The Paperchase (19 page)

MRS DIAZ WAS VAST
, like a tiny planet – Mercury, maybe. She was standing on a chair holding a small green watering can up to a tier of hanging baskets. The fact that she was raised up into the atmosphere of the room – a conservatory that had obviously been added to the house – made her seem even rounder and bigger. She cut short the watering when she saw me come in. After stepping down with a nimbleness that belied her size, she sank into a huge wicker chair. She was squeezed into the seat like a coconut at a coconut shy.

‘Don’t tell my husband you saw me up there,’ she said, ‘but if I have to wait for him to water them, they’ll be nothing but potpourri!’

She fanned her face with her hand. ‘I can’t bear this weather. There’s nowhere for the heat to go.’ She was very
pale, except for her cheeks, where the red was unhealthily intense, as though they had been scrubbed too hard. Her light brown hair was very fine, like a toddler’s, and had been cut short.

By way of small talk I mentioned that the bookshelf in her living room included two copies of
Peanut
Gatherers.

‘Your uncle gave me one of those. I forget which.’ She had the island accent, a pleasant low voice, and a fat woman’s throaty chuckle. ‘I was a big fan.’

‘Of him, or the work?’

‘Both. I used to run an auction house in Westwich – this is before I met Tony. Your uncle would be there every week. We had the auctions on Wednesdays. That’s how I got to know him. His taste was very … eclectic.’ She coughed. ‘Excuse me. Could you slide that stool over?’

She propped her feet up on to the stool with audible relief. ‘I used to put bids in myself for certain things, so I’d notice who bought them. Books mainly, and cup-plates. We liked some of the same stuff.’

It turned out that Mr Diaz – or Tony, as she Anglicised him – was her second husband. Her first husband had been older, a hard-drinking Ionian, who had run off, leaving her to bring up three kids. She began telling me how she had scratched a living from a restaurant she opened on the island. She sold it for a profit with which she bought a bigger
restaurant
, made a success of that, and then bought the auction house. It was an impressive story: she couldn’t resist a
digression
on the hardships they’d all undergone along the way: eating scrapple, wearing homemade clothes – and a long account of her fifteen-year-old son’s stepping in as auctioneer on the opening night when the real one showed up drunk. After twenty minutes I was starting to wonder how I could bring the conversation around to the Fernshaws without
seeming
rude. But the good thing about people who talk a lot is that sooner or later they touch on everything.

‘My first husband was from an old island family like the
Fernshaws. He was a Cullity. They all came from up-island. Do you know what that means?’

I said I didn’t.

‘That’s the west of the island – it’s from sailing. Because it’s “up” in terms of longitude. Harriet Fernshaw was from
up-island
, too. Now she was a Tregeser and a lot of them were deaf. I guess they carried the gene for it. Here, pass me that.’

It was a high-school yearbook from 1970 bound in rubbery dark blue plastic. A mortarboard and a quill pen were raised in relief on the cover.

‘My brother’s yearbook,’ she said. ‘I loaned it to your uncle. He got interested in the Fernshaws, too.’

I felt a momentary excitement at the thought that my uncle had passed this way: it was like coming across his footprint in a forest. ‘What did you tell him?’ I asked her. She was flipping through the glossy pages of the yearbook.

‘I asked him which Fernshaw he wanted to know about.’

‘How many are there?’

‘Funnily enough, that’s what he said.’ She paused. ‘Here we are. Dick Fernshaw.’

He was square-jawed, with a smart crew cut. Not much like Nathan, maybe a little like Terry in the eyes.

‘Looks like the all-American boy, doesn’t he? He was a nasty piece of work, though. My brother once saw him
stuffing
a kid into a gym locker. You know—’ She mimed it with uncharacteristic ferocity. It sent her fine hair flying around her head. ‘He stopped – at least this is how my brother tells it – he stopped and said: “You don’t see anything, do you?” My brother just nodded and got the hell out of there. He was a bad kid. Grew up to be a bad man. No one was sorry to see you go.’ This last sentence she said to the photograph itself. ‘He’s the father of Harriet’s eldest.’

‘He was lost at sea?’

‘Him? Oh no, he was killed in Vietnam. Brave soldier too, by all accounts.’

‘Killed in Vietnam?’ I was confused. ‘I’ve had it from two or
three different people that Mrs Fernshaw lost her husband in an accident at sea.’

‘That’s right.’ She took the book from me and turned the page. There was no photo here, just an entry and a list of the school associations of which Zachary Fernshaw had been a member.

‘There’s no photo,’ I said.

‘He didn’t turn up for it, I guess. A few people didn’t. It was a way of saying screw you to the school authorities. Zac wouldn’t have meant it like that. He was a good kid. I guess he was ill or something. This one photo does for the two of them.’ She turned back to the previous page. ‘Their mother couldn’t tell them apart.’

