The collected stories

by Paul Theroux

  'When applied to houses, delightfully old-fashioned means a drafty ruin. When applied to clubs, it means bad food and no women.'

  'The Savile has quite decent food,' Lord Billows said. 'And most of the staff are women.'

  'I was in a club like that once,' I said.

  'In London?'

  'The States. When I was eleven years old,' I said. 'No girls. That was the rule.'

  Lord Billows stared at me for several seconds, as if translating what I had said, and then he said coldly, 'You'll excuse me?' He walked away.

  'You shouldn't have said that to him,' Sophie said. 'Why make a fuss about men's clubs? I don't object. I hate all this women's lib stuff, don't you?'

  She had not addressed the question to me, but to Mrs Howlett - Diana - wife of Roger, the publisher, who was standing next to her. The two women began laughing in a conspiratorial way, and

  DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (II): THE LONDON EMBASSY

  Roger Howlett told me several stories about Adlai Stevenson, and I gathered Horton had briefed him about me, because Howlett finished his Stevenson stories by saying, 'Adlai was enormously good value - single, like yourself.'

  'Meet Walter Van Bellamy,' Roger Howlett said, and tapped a tall rangy white-haired man on the arm. 'One of your fellow countrymen.'

  Bellamy showed me his famous face and celebrated hair, but his eyes were wild as he said, 'You and I have an awful lot in common, sir.' Then he moved away, pushing through the crowd with his arms up, like a sleepwalker.

  'He won all the pots and pans last year,' Howlett said. 'And here is one of our other authors.' He took hold of a large pink man named Yarrow.

  'I've written only one book for Roger,' Yarrow said. 'It was political. About land reform. I was a Young Communist then. You didn't blink. That's funny - Americans usually do when I say that. It was a failure, my literary effort.'

  'I've found,' Howlett said, 'that some of my authors actually get a thrill when their books fail. I've never understood it. Is it the British love of amateurism?'

  I knew from the guest list that Yarrow was a Member of Parliament, but to be polite I asked him what his business was.

  He hooked his thumb into his waistcoat pocket and sipped his drink and said, 'I represent a squalid little constituency in the West Midlands.'

  The way he said it, with a smirk on his smooth pink face and a glass in his hand and his tie splashed - he had sloshed his drink as he spoke -1 found disgusting. If he meant it, it was contemptible; if he had said it for effect, it was obnoxious.

  I said, 'Maybe you'll be lucky and lose your seat at the next election.'

  'No fear. It's a safe Tory seat. Labour haven't got a chance. The working class don't vote - too lazy.'

  i want him to do me a book about Westminster,' Howlett said.

  'Europe - that's the subject. We're European,' Yarrow said. 'That's where our future is. In a united Europe.'

  'What actually is a European?' I asked, i mean, what language does he speak? What Hag does he salute? What are his politics?'

  'Don't ask silly questions,' Yarrow said, i must go. There's a

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  vote in the Commons in twenty minutes. Rather an important bill.'

  'Are you for it or against it?'

  'Very much against it!'

  'What is the bill?'

  'Haven't the faintest,' Yarrow said. 'But if I don't vote, there'll be hell to pay.'

  He left with two other MPs. Howlett went to the buffet table, and I walked around the room. I saw Miss Duboys talking to Lord Billows, and Vic Scaduto to Walter Van Bellamy, the poet. A black American, named Erroll Jeeps, from our Economics Section, looked intense as he stabbed his finger into the transfixed face of a woman. Jeeps saw me passing and said, 'How are you holding up?'

  'Fine,' I said.

  'This is our main man,' Jeeps said, 'the guest of honor.'

  I said, 'I'd almost forgotten.'

  'It's a very jolly party,' the woman said. 'I'm Grace Yarrow.'

  'I just met your husband.'

  'He's gone to vote. But he'll be back,' she said.

  'The third reading of the finance bill,' Jeeps said. 'It's going to be close.'

  'You Americans are so well informed,' Mrs Yarrow said.

