabric of the house would have to be approved by the trustees.’

‘What if I want to sell the house?’ I said, trying to make it sound as hypothetical as possible.

‘Out of the question. But in the example of the
bathroom
… I mean, we have a certain latitude in the way we interpret the document. I would have no objections, nor do I
think would Rosie Queenan, the trustee appointed by the bank. The only trustee who might object is Mr Blair, the guy from the churchmen’s fund, but I doubt it.’

I wanted to ridicule his careful, legalistic replies. Did the prohibition against altering things mean that I couldn’t throw away the jars of vitamin pills that cluttered the bathroom floor? What about the spider in the water jug, was it protected by the will?

I must have looked anxious, because Mr Diaz felt he had to reassure me. ‘I wouldn’t worry too much about it. I’m here to advise you. Let me do the worrying. You enjoy your break,’ he said.

He meant to be encouraging, but I was disheartened by the implicit assumption that no one would come to the house for longer than a holiday.

We went back to the kitchen and Mr Diaz took his glass of water off the sideboard and drank it in one go, with his hand pressed against his stomach. He smacked his lips. The gesture signalled the end of his visit. ‘You’ve got your own well, haven’t you,’ he said, dabbing at his moustache with a
handkerchief
. ‘I always prefer the taste of well water.’

I opened the screen door for him. It slapped shut behind us. The sun had burned off the early morning haze and it was
getting
hot. We set off across the lawn towards Mr Diaz’s car, which was parked in the driveway, about a hundred yards away. He said I should make an appointment to come see him about the paperwork. ‘Get yourself settled in first, then give me a call,’ he said.

I stooped to pick up a handful of dead twigs from the lawn as we walked: they were like a speck of fluff on a huge baize billiard table. ‘There’s no phone,’ I said, ‘but I think I can call from my neighbours’.’

‘The Fernshaws?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Real Ionians,’ he said. ‘Not wetbacks like me.’ He smiled, his teeth ivory in the sunlight under his clipped moustache.

‘They’re deaf,’ I said.

‘Sure are. Used to be a lot of deaf people on the islands.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Not so many of them now, but in the old days, I mean it’s a rural thing: small gene pool – lot of double yolkers.’

‘Inbreeding.’

‘That’s right. The islanders even evolved their own kind of sign language. My wife knows some actually. She’s a real islander.’

‘She’s not deaf though?’

‘Who?’

‘Your wife.’

‘Oh no. Everyone spoke sign language back then – everyone was related to someone who was deaf so it was the easiest thing for everybody.’

We reached Mr Diaz’s car. He shook my hand and got in, then rolled down the window. ‘I was sorry I couldn’t be at the funeral,’ he said. ‘My wife had to go into the hospital and I drove up to Boston to be with her.’

‘Nothing serious, I hope.’

‘It looks like she’s out of the woods now, but she’ll be taking it easy over the summer just to be sure. She was real sorry about Patrick, too. He wasn’t the most easygoing guy in the world, but he was a kind man.’

While not the whole truth, it was as accurate a eulogy as anything that had been said at the funeral.

‘His death came right out of the blue,’ he added.

‘Yeah, it was a shock to me, too,’ I said, but I thought it was probably better not to explain why.

PATRICK’S CAR WAS PARKED
inside the shed. It didn’t look much like it had twenty-eight years before, but then neither did I. The bodywork was pitted with rust and a dent in the door on the passenger side had been mended with a piece of plywood. It wasn’t a car you would want to pick up a date in. And that was sad. Every summer, Patrick told us the same stories about the dating rituals of his teenage years. They were stories like Homeric myth with their own catchphrases and epithets, and they had undergone much embellishment over the years. They were peopled with bizarre characters: the Bubble brothers, Mrs Thornquist, one-eyed Captain Spadger, Tackaberry Mackadoo; and they covered the years of Patrick’s youth, as an altar boy, as a student, as a high-school basketball star, a
lifeguard
at Revere Beach. It was a life that I envisaged taking
place in Technicolor; a life a hundred times more exciting than the life I led.

Mr Sandford – he of the gerbil’s-arse moustache – once told my father that the function of epics is to embody the cardinal virtues of their society and their historical moment. In the
Aeneid,
I gather it’s filial piety; in the
lliad,
it’s martial valour; in 1950s America as described by my Uncle Patrick, the most important qualities a young man could possess were the right car and a duck’s-arse hairstyle.

Patrick went into more detail about how he used Vitalis to sculpt his hair before a date than Homer did about the armour of the Trojan heroes. He really didn’t care whether it was of interest to us. He was in a state of what recovering alcoholics call euphoric recall: he wasn’t here, he was there, in the America of Eisenhower and Elvis and tailfinned cars, shaping and preening before the bathroom mirror; almost believing that his bald head was covered with lustrous black locks.

