The Paper Men

by William Golding

  So I had to break in brutally.

  “There isn’t going to be an agreement.”

  Rick’s mouth opened and shut without anything coming out of it but a dribble of the wine he had been drinking.

  “I’m sorry, Rick, but that’s how it is.”

  “You kay-ant—” He took a gulp of wine, shook himself and reverted to the mid-Atlantic ridge. “You can’t not. You, you promised me there in Weisswald after I’d. Not even you. You can’t.’

  “Listen, Rick, old friend—”

  “I say you can’t. You don’t know what it means. I put down every chip I got. You don’t mean it, sir, Wilf. I can take a joke—”

  “I’m not joking.”

  “I warn you, Wilf Barclay. I’ll write it whether— Look, sir. It means sheer beggary. I gave up everything. Mr St John John, Mr Clayton, you’re witnesses—”

  “Tell us more, Rick, after all we’re his old chums.”

  “I gave up my career like I said. I saved his neck—”

  “You did not!”

  “I did so! There, in the fog—”

  “You threw your wife at me, you followed and spied on me. Don’t make me too angry.”

  “You angry? God Almighty. You know what he made me do, sir, gentlemen? I never followed you—or if I did, why not? It’s a free country and you had your fun, jumping into a cab that time, a taxi, and being on the other Rhine boat and to cap it all, jeering at me in Marrakesh. If you go on like this—I’d meant to respect your wishes—”

  “Will you listen?”

  “I warn you. I’m not helpless!”

  “Oh for God’s sake!”

  “I’ll use the material Mrs Barclay gave me. And Miss Barclay!’

  “What material?”

  “They told me things.”

  “Oh my dears! A positive dénouement!”

  “Listen carefully, Rick. You’re a bit drunk and perhaps—anyway, listen. You’re not going to write that particular biography. I’m going to write it myself—”

  Rick gave a kind of howl. I’ve never heard anything like it. Perhaps it’s how a wolf howls or a coyote or something strange and wild. Things got very confused after that. I mean he also kneeled down or rather flung himself down on his knees.

  He also bit my ankle. For a turbulent moment or two I thought that I was about to experience that massive male strength again but then he was more or less in my lap and his hands went to my head. He got them on my right ear and left cheek and I think he was trying for my eyes with any fingers and thumbs he had to spare. Johnny tried to come between us and Gabriel, trying—I deduce—to pull the table away because of all the glass, got involved with two men from another table who rashly intervened. From what I’ve gathered since a wave of hysteria swept over the roomful of diners and those sober-suited professional men for the most part joined in. Tables went over, there were tears, people fell about, menus, wine lists, bills, order books, bits of manuscript flew up into the air and seemed to float like snow. People were cut by glass but in general we didn’t get much hurt. Even when we try, we chaps aren’t very good at that sort of thing. Like Mary Lou, if in no other way, we aren’t physical. I dare say there was some scratching and the odd bite, but little more. I lost a little of my beard and one ear was glowing, that was all. I didn’t even see what had happened to my “guest”. I slept very well.

  When I got downstairs next morning the club secretary was standing in the hall. He was looking severe as I suppose was natural. He marked me off on the list he had ready in his hand.

  “Mr Barclay, I must ask for your account of what happened last night in the dining-room.”

  “I can’t be bothered. Sorry.”

  “I have to report to the committee.”

  “If they want me to resign, tell them I’ll go quietly.”

  “I simply don’t know yet how much it’ll cost to repair our Psyche.”

  “Very aptly put, colonel, oh very apt.”

  The colonel’s frown deepened.

  “Are you admitting responsibility? If so—”

  “Oh what the hell. In a way I suppose. Yes.”

  I went into the coffee room which was empty except for a waitress and Mrs Stoney who was sitting at the receipt of custom and looking like her name. I had nothing but coffee. When I went to pay the bill, Mrs Stoney swelled a bit.

  “Well, Mrs Stoney, what did you think of it?”

  “It’s not my place to comment, sir.”

  “Oh come. We shan’t see each other again for I dare say they’ll sling me out. Come now, sound off, Mrs Stoney, what did you think of it?”

  “Your change, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  “Boys will be boys, Mrs Stoney. Goodbye.”

  So away I went. I had, I thought, a new shadow behind me, another bit of past to avoid. For even I, with all my quiet happiness, felt a bit humiliated by the ineffectual pothouse brawl. In books they make far too much of what can be read in a face—exaggerate wildly. But I did not care to remember Mrs Stoney. There are some expressions that can be read like large print, most prominent among them, contempt and dislike.

  Chapter XVI

  I wondered if I could bear to go home but the road unwound just as if things were normal. That was ironical as I soon found. I had been thinking of the roughing up poor Liz had given me. After all, in law she had no claim and Emmy was long past her twenty-firster. What really took me “home” was this MS you’re reading, the job I had to do, to make some use, it might be, of the mass of boxed-up papers before I finished with them. Even so I braced myself for it.

  And then Emmy met me at the door, red-eyed.

  “She’s gone.”

