The Paperchase (15 page)

THE NAME ALONE
was like a spark igniting a gunpowder trail of associations in my brain. Mycroft is Sherlock’s older brother. That’s a fact – a fictional fact, in the sense that Arthur Conan Doyle invented him, rather than Patrick. Mycroft is
mentioned
in only a handful of Doyle’s stories and there’s something troubling about his absence.

Nothing really explains Mycroft. He’s superfluous to the stories. That’s what’s so interesting about him. He’s not
created
for a reason, he doesn’t have a function in the plot. He’s there because he’s there, vivid and unnecessary – like all the best things. He’s extra, the imagination’s tip to the reader.

And as fictional characters go, there is less of him than most. After all, what is a character in a book? Four facts, a speech impediment, boss-eyes, a fluffy moustache from a box
of costumes. Mycroft is empty. But it’s a pregnant emptiness. And Patrick had seen something moving there, something that reminded him of himself.

Doyle portrays Mycroft as an indolent genius, with more natural aptitude than his younger brother, but without the drive to achieve anything with it. The first time he meets Watson (in ‘The Greek Interpreter’) he astonishes him by out-deducing Sherlock. In ‘The Bruce Partington Plans’, we learn that Mycroft plays a significant role in the British
government
of the time. Sherlock calls him ‘the most indispensable man in the country’. The only other things about Mycroft that are certain are that he is very fat, and a member of the Diogenes Club, where conversation is forbidden.

Sherlock Holmes trivia was one of Patrick’s minor
enthusiasms
. Vivian and I didn’t share it to the extent of actually reading the stories, but we were able to participate in Patrick’s quizzes because, like his anecdotes and riddles, the questions were the same every year: ‘What was the curious incident of the dog in the night-time?’ (The dog didn’t bark, that was the curious incident); ‘In which story does Holmes say, “Elementary, my dear Watson”?’ (He never says it); and, of course, ‘What is the name of Sherlock’s smarter older brother?’

Patrick had mentioned Mycroft in one other place. In a footnote to
Amazon
Basin
(the unplagiarised section) he calls him one of literature’s three most intriguing absences. The other two are Yorick – the fool who’s dead before
Hamlet
begins – and camels from the Koran. Patrick maintained that if God had indeed written the Koran, He would have
remembered
to put in the camels.

Patrick’s typescript began where Doyle had left off. It
consisted
of three stories which delved into the absent personality of Mycroft. Even before I got down to reading them, I was
virtually
certain that Mycroft was the unnamed hero of the fragment that had puzzled me on the plane. The stories would confirm it. They were written in the same antique style. Serena Eden was not mentioned again, but Doriment was – the mad
painter – and in an aside in the final story, Mycroft referred to his time in India.

As impatient as I was to read them, I was conscious of my obligations to Patrick. Before beginning, I made some tea to sober me up. I found a comfortable chair in the library. I moved a standard lamp to give me the right degree of light: the yellow bulb spawned a twin in the rainswept window behind it.

The first completed story, ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’, found Mycroft back in London. He’s trying to help rehabilitate the crazy painter Richard Doriment, who has been put in an insane asylum after murdering his father. Mycroft petitions the governors of the asylum to allow Doriment to exhibit his work. However, when Mycroft finally succeeds, the weird new paintings confirm the judgement that Doriment is completely bonkers. Among the VIPs invited to the exhibition are Sherlock and Watson. They and Mycroft find themselves standing baffled in front of a portrait of a bizarre-looking mythical beast which is in the process of ingesting a human corpse. This is how the story ends:

The last line makes me think of one of those replica guns that fire a flag saying BANG! Patrick seems to have based Doriment on the mad Victorian painter Richard Dadd.

In the second story, ‘The Duellist’, Mycroft goes to visit the painter Horace Vernet in Paris. Vernet (1789–1863) was a real French painter whom Doyle claimed was Sherlock’s maternal uncle. Horace needs to get some money for a purpose that is never made clear and takes Mycroft with him to the apartment
of an old Russian émigré by the name of d’Anthès. The description of d’Anthès, who is attended by an elderly lady called Yelena Gravanova, was one of the funniest things I had read in the stories so far. Patrick/Mycroft describes ‘the great bully-bag of his testicles bulging out of his trousers’, and the old man ‘wheezing through interminable descriptions of his salad days at the Russian court, name-dropping lists of the titled ladies he had bedded’. My croft and Horace leave the apartment and the story concludes with the following exchange.

