My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  I was at the Museum Tavern when it opened at five-thirty, and so I saw her enter with her friends—a young woman named Philippa wearing a fur coat and a thin-faced, damp-haired young man named Ronnie.

  After we had told each other our names, they asked me what I was doing in London. I mentioned Uganda, my university job there, and S. Prasad. They seemed uninterested in what I said, and so I knew they were impressed: it was the English way—pride and shyness and obliquity. Most of my colleagues were English, after all. They supposed I was an American among Africans.

  Finally Philippa said that she would quite like to go to Africa.

  Rosamond said that Africa had never interested her but that she would do anything to go to Hong Kong. I thought that this was her English way of pinching me, but affectionately.

  Ronnie said, “You think Africa’s all elephants and lions and naked savages, but actually the animals are all in game parks and the Africans are hideously respectable. They’re always quoting the Bible, and they’re desperate for knighthoods.”

  He said this with great certainty, but it was similar to what Rosamond had said and for the same reason—he was trying to provoke me.

  When I smiled at him, he said, “They all wear ties and waistcoats and striped trousers. I’ve seen them on telly. And those cities are fantastically suburban. Andrew here probably lives in a very boring flat, or the sort of dreary maisonette you might find in a market town in the midlands.”

  I smiled again and said, “I guess I do.”

  “You see!” Ronnie laughed hard and squeezed my leg, but the pressure lingered a fraction too long, and I knew he was a homosexual.

  He was the sort of boisterous, unhappy, abusive, eager-to-beloved Englishman who always went too far in order to be the center of attention. We had them in Uganda; the Staff Club was full of them. “You’ll be here next month, won’t you?”

  I said no.

  “What a shame,” he said. “We’re going to have a huge demo in Grosvenor Square in front of the American Embassy. We’re planning to break things.”

  “I’ll be in Africa.”

  “How dull,” Ronnie said, and then he turned to Rosamond. “Africa’s just like Surrey.”

  “On the other hand, hyenas get into my trash can about once a week. I found a snake in my kitchen last year. And last month I found a bush-baby hanging on to my window.”

  “What’s a bush-baby?” Rosamond said. All this time she had been listening very intently to Ronnie hectoring me.

  “It’s a ball of fur with big round eyes—a monkey,” I said. “I’ve only seen them at night. It’s about the size of a big tomcat. The first thing you notice is its dark eyes, and once you see them you know it won’t do you any harm—you want it to stay. I was just going to bed and I heard it scratching on the window bars. It was holding on with its little monkey-hands and sort of sitting on the sill as though it wanted to come in and get into bed with me. It wasn’t startled to see a human being. It just looked at me with those lovely pleading eyes.”

  “That’s sweet,” Philippa said.

  Rosamond looked happy, and was about to speak when Ronnie began to laugh in a mirthless and hostile way.

  “Do you know there’s no cure for rabies?” he said. “If one of these sultry-eyed little creatures bites you, you froth at the mouth and die the most horrible and painful death through dehydration.” He smirked and went on, “It’s all in that boring book with the delightful pictures of fetuses that we published last month. God, is that the time? Michael’s going to scream the house down. What a pleasure to me you are, Andre. Were you named after Andre Gide, by any chance? I hope the answer’s yes!”

  “Michael’s his boyfriend,” Rosamond said, after Ronnie had gone. “He took him to the Christmas party last week. No one was the least bit shocked.”

  Philippa said, “I must go. It’s late closing at Selfridges. I have shopping to do. ’Bye, Ros. Lovely to meet you, Andrew.”

  All that time I had wanted to be alone with Rosamond, and now I was content. I hoped to sit there drinking with her for a few more hours, and to get drunk, and take her home and make love to her. I saw it as something like climbing four flights of stairs, and an event taking place on each landing, drinking on one landing, arriving at her place on the second landing, and the third and fourth a bit far off at the moment to be clearly described. But I felt we were already one flight up that long climb.

