The Paper Men

by William Golding

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You’re not a day older. Boozing, wenching, living it up—”

  “Only boozing. And that—”

  “Oh shut up. Of course you will again. The thing is, I need someone. That’s the fact of the matter and I won’t penalize Emmy, not any more. You know? Well. You don’t.”

  “Not really.”

  “Then I had my great idea. I got hold of Thomas and bullied your poste restante out of him. I thought I’ll get Wilf home if it’s humanly possible. He’s no idea of caring for other people but he’s too bloody weak to scarper. It’s blackmail, you see.”

  “This is where we left off only backwards. More or less. Worse, perhaps.”

  “So it is.”

  Then we were silent again so you could hear the birds in the orchard and far off a whinny from the other end of the paddock. Elizabeth spoke in her natural, social voice, absurdly conventional.

  “Won’t you sit down?”

  “Well. Yes. If I may.”

  So there we were, our feet on the warm floor, both seated, one each side of the empty grate.

  “I’m sorry, Wilf. I didn’t mean it to be—I don’t know what I meant it to be.”

  “When you are better again—”

  “As you used to say, ha et cetera. Wilfred Barclay, the great consultant.”

  “There must be something—”

  “There’s everything you want in the spare room. Use that bathroom. I use the back one, have all my things there. Mrs Wilson’ll cook. Or you can go out. All the pubs do reasonable food these days. I can’t stand cooking.”

  “Feed you up.”

  “I don’t eat.”

  “You should.”

  “Don’t you know anything? Haven’t you seen anything?”

  “The war—”

  “God, the injustice of it! You booze and wench and lie and cheat and exploit and posture like a— I’ve put you to bed, lied for you, covered up for you—and I get cancer just as if I’d boozed away every year of my life!”

  There was nothing to say. The shadows of the evening had crept right across the room. Facing me was a blur of brown skull with black eye sockets.

  “You always were good at silences, weren’t you, Wilf?”

  “It was more a case of you not giving me a chance to speak.”

  “That’s a good one! It goes far to restore my belief in your rottenness. Well. Soon you’ll be able to talk with no one to interrupt. Happy?”

  I said nothing, did nothing. As so often, to speak the truth was impossible; for I was happy indeed—had remained happy ever since the dream. Nothing could alter that, not even poor Liz. The truth was shameful and it was too late to learn compassion or find another dog.

  There was too much silence. I broke it at last.

  “I’m staying, that’s all.”

  “You must’ve got religion. Visiting the sick. You can’t go, can you? What would the biographers say? A dying woman who bore you a child. You have to stick round, Wilf, and see it through. A slice of life. No writer should be without them.”

  “All right.”

  “Robert Farquharson of The Keyhole knows. So does Rick Tucker.”

  “Yap yap.”

  “That’s what he kept saying the other day. I thought it must be some new catch word but I’m not au fait these days, don’t even watch TV.”

  She scrabbled for a cigarette in the box on the table by her chair and lit it, then went straight into a coughing fit. She threw the cigarette into the grate but immediately she stopped coughing fumbled for another one.

  “You still don’t smoke, do you, Wilf? Men! Even Humph was scared of this, this—”

  “Illness. Sickness.”

  “—this cancer.”

  “Look, Lizzie, I’ll try to explain. This has struck me all of a heap. But I want to help. I’m not used to helping.”

  “I’ll say! Christ! What is it? Have you been Received? Are you under instruction? What you need is reconstruction.’’

  “You’ve been saving this up. Go right ahead. Get rid of all the vomit. When you’ve done I’ll try to say—”

  “—and you’ll succeed. That’s one thing about you, Wilfred Barclay, when you do break a silence it may not be significant or profound but for sheer glibness—”

  “Will you listen or not? Just tell me. If not, I’ll shut up.”

  She coughed a bit then threw the second cigarette into the grate.

  “All right.”

  So I told her or tried to tell her. I went right through it, from waking up drunk but not drunk and knowing at last what it was like to be happy. I tried to explain the immediacy of the dream that had made everything else a kind of mirage. The longer I went on trying to describe the indescribable the sillier it sounded.

