The Paper Men by William Golding

tossed my way.
    “Feeling all right, young Wilf? Sure? Ha ha.”
    As the hypnotist told me, God rot him, You are very receptive to hypnotic suggestion, sir.
    Well, you wouldn’t get such a thick-headed young fool today, they all know everything by the time they’re ten. But I was left with the kind of erection so gorged it was a steady pain and on which masturbation had no effect whatever. All night I wrestled and moaned but there was nothing for it. Next day I had to take my erection to the bank. All morning I stood behind the counter and my tie, smiling brightly at farmers, teachers, parsons, old ladies, young ladies bringing in the firm’s takings for the week and taking out the pay for the employees. All day the knob of my cock wore itself raw against the waistband of my underpants.
    “Maybe I can share the joke, Wilf.”
    He was examining me earnestly. Late light was fading from the window.
    “Joke? How can it be a joke? I was thinking of my time as a banker.”
    “I never knew.”
    “Like T. S. Eliot.”
    The thought of T. S. Eliot and the ithyphallic bank clerk set me off again.
    “I could give you a new slant on banking, Rick.”
    “Could you just mention the date for the record?”
    “Sit still, man, and don’t fuss.”
    It was the spirit of farce, of course. In one way I could describe my whole life as a movement from one moment of farce to another, farce on one plane or another, nature’s comic, her clown with a red nose, ginger hair and trousers always falling down at precisely the wrong moment. Yes, right from the cradle. The first time I shot over a horse’s head my fall was broken by a pile of dung. That’s farce in a good humour, that is. It silvered into my mind, I remember, that if only once I’d come down on something hard, something not farcical—
    Well. There was still time.
    “Talk to me, Wilf.”
    Yes. He could have that. He could start with the pile of dung and go on to the bank clerk. I wouldn’t mind, would even write it out myself, would go on telly and scandalize the box, if that was still possible. I found, to my surprise, that I could look back at the sturdy young man in a goodish suit, white shirt and school tie (a little too brilliant perhaps but all the simple colour combinations had been taken by top places)—yes, I could look back at him with an amused toleration even an affection. I remembered—
    “What is the joke, Wilf?”
    —the time Wilfred Barclay was caught donating tuppence to the bank in order to square his figures; and the row with the cashier, since giving the bank small change was, in the cashier’s view and in the manager’s view and the bank’s view and, for all I know, in the Bank of England’s view, ethically worse than taking small change away from it.
    The cashier was really passionate. He shoved my tuppence back at me.
    “No one, no one at all, leaves this building until the accounts balance to the last penny!”
    I was saved (or, as I would now say, my escape was delayed) by my rugger, which was approved of on every side. When I discovered Maupassant even rugger went. The end came. The end was a Scots bank inspector. I found myself quoting him to Rick.
    “Ye know, Mr Barclay, ye’ve geeven me an entirely niew view of feegures.”
    The manager expressed his regret that a wing three of such brilliance should be lost to the bank and the town.
    “But you see, Barclay, it’s a question of heart. Your heart’s not really with us, is it?”
    That was when I had a spell as a groom, then went some way towards the stage. I carried a spear at Elstree and spent a few months as a provincial reporter, mostly writing up any point-to-point in reach. There was the war. When I came back with a few pounds, Coldharbour wrote itself— I didn’t—Stein and Cowhorn published it, and hey presto.
    A biography of Wilfred Barclay. Well, why not? Was the idea any more farcical than the material it would contain?
    “And who is Lucinda?”
    I came to with a start.