D’Anthès, a real historical figure, died in Paris in 1895 without ever having expressed remorse for killing Russia’s greatest poet in a duel. I don’t think this fact improves the story, but it authenticates it as one of Patrick’s. D’Anthès was a man in the same mould as the other antiheroes who peopled our summer quizzes: John Wilkes Booth, Charles Manson, Reginald Christie, David Berkowitz. Something in Patrick’s internal world drew him towards vivid examples of human
cruelty
.

Reading these two stories at two o’clock in the morning on a leather armchair in Patrick’s library, I felt sorry for my uncle. It was a sad thought: Patrick, isolated and embittered, directing all his energies into pastiching Victorian prose. I remembered that haunting line in the notebook: ‘(I am writing this alone, in an empty house, in silence).’ It made me think of a rock climber, doing a tricky solo ascent which no one will see
or remember. After the long wind-ups, the endings were a bit facile, but I liked the stories. They were funny, and as Mrs Delamitri might have said, ‘so Patrick!’

And I wondered if Patrick realised how revelatory his
writing
was. Mycroft was clearly a fantasy Patrick had about himself. But there was more to the character than simple
wish-fulfilment
. Mycroft had a dark side, absent from Doyle’s originals, but worked up in Patrick’s version of him. He was almost a tragic figure. He was a kind of Atlas – carrying the world inside his brain instead of on his shoulders – though it was no less a burden to him there. He was paralysed by his knowledge; it oppressed him. His corpulence was symptomatic of this: like the overspill of his stuffed cranium. If only he could know less …

The third story was separated from the others by a couple of blank pages. It was quite different from the previous ones. There was no sense that the narrator was trying to set up another surprise ending. In fact, the darkness and guilt that were hinted at in the other stories grew more explicit. The narrative drew nearer to Mycroft’s empty centre and sought to explain what it found there. Beneath the costumes and the grease-paint, I glimpsed real people, people I actually knew. I heard Patrick’s voice speaking to me through Mycroft. And as I surrendered to the story, I had the odd feeling that I was entering my uncle’s dream life.

W
HOLE
DAYS
together I dwell among ghosts.

I saw Abel Mundy in a dream again last night, drowned and dripping, with dead eyes, and river water running from the folds of his drenched clothes. His cold fingers burned like whipcord where I shook my wrist free from his grip.

I pleaded with him. ‘Abel Mundy,’ I said, ‘let an old man rest.’

His voice uttered from somewhere inside him as softly as his last breath. ‘Where was your pity?’ he hissed at me, in an awful parody of my words to him. ‘Where was your pity?’

I
REMEMBERED
this morning the name of the man who gave me instruction in boxing during my early years in the city: R.M. Fernshaw. When I close my eyes, I seem to see the brass plate that was
fastened to the door of his gymnasium in Golden Square; and when I open them, I can read the inscription on it, reflected at me in the dull gold nib of my pen:

And beneath it were posted the hours of admission.

It was a habit with me to take exercise here at least once each week: vigorous endeavour being the only proven tonic against my
melancholia
and the tendency to corpulence which ultimately triumphed over all my countervailing intentions.

It was one of Dick Fernshaw’s less likely contentions that a person’s griefs are buried in the fat which exertion dissolves. On this plan, Fernshaw himself must have been the most sanguine man on the planet. There was not an ounce of fat on his spare frame. In the words I once heard him use admiringly of an aspirant boxer: there was more fat on a butcher’s apron.

In those days, I was spare and quick myself, lacking the heft to deliver a resounding blow, but strong and fast enough to give a good account of myself against most opponents. Of course, this was
gentleman’s
boxing: the Prize Ring had been extinct for more than ten years, and the young men who came to Fernshaw’s gymnasium fought with the mufflers on.

Fernshaw often talked of his Prize Ring days, though I calculated that he hadn’t had above two bareknuckle fights in his career (to his credit, he won them both). He always maintained that a man who had boxed only wearing gloves would never be more than an amateur, but he
disapproved
strongly of brawling. He insisted on discipline in the ring, and
would berate both boxers if a bout threatened to degenerate into ‘a rough unmeaning unscientific scramble’.

I well remember Dick Fernshaw, not less than sixty years old,
interposing
his spry frame when sparring threatened to become too warm. The bobbing fringe of red hair ringed his pate like a hedge round a ploughed field. ‘Never forget: in the midst of impetuosity remember coolness, my lads,’ he would say. ‘Be manly; seek no undue advantage. Science and pluck give advantage enough. Pluck! Science!’ Then, after a pause to restore calm, he would have them go at it again.

