The Paper Men (6 page)

“I don’t think so, sir.”

“What were you looking for? My finger prints?”

“I had to talk to her. There’s a great deal only she knows.”

“Well, I’m damned.”

“And papers.”

“Now look, Rick Tucker. Those papers are mine and nobody,
nobody,
is going to go mucking about with them.”

“But—”

“It was a condition. The house is hers, then reverts to Emmy in the event of. The papers are mine.”

“Of course, Wilf. She said it was all very civilized.”

“Elizabeth? She said that? Why, it was—”

I stopped, not so much out of residual loyalty as caution. Elizabeth had been covering up, of course. It had been a rending, hateful match which would have broken my heart if I had had one and to which only Julian had managed to bring legal decency. I had given everything on my side, not out of generosity but just to be shot of the whole thing. Julian saved us from advertising the mutual hatred which linked us indissolubly for better or worse. Perhaps like me by now, she had worn away all but a vestige of the hatred and accepted the huge scar? Or had I? Had she?

“She said she had to keep them but they were nothing to do with her.”

“My papers?”

“You’ve never understood, sir. You are part of the Great Pageant of English Literature.”

He really did say that. It rolled forth like a statement being read out in court.
The
accused
wishes
to
state
that
he
is
part
of
the
Great
Pageant
—why, there was meat in it!
Prisoner
at
the
bar,
you
have
been
accused
of
being,
and
with
intent
to
deceive,
a
part
of
the
Great
Pageant
—

“Balls!”

Rick’s chin was back, forehead thrust forward, eyes looking out from under his ledge of rock.

“So give over, professor.”

“In any case, she refused me, Wilf.”

“She never was promiscuous. I give her that.”

“I know you’re joking, sir. But I see the hurt.”

“Well, for God’s sake! How was Capstone Bowers?”

“Well, I guess.”

“Good. Very good.”

“She wouldn’t even let me see the boxes.”

“Good. Good.”

“She said not without your permission. Written permission. That was the agreement, she said. ‘Gentleman’s agreement,’ she said and laughed. You both laugh a lot. I’d like to research that.”

“Vivisection. You don’t know about my life. You aren’t going to either.”

A minute cup of coffee and a large brandy had appeared on my rush place mat. I warmed the brandy with cupped hands.

“It’s important to me, Wilf. Very important. I’d give anything—
anything!
You don’t know the competition—and I have a chance. There’s a man—I’ll tell you one day. But I must have your permission—”

“I said no, damn it!”

“Wait, wait! I’m not talking about the papers—there’s time and maybe one day—but there’s another thing.”

“The devil of it is, I gave up drinking yesterday. Now here I am, without conscious volition, drinking brandy and really, you know, a little, just a little—”

“Another thing—”

“I’m what they call
just
a
little
on
circuit.
The condemned man ate a hearty breakfast. How odd it must be on circuit. Rather like motor roads. No one to talk to. Just booze and the papers of the next day’s cases. Cheers.”

“Wilf—”

I thought of judges and how little I knew about them. Lucky me. A long life of undiscovered crime. Those who didn’t get away with it were exported to Australia. The criminals that stayed behind bred the likes of us. Take your pick.

I became aware that Rick had gone on talking. I interrupted him.

“I get drunk so easily nowadays. It’s the altitude.”

“Wilf, please!”

“Professor?”

“It means a whole lot to me. I can do no more than plead—”

“You wanna be a full professor? Emeritus?”

“Wilf. I want you to appoint me your official biographer.”

I looked up at him and then a long way past him. My life, that life, that long and lengthening trail of—of what? Foot prints in the sands of. Snail trail. The evidence for the prosecution and, let us not forget, the evidence for the defence, if any, and the prisoner is not about to throw himself on the mercy of the court. Let him plead guilty, the social worker will come forward and testify in his behalf that he was kind to his old mum and horses, threw money about, often in the direction of his friends, had slipped many a bank note into this collecting box and that; all this, m’lud, I offer as a counterbalance to the prisoner’s habit of scrawling lies on paper into a shape that the weak-minded have taken as guide, comforter and friend, allegedly, often to their cost. I would remind you, m’lud, that the principal witness for the prosecution, the man Plato, is a foreigner. Mr Smith, the case for the prosecution has been made. You will confine yourself to giving evidence as to the moral stature of the prisoner. Well, m’lud, if the truth is to be told he has been a real bastard. …

Those memories, how they sting, scald, burn!