  “Who?”

  “Mummy.”

  “Gone where?”

  “You—you—she’s bloody dead, that’s where.”

  “When?”

  “Just now. This morning. Just your luck. You’d skipped.”

  Large tears trickled into the drawn-down corners of her mouth.

  “It’s been years and years, Emily.”

  “Oh God.”

  I suppose a father would have put an arm round her, better still offered her a shoulder to wet. But I wasn’t a father, only a stranger who was repelled by what fell from her eyes and nose. She was trying to say something but got little of it out.

  “I—I—can’t—”

  Her mouth opened and nature performed a yelling cry there before me in the human face and body. Then I did hold out a hand but she didn’t see it or didn’t want it. She turned and stumbled away, a plain, heavy young woman and she went down to the river where she used to go and hide as a child when the world was too much for her. I went into the hall, put down my single bag and climbed the stairs.

  “Our” bedroom door was opened and the window. The curtains moved a little and a faint sweetness came from the bowl of primroses and seemed a token of universal indifference. Blessed be indifference! Henry moved out of a corner, his cheerfulness if anything less subdued than usual, less subdued than his voice, however, which was little more than a whisper.

  “She had no pain. The liver, you see.”

  Lucky, lucky Elizabeth! Of numberless exits to have been awarded that one!

  All the appropriate things had been done. The nurse or Henry or both had worked fast and well. Her watch and her mother’s ring lay on the occasional table by the bed. She was monumental under the white sheet. Henry moved forward towards the bed. He turned and invited me silently. Thus enslaved by what was evidently one of the rituals of death I moved forward and stood beside him. He drew the sheet down to her breast and held it there.

  Elizabeth looked quite astonishingly and unnervingly like herself. Someone had wiped off the scarlet slash of lipstick and her unadorned face was minatory. I found myself wondering why I had braced myself for changes. It was nothing, the fall of a leaf.

  Her eyes snapped open and they stared up at me. The whole world swam round me for a moment and was covered in mist.

  Henry
was tut-tutting. He was bending over her and doing something, a trick of the trade. He drew the sheet up again.

  I found my voice.

  “Pennies. Drachmas. Obols.”

  Henry put his hand under my elbow and turned me. We marched away together and downstairs. I went to the appropriate cupboard and got not wine for us but whisky. I offered some to Henry without thinking, but he smiled and shook his head. I took a pull at the whisky which went the wrong way. What with shock and coughing I was nearly sick. Henry patted my back. The resources of science.

  Presently I straightened up and he beamed at me.

  “Better?”

  I examined myself. There wasn’t any question of being “better”.

  “I suppose so. Yes.”

  Henry smiled delightedly.

  “I’ll take care of everything, er, Wilf.”

  “Yes. I suppose so. Thank you, Henry.”

  “Well. I’ll be going, then.”

  Still beaming he withdrew.

  I went into the garden and pushed through the bushes. Emmy was sitting on the stone seat and peering into the woods across the river. I stood behind her.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I don’t know. You’ve left it a bit late, haven’t you? No. I don’t think so.”

  “People will have to be told. Relatives.”

  “And the vicar. She was C. of E. every now and then.”

  “Is he the young chap in jeans, a sweater with a hole in it and an eighth of an inch of clerical collar?”

  “That’s him, Douglas. He’s all right. Last week she was sounding off about me in front of some people. Later he murmured to me, ‘Suffering doesn’t always improve people.’ Down to earth.”

  “Is there anything, I mean, that I can do for you?”

  “As you said just now. It’s been a long time.”

  “For me too. So. If it’s any comfort there’s rather a lot of money coming your way. From her first, then me.”

  As Rick once said, we laughed a lot, Liz and I. Now he could have included Emmy.

  *

  Everything went off OK. A crowd of relatives turned up to the funeral but tended to group round Emmy and leave me alone. It wasn’t shyness either. Rick came to the service which Emmy insisted on having and to the cremation afterwards. He sat at the back, crying noisily, and rushed away before the ceremony was over. Later, in the house, I was left alone even more pointedly as people scrummed politely for the smoked salmon and Moselle. Only once a man broke free, one of her relatives I suppose, though I don’t know. He may have been a chum of Capstone Bowers sent to depute for he had army written all over him, large, stout, red-faced. I was ready for conversation or even the offer of a drink but he glared down at me for a few seconds, opening and closing his mouth like a goldfish. Then he changed his mind and went back into the mob. I thought of my Italian connection and the come-uppance she gave me. This was an English Home Counties come-uppance. It went far towards confirming me in my rediscovered belief that there are better places.

  “Home thoughts from abroad, forsooth!” It made me feel angry.

  The young man, Douglas, emerged from the mob hastily as if to pour oil and repair some social damage. He had a black silk front and rather more clerical collar showing than usual. He came to me with the sort of ducking earnestness which reminded me of Rick Tucker in the days when he was really diffident. I was still angry.

  “Ah—Douglas, isn’t it?—how’s the Church these days?”

  “Struggling, Mr Barclay. In need of help.”

