The Paper Men (4 page)

There was an odd fly in the ointment. You could call it a faint, a distant awareness of Liz: and I see now that I’ve written it down that it wasn’t that at all.

It’s difficult to explain. I never got over, never
have
got over, thinking I’ve seen her. I never did see her after I left England until I went back there. But I’d be sitting outside a café at one of those round, white tables that are as placeless as motor roads and I’d be watching a crocodile of tourists, all, it may be, following their guide down round the corner to the Uffizi, and when they’d gone I’d remember that—
surely!
It had been a gesture, a dress, a voice. I’ve even started to my feet and made a step to follow, then stopped because even if it were so, what was the point? I was once coming down the stairs from an osteopath in Brisbane and I stood aside to let a woman go up; then when she had gone into his office I turned to follow her until I remembered Capstone Bowers and I went away. I worried sometimes about all this, but then I found a solution to that bit of nonsense in my brain. I came across the account of a solo voyage round the world by some sensible man—sensible, I thought, because his voyage was so like mine, an attempt to avoid everything. He heard voices and the rigging began to say things to him that he only just couldn’t understand. I “only just” didn’t see Elizabeth in my deliberate, crowded isolation. Having my Italian chum about the place—or rather, my Italian chum having me about the place, one should say—had masked or prevented this curious series of non-meetings from happening. Now she was busily on her knees and I was alone. I thought time would cure me. Ha et cetera.

Yet here is a contradiction. My contacts were with waiters, chamber maids, receptionists, hostesses. I shared the occasional meal with some international commuter as rootless as myself. I remember one time, when only a little drunk, I and a man I never saw again argued as to which country we were in and agreed to differ. I forget who was right—neither perhaps. Then again, there was always bar talk. All the same, bit by bit it came over me. I was lonely.

How mixed all this is! But I had reached sixty that time when I flew into Zurich and I had drunk far too much on the plane. To put it mildly, I needed somewhere to recover and the airport doctor advised Schwillen on the Zurich lake.

So I made another of the predestined steps in my life. Schwillen was inevitable and so was meeting them. It was my first morning in Schwillen that it happened and I’d drunk a little, not too much, and was feeling just about right. I climbed a little bluff over the lake where there was a monument to some Lithuanians. There was a park and a castle and green-painted chairs to sit on. So I sat. I remember contemplating with some pleasure the fun it would be to have an aristocracy all named after cheeses and contrariwise.
Le
gratin
indeed! Then I became aware of a large figure standing between me and the sun.

“Wilfred Barclay, sir? Wilf?”

“Good God.”

“If I might—”

He was huge—really huge. Or perhaps I had shrunk.

“I can’t stop you sitting down, can I?”

“It’s really great to see you!”

“How are my dependent clauses?”

“I ought to explain, Wilf—”

“Don’t bother. Go away and teach.”

“Sabbatical, Wilf. Every seven years.”

“So long? It seems only yesterday.”

“Seven years, Wilf, sir.”

“You served seven years for Leah. Her eyes will be weak.”

“No, sir. She’s Mary Lou. I guess you don’t know her. There.”

I looked where his eyes showed me. A girl was just stepping on to the gravel patch where we were sitting. She was very young, twenty, I thought. She had a pale face and dark, cloudy hair. She was slim as a cigarette.

“Mary Lou, look who’s here!”

“Mr Barclay?”

“Wilfred Barclay.”

“Mary Lou Tucker.”

Rick gazed down at her proudly and fondly.

“She’s a real fan, Wilf.”

“Oh, Mr Barclay—’

“Wilf, please. Rick, you lucky young devil!”

I shed forty years in a flash. Correction: I felt as if I had shed forty years. Rick was my friend. They were both my friends, this one in particular.

“Felicitations, Mary Lou!”

Somehow it was obvious they were just married, or if not “just”, why, she looked like that, all grace and glow! I took her by the shoulders and kissed her. I don’t know what she thought of the Swiss wine—Dôle—that I’d been drinking as early in the morning as that. I thrust her away, examined her from low, pale brow to delicate throat. Her cheeks had
mantled.
That was the only word and before you could repeat it her cheeks had paled and mantled all over again. Everything inside was at the surface in a flash; but then, it hadn’t far to go.

