The Paper Men Read online

  Those memories, how they sting, scald, burn!

  At nineteen I was a bank clerk, allowed to take in savings, register cheques. I was supposed to be reading for banking exams in my spare time, ha et cetera, so that I might—who knows?—become a cashier and end up as a bank manager. I was just out of school—school for farmers’ sons mostly, lads who couldn’t pass the common entrance. Mum’s shoestring riding stables sort of edged me in. She must have had some kind of pull, God knows what. So I could stand behind the counter with my old school tie well to the fore, smile brightly, as they used to say, while giving service without servility. The manager began by liking me because I could think of nothing better to do with my Wednesday and Saturday afternoons than play rugger. I was in a daze, I remember at the speed with which mum’s death—she’d thought I might go into the Church because I liked reading so much—had projected me into this world of figures. Even the rugger club consisted of old men by my standards. After the game on Saturday there’d be mild high jinks in a pub somewhere. Christ, I was naive!

  Almost the first game, or after it, there was a corner snigger—

  “Where’s young Wilf? He ought to try one!”

  “One” was a pill. No, it wasn’t a drug, as it might be today. It was a commonly advertised aphrodisiac. Well, at least I am able to offer some personal evidence in a sphere where the claims are contradictory and few men appear willing to put their own evidence on paper. The pill worked. Perhaps it contained a mite of Spanish fly. Perhaps it was a placebo. But it worked.

  Yes, of course, they assured me, we’d all be going on to the girls, where else? So, watched carefully and roundly applauded, I took it—nineteen, just nineteen! Well. I told my ex-chum, did I not, that Padre Pio’s stigmata must be nothing but suggestion? Experientia docet stultos, as Zonkers used to tell us when he gave us lines. I looked forward fearfully and libidinously. Of course, beyond the, shall we say, physiological plane nothing happened at all. The evening dwindled to half-pints drunk slowly, rugger songs, dirty talk and the odd remark tossed my way.

  “Feeling all right, young Wilf? Sure? Ha ha.”

  As the hypnotist told me, God rot him, You are very receptive to hypnotic suggestion, sir.

  Well, you wouldn’t get such a thick-headed young fool today, they all know everything by the time they’re ten. But I was left with the kind of erection so gorged it was a steady pain and on which masturbation had no effect whatever. All night I wrestled and moaned but there was nothing for it. Next day I had to take my erection to the bank. All morning I stood behind the counter and my tie, smiling brightly at farmers, teachers, parsons, old ladies, young ladies bringing in the firm’s takings for the week and taking out the pay for the employees. All day the knob of my cock wore itself raw against the waistband of my underpants.

  “Maybe I can share the joke, Wilf.”

  He was examining me earnestly. Late light was fading from the window.

  “Joke? How can it be a joke? I was thinking of my time as a banker.”

  “I never knew.”

  “Like T. S. Eliot.”

  The thought of T. S. Eliot and the ithyphallic bank clerk set me off again.

  “I could give you a new slant on banking, Rick.”

  “Could you just mention the date for the record?”

  “Sit still, man, and don’t fuss.”

  It was the spirit of farce, of course. In one way I could describe my whole life as a movement from one moment of farce to another, farce on one plane or another, nature’s comic, her clown with a red nose, ginger hair and trousers always falling down at precisely the wrong moment. Yes, right from the cradle. The first time I shot over a horse’s head my fall was broken by a pile of dung. That’s farce in a good humour, that is. It silvered into my mind, I remember, that if only once I’d come down on something hard, something not farcical—

  Well. There was still time.

  “Talk to me, Wilf.”

  Yes. He could have that. He could start with the pile of dung and go on to the bank clerk. I wouldn’t mind, would even write it out myself, would go on telly and scandalize the box, if that was still possible. I found, to my surprise, that I could look back at the sturdy young man in a goodish suit, white shirt and school tie (a little too brilliant perhaps but all the simple colour combinations had been taken by top places)—yes, I could look back at him with an amused toleration even an affection. I remembered—

  “What is the joke, Wilf?”

