He would have been thirty-six, tall and dashing, every inch the successful writer. It had been a while since the Peanut Gatherers, but not yet an inexplicably long time. His hair was collar length, sort of late Beatles. He was tanned, solid, not yet balding, not yet jowly. He would have had owlish dark glasses, a T-shirt, black corduroys. Lydia was with him. The extravagant gesture with the money was probably intended to impress her.
We, the children, went insane with greed, flinging the Frisbee desperately at the tin from the line we had made with our shirts twenty or thirty yards away. The moment when I threw the Frisbee and knocked the butt-tin off the stake has a special exhibition space dedicated to it in my mental museum. I can enter it at will and poke around the related exhibits: the basketball boots I wore that summer, my brother’s huge black swimming goggles that made him look like a pioneer aviator, the dried-up minnow from a pair my cousin kicked on to a sandbar and let me keep. But the mainstay of this gallery is a recording of the moment when the Frisbee struck the can with a thunk! From various angles, I can watch my cousins charge forward to ransack its contents while I, out of my wits with greed and overexcitement, fall sobbing to the grass. Patrick scoops up the money before anyone else can get to it and insists that he knocked off the butt-tin as he caught the Frisbee behind it. A replay of the action contradicts him: he is a foot away from the can as the Frisbee strikes it, again, and again, and again.
To appease me, Patrick constructed a paper chase that led to some wholly unimpressive bribe. But the paper chase itself was a revelation. We insisted he create more. Once, each clue yielded a fragment of a map, drawn in brown ink and aged with the soot of a candle flame. Others were based on pictures, or riddles. ‘You’ve looked north, you’ve looked south, Now look for the clue in the genius’s mouth’ led memorably to a wad of paper that Patrick could barely conceal in his cheek for giggling.
Vivian and I even made paper chases for each other: ordeals of fifty clues that involved climbing trees and struggling through thickets of brambles. The pleasure was all in the anticipation. The treasure – candy, a book, a baseball glove – was discovered with a sense of deflation. My brother said he wished there was a paper chase where the reward was a paper chase. To me, that thought was nightmarish, as unacceptable as infinity or the endlessly repeating music of a fevered dream.
I couldn’t persuade myself that what I had found in Patrick’s notebook was meaningless. It seemed like a clue, if not one that would lead tidily to a Tootsie roll or a Three Musketeers bar. For a while, it fascinated me. I made various resolutions to find out more and went as far as ringing up the London Library until the inertia of my old routine drew me back in. The memory of Ionia grew very faint.
I doubt I would have thought about the story again, but two weeks after I got back, my father left a message on my answering machine asking me to call him. I was surprised. We had hardly exchanged a dozen words during my visit, which seemed to suit both of us, and I kept him waiting a few days on principle. When I finally rang him, he told me, in a more than usually resonant voice, that I was the chief beneficiary of Patrick’s will.
FIVE
PATRICK HADN’T FORGOTTEN the rest of his family: on the contrary, his will had been drawn up with a thoroughness that made me think it was the final instrument of his anger against them. Patrick had the paranoiac’s gift of investing everything with significance. His other legacies were small and sardonic: a pasta machine for an overweight sister (Judith); the complete works of Frederick Rolfe for an illiterate and vulgar niece (Tricia); a mechanical penny-bank for my father, whom Patrick had always considered covetous. He had amended the document constantly, according to his persecution mania, and whom he considered to be his current enemies.
It seemed improbable that he would choose me to be his chief beneficiary. I felt a little like that horse that Caligula appointed to the Senate. But there was a crazy logic to it, too. In a way, I was the only person he could have chosen. The inheritance was mine by default. There was no one else.
