The Paperchase (10 page)

TIME PASSED SLOWLY
on Ionia. Without the incident of office life and the distractions of other people, the days seemed empty. I didn’t exactly miss my job, but I realised that it had been my strongest connection to the world. Even when I had hated it, it had given me a feeling of being involved in a flux of events – wars, peace talks, elections, natural disasters – that I took to be the life of the planet. Following them, if only remotely, from the newsroom had been a way of navigating through time: it gave a form to something that was otherwise infinite and blank. For a while in Ionia I felt as though I’d fallen off the map.

I made myself as busy as I could. I set myself the task of painting a series of views from the widow’s walk – one in each direction – and I bought paints at an art supply shop in
Westwich as soon as I could get the car to start. My first attempts were poor but I told myself not to worry; the gift shops on Ionia were full of bad local art. And the weather was good for seven days straight from the moment I set up the easel. I wore long sleeves and a sun hat to protect myself and took a pitcher of iced tea up to the roof. As I painted each morning, I could hear the ice cubes cracking in the jug, and the smell of the acrylic paint grew more intense as it warmed up in the sunshine.

Bit by bit, I began to establish a routine that made me feel less adrift. I bought a shortwave radio to keep in touch with the world beyond the island. I thought of my colleagues in the television newsroom hustling to produce the bulletins. For a while I wrote down the headlines in a notebook, as a way of marking off the passing days. But it made me feel like a
prisoner
scratching lines on the walls of a cell, so I stopped.

The wind always changed direction in the midafternoon and then picked up, making the wood of my eyrie creak. That was my signal to go downstairs, have a martini and cook myself spaghetti on the two electric rings I’d bought from the
hardware
store. Each evening, I read in Patrick’s library until my eyes began to close over the pages. I found that I slept better and I dreamed more – or remembered more of my dreams, anyway, which seemed healthy.

I spent almost two days searching the house for something that would explain the fragment of writing I had read on the plane. There was nothing, not a trace, although in a filing
cabinet
in the basement I found manuscripts of Patrick’s novels along with carbon copies of correspondence.

In one folder I found a letter on Harvard stationery inviting a priest – let’s call him Father Xavier – to give a talk to the Harvard Theological Society. The letter was fulsome; it praised the priest’s work, his publications. It even hinted that he would be paid generously for the lecture. Father Xavier’s response was not included, but from the next letter it was obvious that he had taken the bait. Patrick’s second letter was
a derisive attack, written on the same stationery, in which he called the priest an ‘intellectual stick figure’. ‘When we need a jug-eared ass-kisser to address the society, rest assured you will be our first port of call.’

There were some unspeakable letters to my father; a crazy letter to Nancy Reagan in the White House in which Patrick called her ‘a one-titted witch’. In another letter – apparently in response to a request for an interview from a prospective
biographer
– Patrick bragged about having a wealthy patron to support him in a libel action and stopped just short of an
outright
threat to break the recipient’s fingers.

Some of them were funny, but too often you felt that Patrick’s attack was out of control. It was shocking to feel the force of his hatred, even second-hand. What made them so potent was that the venom was allied with an acute sensitivity to people’s weaknesses. He knew where to stick the knife and how to twist it. Even when his attacks went wide of the mark, there was something so concentrated, so spectacularly ruthless in his efforts to offend, that the effect was still unsettling. Everything was thrown at the attackee: crimes, sins,
birthmarks
, poor grades, big ears, bad debts, flat feet, buck teeth, homely relatives. You sensed Patrick thought somehow that he was always on the side of the angels; somehow, he was the one victimised and misunderstood and therefore justified in
whatever
he flung back at his tormentors. I couldn’t face reading more of them. They were an unworthy epitaph: his brilliance, his humour, his erudition, his empathy – all subjugated to the desire to wound. And I knew – because I had known him – that they weren’t the whole story.

Patrick and I had been working in his garden once. An apple tree had fallen down in a storm. Its silvery trunk was blistered with lichen the colour of oxidised copper – a very soft green. We dragged the sawn-off branches up the garden. ‘Jeez, you’re a strong sonofabitch,’ he said. This made me brim with pride – particularly as I was thirteen and undersized for my age, with arms and legs like pipe cleaners.

When we were finished we picked cherry tomatoes from the small vegetable garden on the lawn. They had a very herby and intense flavour. We sat outside the summer kitchen eating them from a colander. ‘Do you ever give the finger to God?’ he asked me.