  —the time Wilfred Barclay was caught donating tuppence to the bank in order to square his figures; and the row with the cashier, since giving the bank small change was, in the cashier’s view and in the manager’s view and the bank’s view and, for all I know, in the Bank of England’s view, ethically worse than taking small change away from it.

  The cashier was really passionate. He shoved my tuppence back at me.

  “No one, no one at all, leaves this building until the accounts balance to the last penny!”

  I was saved (or, as I would now say, my escape was delayed) by my rugger, which was approved of on every side. When I discovered Maupassant even rugger went. The end came. The end was a Scots bank inspector. I found myself quoting him to Rick.

  “Ye know, Mr Barclay, ye’ve geeven me an entirely niew view of feegures.”

  The manager expressed his regret that a wing three of such brilliance should be lost to the bank and the town.

  “But you see, Barclay, it’s a question of heart. Your heart’s not really with us, is it?”

  That was when I had a spell as a groom, then went some way towards the stage. I carried a spear at Elstree and spent a few months as a provincial reporter, mostly writing up any point-to-point in reach. There was the war. When I came back with a few pounds, Coldharbour wrote itself—I didn’t—Stein and Cowhorn published it, and hey presto.

  A biography of Wilfred Barclay. Well, why not? Was the idea any more farcical than the material it would contain?

  “And who is Lucinda?”

  I came to with a start. It was the ageing man’s failing of shortening the link between the words in his mind and the words on his tongue. Rick was regarding me intently. Of course—he’d been there, shot by an air gun, the whole scene as deeply engraven in his memory as in mine. I shook my head and gave him what I hoped was an inscrutable smile. A shadow passed over the professor’s face (as we say in our extravagant way) when he saw the shop was no longer open.

  Lucinda was more of a problem, more mixed, more nearly on the grey edge of the impermissible. So much of it, though, if not all of it, was her idea, not mine. When it came to sex, Lucinda was a genius. If she chose to write her memoirs! Dear God, Domine defende nos! A book for none but the gallant investigators of the human farmyard. She was such an inventor! Folks, what you have been looking for, take it home with you, a present for the wife, the kiddies, the dear old folks in whose toothless caverns marge will not melt—something new!

  It was the Jiffy camera—a sort of proto-Polaroid, I think. She had one before they were even on the market. She would, of course, she knew a man. Trust Lucinda! Even her car was a one-off job. But using the camera was her idea, and God knows why it was so exciting but it was and made you feel like the chap in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, above a mortal man impassioned far, practically bank clerk standard, in fact. She was ten years older than me, preserved carefully and very nearly the last relic of the BUF. But to strip off the rectangle of film, then together, naked or half-naked in bed, to watch the faint shadows, shapes hardly filled with colour, which way up, and she’d cry, “There I am!” or “There you are!” Of course, she wanted faces, her own mostly and mine sometimes, but rarely on the same pic, not possibly on the same pic.

  I know now that her compulsion to have her face photographed in such situations and only seconds later to see it again in full colour was a substitute for having it off at the crossroads and stopping the traffic; or like the empress who performed on stage with peas and a duck to roars, one must
suppose, of Byzantine applause. One day she remarked casually that we’d better wait for a bit as she thought she might have caught a dose of clap. I have never dodged so fast, even on the rugger field. After that—long after that—was the letter I’d torn up, together with photographs showing her and mostly anonymous bits of me, and thrown in the dustbin—fool!—only to have the resurrection man fish them out again. She kept the ones with my face on. Yet all that was before the days of Elizabeth—so why did memory of Lucinda in this most permissive age make me quiver so with unease?

  Margaret. That was the connection. Directly I remembered, I twinged inside. I had done my best to forget the whole business with Margaret and succeeded pretty well. Only Lucinda was a part of it. I’d asked her advice. I’d told her about the mad, obscene letters I’d written Margaret, the only woman I’d wanted and couldn’t have, the accusations, the curses on her marriage, oh impossible, vile—I must have been mad, literally mad. When I recovered I was desperate to get the letters back—mad all over again.

  Lucinda was full of contempt.

