Free The Paper Men by William Golding

holocaust—and find the date unusually full. There’s nothing about the view but much about the glamour of young women, Nimue and the Shakespearian mirages, Perdita, Miranda. There’s an attempt at describing Mary Lou but it is scribbled out and the Wilfred Barclay of that date writes about Helen of Troy! He comments on the way in which Homer gets his story across by describing not the woman but her effect on others. The old men on the wall watch her pass and say it is small wonder such a woman caused so much trouble, nevertheless let her go home before we have even more trouble! Or some such words. I’ve only read Homer in translations but that’s what I remember. Well. Mary Lou made the sun come out on the lake and when she went the sun went with her. Mary Lou threw up and one was instantly sorry for her transparent face instead of being—as if Wilf did it, for example—disgusted. I can’t—I couldn’t—even describe her hands, so pale and slim and small. I ended, I find, by comparing myself to the old men on the wall. Yes, let Helen go home before there’s trouble.
    I had written all that I remember, despite the view, when there was a knock at the outer door. I crossed the lobby and opened it to our little Helen, who held a tray with coffee for two on it.
    “Come in! Come in! Here—let me take that—do sit down!”
    I was in a state of absurd confusion. Mary Lou folded herself into a chair and destroyed any attempt I might have made at direct description before I got it on paper. She rested her hands in her lap, wrapped her ankles round each other as in deportment. She turned her head to gaze out of the window and it seemed that localized movement altered every line of her body.
    “You have a truly wonderful view here, Mr Barclay.”
    “Wilf, please, as before. Yes, I’m finding it difficult to look at anything else.”
    Defeated by holiness, the medieval illuminators stood their saints in a world of gold; then later, as perhaps—vision—became more selective, set a saintly head against an aureole. Beauty too, I think; which was what the old men saw as they sat on the wall, their voices thin and dry as the stridulation of crickets.
    “Truly inspirational.”
    “My God, yes. There aren’t any words.”
    “Reminds me.” She unzipped her little handbag. Put back her hair with the flow of one forearm then took out an envelope. “Rick said to give you this.”
    “What is it?”
    There was a change of colour in her face, very slight—but then everything about her seemed suggestion rather than fact. Perhaps she didn’t exist at all but was a phantom of absolute beauty like the false Helen who caused all that pain to seek her through the world.
    “Rick said to give it you.”
    “May I?”
    There was another smaller envelope inside it, which had a note wrapped round, Gone prospecting for our walk tomorrow. Hope Mary Lou has more luck than I did. Rick.
    I glanced at Mary Lou, who had her head turned away. She was looking at the view, of course, her hands grasping the arms of her chair not quite gracefully. I opened the inner envelope. It contained a sheet of hotel stationery with a sentence or two typed on it, appointing Assistant Professor Rick L. Tucker of the University of Astrakhan, Nebraska, as literary executor and giving him such access as he might require to the papers currently in the care of Mrs Elizabeth Capstone Bowers. My name was typed at the bottom with a space above it for my signature.
    I looked at Mary Lou again.
    “You don’t know what this is?”
    She answered in what can only be called a tiny voice.
    “Rick said to give it you.”
    Avoiding the lie direct, poor girl. It might be so. Probably she loathed me and the whole situation. It was an unfair loathing, for I had tried to get away and been followed to the Weisswald.
    “Tell me, Mary Lou. What do you want for Rick?”
    Mary Lou thought; or rather, she tried to think. The effort produced a slight corrugation in her lovely