Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

He didn’t show up until more than a year later. He walked into a Westwich bar in his uniform. He’d thrived under the army’s benign discipline and, away from unfavourable comparisons with his brother, discovered he had a knack for soldiering.

Why had he come back? Mrs Diaz wasn’t sure. Perhaps he just wanted a chance to show the islanders how he’d made good. Perhaps he wanted to take responsibility for his baby daughter. Perhaps he wanted to marry her mother and make a life together.

In any case, it never got that far. His brother, who had spent his life overcompensating for his twin’s shortcomings, had married the woman himself.

Richard heard all this from one of his old friends. He found Harriet, who refused to let him in to see the baby, so he got drunk and went looking for his brother. Luckily — or unluckily, who’s to say? — he never found him. Zac was away at sea. Richard went back to the mainland, swearing he’d come back for revenge.

‘And did he?’ I asked.

‘Oh no. He got his. Fragged in Vietnam.’

‘Fragged?’ I wondered if it was like ‘fagged’ at English public schools. It would have been a justly bathetic end if this glamorous hood had spent the Vietnam War making toast for more senior officers and shining their shoes.

‘As in “fragmentation bomb”,’ explained Mrs Diaz. ‘It means he was killed by his own men. I guess he was too much of a hard-ass, a disciplinarian.’

As for Zac and his new bride and his stepchild, against the odds they were happy. He learned his wife’s rare language and made a decent living fishing for tuna. ‘They’d take the catch into P-town and sell it to Japanese buyers right off the dock. He made good money. I suppose the fish ended up as sushi.’

After ten years together, the couple had a child of their own, a boy named Nathan after Zac’s dead father. But Zac himself didn’t live to see his child turn one. He was hiking with a couple of friends along the coast at Nawgasett on the mainland when he lost his footing on a rock. A wave — not even a large one — splashed over his foot and caused him to slip into the water. He struggled against the current but like a lot of the older island fishermen he wasn’t much of a swimmer. One of his friends ran to fetch the Coast Guard but Zac was dead even before he made it back.

This is the distillate of a conversation that bubbled on for an hour and a half until Mr Diaz came into the room with his wife’s painkillers. Although I was never bold enough to ask her what was wrong with her, from hints she dropped I guessed that the operation she’d had had been a hysterectomy.

Seeing her with her husband, I noticed for the first time that she was older than him by about five years and possibly more. He was sweetly uxorious: bustling around her, fixing pillows and draping an afghan over her lap. She allowed herself to be a little crotchety with him, but in a way that suggested a deep affection. I took the interruption as my cue to go.

Something like nuclear fission had taken place. The fictional villain of my uncle’s story had split into two people: Zac and Richard Fernshaw. There was no question of a murder, because there was no victim. What had seemed like a story about an abusive husband had its roots in a story about two brothers.

I had asked Mr Diaz to show the story to his wife. ‘It’s a what-if,’ she said, when I asked her about it. ‘It’s kind of like the good brother never saved her. What would have happened then? What kind of a father would Dick Fernshaw have made? A terrible one, obviously. Luckily old Mycroft is around to take care of business.’

‘Don’t you think the violence in the story is excessive?’ I said.

‘Excessive?’ The word sounded a bit precious when she repeated it. ‘I suppose it is.’

*

I bought some flowers from a shop in town before I drove home, and put them in front of my uncle’s self-portrait as an expiation. I told myself I’d visit his grave on the mainland before I left the country for good.

I understood that since there was no victim, there could be no question of a murder, or a murderer. There was only a murderous rage, an anger without an apparent location that was the story’s most troubling feature, and which had lured me into the false assumption that the events it described were real.

IT TOOK ME FOUR MORE days to get my affairs in order and make my arrangements for leaving the country. My flight was scheduled to leave Logan Airport just before midnight on a Sunday, three days before what would have been Patrick’s sixty-fourth birthday, so I decided to have a barbecue to celebrate my last day on the island. It would be both a leave-taking and an anniversary.

I called Aunt Judith in Boston to invite her too and apologised for not having kept in touch. She mentioned that Vivian had been shooting something in Vermont and was threatening to pay her a visit in Medford. She didn’t use the word ‘threatening’, of course. She would have been pleased to see him. I said to let him know he was welcome to come, too. Throughout our conversation I was thinking that Judith’s reliable Christmas presents were almost all that remained of the invisible links that once held our family together.

I didn’t expect my brother to turn up. I just wanted to send the message that, on my side at least, I was dismantling the barricades. I was realistic enough not to expect that we’d become bosom buddies — we’re too different for that.

The Saturday before was overcast and humid. Nathan helped me manoeuvre the barbecue — the one with a tall black hood like a blast furnace — out of the shed and up the hill to the house. He had the idea of putting it in the pony trap to move it more easily. We laid the barbecue on its side and lashed it down, then each of us pulled one of the shafts of the trap. I told Nathan how Captain Scott and his team had pulled their sleds to the South Pole the same way. It struck me as I was telling him that I had heard the story first from Patrick: The Worst Journey in the World was one of his ten favourite books.

But talk of Antarctic weather was out of place the following day. By eleven it was clear that it was going to be one of the hottest days of the summer. The sky was a searing blue — like balloon silk.

The first guests to come were the Fernshaws, who brought with them a giant Tupperware bin of potato salad. Winks hopped across the lawn behind them on crutches.

I had invited everyone I could think of. Mr Diaz was there, Mrs Diaz sent her regrets, but Stephanie the paralegal came, as did Officer Topper, whom I invited on a whim. Mrs Delamitri brought her friend from up-island, who in turn brought some guests she had staying, including a whey-faced Englishman in his late forties called William Ricketts who worked for the United Nations and turned out to have been a pupil at my boarding school. ‘I met your uncle once,’ he told me.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘he mentioned you.’

Mr Ricketts insisted on reminiscing to me about our alma mater while I tried to cook the burgers and the chicken thighs on the barbecue.

It annoyed me that he singled me out as a co-conspirator. Not only was I preoccupied with the temperamental barbecue, but I also thought his cliquishness compared badly with the geniality of my American guests, who were swapping anecdotes and doing their best to overcome the communication barrier posed by the Fernshaws’ deafness. It was a reminder of what was waiting for me back in England — guardedness, reserve, insularity — and it was an affirmation of the regrettably English parts of my own character, because William Ricketts was the person at the gathering I most resembled.

But I was enjoying myself anyway, partly because the event was so improbable. I liked overhearing Officer Topper holding forth on genealogy to Winks, and seeing Nathan interpreting one of Mr Diaz’s rambling anecdotes in gestures to his mother. And I liked the continuity that it implied with the celebrations I remembered here from my childhood.