The Paperchase (21 page)

‘The younger brother stepped in. He loved her anyway, and he may have had faults, but pride wasn’t one of them. I mean, he didn’t need to punish her for preferring his brother. And he was hard-working. It may sound strange, but I think he believed in hard work in the way some people believe in God – and that through hard work, he’d make her love him. More wine, Dad?’

My father shook his head – I sensed the movement in the darkness, but nothing else.

‘To cut a long story short – although you might say it’s a bit late for that – they got married and things worked out quite well and they had a second child together. Then she died
suddenly
. It was a terrible blow, but it had one surprising consequence which was that the brothers became friends again, tentatively. I think with all brothers there’s so much similarity, you know, that even after a row, they continue to look at the world in the same way.

‘So there was a sort of rapprochement. It was a bit tense, I gather, perhaps because the older son was never told about, well, what I’ve just told you. And in the end the strain grew – you know how old men get weirder as they get older – and the friendship became impossible to sustain.

‘That’s more or less the story. The reason I’m telling you is that I found it very touching. The younger brother never took credit for what he’d done. I can’t imagine that he was ashamed about it. He brought the child up as his own, loved it in his own way, and had the usual parental failings, but didn’t favour either of his sons, even got them mixed up at times, which, given the circumstances, is quite lovely, I think.

‘One of Patrick’s neighbours told me all this. She said to me, “Who was the older boy’s real father, then?” I told her paternity’s not the issue, is it? The younger brother was a father to both the sons. And it was a pity, in a way, that the older child could never know.’ I had to stop briefly because I didn’t want my father to hear the catch in my voice. ‘It was a pity – imagine the love and gratitude if he’d known the truth.’

My father was silent for a long time. I began to think I’d made a terrible misjudgement.

When he finally spoke, there was more astonishment than anger in his voice. He had been turning over in his mind the one thing that he still hadn’t been able to forgive.

‘Not a letter,’ he said, in a whisper. ‘Not even a letter when she was dying.’

GETTING BACK TO LONDON
was the strangest thing. The city was shabby and overcast but it also seemed as comfortable as an old couch – specifically, the couch I had chucked out to make room for Platon Bakatin’s sofa-bed.

No one met me at the airport. I just kept walking past the phalanx of chauffeurs with signs, and expectant relatives, and for once I was in no hurry to get back to central London and a makeshift bed in Stevo’s dingy studio flat.

Although I hadn’t spent the night at my father’s, he did insist on taking me back to show me round his vegetable garden. It was past midnight, but he had two ridiculous
flashlights
that we wore on our heads. The beams glinted on the shiny skins of tomatoes and aubergines.

‘
Solanum
melangena
,’ my father said.

I nodded. We both pretended not to notice each other’s tears.

That our reunion was only tolerable because of a
complicated
charade that redirected our strong feelings on to members of the vegetable kingdom, I find both typical and unbearably moving. And that is how I most often remember my father – eyes glistening, torch sweeping the garden like the beam of a lighthouse, excitedly explaining the difference between white and purple aubergines.

He died a year and half later from a more virulent
recurrence
of colon cancer. We were deprived of a death-bed reunion by a baggage-handlers’ strike at Heathrow. My wife was having a difficult pregnancy so I had decided to remain with her as long as possible. As it turned out, I had cut it too fine. I still regret not managing to say goodbye properly, but Vivian was by his side and once again reported that his last words were ‘Bolder than Mandingo’. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a lie, but I think that Vivian may have been unable to repress his cineaste’s need for a strong ending.

I have never been back to Ionia. I relinquished my interest in the estate and every year get a Christmas card from the two old priests who now live there. Father Donovan is the name of one of them. I can never read the other man’s signature.

For a while I was so busy trying to put a life of my own together that I thought very little about Patrick, although I was always reminded of him when I saw that old guy outside Baker Street tube station dressed as Sherlock Holmes and handing out brochures to the museum.

Then Mr Diaz wrote to me two years ago. He needed my permission to open the house to one of Patrick’s prospective biographers. I gave it, figuring that some lucky postgraduate student was welcome to make what sense he could out of the penny-banks, the ice-cream scoops, the crazy letters, and the unpublished writings. It’s not a boast to say I was the only person capable of following Patrick’s paper chase right through to its conclusion.

The biographer, Edwin Sapsted (D. Phil., Oxon.) has been in touch with me a couple of times over the past twelve months. He E-mailed me lists of questions on matters of chronology, stuff about the history of the house, and Patrick’s relationship with my father.

I decided to be helpful but not too helpful, because although I wanted to unburden myself, I didn’t feel right about it, even with my father and Patrick both dead. So I fended off his inquiries and when he asked me about Mycroft Holmes I told him all the books he needed were in Patrick’s library. I didn’t tell him my own conclusions about the stories. But his
curiosity
piqued something inside me, and I found my thoughts drawn back to Ionia.

I think the imagination roams widely over the world until it finds a predicament that reflects its own secret agonies. And if it lacks the will to move on, it roosts and broods, and pecks at old injuries. Mycroft can nail half of London Bridge to that barrel as ballast, but nothing will stop Abel Mundy’s restless ghost pursuing him into his dreams.

Because the ugly secret of that final story – and of this story, perhaps of all stories – is that the author ultimately identifies with his villain. Abel Mundy, violent husband and failed parent, is a grotesque, but strip away the calumnies and he is only a husband and a parent – and I think that is why Mycroft murders him.

It’s very late. Going over all this for the last time before I set it aside for ever, I see that I’ve tried many ways to approach Patrick – through the facts of his life, and his work, and the gaps in his work, and the impress of his personality upon the house and island that he definitely loved – and yet in the end, he has eluded me. Whatever he was, he is now too insubstantial for me to grasp, except fleetingly.

Mycroft comes closest to embodying something of him, but in spite of everything that Patrick wrote, Mycroft also remains frustratingly absent. So I’m resigned to the idea that my final approach to Patrick is a qualified failure. And after all, there is
a quiet poetry in Mycroft’s absence. It echoes the life of another absent man, someone who perhaps resembled his
creations
– Mycroft, Abel Mundy and the innocent protagonist of
Peanut
Gatherers
– but who was, principally and biologically, my father, Patrick March.

Marcel Theroux is the author of five novels,
A Blow to the Heart, A Stranger in the Earth, The Paperchase
, winner of the 2002 Somerset Maugham Award,
Far North
which was short-listed for the America’s prestigious National Book Award, and
Strange Bodies
. He lives in London.

A Stranger in the Earth

A Blow to the Heart

Far North

Strange Bodies