‘Not really,’ I said, wondering what my father would make of this blasphemy.

‘You don’t ever want to throw up the window, flip Him the finger and say, “Eat me!”?’

I shook my head. He looked mildly surprised as he popped a handful of tomatoes into his mouth.

Another time we went rowing together off Pilgrim Point. We had rowed out about a mile and half on to the black water of the open ocean when the current seemed to alter. It began in one corner of the sea in front of us – a little patch of waves dancing up from the flat water – then it spread, until it was all around us.

‘Know what I think, Skipper?’ said Patrick, as a wave slopped in over the side of the boat.

‘That we should get out of here?’ I said.

The rowboat had two sets of oars and we pulled like madmen for the safer waters of the point. Patrick explained that the trick was to keep the waves abaft us and not to take them beam on, or we would capsize. Even at that moment, when we were both fearing for our lives, I liked the sound of those unfamiliar words: ‘abaft’, ‘beam on’, ‘capsize’.

When we got to shore, Patrick made me promise not to tell my father what had happened. I was a little proud of myself: there was a bond between us – first of shared fear, and now a secret.

I didn’t know which was stranger: to be remembering so much about Patrick, or to have forgotten so much in the first place. My uncle had been indispensable – whatever his faults, his love and curiosity had softened some of the austerity of my childhood. He was a spokesman for the importance of small things, enthusiasms, hobbies, games, puzzles, jokes, words,
hot fudge, cream cakes, fried dough – all helpful talismans in a cold and draughty world that seemed to belong on the whole to people like my father.

I wasn’t the only person who felt like this – it’s why people over and over again were prepared to forgive him when he acted out of a child’s untempered indignation and wrote them one of those letters, or told them to their face that they were a pain in the ass, or berated them for some peccadillo.

I often dreamed about Patrick – not surprising when you think that the whole house vibrated with his presence. I
encountered
it everywhere. It was apparent in the look of the house, the possessions with all their associations – any visitor would have noticed that. But living there gave me a more pervasive sense of him. Over time, his preoccupations became my preoccupations: I fretted over the low water pressure in the shower; I worried about cutting the grass; I kept milk and drinks cold in a
box-cooler
that Patrick had left under the kitchen table. The house bore the impress of Patrick’s personality so strongly that by
fitting
myself into it, I began to resemble him.

I didn’t notice it at first; the feeling stole up on me. Then one afternoon I was queuing in the post office to send some letters back to London and I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror above the counter. Because it was a nuisance to drive into the town to do laundry I had got in the habit of
supplementing
my clothes with Patrick’s – I borrowed a shirt or two, a pea jacket to wear on cool evenings, an old pair of trousers for wearing when I painted or cut the grass. I was shocked by the reflection partly because it was out of step with the image I had of myself: my hair had grown and was unkempt from my fingering it at the easel; I was unshaven and my clothes looked ragged. But I was also shocked that I looked so much like Patrick. And I thought I detected a watchfulness behind the postmistress’s breezy efficiency.

That afternoon I drove up to the running track behind the high school. It wasn’t just morbid curiosity. I wanted a clue. Perhaps the scene of his death would provide it.

Heat haze shimmered above the edges of the running track so that it looked as though it were cooking on an enormous griddle. The school’s sports grounds had been carved out of a scrubby pine forest that was making halfhearted efforts to regain territory. Long strands of creeper reached almost to the one-hundred-metre start line – the straight bit of track that was joined on to the circuit like the tail of the letter Q. Poison ivy was growing thickly among the grass, some of it green, some of it brazen or bright red. Come September it would all be chased back to the woods, but for now it was permitted a temporary reconquest.

The main building of the high school wasn’t old – a
geometrical
castle of pink bricks – but the extremes of temperature had weathered the track. On summer evenings it was a
popular
place to run, but it was relatively early and though I could hear the hollow thwack of tennis balls from the court on the other side of the softball pitch, the running track was empty.

Standing at the chain-link fence for balance, I stretched my calf muscles, then set off towards the start line and jogged slowly round. A catbird squawked in the pines around the track. I tried to imagine myself into Patrick’s pristine
size-twelve
running shoes.

Spring is a dangerous season for old men – you don’t have to be a poet to figure that out. Something in their blood starts bubbling at the approach of summer. It’s the time of year, after all, when life calls on the living to get up and at it. And who wants to admit he’s past the age when life called to him and meant it? Do anything but face that truth.

Mad with spring breezes, my Uncle Patrick had taken up jogging at the age of sixty-three.

