by Paul Theroux
Jenny said, “You seem to have all this energy.”
“I’m so glad to be back,” I said.
It was New Year’s Eve. We had always made a point of not celebrating, not going to a party; simply giving thanks that the old year had ended peacefully and then going to bed before midnight.
She had not replied to me. I said, “Aren’t you glad? Didn’t you miss me?”
We sat smoking among the ruins of the meal and two empty wine bottles.
Jenny spoke very deliberately when she was being truthful. In her measured way, choosing her words, she said, “It was so awful when you went. It was such an emptiness. I was so desperately lonely that I pretended to myself that you were dead.”
She saw from my face that I was horrified and could not hide it.
“That was the only way I could manage to live from day to day.”
I said, “The only way I could manage was by imagining that you missed me terribly. That you were waiting for me.”
She said nothing, and I gathered from her silence that she had not been waiting. For a moment, it crossed my mind, as it had during that phone call from Siberia, that I might have died—been blown up in Vietnam, or poisoned in Burma, or frozen in Siberia—and it would have made no difference.
“Don’t frown, Andy, please, I am glad you’re back. I had forgotten what a good cook you are, and Jack is a different boy—he really missed you. He used to go all quiet, and I knew he was thinking of you.”
“Bedtime,” I said, looking at the clock. It was ten minutes to twelve.
We made love that night and other nights—not passionately but with a sort of insistence on my part. I kept wondering whether she would resist or refuse. She didn’t resist, but neither did she take much pleasure in it. Yet that was not strange. After such a long separation we were still not used to each other.
She worked at a branch of Drummond’s Bank off Ludgate Circus. She was supervisor in the Foreign Exchange Department in a district of London where money was constantly being changed. Her pay was good—she earned more than I did—and her position was equivalent, on the bank’s scale, to assistant manager. Her hours meant that we had needed a so-called mother’s help. Before I had left there had been a girl in the back bedroom—Betty, from Bradford.
“What happened to Big Betty?” I asked soon after I arrived back.
“She left before Christmas. She’s doing a diploma in education. She said she wants to work with handicapped children. ‘Brain-damaged yoongsters’ is what she called them.”
“I can take Jack to school from now on. Then we’ll have the house to ourselves.”
“I was hoping you’d take him. We still have Mrs T. cleaning three mornings a week, so you won’t have to do the dusting.”
“I wouldn’t mind doing the dusting!”
“You’re so domestic all of a sudden.”
“Yes. Because I had a feeling sometimes on that damned trip that I’d never get out alive. That I’d be in some horrible place like Afghanistan or Siberia and wouldn’t be able to leave. I used to think—what if I die? What a long expensive road to travel, and all that trouble, just to die.”
“You’re home, Andy. Don’t look so worried.”
“I did nothing but worry. I got very superstitious. I was afraid you wouldn’t be here when I got back.”
She kissed me. She said, “It’s wonderful to have you back.”
I looked closely at her face and then she turned away.
After all that dislocation, and the uncertainties of travel, it was paradise to be in this quiet, terraced house in a London back street. People said it was the dreariest part of south London. I was a stranger there, but I felt at home: it was life, and I was happy. I spent the day doing small things, taking Jack to school, and then making his lunch and giving him a nap; afterwards we went for a walk, and shopped, bought food for dinner, and I cooked. In between, when I had a quiet moment, I looked over my notes. I was daunted by them—the strange handwriting, the bizarre-sounding place-names. There were four large notebooks, about five hundred pages, filled with my writing. There was too much of it. I wanted to do something with it, but what? I imagined the book, but I had never written that sort of book. I was afraid to begin.
It was a relief to have household chores to do. They kept me from thinking; they were brainless and tiring; they were just what I needed. Little Jack seemed to me a perfect child, and I knew that he was glad I was home. He had a serious face, very pale from the English winter and perfectly smooth. He had small beautiful hands and deep brown eyes that were so expressive I did all I could to please him. I gave him treats, bought him chocolate at the corner shop, and cakes at Broomfield’s for tea; I watched television with him, holding him on my lap. When he was at school I missed him so much that sometimes I went early to meet him, and loitered until he appeared.
“What do you want for lunch?”
“Paste sandwiches, and sausage rolls”—he had already acquired a London accent—“and, Dad, can we have jelly—the kind they have at birthday parties?”
It delighted me that I could make him happy by being with him and offering him these simple things.
I said, “I missed you when I was away.”
“But you’re home now,” he said, encouraging me.
“And I’m not going away again.”
“That’s good, because we have to go for our walks and sail my new boat.”
I had bought him a toy sailboat that we floated on the pond at Crystal Palace. It was a large muddy park, with gardens, and great stretches to run about in. The pond was in a glade, and we always brought stale bread for the ducks. After these outings, which left Jack with a pink nose and cold hands, we took the 73 bus back to Catford.
We watched television—the children’s programs, Blue Peter, Crackerjack, and Doctor Who. I thought there was nothing better in the world than to sit with my small warm son on my lap, watching these simple-minded programs. His laughter made me hold him tighter. Why had I ever gone away?
