My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  He took it in his fingers like a turd.

  “Those are your words on that paper,” I said.

  He pinched the paper but said nothing.

  “Eat it,” I said.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.

  “I’ll shoot!” I moved nearer him and my big wet sleeve trembled near his face. “Now stick it into your mouth and make it snappy.”

  The heavily breathing woman was whimpering, trying to contain her sobs; but they burst through her nose.

  Slee put the paper on his tongue and closed his mouth on it.

  “Swallow it.”

  He hesitated. I jerked the pistol again to startle him. His mouth moved and from the effort of it tears came to his eyes.

  “If you go near my wife again, you fucker, I’ll kill you.”

  He looked as though he was going to vomit. The others, perhaps realizing they were safe—that my quarrel was with Slee—were very quiet and attentive, except for the whimpering woman. All their worry about my intrusion had changed into a sort of resentment directed against Slee.

  He stood up slowly, as I backed towards the door. It was the feeblest show of defiance.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  I could tell his teeth were locked together.

  I took a step towards him and said, “You’re dead, asshole,” and squirted my pistol at him. “You’re history.”

  “My eyes!” he shrieked—the suddenness of it alarmed me. He put his hands over his face. But before he could recover and chase me I ran out of the room, I heard someone say, “Is it acid?” I slammed the dining room door so hard the wall shook and there was a series of crashes, like china plates or vases, or perhaps large framed pictures, dislodged and hitting the floor.

  I fled into the rain, laughing.

  6.

  Sunday we went to Richmond Park and looked at the deer, and had tea in a drafty old building on the west side of the park. Jenny said, “On my way to the loo I saw a sign saying Bertrand Russell grew up here.”

  Jack said, “Who’s Bertrand Russell?”

  “A famous man, who was very clever,” Jenny said.

  “He was a silly shit, with a filthy mind, who hated Americans,” I said.

  “Daddy said ‘shit,’ ” Jack said, trembling with excitement. His lip curled and he said, “Shit!”

  On Monday, as Jenny was putting on her coat, I told her I had been to Sevenoaks. I wanted to prepare her.

  “I’ve taken care of your friend Slee.”

  Leaving out the wild hair, the wet raincoat, and the water pistol filled with urine, I told her what I had done. “Made a fuss” was the expression I used. I did not say that I had ordered him to eat the message, though as I was telling her in euphemisms of the encounter I kept seeing his tears as he choked on the piece of paper, like a young child being forced to eat cold oatmeal.

  “Oh, God,” she said, hesitating at the door. “Oh, God. You didn’t. You fool. How could you?”

  For a moment I thought she had decided not to go to work. She looked sick, she looked terrified. The craziness of it came to me as I saw her face.

  She said, “This had better not be as bad as you make it sound.”

  I knew it was worse. I had left all the bad parts out. But I was counting on their summary, and expected them to exclude the details: dripping on the table, yelling at Wilkie, saying “fucker,” and squirting piss in Slee’s eyes, not to mention making him chew and swallow the paper.

  Just the way she slammed the door when she got home told me that it was going to be a long night. She did not say a word to me until Jack was in bed. We had taken turns reading him his current favorite, Ant and Bee and the Rainbow, how they created the colors. I lay in the darkness reading, and dreading what was to come.

  “Are you out of your mind?” she said.

  Fury had given her a different face. She had stiff unpleasant features and hateful eyes. Her skin was the color of cement. She loathed me.

  “Are you crazy?” she said. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”

  All these questions; and there were more.

  “What are you playing at? Do you want to get me fired? What’s your problem?”

  She then told me what I had done. It was a surprisingly accurate version of my caper at Greville Lodge—conning the maid, bursting in, interrupting the dinner, snapping at Wilkie, swearing, making Slee eat the paper, frightening everyone with the gun. The gun was the worst of it: the English hatred of firearms, their horror of all weapons as instruments of intimidation.

  She told it meaning to shame me, but as she spoke it all came back to me and seemed wonderful. Remembering it, I smiled.

  “It was a water pistol,” I said.

  “He thinks you might have damaged his eyes. There were chemicals in it.”

  “Piss,” I said.