So, for Patrick to have allowed his car to fall into a state of such disrepair was a bit like Siegfried selling the ring of the Nibelungen for two dollars at a yard sale.

To make matters worse, whoever had returned it from the other side of the island hadn’t bothered to disconnect the
battery
or even remove the towel from the passenger seat, which, presumably, Patrick had taken down to the running track to dry himself after the run which killed him.

The space behind the two front seats was so small that it seemed improbable that Vivian and I had ever fitted inside it, but we had. The two of us had been squashed in there as we drove back to Westwich that first Christmas.

When we got back to London at the beginning of January we had begun to correspond with Patrick. The two of us wrote long letters on my father’s yellow legal pads, and Patrick sent us drawings and silly poems back. I copied out the story of David and Goliath from a book I got from the library and told Patrick I had written it.

The following summer my father rented the house near
Provincetown that became an annual fixture for the next ten years. We saw more of Patrick and Lydia, but to my
recollection
my father and Patrick never spent a night under the same roof. It was as though there was a tacit understanding that there were limits to their renewed friendship. If we stayed on Ionia, it was at a guest house in Westwich; and when Patrick stayed on the Cape, it was usually at a place in Provincetown. The only exception was the summer when we painted Patrick’s house. Vivian and I camped on Patrick’s lawn. As
self-conscious
adolescents, we didn’t feel comfortable sharing a bed.

But given these limits, I remember those summers as the happiest of my life. When I think of the word ‘childhood’, the first, most pleasant associations that spring to mind are the gold summer light on the beach outside Patrick’s house; the smell of candy-floss at the Barnstable County Fair; the tingle of a mild sunburn; my father and uncle squabbling over the barbecue; the cold, cold water of the Atlantic Ocean. These were my real inheritance. A happy enough childhood is the capital that supports you during your adult life.

About two years after that first Christmas, Lydia left Patrick for another man. My father told us we should remember Patrick in our prayers because he wasn’t well. I suppose this was his way of saying Patrick had had a nervous breakdown. Lydia’s departure marked the beginning of the closeness between Patrick and my father that lasted until I was about sixteen. They were both in effect now widowers, and I think they must have found the symmetry reassuring.

The idea of Patrick’s being jilted by Lydia got mixed up in my mind with a book I was reading at the time. The memory of his big white doorknob was still very fresh, and I’ve never quite shaken off the idea that my uncle was in fact the Dong with a Luminous Nose, abandoned by his Jumbly Girl, and searching for her by night over the Gromboolian Plain.

The battery in the Triumph was almost completely dead, so I found a charger in the shed and set it going.

Patrick’s car had played another role in the history of my family. The need for spare parts from England – they were unobtainable on Ionia – had been a link between Patrick and my father. I don’t know if it prevented them from falling out sooner than they did, but we stopped shopping for wine gums and wiper blades just before my sixteenth birthday. And it’s from then that I date the break-up of my fissiparous family.

If brothers can’t get on, my father once said to me and Vivian after we’d quarrelled, what hope is there for anyone? Of course, it doesn’t follow. Brothers – sisters I’m not qualified to speak about – are brought up to want the same things. Hence the emulousness, hence the contention.

And who was Dad to preach? For the last twenty years of Patrick’s life, he and my father did not speak. My father claimed it was Patrick’s fault. Patrick claimed it was my father’s fault. Who knew? I never got to the bottom of it, and I felt that to attribute blame to one side or the other just
perpetuated
the split. In any case, it seemed obvious that a quarrel as permanent as theirs didn’t arise from a single cause, any more than a man banging in a tent peg over a seismic fault causes an earthquake.

I got a clean towel from the house and walked across the marsh and down the powdery sand dunes to the beach. I was finally glad for not being in London. The sea was as clear and green as it had been that day in May. Another month of sun had warmed it slightly, but when I jumped off the jetty, the cold water squeezed my skull like a metal band. After a few moments it eased a little, and I struck out, swimming over a patch of long seaweed, like a stand of pine trees under water. I turned on my back and the sea closed over my ears. I
wondered
if this was what it might be like to be deaf: was it silence, or the close gurglings of your own blood, or some other sound which, never having heard another, you could never put a name to?

Even on a still day, the sound of the sea was everywhere on
Ionia, but the Fernshaws and the other deaf Ionians dwelled in a place where sound was absent. Their island was a place of light and movement: the quick glittering of the ocean, the changing clouds, the vast blue sky. Perhaps their pleasure in these was all the greater as a kind of compensation. I thought of the surprising grace of Mrs Fernshaw’s pointing fingers, and the fluidity that seemed out of keeping with her age and size.

