The Paperchase

by Marcel Theroux

  I had a mental image of Janine and Mrs Delamitri struggling up and down the ladder in shoulder pads and high-heel shoes. Or possibly, Mrs Delamitri would have bought a special outfit for cat burglary – a one-piece black number with a matching mask by Donna Karan.

  When the waiter brought the bill over, Mrs Delamitri slipped him a credit card made out of some rare metal – titanium or zinc or something.

  ‘But the letters weren’t in the boxes, so you had to hire professionals to do the job properly,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry, Damien.’

  ‘What had you stolen, the first time?’

  ‘I really don’t know. I mean – I have an idea that there’s some bills and stuff. This probably sounds silly after everything I said, but I wanted to respect his privacy.’

  Far out to sea, a three-masted yacht was under sail and carving a chevron into the deep blue water.

  ‘What will you do now?’ she asked.

  ‘Go back and have a swim,’ I said.

  ‘I meant more generally.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, and for the first time, my uncertainty seemed like a virtue. I knew that I would leave the island as soon as the cheque cleared. I wanted to go somewhere where I could have a life of my own, but where or what that might be, I couldn’t say.

  *

  She talked about Patrick on the drive back. ‘I saw him last year about this time.’

  ‘Did you stay at the house?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but I didn’t spend the night with him. Not in the same bed. He had terrible dreams. I used to hear him crying out and I’d want to go to him. But I always stopped myself.’

  ‘Was he on medication?’

  ‘Two or three kinds. For the depression and the mood swings. He could just about keep it together living the way he did.’

  ‘Yeah, seeing people in homoeopathically small doses.’

  ‘I loved him, you know,’ she said. ‘But there was always this feeling that he’d done something awful. I kind of felt bad for thinking it about him …’

  We talked about funny things Patrick had said or done. I recounted Patrick’s description of the fungus on the saucepan of soup that had been sitting on Edgar Huvas’s stove for three days. ‘It looked like an echidna!’ ‘What’s an echidna?’ I had asked. ‘It’s a species of anteater. Green, and hairy, and, I might add, inedible.’

  Mrs Delamitri pressed a button and the top of the car folded up in a slow, creaky way like an old woman settling into a chair. I closed my eyes against the sudden sunlight and drifted off into a pleasant alcoholic reverie.

  The clocks in the house were striking five in a dishevelled chorus of bongs and plinks. Nathan had gone home and left a note inside the front door saying he would be back to finish off in the morning.

  I grabbed a couple of towels and we went down to the beach. I swam lazily in the cold water, while Mrs Delamitri took off her shoes and paddled along the shoreline.

  Afterwards, we sat on the towels and I smoked one of her cigarettes.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For lunch, for the money. For bothering to tell me the truth.’

  ‘Oh … Don’t mention it.’ She smiled, but I thought she looked a little sad.

  ‘You can see the Vineyard sometimes from here on a clear day,’ I said. ‘Look.’

  She dusted the sand off her hands and stood up. The sky to the west was beginning to turn a lobster pink. ‘Where?’

  I came up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders; she softened slightly into my touch. ‘Over there, I don’t think you can see it today.’

  I put my arms round her waist and pressed my face into her crispy, dry hair.

  ‘Patrick hated this beach,’ she said, in a whisper. ‘He complained about the flies and the stones.’

  Her back arched slightly towards me, her hip pressed into my crotch. She stayed there for a moment and then gently disengaged herself.

  ‘Miranda,’ I said.

  ‘I’d love to, Damien,’ she said, ‘but I think it would be a little weird.’

  TWENTY

  MRS DELAMITRI KISSED ME on the mouth when she left. She honked her horn as she backed out of the driveway, and I waved at her as Patrick must have done many times from the bank of lawn beside the road. Then I went back to the house and had another drink.

  I hadn’t been drunk since coming to the island. I think I had some idea that it would set a dangerous precedent for someone living alone. It had been part of Patrick’s weird stability that he rarely drank – although I had a distant recollection of him drinking whisky and listening to opera on a rainy afternoon while following the libretto.

  But I was already drunk – and I was already leaving – so I poured myself a whisky, leavened it with a couple of drops of water from the tap, and turned on the jukebox in the summer kitchen.

  The sunset was fading out of the sky, and the evening that drew on seemed to hum with possibility. It was the wine, but it wasn’t just the wine. All I wanted was to be back among the living – anywhere – in Vientiane, Cardiff or Cuzco. And I didn’t care what I did. Even going back to work in London held no terrors; at least it was a life.

  Now that I was able to leave the house behind, I realised that the solitude had been a purgative. My old life had died with Patrick. And the dusty, isolated, frugal legacy he had left me actually affirmed its opposite. I felt grateful to Patrick. I was Scrooge, waking up on Christmas morning after the third visitation, having finally grasped the message that the dead bring to all the living – that there’s still time. Patrick was my Ghost of Christmas Future. I felt grateful to him for being my unwitting angel.

