Read Online The Paper Men by William Golding - Free Book Online Page A

forgotten. It was near-enough jungle, and anyway it was an Indian, probably and quite possibly he wasn’t killed or even injured much, might have been an animal. Then I’d driven fast through a ford so that water had cascaded clean over the roof. Who could examine that river for bloodstains? Will all the waters, ha et cetera, and unlike her I didn’t really know anything. Nudged a shadow and the slight shock, the rutted road, the cry, a bird or something. If there was a record—such and such an Indian found, well, dead—I’d told no one, not even myself, only gone over it later, over and over—How could I have gone back after ploughing through the ford? Go back again? Put myself in the hands of some louts in uniform and all to explain that I might have, wasn’t sure—the language was the difficulty, of course. My Spanish wouldn’t be up to it. I’d end by accusing myself through sheer inability to cope with the subjunctive.
    Hit and run.
    Happens every day somewhere, probably with extenuating circumstances, as in this case, clearly.
    “—so, believe me, she did full justice to your genius.”
    I surfaced from molten metal.
    “Genius?”
    “That’s what she meant.”
    “Nonsense. Don’t forget I know Liz—oh I know her! She thought I had talent, ingenuity. I hit the jackpot. Someone has to.”
    Oh God, oh God, oh God, the process, link by link, we don’t know what will come from this seed, what ghastly foliage and flowers, yet come it does, presenting us with more and more seeds, millions, until the whole of now, the universal Now, is nothing but irremediable result.
    “If you could only see your way.”
    “That’s funny. That’s very, very funny.”
    “Just your signature with a sentence or two appointing me your literary executor, no harm, I’d co-operate, of course.”
    “I’m a bit drunk. Talk tomorrow.”
    “And, you see, I should be authorized to catalogue the papers left in her charge.”
    I contemplated his eager, diffident, stubborn face, that of the prospector who had chipped quartz and seen the yellow gleam inside it. My sentence and signature would confirm his staked-out claim. Then the letters, manuscripts, journals, journals right back to school days—
    Jeffers is a frightfully good chap and I am keen on being his—it’s marvellous being in the second with him—Jeffers caught a  frightfully good catch off my bowling at first slip—I told him it was a frightfully good catch and he didn’t seem to mind my  speaking to him — Thank God that kind of farcically misplaced emotion had never pursued me into adulthood to make an even deeper confusion of life!
    He was continuing to stare at me.
    “So if you could see your way—”
    “I’ve seen it, the whole lot, inch by inch.”
    There was no doubt of it. Given the least slackening of attention on my part, Rick’s face, or his two faces, would slide apart. Well, why not? He had two faces.
    “Of course, Wilf, where you wanted it would remain in confidence.”
    With considerable effort I brought his two faces together. I had an idiotic thought that he probably kept a different expression in each face, which was why when you merged them they cancelled each other out.
    “How the devil did I get like this? Haven’t drunk much.”
    “It’s the altitude.”
    “Used to be the lobster. You know. Thingummy.”
    “Pickwick.”
    “Age and decay. No, Rick, duty and dereliction leads me back to solitude.”
    “Shelley.”
    I had to respect that, however unwillingly, because I only knew the quotation by a freakish chance. The line was in Shelley’s scraps, not his published works. How the devil? Since my time they’d have published it all, of course, a Shelley factory like the Boswell factory, leave no leaf unturned, never mind what the poor bugger thought about it himself. Death pays all debts. Christ!
    “Proper parlour game, isn’t it?”
    “Look, Wilf, I could write the whole thing out on this menu. The manager could witness it,