The Paper Men Read online

  “Look, Liz—”

  “‘Longing to be with you. Lucinda.’”

  I was too miserable to speak. I gathered the eiderdown from my bed and found my way, half-blind, to the hole I sometimes call my study. The dawn chorus had died away and I knew that the sounds of Monday morning would begin long before my head was anywhere near rescued from ruin. It was at that—well, not moment but juncture—that I realized something not so much with a start as with a convulsion. There were torn photographs in the dustbin as well. Why had I gone through those boxes to rid myself of old shames, my past, and dumped them in the dustbin instead of burning them? Why had I told Tucker? Why was he such a dedicated, such a determined, single-minded fool? Somewhere in all that spilt rubbish, crumpled, torn, smeared with jam or fat—now there was no knowing who in the household, our daily, or out there, the dustmen, or milkman—or lying in a badger’s stomach or its sett: the point was that Rick L. Tucker and a badger with their dawn antics had put me in danger of losing my wife and my dignity at the same time. The assiduity and humble determination that had seemed comic at first now seemed to threaten me like a disease. It was as if all paper had become sticky by nature so that whether it was lard or marmalade you could never rid yourself of the stuff, once committed to it. It was flypaper and I was the fly. It was the Venus Flytrap, the Sundew. It was those footsteps in the sands of time that I now saw I preferred not to leave behind me.

  Chapter II

  “And who is Lucinda?”

  That was the beginning of the end of my marriage to Liz. Never marry a woman nearly ten years younger than yourself. It took years, what with the state of the law as touching divorce. We were and are and always shall be profoundly connected, not in love or hate, nor in the trite compromise of a love/hate relationship. Whatever it was, the thing was there, to be enjoyed, fought against and suffered. We were entirely unsuitable for each other and for making anything but a dissonance. As long as Liz stayed healthy she was integrated and moral. I lived in the simple conviction, I now see, that I could only remain integrated by immorality. This immorality carried in it the necessity of concealment—though who knows now what Liz knew or suspected? That dirty piece of paper was a catalyst. If I had been sufficiently aware, I might have seen in its appearance from the dustbin the corner of a pattern that was to prove itself universal. Lucinda pre-dated my marriage to Liz and at the time of the dustbin I was involved with a girl successfully concealed. Irony? The Eye of Osiris?

  Caught in the kitchen with Rick L. Tucker and the piece of paper, I was led to do the one thing to which I was wholly unaccustomed; that is, I made a clean breast of everything. Contrary to all expectations (particularly as illustrated by novels), Elizabeth understood but did not forgive. On mature reflection (old man sitting in the sun), I think she only wanted the excuse. Our rows were fiercer than duels. We were sophisticated but uncivilized. I went and stayed at the sleazier of my clubs, telling her that she was welcome to the house, garden, paddocks, horses, cars, boat, limited company, anything, but I couldn’t stand it any more. The club had a strict limit for the number of consecutive nights you could sleep there. So when I went home to be forgiven, I found she had gone off herself. She had left a note saying that I was welcome to the house, garden, paddock, horses, cars, boat, limited company, anything, but she couldn’t stand it any more.

  Even then we might have come together and continued our necessary wrangle until age and indifference had granted us a mutual sense of humour. But that horsy creature Capstone Bowers appeared on the horizon. Julian sorted it all out in time—the goods and chattels and messuage or whatever it is—and the marriage came to as much of an end as any marriage of that length ever does. The only damaged party, I think, was our poor little Emily. I met Humphrey Capstone Bowers only once, by appointment, at that same sleazy club, the Random. They—we—are an odd lot and connected with paper, from advertising and children’s comics all the way through to pornography. You might say that apart from me our most celebrated member is Anon. Capstone Bowers looked down his nose at the crowd—he must be the last Englishman to wear a monocle—and muttered that he hadn’t seen such a lot, ever. Pressed severely by me, he remarked that we were all rather bush. To give you a completer picture of the man, he shot big game all over the world and targets at Bisley. Towards the end of our brief conversation which we were holding to, as he said, “sort things out”, I was building myself up to the point where I would employ my ample linguistic resources to tell him what I thought of him, when he said with the simplicity of absolute candour, “You know, Barclay, you’re such a shit.” You can see the sort of man he was. I mean.

  Well.

