The Paperchase

by Marcel Theroux

  Somewhere between New Haven and Providence I had had enough of driving. The radio and periodic blasts of air from the open window weren’t enough to keep me alert, and I found myself dropping off at the wheel. I didn’t feel ready to join Patrick in the funeral home, so I pulled off the interstate and found a motel. I can’t remember the name of it. Was it an Econolodge? A Comfort Inn? A Motel 6? A Knight’s Inn? A Day’s Inn? A Budgetel? An E-Z Rest? Whatever it was called, it had a huge glass window draped in orange cloth and fronting the parking lot, a remote control stapled to the bedside table, which was scarred with cigarette burns, and a wide, saggy bed, like the back seat of a limousine, from where I continued to steer the rental car in my dreams, carefully guiding it down the right-hand lane of the highway.

  *

  The funeral home was fiercely air-conditioned. The only person without goose pimples was Patrick, peering out of the hatch of his coffin, his face waxy, his hairy fingers entwined over his chest and padlocked with a rosary. His nostrils were more cavernous than I remembered; his features greyer and more jowly. His blond wig had been decorously arranged over the top of his papery head. I had once been so used to Patrick’s weird hair – the wigs followed experiments with comb-overs, transplants, weaves, and pate-dye – that I was surprised when people drew attention to it. I took his appearance for granted and somewhat resented people who didn’t. No one pointed out men wearing baseball caps, or beards. Why point out the wig?

  But seeing him after so long, with his old grey face on the pillow, I saw why people had been so surprised. ‘Wig’ didn’t really do it justice. I kept thinking of the word ‘syrup’ from ‘syrup of figs’ – the Cockney rhyming slang for a wig. Patrick’s was a golden syrup flowing over his head. It was the hair of a surfer, or a 3-D Jesus, and it looked decidedly odd on a man of sixty-three whose natural hair colour had been raven black.

  I touched the back of Patrick’s hand gingerly and made the sign of the cross, and said a Lord’s Prayer up to ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, which was all I could remember. My hand was drawn to the golden curls of his wig. Almost inadvertently, I found myself giving it a valedictory pat. The sensation of the wiry hair on my fingers stayed with me for the rest of the day.

  The people around me seemed oblivious to the presence of the corpse. The only sign that they were aware of it was in the hushed tone of their voices. No one appeared to recognise me either. Being ten years older was like being in disguise. I retreated to one of the side tables to get a drink and bumped straight into my father.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how kind of you to have come, Vivian.’

  How kind of you to have come: he said it so precisely that it threw me for a second, it didn’t even sound like English.

  ‘Damien, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m Damien.’

  ‘Damien! Well … The two of you … so very alike now. You’ve filled out.’

  He was wearing a dark suit and one of his Jermyn Street cravats. He looked, I thought, like a Hollywood English butler – something he was probably aware of himself. His hair was greyer, but there was still a good deal of it. It makes nonsense of genetics that Dad should have so much hair and Patrick so little. But age had made them more alike in other ways – the jowly faces, cartilaginous noses, the same shaggy eyebrows with the odd overgrown hair poking out of them: stalks of wheat in a windowbox. Dad’s was a fuller version of the face in the casket.

  ‘Work is making me fat,’ I said.

  ‘Really? I always found it kept me thin.’ He patted his paunch. ‘I gather you’re still at the Beeb?’

  ‘Still at the Beeb,’ I said. ‘Still at the Beeb.’

  ‘Jolly good.’ To my shamelessly Anglophile father, ‘Working for the BBC’ was right up there with ‘took silk’, ‘reading Greats’, and ‘someone in the City’. I had never managed to explain to him that the BBC I worked in was a kind of high-tech post office, full of underappreciated people grumbling about the pay and conditions.

  At that moment, I had the feeling I always had talking to my father: the feeling that he was looking down on my life from very high up without too much interest. He was outwardly impressive, like the deity of a pre-Christian religion: a totem pole, or a King Log, an Ark that you carried around the desert to intimidate your enemies. But it was a bluff. He couldn’t intercede for his people. The box was empty. Even his sonorous, mid-Atlantic voice seemed to have a wooden echo.

