The Paper Men (12 page)

“More.”

He did look a bit startled then and the smile went stiff. All the same he took the cup and saucer and went away. I sat with my painful arms round my knees. It had started down in Schwillen when—of all things!—I had felt lonely and had not been enjoying it—
I
, Wilf Barclay, a specialist in loneliness if ever there was one! I chewed over the steps that had put me in this position of all that I had not wanted to find myself in. The door of the bedroom was open and I could see beyond it, in the sitting-room, how Rick’s
billet
-
doux
lay on the table still, unsigned, unmoved. My shakes and memories began to be consumed by another feeling that at least restored some personality to me. It was a tide of sheer fury. When Rick came back with another steaming cup I flung over on the pillow and would not look at him. I muttered my accusation.

“It seems I owe you my life.”

Fury, hatred and fear. Somewhere in my paroxysm I was so fierce with him that he took himself off and I was there in my shirt and pants, shaking like a machine with a part missing. First his wife, then when that ploy failed, my life, my own damned, sweet, secret possession, handed back to me, but now, as I saw, on conditions like the surrender of a city. Also there was something else to add—a physical detestation of his strength and warmth and stink!

It was the manager who brought me dope from the doctor and I sank into a sleep beyond dreams, still making plans, such as tempting them both to a cliff. There’s no doubt about it. Shock had unbalanced my mechanism. At one point I had Tucker writing my biography but with such strict supervision it included for the world’s inspection an account of how he had attempted the virtue of St Wilfred with the offer of his beautiful wife; an offer rejected with such gentle tact and kindness that he (Assistant Professor Rick L. Tucker) flung himself on his knees and received such a gigantic hack in his privates from one of those boots that were no good for rough country he immediately entered a monastery, leaving his beautiful wife to—

Yes, I was unbalanced, there’s no doubt about it. But the dope was good and I wish I knew what it was.

I woke with aching shoulders and a blank mind. I looked at my watch and it took me some time to work out that today was in fact tomorrow. My mouth tasted as if it were lined with nasty metal. I washed it with cold water for a long time. My legs were inclined to give way. With the memory of the day before there came very little fury or hatred. All that came of those weird sisters was fear, not to say panic. As if recovery from the dope implied that I was on my own and open now for business, I saw the dreadful results of giving Rick any permission whatever—that determined, sedulous search into a past raw with unforgiving memories! That girl impossible for me, such a danger, such a grief!

The paper was still there, lying on a newly dusted and polished table. Had the fat, grey-haired woman dusted round it, or had she lifted it carefully, dusted, polished, then replaced it with the precision of a referee putting back a snooker ball? There the paper was.

It
seems
I
owe
you
my
life.

That brought me to, like the school bell. I owed him my life, nothing less. It was like every boy’s story that ever was.

“I owe you my life, old man.”

“That’s all right, old fellow. It was nothing.”

“Your arm’s broken, old man.”

“It’s not my right arm, old fellow.”

It was sheer, low comedy all over again.

Well, there the paper was. I turned my attention away from it and into myself. Wilfred Barclay didn’t fit into any boy’s adventure story, only into a parody of one: and even then not as the hero or the hero’s little chum with whom junior could empathize, but perhaps as a small-time crook put in to demonstrate that crime does not pay or that virtue does. He would get laid out with a straight left. Wilfred Barclay would reel away, holding his jaw and vowing filthy revenge. He would never be fool enough to sign that paper. He would have taken the wife and scarpered.

Scarper!

Never mind the wife. There are wives everywhere. Anyway, had I deceived myself? Had she ever been offered to St Wilfred? Careful! Was I mad? Was Rick mad? There was an intensity at times about his stare, white showing all round the pupils, as if he were about to charge dangerously. A psychiatrist would find him interesting. To hell with a careful examination of him. His hair—he was
disgusting.
It would be less risky to keep tabs on a rhinoceros. This was a mad house and Wilfred Barclay, St Wilfred, no longer a character in a boy’s book, would do a bit of levitation, gravitation. He would not bow out, he would simply disappear, vanish down the rack railway, hey presto!