  Freedom at fifty-three! What nonsense. What bloody nonsense! Freedom was what faced me. My advice is, don’t try it. If you see it coming, run. Or if it tempts you to run, stay put. Believe it or not, my head was full of anticipated sex, and with imagined girls young enough to be my granddaughters, very nearly. That may have been why I didn’t mind Capstone Bowers moving in with Liz one little bit. It was nothing to do with our unbreakable, unbearable connection. Poor little Emily minded. She ran away and had to be fetched back by the police. I could understand her bolting. From what I’ve heard since, even the horses hated Capstone Bowers.

  I moved about. I had many acquaintances but few friends. I stayed with one or two of them. One even produced a woman but she proved to be a serious academic and a structuralist to boot. God, I might as well have shacked up with Rick L. Tucker!

  I moved to Italy and irony at once took charge, for I chummed up with an Italian woman of near enough my own age and more or less in a pass of the windy Apennines, like the man said. I was fond of her, I suppose, but what kept me there for more than two years was a piano nobile like a museum and servants who hid their sneers. I was so chuffed, I remember—oh Barclay, Barclay, what a snob you are!—I rang Elizabeth and got Emily out to me for a bit. She hated Italy, the place, my Italian chum and, I’m still sorry to say, me. So back she went, and we didn’t meet again for years.

  All this time, though I hardly noticed except as a small irritant, Professor Tucker kept sending letters which Elizabeth forwarded because it gave her an excuse to nag me about my papers. They were strewn through the house and increasing daily from one source or another. I ignored the letters. Only when she sent me a cable, FOR GODS SAKE WILF WHAT AM I TO DO WITH YOUR PAPERS, did I reply, BURN THE BLOODY LOT. But she never did. She took to nailing them up in tea chests and dumping them in the wine cellar. Outside a game reserve or a rifle range Capstone Bowers was such an ignorant sod he never grasped what they would be worth on the open market or, worse, on the closed one.

  My Italian connection came to an end. The fact is that religion, in the shape of Padre Pio, had got to her. Out of curiosity we’d been to one of those dawn masses which always ended in a stampede of the faithful, anxious to get a glimpse of the man’s stigmata before his helpers carried him away out of sight. I was a bit shocked to see that cool, civilized woman scrumming with the rest. She came back to me at last, her veil down and tears streaming behind it. Her voice was deep with a kind of triumphant grief.

  “Now, can you doubt?”

  That irritated me.

  “All I saw was a poor old man being half-carried away from the altar. That was all!”

  She said nothing more in the church, but the argument started again in the back of the car on the way “home”. I know now that what was significant about my reaction as well as hers was the fact that we were involved, both of us, and driven to quarrel so bitterly. My driving force was a passionate need for there not to be a miracle.

  “Look, it’s all hysteria!”

  “I saw them, I tell you, the wounds. God forgive us, we’re not worthy even to speak the word!”

  ‘Supposing you did see them, what does that prove?”

  “There is no ‘Supposing’.”

  “People can think themselves into these things. It’s like a false pregnancy—every symptom there but n
o baby. Remember what I told you about when I was a bank clerk?”

  “You are disgusting, Wilfred Barclay.”

  “And later on, years later. Look at that hand! I was hypnotized. I mean, I was literally, professionally hypnotized. At a party it was and in my, my—”

  “Oh, I, I, my my—”

  “Will you listen? Yes. Egotism. I didn’t think anyone could do such a thing to me. And what happened?”

  “I do not wish to talk about it.”

  “There, on the back on my hand, my own initials, flaming like scars, inflamed like burns—”

  “I will not talk about it!”

  (But the man knew. It was his triumph, his power. There was infuriating complacency in his smile. You are very receptive to hypnotic suggestion, sir. Give Mr Barclay a big hand, ladies and gentlemen!)

  “Look, dear. You don’t want to talk and I don’t want to hurt you—but you see suggestion can do such things!”

  “An old man bleeds for you day after day, year after year. He allows God to dispose of him in two places at once because his charity is too great for the resources of one, poor body—”

  The extraordinary woman burst into tears.

  After that, of course, we fought no more. It was a sort of truce, I suppose. I treated her with uncomprehending and heavy tact, staying out of her way as far as possible. She herself withdrew and became the perfect hostess like Liz. It’s an awful effect to have on people. I wish women would throw things.