  I lay down on the grass and looked at the sky, and by a strange reversal, it seemed to be below me, like an ocean of stars, fading away in its depths to blackness. Around me, the island seemed to be breathing in time with the sea. Then I realised it was my own breath, respiring as the waves broke and withdrew.

  Going back into the house to refill my glass for the second or third time, I remembered the box files. They were stacked where we had left them in the library. I carried four of them up to my bedroom to open them.

  The first one contained letters, but there were fewer than I had expected. I threw them into the air – a sheaf of yellow pages covered with round, childish handwriting spilled over the floor.

  Because I’d seen his handwriting so recently, I got it into my head that the author of the letters was Nathan Fernshaw, and I wondered why he had written to Patrick in such detail. I picked up a couple of leaves from the floor. The first lines I read had the felicitous spelling mistakes of a young child: ‘my friend raymond was unconshase’; a second page was written by a self-conscious adolescent wiseacre: ‘Dear Patrick, I just wanted to write a letter that doesn’t begin, “How are you?” – oops – it managed to sneak in anyway …’ A third page was somewhere in between:

  ‘it is the end of my holiday and it is halloween. we are going for a midnight walk with dad and we will bring our scooters and vivian’s go cart we hope we are thought to be ghosts and suspicions are arosed about ghosts walking across the common but we will no who they were but if real ghosts did walk across the common brrr.’

  And now there was a flash of recognition – or flashes that froze instants of the distant past. My widowed father pushing Vivian along a path on Wandsworth Common. The great orange lights of Trinity Road pushing back the blackness. A ‘midnight’ walk that took place at 8 p.m. The first anniversary of my mother’s death. I knew instantly what would be at the foot of this page, and the previous page, and every other page in the box. Love Damien.

  I opened the other box files, thinking I might find more of my own letters, or Vivian’s, or letters from my father. One box contained yellowing royalty statements for Peanut Gatherers. The others held a miscellany of unconnected papers: receipts, invoices for some gardening work, an old copy of Boston magazine with an article about Patrick’s writing classes for
the prisoners, and a coffee-stained manual for the computer in the dining room.

  I gathered my own letters into a thin sheaf and lay in bed poring over them. They were embarrassing reading, as only your own letters can be. I had sent my uncle an exhaustive explanation of the rules of conkers with diagrams; various thank-you letters; two pieces of correspondence written from boarding school in consecutive late Octobers full of nostalgia for summer barbecues and Bolder than Mandingo. By a weird symmetry, the mild Ionian night that I said I missed in my letters hung thickly over the window of my bedroom, where I lay, more than twenty years later, reading my own handwriting. I felt able to recognise, at that moment, what my teenage self, cooped up in the oppressive male atmosphere of a boys’ boarding school, couldn’t or wouldn’t remember: that those summers had been full of longueurs, that we had had no friends, that there was a loneliness intrinsic to time spent with my family. And I remembered too that each holiday contained a moment of recognition when I realised I ached with boredom and solitude, and that Stevo was having a better time working in his dad’s sportswear shop in Kentish Town.

  I had to go back downstairs to get the other boxes. It was past midnight. It had begun to rain and clouds had extinguished the starlight. Inside the house, the darkness was so deep it seemed to have a texture – the restless, electric quality you find on the inside of your eyelids.

  The first box was empty, and my disappointment deepened when I found the second also contained nothing. I wondered if Mrs Delamitri had been telling the truth when she said she had respected Patrick’s privacy. The third held a collection of auction catalogues. But in the fourth, concealed under several sheets of blank paper, was a typescript with the same quirky lettering as the inventory.

  I pulled back the wire trap that held the typescript flat in the bottom of the box. There were close to a hundred pages, loosely fastened through a hole in the top left-hand corner by a piece of cord with a metal stay at each end. The first page was blank, the second was a title page. A single row of capital letters across the middle of it read:

  THE CONFESSIONS OF MYCROFT HOLMES

  TWENTY-ONE

  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 doctor paused before the canvas. His gaze fixed on the organs of the ranged beast, which appeared visible through an opening on the crown of its head.

  ‘The beast’s tubes must serve some purpose!’ cried the doctor.

  My brother looked at me in bafflement.

  ‘Alimentary, my dear Watson,’ I said.

  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.

  ‘What an unbearable fraud with his hideous Countess Gruffanuff!’ I said, finally free to reveal the extent of my revulsion.

  ‘He may be loathsome, but his notoriety is, I assure you, genuine, and rests on a very singular claim indeed,’ said my uncle.

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The Baron d’Anthès killed Pushkin.’

  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 exampl
es 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.