The Paperchase (20 page)

VIVIAN HAD SOME KIND
of Japanese off-road vehicle that seemed only slightly smaller and less robust than the amphibious
vessels
they used for landing troops on D-Day. Even so, he cringed when I closed the passenger door and complained that I’d slammed it.

‘Do you want to slam it a bit harder?’ he said. ‘There’s a woman in Provincetown who didn’t hear you that time.’

I opened the door and shut it again as delicately as a
surgeon
lowering a new heart into a patient’s rib cage. ‘Better?’

‘I bet you don’t shut the door of your car like that,’ he grumbled as we turned out of the driveway of my uncle’s house for perhaps the last time in our lives. ‘Not that that
shit-box
would ever have made it as far as Boston.’

I began to regret having accepted the lift, but the alternative would have been a taxi and then the bus.

We drove mostly in silence to the ferry port at Westwich.

Vivian’s prepubescent girlfriend fell asleep on the back seat with her feet on the sofa-sized armrest that separated me from my brother. She remained comatose all the way to Westwich, slept through the ferry crossing, and only opened her eyes briefly when we arrived on the mainland.

I felt a slight ache at the thought of leaving. The dense pine trees that stretched away on either side of the highway and the dusty golden light of late afternoon on the Cape seemed so familiar that I found it painful to think I might revisit it again only as a memory.

‘Dad was ill,’ Vivian said, apropos of nothing, as the car rumbled up Route 6 towards Boston.

‘Judith didn’t mention anything.’

‘I imagine he didn’t tell her. You know what he’s like.’

‘Is he all right?’

‘He’s over it now. I had my assistant call you at the time but she said some fucking Russian guy kept answering the phone.’

‘You had your assistant call me?’

‘You never return my calls anyway, so what difference does it make?’

‘What was wrong with him?’

‘He had a medical in Boston while he was over for Patrick’s funeral – he must have felt he was next in line for the big guy with the sickle. He called me up afterwards to brag.’ Vivian lowered his voice in an impression of my father’s drawling mid-Atlantic accent: ‘“Blood pressure one forty over
eighty-five
, they said I had the eyes of a fighter pilot, I could have run on that treadmill all week. Nothing wrong with your genes, Vivian.”’

I laughed in spite of myself. Vivian smiled. When he was funny, he was also strangely remote from me: it reminded me of the distance between us.

‘Turns out he didn’t quite get the all clear. They ran tests on everything, you know what American doctors are like:
fingers
up the back-bottom, checking the old chap, cholesterol
levels, chest X-rays, blood sugar and God knows what else. He had some sort of discoloration on his arm and they wanted to check that out, too. Anyway, the stool sample showed up little traces of blood, so they had to have him back for a colonoscopy, and found a tumour.’

‘Oh.’

‘Yeah, that was my reaction. He was in hospital a week while they removed it. They did what’s called a “resection” – they just cut out about fifteen centimetres on either side of the lump and then join the two ends together. The procedure itself is no big deal, actually. I went to see him a couple of times, including on the day of the operation. I was with him when they wheeled him into the operating theatre. He was all groggy just before he went under. I was holding his hand and he kind of whispered something to me. I had to bend down to hear it. I’ll give you five hundred bucks if you can guess what it was.’

‘“
Veni,
vidi,
vici
”? “It is a far, far better thing …”?’

‘That’s two guesses and they’re both wrong.’ He paused for dramatic effect. It was a serious story and my suggestions were unwelcome. He paused, as though waiting for my flippant remarks to disperse. ‘He was whispering, “Bolder than Mandingo”. Bolder than Mandingo! Remember that dumb game? He was making a joke. They could have been his final words. I was proud of him.’

‘I’ll have to ask him about it when I see him,’ I said. I knew that Vivian hadn’t been trying to make me feel like a disloyal son, but I did anyway. I wanted to tell him that I was going to see our father now, but I was afraid it would have sounded defensive, or like a boast.

Vivian stretched forward over the steering wheel and then settled back into the seat. ‘This reminds me of when you slashed my arm with your Swiss Army knife,’ he said.

I found myself repeating the explanation I gave at the time. I had been sixteen, and travelling up to Maine with Vivian and my father. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to cut you. I was just threatening you with it.’

‘Just threatening me?
Just
threatening me? Ha!’ He laughed to himself for what seemed like a long time. ‘Just threatening me. Did you hear that, honey?’ Lolita in the back said nothing. She was listening to a Walkman. ‘I must remember that.’

I stared out of the window trying to think of a similar
outrage
that Vivian had committed against me so as to erase his moral superiority, but I couldn’t remember any. The cruellest thing my brother had done had been completely unintentional. He had grown four inches taller than me by the time I got back home from my first term at university. And he not only had usurped my height, but had taken on a kind of sneering superiority in his way of speaking that can only have been an imitation of me. Everything he didn’t like was dismissed as ‘sad’ or ‘tragic’, which was slang for ‘contemptible’, and while I still caught glimpses of the old, soft Vivian when I overheard him talking to his friends, I never saw it again myself.