  “It’s quite simple. The easiest thing in the world. You find a bent solicitor, give him her address and a hundred pounds. Go back after a month and he’ll hand you your letters in a plain envelope. Nothing said. It’s done every day. All finished, my dear little man. What a little man it is, den! God. I ought to charge you thousands for those pics.”

  “It would be—illegal.”

  “Criminal,” she agreed cheerfully, “but that’s the solicitor’s affair. You’re making a packet out of the film aren’t you?”

  “A small packet.”

  “If a man with money can’t indulge himself with such services,” said Lucinda with an air of calm reason, “what’s money for?”

  “I don’t know a bent solicitor. Mine’s so unbent he’s rigid.”

  “There aren’t any unbent solicitors. Only some less bent than others.”

  Sitting opposite Rick Tucker, who now had snow and stars behind him, it came over me in a breathtaking swirl of astonishment. More than thirty years before I had indeed gone by long and devious ways to a bent solicitor. I had given him money. I had made myself an accessory after the act for nothing, for less than nothing. When, standing in my flat by the fire that was intended to consume my own disgusting and pitiable letters, I opened the manila envelope I stood dumb for whole minutes. The letters were tied up with pink ribbon. I surfaced then from what must have been months of drunken misconception. They weren’t my letters at all. They were her husband’s, turgid, inarticulate offerings from that stupid house agent; but she loved him and they were preserved like relics. Mine—in a skyhigh pride I had never dreamed that anyone could destroy my letters (mad, mad, mad) but she had done just that—charitably too, since she could have turned them over to the law—she had burnt the obscene things as they came. Or worse—had she kept them indeed? Were they now afloat in the world, the wrong world? If so, their disappearance together with the disappearance of her husband’s letters would be a clear lead, I was never free, should never be free from the surfacing of that possibility—

  “I hope to God he broke the place up.”

  Someone was looking at me—staring.

  “Wilf?”

  I pulled my eyes away from his, allowed them to track down, his nose, a little broad, the bridge slightly sunken, his long upper lip, the lower one dropped a fraction from it. His napkin came into view, patted his mouth, disappeared again. He was wearing a shirt with white and brown stripes, very broad. We’d have thought them so vulgar when I was his age.

  “Is anything wrong?”

  I burnt her husband’s letters, of course. I couldn’t even send them back.

  I lived in a state of dreadful sanity and apprehension. I took off for South America as if the police were already after me. The thing surfaced for years, disguised in nightmares or strange half-waking dreams, until it had become a faint far-off thing only to be recalled when, as now, my mind was forced to walk backwards.

  Odd to think that nothing would have happened without Lucinda. She was the sort of person who ends with hard drugs and charitable people saying she was her own worst enemy, hurting no one but herself. Little they knew or understood the adamantine chain that bound the lesser crime to the greater, led on to it step by step unless you turned and faced the fact instead of running from it. How wrong they would be about Lucinda! We are all members one of another. Ha et cetera.

  “Can’t I share the joke?”

  “I suppose it’s a joke. On a large scale. I’m drunk. Had too much brandy.”

  “Wilf, there’s a strain of, call it diffidence, in you that won’t allow you to see the interest in a biography—”

  Amused by the bank clerk, ruefully, jeeringly accepting the follies of Lucinda’s lover—(title for a romance in single syllables)—but the letters, Margaret, my crime—

  “Just a note—and of course at this moment in time hopefully we should do no more than agree the parameters—”

  Running. Always running, a wing three running in panic lest I should be grabbed by some enormous oaf from the scrum—

  “Just a note, Wilf, signed by you and empowering me, particularly in the event of your passing on, I am after all a generation younger—”

  Well. He was an enormous oaf from the scrum.

  “Rick. You do me the honour of including me among kings, presidents, multiple murderers, telly personalities—”

  He caught on in what for him was a flash.

  “Also Thomas Wolfe, Hemingway, Hawthorne and—” here his voice sank in a kind of awe, “White Melville!”

  “I’m not American. A defect, of course. However, Elizabeth used to say—”

  “Yes, Wilf? Go on!”