‘Twins?’

‘Yup. Zac was the elder by a couple of hours. A nicer guy you could never hope to meet anywhere. He was an angel.’

The story Mrs Diaz then told me was like all stories – full of what Patrick called ‘pavanes and divagations’. I couldn’t remember her every digression, even if I wanted to, or the way my questions prompted her to clarify and elaborate her
original
narrative. I’m sure there are more artful ways of relating what she said – my uncle’s story was, in a very lateral way, one of them – but I’m more comfortable with a digest of the facts.

Richard and Zac Fernshaw were the only children of a
relatively
elderly island couple. They were identical twins, born within an hour of each other, into a family where twins occurred in every other generation. ‘The Fernshaws had the genes for
that
,’ said Mrs Diaz, meaning, I suppose, that it was a more benign legacy than the gene for deafness carried by a disproportionately large number of island families in the
nineteenth
century.

I had the feeling that Mrs Diaz embellished her account of their childhood slightly. She was making the point that while Zachary was conscientious and good-natured, Richard was
selfish
, violent and eventually delinquent. She dwelled on this contrast as though it were something essential in the boys’
natures – a Manichaean split; Cain versus Abel. I didn’t say what I felt: that faced with a Goody Two-shoes of a sibling, behaving badly might be a necessary way of carving out your own identity.

There were no academic expectations placed on the two kids. Zac finished high school and joined his father’s fishing business. Richard left home to hang out with a gang of
self-styled
hoods in town, where he got involved with petty crime and earned the disapproval of the town’s elders and the
sneaking
admiration of their children. In a quiet town like Westwich in the early seventies, young men like Richard had the status of dangerous, glamorous outsiders. They were followed from afar by some of the town’s good girls, who probably saw in them a vicarious way of chafing at the strictures of their own parents. Richard got one of these girls pregnant – a pretty, deaf teenager called Harriet Tregeser. Then he left the island to join the army.

From the way Mrs Diaz told it, I couldn’t figure out if he knew about the pregnancy before he went away. She implied that he’d joined to evade his responsibilities as a father, but it seemed just as likely that he hadn’t known, and had gone off to the mainland blithely unaware of the impending birth.

I don’t think I had the reactions to her story that Mrs Diaz wanted. It was hard for me to think of Richard Fernshaw as a monster, even if he had upped and run when he heard about the pregnancy. He would have been more than fifteen years younger than I was then when he found out that Harriet was pregnant. Abortion was unthinkable in that close-knit island community. Richard Fernshaw was just a boy, panicky and inadequate, who had shirked responsibility ever since he had learned to walk. He disappeared.

He didn’t show up until more than a year later. He walked into a Westwich bar in his uniform. He’d thrived under the army’s benign discipline and, away from unfavourable
comparisons
with his brother, discovered he had a knack for soldiering.

Why had he come back? Mrs Diaz wasn’t sure. Perhaps he just wanted a chance to show the islanders how he’d made good. Perhaps he wanted to take responsibility for his baby daughter. Perhaps he wanted to marry her mother and make a life together.

In any case, it never got that far. His brother, who had spent his life overcompensating for his twin’s shortcomings, had married the woman himself.

Richard heard all this from one of his old friends. He found Harriet, who refused to let him in to see the baby, so he got drunk and went looking for his brother. Luckily – or
unluckily
, who’s to say? – he never found him. Zac was away at sea. Richard went back to the mainland, swearing he’d come back for revenge.

‘And did he?’ I asked.

‘Oh no. He got his. Fragged in Vietnam.’

‘Fragged?’ I wondered if it was like ‘fagged’ at English public schools. It would have been a justly bathetic end if this glamorous hood had spent the Vietnam War making toast for more senior officers and shining their shoes.

‘As in “fragmentation bomb”,’ explained Mrs Diaz. ‘It means he was killed by his own men. I guess he was too much of a hard-ass, a disciplinarian.’

As for Zac and his new bride and his stepchild, against the odds they were happy. He learned his wife’s rare language and made a decent living fishing for tuna. ‘They’d take the catch into P-town and sell it to Japanese buyers right off the dock. He made good money. I suppose the fish ended up as sushi.’

After ten years together, the couple had a child of their own, a boy named Nathan after Zac’s dead father. But Zac himself didn’t live to see his child turn one. He was hiking with a couple of friends along the coast at Nawgasett on the mainland when he lost his footing on a rock. A wave – not even a large one – splashed over his foot and caused him to slip into the water. He struggled against the current but like a lot of the older island fishermen he wasn’t much of a swimmer. One of
his friends ran to fetch the Coast Guard but Zac was dead even before he made it back.