  We talked about African politics, and English weather, and American money. Meanwhile I was looking at her pale skin, and the way the heat of the pub had reddened her cheeks and dampened her small ringlets of hair against her forehead and neck.

  She said there was a play she wanted to see sometime. I said, “We could go together,” and she quickly agreed. I said, “We should go out to eat—”

  I loved saying “we” and watching her eyes brighten. I hadn’t touched her.

  “Have another drink,” I said.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Do you know what I’d really like?”

  Then we were outside, swaying, hugging each other in order to stay upright. I thought: If I’m this drunk so is she.

  Yellow light lay in spattered puddles on the black street, and pelting raindrops were dazzled by the headlights of oncoming cars. We walked through the rain and London seemed more than ever like a city underground. This wet sloppy weather looked dramatic to me. The rain and my drunkenness made me feel romantic and reckless. In the back of the taxi I took Rosamond in my arms and kissed her, and slid my hand under her huge coat, and groped for her. She didn’t resist; she squirmed and helped me a little—moved closer to me and touched my hair. Before we reached her street she had made it clear with her hands and her tongue that I could make love to her. Nowhere I had ever been had seemed a better place for kissing a stranger than a London taxi.

  In the dark hours of the following morning she said, “Are you surprised I slept with you so quickly? I’m not usually such an easy lay. But when you told me that story about the bush-baby I trusted you somehow. I knew you wouldn’t hurt me. And I knew you wouldn’t turn me down.”

  Bless that bush-baby, I thought, and I remembered Africa.

  I told her I had to go but that I wanted to see her again—tomorrow. Today, she said, and kissed me. I put on my clothes and walked into the street. I was not afraid to be in this empty London street at four in the morning. I walked along and when a taxi approached I hailed it, and went back to Prasad’s across the river.

  Prasad was in his purple bathrobe and Indian slippers, sitting at his empty desk in his study, with an unlit pipe in his fingers. He said he had insomnia.

  “I’m waiting for the birds to start chuntering,” he said. “Are you all right, Andy? Of course you are!” He sniffed and smiled—he’d had a whiff of Rosamond. “You young chaps!”

  I felt I had arrived in London at last.

  2.

  Within a week I began to have habits and haunts in this city: I invented routines and kept to them as a way of dealing with strange places and lengths of time.

  I slept late, and after lunch Prasad and I went for walks. We visited bookstores, we went to an uneventful séance at the Brixton Spiritualist Church, we went to museums. He was my guide. He was a solitary man. He knew everyone, but he had no close friends. His loneliness had made him intensely observant, as though this studious scrutiny were a remedy for being lonely. He knew the most obscure details of the paintings in the museums. He would lunge at the pictures, pointing out brushstrokes. “It’s a tiny smear. Now step back. It’s a person—is it a child? Back farther. It’s a man. Look at the hat!”

  I could only think how many afternoons he had spent looking at these pictures on his own and discovering these secrets. I liked him, I was grateful for his friendship, and I admired his writing; but his isolation frightened me. I wanted my life to be different.

  He grew quieter as these afternoons wore on, and at the end of the day he always asked, “Are you meeting your friend?”
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  “Yes,” I said. “At that pub I told you about. Why don’t you come along?”

  “I hate pubs,” he said, and he made his sour face. It was his look of disgust, as when he talked about sex, or meat, or bad books, or music.

  “She’d love to meet you,” I said, although that was not true.

  “I am quite happy,” he said. And he looked happy: declining, refusing, withdrawing—such actions gave him pleasure. He sometimes smiled when he said no. “I don’t want to know any new people.”

  That was the way it went. I spent my days with Prasad and my nights with Rosamond, one life turning within the other, and both spinning within me. I always met Rosamond at the Museum Tavern and we always drank too much and always took a taxi back to her flat in Victoria. Before dawn I got up groggily and wandered the streets until I found a taxi to take me across the river. I never saw her building in daylight, and probably would not have recognized it if I had. We always spoke of going to movies or plays, but we never went.