  Horton stepped over and said, 'I'm going to drag our guest of honor away,' and introduced me to a Times journalist, an antique dealer named Frampton, and a girl who did hot-air ballooning. The party had grown hectic. I stopped asking for names.. I met the director of a chain of hotels, and then a young man who said, 'Sophie's been telling me all about you' - as if a great deal of time had passed and I had grown in reputation. A party was a way of speeding friendship and telescoping time. It was a sort of hot-house concept of forced growth. We were all friends now.

  Someone said, 'It rains every Thursday in London.'

  'We bought our Welsh dresser from a couple of fags,' someone else said.

  The man named Frampton praised one of Horton's paintings, saying, 'It's tremendous fun.'

  At about eleven, the first people left, and by eleven-thirty only half the guests remained. They had gathered in small groups. I met a very thin man who gave his name as Smallwood, and I could hardly match him to the man on the guest list who appeared as Sir Charles Smallwood. And I assumed I had the wrong man,

  DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

  because this fellow had a grizzled, almost destitute look and was wearing an old-fashioned evening suit.

  Edward Heaven, a name that appeared nowhere on the guest list, was a tall white-haired man with large furry ears, who vanished from the room as soon as he told me who he was, on the pretext of giving himself an insulin injection in the upstairs toilet. Tuts some people off their food, it does,' he said, but he made for the front door, and the next moment he was hurrying down the street in the drizzle, without a coat.

  The party was not quite over, I thought. But it was over. Of the nine people remaining in the room, seven were Embassy people, and when the last guests left - the Times man and the antique dealer - Horton said to us, 'Now, how about a real drink?'

  He then went out of the room and told the hired help they could go home. In his dark suit, and carrying a tray, Horton looked like a waiter. On the tray was a bottle of whiskey and some glasses. He poured himself a drink, urged us to do the same, and said, 'Please sit down - this won't take long.'

  I assumed this was one for the road. But it occurred to me, sitting among my Embassy colleagues, that I had said very little to them all evening. In a sense, we were meeting for the first time. Their party manner was gone, and although they were tired - it was well past midnight - they seemed intense, all business. This impression was heightened by the fact that Debbie Horton, Everett's wife, had disappeared upstairs in the last hour of the party. Neither Miss Duboys nor I was married, and none of the others' wives were present. We had all come to the reception alone.

  Horton sat in the center of the circle of chairs, like a football coach after an important game. Scaduto had told me that he liked to be called 'coach.' He looked the part - he was a big fleshy-faced man, who used body English when he spoke.

  He said, 'To tell the truth, I didn't expect to see Lord Billows here tonight. We were told he was going through a rather messy divorce.'

  'They've agreed on a settlement,' Al Sanger said. Sanger had dark hair and a very white face and a bright, almost luminous, scar on his forehead. He was, like me, a political officer, but concerned with legal matters. 'His wife gets custody of the children.'

  Miss Duboys said, 'What happens to her title?'

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  'She stays Lady Billows/ Erroll Jeeps said. 'If she remarries, she loses it.'

  'Find out what she's styling herself now,' Horton said to Jeeps. 'We don't want to lose touch with her. If we do, there goes one of our most persuasive strings.' He turned to me and said, 'I noticed our guest of honor chatting up Lord Billows. Did you make any headway?'

>   'He wanted to put me up for a club,' I said.

  'Jolly good,' Horton said.

  'I told him I wasn't interested.'

  'That was pretty stupid,' Sanger said. 'He was trying to do you a favor.'

  I could tell from Horton's expression that he was in sympathy with Sanger's remark.

  Sanger still faced me. I said, 'So you approve of discrimination against people on the grounds of sex?'

  'It's a London club,' he said.

  'They don't allow women to join.'

  Sanger said, 'Are you afraid they'll turn you down?'

  Horton and the others looked shocked, and Margaret Duboys said, 'I don't want to get drawn into this discussion.'

  I said, 'Tell me, Sanger, is that remark characteristic of your tact? Because if it is, I'd say your mouth is an even greater liability than your face.'

  'Gentlemen, please,' Horton said, in his coach's voice. 'Before this turns into a slanging match, can we move on to something less controversial? I need something on Mrs Whiting - the second Mrs Whiting. Did anyone have a word with her?'

  Scaduto said, 'I didn't get anywhere.'

  'She makes furniture,' I said. 'Very small furniture. For dollhouses.'

  Sanger said, 'You dig deep.'