  Her nastiest thrust; because like all deeply wounding marital broadsides there was a truth in it that only she could know. She told me (sitting the other side of the scrubbed kitchen table, all very homey), she told me that given half a chance I would act the genius, the great man—

  That’s what you always wanted, Wilf—God, don’t I know it?—particularly before any pretty girl who’s fool enough to come near you and take you at your own valuation, the sacré monster outside the accepted rules, a national treasure, the point about you being words that the world would not willingly let die whereas what you write is—

  “Popular.”

  “It’s a common misconception, Wilf.”

  “That my work’s popular?”

  “Hell, no. I mean that what’s popular is—”

  “—inferior.”

  “I didn’t mean—I wanted her side of the story.”

  Her jeer had been the work of a scalpel. It was one of the many things that had kept me running, that made me shun that offer and that more and more made me hide myself away, because apart from other considerations it proved to—to whom? her? me?—that I sought no fame, struck no attitudes.

  “What did you mean by ‘her side of the story’?”

  “I understood, Wilf, sir. The need for freedom. Why even with Mary Lou, between you and me—”

  “Her side of the story.”

  “She was real nasty about some time you, like she said, ‘shot off’ to South America. She was having trouble with Emily. I forget which country in South America. When would that be?”

  It was strange. I was seeing a process. It was not an intellectual concept, it was felt as well as seen, feared as well as grasped. It was simple, trite. It was universal. It was just one thing coming out of another—oh, just that, no more—Margaret, the letters, Lucinda, my fright, my running and running, one thing after another—

  South America.

  What year indeed? What would he turn up, dull and indefatigable, treading through my past life with his huge feet, shoving his nose down to that old, cold trail? A really modern biography without the subject’s consent. Cheap printing in Singapore, ten million pulp copies from a backstreet factory in Macao. No control, sold over or under every counter. How they would laugh a
t Wilf Barclay, masturbating round South America in sheer fright of police and fear of women. Barclay got his fear of the clap from way down by his feet and Lucinda’s idea that a night on the town was for her to be had against the dockyard wall by a dockie and, if possible, by the dockie’s mate. And Barclay’s heroic encounter with a revolution—three days spent shivering in a cellar; and so driving in a panic towards safety! He would turn it up.

  Dead.

  How closely would they look? How worthy was I of being dug round? Worth it to Rick, evidently, who could find no one better, no one behind whom the pseudo-scholars were not queueing up in our dreadful explosion of reconstituted rubbish. He would have access to more mechanisms than Boswell, not just paper, not just tapes, videos, discs, crystals with their hideous, merciless memories, but others, sniffers, squinters, reconstitutors, mechanisms doubtless that listened in a room and heard echoes of every word, saw shadows of every image that were trapped on the walls, like Capstone Bowers’s gun.

  Dead.

  Of course. In South America, never mind where, even now there would be a record. That Indian—or perhaps not. It was so dark and I only had sidelights because of getting away and my determination was to say if necessary that he walked right across the road into my headlights—Was there any way in which they could find out that in panicky forgetfulness I had been driving along that dirt road as in England, on the left-hand side? They say if you stop, the other Indians will kill you. It was an occasion to be pushed back down and down and away and at last hardly believed in, not believed in, though never forgotten. It was near-enough jungle, and anyway it was an Indian, probably and quite possibly he wasn’t killed or even injured much, might have been an animal. Then I’d driven fast through a ford so that water had cascaded clean over the roof. Who could examine that river for bloodstains? Will all the waters, ha et cetera, and unlike her I didn’t really know anything. Nudged a shadow and the slight shock, the rutted road, the cry, a bird or something. If there was a record—such and such an Indian found, well, dead—I’d told no one, not even myself, only gone over it later, over and over—How could I have gone back after ploughing through the ford? Go back again? Put myself in the hands of some louts in uniform and all to explain that I might have, wasn’t sure—the language was the difficulty, of course. My Spanish wouldn’t be up to it. I’d end by accusing myself through sheer inability to cope with the subjunctive.