As soon as I had decided that, my heart became high and giggly. I had not known till then what a strain sheer companionship had been. I got hold of the manager and found that the Tuckers had gone walking. I explained myself. After the shock I needed solitude. Though I had booked in for a week, I must go now. (I promised him compensation—a full meed of praise for him and the hotel in a book! I do, in fact, some years after, I forget how many, discharge that debt. The hotel Felsenblick, Weisswald, Switzerland, is comfortable, the view superb, the drop ghastly. You will find Major Adolf Kaufmann, a very retired general by now, unobtrusive and silent.) The fat woman packed for me and carried my bags to the rack railway, where I caught the three o’clock descent. So I escaped, leaving behind me as forwarding address The Hotel, Akureyri, Iceland. Three hours after I was in a plane bound for Florence and another hire car. By early evening I was driving through the Apennines on my national home, an autostrada. I was calm, watching the motionless landscape stream past. I was surrounded by metal and I was my own master. That night I spent in a sleazy hotel a biscuit toss from La Rotonda. I remember the joy and freedom with which I flung up my window, gazed out on the magnificent shadow and invented quite unfair bits of dialogue for Mr and Mrs Rick.

“There’s a great hole in the roof, hon.”

“That’s bomb damage, I guess, hon.”

I was myself again. I slept soundly.

Next morning I was not really worried again but a bit preoccupied. After all, La Rotonda is a place like Piccadilly or Time Square where, they say, you’ll meet anybody if you wait long enough. It’s an oblique way of saying that a lot of people go there. Once Rick and Mary Lou had lost the scent—even Rick had more wit than to go to Iceland—Rome was likely. Go thou to Rome! He would do it. Had he not said Mary Lou simply had to see Rome and Dublin? A flash of the glamour made me catch my breath. There was no guarantee that she had not yet
done
Rome or that, having done it, she would not want to do it again. I was in Navona and sitting at another round metal table or the same metal table when my heart, as they say, turned over. No. I didn’t see Mary Lou, I saw Rick. I saw Rick in the same way I used
very
nearly
to
see
Elizabeth in the old days when I still cared enough. That is to say, I did not
see
Rick precisely. But I came to with a jump that would have spilt the coffee if I had not just drunk it.

“Christ!”

It was entirely possible. They could have left straight after their walk, then flown direct from Zurich to Rome in the evening or overnight or that very morning. I would have been safer on my motor road. I wasn’t seeing. I was remembering with an etched precision. Only this wasn’t a memory swimming up, as it were, from the depths. It was a kind of time slip or time shift, or like the “click” with which you can substitute one slide for another, then click back to the first one. It was a moment at which I had to pause and refuse to credit Rick with more than method and determination. He was not a ghost, worse luck. He was not a saint with powers of transportation and bilocation. He had been there in the Piazza Navona! He had just inspected the fountain, probably identifying the mythologized rivers. He had been turning away, still putting his tiny camera to rights under the cuff of his sweater on the right arm. I had not seen the front of that sweater with
OLE ASHCAN
knitted into the chest but I had seen the very beginnings of the O. What was more, less than forty-eight hours before, my nose had been resting in the disgusting heat of the sweater at the back of his neck when he carried me down through the alp from that damned mountain path. I knew it well enough and his huge shoes and his hair, discreetly long as befits a serious academic. He had gone away, vanished down a street on the other side from the café. If I had not been in a dream at the completeness of my escape from involvement, I would have started up and run before he vanished. Or I could have tracked him to his hotel, where the golden cloud of glamour was still lying in, not being physical.

I jumped up, shoved some money on the little table and hurried away, keeping a weather eye round most points of the compass, which enabled me to see the sinister speed with which a passing dropout removed my money from the table before the waiter could reach it. I kept assuring myself that I had not been mistaken—could not be mistaken. Oh yes, I remembered the line of Rick’s shoulder, his arm, his trousers made from the latest spinoff and those thick-soled imperial hoofers with which tourists keep a distance between themselves and the land they tread on. Yes. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied with calm pleasure in a sense of anonymity, I might even have seen him face to face. At this point I realized that my sense of security could not have influenced Rick. He would have seen me whether I had seen him or not. Or had I developed the chameleon’s power? Had I looked like an iron chair or a stretch of stone wall?