Sixty-three. That’s a number to conjure with. Patrick always said that people’s numerical imaginations were very jaded. Between two and ninety-nine there’s not much to hold their attention. What he called zero and I call nought is mystical, inviolate, virginity. Number one is golden, primacy – the American obsession: One hundred is a century, tantalizingly
outside the span of human life.
The
days
of
our
life
are
three
score
and
ten.

Jogging lends itself to mathematical speculation. There’s the beat of your shoes on the asphalt, measuring out four hundred metres with each lap. Each one is a quarter of a mile. Each time you pass the start, it’s a lap gone. From here, it’s only a small sideways step from maths to metaphysics: every birthday is a year gone. Every summer gone means another winter. And your whole life goes, seven years at a time, as invisibly and relentlessly as the hour hand. Seven, fourteen, twenty-one, twenty-eight, thirty-five, and so on: the scheduled climacterics, the times allotted by nature for retrospection and despair. Patrick was at sixty-three – the ninth lap of ten; thirty-five, which I was at the time, is the fifth.

I suppose that, pounding round the shimmering asphalt, Patrick was pursuing his youth. His heart was in the chase, but not up to it. He must have been miles away: remembering the summers he spent as a lifeguard along the North Shore; or the gleaming pompadour that he whipped up with Vitalis for the high-school prom; or some other memory that was too
important
to share with anyone, something that he kept back for himself as a bulwark against despair. A kiss, perhaps; or a poem; something he told no one. I wondered what he
remembered
as his congested heart gave out on the back straight; I wondered if it was an answer to the question that was
bothering
me:
Who
was
Patrick
March?

P
ATRICK MARCH WAS
A
WRITER
but that’s not the first thing that I remember about him. The first thing that I remember about Patrick’s life is that he wet the bed as a child. I say ‘
remember
’, but this fact surfaces without any effort on my part. At boarding school, I suffered from enuresis too – an improbably tidy term for a constellation of humiliation, discomfort, rubber sheets and special talks with the housemaster. You can
imagine
how understanding thirteen-year-old boys are about someone who can’t help pissing in his own bed. And I grew up in more enlightened times than Patrick. His own uncle, a priest – who like other Catholic priests was considered an authority on children and marriage on account of having no personal experience of either – was delegated to talk to him about it. ‘You’re killing your mother!’ was, according to Judith,
his memorable first approach. Then: ‘When you’re married, are you going to piss on your wife?’

Patrick’s bedwetting, like mine, cleared up on its own, but it was always looked on as something shameful. Tricia, the niece who inherited the collected Frederick Rolfe, once tried to humiliate him by alluding to it. The three of us were standing on the deck of my father’s rented house in Provincetown. Tricia was in her early teens, and a broth of hormones,
orthodontic
engineering, big hair and pullulating skin. Patrick had been teasing her about her boyfriends.

‘I know something about
you
,’
she said.

‘What? Come on, what?’ Patrick dared her, his voice rising an octave on the final question.

‘I could say something about you, but I’m not gonna.’

‘Come on.’

She narrowed her eyes and hissed at him: ‘Wed-betting!’

Wed-betting.
Her unintentional spoonerism dissipated the tension and gave Patrick a let-out.

‘I’ve never bet on a wed in my life,’ he said.

As the oldest son, Patrick had borne the weight of his family’s expectations. He had carried this burden invisibly – in high school he was handsome, popular, athletic and outgoing. Then, at seventeen, he went to a Franciscan seminary to train for the priesthood – a choice that seemed less of a non sequitur in those days. Patrick used to describe arriving on the first day and choosing a box of cornflakes from a variety pack for his supper. It stuck in my mind because it seemed like the last thing in the world trainee priests would eat. What’s more, there were no bowls. The seminarians would lay the cartons flat, tear off the front panel, pour the milk in and eat the cereal straight out of the box.

He left the seminary after two years, went to the state
university
at Amherst and then got a job teaching English in a missionary school in Western Samoa. He was happy there for a couple of years, but when the principal left, Patrick fell out
with his replacement and came home. He won a place at Harvard Law School in the same year as my father, but left after two semesters. The ‘J.D.’ after his name on the signpost was wishful thinking.

Aged twenty-five he seemed to be settling into a pattern of false starts. He had acquired a range of almost wholly useless abilities – basic conversational Latin from the seminary, good Samoan, a degree in English Literature – and a new prickliness about what he felt was his inability to live up to his potential. Meanwhile, my father was lapping him, winning plaudits from his professors and showing a single-mindedness that must have seemed like a reproach to Patrick.