This is the distillate of a conversation that bubbled on for an hour and a half until Mr Diaz came into the room with his wife’s painkillers. Although I was never bold enough to ask her what was wrong with her, from hints she dropped I guessed that the operation she’d had had been a hysterectomy.

Seeing her with her husband, I noticed for the first time that she was older than him by about five years and possibly more. He was sweetly uxorious: bustling around her, fixing pillows and draping an afghan over her lap. She allowed
herself
to be a little crotchety with him, but in a way that suggested a deep affection. I took the interruption as my cue to go.

Something like nuclear fission had taken place. The fictional villain of my uncle’s story had split into two people: Zac and Richard Fernshaw. There was no question of a murder, because there was no victim. What had seemed like a story about an abusive husband had its roots in a story about two brothers.

I had asked Mr Diaz to show the story to his wife. ‘It’s a what-if,’ she said, when I asked her about it. ‘It’s kind of like the good brother never saved her. What would have happened then? What kind of a father would Dick Fernshaw have made? A terrible one, obviously. Luckily old Mycroft is around to take care of business.’

‘Don’t you think the violence in the story is excessive?’ I said.

‘Excessive?’ The word sounded a bit precious when she repeated it. ‘I suppose it is.’

I bought some flowers from a shop in town before I drove home, and put them in front of my uncle’s self-portrait as an expiation. I told myself I’d visit his grave on the mainland before I left the country for good.

I understood that since there was no victim, there could be
no question of a murder, or a murderer. There was only a murderous rage, an anger without an apparent location that was the story’s most troubling feature, and which had lured me into the false assumption that the events it described were real.

IT TOOK ME FOUR MORE
days to get my affairs in order and make my arrangements for leaving the country. My flight was scheduled to leave Logan Airport just before midnight on a Sunday, three days before what would have been Patrick’s sixty-fourth birthday, so I decided to have a barbecue to
celebrate
my last day on the island. It would be both a leave-taking and an anniversary.

I called Aunt Judith in Boston to invite her too and
apologised
for not having kept in touch. She mentioned that Vivian had been shooting something in Vermont and was threatening to pay her a visit in Medford. She didn’t use the word ‘
threatening
’, of course. She would have been pleased to see him. I said to let him know he was welcome to come, too. Throughout our conversation I was thinking that Judith’s
reliable Christmas presents were almost all that remained of the invisible links that once held our family together.

I didn’t expect my brother to turn up. I just wanted to send the message that, on my side at least, I was dismantling the barricades. I was realistic enough not to expect that we’d become bosom buddies – we’re too different for that.

The Saturday before was overcast and humid. Nathan helped me manoeuvre the barbecue – the one with a tall black hood like a blast furnace – out of the shed and up the hill to the house. He had the idea of putting it in the pony trap to move it more easily. We laid the barbecue on its side and lashed it down, then each of us pulled one of the shafts of the trap. I told Nathan how Captain Scott and his team had pulled their sleds to the South Pole the same way. It struck me as I was telling him that I had heard the story first from Patrick:
The
Worst
Journey
in
the
World
was one of his ten favourite books.

But talk of Antarctic weather was out of place the following day. By eleven it was clear that it was going to be one of the hottest days of the summer. The sky was a searing blue – like balloon silk.

The first guests to come were the Fernshaws, who brought with them a giant Tupperware bin of potato salad. Winks hopped across the lawn behind them on crutches.

I had invited everyone I could think of. Mr Diaz was there, Mrs Diaz sent her regrets, but Stephanie the paralegal came, as did Officer Topper, whom I invited on a whim. Mrs Delamitri brought her friend from up-island, who in turn brought some guests she had staying, including a whey-faced Englishman in his late forties called William Ricketts who worked for the United Nations and turned out to have been a pupil at my boarding school. ‘I met your uncle once,’ he told me.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he mentioned you.’

Mr Ricketts insisted on reminiscing to me about our alma mater while I tried to cook the burgers and the chicken thighs on the barbecue.

It annoyed me that he singled me out as a co-conspirator.
Not only was I preoccupied with the temperamental barbecue, but I also thought his cliquishness compared badly with the geniality of my American guests, who were swapping anecdotes and doing their best to overcome the communication barrier posed by the Fernshaws’ deafness. It was a reminder of what was waiting for me back in England – guardedness, reserve, insularity – and it was an affirmation of the regrettably English parts of my own character, because William Ricketts was the person at the gathering I most resembled.

But I was enjoying myself anyway, partly because the event was so improbable. I liked overhearing Officer Topper holding forth on genealogy to Winks, and seeing Nathan interpreting one of Mr Diaz’s rambling anecdotes in gestures to his mother. And I liked the continuity that it implied with the celebrations I remembered here from my childhood.