All morning, when he was at school, I longed to see him. If for some reason I had to go out I rushed back to be with him. And he never disappointed me—he was always eager to see me.
The weekends seemed blissful—the bliss of a routine—shopping at the supermarket in Sydenham on Saturday morning, then home for lunch, and doing odd jobs in the afternoon. Jenny always made dinner on Saturday night. We seldom went out. We talked of going skiing—some year, for sure, when Jack was older. The best part of Saturday was going to bed early and making love. On Sundays we drove into the Kent countryside or went to a museum. I carried the boy on my shoulder.
I never asked what was coming. This was what I wanted—a happy home. The anxieties I had felt in travel were in the past. In returning home I became the person I really was. Travel was another life I had left behind.
Jenny said, “How’s your book coming along?”
A book had been my whole reason for that ordeal. I had not started it, but I said, “Fine.”
“What do you do all day?”
“I write, I play with Jack, I smoke, I watch children’s programs on television.”
“Do you have a deadline for the book?”
“Sort of,” I said. “The contract says ‘spring ’74.’ ”
“That’s soon,” she said. “Three or four months. You don’t seem worried!”
The trip had almost broken me; so what would a book do? My secret was that there was no book—none that I cared to write. For the moment, I wanted nothing more than this—the little family in the little house in a corner of a dark city. I was safe.
“What happens if you don’t deliver on time?” Jenny asked. “Do the publishers get their money back?”
“I spent it,” I said. “But even so, I think I’ll get extra time.”
And I thought: What if she knew the truth—that I had not done anything, that the book was a fiction, that in an average day with his crayons Jack wrote more than I did?
Sh
e said, “It’s lucky for you I’ve got a good job.”
It was true. I also felt secure because she was working, and she was proud to be working. Her conception of labor was that it liberated you. I believed that she had it slightly wrong—that her work liberated me and gave me time. And now it seemed there was a coherence to my life. There was also a completeness. I suspected that she knew I wasn’t working. Perhaps she was proud of being the breadwinner. I did not dispute it. For about a month after I returned I was happy and had no other life.
And then it ended. We were at Crystal Palace Park, late one afternoon towards the end of January. It was a cold day, and darkening—the sky against my eyebrows. But I was keeping a promise to Jack. I had the sailboat under my arm as we entered the park by the great brick gateway.
As we walked towards the pond, Jack tugged my hand and said, “I want to see the dinosaurs.”
I thought he was confusing this place with Hyde Park. The Natural History Museum and its dinosaurs were near there.
“There’s no museum here,” I said.
“Not the museum—the dinosaurs.”
“Do you mean the zoo?”
“No! Not the zoo—the dinosaurs!”
“Listen, Jack, there aren’t any dinosaurs here.”
“Yes!”
It was terrible to hear him insist. He then began to sob in frustration, and ran ahead of me, along a path, towards a garden I had never seen before. And there in the garden was a large greeny-bronze stegosaurus (it said so on a sign) with a long tail and horns, seeming to claw its way past a rhododendron. In the twilight it looked half alive, like a creature that came out at night.
“There,” Jack was saying. His face was white. “I told you!”
He was a lovely boy, but he had the crowing pedantry of most bright children; he was infuriated by contradiction. And he showed me more dinosaurs in the shadowy garden. I was touched, because the creatures were five times his size.
My next question simply slipped out in a kind of admiring way.
“How did you know about these things?”
“I came here with Mummy’s friend.”
I struggled to say, “Is Mummy’s friend a woman or a man?”
He answered promptly and all at once I was freezing.
Jack had said, “What are you looking at, Dad?”
I said, “Nothing,” and meant it.
He had seen a change in me that instant. I talked to him glumly, trying to decide what I should do next. I could not think. My mind was a blank. I had no plan.
The next day I took up my notebooks and began to reread them closely, and all the sadness and difficulty of my long trip came back to me. I felt sorry for myself, because I had been right in Siberia: my suspicions were confirmed. I had been fooled. I felt I was back in Siberia, and it was then that I remembered the entire telephone conversation, and all of it upset me.
The thought that I had suppressed then, and that I allowed myself to consider now, was that my call had been a great surprise to Jenny. It had been six in the morning. I never wanted this to be true, because it had been my gloomiest and most tormenting suspicion, but while we had spoken on the phone she was with someone else. He was lying on my side of the bed, waiting for her.
Perhaps it had not awakened them, but only interrupted them.
Let it ring.
No, it might be him.
So what?
He’d wonder where I was. Let me up, darling.
That was why she had been worse than noncommittal; she had been cold.
Who was it?
It was him. Don’t worry. He’s in Siberia.
Now I had a secret, and it was like an illness. My habit of concealment was so highly developed I was able to accommodate it. But it was painful—hiding it, living with it. The secrecy re-created the double life that I had once been used to. But it was not simple, and it was not the game I had invented as a teenager. I was thirty-two. I knew that a double life is not an alternating existence of first one then the other, like an actor changing clothes. It is both lives being felt and led simultaneously.