My grandmother was so anxious about him that she agreed gladly when he proposed going to art school in New York. To a second-generation Italian American like her, it can only have seemed a slightly less criminal waste of money than dropping a suitcase of dollar bills into the Charles River.

Patrick drifted through art school. He took himself off the Fine Arts course after a couple of semesters and studied instead for a degree in commercial art – another name for graphic design, I think. Previous experience had stiffened his resolve to finish and he stuck it out to the end, but then had difficulty finding work. He toyed with the idea of a doctorate. ‘More education?’ was his mother’s incredulous reaction. My grandfather said nothing: it was his nature to be as stoic and uncommunicative as Plymouth Rock itself. By this time, my grandparents’ ambitions had devolved entirely on to my father. By the time Patrick finished art school, my father had been practising law in London for almost two years and his wife was expecting their second child.

Patrick spent a miserable summer working night shifts with a team of construction workers, building a tunnel to carry a road through downtown Boston. In the fall, he found a job teaching art at a private girls’ school in Rhode Island. He got paid enough to live on, had rooms on the campus and enough free time to paint and write.

He taught his lessons in a perfunctory way and saved his energy for the evenings when he would write in longhand at the kitchen table of his tiny one-room apartment. He used the same long yellow legal pads my father used for his work.

The first draft of
Peanut
Gatherers
was finished in less than three months. It’s a remarkable fact – all the more so when you consider that Patrick struggled to finish anything else for the rest of his career. He was borne along by alternating spells of fear and enthusiasm. He once compared writing to a walk that began as a gentle downhill stroll in sunshine and quickly became an uphill struggle against worsening weather and diminishing light. What kept him going, I think, was the fear of adding another failure to the train he felt he dragged along behind him.

It is a novel about an innocent abroad, drawing heavily from Patrick’s own experiences as a teacher in Western Samoa. He took advantage of the increasingly liberal sexual climate of the time to write frankly (and titillatingly) about the customs of the island and the adventures of its protagonist, Horace: the apparently innocent title is a punning allusion to a Samoan sexual custom.

Peanut
Gatherers
is a great book. It’s written in a breezy style that’s quite uncharacteristic of Patrick and is full of
mischievous
humour. There’s a funny section about two witch-doctors who conduct a necromantic mind duel from their respective huts over the ownership of a Boston Red Sox baseball cap. In my favourite episode, a missionary from Utah gets Horace to help him translate the Book of Mormon into Samoan. Horace sabotages the translation, filling it with
swear-words
and nonsensical idioms. There’s a brilliant set-piece where the missionary reads the translated book to a church full of incredulous locals. (‘My manly element is as kinked as a taro root. I allow eunuchs to pleasure my rectum with green bananas. May ringworm visit my mother’s descendants unto the fifth generation.’) His services become the most popular events on the island. At each one, members of the congregation
cry and wet themselves from laughter and the missionary thinks they’re being visited by the Holy Ghost.

The book was quickly accepted by a Boston publishing house. It didn’t sell particularly well, but by one of those twists of good fortune which had so far been absent from Patrick’s life story, the rights were bought outright by a Hollywood studio for a fairly considerable sum. Patrick was given a lot of money to write the screenplay, and then when he and the executives found themselves at loggerheads, he was given even more not to write it.

Peanut
Gatherers
opened in 1966 as one of the last
big-budget
Technicolor musicals just as old Hollywood was about to be swept by a new avant-garde. It bombed at the box office but was nominated for two technical Oscars – set design and make-up.

Patrick had long before dissociated himself from the movie. His experience of Hollywood soured him and brought out an ugly – and uncharacteristic – streak of anti-Semitism. One of his pet projects was a list he kept of important figures in the film business and their original, Jewish, surnames.

His subsequent books were either unreadable or
unpublishable
: a libellous
roman-à-clef
about Hollywood; a novel about Button Gwynett – one of the signatories to the Declaration of Independence; a stream-of-consciousness novel about a
left-handed
hero that would be written in mirror-writing.

With many of these ideas, it was almost as though he was avenging himself on the approachability of the novel that had brought him his first success. As he got older, and none of his books gained an audience, he found himself in the perplexing position of being haunted by his own ghost, the ghost of a
successful
young novelist.

He did write children’s stories and publish books of poetry privately. But what literary reputation he enjoyed was damaged by the whole scandal over
Amazon
Basin.