  Even so, it might have turned out differently if my attention hadn’t been taken up by another matter. I had to lecture. It’s amusing in a way that a man whose education finished in the fifth should find himself mixed up so with scholars. The truth is that what began with my feeling flattered ended by boring me—and worse. As I say, I was sometimes called to lecture for my country’s good. I did it obediently, at gatherings of academics. You see, though you can accuse Wilfred Barclay of being an ignorant sod with little Latin and less Greek, adept in several broken languages and far more deeply read in bad books than good ones, I have a knack. Academics had to admit that in the last analysis I was what they were about. I repeat there was nothing in it for me but a bit of flattery, a tiny, perhaps absurd, feeling that my country needed me and the occasional interest of an exotic place. It was a long time before the penny dropped. The penny was, of all things, of all people, the badger at the bin, Rick L. Tucker.

  At the time of the row about stigmata, with my Italian chum behaving like a gracious lady, I was about to go to Spain. I debated pushing off without seeing her but rashly came to the conclusion that would make things worse. I wish now I had left in the dignity of silence.

  “Well, I’ll be going, then.”

  She did not turn completely to face me. She turned her head so that her profile was outlined against the worn tapestry. “It is enough.”

  “What is?”

  “The two of us.”

  “Why?”

  “It is enough. That’s all.”

  I considered a number of inquiries. I meditated admitting the crudity of my response to Padre Pio and offering to go and give the poor old man a chance to convert me when I came back. Time, I thought, time was the great healer.

  “When I come back we’ll talk.”

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  If that was not enough she followed it with a blast of Italian, gutter stuff I think, and of which I only got the general drift of her attitude to me, to Protestants, to men and to the English as I exemplified them.

  So I took off for a conference in Seville at the old tobacco factory which chaps who know that sort of thing will remember is where Carmen waggled her hips, though now it’s only a university. Mostly at conferences I keep away until the last day, when it’s my turn to sound like an author. But the professor who had invited me, when asked if they had any Carmens still about said, “Yes, very many,” so I went along, forgetting it would be out of termtime.

  There at the podium I would grace later was Rick Tucker, larger than ever and reading from a huge manuscript. A sleepy bunch of professors, lecturers, postgraduate students were all trying their hardest to stay awake and Professor Tucker was making it difficult for them. I sank into a vacant chair at the back of the hall and composed myself to slumber.

  What jerked me awake was the sound of my own name in Tucker’s peculiarly toneless American. His head was down, and he was reading from the manuscript, and he was on about my relative clauses. He had counted them, apparently, book by book. He had made a graph, and if they consulted appendix twenty-seven among the goodies handed to them by the grace of the conference organizers, they would be able to find his graph there and follow his deductions. Here and there among the audience I saw heads nod, then jerk up again. A few females appeared to be taking notes. A male head fell back in front of me and a faint snore came from it. Prof. Tucker, still toneless, was now pointing out the significant difference between his graph and the one constructed by a Japanese Professor Hiroshige (that was what he sounded like), for Professor Hiroshige, it appeared, had not done his homework, to our surprise, and had also been guilty of the gross error of confusing my compound sentences with my complex ones. In fact Professor Hiroshige should get lost and leave the field to the acknowledged expert, who had heard from the author’s own lips that he did not tolerate so overly broad an interpretation in his iconography of the absolute, or words to that effect.

  I sat there, amused, and having my ego massaged gently, when Rick Tucker, while turning a page, chanced to glance up at his audience. It was the dustbin all over again. It was glug or gulp. From that moment his voice faded and his colour deepened. Listening intently, I could tell why. He was drawing his chin back into his collar. He was not the sort of man who finds it possible to depart from the text before him. The stream of typed words drew him along inexorably to where, in my hearing, he did not want to go. He claimed, I heard him mutter, a deep personal relationship with me and (what a more experienced academic would not have wished to have, knowing the slipperiness of that slope) my verbal agreement with everything he was now telling his listless audience. Then, perhaps faced by some even more outrageous statement of our alleged intimacy, he tried to ad lib, turned two pages at once, then dropped the whole manuscript from the desk so that it glided and fluttered this way and that across the floor. It woke the audience and during that brief interlude I made an unseen exit. Next day I performed the party piece I was paid for and raked the audience for a sign of Rick, hoping to show him what could be done in the way of ad libbing round a man who claimed a deep personal relationship with me but he was nowhere to be found. I wonder why? Such sensitivity was not like him. Then the whole thing slipped from my mind because when I went back to Italy things took a steep dive into the absurd and I got the shock I was not prepared for. It was a mixture of quaintness, meanness and majestic lunacy. I was prepared to be dignified but forgiving about the plane not being met by a car; but the gate was shut, barred and locked. A green canvas wagon tilt just by the gate covered several suitcases all carefully, you might say lovingly, packed with my personal effects. How the servants must have sniggered. I sat in the taxi, a folder containing all the guff from the conference on the seat by me, and wondered where to go. It was an Italian comeuppance.