“Late felicitations, Mary Lou. Husband and wife is one flesh, and since I can’t kiss Rick—”

Tucker gave a yelp of laughter.

“—you take it out on Mary Lou! Hold it right there!’

A minute camera flicked into his right hand from his sleeve with the dazzling speed of a stiletto. The pic must be about in some drawer or other, perhaps in the library at Astrakhan, Nebraska. There’ll be Mary Lou, her beauty dulled by the instant record, there’ll be my scraggy yellow-white beard, yellow-white thatch and broken-toothed grin. The camera cannot have caught her warmth and softness. It was what you might call a close encounter of the second kind, no image of a girl but the pliant, perfumed, actual—I was not used to it and put very far off my guard. A wave of feeling pulsed up my right arm from the thin covering over her waist. My ageing heart missed a beat and syncopated a few others. She was perfect as a hedge rose.

“Wilf, you and Mary Lou should have a beautiful relationship. After all she majored—”

Mary Lou broke in.

“Now, hon, we don’t have to—”

But he was gazing down earnestly into my face.

“God, Wilf, Elizabeth is a dear person and I was truly sorry.”

“Oh, Mr Barclay—”

“Wilf, please. Try saying ‘Wilf’.”

“I don’t think I can!”

“Yes, do, do. Go on, just say it!”

“No, I, I can’t—”

We were all laughing and talking at once. Rick threatened to beat her if she didn’t, and I was saying I don’t know what, and she was laughing beautifully and saying that, no, she couldn’t, and—

“Oh, Mr Barclay, that quaint old house!”

Believe it or not, I never noticed. It was only later that I realized that my sometime quaint old house was where they had just come from. When we had done our silly laughter and paused, it was as if in expectation of some second act.

“Here. Why don’t we sit down?”

There was a bench seat. I sat in the middle. Rick sat on my left, Mary Lou sat down somewhat gingerly on my right.

“Wilf,” said Rick ponderously, “I have to ask a question.”

“Not about books, for God’s sake.”

“No, no, but— Well, I suppose you’re alone?”

“No constant companion. No just good friend. No seen constantly in the company of. D’you know, Mary Lou? I’m sixty!”

I paused, rather expecting Many Lou to be surprised. After all, I was rather surprised myself. But she nodded solemnly.

“I know.”

Rick leaned towards me.

“And you’re writing, Wilf?”

A touch of the old irritation came back. I grunted. Rick nodded.

“That kind of trauma.”

“Good God, man, it’s years and years—unless you’re talking about my … my Italian connection.”

“All the same—”

“Complete change of life style. Fancy-free. Can make a pass at any girl in sight with no one to say me nay but the girl.”

Mary Lou moved slightly along the bench. I had, after all, breathed in her face. I expect her mother had told her you can never be sure with men. Well. You can’t.

Rick was laughing with a touch of the locker room.

“I’ll bet they don’t!”

“Wanna bet?”

“Not on my salary, Wilf. An assistant professor—”

“Assistant? But weren’t you full?”

“Honestly, Wilf—”

“It may well be on your letter, somewhere in that quaint old house, nailed in a tea chest: ‘—of the Department of English and Allied Studies, University of Astrakhan, Nebraska’. I remember it so clearly because it led straight on to that night.”

“Wilf. I’d sooner not.”

His voice faded, as it had faded in Seville. Mary Lou was sitting very tall and looking straight ahead. She swallowed—a lovely movement of the throat, Eve’s Apple. She spoke without turning her head.

“Remember, hon. Cross your heart.”

“But, hon—”

“You best tell Mr Barclay, hon. You’ll never rest quiet else.”

“What is this, you two? Something I don’t know about?”

“Mr Barclay. He wasn’t a professor as of that date. He was a postgraduate student and he borrowed the fare off’n his mom to come to you in vacation.”

“I was desperate, Wilf. You were my, my—”

“Assignment?”

“Special subject. It’s official, Wilf.”

“Only remember, Mr Barclay, she was a really wicked person. Rick’s told me about her.”

“About who?”

“Ella. I’m glad you’ve told him you weren’t a professor then, hon.”