  “—it turned me round, you see. I’d been screaming and holding on to time as if I could stop the whole process; but the dream turned me round and I knew that the way I was going, towards death, was the way everybody goes, that it was—healthy and right and consonant—here, what’s the matter?”

  I found I was standing over her. I thought she’d had some kind of seizure or attack but then I saw that she was laughing.

  “You utter, utter bastard! You clown! You, you—”

  “Look, Liz—”

  “You talk about happiness, years away from your own death—”

  “I don’t mean that! I was trying to tell you that it’s all right!”

  The laughter and coughing were mixed up.

  “You get some kind of fancy religion—”

  I was shouting.

  “I found I was part of the universe, that’s all!”

  Her laughter went eldritch.

  “You’re not part of it, you sod! You’re the whole bloody lot! Here am I—”

  She burst into tears.

  That was when our local doctor called. Perhaps she was expecting him, I don’t know. Henry was a master of elaborate tact. Me, he greeted—perhaps the word had gone round—as if I had come back from a weekend in London rather than years away. He greeted Liz as though he hadn’t heard her rage and didn’t notice the wetness in her hollow cheeks. Indeed he—exuded—a kind of cheerfulness as though he knew that in spite of all the evidence that might be brought by the prosecution, in spite of suffering, darkness and death it was just a game and at some point we should all give up pretending in the tragicomedy we had put on and return to permanent, common-sense awareness.

  I took my things up to the spare room and examined it. Once upon a time, Rick had slept there by himself, then later with Mary Lou, and now again by himself. Many others had slept there at odd times. It was a cottagey room, the fireplace still in order and a smallish window that looked up the river to Foxy’s Island. When the leaves were off the trees or newly budded as now, you could see to the turn where the milldam was. Even if she hadn’t told me I’d have known that Capstone Bowers had slept there—either when Liz’s sickness became acute or when they started the final series of quarrels. His books stood on the mantelpiece, Maneaters of the Deccan, The Elephant Gun, Rifles, Ammunition and Rifle Shooting, Bisley, History and Records. Above them a horizontal shape of unfaded wallpaper showed where he had hung his “Bisley” gun. I leafed through his books, waiting till the doctor had gone. There were some splendid diagrams, one of where to shoot a tiger—behind the shoulder or up the arse, never in the head if you want to mount. Adages. How to follow up a wounded animal. Shooting for the pot. Good God, poor Liz, living for all those years with this monster!

  I left my bags and went downstairs. From the fact that I could hear Mrs Wilson clattering in the kitchen I deduced that Henry had gone otherwise she would be on tiptoe and the dishes muffled. I went looking for Liz but couldn’t find her. Emmy was in the long room.

  “So you’ve come back to be with mummy. What a fool.”

  “You’re here.”

  “That’s different.”

  She wandered away towards the kitchen. I stood in the m
iddle of the room as if waiting for my hostess. Well. I was. Anything farther from a reconciliation or even accommodation—where was the big, warm-hearted and final Barclay Book that had floated before me every now and then since the dream? We were about as warmhearted as scorpions.

  Liz came down from her room, calm and dull. She’d been given something.

  “Sorry about that. No, not him. Me. Won’t you sit down?”

  “I have to go away again.”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I’ll be back again. It’s Rick Tucker. I promised—”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll meet him at the Random. He’s not getting the papers, not those, anyway.”

  “He’s mad, you know.”

  “Yes.”

  “So he won’t like it.”

  “Well.”

  We were both silent for a while. Liz took out a cigarette, changed her mind, made a gesture towards putting it back in the box, then threw it in the grate with the others.

  “It’s odd, Wilf.”

  “Yes. We shouldn’t have married. Ought to have been relatives, brother and sister, it’s been that sort of thing, lifelong, always connected no matter what.”

  “I didn’t mean us. I meant you and him. The other day I was reading a biography. Mrs Hemingway said, ‘Aldous got better. Ernest got worse.’ When I read that I thought about you. She said nothing of critics and drudges. You know what? You and Rick have destroyed each other.”

