by Paul Theroux
"You know who those old buffers are talking about?"
"That woman?"
"Yes. Your friend. Lady Max."
"I don't even know her."
And I thought: I have no friends, except you. I spent all my time writing. I had a wife and two children and they were the whole of my life, my society in London. I could not tell Musprat the truth, that he was my only friend, and this outing at the Lambourne twice a month was my only outing.
"I met her at that party," I said. "That's all."
But I saw her clearly—her white forehead, her black hair drawn back, her bright eyes, her pretty mouth and thin fingers.
He had set the triangle of balls on the table. We were taking our separate shots with the cue ball to see who would break. Musprat strained and stroked and his cue ball came to rest an inch from the cushion.
So he went first, and pondered his break, and took his shot, a purist's poke. He nicked the edge of the cluster of balls, hardly disturbing the triangular arrangement.
"Your shot," he said.
At this rate we would be playing for a week. There was the slow, tactical you-can't-see-me game of snooker that I hated, although it was said to be the real thing. And there was the speedier version, nearer the American game of pool that I was more used to, with bolder strokes and more obvious moves, played more on the open table and less in the shadow of other balls.
I lined up the cue ball and hit the clustered balls hard, blasting them apart.
"How rash," Musprat said. The balls were still caroming, and none were potted. "How convenient."
And he began potting balls. When he finally kissed one, snookering me, and I went to take my answering shot, I nudged the cue ball with the tip of the cue.
"It moved. You touched it. That's your shot."
"It was an accident, Ian."
"That's your shot," he said firmly, in the stern, prissy voice he had learned at school. He chalked his cue. "No exceptions. If we start making exceptions where will we be?"
He was ponderous as only a drunken man can be. He fought for every point, and when I realized how badly he wanted to win I became bored by the whole business—the desperate fussing of his insistent competition—and wished I were home with my family.
"Get in there," he said. He was speaking to the brown ball. "I've potted the pink but it's got to go back on the table."
The idea was that as long as the player went on potting, his opponent flunkeyed for him, replacing the balls that were hit out of sequence. Flunkeying was another school role, for the younger, newer, duller boys.
We were about evenly matched, yet he won more often than I did, partly because I always let him have the disputed point and also because he was the more consistent player—not aggressive, but tenacious. No one held on like the English, and when they really wanted something they knew no shame. They were never more blatantly disregarding or single-minded than in this tenacity. No surrender, that was Musprat's way, but winning gave him very little pleasure. It only made him chattier.
"And it seems," he said, continuing the line of talk that he had broken off earlier, "that she's an admirer of yours. The Lady Max. She told Heavage. He told me."
This was news—that she knew Heavage, who had a reputation as an obnoxious and persistent womanizer. Poor Gillian, people always said of his wife. He was niggardly, a trait I associated with most lechers. And I hated him for speaking French to me and treating me like a hack.
"What do you think of her?"
"I told you. A bruised peach," Musprat said. It was his only summing-up.
"I thought she was witty."
"That's the one thing she's not," he said.
"So you don't like her?"
"What does 'like' mean? I don't care one way or the other." Musprat was still sinking balls. "She always gets what she wants, though."
"What's wrong with that?"
"She wants everything."
He could not pot the green. He lined up his shot and sent the cue ball gently into it, and it came to rest between the pink and the blue.
"Snookered," he muttered with satisfaction.
"Oh, I say," an old man cried out from the shadows, and soon I conceded the game.
Musprat was uncharacteristically jaunty afterwards, and friendliness gave him an air of confidentiality. He wanted another drink, and then he wanted to sit by the fire, and then he wanted to talk.
He began to behave like an uncle. He said, "How would you like me to put you up for membership? The drill is that I simply put you in the book and the other members scribble remarks next to your name."
I did not know how to say no without offending him, so I equivocated, knowing that he would drop the idea when he was sober.
"You look like a wet weekend," he said. "Don't worry. I'll let you have a rematch."
