The Paper Men by William Golding
I was moving down. The gasps behind me quickened. I dared to shift a heel and dig it in an inch or two higher, but the soil slid away and I felt how the effort had diminished the friction that helped to keep me from falling into the fog.
Rick articulated.
“Hold still.”
I stopped moving down.
“Root above left hand.”
I dared to let go of the plant slowly and allowed my fingers to crawl. The root was there, thick, slimy but graspable because of its contortions.
“Pull.”
There was undreamed of strength in my left hand. The only limit was the strength of the root. I could have lifted myself with anvils hanging from my feet.
“Turn over—real slow.”
I did that, and the fist turned with me, my collar twisting but not too much. Now there was something to see. There was perhaps eighteen inches of earth, coarse grass, small stones and small roots. The slope was close to the vertical. Rick was flat on the path, his left hand hooked round the upright post that had held one end of the fallen bar. His right hand held my collar. The upright post was bowing outwards very slowly, earth and stone dropping from its base.
“Jesus!”
Rick articulated again.
“I won’t let go.”
Inch by inch. I had such hope of safety now that the mixture of hope and fear was almost more agonizing than the instant terror, for Rick was moving with the post, it was what held him, that and his weight against my weight. We were looking each other in the face, an eyeball confrontation, his beneath a frowning forehead. He seemed extraordinarily calm, as if this idiot caper played with our destruction was a small problem of tax or admin.
Inch by inch. Heel, fingers, hand, fist— Then I had a hand on the path, then an elbow, then I lurched forward on one knee as the post fell and thumped somewhere in the fog. We were tangled on the path. I scrambled across it and my body huddled itself against the roots and solid rock of the mountainside. I didn’t say anything. I began first to crawl, then stagger, back along that path, keeping close to the left-hand side like a tramp or a drunk needing the security of a wall beside him. I stumbled through the little stream and fell on the rock where I had sat. I could see Rick’s boots in front of me. The deeper voice of the stream had consumed the lighter one. It was as if the mountain was speaking with the same deep tone that had been audible and now, in the mind, visible round the falling lump of rock. I started to giggle.
“Shiver and shake. Alfred Lord Tennyson.”
“Take it easy, Wilf. You’ll be all right.”
Of course he would know, Eng. Lit. and all that. Shiver and shake along the country road, a treat for the local lads.
It seemed to me that I could feel the indifferent threat of the earth through the soles of my feet, the volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, terrors of nature’s fact, the ball flying through space. That was what the water spoke of, not Gaia Mater but the space rock balanced between forces so that gravity exhibited itself with this ghastly indifference.
“Here.”
Irresistible hands were grasping me. I rose, as it might be propelled by a force of nature, I came against wool and warmth. There was strain in my arms. My cheek was ground into skin, hair, the muscles of a neck. We were moving slowly at first, then briskly. A horse, a horse! That huge creature had my passive body in charge, had lifted me into its aura of strength and warmth. It was the warmth that was most disconcerting, now another human manifestation like the smell of shit that stung my nostrils, for he was cantering, there is no other word for it, down through the meadows and into the home stretch. Then I was being lowered. There were voices and other hands and presently I was in my own bed. I opened my eyes saw two thick columns of trouser, and at the juncture of those columns the bulging flies above me. I shut my eyes again. I heard him move and dared a look through one eye. Now he stood at the foot of the bed, looking down. There was a slight smile round his lips. I thought it was friendly enough but there was something else in it. The smile widened.
I shut my one eye again. There was no doubt at all. The smile was a smile of triumph.
“You OK?”
The manager was at his shoulder. They consulted. Rick talked of brandy.
I interrupted him in a voice which I heard was normal enough.
“I don’t want brandy. I want hot chocolate.”
Nursery stuff. But the manager hurried away. Now I was sitting up, my shoulders felt as if they had been racked. Every now and then I had the shakes again. A sensitive type, Wilf Barclay! I shut my eyes, screwed them up and endured the agony of this added link in some chain of farce, this unbudgeted addition to a whole store of recurrent memories, the time Wilf Barclay fell off a cliff and was held up by—
“I didn’t lose my trousers. I hadn’t a round, red nose and ginger hair and a painted squint.”