  “You’re sick,” she said, disgustedly.

  “He deserved it. He deserved much worse than that. He was lucky.”

  “It wasn’t only him, you know. You ruined their dinner party—you ruined their whole weekend.”

  “If I’d had a real gun I would have shot him,” I said. I remembered the Mossberg I used to own when I was fifteen. I pictured Slee’s look of terror as I threatened him with it, and the way he wilted and bled as I shot him. “I will shoot him.”

  “Wilkie thinks you should see a doctor. I was in his office an hour. He was so humiliated—and you can just imagine how I felt. He kept telling me that he would have gone to the police if it hadn’t been for Terry—”

  “Stop calling him Terry!”

  “I’ll call him anything I like. You should thank him. He persuaded Wilkie not to press charges.”

  “What charges? Making him eat a piece of paper? Is that a criminal offense? Hah! I’d love to see him in court.”

  I saw him saying, Then he made me put the paper into my mouth, Your Honor, while people in the public gallery laughed.

  “You terrorized those people,” Jenny said. “You broke some valuable china. Mrs. Wilkie was hysterical. Oh, God, you’re pathetic. You think this is funny.”

  When she said that I remembered the moment of squirting Slee, and the way he had put his hands over his face, and I laughed, thinking My eyes!

  “You’re mad because I forced him to eat a piece of paper. Hey, it was his own piece of paper! It was funny. I’d do it again. I’d make him eat more.”

  “I’m not cross about that,” she said. “I know your pride was hurt. I didn’t realize you’d take it so badly.” She had become very rational, but was still angry. I hated her in her logical moods, because she was intelligent, and I could only get the better of her when she lost her temper. “What I object to is your making a mess of things—ruining the weekend. And especially all that talk. You can’t keep your mouth shut, can you? Now everyone in the bank knows.”

  It seemed to me appropriate that she should have to face them. She had wanted to hide and be blameless.

  “You brought it on yourself,” I said. “If you hadn’t fucked the guy this would never have happened.”

  “I told you I was sorry,” she said. “I told you that I still loved you, that I was glad you’re back, and that I wanted our life to continue as normal.” She had been looking at her hands; now she raised her head and looked me in the face. “But that wasn’t good enough for you.”

  It wasn’t: true. I needed the triumph of humiliating that man. Now we could continue.

  I said, “We’ll be all right.”

  “No,” she said. “You’ve spoiled it. You’ve put me in a horrible position. I can’t forgive you for that.”

  “That’s right—stick up for that asshole. He didn’t put me in a horrible position. Don’t think about me.” But sarcasm didn’t help, and I could not keep myself from adding, “I’ll shoot him!”

  “You’ve made my job practically impossible,” she said. The hatred in her voice hurt me, because the voice itself sounded so logical. “I have no respect for you.”


  She was pale, and had the thin starved look that always emerged in her when she was infuriated. But there were no tears. No matter what I said she would not lose her temper.

  “You’d better find another place to sleep.”

  “This is my house!”

  “Then find another room,” she said coolly, “because I don’t want you in my bed.”

  My study had no heat, but it had a sofa, and there I slept that night, snoring under my overcoat and still wearing my socks, like an alienated madman in a Russian novel.

  The next day, waking alone in the cold room, I had the impression that I was still in Siberia, sniffing the frozen dusty air of Khabarovsk; that I was somehow marooned, and that something terrible was about to happen.

  I lay there in the darkness, clutching my coat, at first frightened and depressed by these Siberian impressions, but at last reassured when I saw the glint at the window. The bright winter morning in London had cast a frosty white shine across my desk, my typewriter, my papers, and the stack of thick notebooks I had brought back from my trip.

  I did not dare to open them then, but after I had dropped Jack at school I went upstairs, into the cold room, and began reading. I realized only then how much I had written down. I had written everything, and because I had done that I had forgotten it all. The notebooks surprised me in their detail: skies, food, trains, faces, smells, clothes, weather; and they were full of talk. It was exact talk, scribbled first on pieces of paper and then written faithfully as dialogue.