  Fortunately Coldharbour kept on selling, as it still does, to say nothing of All We Like Sheep, and money was no problem. Neither, at that time, was invention, for I saw, leafing through the papers from the conference, that I had no need of it. Here, then, is what turns that whole mixed episode—my Italian connection, Padre Pio, stigmata, Rick L. Tucker with his graph of my relative clauses—into what I now see to have become the central strand of my life. For, sitting that evening in a hotel bedroom, the papers were all I had to read and I read the lot.

  Coldharbour was a one-off. But the books that followed hadn’t been bad either. There were things, mantic moments, certainties, if you like, whole episodes that had blazed, hurt, been suffered for—and they were wasted. I had w
ritten them, I saw, for nobody but myself, who had never reread them. The conference had operated in the light of certain beliefs. One was that you can understand wholeness by tearing it into separate pieces. Another was that there is nothing new. The question to be asked when reading one book is, what other books does it come from? I will not say that this was a blinding light—indeed, what are academics to do?—but I did see what an economical way there was for me to write my next book. I did it there and then, living by the shores of Lake Trasimene. I did not need to invent, to dive, suffer, endure that obscurely necessary anguish in the pursuit of the—unreadable. There, hanging in the fringes of the Apennines, my ex-chum’s family history rendered invention irrelevant. So I wrote The Birds of Prey in next to no time, with no more than five per cent of myself—not the top five per cent either—sent it to my agent, together with some poste restante addresses, and drove off in a hire car.

  Middle-age was leaving me and something more advanced was approaching and I didn’t much like the look of it. Memory, for example. Now and then it was patchy where it used to be good. I forgot my ex-chum with great rapidity and the book, The Birds of Prey, even faster. My friends had become acquaintances. Since no one writes letters any more, they soon ceased to be even that.

  So I drove. In what must have been about two years—I think two years, but I’m bad at dates and times and ages, my own included—I learnt the main road system of Europe and further afield than that. I learnt the high roads, motorways, the autoroutes, autostradas, autobahns, autoputs from Finland to Cadiz. In the days when it was still possible I drove the whole coast of North Africa and a bit of the west. But mostly it was Europe. I hired cars. Now and then, if I needed to write, I bought a typewriter. I kept a journal in longhand but found if I leafed through it the thing was terribly boring and made me feel faintly sick. But I always kept it even if only one sentence for a day. It was a compulsion, like having to avoid the cracks between paving stones. The relatively cheap but also efficient milieu of the motorway in every country, its spiritual emptiness, its pretence of shifting you to another place while all the time keeping you motionless on the same concrete waste—that kind of internationalism became my way of life, my homeland if you like. I never achieved the very young girl of the lustful imagination and hardly missed her. “Time, unnoticed, did its dusty work.” There had been years when women had looked first then been told who I was. Now, on the rare occasions when I found myself socially among people, women were told who I was and looked afterwards. It was a curious repeat of or variation on the early years after my first book, Coldharbour, and before I met Liz. In those days I drove for two years in the States—Nabokov country, you might call it—selling my lectures on the academic merry-go-round. Later I drove in South America—well, never mind that. Now, however, it was Europe and extensions. I had a hobby, by the way, a hobby with no genesis, just like a book, the hunting of stained glass for no reason at all, just fun, nothing written down. I just like looking. I am in fact an authority on the stuff, though nobody knows so. I can date most glass to a decade, or at least defend my dating, though I’ve never tried. This eccentric enjoyment has turned me into something of a church fancier. You will have the darkest suspicions of me, what with Padre Pio and churches, but I have to make it plain that though I have spent many hours in, for example, Chartres cathedral, there is nothing religious about my interest in churches. It was art, the way of preventing light from entering a building when you don’t want it there. Also churches are most often dark, cool places and ideal for recovering from a hangover. I suppose I ought to mention that I drank a lot now and then and at least more than “some” most of the time;