“Lie down again, Wilf.”
“The very thing, the last bleeding—the only bloody thing that could have happened to reverse everything. How do I do it? What does it? Oh fuck!”
“You better lie down.”
The manager hurried back. He had a cup and saucer. Rick took it from him. The manager hurried away. From outside I heard Mary Lou’s voice.
“Should I come in?”
I shouted, “No!”
Rick put the cup down on the little bedside table. I came over dizzy and lay back. There was a long pause in which doors opened and shut several times, then another pause.
A heavily accented German voice spoke by me.
“He is in some shock, I think. The chocolate was good. The body has its own voice.”
Then I realized that my pulse was being taken. The voice spoke again.
“It is not so bad. How old? That old! Well. Drink your chocolate, Mr Barclay. Professor Tucker? Yes. Just rest, I think. He has the physique of a far younger man.”
I could hear Rick muttering. The doctor spoke again.
“I will send something. Yes, now, it is only a few yards. Do please remember, even in the Weisswald we say the green fields kill more than the white.”
But under my shut eyelids I was stretching antennae of horror out to the edge of the universe. The dice were rolling, three sixes or three ones. They were large as planets.
“I’ll wait to give you the stuff, Wilf.”
He was large as a planet, entering my universe with his necessity and his warmth and his smile and dainty bed-piece all drawn along by that gravity of an ambition not worth suffering for. I opened my eyes to get away from the rolling dice and there he was, large as his life, smiling anxiously by the foot of the bed. I examined myself and found I was in vest and shirt. I sat up, lifted the cup and saucer to me as they rattled against each other. I did not care to look at him.
“Let me—”
“Leave me alone!”
Ungrateful bugger, Wilf Barclay, and now enjoying his ingratitude the way he might enjoy cruelty if he had the courage. Ingratitude and sadism all mixed up—what nonsense! But Professor Tucker still stood there, while my cup and saucer rattled in my hands and I managed at last to drink. It did immediately calm me with its nursery taste and nursery memories. I was able, as they say, to take a hold of myself. I went on drinking until I had finished the lot, then held it out to Rick.
“More.”
He did look a bit startled then and the smile went stiff. All the same he took the cup and saucer and went away. I sat with my painful arms round my knees. It had started down in Schwillen when—of all things!—I had felt lonely and had not been enjoying it—I, Wilf Barclay, a specialist in loneliness if ever there was one! I chewed over the steps that had put me in this position of all that I had not wanted to find myself in. The door of the bedroom was open and I could see beyond it, in the sitting-room, how Rick’s billet-doux lay on the table still, unsigned, unmoved. My shakes and memories began to be consumed by another feeling that at least restored some personality to me. It was a tide of sheer fury. When Rick came back with another
“It seems I owe you my life.”
Chapter IX
Fury, hatred and fear. Somewhere in my paroxysm I was so fierce with him that he took himself off and I was there in my shirt and pants, shaking like a machine with a part missing. First his wife, then when that ploy failed, my life, my own damned, sweet, secret possession, handed back to me, but now, as I saw, on conditions like the surrender of a city. Also there was something else to add—a physical detestation of his strength and warmth and stink!
It was the manager who brought me dope from the doctor and I sank into a sleep beyond dreams, still making plans, such as tempting them both to a cliff. There’s no doubt about it. Shock had unbalanced my mechanism. At one point I had Tucker writing my biography but with such strict supervision it included for the world’s inspection an account of how he had attempted the virtue of St Wilfred with the offer of his beautiful wife; an offer rejected with such gentle tact and kindness that he (Assistant Professor Rick L. Tucker) flung himself on his knees and received such a gigantic hack in his privates from one of those boots that were no good for rough country he immediately entered a monastery, leaving his beautiful wife to—
Yes, I was unbalanced, there’s no doubt about it. But the dope was good and I wish I knew what it was.
