Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

He showed me round briefly. His living rooms were plain and sparely furnished. His tiny study was dominated by a wall of legal textbooks. A big photograph of Vivian and me jumping off a sand dune in Truro hung above his desk.

I had come to take my father to dinner. He chose the restaurant, a local place called Il Vecchio Pazzo. I had made it clear that I would be paying, over his protestations. It made me feel more up to the task at hand to be in the driver’s seat in this way. The power of being the giver amounted to a slight equalling of our respective positions. Although, when I worked it out, I realised that his dead brother’s mistress’s husband was the real sponsor of our reunion. But money’s weird like that.

My father insisted on changing for dinner. I waited in his tiled sitting room, worrying that he would appear in an opera hat and tails as though dressing for the captain’s table on some prewar Atlantic liner, but he put on nothing more formal than a navy-blue, brass-buttoned blazer.

The waiters clearly knew my father. I overheard one of them referring to him affectionately as ‘Il Ingles’, and he seemed pleased when I mentioned it. He introduced me to the maître d’ and chatted away to him about the menu in Italian. Once his detailed inquiries had been satisfied, he turned to me and said, ‘You could follow that, couldn’t you?’

‘I don’t speak Italian, Dad.’

‘Well, it’s all basically Latin.’

‘Never my strong suit, I’m afraid.’ I helped myself to water from the bulbous carafe. My father was turning over the napkin in his lap slightly nervously. I remembered that there was always something distracted in his manner — he had a restless energy that was only still when he was at his desk working. But he seemed a little more twitchy than usual. He probably thought I wanted to interrogate him about his illness. Still, he was handling the situation with great aplomb.

He broke up a piece of bread and used it to sop up some olive oil. ‘How’s life at the Beeb? It’s terrible what they’re doing to the World Service.’

‘It doesn’t really apply to me,’ I said.

‘Well, of course, I know you work for the TV part.’

‘I mean, I haven’t been in London for a while. I’ve been on Ionia.’

‘Ionia?’ As he said it, I was struck by what a beautiful word it was. He repeated it softly; his surprise gave it a sense of wonderment and his sonorous voice lingered on the vowels. I remembered the sound the breeze made when it sprang up to rustle the pine trees in the late afternoon. ‘Is the water still as cold as it used to be?’

‘Most definitely.’

‘I remember taking you and Vivian to the beach there before either of you could swim and having to watch you both like a hawk.’ He pronounced ‘hawk’ hock ; it was one of the Medfordisms he could never shake off.

‘I saw Vivian a few days ago.’

‘You saw Vivian there?’

I nodded. ‘He told me about your operation.’

‘How is he?’

‘Strength to strength, I gather. I was staying at Patrick’s.’

My father raised his eyebrows, but it could have been in surprise, or because, at that moment, the waiter was sliding a plateful of ravioli under his nose. I was having the same: it had a delicious, indefinably meaty filling.

‘What is this, pork?’ I said.

‘ Coniglio .’

I shook my head.

‘Bunny rabbit.’

‘It’s good.’ I tore up some bread and swirled it in the garlicky sauce. ‘I figured I’d spend the summer there — swim every day — reminisce. Do a spot of painting. I couldn’t think why else he would have left me the house.’

‘He was a truly strange man, Damien. I say that as his brother. I could show you letters I got from him that would make your hair curl — abusive, deranged, cruel.’

‘I know, I know. But I was talking to his lawyer about it. Apparently he told the guy that I’d know what to do with it. But what? After about ten minutes I realised I’m sure as hell not supposed to live in it. But I figured it out. It’s a museum. It’s an unofficial museum, and I was supposed to be the curator.’

‘You’re not eating your ravioli.’

I spooned a couple into my mouth and the waiter took my plate away. ‘Tell him they were great.’ I said. ‘Delicioso.’

My father murmured something to the waiter, who seemed to retire through the swing doors satisfied.

‘I brought you something, by the way,’ I said, passing him the envelope of photos I’d found in Patrick’s library.

‘Well, I’ll be darned,’ he said. ‘This is from before your mother and I were married.’ He went through the photos twice, pausing on each shot as though in front of a painting in a gallery, absorbing details of the figures, the composition, the relationship of the figures to one another. I sensed he was a million miles away.

‘Well,’ he said, passing them back to me.

‘Keep them, Dad. I brought them for you.’

‘I’m touched, Damien.’ He sounded slightly abashed. I looked down at the crumbs on the table in front of me.

My father had chosen the wine for the main course, which was some kind of slow-braised lamb — shanks, I think. The wine was a deep, deep red and sat shimmering in the glass. The flavour was so full, it made me think of arterial blood — if that can be a pleasant quality in a wine.

‘This is nice, isn’t it?’ I said. I wanted it to mean the whole thing — me being there, me and my dad, in Italy, eating dinner.

But my father chose to understand it less emotively. ‘Yes, this was a great find. I’m very fond of this place. One of the things that I’m most proud of in life is that the chef here uses my honey on his baked figs. That’s quite an accolade, I think.’

‘It is. It is.’ I took a sip of my arterial blood. I was thinking that my dad was — emotionally speaking — a fiddler crab, backing away into his tiny hole at the slightest approach, beadily scouring the beach, and impossible to dig out. He had to be stalked stealthily.

The main course arrived and we had to postpone our conversation while the waiters went through a little masque of giving my dad the best service in the restaurant. I liked the fact that he was popular with them.

‘I was in the middle of telling you something,’ I said, when they’d gone.

‘Don’t let it get cold.’

‘Okay, Dad.’ I ate some of the lamb — it was soft and aromatic from long cooking. I noticed he seemed preoccupied — maybe the photos? — so I decided to postpone what I had to say until after the meal.

We had the baked figs and the chef emerged like a deus ex machina from the bowels of the kitchen to drink a toast to my father’s bees, Then we took our vin santo out to the terrace and sat staring at the darkened valley. The yellowy moon picked out the neat rows of vines in front of us.

‘I made a big discovery on the island,’ I said.

‘On Ionia?’

‘Yes. On Ionia.’ I liked hearing him say the word almost as much as I think my father enjoyed saying it. ‘I turned up a manuscript of Patrick’s with some unpublished stories in it.’

‘That is a find. What were they about?’

‘It’s called The Confessions of Mycroft Holmes. You know, Sherlock’s older brother. Do you ever read Sherlock Holmes?’

‘Not now, no. I’d have thought those stories were pretty well unreadable now, at my age.’

‘There’s some good stuff in them. I reread them when I was trying to get to the bottom of Patrick’s stories. I had to do some detective work of my own. Do you remember the Sign of Four ?’

‘It’s been years since I read it, Damien.’

‘That’s the one where Sherlock says: “How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.” That’s good, isn’t it? It sounds like a maxim of jurisprudence.’