The last thing in the world that Patrick wanted was for his family to benefit from his death. One way and another, he had fallen out with all of them, alienating them over the years with stinging letters or cold silences. He suffered from the worst kind of paranoia – the kind that has a firm basis in reality. Of course people talked about him behind his back. Of course people avoided him. Of course people were afraid of him – to have any dealings with him whatsoever was to risk coming into conflict with him. And the most trivial disputes could engender letters so offensive that the insults would be burned on to your consciousness for ever. ‘You have all the attributes of a dog except fidelity,’ he wrote to an ex-girlfriend. He once told my kindly Aunt Judith she was a two-hundred-pound puff adder.
I, in my dull job, neither rich nor poor, three thousand miles of ocean away, barely registered in his consciousness. I just hadn’t had the opportunity to get on his wrong side. I flattered myself that he might have been inspired by some fond memories from fifteen or twenty years earlier, but I knew that most of the arguments in my favour had been negative ones: it wasn’t who I was that mattered to Patrick, but who I wasn’t. Leaving the estate to me was bound to antagonise the whole family.
The terms of the will were strange, I suppose, but it would have been stranger still for them to have been normal. I had only been granted a life estate in Patrick’s house, its contents (apart from the things he’d left to his family), and the ten acres of lawn, marsh and sand dune that it perched on, along Ionia’s eastern shore. It was a condition of the will that the contents of the house were not to be dispersed, and the building itself was to be maintained as it had been in his life. To accomplish this, Patrick had created a trust which would remain the real owner of all his possessions. The trustees would oversee the property, making sure I didn’t do anything that would conflict with Patrick’s wishes, and looking after the money invested for its maintenance. If they thought I was failing to meet the conditions set down by my uncle, they were to assume control of the property and hand it over to a charity that ran rest homes for old churchmen. If I died intestate (it did strike me as odd that my uncle had made contingency plans for my death as well as his own), the estate reverted to the same charity.
After the initial excitement of the bequest, it was disappointing to realise that it was all hedged about with conditions. It was very typical of my family: I couldn’t see the gift for the strings. Patrick’s money was all tied to the maintenance of the house – which I couldn’t sell. Unless I went to live there, my life would change very little. My inheritance wasn’t going to provide me with an income. The trustees would release money if tiles blew off the roof of the house on Ionia, but not a penny would be available for me to redecorate my flat in Clapham. So that was that. I could forget about the casinos of the Riviera, endowing lectureships, and acquiring a stable of polo ponies. In all my fantasies of sudden wealth, I had imagined that the principal feeling would be one of enormous freedom. But the news of the inheritance hadn’t changed my life at all. My life was exactly the same. The only difference was that now I had an alternative: it came down to a straight choice – my life or Patrick’s.
*
On one of my first night shifts after the phone call from my father, Wendy asked me to put together an item about a famine in Indonesia. I got the research department to send me over a whole screed of articles about the place.
At two o’clock in the morning, I was sitting in the tea bar reading about the Stone Age tribes who lived in the mountains of New Guinea. One of the articles was lamenting the decline of their culture, and saying that they simply weren’t equipped for the brutal struggle that we accept as twentieth-century living. They were useless workers: after five minutes of digging a ditch, they would just get bored and go off for a smoke and a cup of tea. They wore penis sheaths and composed epic insult poems in blank verse. They conducted mock battles with one another. The apparent strangeness of their lives started me thinking about
the conventions of my own tribe. What would an ethnographer say about me?
I defied nature by working at night. I made myself dyspeptic over fictional deadlines. I hoarded money. I was postponing life until I felt I’d earned enough to deserve it. I was very superstitious, believing my destiny to be controlled by a priestly class called Management. I lived alone.
I realised that although I felt bitter about life, I had experienced only a small corner of it. It was like rubbishing the whole of Indian cuisine on the evidence of the chicken tikka sandwich I’d just bought from the Headlines Tea Bar.
On the tube home, I could feel the decision to leave ripening inside me. The woman opposite me was sniffling from a cold and reading a voluminous guidebook to India. Then, somehow, a moth got into the train through one of the windows. It fluttered along the length of the carriage like a scrap of paper, unnoticed, except by me, and then exited through a window farther down the train into the blackness of the tunnel beyond.
