Read Online The Back of His Head by Patrick Evans - Free Book Online Page A

together, the pain and the love. They were the one thing.
    By the time I was a young man I thought of him not as a mere human being but almost as an incandescence—and it still doesn’t seem a completely extraordinary thing to confess that to you. He could do no wrong—even when he did. He was Raymond, he was the Master. He transformed everything he touched, everyone he touched. I knew to let him do it, because he was who he was. Some people make their own rules, and others are there to obey them. That’s just how it is. One simply submits to the greater force. One submits to a force of nature.
    And all of this now, it seems, a long lifetime ago. Somehow, he has gone, and the excitement and unpredictability he always brought have gone with him: here I am, somehow, left policing the theft of an ashtray . A glance up from my desk here in the Chicken Coop and I see the roof of the Residence beyond and below my office window, its distinctive tiles flecked with yellow-green moss, its guttering slumped along the bargeboard and hanging from its ties like a row of grubby hammocks. This is the sort of thing I think of now, and the question of how to pay Val, the sole remaining full-time gardening lady, and the others I am obliged to think of as well—the Butts, most obviously, both of them pensioners now and thus to some degree self-sufficient, both of them (I have to admit) kept on for sentiment’s sake as much as anything else. Each requires a notional salary of sorts, not to mention the Chicken Coop building to go on living in: more expense, more expense and more decisions.
    In the Blue Room this evening I put away these thoughts as I watch the sunlight leave it, its glow fading from the walls and from the Medal and from the Citation below it. The sherry glass is crystal, Waterford, of course, and one of the many treasures from Raymond’s parents’ estate at Hamilton Downs, while the sherry is Amontillado: the music, that Vivaldi castrato piece I’ve mentioned earlier as the nonpariel on the other side of a Geminiani Concerto Grosso disc.
    Finally, opened across my thigh, and worn from the habit of use, Raymond’s third novel Flatland , with its imperishable opening sentences: July. No green left. The pines, the pistachio trees, the palmettos and the cork-oaks black against the rust of the earth —I don’t need to read the words since I have so much of the Master’s work by heart: but I adore the simple fact of the book, the feel of the work and the use in it, the embodied thought in my hand as I raise it and let the words on the page meet yet again the words in my head. Such economy , and yet such pungency of expression: almost nothing between the reader and the world that is realised upon the page. I want the words to disappear , he used to say, and here he has all but made them do that, in a passage of extraordinary delicacy and originality and authenticity.
    His book is here tonight not so much to be read as simply to be , to reassure, to give to the moment as the extraordinary voice of the boy builds and soars and takes me with it to that other world the old man told me about and promised me and so very nearly took me to, and which so surely exists and is where he dwells now. Here it comes, here it comes at last, as the sun winks, and the evening falls, and the glass tips, and the words reassure, and the music climbs to heaven in the pretty mouth of the butchered, ruined boy.
    Extraordinary, extraordinary—the insoluble puzzle at the heart of beauty, the Master used to say, the killing in the middle of it . That is what he showed me: that, I think, was his especial, demanding gift, the knowledge in those traditional words the Italians used to say:
    Evviva il coltellino!
    Long live the little knife!

III

    Actually, if you want to know the truth, Patrick, what I usually did first thing in the morning was, I’d wipe the old man’s arse for him. That’s what I