Marcel Theroux - The Paperchase

‘Say it again.’

I repeated it and my father said the words slowly to himself. ‘Yes, that is good,’ he said thoughtfully.

I took a sip of my wine. It gave me a thrill to think that it had grown in the earth which I could smell cooling below the terrace we were sitting on.

‘What happens in the last story — briefly, so you don’t have to wade through it. Mycroft — who’s kind of a layabout — meets this fellow, Abel Mundy, who has a deaf wife and kids. Mundy’s a nasty piece of work — this is, like, high melodrama — and Mycroft ends up topping him. Simple enough.’

‘Simple enough,’ my father agreed.

‘But here’s the weird part. Patrick really had some deaf neighbours. And being a little literal-minded, I thought: It’s a confession! — maybe he’s trying to tell us something. Maybe he’s offed this bloke, Fernshaw — Mundy.’

‘Who?’

‘Patrick. It sounds ridiculous, but I really did believe it, I think, for a moment anyway. That he might have been capable of murder.’

My father shook his head. ‘He was capable of a lot of things, but not that.’

‘No, you’re right,’ I said. I took another sip of the wine and it seemed to leave a trail of stars across my tongue like the one above us. ‘You’re absolutely right. I looked into it further and it turned out that the villain in the story is actually a composite. He’s based on two characters, two brothers, who have a pretty interesting story of their own.’ I broke off. ‘You know what? I think I left those photos indoors.’

‘No, I have them right here. You gave them to me, remember?’ My father patted the inside pocket of his blazer.

‘Of course I did. My memory is going. What was I saying? This story. It was a basically a love triangle: two brothers in love with the same woman. I’m not even sure how the three of them met, but I have a feeling they were all foreigners abroad and just sort of fetched up in the same city. The brothers were close in age but quite different. The younger brother was rather conventional, hardworking and — not dull — what’s the word? Prosaic. Maybe a little more prosaic than the other.’

‘You don’t mean “prosaic”, surely?’ said my father.

‘Don’t I?’ I wished I’d held off the vin santo. Trust my dad to be listening to my tale of heartbreak with one eye on Fowler’s Modern English Usage. ‘Let’s just say “prosaic” for now. I need to tell you about the other brother. I suppose I think of him as poetic, but he wasn’t a poet. Actually, he was a bit feckless, and found it hard to keep himself to one thing for any length of time. They were both complicated people. I don’t know about the woman, presumably she was too. But the older brother was definitely more glamorous, funny and unpredictable, and the kind of man women like to be with. Or this woman did, at any rate, because she was totally smitten with him, and probably didn’t even notice the younger brother. They had that “hearts and flowers” phase of the romance and she got pregnant.

‘So now, she’s pregnant and looking for some help, but as I said, the older brother wasn’t able to commit to anything and he just fucked off. He disappeared, went, I don’t know, to Russia. He went away, God knows where. Poof! Just vanished.’

I was trying to sense my father’s reaction to what I was telling him, but he sat there beside me in absolute silence.

‘You can imagine the state the girl was in,’ I said. ‘This was a different time. Being pregnant and unmarried was seriously bad news. Oh yeah, and to make things worse, she was a Catholic — all three of them were, in fact.’ I paused. ‘You’ll never guess what happened.’

He said nothing — the only sound was the slow sigh of his inhalation.

‘The younger brother stepped in. He loved her anyway, and he may have had faults, but pride wasn’t one of them. I mean, he didn’t need to punish her for preferring his brother. And he was hard-working. It may sound strange, but I think he believed in hard work in the way some people believe in God — and that through hard work, he’d make her love him. More wine, Dad?’

My father shook his head — I sensed the movement in the darkness, but nothing else.

‘To cut a long story short — although you might say it’s a bit late for that — they got married and things worked out quite well and they had a second child together. Then she died suddenly. It was a terrible blow, but it had one surprising consequence which was that the brothers became friends again, tentatively. I think with all brothers there’s so much similarity, you know, that even after a row, they continue to look at the world in the same way.

‘So there was a sort of rapprochement. It was a bit tense, I gather, perhaps because the older son was never told about, well, what I’ve just told you. And in the end the strain grew — you know how old men get weirder as they get older — and the friendship became impossible to sustain.

‘That’s more or less the story. The reason I’m telling you is that I found it very touching. The younger brother never took credit for what he’d done. I can’t imagine that he was ashamed about it. He brought the child up as his own, loved it in his own way, and had the usual parental failings, but didn’t favour either of his sons, even got them mixed up at times, which, given the circumstances, is quite lovely, I think.

‘One of Patrick’s neighbours told me all this. She said to me, “Who was the older boy’s real father, then?” I told her paternity’s not the issue, is it? The younger brother was a father to both the sons. And it was a pity, in a way, that the older child could never know.’ I had to stop briefly because I didn’t want my father to hear the catch in my voice. ‘It was a pity — imagine the love and gratitude if he’d known the truth.’

My father was silent for a long time. I began to think I’d made a terrible misjudgement.

When he finally spoke, there was more astonishment than anger in his voice. He had been turning over in his mind the one thing that he still hadn’t been able to forgive.

‘Not a letter,’ he said, in a whisper. ‘Not even a letter when she was dying.’

GETTING BACK TO LONDON was the strangest thing. The city was shabby and overcast but it also seemed as comfortable as an old couch — specifically, the couch I had chucked out to make room for Platon Bakatin’s sofa-bed.

No one met me at the airport. I just kept walking past the phalanx of chauffeurs with signs, and expectant relatives, and for once I was in no hurry to get back to central London and a makeshift bed in Stevo’s dingy studio flat.

Although I hadn’t spent the night at my father’s, he did insist on taking me back to show me round his vegetable garden. It was past midnight, but he had two ridiculous flashlights that we wore on our heads. The beams glinted on the shiny skins of tomatoes and aubergines.

‘ Solanum melangena ,’ my father said.

I nodded. We both pretended not to notice each other’s tears.

That our reunion was only tolerable because of a complicated charade that redirected our strong feelings on to members of the vegetable kingdom, I find both typical and unbearably moving. And that is how I most often remember my father — eyes glistening, torch sweeping the garden like the beam of a lighthouse, excitedly explaining the difference between white and purple aubergines.

He died a year and half later from a more virulent recurrence of colon cancer. We were deprived of a death-bed reunion by a baggage-handlers’ strike at Heathrow. My wife was having a difficult pregnancy so I had decided to remain with her as long as possible. As it turned out, I had cut it too fine. I still regret not managing to say goodbye properly, but Vivian was by his side and once again reported that his last words were ‘Bolder than Mandingo’. I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a lie, but I think that Vivian may have been unable to repress his cineaste’s need for a strong ending.