  ‘Seen anything of old’ – he checked himself for a beat – ‘Vivian?’

  ‘We haven’t spoken for a couple of years,’ I said, trying very hard not to make it sound like a rebuke.

  ‘Ah!’ boomed the voice of the Ark. His shaggy eyebrows flew upward like divots, but he said nothing further. He knew that if he asked too many questions, he ran the risk of unearthing tiresome information.

  *

  The body was buried the following morning on the family plot in West Dennis. It was a bright May day. At the last minute, one of the readings in the service was reassigned to me, because I had come the farthest to attend it. My brother Vivian had not bothered to turn up.

  My steps echoed through the church as I walked back to my pew from the lectern. My ears were still blocked up from the flight, and the effort of projecting my voice made me lightheaded.

  My father then read an extract from the Book of Common Prayer. I had to admit it sounded good. His foghorn of a voice filled the room:

  ‘The days of our age are three score and ten,’ he read. ‘And though men be so strong, that they come to fourscore years, yet is their strength then but labour and sorrow; so soon it passeth away and we are gone.’

  Aunt Judith was sniffling into a handkerchief. I was shocked how grey and old the four surviving siblings looked – even from the back.

  ‘O teach us to number our days,’ my father went on, ‘that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.’

  *

  The reception was held at Patrick’s house, which meant catching the ferry to Ionia after the service. A few people didn’t have time to make the extra trip. Patrick’s mother, my nonagenarian grandmother, wasn’t considered strong enough to go. As I kissed her cheek and said goodbye, I could hear my voice reverberating tinnily through the amplifier in her hearing aid.

  Ionia sits in the Atlantic a few miles off the coast of Massachusetts. It’s less than an hour from the mainland, but in the middle of the sound the sea floor drops off sharply. The water there is as blue-black as open ocean, and for a couple of minutes you are out of sight of either shore.

  I went up to the top deck to get away from the funeral party. Sitting together in their dark clothes on the orange plastic seats of the ferry, they looked like a group of missionaries.

  The breeze from the island carried the scent of pine trees. A small boy clattered up the stairs hugging a box of Crackerjack popcorn, eager for a first glimpse of land. And suddenly, Ionia’s low hump had broken the straight line of the horizon. From the lee of the shore, a gust of wind blew through me like the draught from an open window.

  We reached Patrick’s house in taxis from Westwich. A catering company had laid out tables on the lawn by the summer kitchen and were serving a sickly seafood chowder.

  The house stood alone at the top of a slope that rolled down to a tidal marsh and the sand dunes beyond it. It was built of wood, with white sides and jet-black shutters. Inside, it smelled of timber and books and wax polish. I was startled by familiar details – the stone in the library with the woman’s face painted on it in coloured ink; the narwhal’s tusk; the sky-blue velvet love seat in the sitting room; an idealised self-portrait of Patrick like a languid Byron, with high cheekbones and lots of hair. Seeing them again I felt the exhilaration of the lucid dreamer: as though by remembering them I had brought them into existence.

  I felt a kind of reverence for the place – it was full of relics, after all. The house was Patrick’s life’s work. In the absence of a family, it was all he had to project himself into the future. It was the sum total of
his life’s choices. And what choices!

  Patrick had hoarded all sorts of junk: records, books, ice-cream scoops, mechanical banks, marbles, playing cards. But among the worthless detritus that had accumulated over decades were some treasures. For every twenty battered old cookery books, there might be a first edition of Vile Bodies; for every fifty records by Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band, you would find an original Sun pressing of Elvis Presley; for every gimcrack scrimshaw, a netsuke, or a Victorian doll. And the confusion, the clutter, the mixture of art and trash reflected him exactly. The house was Patrick.