About a year after that, I found a diary in the drawer of his desk when I was looking for a pencil sharpener and leafed through it – pretending to myself that I wasn’t sure it was a private notebook – and found myself referred to as ‘that weirdo Damien’. I carried on reading it in the hope of finding
something
complimentary as an antidote, but only discovered further remarks in the same vein and a couple of short
sentences
where he said I was so staid that he felt sorry for me. I think I was hurt, apart from anything, by how little I featured in his internal life, more than by the tone of my few
appearances
there.

‘What was the kid’s name?’ my brother asked suddenly.

‘Which kid?’

‘The kid at your cook-out.’

‘Nathan?’

‘Nathan.’ My brother pronounced it with a sonorous
finality
, as though it were the tag on a folder of observations he was tucking away into a mental filing cabinet. ‘I’m hungry. There’s a couple of Twinkies in the glove compartment,’ he said.

I opened the packet and passed one to him: sticky and
corn-coloured like a barely damp bath sponge. He stuck half of it into his mouth. ‘Want one?’ he said – except his mouth was so full it sounded like
Wampum?

‘No thanks.’

At the airport drop-off I hugged him awkwardly. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said.

‘No sweat. Judy and I are flying back to LA in a week, but please look us up if you’re out there.’

‘Did you give her a sleeping pill?’ I said.

‘She’s had a busy week,’ he said.

‘Up early for kindergarten?’

‘Don’t spoil it, Damien.’

‘Sorry.’

We shook hands.

‘I promise to return your calls if you promise not to have your assistant make them,’ I said.

‘Deal.’

He walked me to the check-in desk. ‘You’re flying to Frankfurt?’ he said. ‘Why the hell would you want to go there?’

‘It’s the transport hub of Europe, mate. Connecting flight to Pisa.’

He looked at me in astonishment. ‘You’re going to see Dad?’

MY FATHER’S HOUSE
was an hour’s drive from the airport. He had a big villa that looked out over olive terraces. I suppose the landscape had been chopped out of the hillside by the Etruscans, but the depth of my historical reference is such that winding roads and hills and vineyards mainly evoke a
mythical
location which I think of as Car Advert Country.

I parked on the verge and walked through the front gate. The housekeeper indicated in signs that Signor March was round the back, tending to his garden somewhere.

I found him at the foot of the slope, among his beehives. He wore one of those veiled hats and was moving an object that might have been a wooden tray, but that was obscured with teeming black bodies. Around him, the bees seemed to make solid shapes in the air, like translucent curtains being pulled this way and that by the wind.

‘Stay where you are,’ he said. ‘I’m moving the queen.’

‘No gloves, Dad? Don’t they sting you?’

‘They sting me – but it prevents arthritis, so I’m happy to put up with it.’ His voice was slightly muffled through the layers of cloth around his face. ‘I forgot where you said you were staying.’

‘A schoolfriend of Laura’s has got an old mill outside Lucca,’ I said. I decided it wasn’t really a lie, since the
statement
was true, even though the inference I expected him to draw was false. Laura and I had spent the New Year there ten years earlier, but I hadn’t seen the woman since.

‘Woman friend?’ asked my father.

‘Yup.’

‘You should have brought her along. Is it a romantic
entanglement
?’

For some reason I thought of the moustachioed dragon who had studied my passport photo like a chess puzzle before giving me a room in her guest house. I smiled. ‘No. Unfortunately not.’

When my father took off his hat, I noticed he had lost weight. It made his features more prominent. His hair had been cropped into an unintentionally fashionable style, and with his beaky nose and beady eyes I thought he bore a
striking
resemblance to a baby eagle.

‘Vivian told me you’d been ill,’ I said.

He waved his hand dismissively. ‘Nothing worth bothering with.’ Then he changed the subject. ‘You’ve never been here before, right?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you have time for the tour of the house?’

He showed me round briefly. His living rooms were plain and sparely furnished. His tiny study was dominated by a wall of legal textbooks. A big photograph of Vivian and me jumping off a sand dune in Truro hung above his desk.

I had come to take my father to dinner. He chose the restaurant, a local place called Il Vecchio Pazzo. I had made it
clear that I would be paying, over his protestations. It made me feel more up to the task at hand to be in the driver’s seat in this way. The power of being the giver amounted to a slight equalling of our respective positions. Although, when I worked it out, I realised that his dead brother’s mistress’s husband was the real sponsor of our reunion. But money’s weird like that.