  Chapter XV

  I went to London for three days. I’d have made it more only the club now had an even stricter time limit for staying nights. Somehow I couldn’t face the Athenaeum among all the bishops and vice-chancellors. Say what you like about the Random, there isn’t a bishop in sight. Come to that, nowadays there’s hardly ever a writer in sight. The first evening there was no one about I knew so I rang my agent but he’d gone home, of course. He lives in the country and I realized I didn’t even know his address—canny fellow! I thought of a girl but couldn’t be bothered or was too old or afraid or too sensible. I looked at some of the theatres and realized I just simply didn’t care about them or about the films. I stood on the pavement of Piccadilly and watched the human race off for its evening’s entertainment and thought to myself that Liz was right. I was destroyed in that I no longer belonged to that race but to the ghosts and memories of men. I had my dream and the solid pavement was insubstantial beside it. The violin string was either slack or snapped. Intolerance had drawn back and, though still there, was about as relevant to me as church furnishings. It was the dream singing which wasn’t singing; and since singing starts just where words leave off, where are you? Face to face with the indescribable, inexplicable, the isness, which was where you came in.

  I wandered back to the Random and had a drink to pass the time. Sitting was so peaceful (the place was empty except for two strangers talking earnestly to each other at the bar) that I had another and then another and so on. I did slip a bit.

  Next day I saw my agent at his office and did a lot of nodding. He wanted to know if I had anything coming along and I said yes but I’d sooner not discuss it as discussion can sometimes harden an outline—the usual stuff—and he also nodded and I saw how anxious he was to get rid of me. Wilfred Barclay won’t do much more, you know. He’s all washed up and living on his rents. He’s gone all indifferent. Maybe it’s time we thought about a collected edition. I went back to the Random and spent the day in bed, sleeping—actually sleeping, peacefully, like a babe as they say, inaccurate as usual. I got up round about five o’clock and sat in the snakepit, waiting. Presently Jonquil came in and told me that Professor Tucker was outside. I was surprised she hadn’t told him to go right in but all was made clear when I went out to the lobby. He was squatting on the floor with his back against the grandfather clock. His front was open to the navel if you could have detected that spot among the curls but a large gold necklace lay among the thickets and every kind of charm hung from it—the cross of Lorraine, the Eye of Osiris, the Ankh, a swastika the right way round, the pentacle and a dozen others I couldn’t recognize. As I came into the lobby, Rick put his tongue out and grinned and barked. I was a little worried that he was up the wall for good and all which though it would solve things in the long run would pose some immediate problems. But after his initial bark he got up and dusted the Random off his seat.

  “Wilf, sir, you’re looking great!”

  “Tell me how.”

  “Just great!”

  He laughed excitedly like a kid that’s been promised, yes, today we really will go on a picnic. He was so young. He was so young-looking. Forty. Maybe forty-five.

  “And you look great, Rick, just great. Come along.”

  I led the way to the bar and Rick followed, chiming quietly like a very superior carriage clock.

  “A drink or two first, Rick, then dinner. You don’t mind eating here? The food is reasonable and the drink first-class.”

  Rick was gazing round him, making a mental note of all the Eng. Lit. faces on the walls. He identified them one after another with little cries of triumph.

  “But you’re not there, Wilf!”

  “Not dead yet. Give me time.”

  We took our drinks back to the snakepit.

  “The paper, Wilf. The agreement—”

  “After dinner, Rick, there’s a good chap.”

  “It’s been so long now—can I phone from here?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’m so anxious to telephone the good news to Mr Halliday. He will be delighted. You like my necklace? To it I attribute the recent, how to say, change in my, my fortunes—”

  “My dear Rick, you speak like an Englishman! Yes, I do like your necklace. Doesn’t it ever get in the soup?”

  “It was in my bag when. Wilf, sir, I have to apologize sincerely. I was not myself. It was just anxiety for I do sincerely see my life’s work or as one might say my duty to be the careful investigation of—”

  “I know, I know. After dinner.”

  “—and apologize for what I said.”

  “For calling me a mother-fucking bastard?”

  There was a cry of delight from the doorway behind us. Johnny St John John and Gabriel Clayton were coming through it.

