The Paper Men

  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.

  So there Helen Davenant and young Ivo Clark rode their horses through the green fields of an English countryside that I was hard put to remember with anything like accuracy. Not that it matters, of course. Horses at the Spring is as much a pastoral as Daphnis and Chloë or one of Virgil’s Eclogues. I remember I was deeply moved by it myself. Helen owed something to Mary Lou—a kind of clumsy goodness, painstaking and ignorant, her innocence complete. Ivo, I don’t mind admitting, was that groom who had once been a bank clerk and I had to do a fair cleaning-up job on him. It was all so easy to write and so enjoyable! I have found out that the critical reaction was adverse (they said it stank) but I don’t think it was really as bad as all that. I had a very peaceful time. With modest triumph, though, and some regret, I let the manuscript go to my agent. I gave him a poste restante in Yugoslavia, then hung about, waiting for a reply, in Titograd which is where no tourists go.

  The result was I got a whole load of stuff out from England. The first thing that arrived before the rest was a telegram from Liz. ONCE AGAIN WHAT AM I TO DO WITH YOUR BLOODY PAPERS QUESTION MARK THEY ARE INCREASING DAILY HUMPH OBJECTS HOPE THIS FINDS YOU AS IT LEAVES ME EMMY SENDS WISHES. LIZ. The next was an enthusiastic telegram from my agent full of congratulations and saying he was having the MS retyped. I was very chuffed by the news and thought even better of myself. Liking sex but incapable of love, indeed!

  Ha et cetera.

  Then a hundredweight or so of mail turned up. I was getting tired of drinking Dingaç, which is the most fattening wine in the world and filthy sweet. So I took the lot back to Italy and sorted through. The only interesting thing was a deliberately reasonable letter (not telegram—the letter had been written before) from Liz. Would I keep the Tuckers off her back? Rick must be working for Pinkerton’s! She didn’t mind Humphrey making passes at Mary Lou, she was resigned to male nature and the leopard (a touch of unconscious humour there, I fancy) would never be shot of his spots. But she was afraid that Rick had been seeing Emmy in London. Did I remember Emmy? (Heavy sarcasm.) Emmy had suffered enough, was to be blunt not the sort of young woman normally attractive to men, and she felt that Rick was using her as a stalking horse, or one of the “hides” Humph kept on about, for keeping an eye on me: or even to screw (an unconscious pun probably) out of her memories of me as dad. Rick had a project and she must tell me the crown of his life’s work would be a biography of me, poor Wilf, but before that he was working on Wilfred Barclay, a Source Book. It was a pity the man Halliday couldn’t find a better use for his money but power corrupts and all that. She hoped wherever I was I had found happiness and (a real Liz touch) I had certainly spent enough time, money and people running after it. Now the bitterness was over she’d come to see that I’d been generous in allowing her to keep her share of the limited company, she didn’t know what she and Humph let alone Emmy would have done without it, he didn’t do a hand’s turn, a man’s man. P. P. S. Kestrel had had to be put down sorry, she hoped I was happy with whoever I was with. She wasn’t well.

  I read and reread that letter because it contained so much, most of which had to be inferred. Not well! Who could be, living with that bastard? There’s no doubt, women ought to have their marriages arranged for them—my God, the bastards they hook on to blithely! They—I used to think it served her right, him I mean, but after years of not caring, now I felt genuinely sorry for her; however, enough is enough. What was more important was Rick. God almighty! Pinkerton’s! It scared me so much, no matter how much I told myself she was exaggerating, that I couldn’t think of much else. What with having no book to write and Liz’s letter, I saw that it was time I moved on. I thought too that I’d better learn a bit about Halliday, since he must be behind the whole operation. I didn’t like the reference to his power. I began to have nightmares. They weren’t really bad ones but suffused with worry. I mean, in the diminished response that you can have in a dream to events that in “real” life would fill you with terror, it was worry I felt when my dream self was condemned to be hanged, not the terror I should have felt if it had been actual. For a man who doesn’t normally dream (no unconscious, as she used to say) they were a turn-up for the book. It was a pity about Kestrel and Emmy.

