The Paper Men (17 page)

“Where are you, Wilf, where are you? Hold on! Don’t go!”

“I won’t.”

“But you’ve done it so often and then just hung up!”

“Don’t be wet!”

“Where are you then?”

“Let’s just say I’m on a motor road.”

“Yurp or the States?”

“A motor road. Now listen, Rick old friend. I want to see you.”

“Well, surely, surely! God! It is really you?”

“I’m going to meet you in a place we both know.”

“Any place, Wilf! My God!”

“That hotel in the Weisswald.”

Then there was a long, long silence. Even the girl at the till thought I’d finished and looked up. I wondered if I’d spoiled things.

“I’m waiting, Rick.”

“Well, I know, Wilf.”

I decided it was time to sprinkle a little bait.

“I’ve been thinking about the biography, Rick.”

“Oh my God, Wilf, it’s like being—like being saved by the bell. My God! He gave me seven years and—”

“I’ll be there Thursday. Get your Mr Halliday to buy you the ticket right now.

“Hell, the Weisswald isn’t far. I can make it without.”

“How’s it with Mary Lou, Rick?”

There was a pause. My mind’s eye saw his chin sink back. Not a good phoner, our Rick. His voice came over low and defensive.

“They have a beautiful relationship, Wilf.”

“Like us.”

There was a period of white sound. I carried on.

“I’ll be there on Thursday. Don’t turn up till Saturday. I want to live myself in. Acclimate.”

I hung up. I’m not like Rick, I find it easy to be firm on the phone—easier than face to face. It’s as if my faceless voice is a different person I can use the way some people use a solicitor to say their dirty work for them. So on I drove with the tight wire in my chest and on and on. I spent a night, I remember, in that colossal motel wherever it is, then over the mountains and far away to the dear old Weisswald. I didn’t seem to mind the rack railway so much this time, it was odd. I was welcomed to the hotel not by Herr Adolf Kaufmann whose recommendation is included somewhere in this opus but by his nephew, an entirely different Adolf Kaufmann, who having consulted the hotel filing system greeted me as an old friend and gave me the familiar suite with a bottle of Dôle already opened on the table. And they say that values are not what they were! It was odd to find the manager so much younger though. The fat woman had died and the décor of the bar was changed, that was all. It sent me to the bathroom mirror to look at myself and, my God, I saw myself for the first time in years and years. If you don’t change your hairstyle because it’s mostly fallen out and you don’t shave, you’ve no cause to go chasing yourself in a mirror. Yes, time had done some engraving over most of what was visible and I reminded myself to go back to washing regularly. I made a clever deduction from this and had a shower at once. My bag didn’t seem to have any underclothes in it so I sent out for some which arrived promptly.

I forgot to say that there was a photograph hanging in the bar. I looked at it idly enough at first. It was the sort of photograph you see in the cheaper glossies, Commander W. F. “Gutsy” Hunkelberry-Fawcett sitting this one out with a young friend at Fartmouth Hunt Ball—

Then I saw that the waiter was the manager’s uncle, old Kaufmann deceased. This led me to a consideration of the bearded oaf sitting at the table and grinning clownishly across it at the wench on the other side. Yes of course, our sins shall find us out, there’s One Above with a note book and a camera and he doesn’t allow us to pose but simply snatches the pic at his own sweet will and at our disadvantage. It was Wilfred Barclay all right, famous Wilf, who thus conferred such distinction on the bar that they hung him there—taken at a moment when sitting down he couldn’t fall down drunk; taken by his old chum, meaty Rick L. Tucker, the hairy Ainu, the strong man with his warmth and his deodorant and his bulging flies—why was there no photograph of
them
? They would do credit to any establishment. The flies, I mean.

And the girl. Yes, the girl. That’s the thing about a flash. It blasts the life and colour out of a face, however delicate, so that this was not so much the Mary Lou who had adored her big strong man and tried as far as she could to complete the magic circle—oh no! This was the doll, the fashion model, the plastic imitation of a girl, white-faced, blackhaired, the cloud of it frozen, the gentleness gone, destroyed. And yet they tell you that a camera does not tell the truth! There we were, Wilf the clown, still libidinous half a generation after he should have known better; and the girl, her lipstick black as her hair, her dumb, flat face an exact expression of that mind as interesting as a piece of string! I shut my eyes, unable to go on looking at the thing.