At nineteen I was a bank clerk, allowed to take in savings, register cheques. I was supposed to be reading for banking exams in my spare time, ha et cetera, so that I might—who knows?—become a cashier and end up as a bank manager. I was just out of school—school for farmers’ sons mostly, lads who couldn’t pass the common entrance. Mum’s shoestring riding stables sort of edged me in. She must have had some kind of pull, God knows what. So I could stand behind the counter with my old school tie well to the fore, smile brightly, as they used to say, while giving service without servility. The manager began by liking me because I could think of nothing better to do with my Wednesday and Saturday afternoons than play rugger. I was in a daze, I remember at the speed with which mum’s death—she’d thought I might go into the Church because I liked reading so much—had projected me into this world of figures. Even the rugger club consisted of old men by my standards. After the game on Saturday there’d be mild high jinks in a pub somewhere. Christ, I was naive!

Almost the first game, or after it, there was a corner snigger—

“Where’s young Wilf? He ought to try one!”

“One” was a pill. No, it wasn’t a drug, as it might be today. It was a commonly advertised aphrodisiac. Well, at least I am able to offer some personal evidence in a sphere where the claims are contradictory and few men appear willing to put their own evidence on paper. The pill worked. Perhaps it contained a mite of Spanish fly. Perhaps it was a placebo. But it worked.

Yes, of course, they assured me, we’d all be going on to the girls, where else? So, watched carefully and roundly applauded, I took it—nineteen, just nineteen! Well. I told my ex-chum, did I not, that Padre Pio’s stigmata must be nothing but suggestion?
Experientia
docet
stultos,
as Zonkers used to tell us when he gave us lines. I looked forward fearfully and libidinously. Of course, beyond the, shall we say, physiological plane nothing happened at all. The evening dwindled to half-pints drunk slowly, rugger songs, dirty talk and the odd remark tossed my way.

“Feeling all right, young Wilf? Sure? Ha ha.”

As the hypnotist told me, God rot him,
You
are
very
receptive
to
hypnotic
suggestion,
sir.

Well, you wouldn’t get such a thick-headed young fool today, they all know everything by the time they’re ten. But I was left with the kind of erection so gorged it was a steady pain and on which masturbation had no effect whatever. All night I wrestled and moaned but there was nothing for it. Next day I had to take my erection to the bank. All morning I stood behind the counter and my tie, smiling brightly at farmers, teachers, parsons, old ladies, young ladies bringing in the firm’s takings for the week and taking out the pay for the employees. All day the knob of my cock wore itself raw against the waistband of my underpants.

“Maybe I can share the joke, Wilf.”

He was examining me earnestly. Late light was fading from the window.

“Joke? How can it be a joke? I was thinking of my time as a banker.”

“I never knew.”

“Like T. S. Eliot.”

The thought of T. S. Eliot and the ithyphallic bank clerk set me off again.

“I could give you a new slant on banking, Rick.”

“Could you just mention the date for the record?”

“Sit still, man, and don’t fuss.”

It was the spirit of farce, of course. In one way I could describe my whole life as a movement from one moment of farce to another, farce on one plane or another, nature’s comic, her clown with a red nose, ginger hair and trousers always falling down at precisely the wrong moment. Yes, right from the cradle. The first time I shot over a horse’s head my fall was broken by a pile of dung. That’s farce in a good humour, that is. It silvered into my mind, I remember, that if only
once
I’d come down on something hard, something not farcical—

Well. There was still time.

“Talk to me, Wilf.”

