Free The Paperchase by Marcel Theroux Page B

the house.
    The house was neither old, by English standards, nor large, by American ones; but it was handsome and considered a good example of the island’s architecture. Summer visitors would sometimes make the detour to look at it, occasionally coming up to the porch and asking Patrick’s permission to take photographs. He was invariably courteous and would take them on a tour of the property before sending them away with brown paper bags of the hard little fruits that grew in his garden: apples, pears, peaches that were somehow tasty despite being very furry and juiceless.
    It was a house that a child might draw, sketching out a crude oblong for the body, a triangle for the roof, regularly placed windows and a door in the middle. It was made of timber, two storeys high, with sides painted a blinding white, a steeply pitched roof and black wooden shutters on every window. One year, Vivian and I helped Patrick to paint the whole thing, using tall ladders to reach up to the eaves. It was an enormous job, and we had agreed to do it for what seemed like a huge fee: fifty dollars – between us. But it was a week’s work and we finished each day exhausted and splattered with paint. Patrick always talked about covering the woodwork with vinyl siding, which would have spared him the trouble of having it painted, but he was too much of a purist to do it.
    On the roof of the house, the Captain had built what is known in the region as a widow’s walk. This was a form of balcony, like a crow’s nest in a ship, that was reached through a hatch in the attic. From it, the island looked like an island, with the sea suddenly huge and menacing. Widows, I suppose, would patrol them hoping to catch a glimpse of a familiar sail on the horizon. Or muse on the immensity that had swallowed their husbands. Patrick used his mainly to check on his TV aerial, which would get blown down periodically in strong winds.
    There were two other buildings on the property: a stable off to one side, and a summer kitchen on the seaward side of the house. I don’t know if this was characteristic of the region ora unique example. Since the Nethers family wanted their house to remain cool in summer, the Captain had built a tiny one-room outbuilding to cook in during hot weather. Patrick almost never cooked anyway, so he barely needed one kitchen, let alone two. The summer kitchen contained a bed, a life mask of Keats, a fridge, a vintage jukebox and about thirty egg-weighers.
    As I mentioned before, Patrick liked to collect things. A second fridge in the main house contained nothing but ice-cream scoops. The mechanical bank that he had left my father in his will came from a collection of about fifty. Patrick owned more than two hundred glass cup-plates; four complete sets of the works of Dickens; six filing cabinets full of 45s for the jukebox. And there were incipient collections everywhere of things that he was not consciously collecting but that had begun to propagate: blenders and tinned food; playing cards; piano rolls by the player piano; an alphabet of vitamin pills in the bathroom cabinet; lawnmowers and hand tools in the shed, which also contained a rusty cider-press and a trap for the deceased pony Spellvexit.
    (An egg-weigher, as the name suggests, is a device used for weighing eggs.)
    The main house had entrances front and back. The one that faced the street was shaded by an elaborate wooden awning and a stand of trees. The entrance on the seaward side faced the summer kitchen and looked down the slope to the marsh and the ocean beyond it. I remember this space as teeming with life on Patrick’s birthday or during August barbecues. Patrick, or more likely one of his twenty something girlfriends, would be tending the barbecue – an antique that had a metal chimney and looked as though it was for smelting iron ore; Dad would be cajoling the rest of the family into a game of cricket; Vivian and I would be trying to persuade whoever was our age and