“I’m glad too, hon. So now I’ve told you, Wilf—”

“Mary Lou told me. Husband and wife—”

But Rick was staring across at Mary Lou with an expression of less than perfect devotion.

“—and I have tenure and I am an assistant professor and I have a kind of sabbatical.”

“And I know you’ll feel better now, hon. Now you can go on like you begun, hon. It’s best. Always.”

The sun was bright behind the trees, the leaves showering their shadows across the gravel. Every tiny wave sparkled on the lake. It all made me laugh.

“I’d quite forgotten what it’s like to talk in—well, our mid-Atlantic lingo!”

I slid my arm along the back of the seat.

“So much for Rick’s confession, Mary Lou. How about you? Anything to declare?”

“Well, no, I guess not.”

She moved slightly away from me again.

“But you mustn’t go!”

“It’s not that, Wilf. She doesn’t want to impose. She knows how generous you are. I’ve told her.”

“That’s right,” I said out of my fatuity. “What’s it to be, Mary Lou? The crown jewels or a moon rock?”

Mary Lou slid right off the end of the bench. It was deftly done for she rose to her feet, dusting off her calf-length skirt as she did so.

“I’ll get back, hon. You two have so much to talk about.”

She went very quickly and a cold wind poured down the slope behind the bluff and dulled the lake to pewter. Somehow it brought the dustbin back to mind.

“Rick. You are a con man. Nothing but. My congratulations. It’s far more interesting than scholarship.”

“I was meaning to tell you, Wilf. I was going to be a professor. I knew that.”

“Con men know they’re going to be rich.”

“But I
knew!
”

“Hell, what’s a professor anyway? When I was young I thought a professor amounted to something. They’re no better than writers. I eat ’em for breakfast. Taste different, that’s all.”

“Critics, Wilf! They make or break!”

“But what about John Crowe Ransom? From your letter I got the impression he was a real buddy. Did you tell
him
you were a professor?”

Rick’s face went from scarlet to puce. Since I was looking sideways at him, I now saw from a new angle a curious bit of his individual body language. I’d seen it years before when he came to the house, bashfully determined to beard me in a lair rumoured to be dangerous. Later I’d seen it at that conference. I’d thought then it was some sort of illusion, I don’t know why, that drawing back of the chin into the neck, that look up under lowered brows. But no. When embarrassed Rick really
did
draw back the bottom half of his face, project a forehead supposed to be, hoped to be, brazen and look up under his eyebrows like a crab from under a rock. He did it now and not even to me. It had become mechanical and he did it to the lake as if determined to be undaunted by that pewter sheet.

“Come on, Rick—out with it!”

“It began with a mistake by my—our—secretary in the office. Ella. I used to get letters addressed to Professor Tucker. It was the same for everybody, a sales pitch, flattery.”

“So you took a leaf out of the commercial handbook. Bravo!”

“You’ll never know what your work’s meant to me.”

“If anyone lets on what a con man you are, you’ll be drummed out of the academic regiment.”

“It was that goddammed girl. Me too, I have to say. I let it ride.”

“You took a risk. Congratulations.”

“Worth it, though. Her mistake earned me this, hopefully, intimacy, sitting here like this, side by side.”

“How the hell else could we sit?”

“That girl, Wilf—” chin drawn back again, leaden waters fronted—“she liked me. She thought she was doing me a favour.”

“And John Crowe Ransom?”

“I really forget, Wilf. I really do. We did meet.”

Suddenly I saw that the waters were lifeless.

“What does it matter? I’m leaving tomorrow. Then Mary Lou’ll be able to sit on this bench without falling off it.”

There was a pause. Rick broke it.

“But you’ll have dinner with us tonight?”

“All three of us?”

“Surely.”

“Right. But you’ll be my guests. Old man’s privilege. The only one.”

“Mary Lou’s shy, Wilf. She always was. But she does know what a really warm person you are under that British exterior.”

“And I thought I was international.”

Rick stood up. He came out with one of his prepared statements.

“We’ve always thought of you, sir, as a really fine example of and credit to your Great Country.”

He took himself off down the bluff after his wife. He left me there nodding solemnly like a porcelain mandarin and murmuring,
Be
wary
of
Mary,
don’t
be
a
prick
with
Rick.

Then I added the loathsome words aloud.