He did not know how sad I was. It was worse than he knew, and it depressed me. He had been my only friend. I had nowhere else to go.
4
"Doesn't she know you're married?" Alison asked me the night of Lady Max's dinner party.
"I'm sure I told her," I said, hedging. But had I? "I only met her once."
"I don't understand why she didn't invite me."
The flames were gone from the grate, and there was heat from the mass of coals but little light. It was almost eight o'clock. I had sat with Alison while she had eaten—cold fowl and salad—and now she was drinking her customary cup of tea, sipping it neatly and looking comfortable in her big warm chair. She would read or watch television for an hour or so and then, growing sleepy, would crawl into bed.
Reflecting on this, I began to wish that I hadn't agreed to the late dinner with Lady Max. I was tired after a day of writing and I needed to rest, nestling against my wife in bed. These days I slept nine hours like that and in the morning, thinking of my novel, saw light breaking through the treetops of the jungle clearings.
I said, "Would you have come with me if you'd been invited?"
"And sit in some stuffy house in the Boltons," she said, suddenly defiant, "listening to a lot of old bores droning on about poetry? No, thank you very much. I'd rather watch Dallas."
Before I left the house I put my head into the boys' bedroom. The room was cool but the children seemed to radiate warmth—their glow was in the air—and this warmth from such small beds I associated with their good hearts. They still smelled soapily of their baths, and I kissed their warm cheeks and whispered good night. What is it in darkness that makes us whisper?
They were in that mild twilight of fatigue that was like sinking in warm water as their breathing became shallower and they slipped softly from wakefulness into the depths of sleep.
"Why are you all dressed up, Dad?" Anton asked.
"I'm going to see a lady. Lady Max."
"See a fine lady upon a white horse," Will said, calling softly from his bed. "Is she rich?"
"Probably. I don't know. Money's not important here. Class is the thing," I said, and was annoyed with myself when I realized I was quoting Musprat. "You know, middle class, upper class."
"What class are we?"
"None. We don't care about that." I wanted to say, I'm a spectator. But I only half believed it. I wanted more.
The boys kissed me, and their tenderness reassured me that all was well between Alison and me.
When I left the room, I heard Anton whispering across the room to Will, "I think we're middle class."
Going out into the winter night took an effort of will like crossing a frontier, because I was reentering London after a full day in the fastness of my tall house.
It was such a quiet and gentle city at night, with shadows on its face—it was a city that slept, a city with a bedtime. And in this area of south London the skyline was old-fashioned chimney pots, slate roofs, and church spires. On these winter nights I had the illusion of being a part of it, an alien being swallowed by the city's shadows, and transformed.
I loved nighttime London's sulfurous skies, and at Chels
ea Reach the light shimmering in the river had the watery, dreamy quality of one of Whistler's Nocturnes. I was intensely conscious of where I was, and that was a reminder of another trait that Londoners possessed: we could find our way around in the dark.
All this from the upper deck of the bus, sitting at the front window, and with the sense that I was piloting a very old, low-flying plane.
Lady Max's house, in an empty corner of a square, a short walk from the bus stop, was one of those newly painted cream-colored Victorian façades, almost phosphorescent in the light of the street lamps, with tall bay windows and pale pillars at the top of an intimidating flight of stairs.
A small woman with a pretty face and a nimble, simian way of walking greeted me in a singsong accent as she took my coat. Another Filipino.
Imposing from the outside, the house was moribund within, like a walk-in sarcophagus. It was the foyer's marble floor, it was the dust, it was the brittle flowers and dry plants and gloomy pictures in ornate frames; it was most of all the temperature and the smell of damp carpets—a chilly, sullen lifelessness, as though no one had eaten or slept here for a long time. Just as I thought of my own warm house on the other side of the river, I heard my name being called from a room beyond this foyer.
"Paul," Lady Max cried out. She remained in her chair in a queenly way.
