The Paper Men

  “What Emmy?”

  “Your Emmy. Yours and Liz’s. The young man she went about with for a bit, that vast American academic—”

  “Tucker! He’s still in Europe?”

  “I had quite a tendre for him for a while—at least a week. He’s huge, isn’t he? Do you think he could be persuaded to be cruel? But then the trouble with these large Americans, they will keep on showering and using a positively asexual deodorant, unlike our local fishermen—have you sat down wind of them yet? It’s enough to give one an orgasm.”

  “What was he doing with Emmy? I mean—where does he get his money from? He’s married to— He had a sabbatical only four years ago—perhaps he’s got the push. Goody goody.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Know what?”

  “That pretty little thing—”

  “Helen—I mean, Mary Lou—”

  “Right. Aha! So that’s where the warmth in Horses at the Spring comes from! Yes, she does have something, doesn’t she? So unfair. Well. She’s back in the States. Tucker has a line out to some philanthropist, a billionaire. She’s got a job with him as a secretary or researcher or something. Something, I suppose.”

  “Halliday!”

  “That’s the name.”

  —and I was back in the Weisswald, sitting before the view of Mary Lou, truly inspirational.

  No, Wilf. Mr Halliday is very fond of ladies.

  Billions. Trillions. Mary Lou is interested in astronomy. Quadrillions. Money enough to start the Big Bang. Able to buy Mary Lou not with the lithe limbs of Paris. The girl you meet too late. The girl you have forgotten. That bit of you dissected out, a rare specimen. Able to buy Wilf, track him down, send forth. Run or stay still, in the end he’ll get you. He can stand still and wait for you to arrive. Purchasable purity, sanctity, holiness, beauty incomparable. Oh grieve for her, that circle she had tried to complete with Rick, make him invulnerable, now seen to be brittle and irretrievably broken—

  “Wilf?”

  “You know, when the circle’s broken and she’s no longer looking inward but can look outward at somebody else she’s probably quite different—probably a fascinating conversationalist and not physically heavy under the influence of his gravity but light as air, flirtatious—”

  “You know? You’re in fugue!”

  “Halliday.”

  “I must say, Wilf—the sun is very strong, isn’t it? Perhaps—”

  “What do you know about Halliday?”

  “It’s time we got under cover.”

  Rick probably left him a note on some enormous bare executive desk, oh acres and acres of it in consideration of the services hereinafter specified of my wife Mary Lou Tucker—

  “One billion, I should think.”

  “Come along, Wilf. Can’t afford to lose you, can we?”

  With that sort of money Rick could afford to have the CIA and the FBI and our own useless lot, let alone the KGB, on my track! It accounted for my justifiable unease in so many places, passports and all that.

  “Off with our tiny flippers, Wilf, there’s a dear.”

  “Bugger off, Johnny, if you’re capable of it.”

  “Now that was horrid.”

  “I mean it.”

  “I must say, Wilf, apart from my unnatural affection for you, you intrigue me. Why a man ostensibly so indifferent to society should be, if I may coin a phrase, so shit-scared of critical opinion—”

  “Well. Aren’t you critical opinion, and if so can you wonder?”

  “Rudesby!”

  Clearly Halliday was more dangerous than Rick. After all, with his sources of information he didn’t have to guess. He simply knew my biography and could pass it on to that hairy hack Rick Tucker.

  “Who knows your biography?”

  Johnny was standing on the front step of the hotel. He had stopped pulling me by the wrist, though he still had hold of it and he was staring into my face. I shook off his hand.

  “Got to shower.”

  “The water won’t be on yet, as well you know.”

  “Got to lie down.”

  Johnny nodded seriously.

  “That’s—er, the ticket. Great nature’s second course. Macbeth, q.v.”

  “Ha et cetera.”

  Johnny was still nodding to himself when I got myself away from him.