  I went upstairs and found my cousin Tricia rummaging through one of the upstairs cupboards. I wanted to see what was in there too, but I had a vision of Patrick bristling with anger: he was intensely private, and the sight of Tricia digging through his possessions, and almost sweating with excitement, would have undoubtedly hastened the myocardial infarction that killed him. She pounced on an antique shawl and wrapped herself in it. She said she wanted it to remember him by; but there was a fuck-you in her voice. It occurred to me that Patrick’s family had all been slightly afraid of him. He had consistently excluded and offended them. If any one of us had turned up while Patrick was alive, he would probably have hidden in one of the upstairs rooms and not bothered coming down. And people had grown fearful of him. By returning to the house, by gawping at it like tourists, by taking his things – and by the end of the day, everyone had something – his family were saying: You don’t scare us any more. But it was a boast: they were slightly jumpy – a group of children striking poses by a dead tiger.

  Patrick’s study took up one end of the top floor of the house. The ceiling was open to the eaves and a library ladder on casters led up to a gallery where Patrick kept his reference volumes. I pulled out books in no particular order: something about knots, one on seamanship, another on phrenology, an Esperanto grammar.

  A forbidding wall of black filing cabinets lined one side of the lower room – these held his record collection. Beside them, a hatch in the floor concealed a narrow set of stairs down to the kitchen.

  I sat on Patrick’s leather swivel chair and admired the view.

  The room’s only windows faced north. A ribbon of sea was visible glittering beyond the dark band of trees. Through a telescope, the surface of the ocean seemed to snap and ripple like a flag in the wind. Direct sunlight rarely entered the room. It was cool and dim, like a cavern, or a wine cellar, and haunted with the smell of books and wood. A potbellied stove warmed the study in winter.

  Snatches of conversation drifted up from the gathering beneath the window.

  What I was hoping to find was a fountain pen. I had a picture of myself back in London, keeping a diary and using a relic of Patrick’s life to record the minutiae of mine, but the only objects on top of the desk were a row of green box files and a human skull with pencils in its noseholes.

  The leather chair creaked and yawed back as I leaned over to open the drawers. I looked in a couple – with the prickling selfconsciousness of a man walking knowingly into the ladies’ toilets. They held only stationery and bundled letters.

  I slipped a box of Dixon Ticonderogas into my jacket pocket and almost as an afterthought added two small notebooks – nice ones, with creamy pages and all-weather covers. The pencils rattled in my pocket as I went downstairs: a faint noise like the misgivings of my feeble conscience.

  I left the house to get away from the funeral party milling around the garden and walked down the wooden boardwalk over the sand dunes towards the beach. The wind was blowing hard. The tips of the dune grass had bent over and inscribed hieroglyphs in the sand around them. I stepped onto the beach and sank in up to my ankles, so I took off my shoes and socks and walked down to the water barefoot. The sea was as green and sweet as peppermint mouthwash – and so cold it made the bones in my feet ache. I had the whole beach to myself – not unusual there even in summer. The only person I could see was a man throwing a Frisbee for his dog to retrieve from the tiny waves which burbled up the beach, and he was half a mile away, beyond the jetty of black rocks that marked the end of Patrick’s patch of sand dunes. Much farther out, a fisherman in a small boat with an outboard motor was checking lobster pots. For all the strangeness of his life and death, Patrick really hadn’t had it too bad here, I was thinking.

  But my father seemed to think otherwise. I could hear his voice booming over the garden as I walked back up to the house.

  ‘I would never use the word “failure” of anyone,’ he was saying. ‘I don’t consider that to apply to him at all. He lacked purpose. You know what he lacked? You really want to know what he lacked? He lacked hunger.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right,’ said Judith. ‘It just makes me so sad to think of him here on his own. I’d get so lonesome. Do you think we let him down?’

  ‘None of us let him down,’ my father said.

  I had my shoes in my hand. The spiky lawn was prickling the soles of my bare feet. ‘Post-mortem?’ I said, cheerily.

  A wary look came over my father’s face, but he said nothing.