Even so, the oaf in the photograph was not as repellent as the man I had examined in my mirror.
That
would have made a photograph and a half! And Mary Lou, what had the years of failed marriage, the years of Halliday, done to her? Rick ought to take a photograph of us all over again, I thought, before and after, but of course it was like Lucinda, there are circumstances where you can’t get the two faces you want on to the same pic, can’t possibly get them there. So I went back, put on a change of underwear, confirmed that I couldn’t buy a suit off the hook in Weisswald, wrenched open the french windows in “my” sitting-room, glanced at the Spurli, took a deep breath, strode across the balcony, seized the rail with both hands, bent over and looked down.

It was what commonly passes as hell for about five seconds. Then it was nothing but a quantity of space with a smash at the bottom, which was even a bit comforting. So I informed myself.

“You’ve come of age.”

And, we’ll agree, about time! I went back into the sitting-room, closing the french windows behind me. The table in the centre was still polished as if the ghost of the fat woman had been at work but probably it was only another fat woman. The only paper on it was a menu, lying beside the open bottle of Dôle. I looked at the bottle warily. It was going to be no good Rick finding me knocked out by booze and having the shakes. If I was going to be master, I reasoned, I had to muster every bit of firmness I could find in me. I out-stared the bottle—not as easy as you might think—then went looking for warm clothing. The manager fixed me up with a sweater and an anorak that had been left by visitors. It’s astonishing what the kind of drunken louts who live for
après
ski
will leave behind them. My sweater had
TRY
ME
knitted into the front, like Rick’s
OLE
ASH
CAN
. I set off with great care (remembering the way you have to acclimate) to walk the time away before I could reasonably allow myself a drink. Drink
does
slacken the steel string a bit but, as I’ve said or as you may have inferred, invariably leads to problems. It’s no good relying on experience. Problems get worse with age, not better. If only I had a young head on old shoulders, ha et cetera. I went up along a chilly path from which the snow had only lately receded. It was the one which we had walked together years before and down which Rick had carried me. I should not have recognized it with snow lying all about except for the direction. Most of the scene I had never even glimpsed before because of the fog; but now everything was clear, as outer space. But it’s true the old infirmity which had been called the need to acclimate came over me. I went on slower and slower and stopped. I didn’t look about me much but sat down on a convenient outcrop or jut of rock and waited for my heart and breath to get a bit easier. I found myself listening to the sound of water. It had only one voice, and this was the light, babbling one. I opened my eyes and when I looked down, believe it or not, I recognized the rock I was sitting on and there in front of me was the rail. Come to that, there was the stream. It was different of course, much broader for one thing and coming out of a snow bank from a cave of ice. This cave more or less squeezed the water flat, which was why it only had that top voice.

I looked round. My jaw must have fallen right down to my chest. I couldn’t be mistaken. There, flooded, were those half trunks that had been made into conduits and sunk in the path. The stone was clinching evidence. It was too big to be moved without explosives or gangs and machines. It stuck out of the mountainside and had done so for geological time, I was certain. And yes, of course, the last time we had been there I had heard cowbells in the fog without having the wit to see what it meant. Old Quixote on the wooden horse.

Who was it, I thought, had set about designing something theologically witty? In about ten seconds I was near enough blind with humiliation and rage—not at once rage with Rick; for this after all had been no more than one of those ordained moments of low comedy like going over a horse’s head into shit, or Lucinda fished out of the dustbin. Once every ten years or so the life of the natural clown met with a proper, natural circus act. Now this one, perhaps the best of the lot, was added—hanging on a cliff, suspended in the fog, saved from destruction by my biographer—retrieved, useful, to disremember with burning cheeks at hours of sleeplessness, nature’s comic, but Rick the proximate agent, Rick the accessible, Rick the object, Rick the Prick— There, just under where I’d hung in fog, a meadow stretching away, with cows in it. Tinkle, clonk.