It was at Fernshaw’s school of arms in the autumn of 18— that I first met Abel Mundy. He was older than most of us, forty, florid-faced, with a distinctly military deportment. I knew at once that he had seen
service
in India, and surmised from the oakum and tar on his boots – and the ink on his cuffs – that he was now employed as a shipping clerk at one of the warehouses on the river.

It was some time before I could verify my hypotheses. Mundy was a quiet, some would say brooding man, of a formidable intensity, great physical strength, but few words. That first day, he was matched with another heavyweight, Dickinson, a solicitor and Blue, for light sparring after the dumb-bell exercises. Dickinson was a more than capable boxer, and the two men finished amicably enough, but Mundy gave him a rough time of it. Fernshaw, without being partisan, urged Dickinson to counter when he was having the worst of it on the ropes. ‘Come on, lad. Don’t let him hang you. He’s older than I am.’

That day was memorable for more than just the arrival of Abel Mundy. Fernshaw had been dropping hints to me for some time about his intention of distilling the wisdom he had gained cultivating the
physical
sciences in a book. It was a harmless enough ambition, and I confess I egged him on to it, because I found his cherished convictions amusing. He held, for example, as many do, that Onanism drained fluid from the brain and weakened the nervous system. He counselled the wearing of undergarments fashioned from a single strip of cloth folded around the nether parts in Hindoo style. He drank neat vinegar to strengthen his
digestion. He – and I would not believe this, had I not seen it myself – he preserved the parings after he had dressed his nails and ate them, in the belief that it restored vital energies. All this, and a good deal of no doubt sensible information concerning boxing and physical culture, was to be collected in Fernshaw’s volume. It was almost too much to hope that all of his wrong-headed snippets of wisdom would be gathered in one place for the edification and amusement of the general public, and many of Fernshaw’s students looked forward to its publication for
reasons
quite other than the ones he supposed.

After our exercise was over, and Fernshaw was preparing the hall for one of his private pupils, I happened to mention the subject of the book to him, in the hope of teasing more foolishness out of him.

‘Ah – Mr Holmes,’ said he. ‘I’m glad you mentioned this to me. I was discussing the slim volume, or pamphlet – as you know, I’m not ambitious concerning its size, but merely concerned to preserve, as it were, some of the axioms of pugilistical science – I was discussing it, as I say, with my wife, and it was her contention – where she thinks of these things I don’t know – that a favourable commendation from someone highly esteemed might further its cause. I thought naturally of you …’

‘My dear fellow,’ I began, ‘I’d be flattered.’

‘And wondered if you might show it to your brother.’

‘My brother?’

‘Seeing that he is in an illustrious and some might say unique
position
, I thought a recommendation from him would carry the most weight. Naturally, I don’t want to put him to any trouble, but it would be rendering me a service. If he could see his way to penning a few lines as a form of introduction to the work … Well, that’s as much as anyone could want.’

‘Certainly,’ I said. ‘Let me know when you have the finished draft and I’ll bring it to his attention.’

‘Much obliged to you, Mr Holmes. May I offer you in return a word of advice about your choice of undergarments?’

‘The deuce of the thing is I’m already late for a rather important engagement. I’m afraid it will have to wait until next Thursday.’

‘Until then, sir. Keep your guard up! Pluck, Holmes. Science!’

The last few words pursued me from the basement of the house and out into the warm twilight of Golden Square, while Abel Mundy looked on silently from one of the benches smoking a cheroot.

The truth of it was, I had no engagement, but I had found myself rather taken aback by Fernshaw’s request. As much as I thought his projected book a foolish undertaking, I couldn’t help but feel hurt that it was the commendation of my brother that he sought, rather than mine.

I lodged at that time in a set of rooms on Dover Street, where I had a bright drawing room that served me also as a studio. That evening, I remember, I did not return there immediately, but went from Fernshaw’s gymnasium to visit a young lady in Shepherd’s Market who worked as an artist’s model but who also submitted herself to the sexual attentions of wealthy men. After the knock-back of Fernshaw’s request, I wanted to restore my self-esteem with a vigorous rogering.

A
BEL
M
UNDY
came regularly to Fernshaw’s gymnasium and was soon among the group – which did not include myself – who contested amateur prizes at tournaments. Despite his relatively advanced years, he invariably won and earned something of a reputation for his strength and ringcraft.

It was an unspoken rule among the men who trained with Dick Fernshaw that the subject of our occupations was never mentioned. In a city where too much store was set by a man’s work, his income, his place of residence, it was refreshing to consort with fellow humans on terms simply human.