Yes. He could have that. He could start with the pile of dung and go on to the bank clerk. I wouldn’t mind, would even write it out myself, would go on telly and scandalize the box, if that was still possible. I found, to my surprise, that I could look back at the sturdy young man in a goodish suit, white shirt and school tie (a little too brilliant perhaps but all the simple colour combinations had been taken by top places)—yes, I could look back at him with an amused toleration even an affection. I remembered—

“What
is
the joke, Wilf?”

—the time Wilfred Barclay was caught donating tuppence to the bank in order to square his figures; and the row with the cashier, since giving the bank small change was, in the cashier’s view and in the manager’s view and the bank’s view and, for all I know, in the Bank of England’s view, ethically worse than taking small change away from it.

The cashier was really passionate. He shoved my tuppence back at me.

“No one, no one at all, leaves this building until the accounts balance to the last penny!”

I was saved (or, as I would now say, my escape was delayed) by my rugger, which was approved of on every side. When I discovered Maupassant even rugger went. The end came. The end was a Scots bank inspector. I found myself quoting him to Rick.

“Ye know, Mr Barclay, ye’ve geeven me an entirely niew view of feegures.”

The manager expressed his regret that a wing three of such brilliance should be lost to the bank and the town.

“But you see, Barclay, it’s a question of heart. Your heart’s not really with us, is it?”

That was when I had a spell as a groom, then went some way towards the stage. I carried a spear at Elstree and spent a few months as a provincial reporter, mostly writing up any point-to-point in reach. There was the war. When I came back with a few pounds,
Coldharbour
wrote itself—
I
didn’t—Stein and Cowhorn published it, and hey presto.

A biography of Wilfred Barclay. Well, why not? Was the idea any more farcical than the material it would contain?

“And who is Lucinda?”

I came to with a start. It was the ageing man’s failing of shortening the link between the words in his mind and the words on his tongue. Rick was regarding me intently. Of course—he’d been there, shot by an air gun, the whole scene as deeply engraven in his memory as in mine. I shook my head and gave him what I hoped was an inscrutable smile. A shadow passed over the professor’s face (as we say in our extravagant way) when he saw the shop was no longer open.

Lucinda was more of a problem, more mixed, more nearly on the grey edge of the impermissible. So much of it, though, if not all of it, was her idea, not mine. When it came to sex, Lucinda was a genius. If
she
chose to write her memoirs! Dear God,
Domine
defende
nos!
A book for none but the gallant investigators of the human farmyard. She was such an inventor! Folks, what you have been looking for, take it home with you, a present for the wife, the kiddies, the dear old folks in whose toothless caverns marge will not melt—something new!

It was the Jiffy camera—a sort of proto-Polaroid, I think. She had one before they were even on the market. She would, of course, she knew a man. Trust Lucinda! Even her car was a one-off job. But using the camera was her idea, and God knows why it was so exciting but it was and made you feel like the chap in ‘The Eve of St Agnes’, above a mortal man impassioned far, practically bank clerk standard, in fact. She was ten years older than me, preserved carefully and very nearly the last relic of the BUF. But to strip off the rectangle of film, then together, naked or half-naked in bed, to watch the faint shadows, shapes hardly filled with colour, which way up, and she’d cry, “There I am!” or “There you are!” Of course, she wanted faces, her own mostly and mine sometimes, but rarely on the same pic, not possibly on the same pic.

I know now that her compulsion to have her face photographed in such situations and only seconds later to see it again in full colour was a substitute for having it off at the crossroads and stopping the traffic; or like the empress who performed on stage with peas and a duck to roars, one must suppose, of Byzantine applause. One day she remarked casually that we’d better wait for a bit as she thought she might have caught a dose of clap. I have never dodged so fast, even on the rugger field. After that—long after that—was the letter I’d torn up, together with photographs showing her and mostly anonymous bits of me, and thrown in the dustbin—fool!—only to have the resurrection man fish them out again. She kept the ones with my face on. Yet all that was
before
the days of Elizabeth—so why did memory of Lucinda in this most permissive age make me quiver so with unease?