My father insisted on changing for dinner. I waited in his tiled sitting room, worrying that he would appear in an opera hat and tails as though dressing for the captain’s table on some prewar Atlantic liner, but he put on nothing more formal than a navy-blue, brass-buttoned blazer.

The waiters clearly knew my father. I overheard one of them referring to him affectionately as ‘Il Ingles’, and he seemed pleased when I mentioned it. He introduced me to the maître d’ and chatted away to him about the menu in Italian. Once his detailed inquiries had been satisfied, he turned to me and said, ‘You could follow that, couldn’t you?’

‘I don’t speak Italian, Dad.’

‘Well, it’s all basically Latin.’

‘Never my strong suit, I’m afraid.’ I helped myself to water from the bulbous carafe. My father was turning over the napkin in his lap slightly nervously. I remembered that there was always something distracted in his manner – he had a
restless
energy that was only still when he was at his desk working. But he seemed a little more twitchy than usual. He probably thought I wanted to interrogate him about his illness. Still, he was handling the situation with great aplomb.

He broke up a piece of bread and used it to sop up some olive oil. ‘How’s life at the Beeb? It’s terrible what they’re doing to the World Service.’

‘It doesn’t really apply to me,’ I said.

‘Well, of course, I know you work for the TV part.’

‘I mean, I haven’t been in London for a while. I’ve been on Ionia.’

‘Ionia?’ As he said it, I was struck by what a beautiful word it was. He repeated it softly; his surprise gave it a sense of
wonderment and his sonorous voice lingered on the vowels. I remembered the sound the breeze made when it sprang up to rustle the pine trees in the late afternoon. ‘Is the water still as cold as it used to be?’

‘Most definitely.’

‘I remember taking you and Vivian to the beach there before either of you could swim and having to watch you both like a hawk.’ He pronounced ‘hawk’
hock
; it was one of the Medfordisms he could never shake off.

‘I saw Vivian a few days ago.’

‘You saw Vivian there?’

I nodded. ‘He told me about your operation.’

‘How is he?’

‘Strength to strength, I gather. I was staying at Patrick’s.’

My father raised his eyebrows, but it could have been in surprise, or because, at that moment, the waiter was sliding a plateful of ravioli under his nose. I was having the same: it had a delicious, indefinably meaty filling.

‘What is this, pork?’ I said.

‘
Coniglio
.’

I shook my head.

‘Bunny rabbit.’

‘It’s good.’ I tore up some bread and swirled it in the
garlicky
sauce. ‘I figured I’d spend the summer there – swim every day – reminisce. Do a spot of painting. I couldn’t think why else he would have left me the house.’

‘He was a truly strange man, Damien. I say that as his brother. I could show you letters I got from him that would make your hair curl – abusive, deranged, cruel.’

‘I know, I know. But I was talking to his lawyer about it. Apparently he told the guy that I’d know what to do with it. But what? After about ten minutes I realised I’m sure as hell not supposed to live in it. But I figured it out. It’s a museum. It’s an unofficial museum, and I was supposed to be the
curator
.’

‘You’re not eating your ravioli.’

I spooned a couple into my mouth and the waiter took my plate away. ‘Tell him they were great.’ I said.
‘Delicioso.’

My father murmured something to the waiter, who seemed to retire through the swing doors satisfied.

‘I brought you something, by the way,’ I said, passing him the envelope of photos I’d found in Patrick’s library.

‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ he said. ‘This is from before your mother and I were married.’ He went through the photos twice, pausing on each shot as though in front of a painting in a gallery, absorbing details of the figures, the composition, the relationship of the figures to one another. I sensed he was a million miles away.

‘Well,’ he said, passing them back to me.

‘Keep them, Dad. I brought them for you.’

‘I’m touched, Damien.’ He sounded slightly abashed. I looked down at the crumbs on the table in front of me.

My father had chosen the wine for the main course, which was some kind of slow-braised lamb – shanks, I think. The wine was a deep, deep red and sat shimmering in the glass. The flavour was so full, it made me think of arterial blood – if that can be a pleasant quality in a wine.

‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ I said. I wanted it to mean the whole thing – me being there, me and my dad, in Italy, eating dinner.

But my father chose to understand it less emotively. ‘Yes, this was a great find. I’m very fond of this place. One of the things that I’m most proud of in life is that the chef here uses my honey on his baked figs. That’s quite an accolade, I think.’

‘It is. It is.’ I took a sip of my arterial blood. I was thinking that my dad was – emotionally speaking – a fiddler crab,
backing
away into his tiny hole at the slightest approach, beadily scouring the beach, and impossible to dig out. He had to be stalked stealthily.

The main course arrived and we had to postpone our
conversation
while the waiters went through a little masque of giving my dad the best service in the restaurant. I liked the fact that he was popular with them.