I think a family is made up of people who are bound together by habit more than by ties of blood. My evidence for this is that a family can die while its nominal members are all still living. Mine did. But that afternoon, I got the feeling that I’d managed to reincarnate it. Its old habits had been revived – as though a group of people had got together and learned to speak a dead language.

I’d set up Patrick’s croquet hoops on the flattest part of the lawn. It wasn’t real croquet, it was a variant, a dialect of the game that Patrick had half remembered and half made up. But since we had never played anything else, it had always been croquet to us.

After we’d finished eating and had a short rest, I explained the game to everyone who wanted to play. Winks couldn’t, Officer Topper had to go back to work and Mrs Fernshaw didn’t want to, but everyone else was up for it. Only William Ricketts raised objections to the unorthodox rules, but he was too hesitant to offer an alternative and just carped quietly from the sidelines as I ran through my version of them.

I teamed up with Mrs Delamitri and Stephanie the
paralegal
; Nathan with his sister; William Ricketts with Mrs
Delamitri’s artistic friend, whose house guests played as a threesome with Mr Diaz.

I suppose we’d been playing for about half an hour when the sound of an engine must have become audible from the driveway. I say ‘must have’ because I didn’t hear it myself. I was wrapped up in the game and while I tried to retain a relaxed and casual appearance I was determined to batter William Ricketts’ ball into the salt marsh.

There must have been the sound of an engine, logically, because a car was arriving. But the first I was aware of it was when I saw my Aunt Judith’s head peering around the side of the house, shortly followed by her waving hand and then the rest of her body. Just behind her was her husband, Lynde, a retired high-school gym instructor, who had been a silent and unfathomable accessory at family reunions for as long as I could remember.

I was surprised to see them – I wasn’t sorry, but I knew it must have been a long trip and I had invited them more for the sake of form than in the belief they’d really show up. But I was more surprised to see that my brother Vivian was
bringing
up the rear.

But I was pleased, almost in spite of myself, to see him loping across the lawn behind them. There was an uncomfortable moment when I forgot to detach myself from my croquet mallet to shake his hand, but the greetings over, I was able to conceal my awkwardness by officiously discharging my duties as host.

My brother had driven down with a friend – a bit of blonde eye-candy who was younger and more silent than Terry Fernshaw. My brother was looking tanned and muscular. I caught him admiring his own biceps as he held a cup of iced tea in front of him. Why a film director should want to
emulate
a leading man, I don’t know. I would have thought that one of the perks of the job was being able to exude some status-related sex hormone without going to the trouble of breaking a sweat at the gym. Anyway, he made me feel very pasty and English.

It might have been my paranoia, but I think that a slight buzz went around the garden when he arrived. People are like that about celebrity; and they’re noticeably less good at
concealing
their interest when the person in question is someone they think they ought to know but can’t quite place.

‘Was
October
Conspiracy
one of your brother’s?’ William Ricketts asked me discreetly.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Oh, that was jolly good. Yes, I enjoyed that.’

He worked up his courage to pass on the compliment to my brother, who was obliged to inform him that he’d had nothing to do with it.

Most of the guests began to disperse around four. Several were returning to the mainland as I was and had long journeys home. But the Fernshaws and Winks and Mr Diaz had gone down to the beach for a swim. I walked down to tell them I was getting a lift to Boston with Vivian.

I said goodbye and exchanged a wordless farewell with Mrs Fernshaw, who gave me a hug. As my cheek brushed the side of her head, I found myself looking at the silent zone around her ear. Even if we had shared a language, I wouldn’t have been able to say much more than goodbye, or begin to explain that something I had found in her story was sending me across the world to find the conclusion of my own.

As I left the beach afterwards, I turned back for a last look. A mass of clouds had formed over the eastern end of the island – their undersides were just touched with pink as the sun dipped on the other side. Terry and her mother were scouring the lower part of the shore for sea glass. Mr Diaz and Nathan had taken the turtle boat into the water and were floating it in the shallows between the shore and the sandbar. Winks had rolled up his trousers and was hopping at the water’s edge with his crutch. Occasionally he used it to point at something – the moat of water around the sandbar was full of starfish, sand dollars and flickering shoals of minnows – and the crutch cast a long whisker of shadow along the beach.

For a brief moment, there was one of those special
conjunctions
of the season, and the weather and the company – all of them, even William Ricketts – that brought the present into sudden communion with the past. That could almost have been Patrick playing in the water, or my grandmother
collecting
sea glass. It was as though the past had been brought to life in front of me – the past that at all other times was no more than a handful of August afternoons as faint and distant as the lights of a remote constellation.