  We made love recklessly, like strangers—mishearing every cry. Rosamond groaned and sighed and fought back; and when I relented she encouraged me, startling me with certain words. This prim blonde English girl with her interesting job and her dainty way of drinking, would take off her pretty dress and pretend to be a whore. Plunging blindly on in the darkness of her room, I was almost convinced. She loved it when I told her she was hungrier than any whore that I had ever known.

  Afterwards, when we lay panting for breath, I thought of Prasad. “This sex thing is important to you,” he had said. “You young chaps. All that libido.” And once in a matter-of-fact voice he said, “I’ve got a very low and unreliable charge.”

  It was a week before I realized that Rosamond had what she called flatmates—there were three other young women in this large apartment, and each had her own bedroom. One of them was Philippa. We returned one night to find Philippa in the kitchen with a young man. I felt we had interrupted them in something very tender.

  “Andrew, I’d like you to meet my fiancé.”

  The formal word surprised me and made me feel faintly indecent.

  His name was Jeremy. He was in advertising. He said, “You Americans have some super ideas,” and seemed very nice and a bit shy.

  Philippa said, “Howlett’s could do with some good advertising ideas. Roger thinks book promotion is vulgar.”

  “Michael says he’ll never be a really first-rate publisher because he’s too much of a gentleman.”

  This conversation continued for a while, and I listened and said nothing. But I was thinking: They are living in the world, generating ideas, publishing books, making money, thinking up advertising slogans, working from day to day and solving problems. Nothing they did or said had anything to do with me. I pretended I had a job, I said I was a writer; but really I was simply living in Africa, waiting for something to happen to me.

  Rosamond said, “Andy lives in Africa.”

  It was as though she were explaining why I was so silent.

  I had run away, but I had run so far it was interesting.

  Jeremy said, “There’s an enormous future for tourism there. Especially in Kenya.”

  Was there? I lived not far away and I did not know that.

  Rosamond said, “Andy’s a writer.”

  Hearing her say that made me think that she was proud of me, and I felt a pang of love for her.

  “We were just making cocoa,” Philippa said. “Would you like some? We’ve made masses—I used all the milk, I’m afraid.”

  Rosamond and I were pleasantly drunk and wanted the feeling to last. We said no to the cocoa, and locked ourselves in her bedroom. We undressed each other impatiently.

  “The better you know someone the less you’re interested in their clothes,” I said, and unhooked her black bra.

  “You’re drunk,” Rosamond said, in a drunken way, and pulled me to the floor, and wrapped her legs around me.

  “They’re going to get married after Christmas,” she said after we made love. We were stuck together, still on the floor. “In a beautiful little church in the Cotswolds. They never go out. They’re saving all their money for a deposit on a flat.”

  It seemed such a pleasure to be married. I thought of Prasad and his wife in their house in south London. Sarah fussed over him and poked fun at him. But she also helped him. She read his proofs, she cooked, she ran the house. They seemed very close, as though they had formed their own intimate little society. That was the reason he seldom went out, and it was why they did not mind my staying away these nights with Rosamond: Raj and Sarah had a private life to which I could not be admitted. It seemed to me that nothing was more exclusive or unknowable than a happy marriage. It was the rarest friendship in the world, I felt.

  “It would be nice to be married,” I said.

  Rosamond said nothing and then she giggled in the darkness and said, “What are you saying to me?”

  “Would you like to get married?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. She tossed her hair. “I’ve never given it any thought.”

  But when we made love again shortly afterwards she whimpered and began to cry. Her face was wet with tears. She said, “I’m happy,” and held me close to her. She hugged me. She said, “I won’t let you go. I’m going to keep you prisoner.”

  When I struggled to get free, she laughed, and became aroused once more.

  I was haggard when I arrived back at Prasad’s that early morning: I clucked, seeing my face in the hall mirror.

  Prasad opened his study door and said, “I think you like this girl.”

  He was in his pajamas. The man never slept.