It was another year before I deepened my acquaintance with Abel Mundy in circumstances that would have repercussions for both of us.

A
N
ERRAND
had taken me far out of my usual haunts, east of London Bridge to the wharves on the south bank of the river. The scents of a hundred nations mingled here: spices, sugar, exotic banana-fruits from the West Indies, tea from the East, chocolate beans from Java and Sumatra, and bolts of Calico were stacked in the warehouses that fronted the busy Thames.

It was past five, and the flood of commerce had slowed to a trickle. A few clerks lingered over their account books, but ships lately in waited until the morning to be unloaded. A lamplighter was working his way along Tooley Street, confounding the darkness with a twinkling yellow flame.

Some distance away, a man emerged from a doorway, glanced upwards to ascertain the clemency of the weather, pulled his greatcoat around him, adjusted the hat on his head, and made his way along the pavement with a broad-backed, hunched-over walk that gave me his identity as certainly as his face did, lowered and concentrating as if examining the paving stones for fallen pennies.

‘Abel Mundy,’ I said, and on hearing his name he started upwards with a hunted expression and peered at me through the darkness.

‘Who the devil …?’ he began to say.

‘Mycroft Holmes.’ I extended my hand to him. ‘We box at Fernshaw’s together. I never expected to encounter a friend so far east. You work here, I presume?’

The explanation of our acquaintance and my use of the word ‘friend’ appeared to set him at his ease.

‘Well,’ he said, gruffly, ‘I’d wager long odds against this encounter. What brings you here?’

‘A combination of business, bad luck and curiosity‚’ I said, thinking that this was a tactful way of explaining that I was visiting the unfortunate Richard Doriment, an artist of my acquaintance who was incarcerated in a lunatic asylum not far from the docks.

‘Ah,’ said he, ‘the three most powerful forces in a man’s life.’

‘You forget two more powerful,’ I said: ‘God and woman.’

‘Yes,’ he said, with an odd look. ‘There is
that.
’

We fell in together and crossed London Bridge, engaging in pleasant enough conversation, until our ways parted at the Monument: his to the east, mine westwards to my lodgings.

‘You’ve come this far,’ he said. ‘Do me the honour of having your supper with me at my house.’

I must admit that even then there was something about Mundy that struck me as not altogether canny. There was a submerged malevolence, a quiet kind of anger that I found all the more unsettling for its being hidden. Still, I assented, because the pull of curiosity had always got the better part of me than the push of fear, I also had a sense that the
invitation
was made more for the sake of form than from a real desire to share his repast with me.

As we walked together to a house near Fenchurch Street, Mundy confirmed my suspicions, apologising in advance for the frugality of his table, and hinting that I might in fact be happier to have my supper at one of the ordinaries near his home. This only strengthened my desire to see where he lived. I told him to set his mind at rest, saying that I only ever took a cold supper in the evening myself, or sometimes a little thin soup. We drew nearer to our destination – a house of average size, none too smart from the outside, in which the Mundys occupied the upper two storeys – when he turned to me again, stopping altogether this time.

‘Holmes,’ said he, drawing his large hand down his face from his cheekbones to the tip of his chin, ‘the other thing you should know is that my wife and children are deaf–mutes. We converse in gestures.’

It was hard for me to know exactly how to respond to this. ‘Deaf from birth?’ I said.

‘Deaf from birth,’ said he, cleaning his shoes on the cast-iron scraper inside his gate.

‘Deafness is a terrible affliction,’ I said.

‘It is,’ he said; and then with a glint of pride: ‘But I consider myself lucky not to be one of those husbands who must suffer a wife’s constant prating, chattering, idleness! I have what all men want and few have: utter obedience. You’re not married yourself, Mr Holmes?’

I told him I was not.

‘You’ll want a wife for three things, Mr Holmes,’ he said. ‘Fucking, cooking and bearing children. Given those three things are of sufficient quality, the absence of speech will not, I assure you, appear to be a heavy burden.’

I was glad it was dark here, because the coarseness of his expression brought the blood to my face. We had by this time ascended the creaky interior staircase of the Mundys’ home. On entering their house I was struck by two things. The first was the heat of the fire. It was not a cold day, but the coals were piled high in the grate and burning merrily. The heat of the room was such that even far from the fire, I was
uncomfortably
hot in my jacket. ‘Time in the tropics thins a man’s blood, Holmes,’ Mundy said. ‘Were the fire any smaller I would be freezing to death.’