Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

My scholastic zeal waned in proportion as my father’s waxed. And the upshot of all this was that, thanks to the intervention of Mr Sandford, Dad and I took Latin O-level together, in the gymnasium of my school; with Dad sitting at the desk in front of me: March, pater, and March, filius.

I remember the whole thing with an awful clarity. In two separate three-hour exams I watched my dad’s head bowed over his desk and listened to his expensive fountain pen scratching away on the paper. In the final exam, he called the invigilator over to complain about an apparent misprint in the unseen translation, and the papers were taken away from us, and we had to wait forty-five minutes while it was established over the telephone that a misprint had indeed occurred and the erratum in question was chalked up on the blackboard.

The thing that etched it forever on my memory as a terrible moment was the reaction of my fellow students, who treated me with a tender, kindly pity that hurt much more than any name I had been called in the preceding years.

Dad got an A in the exam and came second overall in the entire country. The boy who beat him was a nine-year-old prodigy from Scotland. I got an E.

The results were posted to us in America during the summer. Dad shot the cork from a magnum of champagne across the garden on the evening he heard the news. He commiserated with me, but to my eyes the arc of the cork seemed to inscribe the word ‘parricide’ in the night air. Or would have, had I learned enough Latin to know what it meant.

I did better in my other subjects, and tried to draw some comfort from the fact that the letter from the examination board which Mr Sandford forwarded to my dad, and which he exhibited casually on the dining table without seeming to draw attention to it, began: ‘This remarkable young man …’; as though he were an inky-fingered schoolboy, instead of a middle-aged widower, with most of his life behind him.

‘Dad’s such a fucking horse’s arse’ was Vivian’s reaction.

I toyed briefly with the idea of withdrawing from the economy of success and failure altogether, growing dreadlocks and going to live in a caravan. But instead, I changed schools, opting out of the private system and going to the local sixth-form college, where I discovered I wasn’t as stupid as I’d thought. I went to university in Swansea, eventually, to do Soviet and East European Studies, which might have been some kind of Oedipal attack on my American heritage. I saw less and less of my father, who eventually gave up on London and moved to Italy, where he wrote law textbooks and was finally accepted as a bona fide Englishman. I spent two years after Swansea working in America, and came home to a job at the BBC, which seemed like the answer to all my prayers at the time, but over a number of years, it grew to remind me of my family, in the way that it seemed to be full of bright people competing for too little love and attention.

THERE IS A ROCK with a ledge worn into it at the end of the jetty that marks the boundary of the beach nearest to my uncle’s house. When the sea is high, or rough, it’s too dangerous to approach — a single wave could knock you senseless. But on a windless day, with the ocean as flat as the icing on a sponge cake, it is a perfect place to dive from. When my family was still on speaking terms with one another, we used to play here, in the summers when we visited Ionia.

The game we played was this: each of us had to jump off the rock and turn to catch a soccer ball before we crashed into the water. There were many variations: you could work in a spin or a somersault, or do it with two jumpers who had to pass the ball between them and then back to the thrower. It was the best game we had, and it was — not coincidentally — the only family game we played that lacked any sense of competition. We called it Bolder than Mandingo, because that was what you had to shout before you hit the water.

It was Patrick’s idea to say it, and because of his Boston accent, and the obscurity of the phrase, and perhaps because of Patrick’s obsession with hair loss (this was before the wig), Vivian and I thought we were saying ‘Balder than Mandingo’ as we leaped off the rock. But Mandingo was the title of a sixties novel about an interracial love affair, and ‘bolder than Mandingo ’ a plaudit invented by some reviewer for another book.

Bolder than Mandingo became family shorthand for a leap into the unknown so I decided to write it on the invitations for the party I had before I left London for Ionia. Most of the guests thought it was a reference to a forgotten spaghetti Western, and my friend Stevo turned up in a bootlace tie.

My four-week notice period at the BBC had concluded the same day. It somehow reminded me of my last day at prep school, when I hung my tie on a lamppost on the way home in a moment of uncharacteristic spontaneity. Afterwards I dreamed about my dead mother telling me off and was racked by guilt and went back to retrieve it, the nylon stripes damp with rain. I probably still have the tie somewhere.

I was surprised how quickly the decision to leave my job had overtaken me. For a while, it had looked as though I was going to take a sabbatical, and leave a door open back into my old life at the BBC. But then I decided that after six months in Ionia, I would rather come back to London and start afresh than go back to a job I had grown to hate.

The possibility of change changed everything. The thought that I had no alternative was all that had kept me in my old life, and now that things could be different, they couldn’t stay the same. I couldn’t become a tribesman on Irian Jaya, or a Tatar horseman. But I could live as Patrick had lived. His will offered me that possibility. And his life seemed sufficiently different from mine to be the change I craved. By now, I felt too close to the idea of being free to contemplate anything else. It was that moment suspended between the rock and the ocean when you bunch your knees up and anticipate the cold shock of the water. It was too late to get back on the rock now. Bolder than Mandingo.

The rather complicated provisions of the inheritance had been simplified by the rumour network in the office. I had come into a fortune, the gossip went, so I was jetting off to start spending it. On my last day, one of the producers, a man called Derek Braddock, came up to me with a mock-quizzical expression on his face as I was clearing out my desk.

‘Damien,’ he said. ‘Got a message for you, mate. Couldn’t quite understand it.’ He passed me one of the flimsy pieces of paper that we used for telephone messages. ‘Bloke called Riley. Says he wants his life back.’

I looked at him for a moment. ‘Life of Riley. Very good, Derek. You’re wasted here.’

Derek chuckled like a moron. He had a pale and mumpy face — like a photograph of a Great War soldier. I thought: There’s nothing more coercive than a bad joke.

Wendy had come up alongside him, with her hands behind her back. The dozen or so people in the office crowded around her while she made a short speech about what a pleasure it had been working with me and that I would always be welcomed back if the life of the idle rich ever got too much for me. It seemed churlish to contradict her, so I smiled and made a speech of my own about how much I’d enjoyed working there and how I’d be glad to see any of them on Ionia, if they didn’t mind sleeping on the beach; just joking, they’d always be welcome.

One of the production assistants had gone out to buy sparkling wine in the lunch break and this was produced, along with a present and a card, amid much teasing about licence-payers’ money and Producer Choice. The present was a book, a thoughtfully chosen anthology of writing about castaways which I made everyone sign. I felt a surge of affection for all of them, even Derek Braddock, whom I’d always found a pain. I thought to myself that even if work had replicated all the faults of my family, at least it had replicated some of its virtues too: the humour, the intelligence, the companionship. For the first time, I felt a sense of loss. For good or bad, the life I had made in London was something of my own, and I was leaving it behind. I was exchanging something real for something unreal. It suddenly seemed like a dangerous swap.