The Paper Men (10 page)

What
did
he
expect?
What was the, as we say in our jargon, projected scenario? Did he think we would fence archly, and she, girlishly, dodge round the table and say, no, Wilf, no, not unless you sign that paper? Or was she to crawl up me odalisquelike to plead with her lips pouted? Or was she to agree in a matter-of-fact way like a noseblow and then I, obligated, would sign, saying, take it, it’s what you want.

Thank
you
for
having
me!
The pathetic idiocy, the vulnerability of the girl, the gross, insulting imperceptivity of the man! Yet he had not been so very far out after all. Had that skin been warm and given back the faintest signal, how different it would all have been! Neither of us, critic and author, we knew nothing about people or not enough. We knew about paper, that was all. The poor girl was the human one. She didn’t know how to do it. But then—I didn’t know how to do it! He didn’t know how to offer it. Pimp, client and whore, all we three needed the assistance of a professional. I stood in the blazing room, behind me the dark oblong of the window with its quenched stars. I stared at Rick’s paper on the table, then at the card hung on the outer door,
Avis
aux
MM
les
clients.
I thought of Rick lying discreetly in bed, perhaps snoring gently so as to make his wife’s return something neither of them need take notice of or comment on. But she would shake him out of his snores and assure him that nothing had happened, nothing at all except that Mr Barclay had put his hand on her left shoulder, yes, shoulder, and she knew he wanted her only he hadn’t done anything but taken his hand away again and he hadn’t said much, nothing had happened, nothing at all, would he hold her, please, please, make love to her, she was so, so soiled and he must never, never ask her again—

Then at last they would sleep, her tears hung in the thickets of his chest.

The paper was still on the table.
I hereby
appoint
Professor
Rick
L.
Tucker
.…

I could make him suffer. I could sign it and give it to him tomorrow when we went walking.

“Mary Lou forgot this, Rick. By Jove, she earned it!”

Unspeakable! The vision of her, the glamour and the childish vulnerability caught me by the heart and the throat, nowhere else, it seemed. But there was a touch of panic too. I knew that the finger was on me, I was limed by her and would have to struggle to get myself free. Only the space of one day, morning, noon, night, to bring such change! It was there, the trap I had tried to avoid—and
would
avoid!—the bitter sorrow of a love that is fruitless, pointless, hopeless, agonizing and ridiculous. Once more, the clown’s trousers had fallen down.

I cursed myself inwardly, then protested to myself that all was not lost. The brandy was still on the table, the mature man’s consolation. Then, paper man that I am, I began to think—what a story!

I woke too early with a clear memory of the night before and the kind of parched distancing from reality which comes from considerable brandy. After the bathroom I went into the sitting-room and was not surprised to see that the brandy bottle was half empty. Strangely, though, apart from dryness, I had no hangover. Instead I had a thirst which I quenched with about six successive tumblers of mountain water. It seemed rather immoral to have drunk so much and not to be suffering for it, but the fact was undeniable, I was feeling physically as well as I had ever felt in my life. Rage and sorrow burn up alcohol. I remembered and examined my new thraldom and rebelled against it.
Think
no
more
of
her
is
always
the
solution.
For she had committed herself, there was no doubt of it, consented to shape her life on completing with him a charmed circle. It was all the more evident from the ludicrous and sordid non-transaction of the night before. Think no more of her, put that image out of the visualizing eye, for God’s sake, don’t be your age, that way madness lies. Think rather of him and his attempt at
liming
a literary bird—

Well. I would teach Professor Tucker a lesson he would never forget. I would take to my own weapons. I would put him in a book, a story, with such a viciously precise delineation that even Mary Lou would blush for him and the strange rich man Halliday laugh him out of his life.

Then, of course, the novelist’s truism popped out. It was no good putting the real, live Rick L. Tucker in a book. He had this in common with most of the human race—he was quite spectacularly unbelievable. There are things that novelists invent which they call characters but they aren’t. They’re constructs, shaved down out of some wood or other—a psychic plasma—into figures as like each other as Russian dolls. The only thing I could do was select, tone down, adjust, produce a comically loathsome figure, recognizable and tolerable because it was “only a story”.