  I packed my clothes, disposed of the load of post I’d brought back from Titograd and went to Rome, wearing my dark glasses. In the big city I tried to look Halliday up in reference books. It was odd. I couldn’t find him. Admittedly I looked in the wrong book, I looked in Who’s Who when I should have looked in Who’s Who in America, but after all Who’s Who has people like Fulbrights, ambassadors, Secretaries of State and all that lot—but no Halliday! I began to wonder and would have spent more time in Rome had it not been for a condensation of the thought that he was either not important enough or else too bloody important to go in with the rest of us riff-raff and a nightmare that did do more than worry me. It filled me with dread. I dreamed I was in Rome, which is where I was. I dreamed I saw one of those scrawled posters that news boys and girls keep by them and up to date, as it might be GUERRA? or something about a nun winning a lottery, SBALIO! This one, however, was DOV’È BARCLAY? I hurried on in my dream and then, as I might well have done in “real’’ life, hurried back to assure myself that I hadn’t been mistaken, but I couldn’t find it and I woke up sweating.

  I went right round the world. It’s probably been done before—going round the world because you’re scared I mean—but it felt like a first. The bloody ma
n, if that is what he was, was everywhere, or his influence or his property or his men and women. In Hawaii I was sitting at a bar and a man at the other end of it said quite clearly that Halliday owned half the island. The light was dim and anyway I had my sunglasses on, so I was able to shift along and ask him which half and he laughed and said the better half. After I got upstairs to my room I began to wonder whether we had been talking about Halliday. The name seemed to flicker but then the trouble about going round the world because you’re scared is you tend to drink a lot. Credit cards are a blessing but since Global and Tracker you have to be awfully careful about dates. I wasn’t. I got into trouble, believe it or not, through crossing the international dateline and I still can’t understand why. But who after all, other than an airline pilot, can understand the international dateline? At the time I remember making things worse by claiming that it was all the fault of Halliday. This contretemps was bad enough, though it blew my cover and made a radio item. It made the box too, though only a long shot of me disappearing round a corner with my panama pulled down over my face. What was worse was that only two days later I was walking through a village in a far chillier climate, no matter where. I walked through a village and came to with a dreadful start because one item of the washing hung out to dry had been a sweater with OLE ASHCAN on it. Then I knew for certain that the shock of my arrest, however temporary, had knocked me off-centre. Also, as I said, I had been drinking more than usual and the time before that village had got a bit fogged except for the two days just before it. I must say the additional shock of the sweater had a knock-on effect and I started drinking again just when I had practically stopped for those forty-eight hours and I don’t remember what happened. A very nice and incurious young man from the embassy got me out of that. He understood completely my need to hide from Mr Halliday and Rick. He accepted a cheque for various things I seemed to need to pay, I don’t now remember what they were, and he saw me to a plane.

  Chapter X

  Two changes later—the young man had been all against my driving a car for a bit—I was on a Greek island that in those days had remote places in it where the sanitation was primitive which I have come not to mind, preferring it to the marble and plastic and ceramic perfections where you meet so many people. I mean, these days in a so-called good hotel the men’s room is practically a club. You don’t know who you’ll find yourself pissing next to. The island was—and now there’s no need to conceal the fact, I remind myself—Lesbos or Lesvos according to whether you did or did not do Greek in the fifth. I thought solitude and a beach would be very good for recuperating from my arrest or arrests and all that drink. So I had myself driven clear across the island to a rundown hotel and a huge beach. (You wouldn’t believe the road! Part of it was a dried-up watercourse and part a stretch of stones all the size of a cricket ball—girl’s fist—and only useful for stoning crows.) One of the good things about Greece is that the standard wine is undrinkable. I’d been in Greece before and for an extended stay, as they say, like everyone else. I’d drunk myself into kidding myself that I liked retzina and then drunk myself out of that delusion again. Now I was saved from myself, so to speak, except for a soft Cretan red without any resin in it—Minos, I think it was called—and you could buy it in galonia which are earthenware jars done up in withy and you can keep one or more by you.