‘I was in the middle of telling you something,’ I said, when they’d gone.

‘Don’t let it get cold.’

‘Okay, Dad.’ I ate some of the lamb – it was soft and
aromatic
from long cooking. I noticed he seemed preoccupied – maybe the photos? – so I decided to postpone what I had to say until after the meal.

We had the baked figs and the chef emerged like a deus ex machina from the bowels of the kitchen to drink a toast to my father’s bees, Then we took our
vin
santo
out to the terrace and sat staring at the darkened valley. The yellowy moon picked out the neat rows of vines in front of us.

‘I made a big discovery on the island,’ I said.

‘On Ionia?’

‘Yes. On Ionia.’ I liked hearing him say the word almost as much as I think my father enjoyed saying it. ‘I turned up a manuscript of Patrick’s with some unpublished stories in it.’

‘That
is
a find. What were they about?’

‘It’s called
The
Confessions
of
My
croft
Holmes.
You know, Sherlock’s older brother. Do you ever read Sherlock Holmes?’

‘Not now, no. I’d have thought those stories were pretty well unreadable now, at my age.’

‘There’s some good stuff in them. I reread them when I was trying to get to the bottom of Patrick’s stories. I had to do some detective work of my own. Do you remember the
Sign
of
Four
?’

‘It’s been years since I read it, Damien.’

‘That’s the one where Sherlock says: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains,
however
improbable,
is the truth.” That’s good, isn’t it? It sounds like a maxim of jurisprudence.’

‘Say it again.’

I repeated it and my father said the words slowly to himself. ‘Yes, that is good,’ he said thoughtfully.

I took a sip of my wine. It gave me a thrill to think that it
had grown in the earth which I could smell cooling below the terrace we were sitting on.

‘What happens in the last story – briefly, so you don’t have to wade through it. Mycroft – who’s kind of a layabout – meets this fellow, Abel Mundy, who has a deaf wife and kids. Mundy’s a nasty piece of work – this is, like, high
melodrama
– and Mycroft ends up topping him. Simple enough.’

‘Simple enough,’ my father agreed.

‘But here’s the weird part. Patrick really had some deaf neighbours. And being a little literal-minded, I thought: It’s a confession! – maybe he’s trying to tell us something. Maybe he’s offed this bloke, Fernshaw–Mundy.’

‘Who?’

‘Patrick. It sounds ridiculous, but I really did believe it, I think, for a moment anyway. That he might have been
capable
of murder.’

My father shook his head. ‘He was capable of a lot of things, but not that.’

‘No, you’re right,’ I said. I took another sip of the wine and it seemed to leave a trail of stars across my tongue like the one above us. ‘You’re absolutely right. I looked into it further and it turned out that the villain in the story is actually a
composite
. He’s based on two characters, two brothers, who have a pretty interesting story of their own.’ I broke off. ‘You know what? I think I left those photos indoors.’

‘No, I have them right here. You gave them to me,
remember
?’ My father patted the inside pocket of his blazer.

‘Of course I did. My memory is going. What was I saying? This story. It was a basically a love triangle: two brothers in love with the same woman. I’m not even sure how the three of them met, but I have a feeling they were all foreigners abroad and just sort of fetched up in the same city. The brothers were close in age but quite different. The younger brother was rather conventional, hardworking and – not dull – what’s the word? Prosaic. Maybe a little more prosaic than the other.’

‘You don’t mean “prosaic”, surely?’ said my father.

‘Don’t I?’ I wished I’d held off the
vin
santo.
Trust my dad to be listening to my tale of heartbreak with one eye on
Fowler’s
Modern
English
Usage.
‘Let’s just say “prosaic” for now. I need to tell you about the other brother. I suppose I think of him as poetic, but he wasn’t a poet. Actually, he was a bit feckless, and found it hard to keep himself to one thing for any length of time. They were both complicated people. I don’t know about the woman, presumably she was too. But the older brother was definitely more glamorous, funny and
unpredictable
, and the kind of man women like to be with. Or this woman did, at any rate, because she was totally smitten with him, and probably didn’t even notice the younger brother. They had that “hearts and flowers” phase of the romance and she got pregnant.

‘So now, she’s pregnant and looking for some help, but as I said, the older brother wasn’t able to commit to anything and he just fucked off. He disappeared, went, I don’t know, to Russia. He went away, God knows where. Poof! Just
vanished
.’

I was trying to sense my father’s reaction to what I was telling him, but he sat there beside me in absolute silence.

‘You can imagine the state the girl was in,’ I said. ‘This was a different time. Being pregnant and unmarried was seriously bad news. Oh yeah, and to make things worse, she was a Catholic – all three of them were, in fact.’ I paused. ‘You’ll never guess what happened.’

He said nothing – the only sound was the slow sigh of his inhalation.