I woke with aching shoulders and a blank mind. I looked at my watch and it took me some time to work out that today was in fact tomorrow. My mouth tasted as if it were lined with nasty metal. I washed it with cold water for a long time. My legs were inclined to give way. With the memory of the day before there came very little fury or hatred. All that came of those weird sisters was fear, not to say panic. As if recovery from the dope implied that I was on my own and open now for business, I saw the dreadful results of giving Rick any permission whatever—that determined, sedulous search into a past raw with unforgiving memories! That girl impossible for me, such a danger, such a grief!
The paper was still there, lying on a newly dusted and polished table. Had the fat, grey-haired woman dusted round it, or had she lifted it carefully, dusted, polished, then replaced it with the precision of a referee putting back a snooker ball? There the paper was.
It seems I owe you my life.
That brought me to, like the school bell. I owed him my life, nothing less. It was like every boy’s story that ever was.
“I owe you my life, old man.”
“That’s all right, old fellow. It was nothing.”
“Your arm’s broken, old man.”
“It’s not my right arm, old fellow.”
It was sheer, low comedy all over again.
Well, there the paper was. I turned my attention away from it and into myself. Wilfred Barclay didn’t fit into any boy’s adventure story, only into a parody of one: and even then not as the hero or the hero’s little chum with whom junior could empathize, but perhaps as a small-time crook put in to demonstrate that crime does not pay or that virtue does. He would get laid out with a straight left. Wilfred Barclay would reel away, holding his jaw and vowing filthy revenge. He would never be fool enough to sign that paper. He would have taken the wife and scarpered.
Scarper!
Never mind the wife. There are wives everywhere. Anyway, had I deceived myself? Had she ever been offered to St Wilfred? Careful! Was I mad? Was Rick mad? There was an intensity at times about his stare, white showing all round the pupils, as if he were about to charge dangerously. A psychiatrist would find him interesting. To hell with a careful examination of him. His hair—he was disgusting. It would be less risky to keep tabs on a rhinoceros. This was a mad house and Wilfred Barclay, St Wilfred, no longer a character in a boy’s book, would do a bit of levitation, gravitation. He would not bow out, he would simply disappear, vanish down the rack railway, hey presto!
As soon as I had decided that, my heart became high and giggly. I had not known till then what a strain sheer companionship had been. I got hold of the manager and found that the Tuckers had gone walking. I explained myself. After the shock I needed solitude. Though I had booked in for a week, I must go now. (I promised him compensation—a full meed of praise for him and the hotel in a book! I do, in fact, some years after, I forget how many, discharge that debt. The hotel Felsenblick, Weisswald, Switzerland, is comfortable, the view superb, the drop ghastly. You will find Major Adolf Kaufmann, a very retired general by now, unobtrusive and silent.) The fat woman packed for me and carried my bags to the rack railway, where I caught the three o’clock descent. So I escaped, leaving behind me as forwarding address The Hotel, Akureyri, Iceland. Three hours after I was in a plane bound for Florence and another hire car. By early evening I was driving through the Apennines on my national home, an autostrada. I was calm, watching the motionless landscape stream past. I was surrounded by metal and I was my own master. That night I spent in a sleazy hotel a biscuit toss from La Rotonda. I remember the joy and freedom with which I flung up my window, gazed out on the magnificent shadow and invented quite unfair bits of dialogue for Mr and Mrs Rick.
“There’s a great hole in the roof, hon.”
“That’s bomb damage, I guess, hon.”
I was myself again. I slept soundly.
Next morning I was not really worried again but a bit preoccupied. After all, La Rotonda is a place like Piccadilly or Time Square where, they say, you’ll meet anybody if you wait long enough. It’s an oblique way of saying that a lot of people go there. Once Rick and Mary Lou had lost the scent—even Rick had more wit than to go to Iceland—Rome was likely. Go thou to Rome! He would do it. Had he not said Mary Lou simply had to see Rome and Dublin? A flash of the glamour made me catch my breath. There was no guarantee that she had not yet done Rome or that, having done it, she would not want to do it again. I was in Navona and sitting at another round metal table or the same metal table when my heart, as they say, turned over. No. I didn’t see Mary Lou, I saw Rick. I saw Rick in the same way I used very nearly to see Elizabeth in the old days when I still cared enough. That is to say, I did not see Rick precisely. But I came to with a jump that would have spilt the coffee if I had not just drunk it.