  I was tired from swimming and knew that any clothes I put on would be sticky from salt and then sweat. I sat on the edge of my bed and determined to do nothing. I did not move, I hardly breathed. I did not think or feel. I willed myself into a state of nothingness, of deliberate catatonia like a limpet that the tide has left. I came to out of that state with an anguished click!—perhaps it was audible—like a blind running up and letting in cruel daylight. I was remembering Prescott. I never knew the man himself only his letters and the manuscript he kept plaguing me with. It was bad, hopelessly bad, though there was a good idea buried in it. I told him all that, yet he kept plaguing me for years with requests and ideas. At last I had to ignore him. But the thing was that the central idea in my fourth novel was exactly the good one hidden in Prescott’s awful manuscript! Of course, it was properly treated and all that, but still! I swear that when writing The Endless Plain and ever since I had not even thought of Prescott or the manuscript or the whole trying non-association which is only too familiar in type to any writer once he has got out before the public.

  Had I remembered? Was it wholly the work of the unconscious that Liz didn’t believe I suffered from, or had I stolen the idea deliberately at some point? As far as I knew, Prescott had never succeeded in publishing the MS he sent me, though by now he had enough books to his name and was probably as well known as I am. Would he remember and make a point of it in some interview? It seemed to me, as the afternoon turned into a somewhat cooler evening, that there was not a single absurd, humiliating or quasi-criminal act in my life that did not come back to sting and burn me.

  When at last I went downstairs, since there was only the one hotel in the place it was inevitable Johnny should be waiting for me.

  “Ouzo, Wilf, to take the look of anguish off your face.”

  “God forbid. I keep my own galoni in the bar. It’s drinkable. Minos.”

  “I must say, my dear, it can only be those famous wanderings of yours that keep your figure even reasonably within bounds the way you positively rape the bottle.”

  “Famous?”

  “You and Ambrose Bierce. Quote, where is Wilfred Barclay whose recent novel Horses at the Spring, unquote.”

  “Oh shut up. If it comes to that, what are you writing yourself?”

  “Little me? A huge picture book for the rainbow people. About Sappho, of course. I’m undecided whether to call it Ladies of Lesvos or Burning Sappho. I wish someone had really burned the wretched girl. There’s nothing known about her, nothing at all. Besides it’s nominally history and I’m not feeling creative.”

  “That your best one-liner to date.”

  “Funny or not, whenever I turn to the thing I get in such a pet!”

  “You’re not a classical scholar.”

  “I’m an erotic scholar. You wouldn’t believe the information I’ve managed to amass from my women chums, to say nothing of guesswork. You’ll swear, I know, not to pinch the idea, but what do you suppose neolithic ladies used those dinky little carvings of the earth mother for? I’ve even embarked on bogus philology—rather like canting heraldry—and claim that ‘Lesbos’ is derived from ‘Olisbos’, classical Greek for what the ads call a Sex Aid. How do you get on in your wanderings, Wilf? Still in the missionary position?”

  “How do you?”

  “One doesn’t ask for permanence.”

  He fell silent and during that silence I drifted off into a dreary brood only to surface when I heard Johnny speak again.

  “Why are you deadly sick of all this?”

  He was eager again and scanning the various visible areas of my face for information. It came to me that his next move
would be to tell Rick where I was. Come to that, he could sell the information to the press or any or all of the bloody media.

  “Where is he now?”

  “Who, Wilf?”

  “My—my would-be biographer.”

  “Aren’t you the lucky thing? Displaying one’s all! Nobody has offered to write my life, alas. I shall have to do it myself, such a thankless task, a sort of literary masturbation which, say what you will—”

  “In my case—”

  “Yes, yes, I know. You are about to proclaim your complete heterosexuality like silly young Keats. Do you remember? I think it’s in ‘Lamia’. Dear, dear Wilf! You must have it as an epigraph for your Collected Works. Let me see—yes.

  Let the mad poets say whate’er they please

  Of the sweets of Faeries, Peris, Goddesses,

  There is not such a treat among them all,

  Haunters of cavern, lake and waterfall,

  As a real woman—

  What a vulgarian! One can see why it got itself called the ‘Cockney School’.”