I got home and switched on the television to see the morning news, half expecting my decision to be announced. My shoes had been bothering me on the journey home, so I slipped them off and tipped them out on the carpet, where each one left a tiny pile of golden sand.
SIX
MY IMMEDIATE FAMILY were reverse migrants – Americans who left the New World for the Old, and promptly became a kind of parody of Englishness. Americans like them created the idea of shopping-mall Europe: the belief that the continent is actually a collection of themed boutiques where you go to buy old furniture and stinky cheeses, and pick up an order of culture on the side.
I don’t know how they chose our names. The family joke is that Damien March sounds like a private detective and Vivian March sounds like a hairdresser.
Dad became a born-again Englishman. He worked in London for a large corporate law firm, had shirts made at Savile Row, sent my brother and me to a boarding school, and drove a second-hand Bentley. At the same time, neither of my parents let go of America completely. My mother, a midwesterner who grew up on a farm, was never completely happy in England, but my father had more complex reasons for remaining attached to his homeland.
In a way, Dad could only be properly English in America, because in England, his kind of Englishness barely existed. Perhaps there is somewhere in the British Isles where people have afternoon tea, bag grouse and talk in Lord Haw-Haw accents, but it wasn’t in Wandsworth, SW18. Undoubtedly, my father wouldn’t have been welcome in such a place; but this did not stop him from searching. Some weekends, he would take train journeys to destinations on the strength of the placename alone: Virginia Water and Strawberry Hill were two that seemed to promise the idyll he was after. But he never found it, and neither did his small group of expatriate friends who came over occasionally to smoke pipes and brag about their kids’ schools.
America offered my father a kind of consolation. There, he was free to play cricket on the spiky grass of the house we rented near Provincetown each year; he could serve afternoon tea with cinnamon toast; and go up and down Scorton Creek in a punt he had had made in Maine and which he laboriously put in storage at the end of every summer. He was free to do these things without fear of ridicule. One of our neighbours on the Cape once said my father was ‘as English as an English muffin’. This captures him exactly: so-called English muffins, as my father liked to point out, are unknown in England.
So, each summer for about fifteen years, we would all go back to America for six weeks. My father would take an enormous suitcase of work, which he would do in the mornings. Vivian and I would squabble, read, drink Hershey’s chocolate milk and try to avoid the local children, who thought we were affected and stuck-up. Well, we were.
We didn’t really fit in, and we weren’t good at making friends, and it seemed more sensible to make a virtue out of our idiosyncrasies than to try to go against them. We had crew cuts (wiffles, they called them) when all the other boys had outgrown Tudor bowl cuts like Henry V’s. They played Pong at Pucci Pizza; we went on mapping expeditions in the sand dunes at Truro, camping there for up to a week. I insisted on military discipline from Vivian, who was the only rank-and-file soldier in our army of two. By the end of seven days, we had sand in our food, our toothpaste, and our underwear; peeling sunburns; and a map that was redundant as soon as the ink had dried on it. The wind and the weather remould those sand dunes constantly.
My father encouraged this kind of behaviour. He took pride in our bizarre achievements. My brother learned the Latin names for all the local birds. Aged eleven, I lugged law textbooks to the family clambakes and told them I was going to be a barrister. I think our relatives thought all English people were like us.
Of course, all Vivian and I really wanted was cable television like everyone else had, and to be taken to the go-carts and the trampolines, but my father frowned on all that sort of thing, so we did too. We mocked our cousins behind their backs for their orthodontic braces, their annual fads, their Cabbage Patch dolls and baseball cards. And secretly we craved most of the vulgar things we turned up our noses at.
It was an odd life. On holiday in America we clung to our Englishness, and pretended to be upset when we visited Ionia and Uncle Patrick made fun of the Queen and said that all Englishmen carried handbags. In England, we boasted about America, and how many kinds of cereal there were and how many different television channels – even though we could get none of them on the black-and-white television at the rental house that had no outside aerial. But in neither country did we feel at home. It always makes me think of Aesop’s fable about the war between the animals and the birds, in which the bat tried to pass himself off as a friend to each side, and ended up shunned by both.