It came to me—and with an eighth glass of water—that I must do what I had never done before in my life. No more invention, only selection—I must actually study a living person. Rick should become my prey. Instead of trying to avoid him when boredom or anger set in, I must reverse our situation. All the time he thought he was finding out about me I should be finding out about him. It was all the exhilaration of the hunt. Yoicks! Tally ho!

All the time, over breakfast then dressing, I was busy putting together what I knew of him and realized at last that it amounted to less than the police would want for a description. He was large, he was huge—how huge? The tall young man who had crouched behind our dustbin had filled out in every way. He was broad and thick. I called to mind the mat of hair, the forest of hair, I had seen all down his front. As well as that, there were thickets in his arm pits, small images of the same in his nostrils—probably the hair extended down his legs to end round his ankles like the feathers on a cob or, rather more aptly, on a cart horse. It grew thick and close over his head, thick on his eyebrows, thick and long as eyelashes. Had the hairy Ainu crossed by way of the frozen Bering Straits, or had later immigration brought this near-freak the other way across the Atlantic? Examined, rather than run from or derided, I began to see that Professor Tucker was not without interest. How much hair could the novelist get away with? Not quite so much—the bit down the front, the mop of black hair on his head, the eyebrows and eyelashes would be more than enough. Mostly the writer deals with the bits of his characters that stick out. The rest is silence—clothes, I mean. It was sheer luck I knew he was as shaggy between the legs as a Shetland pony.

Skin. Oddly white, in itself, but where a beard and moustache might have been the area was covered with the black roots of hairs all cut off by pressure of the safety razor just, as it were, below ground level but still there and visible, giving, with the white, slightly oily skin, an effect of—what? Absurdly, my mind could find nothing but a quotation from somewhere, a quotation the aptness of which was not apparent—
silence
and
old
night.

Hands, square, fat, white, the backs inevitably sprinkled with the standard Tuckerish hair. And so clean. Far too clean, the nails very nearly convex rather than—hell, which was which? They were dished, would hold rain water.

He must be strong, of course. One of those hands could squeeze—made into a fist could hit—or wielding an axe—but they had never done so. The typewriter was their weapon.

Those shaggy privates—no. Learn, old man, what is not to be thought, not to be touched on, what is nothing, nothing but sickness and pain. Forget. Let it be.

So. To the hunt!

Mary Lou?

I would avoid her as much as possible, only tolerating them until I had all the relevant information on my pursuer. I would suffer a little but then she would be gone.

Rick and I met in the foyer. I was in moderately heavy boots and anorak, Rick dressed, except for the skates, as if he were about to play ice hockey. He looked enormous.
OLE ASHCAN
was to the fore again. Yes, he
was
enormous.

“How tall are you, Rick?”

“A metre—”

“Old style, please.”

“Six feet three inches, sir.”

“And you weigh—not in kilos but pounds?”

“Two hundred twenty-five.”

“Could you divide that by fourteen?”

He did so. I whistled.

“And you look it, Rick, every hunkish pound. What on earth got you stuck with academics?”

“I wanted it, Wilf. Wilf, those boots, they wouldn’t last over rough country.”

“They are not going to be taken over rough country.”

“Maybe not today, but—”

“Have you noticed?”

“Yeah. Fog.”

“They don’t advertise it.”

“No, sir, they don’t. Wilf, I was really sorry not to see the stars with you last night. Mary Lou said it was truly inspirational.”

“She did? Well, today we can see all of twenty-five yards. We are down to earth, Rick.”

“Am I going too fast for you, Wilf?”

“Not yet but it’s a kind thought.”

“Maybe you wondered why I didn’t join you last night?”

Mindful of my new role as hunter, I nodded.

“Yes, why?”

“We take this path to the left. My God, the fog’s thickening, Wilf. But don’t worry, there’s a handrail all the way. Even if the fog closes right in, we can feel along the cliff edge—”

“Christ!”