  My galoni had appeared and I started drinking. Those memories were like worms eating into the flesh, Rick pursuing, worms eating, and monstrous Halliday brooding over all. I thought to myself that the strain was building up in me because I’d stopped writing and should instantly start on another book, but the trouble was my head was empty of all but these thoughts triggered by John St John John who was continuing to talk whether I listened or not.

  “Beware of the worm—”

  I came to with a dreadful start. He had said that, not I! Of course, I’ve worked out since then that while I was brooding in what I thought was silence I must have muttered something about the worm; but at the time it was terrifying as necromancy. It seemed to me that everyone in the world but I could see, had some sort of access, and only I was trapped in myself, ignorant, bounded by my own skin with none of the antennae They seemed to have in order to reach out and touch my secret self.

  “What worm?”

  “—that flies in the night in the howling storm—wasn’t Britten divinely clever? I do envy composers, don’t you? Like mathematicians. They don’t have to have any politics and that sort of thing, just sit up there on a cloud.”

  “What worm?”

  “My dear boy. They are eating you alive. Shall I give you a complete diagnosis?”

  “No.”

  “You see, you are what biologists used to call exoskeletal. Most people are what they called endoskeletal, have their bones inside. But you, my dear, for some reason known only to God, as they say of anonymous bodies, have spent your life inventing a skeleton on the outside. Like crabs and lobsters. That’s terrible, you see, because the worms get inside and, oh my aunt Jemima, they have the place to themselves. So my advice, seeing you’re going to make me a loan and noblesse oblige et cetera, is to get rid of the armour, the exoskeleton, the carapace, before it’s too late.”

  “Any suggestions?”

  “You could try, let me see, religion, sex, adoption, good works—I think sex is the best in the circumstances. After all, even lobsters get together, though I must confess I don’t see how, quite. It’s probably the extraordinary onanism that One Above allows to go on unblasted provided it’s under water.”

  “Salmon and suchlike.”

  “Just so. You’ve been reading that little verse I wrote for the TLS. ‘For man is a funniful fish, a mere fish but a queer fish, a holy roly poly fish, very particular where his milt (the queerest flesh of the fish) is spilt.’ And so on. Good, don’t you think?”

  “No.”

  “Curse you. A jeu d’esprit, of course. You have no sense of rhythm, I’ve always thought so.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “As I was saying, you need a chum. You see, my dear, I know a thing or two. You think I’m an ageing queer in your categorizing way, and of course I am, among other things. I don’t think I’ll try the snail soup. It’ll have to be mousaka again. Isn’t Greek food perfectly loathsome? If it weren’t for bloody Sappho— At the very least you need a woman. Or are you the sort who discovers himself late in life and goes overboard for some handsome young fellow?”

  “Oh for God’s sake, shut up!”

  “All that must have gone from you, drifted away into the far beyond, yes, my dear, gone from you in the battle and strife. Yes. You need a woman.”

  “Have you anyone in mind?”

  “Therein the patient et cetera.”

  “Macbeth, q.v.”

  “Do you know what Apollo said? Well, of course you do! Know thyself. Perhaps you’ve gone all these years without knowing yourself at all. You need a chum. Start at the bottom with a dog.”

  “I don’t like them.”

  “Worms under the carapace isn’t just human sadism, you see. It’s the pure poetry of the art. Only One Above could be as inventive as that.”

  “I’m tired of talking of Halliday. I mean—”

  “Ah well. You always were a prose person, weren’t you?”

  “With wit.”

  “And where has your celebrated ‘callous wit’ gone, je me demande?”

  “I’m old. I’m going faster and faster—”

  “Where?”

  I think I must have shouted.

  “Where we’re all going, you bloody fool!”

  I think I can remember what he said after that word for word, because I have a very clear picture of his face coming closer to mine across the little dinner table, so close I could see he had pencilled his eyebrows.

  “Wilf, dear. Once more in return for the loan. See a priest or a shrink. If not, at least keep away from doctors acting in tandem. Otherwise they’ll have you inside before you can say ‘dipso-schizo’.”