My fondest memories of all those years are the few connected with my uncle. Patrick, the Frisbee incident aside, was a kind man and free of the self-lacerating regimes that Dad imposed on himself. He ate ice cream, abhorred long walks, watched television in bed in the afternoon, and put away heroic quantities of fried dough at the Barnstable County Fair each year. At least, that’s how I remembered him. Of course he had a darker side, but he never showed it to us. For me and Vivian, he was the quintessential eccentric uncle: funny, prone to strange enthusiasms, childless, childish. And he had the capacity to bring out similar qualities in my father, who was two years younger: the same age difference as between myself and Vivian.
My mother died of ovarian cancer when I was six and a half, an event which brought down the portcullis on my childhood. She had been a healthy brake on my father’s rampant Anglophilia. Perhaps if she had lived I would have been an American. She was less enthusiastic than my father about living in Britain; she often complained about the weather, and the rudeness of Londoners. She considered English plumbing to be barely out of the age when the streets had open sewers and the rich carried pomanders to protect their nostrils. When my father reluctantly agreed to build her a house on a new development in Sussex so we could leave London on the weekends, Mum insisted on having an American architect design it, and even imported tile grout from America, because, she said, it was more hard-wearing than the stuff English builders used.
There was barely a month between the diagnosis and her death. I remember being taken to see her for the last time when she was gravely ill in hospital. I sat on the side of her bed and she said, ‘Damien, your father is a very silly man. Remember that, and love him anyway.’
My other vivid memory of her is of seeing her crying one day by the kitchen window. When I asked her why, she said, ‘There are some things little boys shouldn’t know about.’ I’m still trying to figure out what she might have meant by that.
My father sold the house in Sussex soon after she died. He couldn’t bear to stay there and be reminded of her. Anyway, I think a stately pile was more his cup of tea than a Sussex bungalow.
After Mum died, home became school and friends, and secondarily the detached house on the south London street where I grew up. But the visits to the States continued, and were a glim
pse, every summer, into a glamorous parallel universe. We stepped off the plane in London at the end of each summer deaf from flying, and the accents of the immigration officials and cabbies grated, and going back to boarding school felt like beginning a stretch in Wandsworth Prison, which stood forbiddingly at the end of the Common and overlooked the garden centre and haunted my dreams. All the same, London was home.
There was little misery and no privation in our house. Perhaps there was a chilliness; perhaps Vivian and I suffered from the want of a mother. Well, we obviously did. But I can’t say I noticed it then. Dad was a remote and rather austere figure – more so after my mother died – but he had enough money to pay for a succession of au pairs, whom we terrorised, and then to send us away to a school where we boarded even though it was barely five miles from home. Boarding school, with its unrelieved maleness, its emphasis on competition, and its intolerance of difference and sensitivity, was just an extension of my family life. I got teased about my father, who arrived for a parents’ evening wearing plus-fours at a time when I was too small and insecure to laugh it off. But I toughened up, made friends and generally developed the false consciousness of adolescence that’s quite as bad as the one your family foists on you.
A couple of teachers stand out from my schooldays. Herbert Chinn, who taught Classics, reportedly believed electricity was a fluid and put tape over the sockets each night, like that woman in the Thurber story, to prevent it leaking on to the carpet. Mr Hepplewhite, the physics master, announced to each class before he began the syllabus that he did not believe in molecules. He once spent an entire lesson showing us the correct way to fold a jacket. He wore silver sleeve holders and was obsessively tidy, but the backs of his shirts were full of holes. I stayed behind after one lesson and said: ‘Mr Hepplewhite, if you don’t believe in molecules, how do you explain everything?’ He looked at me and said, ‘Ah, March!’ and then carried on with whatever he was doing. I wish I could say this bubble of benign madness protected him well into old age, but shockingly he was killed by a rent boy about five years after I left the school.
The Paperchase Page 4