  I caught the ferry back to the mainland that evening. I almost regretted leaving when I looked behind us and saw the lights of the harbour being eclipsed by the black edge of the horizon. I felt like I was saying goodbye to it for ever. I decided then that that was the reason I had come. That had been the meaning of my climacteric. The last person in my family that meant anything to me had died. There was no one left for me in this country of a quarter of a billion people. I was heading back to my poky flat on my own draughty island and I would be staying there until my three-score years and ten were up. So long, New World.

  It suddenly got very cold. I went below to get out of the wind and on one of the lower decks I bumped into Patrick’s Latvian roommate from law school, Edgar Huvas, who mistook me for Vivian. I remembered him vaguely from his summer visits. He had a photographic memory and an obsession with women’s necks, and looked like the Pillsbury doughboy. He had never been invited back after an incident in a clam bar where he tried to lick the waitress’s neck as she leaned over to take his plate.

  I offered him a lift to Providence, thinking I could use the company and that maybe he had anecdotes about Patrick’s law-school days, but he fell asleep after ten minutes and only woke when I pulled up at the bus station. He shook my hand limply. ‘Thanks, Vivian,’ he said. I couldn’t be bothered to correct him. He took the carrier bag containing the books he had just stolen from Patrick’s library and ambled off to buy his ticket. I watched him leave. I thought about stopping in New Haven for a pizza, but in the end decided to see if I could catch an earlier flight to London, so I drove nonstop to Newark.

  I was starving by the time we took off. I ate and enjoyed the in-flight meal: all of it – wrinkly roll, jaundiced salad, and trifle. I wondered if that was a sign of age. Once upon a time just the smell of aeroplane food had made me want to puke.

  After the meal the cabin crew dimmed the lights for our three-hour parody of a good night’s sleep. The rushing Atlantic wind outside the aircraft made me feel chilly so I got my jacket from the overhead rack and took out the clanking box of pencils and the pair of notebooks I had picked up about a thousand miles before.

  Flicking through them, I saw that only one was completely blank. The other was about a third used. Patrick had started writing in the back of it. It began in bursts: notes at first, a word, a squiggle, a crossing-out, then sentences and whole paragraphs which ran through the book in reverse like pages of Arabic. It looked as though Patrick had intended to write a line or two and then been hijacked by an onrush of inspiration. About three pages in, it began to flow pretty much uninterruptedly. The angle of the handwriting altered where the velocity and pressure of the pen had increased – the way an animal running compresses its body for speed. Letters blurred together, words were skipped; some of the paragraphs sprouted thought balloons as though Patrick were marking places that he wanted to return to and amplify.

  I
t was only a fragment: the beginning of a love story written in a pastiche of nineteenth-century prose, but beneath the formal pseudo-Victorian writing, I seemed to catch the inflections of a real voice – one that I hadn’t heard for almost twenty years. ‘More than fifty years have passed’, it began, ‘since the day I arrived in the capital by post-chaise, and watched the Thames, shirred like a matron’s bustle, foaming into ribbons of lace beneath the arches of London Bridge.’

  THREE

  MORE THAN fifty years have passed since the day I arrived in the capital by post-chaise and watched the Thames, shirred like a matron’s bustle, foaming into ribbons of lace beneath the arches of London Bridge. Old age, while dimming every useful faculty, has left the colours of that memory untouched. In the late afternoon light, the river shone as though gilded with the same aureate brush that seemed poised to draw the lineaments of my own future.

  It was ten years after the Mutiny, the old East India Company had been wound up, and a new generation of gentlemen administrators were selected by competitive examinations to carry on its work. Some of them were bindlestiffs, slack-jawed second sons of country parsons who were doomed to wither like earthworms in the tropics. Others were cads of the old school: straitened Beau Brummel types, without the money to be malcontents. They oozed upwards in the service, their heads pomaded with smarm, their sharp elbows working like paddles on a riverboat. But a few young men were drawn by a sense of duty: a word which wasn’t then pronounced as though it savoured of rotten cheese. They believed their vocation was to carry out the Queen’s command, to secure the country’s prosperity, to promote works of public utility among her dominions. Was it sanctimony? Or arrogance? Or wide-eyed hopefulness? Choose wisely and absolve me, reader. I was one of them.