  “Rick Tucker, you didn’t!”

  “Why, hullo there.”

  “Gabriel, Johnny, Rick. Everybody know each other?”

  Beside Johnny’s lanky figure Gabriel looked short but he wasn’t. He was medium-height and broad as befits a sculptor. He was a bit round-shouldered and this, with his lowering head, gave him some resemblance to a bull. He knew this and was not displeased by it. Now he laid his fist on his forehead in what he thought was the salute of one artist to another then turned back to the others.

  “‘Mother-fucking’,” he said. “I see it as a group. Bronze. We can have it in the other alcove opposite Psyche. Wilf will pay. Much more distinguished than hanging on the wall among all those dreary belles-lettrists.”

  “Gabriel, dear, do us a preliminary sketch at once! Wilf will pose.”

  “He bloody won’t.”

  “I haven’t seen you since Portugal, Wilf.”

  “I never met you in Portugal!”

  “He goes on like this, Rick, you know.”

  “Yes, sir, I do know. It’s remarkable.”

  “I put you to bed, Wilf. You owe me a meal. I will collect tonight.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Me too, Wilf, dear. In view of the positively penetrating analyses of your character with which I have favoured you on this shore or that—”

  “Johnny St John John will now favour us with an example of his penetration.”

  “Another group, Gabriel. White marble, for purity.”

  “Ha et cetera.”

  “You are utterly penetrable Wilfred. You’d be perfectly happy with my little homilies if instead of calling you Rudesby I’d called you cher maître, wouldn’t you now? We all have our ambitions such as they are—a K, per
haps, eh, Wilf? No? All passion spent?”

  “You’re too clever by half.”

  Gabriel was already coming back from the bar with two open bottles of claret held cleverly by their necks in either hand.

  “This is generous of you, Wilf.”

  “So I see.”

  “Glasses, Johnny!”

  “I go, I go. Swifter than et cetera.”

  “You are Rick.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you wealthy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “The day of the rich Americans is past, I’m afraid.”

  “No, sir, it isn’t, sir!”

  “I am looking for a rich American. Arabs don’t go in for sculpture except as an investment.”

  “He’s not wealthy, Gabriel. He’s a poor white like the rest of us.”

  “This man thinks he’s poor, Rick. He’s kept himself, to say nothing of his chums, for a third of a century in booze and travel if nothing else. He’s only got to tell them there’s something for sale and the presses roll, banks gape, reviewers sharpen their pencils—”

  “Knives. For God’s sake, leave me alone. This is a business visit. Rick and I have things to discuss after dinner.”

  “Well, dear, you can’t discuss business in the Random because it’s against the house rules, as well you know. Seduction is on, drag, drugs, my dears, bottomry, barratry, the occasional gang bang—”

  “Don’t be an oaf, Johnny.”

  “—besides, ‘after dinner’ is hours away. Personally I’ve never known a time when drink didn’t expedite business—if, that is, it’s really business and not some euphemistical employment—oh of course, it should be the business that’s euphem—”

  “Johnny, you’re high. Let’s dispose of these bottles at once. It’s very, very kind of you, Wilf.”

  I felt tired and said so but it had no effect on them. Rick, I noted, began to do what I had never seen him do before. He was drinking, not as heavily as Gabriel but feverishly. At last we wandered up to dinner, Rick now talking a bit wildly. His speech had reverted to toneless Middle-West or wherever it came from originally. They all three got higher and higher. Some of the talk was good, particularly Gabriel’s. I was dull. It was odd to find myself the only sober one of the four! The turning point came when I explained to Rick that if he got any drunker he wouldn’t understand what I had to say to him. Well, Rick, with a touch of the whimpers rather than belligerence, gave us all to understand that he wasn’t interested in explanations. He just wanted the agreement. I said, to break things gently and as it were lead him towards the truth before revealing it, that the agreement had never been more than a gentleman’s agreement which made Johnny laugh and laugh. I got a bit angry. Gabriel, with his capacity for stirring things up suggested that he and Johnny should be witnesses to the signing. Before I had gathered my wits together, Rick was explaining the whole thing to them, Mary Lou and all.