The battery would take about twelve hours to charge, which was too long to wait for a cup of coffee, so I dug out an old bicycle which had not much wrong with it apart from flat tyres and brakes that rubbed slightly. I managed to get it more or less roadworthy and then set off for the Colonial Market.

Once I had started cycling, I had a moment of enthusiasm for my new home. The sun was right overhead, and I could smell the tarmac baking in the heat. Butterflies winked their colours at me from the long grass by the side of the road. By the junction of the main road to Westwich, where a bridge forded the creek that drained the marshes, a child had set up an iced-tea and lemonade stall with a hand-lettered sign. I was encouraged to stop by the thought that Patrick would have stopped: he unfailingly supported children who sold lemonade, yard sales and anyone selling vegetables from a shack with a sign saying, ‘Home-grown produce’.

The hub of the bicycle ticked as I rode one of the pedals to a standstill. I saw that the boy was Mrs Fernshaw’s son, Nathan. Boxes of saltwater taffy were stacked under the table to stop them melting in the heat.

‘How’s business?’ I asked him.

‘I only just got here,’ he said.

After the turnoff to Patrick’s, the road we were on continued along the edge of the island to the War Bonnet Cliffs – supposedly named by the first English settlers after the headgear of the indigenous people they displaced from the island. Patrick used to say that the original inhabitants of Ionia were a pacific, agrarian people whom the English had softened up with whisky and imported diseases and then bilked out of their land.
I doubt this story, and not just for patriotic reasons. The settlers were Puritans and more likely to hand out Bibles than firewater. But it is true that the War Bonnet Cliffs got their name long after the last full-blooded Ionian Indian had succumbed to cirrhosis – or old age – on the mainland. The cliffs were the island’s most famous beauty spot, and the farthest point from the dock at Westwich.

I’d only been to the cliffs once, and I remembered them as a big disappointment. My father had insisted on cycling the entire forty-mile round-trip on rented three-speed bicycles. I was twelve. We barely had time to down a soft drink before turning the bikes around and pedalling back. Patrick had wisely refused to contemplate the outing.

The cliffs had been much less garishly coloured than they were in the souvenir photographs. In fact, the high point of the day was the incredulous reaction of the man in the rental shop when we got back to Westwich and told him where we’d been: ‘War Bonnet? On bikes?’

Visitors to War Bonnet went on rented scooters and in
air-conditioned
buses like the one that was now pulling up on the verge and discharging a gaggle of tourists.

They streamed past me towards Nathan Fernshaw’s stand, snapping his photo and buying up boxes of saltwater taffy as fast as he could stack them on the table. It struck me that his resemblance to a child in a Norman Rockwell painting was not accidental, but shrewd marketing. Somehow, Nathan had grasped that he was really a vendor of nostalgia, as bogus in his way as the people at Plimoth Plantation who wore buckled shoes, churned butter, and pretended to talk in Elizabethan English. It was a reminder of another anomaly: while Ionia and the Cape were my New World, for many Americans they had more in common with the Old.

The driver was last off the bus. He gave the boy a wink. ‘Hiya, Nathan. How’s your mother.’

‘She’s good.’

‘Let me have some of that tea.’

The road which had been empty a moment ago was alive with people. The driver stood apart from them, slurping his iced tea from a polystyrene cup. He was in his forties,
florid-faced
, with a crew cut that looked like it came out of an old L. L. Bean catalogue. He saw me looking at him. ‘How you doing,’ he said, without giving it the intonation of a question.

‘I’m Nathan’s neighbour,’ I said.

‘Oh – you’re the English guy from the Captain’s house.’

I must have looked surprised because he threw his head back and laughed. ‘You know what island people are like.’ He made a gossiping beak with his thumb and forefinger.

‘I only arrived yesterday.’

‘Here for the summer?’

‘We’ll see. I may stay through the fall.’

‘Oh, fall’s beautiful here. Well, I’d better round up my people.’

When I cycled back that way an hour later the road was empty again. The midday sun was beginning to bear down on the island, wringing a little heat haze out of its seams, like whey from cheese.

Nathan Fernshaw was packing up his things, moving slowly in the heat. He didn’t look up. The
tsk-tsk-tsk
sound of the headphones he was wearing seemed to follow me along the road for more than a quarter of a mile. I kept hearing the same noise at intervals for the rest of the afternoon, which puzzled me, until I realized it was the whine of insects from the marsh.