But she was so friendly and familiar I was encouraged, and she quickly introduced me to the people present who were arrayed around the room. Graham Heavage smiled and showed no sign that he had rebuffed me in my request to write a lead review. There was an elderly novelist named Dunton Marwood, and a couple called Lasch from South Africa, whose name I associated with anti-apartheid protests. There was a woman named Pippa who blinked repeatedly when I spoke, and the American poet Walter Van Bellamy.
"My wife couldn't make it," Bellamy explained to me, twirling his forefinger in a shock of his white hair.
He was famously crazy and very tall, and when he drew me over to the fire—too close to the flames, he was crowding me—he smiled his wild staring smile and said, "You're from Boston too."
The fire burned but even so gave off less heat than mine in Clapham. This one simply gasped in the chimney.
"I'm from Medford, actually."
But Bellamy had a crazy man's deafness and distraction, and the glazed eyes of a man on medication.
"We Bostonians have to stick together."
I was flattered until he squeezed my arm—too hard. It hurt, conveying desperation rather than friendliness. He then lost all interest in me and staggered towards the bookshelves and pinched out a volume of his own poems.
"Max was just telling us about you, so you arrived on cue, as it were."
This was Marwood, the novelist. I knew his name from the New Statesman fiction locker, and there were always stacks of his books at Gaston's. He was married to a rich woman whom no one knew, and his reputation—though all my information was from Musprat, and it had the Musprat slant—was that he was an envious and conceited bore.
"Are you working on a novel at the moment?" I asked.
"Well done! I usually have to tell people that I'm a novelist. 'You won't have heard of me,' I say. 'I write what is called quality fiction.'"
"Marwood is the poor man's Henry James," Heavage said. "No popular fiction for him."
"God forbid," Marwood said. "No, I've finished my novel. I'm going on a journey. Corsica—know it? Fascinating. Following Edward Lear's itinerary. No nonsense. An in-the-footsteps-of sort of thing."
"Some journey!" Heavage said. "Dodging holiday-makers and trippers is more like it."
"Graham is such a tease," Marwood said. "I say, your new novel sounds splendid."
"My new novel?" I said. "My new book is nonfiction. A travel book."
"Not that. The one you're working on. Sounds smashing."
Lady Max was smiling at me, hearing everything, seeing everything: the world was naked and had no secrets from her. But only then, seeing her regal smile, did I remember what I had told her.
"Stick to your own title," Marwood said. "Don't let Max put you off. She can be diabolical."
So she had told them everything.
By then the Filipino servingwoman had gone around with a tray and I had a drink in my hand.
Heavage stepped over to me. I braced myself to be addressed in French by him—how would I reply? But in an entirely friendly voice he said, "Super review," meaning last week's fiction roundup in which I had slashed four novels. "Did you take anything away with you?"
"I thought we agreed to wait until some good ones came along."
He was unruffled and did not respond to that.
"Keen on Henry James?" he asked. "There's a new edition of his letters. Vol. one just out. Supposed to be rather good, some fresh material. Might be fun, you and James, two expats."
This was a different-sounding Graham Heavage, and he seemed to be offering me a lead piece, the sort of book that V'S. Pritchett usually reviewed. Heavage's manner threw me; tonight at Lady Max's, away from his desk, he looked seedy and powerless. This man, who was naturally and smilingly rude, who demanded sex from his assistants on the paper—assistants who, just down from Oxford, got gladly onto all fours for him, seeing this as their way to advancement in literary London; this ugly, domineering man seemed a little silly and self-conscious trying to be friendly to me.
"Might give you a chance to talk about that very thing," he said. "Expatriation."
Yes, he was offering me Henry James, a lead piece.
"I could let you have fifteen hundred words," he said. "The book doesn't come out for ages. You could take your time."
I said, a little too eagerly, "I'd love to do it. Do you know that James was apparently hit in the groin by the whiplash of a fire hose when he was about eighteen."
