Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

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 examples 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.

The Death of

Abel Mundy

BY PATRICK MARCH

Gods‚ judge me not as a god,

but as a man

whom the ocean has broken

WHOLE DAYS together I dwell among ghosts.

I saw Abel Mundy in a dream again last night, drowned and dripping, with dead eyes, and river water running from the folds of his drenched clothes. His cold fingers burned like whipcord where I shook my wrist free from his grip.

I pleaded with him. ‘Abel Mundy,’ I said, ‘let an old man rest.’

His voice uttered from somewhere inside him as softly as his last breath. ‘Where was your pity?’ he hissed at me, in an awful parody of my words to him. ‘Where was your pity?’

*

I REMEMBERED this morning the name of the man who gave me instruction in boxing during my early years in the city: R.M. Fernshaw. When I close my eyes, I seem to see the brass plate that was fastened to the door of his gymnasium in Golden Square; and when I open them, I can read the inscription on it, reflected at me in the dull gold nib of my pen:

R.M. FERNSHAW, LATE 2ND LIFE GUARDS,

EXPERT IN PUGILISTICAL AND FISTIC SCIENCES:

GIVES INSTRUCTION DAILY IN

FENCING, SINGLESTICK, SABRE, BOXING,

MILITARY DRILL,

CLUB AND DUMB-BELL EXERCISES &C.

And beneath it were posted the hours of admission.

It was a habit with me to take exercise here at least once each week: vigorous endeavour being the only proven tonic against my melancholia and the tendency to corpulence which ultimately triumphed over all my countervailing intentions.

It was one of Dick Fernshaw’s less likely contentions that a person’s griefs are buried in the fat which exertion dissolves. On this plan, Fernshaw himself must have been the most sanguine man on the planet. There was not an ounce of fat on his spare frame. In the words I once heard him use admiringly of an aspirant boxer: there was more fat on a butcher’s apron.

In those days, I was spare and quick myself, lacking the heft to deliver a resounding blow, but strong and fast enough to give a good account of myself against most opponents. Of course, this was gentleman’s boxing: the Prize Ring had been extinct for more than ten years, and the young men who came to Fernshaw’s gymnasium fought with the mufflers on.