  “She’s very nice,” I said, and heard her saying through clenched teeth Bite me—I’m a whore. I had to repeat to myself, Yes, she is very nice.

  “Where do her people live?”

  “Her, um, people live in a place called Walton.”

  “Oh, God,” Prasad said. He made his disgusted face, but it was worse than usual. “Walton-on-Thames.”

  “You know the place?”

  “My heart sinks at the thought of places like that.”

  I knew where she lived, because that very morning, before I left her apartment, she asked whether I would go home with her for Christmas dinner. I had asked her where.

  “It’s one of these nightmare places,” Prasad said. “England’s full of them.”

  “He’s just being silly,” Sarah said, later that day. “It’s lovely. It’s on the river. You’ll have a wonderful time. Much better than our dull old vegetarian Christmas.”

  “We will celebrate in our usual style,” Prasad said. “Very quietly, I’m afraid. My bingeing days are over.”

  Then he laughed, and so did Sarah. I envied them the way they had each other.

  Christmas morning was dry and bright, the blue sky mirrored on the upper windows of old buildings, and the city was very still, as on the day after a great event. There were few people about, no buses, hardly any traffic, and every shop was shut. Near the station, which was closed, there were pools of vomit on the curb, still fresh, like messes of spilled soup. A peaceful silence lay over the city, and the occasional burst of church bells made this silence more emphatic.

  This sunlight and emptiness was perfect for our meeting: Rosamond was waiting in her long cossack coat and fur hat on the steps of Waterloo Station. It was as though we were the only people awake this morning—we had a purpose in the deserted city. Christmas itself made me feel innocently happy, and I kissed Rosamond with such energy and hope that she shrieked. And I gave her a present, a silk scarf from Liberty’s with the date of the New Year on it, 1968.

  “I’m going to wear it,” she said, and tied it loosely around her neck. “It’s beautiful.”

  I saw her glance at herself as we passed a shop window in the station. She looked pleased as she turned away.

  After we boarded the train, she gave me a present—a leather wallet. I said it was just what I needed, and I s
howed her my old one to prove it. Then we sat holding hands, saying nothing, traveling in the empty rattling train that smelled of stale smoke and the mingled odors of last night’s homeward-bound partygoers—perfume, cigarettes, beer, whiskey, fried food. There were shreds of gift wrapping and twisted ribbon among the trampled newspapers. I began to feel sad when I thought about our presents: they were the sort of gifts that people exchanged when they did not know each other well. Sitting there silently—but wanting to speak—I felt Rosamond was a stranger, and I was apprehensive about meeting her family.

  It was not a long trip—much less than the hour she said it would take. England seemed such a small place, in spite of many names. It was all names, and they were impressive, but they were signs on stations, no more than that; a brief stop, no one got on or off, we moved on. The distances were slight and the places disappointing. In Africa for hundreds of miles there were hills and valleys and forests, and nothing had a name.

  Walton was just small houses and roofs. Where was the river? I felt cheated by these London names. There was no green at Bethnal Green—only a street and traffic; and Shepherd’s Bush was a dangerous intersection. The slum at Elephant and Castle was the worst cheat of all.

  “You must be Andrew,” Rosamond’s father said. He said nothing more. He did not shake my hand. He did not tell me that his name was James Graves—I had to ask Rosamond that. I had been feeling cheery, but this English obliqueness sobered me by making me attentive.

  We got into his small car and drove, but not far, to a house I first took to be large until I realized that it was half the building, semidetached, though it too had a name, Rosedene. It was two textures, stucco and brick, with a tile roof, and it lay behind thick hedges. In its small and fussy front yard there were four dusty rosebushes and a birdbath and rectangular patches of grass that looked like upturned scrubbing brushes. Everything was a tight fit—the railway line, the station, the street, Mr. Graves’s car, this house, and even the guests, seated close together in the parlor drinking Christmas sherry. The sun streamed through the windows and warmed the Christmas tree and released a fragrance of pine.