The sunglasses! That was why the morning sun was now trying my eyes! I had picked them up next door to the hotel when I strolled over. They had hidden all of my face except for my scraggy beard, and beards in Rome were thick as buttercups in a field. I must have been unrecognizable as a professional gentleman gathering evidence for divorce or espionage or shoplifting; and now, damn it, doubtless startled by remembering Rick, I remembered leaving them on the usual iron table.
The
round metal table. I thought for a moment that it would be too dangerous to return to Navona and get my spectacles back; but then I sneaked up on the square carefully, as a professional gent, and peered round the corner. Yes, my sunglasses were gone. There had been a raid by another dropout.

I felt very confused and by midday I had left the hotel (forwarding address: The Confederate Hotel, Roanoke, VA) and was driving in a direction which I thought would fox any pursuer. I drove east, reckoning that sideroads were the thing, so soon after the
annulare
I got on to them.

But if it wasn’t coincidence, how on earth could Rick have found out? If he were going on the evidence, he would now be on his way to Iceland. Certainly I had told no one. Customs had been indifferent, a young man who opened the passport and shut it again without looking—or had that been deliberate, to lull me into a
sense
of his indifference?

It was then that I slowed up and pulled into an open space at an elbow of road. I parked and switched off the engine. I said, Wilfred Barclay, you are still in shock. You should have waited a couple of days. Mary Lou had to see Rome and Dublin. They would see Rome, regretting perhaps that poor old Wilf had disappeared so inexplicably, but then it’s not just being a Brit, it’s being a writer. Put the two together, Mary Lou, and you just don’t know
what
they’ll do, rushing off. Why, look at Shelley and Noël Coward. No, hon, not together, separately. Hon, I know you majored in Eng. Lit., you were my favourite pupil, natch, oh I get it, it’s like poor Wilf would say, you’re tugging my leg. No, he’d say, you’re approaching my lower limbs with a view to exerting some traction. Ha Ha. Ha Ha Ha Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha. But what’s Mr Halliday going to say? From that point of view it’s real unkind of Wilf. After all, we only wanted to know about his past, particularly the juicy bits, and the occasional crime, let alone the infinite number of times he’s made a private clown of himself, what makes him tick in fact. He’s no right to hide any of that, hon. Why shouldn’t we make a meal of him?

What would
she
say? Somehow I didn’t seem able to invent speeches for the glamour. But Rick was easy.

Hon, I ought to say I never meant you any harm. The altitude really did get to me. Affected my judgement, I guess. But I knew you’d be safe, he’d turn you down. He’s one of
them,
hon. Got a hang-up. My guess, you could call it an insight, hon, is that he’s never had anything to do with women at all. An invert. After all, hon, his mother brought him up and he was educated at a British private school and you know what that means. Now, hon, it’s time you got out of bed, we got to do St Peter’s before one, hon.

I was amused by my poor invention and felt better. I told myself I was making heavy weather of the whole thing. After Rome they would go to Dublin and walk the stations of poor old Bloom.

The billionaire, Halliday. Mary Lou admired him evidently, in her innocence. Wealth is a secondary sexual characteristic, like talent, like genius. I wondered for a while if I should drive back to Rome and look up Mr Halliday in the appropriate reference book but decided against it.

So at last I was able to trundle on, almost fancy-free and secure. There is one thing, though, that I noticed about myself. It was an indulgence. I feared to be the object of a biography. At the same time I was—no matter how hard I tried not to be—I was flattered by the possibility. Every time my mind flinched from some raw wound of my past it took refuge in a contemplation of my present distinction. Then, paring that same distinction down and down, reminding myself of this and that—of this writer and that writer—in the end my mind would be left with a faint feeling of the valuable, the unusual and the august. I caught myself gazing through new dark glasses and under my panama at groups of English tourists and telling myself,
if
they
only
knew!
So I trundled on, or sat at my round white table and drank. It came to me—this was in a hotel near Aquila which was an escape place in the hot weather for Italians—it came to me that such a man could
show
Halliday and Rick Tucker—such a man was, in fact bigger than he had thought—thank you, Professor Tucker! Hold this one! I remember sitting and, as they used to say, discussing a very tolerable bottle of wine and watching the sun set in the general direction of Rome, and deciding that I was at peace because I knew precisely the book I was going to write. It would extend the Barclay range. It would deal with simple, eternal things, youth and innocence, purity and love. I bought a typewriter at once. The place was quiet. No one spoke to me except in the ways of most minimal courtesy. Liking sex but being incapable of love, indeed! Calmly, perhaps even augustly, I composed my book.