"No, but goodness knows you might want to animadvert on the implication of this unsolicited kick in the goolies," Heavage said without smiling, though Marwood sniggered and Bellamy laughed out loud.
I was certain that it was because he had met me here at Lady Max's that he had offered me the lead review, and that his laborious comedy was a form of friendliness. It was hard for an Englishman of his distinctly pitiless sort to attempt generosity without being patronizing, but I did not mind—at least he wasn't speaking French to me in front of all these people.
Lady Max kept her distance, though each time I looked over at her she appeared to be staring at me. Sitting and smoking, she seemed completely in charge, and she was porcelain pretty, her skin so pale in the lovely way it often was with women in this sunless country.
I was disconcerted by her not speaking to me, and by her incongruity—she was so bright, so delicate in this big shadowy house—and I was disturbed by the fact that I could not smell food cooking. I slipped into the hall to look for the toilet—the Filipino woman, correctly guessing what I was looking for, pointed to the door when she saw me hesitating. Inside were more black shadows, and dammy walls and cold tiles, and again I wished I had stayed home. A satirical print by Rowlandson hung above the basin.
When I returned to the drawing room, the guests were putting their coats on.
"We're going to dinner," Lady Max said. "It's right down the road."
We trooped out to Brompton Road, to a French restaurant called La Tour Eiffel, and we were shown to the sort of secluded wood-paneled private room that I associated with trysting couples or rowdy men. Over the windows hung dusty velvet curtains with fat gold tassels. After we handed over our coats, Lady Max seated us. I was confused, and I wondered if the others were too. Mrs. Lasch's head was down and she was whispering urgently to her husband. The woman named Pippa was on my right, Marwood on my left.
"Where is Walter Van Bellamy?" Lady Max said.
He had gone—vanished on the way—but Lady Max laughed and said that it was just like him. "He's crackers, you know. The real thing."
A bored-looking French waiter in a much too tight shirt, with damp hair and a hot face, entered
the little room and gave us menus and then recited the day's specials and the no-longer-available dishes, speaking in a parody French accent.
Pippa said, "Do you mind? My menu is sticky. I can't stand that," and made a face and handed it to the waiter, who looked offended.
"Shall we have some wine?" Lady Max was addressing the waiter. "The house wine comes in a filthy carafe and tastes like nail varnish. Two bottles of Meursault, make it three, and you can bring them now."
"Drinking Meursault always makes me think I am entering into the spirit of Camus's L'Etranger," Heavage said to me.
But Lady Max was still directing the waiter. She had become a brisk and attentive hostess from her vantage point at the head of the table. There was a tension of authority in the way she sat, in her lifted chin, in the angle of her body—she was twitching, alert, full of suggestions.
After the wine was poured, the waiter took up his pad, saying, "And in addition zere are fresh lobstairs zis ivneen. Zay are not on ze meenue."
"Not real lobsters," Lady Max said, shivering as though insulted by the word. "They're just these pathetic little discolored crayfish from Scotland."
The waiter stood clicking his ballpoint.
"But the potted shrimps are super."
We all ordered potted shrimps.
"And the jugged hare," Lady Max said, and muttered the name in French while licking her lips.
"Ragoût de lièvre," Heavage said in his pedantic accent.
Hearing him, I thought: The English are a nation of pedants, always correcting you, and they hate themselves for being that way, because being in the right is such a dull pleasure.
Lady Max smiled at Heavage—a smile of disapproval—and said, "They do it with chestnuts here."
Most of us ordered that too, except Pippa, who said she was a vegetarian. Hearing her announce it, Marwood growled impatiently. Pippa conferred nervously with the waiter and finally settled on the ratatouille.
"And I will bring a selection of vegetables."
"If you must," Lady Max said. She lit a cigarette and dismissed him, exhaling and flinging smoke at him with her fingers in a witch-like gesture. "They do fuss so, and they don't mean a word of it."