  Chapter XI

  This isn’t a biography. I don’t quite know what it is, since there are enormous gaps where I don’t remember what happened and other gaps because I remember that nothing happened. If all that wasn’t bad enough in the attempt to get some kind of coherence into this mass of paper, the months after Lesvos and Johnny are patchy because of the state I was in. I remember seeing clearly, that same night after Johnny had done his ridiculous diagnosis, that I must get away at all costs. But instead I got sodden, moving in a haze of Minos from day to day and seeing little of Johnny, who didn’t number excessive drinking among his several vices. At last I did manage to get myself transported to the airstrip and flew off. (Forwarding address: Rinderpest, Bloemfontein, SA.) Thank God for planes! They can alter the whole outlook in the merest fraction of time like at the Last Trumpet. I remember sitting next to some chap, a Canadian I think, and maundering on about how marvellous flying was because if you flew enough you were bound to crash, and if you crashed in a jet death was instantaneous, much to be desired, Julius Caesar, q.v. This Canadian was what Johnny would call a cowardy cowardy custard and did not like to be reminded that we were suspended by a crazy application of the laws of aerodynamics over a lot of nasty deep water. He went and changed his seat. Well, I knew Athens would be stuffed with chaps from Great Britain or the States, so I simply changed planes and flew to South Africa, forgetting that South Africa was what I had given as a forwarding address. I remembered that on the way there and determined to come back by return. But—and here the patchiness comes in—I got into a nursing home somehow. I’d had a vivid encounter with the red hot worms under my carapace and a nice female doctor got them out of me through various chinks which she demonstrated by showing me a live lobster from the fish market and then again sometimes I think I dreamed the whole thing. Of course, she left the heat inside me but I thought I could put up with that. I felt that a milder climate would make the heat bearable perhaps but what with one forwarding address and another I was running short of countries where I’d not been compromised. So I flew to Rome (forwarding address: Shangri La, Katmandu, Nepal) and no sooner had we landed than I remembered Rick in the Piazza Navona. So I doubled back on my tracks, taking a local flight with a hire car at the end of it. I drove of
f very slowly for I hadn’t made much of a fist at signing my name to the thing you sign.

  Now I have to tell you about that island although I don’t want to, it still gives me the jitters. But I have to tell about the island because it’s the first half. I’ll write the second half later. As a matter of fact I’ve been screwing myself up to do it for some time and I can’t do it sober, that’s the fact of the matter. Oh I know in the morning I’ll be going down to the kitchen to count the empties with no Liz to glide in like the ghost of something in Vogue. No Rick to go through the dustbin, the ole ashcan. He’s probably wandering about outside somewhere to keep an eye on me. Since Liz had the ashes cut down I can look straight across the lawn from where I’m sitting to the woods on the other side of the river or I would if I could but I am not able, it being about three o’clock in some morning. That’s where the badgers come from to badger me and Rick too.

  Well. I got one ferry and landed up in the city where they incontinently shot the chief of police in the main street before my very eyes. It was the Mafia and I had some sort of idea that Halliday was using them so I took another ferry. I don’t mean back to where I’d come from but onward, ever onward, and found myself with car on a quay whence the streets were too narrow to drive along. So as I didn’t much like the look of the combined slum, hovel, bar, knocking shop they called the hotel Marina, I walked off into the town, to find something bigger and better with a decent bar instead of a plank held up by two ancient slatterns. I came to a gate, opened it and walked to some houses which seemed to suggest they might conceal one of those Italian villas that always get turned into hotels. I should have noticed that these houses didn’t have windows. Silly of me. Well, I walked into a kind of long corridor in one and of course they had ancient corpses all dressed up and standing against the wall for support, you couldn’t expect them to stand up without, I mean. I was shaking when I got out of there but the odd thing about these shakes was that when they should have stopped because I was no longer more frightened than usual the shaking went on. I stopped there among the windowless houses and shouted at them.