  'And cutlery,' I said. 'Very tiny forks and knives. If you wanted to stab someone in the back' - here I looked at Sanger - 'I don't think you'd use one of Mrs Whiting's knives.'

  Horton smiled. 'Debbie wants her on a committee. We had no idea what her interests were. That's useful. What about our MPs?'

  Jeeps said, 'The finance bill passed with a government majority of sixteen. I've just had a phone call. There were eight abstentions.'

  'Good man,' Horton said. 'Were any of those abstentions ours?'

  DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

  'Six Labour, two Liberal. The Tories were solid.'

  Miss Duboys said, 'Derek Yarrow filled me in on the antinuclear lobby. It seems to be growing.'

  Jeeps said, 'I did a number on Mrs Yarrow.'

  'What did you make of Mr Yarrow?' Horton asked me, and I realized that in spite of the crowded party my movements had been closely monitored.

  'Blustery,' I said. There was no agreement. 'Contemptuous. Probably tricky.'

  'He's given us a lot of help,' Sanger said.

  'He seemed rather untrustworthy to me. He described his constituency as "squalid." I didn't like that.'

  'That's a snap judgment.'

  'Precisely what I felt,' I said, and Sanger scowled at me for deliberately misunderstanding him. 'He's a born-again Tory. He lectured me on Europe. You realize of course that he was a Communist.'

  'That's not news to us,' Scaduto said.

  'I intend to read his book,' I said.

  Sanger appeared to be speaking for the others when he said, 'Yarrow doesn't write books.'

  'He wrote one. It didn't sell. It was political. Howlett published it.'

  'Yarrow's a heavy hitter,' Sanger said.

  'Thank you,' I said, scribbling. 'I collect examples of verbal kitsch.'

  Horton said, 'Do me a memo on Yarrow's book after you've read it.' Then, 'Was Sophie Graveney alone?'

  'Yes,' Steve Kneedler said. It was his one offering and it was wrong.

  'No,' Jeeps said. 'She left with the BBC guy - the one with the fake American accent. I think she lives with him.'

  'That would be Ramsay,' Horton said.

  'She doesn't live with Ramsay,' I said.

  'How do you know that?' Jeeps said.

  I said, 'Ramsay's address is given as Hampstead. Sophie Graveney doesn't live in Hampstead.'

  'Islington,' Jeeps said. 'It's not far.'

  'Then why is it,' I said, 'that she jogs around Battersea Park every morning?'

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  The others stared at me. Horton said, 'Maybe you can put us in the picture. If she's living with someone there, we ought to know about it.'

  Scaduto said, 'Her mother's Danish.'

  'So was Hamlet's,' Sanger said.

  'I've just realized what it is that I don't like about the English aristocracy,' Scaduto said. 'They're not English! They're Danes, they're Germans, they're Greeks, Russians, Italians. They're even Americans, like Lady Astor and Churchill's mother. They're not English! My charlady is more English than the average duke in his stately home. What a crazy country!'

  Margaret Duboys said, 'The Greek royal family is Swedish,' and this seemed to put an end to that subject.

  But there was more. The guest list was gone through and each guest discussed so thoroughly that it was as if there had been no party but rather an occasion during which fifty British people had passed in review for us to assess them. Miss Duboys said that she had found out more on the Brownlow merger, and Jeeps said that he had more on his profile about the printing dispute at the Times, and Sanger said, 'If anyone wants my notes on export licensing, I'll make a copy of my update. Tony Whiting gave me a few angles. He's got a cousin in a Hong Kong bank.'

  I said, 'No one has mentioned that fidgety white-haired fellow.'

  'Howlett,' said Scaduto.

  'No. I met Howlett,' I said. 'The one I'm talking about said his name was Edward Heaven. He wasn't on the guest list.'

  'Everyone was on the guest list,' Horton said.

  'Edward Heaven wasn't,' I said.

  No one had any idea who this man was; no one had spoken to him or indeed seen him. But there was no mystery. Before we left Briarcliff Lodge, Horton called the Embassy and got the telex operator, a young fellow named Charlie Hogle. Hogle took the name Edward Heaven and had the duty officer run it through the computer. The reply came quickly. Two years previously, Edward Heaven had been Horton's florist. He was probably still associated with the florist and had found out about the party because of the flowers that had been delivered. Mr Heaven had crashed the party. Horton said that he would now get a new florist and would try to tighten security. You couldn't be too careful, he said. They were kidnaping American diplomats in places like Paris.

  DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (II): THE LONDON EMBASSY

  'I think we can adjourn,' he said, finally. 'It's been a long day.' At the door, he said, 'You look tired, fella.'

  'I'm not used to working overtime,' I said.

  'You've been spoiled by the Far East,' he said. 'But you'll learn.' He clapped me on the shoulder. 'I know it's expecting a lot - after all, you're new here. But I like to start as I mean to go on.'

  DIPLOMATIC RELATIONS (il): THE LONDON EMBASSY

  'My first overseas post was Kampala,' I said.

  'Better you than me. They've got tails there. I asked for New Zealand. I did my graduate work in economics - the effects on the labor force in depressed capital-intensive economies. New Zealand's a good model - it's going broke. I figured I could get some research done. Instead, I was posted here. England's a good model, too. Three million unemployed, galloping inflation - hey, this place is mummified!'

  It was March, but spring comes early to London. The daffodils looked like flocks of slender-necked ducks in pale poke-bonnets, and the crocuses, bright as candy, dappled the ground purple and white. The sky was clear - bluer than any in Malaysia. Girls in riding coats and black velvet hats trotted along the bridleway.

  Hyde Park is a series of meadows, big enough so that the habitual park-users - dog-owners, kite-fliers, lovers, and tramps - have plenty of room. They need it. There was heavy traffic in Kensington Road; I mentioned to Jeeps that in three weeks I had yet to hear anyone blow his horn here.

  'They know it's no use,' he said. 'Look at all those cars. It's worse than Chicago. And the price of gas! Those people are paying almost four bucks a gallon to sit there in that jam. Hey, life can be kind of abrasive here. I wouldn't stay, except that from an economist's point of view this is the front lines. This is where all the casualties are.'

  'You'd hardly know it here. It's very peaceful.'

  'People have been mugged in Hyde Park,' Jeeps said. H
e spoke with satisfaction and now he had a spring in his step.

  We had walked along the margin of the park. Jeeps had pointed out the Iranian Embassy at Princes Gate, where the siege had taken place; he had shown me the scorch marks on the windows. We walked farther. At the Albert Memorial he stopped. He smiled at me.

  'Hey, some people have had even worse experiences.'

  'Killed?'

  'Maimed for life,' he said.

  He was still smiling.

  'That's hilarious,' I said. But my sarcasm had no effect on him.

  Tm thinking of a particular case,' he said, and went on chuckling. Then he turned to the Albert Memorial; the exaggerated grief in the monument, and all that expensive sculpture, only cheapened

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  it and made it more pompous. I looked at it - it was frantic gazebo

  - and thought of money.

  Jeeps was saying, 'England is a terrible place for Anglophiles. This post attracts snobs, you know. They end up so disappointed.'

  I said, 'I've never known a snob who wasn't also a liar.'

  'Right,' he said. 'Baldwick was a liar.'

  'Baldwick - is that a name?'

  'Baldwick is only a name. He was CAO before Vic Scaduto took over. It was the only interesting thing about him - his name. He was really proud of it. It was an old English name, he said, one of the great English families, the Baldwicks of Somewhere -he wasn't sure where. He was about forty-five or so; he'd been posted around the world. He kept asking for London and getting a negative. Like these people who want Africa so they can find their roots - he wanted to find his roots in England. Someone -was it his grandfather? - anyway, someone had told him there was a family estate, a castle, property, shields, suits of armor, all the rest of it. The Baldwicks were in the Domesday Book, the old man said, only where do you find the Domesday Book? Certainly not in Dacca, which was Baldwick's first post. Not in La Paz, not in Addis, not in Khartoum - his other posts. All he found were telephone books.

  'That was it, see? Wherever he went, even if it was Baltimore, he picked up the telephone book and looked for his name. It's probably not so strange. I've done it myself. But the world is full of people called Jeeps - although you might not think so - and it is not exactly crawling with Baldwicks. He never found one! He found Baldwins and Baldicks and even Baldwigs - I love that one