Free The Back of His Head by Patrick Evans Page B

trouble? he asks. Well, then, how d’you explain it? I ask him back—but of course he can’t. Someone having a bad day? he suggests. That’s just silly, I tell him.
    It stays with me, this message, as I turn to this week’s emails and letters. Someone is playing silly buggers —one of Raymond’s phrases. But who, who is it? And why?
    In the envelopes today, just the usual stuff, some addressed to Raymond himself, as usual, and written as if he were still with us. Not everything that arrives here at Cannon Rise is bleak and dispiriting, of course: much of it is from scholars all over the world—almost as soon as the initial excitement about the award died down, the requests from the academics, as I’ve said, began.
    For them, though, the Master had no more time than he had for literary folk in general. Piss off , he would actually write on the bottom of the letters that came requesting access to his manuscripts and for interviews, and often he’d post them back before I could intervene. On a request for a meeting with a view to a possible biography he wrote a dreadful limerick about a young girl from the Azores. One about a young man from Uppingham replied to an early request to make a documentary of his life. Whenever the phone rang near him he would almost always ignore it, but sometimes he’d lift the receiver and engage with the caller in what he called his cleft-palate voice. At other times he would feign idiocy or an obscure foreign accent. Hold the line, I’ll just get him , was another ruse, followed by the dangling of the receiver on its cord and, for the unfortunate caller, a long, fruitless silence till the penny dropped—or in fact didn’t.
    Of course I used to remonstrate with him about this behaviour, but it was no use. These are the folk you write for, I’d tell him, these are the folk you write about . This is your readership , you’d be nothing without them. Cattle, he’d say back. Fuck’em.
    Even when he was alive he was a fortress: that is what I’m trying to say. His concessions at the time of the Prize were reluctant concessions to say the least, nearly all of them coming to some kind of grief. Nothing I’ve done for his estate since he began his decline has been at odds with what I saw in him before it, but none of it has come anywhere near the rage that close encounters would bring about in him as he was dragged, reluctantly, into celebrity. If it’s true that possessiveness and control are what motivate me in my management of the Trust—Semple’s words—such things are no more than extensions of what I saw the old man driven by when it came to protecting his writing and his heritage—or even to the simple business of putting up with people, having folk come near him when he didn’t want them there. Fuck off! he’d yell through the hedge at sightseers when they tried to peer through it to the Residence. I’m not a performing fucking seal!
    There’d been some interest in Raymond and his work before the Prize, naturally, albeit somewhat muted: no one seemed quite to know what to make of him at first, since the early novels were so outré and caused so much uproar when they appeared— Miss Furie’s Treasure Hunt , I mean, and the two Algerian novels that followed it, Frighten Me and Flatland . Beautifully written, yes, yes, they are: but all the same these are the works I have most trouble with myself, to be candid, with their excesses and the misjudgements of a writer slowly beginning to come to terms with his own genius. They certainly have some extraordinary moments.
    The initial response to them, most of it in reviews, is meticulously kept in Raymond’s papers. I’ve winced my way through each of them long ago, and through the comments scrawled in the fading near-sepia of their margins— Amazing! Can’t read English! Stupid shit! —along with his underlinings