  So I swam gently and sometimes I lay on my back with my eyes shut and enjoyed the feeling that I didn’t know what they were writing and saying about Horses at the Spring and nobody knew where I was so I couldn’t be told anyway and by now Mr Halliday and Rick had been reduced to getting their claws into other people. I was a bit uneasy about what people would be saying, since Horses at the Spring had what might be mistaken for True Love in it and people wouldn’t wear that though I couldn’t very well tell them it was there to put off Halliday. However, as they say, ignorance is bliss or calm at any rate. So I lay for days on my tum in shallow water, a mask over my face, a snorkel up by my earhole and watched the lovely nameless indifferent creatures with their colours and stillnesses and sudden darts and habit of being chums all together between meals. Once, I deduce (my one bit of underwater archaeology), there’d been a harbour at one end of the beach and it’s still visible just under the surface, since in restful, geological terms, the island goes up and down like a yoyo. It’s full of small, harmless fish—small because everything bigger has been eaten by the fishermen who now have to go out miles and miles before they can find anything. This sunken harbour—I think of it as my harbour—is not as exotic or exciting as the stuff you see on the Great Barrier Reef or at Eilat on the Red Sea, I know, having tried them both, but gentler, if the word isn’t too silly. Also the rundown hotel has only about three tourists a year and otherwise is patronized by the occasional Greek who is trying to sell, it may be, those incredible pictures of young women being serenaded from gondolas and so on, or sometimes selling God knows what.

  Well. After a timeless time I was flippering myself gently back towards the beach from the outer wall of my underwater harbour when my mask filled with water. That happens to us chaps with beards because you can’t get enough spit on your moustache to make it waterproof. For some reason—I was in about nine inches—I knelt up and tore the thing off with a gesture of impatience. At that, a man who was bending down and adjusting his own mask pushed it up on his forehead and gave a positive squeak.

  “It can’t be! Yes it is— Ho, I say, aren’t I the lucky one! You are Lobby Lubb and I claim the News Chronicle Award!”

  “Go away, Johnny, go away. You’re mistaken. Damn.”

  “I’d know that beard with the kind of incipient fork in it anywhere. Your face is going bald, my dear. You’ll have to wear falsies, a toupée for the lower face. I can see it coming in.”

  I sat up, holding my mask and snorkel. It was like the end of the holidays. I clasped my knees to my chest and looked at him glumly.

  “Is it any good asking you to keep your mouth shut?”

  Johnny wound his considerable length down into the water and sat in front of me.

  “Well now, Wilf. That depends, doesn’t it? As a matter of fact, I’m far too worried about mun to think of anything else—desperately short in fact. I wonder—”

  “Yes, yes. The same as last time.”

  “That’s jolly D. I must say, Wilf—”

  “Skip it.”

  “Well, if you won’t be bothered with thanks— What are you doing here?”

  “If it comes to that, what are you?”

  “Tit for tat—I’m not telling if you’re not telling. But seriously, Wilf, that latest thing of yours, Horses at the Spring—”

  “I don’t want to hear. Damn it, why in hell can one guarantee hearing bad news even in a howling desert?”

  “But it’s so moving, dear! Quote, so human, unquote. Those two young things—and comical old Assby. He’s not by any chance remotely founded on the unessential characteristics of yours truly? Otherwise how do you know so much, Wilf? After all, you’ve never thought yourself to be one of us, have you? Mixed, of course, withdrawn and shall we say in earliest days the wee-est bit experimental?”

  “I don’t want to hear about the bloody book.”

  Johnny straightened out and lay on his turn.

  “Well,” he said, quite unable to avoid a tiny infliction, “well, Wilf, I don’t suppose you will after a bit.”

  I had my compulsions too.

  “How bad was it, then?”

  “Now, Wilf! Who said anything about it being bad? Believe me, in all sincerity, when the spring runs over and they silently realize their love, huge tears welled into my eyes. They did!”

  He giggled. I waited for a while, then knelt up. Johnny saw he might miss some fun. He cried out.

  “You simply can’t go away, Wilf! You couldn’t get a car over from the harbour before tomorrow and that’s the sabbath, let alone the local saint’s day, which you wouldn’t miss on any account! The litany’s gorgeous—‘God bles
s us and God bless them and to hell with the Turks.’ General reaction wasn’t too bad, I do assure you. Of course, we know the creatures that simply would do a knife job, don’t we? Lilian and both the Henrys. The young creature on the box said it was warm-hearted, a thing he’d never thought to find himself saying of you. There! I’ve made your day, haven’t I?”

  “As bad as that. Well, who cares so long as the money’s good?”

  “Not you, dear, evidently. Even Lilian saying that when you tried to get warmth into a character it slopped all over the place is water off the duck’s back!”

  I fished round for something to say. I think I was trying to be honest.

  “After all—you have to write the bad books if you’re going to write the good ones.”

  “Work on that, Wilf. At present it sounds like a poor translation from the French. At least you were approved of by Emmy’s young man.”