And so all the time I was with Jack, watching television or meeting him after school; or cooking for Jenny, or shopping, or going to the laundromat, or telling stories, or listening, or making plans, or making love—all that time, the secret twitched within me.
I believed that she too was leading two lives and that, unused to doing so, she would be careless. I could not wait for her to slip. I searched for proof.
First I looked in the house. There was her dressing table in the bedroom, full of drawers. All burglars and housebreakers go for the main bedroom and make straight for the dressing table: they know it contains everything. I sifted through and found foreign coins, hairpins, broken pens, her passport (she had not left the country in my absence), receipts for gas and electric bills, used checkbooks and jewelry. I recognized all the jewelry. So she had not been given that kind of present. I studied the check stubs—nothing there.
Her clothing was more revealing. Did the fact that she had bought quite a lot of new underwear mean something? I felt it did. But it was all I found. She seldom threw anything away. This meant her drawers and shelves were full. But it was junk, it meant nothing—it was old bus tickets, and out-of-date season tickets and timetables and broken pencils and cheap watches, and old clothes. Looking through this pitiful stuff only made me sad. I found a snapshot of her holding Jack and taped it to the wall over my desk.
Jack said, “What are you doing, Dad?”
“Cleaning out these drawers.”
“Can I help you?”
“No,” I said sharply, and then more gently, “No.”
Leaving Siberia I had imagined a long story about a man in a road humiliated in front of his son. I remembered it now, and thought of the man’s pain, and how the American who had watched it all from his window had taken his revenge.
Jack knew something and because he was unaware of what he knew it was the one subject I could not raise with him. My questions were impossible, though I often looked into his lovely clear eyes and thought: Tell me about Mummy’s friend—did he often take you to the park? Did he play with you? Where did he eat?
Then he would know. The questions would alert him and then he would have a secret. He would have to live with that.
Where did Mummy’s friend sleep?
Jack smiled at me. He knew everything and none of it was wrong.
What was his name?
I had the power to take his innocence away. Just a suggestion from me and he would be brought down. How simple and true the Bible story was, about Adam and Eve wanting to know too much.
I was tempted; but I loved the child too much to involve him in this. Instead, I developed a routine of looking through Jenny’s handbag and briefcase. I usually did it twice. As soon as she came home from work she rushed to see Jack, and she usually read him a story. Then I went swiftly through her bag—keys, receipts, money, tubes of mints, scraps of paper, stamps, address book. I scrutinized these. And her briefcase held accounts-sheets, computer printouts, photocopies of exchange rates to four decimal places, financial analyses, and her Evening Standard.
Later in the evening, she washed her hair or had a bath. Then I looked again more carefully. I had studied every name in her address book. Nothing.
Every day I searched her bag and briefcase, and the only question in my mind was why, after all these weeks, did she keep these meaningless scraps of paper, and the foreign coins and rubber bands? Why didn’t she throw away the stale tube of mints?
“I can’t find my season ticket,” she said one morning.
It was zipped into the side pocket of her black handbag and it was in a plastic holder, which also held two second-class Christmas postage stamps.
“Have you looked in your handbag?”
“Of course I have!”
“Let me look. I might be able to—”
“Don’t you dare touch that bag,” she said in so severe a w
ay I knew she must be concealing something.
A day or so later she said she had found her season ticket. I did not ask where.
I kept searching her bag whenever I had a chance, because she had been so insistent that day that I refrain from touching it. If she said she had bought a new pair of gloves I asked where, and I checked the label in the gloves to make sure she was telling the truth. If she said she would be working late I found an excuse to call her at the office at that late hour. I looked for loose ends, for any inconsistency. There was nothing, and it seemed to me that was the most incriminating fact of all; for one or two loose ends or unexplained moments would have been natural, but none at all was very suspicious.
I studied all her receipts, no matter what they were for—a new chair, a pair of socks, a haircut. If there was a nameless telephone number on any piece of paper, I called the number. I got Jack’s school, the doctor’s office, and even the bank, though it was not her office. Each time I put the phone down without giving my name.
“How’s your work going?” she asked. It was always the friendliest question.
My work! I had no work, except this fossicking in her handbag and searching the house for clues.
I said, “Slowly”—which was a lie. She believed me. “But my study’s cold. I need a warmer room.”
Doing nothing at my desk made me cold, and after a morning of it I got up and my hands and feet were numb.
She said, “Oh, yes, I borrowed the electric fire.”
I had forgotten there had been one in the room.
“I was wondering where it was,” I said, just to see what she would say.
She became very evasive. First she couldn’t remember. Then she said she had given it to someone. I asked who. She said, no, she hadn’t given it away—she had brought it to the bank. But it had broken—one of the bars had snapped. It was being repaired. A new element was being fitted.
She was a terrible liar. I almost felt sorry for her. But why was she being evasive?
Without any warning, I went to her office in the bank late one afternoon at closing time, three-thirty, and demanded to see her.