  “Money, of course.”

  He shook his head with decision.

  “No. Or not—primarily.”

  “If it’s spiritual assistance you need, you’ve come to the right person.”

  “Really?”

  “You will find this difficult to believe but I suffer with the stigmata. Yes. Four of the five wounds of Christ. Four down and one to go. No. You can’t see the wounds, unlike with poor old Padre Pio. But I assure you my hands and feet hurt like hell—or should I say heaven?”

  “I don’t think—”

  “You don’t think people like me should claim such distinctions?”

  He was looking round in a worried manner as if, I thought, to find a really good shrink to recommend. Perhaps he would give me the name and address of his own.

  “Come, vicar. Don’t you find it remarkable?”

  “You are serious?”

  “Otherwise you’ll be off again to those publicans and sinners?”

  “Oh no. Or rather—you are serious?”

  “I should be! At times they hurt like hell.”

  He looked closely into my face.

  “You must be very proud of them.”

  That took me aback. He amplified with a grin of quite unclerical teeth.

  “After all. There were three crosses.”

  I stood there, seeing the room before me as on a screen—the relatives filing away past Emmy, young Douglas now making his goodbye to her, all the shaking of hands and agreeing that people only seemed to meet nowadays at funerals.

  But I was left with so much cleared up! Three crosses—the whole spectrum— Not for me the responsibility of goodness, the abject terror of being holy! For me the peace and security of knowing myself a thief! I stood, saying nothing, doing nothing while they all went away. Emmy came and said something to me, I think, but I didn’t catch what. Indeed, I must have sat down at some point but I don’t remember doing it. Mrs Wilson must have cleared the mess away but I never noticed her. It was a kind of catatonia.

  Next day Emmy said she’d sell the house as soon as I had, as she put it, “fucked off”. Then she went back to her social work in some middle-class slum or other and I was left to clear my things out of the house. I found I’d left little but the papers that had so annoyed Liz and Capstone Bowers. It occurred to me, I remember, that without pondering the matter I’d probably meant them to annoy. We don’t know much about our current selves, do we?

  Rick came and begged me and cursed and yapped. I forbade him the house which is a bit of a joke when you come to consider it. But he hung round, sleeping God knows where and spying on me every now and then round corners. Since my dream I’ve been as certain as your average sane man could be when people are really there and when they aren’t. There’s no doubt at all, Rick is really there and spying on me. He hasn’t the least idea that I have it in my power and what is more in my purpose to heal him. I’ll get him his dream. Wilfred Barclay the great consultant.

  Capstone Bowers rang. He didn’t come to the funeral but had the cheek to demand his books and his gun. I hung up on him. I ought to add he’d drunk what used to be my really brilliant cellar and not kept it up.

  I’ve spent the time, since Emmy went, in ploughing through some of the piles of paper from the tea chests; but mostly in typing and brooding on this brief account. Yesterday I reread at a sitting the whole thing from Rick at the dustbin down to Douglas at the funeral. The wake. Ha et cetera.

  Putting aside repetitions, verbals, slang, omissions, it’s a fair record of the various times the clown’s trousers fell down. At my age there can’t be many more. I do think the best of the lot, the real, theologically witty bit of his clowning, was surely the stigmata awarded for cowardice in the face of the enemy! But St Francis and all the other suggestible creatures didn’t just get it in the hands and feet, they got the wound in the side which finished off Christ or at least certified him dead. I’m missing that one; and there’s hardly time or occasion for a custard pie to provide it. For I intend to disappear again. A car in which one can sleep? Van? Caravan? A begging bowl under an Indian tree? Be your age, Wilf! It is too late for that. I shall disappear into comfort and security!

  Which brings us right up to today. I have taken all the papers from the chests and built them into a bonfire down by the river. As I sit at this desk I have only to lift my head and over the typewriter I can see the pile, a positive mountain of mostly white paper
waiting there—startlingly white against the dark woods on the other side of the river. When I’ve rounded off this manuscript I shall take a can of paraffin down there, drench the lot and set fire to it—a rite of passage made out of the detritus, the nail clippings, cut hair, the worn-away time, unnecessary correspondence, reviews, theses, financial statements, manuscripts, interlinears, proofs, the paperweight of a whole life!

  Then I shall find Rick and give him this small sheaf of papers, all that is necessary, all that will be left, all that means anything to set over against the lying stories, the partial journals and all the rest. It will be a kind of dying. Freedom forsooth, freedom quotha.

  I am happy, quietly happy. How can I be happy? Sometimes the experience is like a jewel, exquisite, sparkling, without words. Sometimes it is calm and beyond all my ordinary experience, because of its perfect calmness. I am happy. That’s not reasonable, it’s a fact. Either I have broken away from the intolerance which is impossible, or it has let me go, which is also impossible.

  How could I change? But I have changed. Drink, for example. After more than a quarter of a century of trying I have now given up drink for good without trying at all! It may be a perilous thing to write in view of the times the clown’s trousers have fallen down; but I know with absolute, inward certainty that I have drunk my last drink.