I found I was standing up and trembling with my fists clenched. I turned away and began to walk carefully towards the hotel—carefully because I did not want anything nasty to happen to my old heart at this altitude, I needed to live until Rick got there and I had to do breathing exercises to get some control back, half-blind with fury as I was. My ears were singing and my heart beating somewhere up by the base of my throat. I don’t remember the path back or opening doors. I remember looking at the bottle of Dôle and deciding to leave it alone. I told the new fat young woman, who would serve behind the bar for a generation or two then die, that I was going to acclimate, yeah, that was how I said it, the interview with Rick was going to be done at strength ten. I told her that bit. I don’t think she understood anything. I hung a “do not disturb” notice on the door, took about a handful of pills and knocked myself out, if anything a little too far, and slept from Thursday afternoon until midday Friday. Then I woke. And after a light lunch consisting of the Dôle I thought I could probably risk, I tried myself out on the path again and really I had acclimated a bit for I reached the stone in little or no time and sat there, feeding my rage like you might poke bits of wood into a fire. I don’t know how long that took. Then I kind of tamped it down and went back to the hotel. I walked backwards and forwards in my sitting-room, waiting for Rick to come. I’d forgotten that Friday wasn’t Saturday and I had to consult my journal to make sure, but the journal itself seemed confused so I had some more pills and knocked myself out again.

Saturday morning wasn’t so good. No, let us have less of this British reticence. Saturday morning was bloody awful. I was so strung up with the wire I thought anyone else in the place—there were three other people staying there but I was able to ignore them—would be able to hear me coming. I remember though, asking the nephew of the manager—well, he
was
the manager—to let me use his typewriter, as you can’t buy them in the Weisswald. I typed a carefully considered document. I put this in the middle of my polished table. It lay on the polish very pleasantly and watching it really made the time pass so I sat there, my back to the french windows, my sunglasses hiding the top of my face and I took an occasional swig from the new bottle of Dôle but not too much, as I needed a degree of sobriety.

The knock on the door came some time in the afternoon. It was not a firm knock. I had deliberately left the door on the latch because I did not wish to be seen to do him a courtesy.

‘“Come in.”

Yes, it was Rick, not remembered but there at the time. He came in cautiously, head right up by the top of the door, body still as big but somehow different in shape. Perhaps his chest had slipped a fraction. He stood just inside the door, blinking against the light. Then he looked round the room very carefully as if he suspected an ambush. He peered across the table at me.

“It really is you, Wilf?”

“Yeah.”

His mouth widened, showing a lot of American teeth.

“I trust you’ve had time to acclimatize, Wilfred—sir?”

“Yeah.”

He saw the paper. My goodness me, his eyes widened almost as much as his mouth. You could have thought he had no eyelids except—ah, the storyteller’s power of observation!—the eyelashes stuck out all round them. A handsome hunk, our Rick.

“In fact, Wilf, I can see your signature!”

“Yeah.”

His eyes, unable to widen any further, bulged a bit. I nodded at him.

“Take a good look, son. We’ll butt heads. I’m not going to avoid you, like in Navona.”

His eyes went back in. I could see that he deepened the corrugations in what was visible of his forehead. Have I told you about his hair? No. Well, Professor R. L. Tucker had abandoned the half-length and gone afro. I mean it. His hair was frizzed and much lighter than erstwhile; and now I saw other things that only a trained observer would notice like for example the clothes he was wearing. His white trousers were flared at the bottom and the gores were sequinned. I’d been so enjoying his eyes that I had neglected all else and now I saw that his shirt, or vest as we say roundabout thirty west, had a huge chunk carved out of it clear down to where his navel would have been in view if that thatch, coppice, undergrowth of Tuckerish hair hadn’t hidden it. Well, if you have hair on your chest, why not say so? As it were. But somehow the high fashion of his gear put me right back to being British from the mid-Atlantic ridge I’d been affecting.

“Won’t you sit down, professor?”

He sank into the chair opposite and I heard it creak.

“How was Rome, professor?”