“I didn’t say anything last night, Wilf, but the altitude got to me too.”

“You’re like her, Rick, you’re just not physical. I’ve never met such a truly spiritual pair. But this cliff: I warn you, I don’t like heights. I don’t even like that bloody balcony.”

“Come to that, Wilf, I don’t like the way these fields smell.”

“Stink. Doctor Johnson.”

“Fertilizer.”

“It’s shit, you fool. It doesn’t disappear for ever in the John and Jean. It’s human. They spread it around. They don’t waste anything.”

Rick gagged and clapped a handful of Kleenex over his mouth and nose. He broke into a canter and soon disappeared into the fog a few yards further along the path. I peered up into the fog and could detect slightly more luminosity in it in one direction than another. Presumably the sun was up there still and moving towards midday. Later perhaps I should be able to see the cliff and decide whether I would go on or not. Meanwhile I strolled slowly between malodorous and invisible fields. I took my time. Some people can’t stand heights. Others can’t stand faeces.
Chacun
et cetera.

Ten minutes later there was the hygienic smell of pines and the suggestion round me of their massive darknesses in the fog. Rick was waiting for me. At that point the air was clearing a trifle, so that as soon as I saw him I also saw tree tops on my left at eye level and pine roots in a bank on my right. Rick, I now saw, was leaning negligently against a railing on the left-hand side of the path.

“Aw, Wilf—it’s solid as the rock.”

Nevertheless he heaved himself upright, adjusted his pace to mine. There was the sound of water rushing down the mountain somewhere ahead. It was strangely comforting, heaven knows why. I stared up into the fog and could make out now and then a silver penny racing through intense whiteness and inanity towards the zenith. I looked down and round me. The three tops had withdrawn, suggesting some increasing gap of air below us on the left.

“Are you sure this path is OK, Rick? You’ve been along it? A solid rail all the way? No nasty surprises?’

“No, sir.”

We walked on together. The rushing sound was nearer and presently water came into view. It was a small mountain stream that dropped out of the fog on the right, splashed across the path and disappeared into the fog below us. Rick stopped before the stream. He raised a finger, hushing me. I stopped and hushed. He had more black hairs in his right nostril than the left. He was right-nostrilled.

There was nothing to hear but the stream and, faintly somewhere, cowbells. I sat by the stream on a convenient projection of rock. I looked up at him, raising my eyebrows. For answer he pointed to the stream. I listened again, bent down and pretended to smell it, put a finger in but took it out again quickly, fearing frost bite.

“Can’t you hear, Wilf?”

“Course I can.”

“I mean—isn’t there something real queer about the sound?”

“No.”

“Listen again.”

It was true. The stream, a single skein of falling water briefly interrupted by the path, had two voices, not one. There was the cheerful babble, a kind of frivolity as if the thing, the Form, enjoyed its bounding passage downward, through space. Then running under that was a deep, meditative hum as if despite the frivolity and surface prattle the thing sounded from some deep secret of the mountain itself.

“It’s not just single!”

“Yeah. ‘Two voices are there, one is of the deep—’”

I looked at him with surprise that turned to an unwilling degree of respect. There had been last night—and now this.

“I’ve never listened to water before—not really listened.”

“I can’t believe that, Wilf.”

Also, my mind noted and put away in some drawer to be taken out later that there was a lengthy piece of prose to be written on listening to natural sound—listening without comment or presupposition.

“How come, Rick, as you might say? I mean why you?”

“I’m not making the connection, Wilf.”

“Listening to a stream!”

“I know how I must seem to you, sir. Just another sincere but limited academic.”

“Oh my! Oh my giddy aunt! Golly! Dash it!”

“I mean it, Wilf.”

“Straightforward. Sincere. A man incapable of—”

But Rick had gone on as if something I had not known in him had been touched.

“I do listen. I always have done. Birds, wind, water—the different sounds of water. Sometimes I think in the sea you can hear the salt. The difference, I mean.”