Amazon
Basin
was – even by Patrick’s standards – a strange book. It purported to be a straight account of a journey
through the Brazilian rain forest, but almost as soon as it was published a few careful readers had written to point out that the whole middle section had been lifted, unchanged, from a 1920s travelogue called
I
Married
a
Headhunter
by a woman named Edna Beveridge.

This is odd for two reasons. Firstly, the plagiarised section of Patrick’s book is easily the worst thing in it. The
beginning
and end of
Amazon
Basin
together form a wonderful long essay about the nature of travel writing itself. The
opening
chapter (‘The Fiction of Solitude’) argues that all travelling is really a version of a more profound interior
journey
; that we are all, always, ‘travelling’ in this way; and that an unknown country is just a screen on which the traveller encounters his own fantasies. Patrick’s version of this idea was a very extreme one. He insisted that all travel writing was actually fiction. Since the true subject of every journey is the consciousness of the traveller, he wrote, patently untrue tales of sea monsters and flying islands are actually more valid than ‘accurate’ accounts of places and customs. The conscious fabricator is more aware of his real theme than the traveller who mistakes his perceptions for objective reality. It’s a dense and peculiar piece of writing which draws on
phenomenology
, medieval travel writing, the Vinland sagas, fake maps, budget guidebooks, the works of T. E. Lawrence and Sir Richard Burton and the logbooks of Donald Crowhurst – the yachtsman who went crazy during a solo circumnavigation of the world.

‘The Fiction of Solitude’ convinced at least one person that all travel was really unnecessary. Having written the chapter, Patrick didn’t bother leaving Massachusetts to write about Brazil. He just slapped someone else’s travel book into the middle of his own, as though his only concern was fulfilling his contractual obligations to his publisher.

The second strange thing is that
I
Married
a
Headhunter
is
not even a book about Brazil, it’s a book about the dayaks of Borneo.

Amazon
Basin
was eventually withdrawn. It has a certain cachet with collectors.

Subsequent projected volumes included a Comparative Dictionary of Onomatopoeia – Vivian said it would be
Finnegans
Wake
without the laughs; a novel about a woman who runs a marathon within two hours – the action was to be set within the time frame of the marathon with flashbacks; and a book that was actually a kaleidoscope, its pages to be sheets of textured and coloured glass that could be shuffled to
produce
different optical effects.

Thinking about the windfall that had altered Patrick’s life, I couldn’t help comparing it to the one that had altered mine. Luck – whether apparently good or bad – has a way of
reversing
itself in its consequences; and then repeating the trick. I wouldn’t say that it was completely bad for Patrick, but the independence he got in this unanticipated and unlooked-for way exacerbated a dangerous part of his character. Money had released Patrick from any dependency, but it meant that he had been able to give up living, in the way that most people understand the word. He’d locked himself away; had become as autochthonous as a heartbeat or a self-winding watch. But why? ‘He lacked hunger’ was what my father had said. It seemed improbable to me.

These were the bare outlines of my uncle’s life as I knew them. I was aware of gaps and missing years; episodes that blurred into one another; contradictions of time and place. What I knew, I knew imperfectly, and I was sometimes
confronted
with objects that showed the limits of my knowledge.

One evening, looking for a book to read, I found an album of photographs on one of the shelves in the library. They were of Patrick and my father some time in the 1950s. I knew instantly they had been taken in London, in winter or early spring. It was something about the colours. A rainy London day has a very specific palette. And the two brothers had the wintry, grey faces of early morning commuters. I turned the page, idly wondering who had taken the pictures, and saw two
or three more, all in the same location (Wandsworth or Streatham Common?). These were all permutations of three people: Patrick, my father and my mother – looking
improbably
blonde and pretty. There were perhaps ten pictures of them, and the last two showed all three of them standing together. They were smiling awkwardly in the first – at
whoever
had been corralled into taking the picture – the second had been taken immediately after, and already the pose of the first had begun to dissolve, my father had turned away from the camera, my mother’s eyes were closed as she laughed and brushed her hair out of her face. Patrick’s hand was on her shoulder, and he looked absently across the frame.

The fact that Patrick had visited London came as a
revelation
. I didn’t recall his ever mentioning it. I knew he had travelled in Europe – the rest of the photos were snaps of
various
European capitals, and blurry ones that looked like they had been taken out of a train window (Poland? Russia?) – and I suppose that would make a visit to London inevitable, but neither he nor my father had ever said anything about it.