“Christ!”
It was entirely possible. They could have left straight after their walk, then flown direct from Zurich to Rome in the evening or overnight or that very morning. I would have been safer on my motor road. I wasn’t seeing. I was remembering with an etched precision. Only this wasn’t a memory swimming up, as it were, from the depths. It was a kind of time slip or time shift, or like the “click” with which you can substitute one slide for another, then click back to the first one. It was a moment at which I had to pause and refuse to credit Rick with more than method and determination. He was not a ghost, worse luck. He was not a saint with powers of transportation and bilocation. He had been there in the Piazza Navona! He had just inspected the fountain, probably identifying the mythologized rivers. He had been turning away, still putting his tiny camera to rights under the cuff of his sweater on the right arm. I had not seen the front of that sweater with OLE ASHCAN knitted into the chest but I had seen the very beginnings of the O. What was more, less than forty-eight hours before, my nose had been resting in the disgusting heat of the sweater at the back of his neck when he carried me down through the alp from that damned mountain path. I knew it well enough and his huge shoes and his hair, discreetly long as befits a serious academic. He had gone away, vanished down a street on the other side from the café. If I had not been in a dream at the completeness of my escape from involvement, I would have started up and run before he vanished. Or I could have tracked him to his hotel, where the golden cloud of glamour was still lying in, not being physical.
I jumped up, shoved some money on the little table and hurried away, keeping a weather eye round most points of the compass, which enabled me to see the sinister speed with which a passing dropout removed my money from the table before the waiter could reach it. I kept assuring
The sunglasses! That was why the morning sun was now trying my eyes! I had picked them up next door to the hotel when I strolled over. They had hidden all of my face except for my scraggy beard, and beards in Rome were thick as buttercups in a field. I must have been unrecognizable as a professional gentleman gathering evidence for divorce or espionage or shoplifting; and now, damn it, doubtless startled by remembering Rick, I remembered leaving them on the usual iron table. The round metal table. I thought for a moment that it would be too dangerous to return to Navona and get my spectacles back; but then I sneaked up on the square carefully, as a professional gent, and peered round the corner. Yes, my sunglasses were gone. There had been a raid by another dropout.
I felt very confused and by midday I had left the hotel (forwarding address: The Confederate Hotel, Roanoke, VA) and was driving in a direction which I thought would fox any pursuer. I drove east, reckoning that sideroads were the thing, so soon after the annulare I got on to them.
But if it wasn’t coincidence, how on earth could Rick have found out? If he were going on the evidence, he would now be on his way to Iceland. Certainly I had told no one. Customs had been indifferent, a young man who opened the passport and shut it again without looking—or had that been deliberate, to lull me into a sense of his indifference?
It was then that I slowed up and pulled into an open space at an elbow of road. I parked and switched off the engine. I said, Wilfred Barclay, you are still in shock. You should have waited a couple of days. Mary Lou had to see Rome and Dublin. They would see Rome, regretting perhaps that poor old Wilf had disappeared so inexplicably, but then it’s not just being a Brit, it’s being a writer. Put the two together, Mary Lou, and you just don’t know what they’ll do, rushing off. Why, look at Shelley and Noël Coward. No, hon, not together, separately. Hon, I know you majored in Eng. Lit., you were my favourite pupil, natch, oh I get it, it’s like poor Wilf would say, you’re tugging my leg. No, he’d say, you’re approaching my lower limbs with a view to exerting some traction. Ha Ha. Ha Ha Ha Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha. Ha Ha. But what’s Mr Halliday going to say? From that point of view it’s real unkind of Wilf. After all, we only wanted to know about his past, particularly the juicy bits, and the occasional crime, let alone the infinite number of times he’s made a private clown of himself, what makes him tick in fact. He’s no right to hide any of that, hon. Why shouldn’t we make a meal of him?