  I turned pages, skipping until my eye lighted on the description of an Indian civil servant on the train to Simla, the dark circles under his eyes, the unsmiling mouth and brown suit. He was telling me of an incident in Bengal, where he had been an accountant; of a man who had threatened him. “I’ll charge-sheet you,” I said, and I fetched the blighter a kick—

  I laughed out loud. Then I stopped, hearing the echo of the strange sound. For a moment in my reading I had been transported, and I had forgotten everything—all my worry and depression, the crisis in my marriage, my anger, my jealousy. I had seen the Indian sitting across the aisle from me in the wooden carriage, and the terraced fields on the steep slopes, and the way the train brushed the long-stemmed wild flowers that grew beside the track.

  It was half a world away, and because it was so separate from me, and yet so complete, I laughed. It was a truthful glimpse of a different scene. It cheered me up. It was like looking at a brilliant picture and losing myself in it.

  And I knew my own laugh. I had laughed in the grounds of Greville Lodge—that was a worrying whickering laugh. And I had laughed last night at Jenny when I remembered squirting Slee with the pistol. That had been wilder, with a victimizing howl in it. But this was like a shout of health, like a foreign word that meant “Yes!”

  After I met Jack and fed him I hurried to my study again and brought out the notebooks. The room was cold until I began reading.

  7.

  Within a few days, stimulated by reading, I started to write. I worked from the notebooks; but it was not copying. I enlarged and clarified and invented. I thought of it as fabulating.

  I had not finished reading the notebooks. I had gone through most of the first one, and had skimmed the rest, my eye always lighting on funny phrases or pieces of exact description. The Booking Hall in Calcutta, I read, and: I woke near the window with coal smuts on my face then peeled a finger-banana for breakfast.

  Such completeness was a gift: I had needed a new world. I propped up the first notebook next to my machine and began typing, improving and ordering the narrative I had scribbled as I had traveled. In the past I had always written in longhand, copying and recopying, and feeling like a monk on a stool. But this was a speedy business. The first day I wrote five pages. It was like singing, or storytelling, because my heart was like a stone, and I discovered that I had to write in this particular way, breezing along, for me to feel better. It worked. For the hours that I sat at my desk I was—not happy, but supremely contented. I was engaged, making something happen: fabulating.

  I was back on my trip, but it was a better trip, much odder, with nuisances and delays left out; no pain, no suspense, no wife. I was the fortunate traveler. The chance encounters I left in and buffed up a little. Cutting improved them. Now I was in Paris, and now in Italy, and on the next page Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. That night while I slept we crossed the frontier. And there was still so much to come, in India and Burma. It would be a long book.

  On the first day, at six-thirty or so, the front door opened and shut. “It’s me,” I heard, and then “Mum!” as Jack ran from the back room where he had been watching television.

  Hearing those voices, I was swept out of the world and I was back in Siberia. My room was cold, my fingers had gone stiff.

  “I’ll be right down,” I called out.

  I could not write another word. I doused the lights and shut the door and went downstairs.

  “You look pale,” Jenny said.

  We kissed for Jack’s sake.

  “I’ve been working.”

  “How is it coming?”

  “I don’t know.”

  It was the truth. As soon as I was out of that room I could not think of anything I had written—I had no memory of it. It was gone, I had left it behind; and I was gloomy.

  I did not ask Jenny about her work—didn’t want to, didn’t dare. We put Jack to bed, then had dinner. We took turns at cooking, at reading Jack his bedtime book. It was not kindness, but a practical effort to avoid conflict. We talked politely, like two strangers who happen to find themselves at the same table, people who begin by saying: Is this seat taken?

  “I hate these dark afternoons,” she said. “This bloody weather.”

  “It’s been raining a lot lately.”

  It was the first time we had ever spoken about the weather. I almost laughed thinking of the married couple, at last alone, who talked about the rain.

  But I liked the rain. One of my few pleasures in England was the bad weather. I liked the rain hitting the window like sleet, I liked the black afternoons; and it cheered me to see people blown and beaten by the wind. London always turned black in a gale, and black suited the city. The cold and wet kept me indoors and made me feel cozy. I had always found stormy weather an aid to writing. I liked seeing Jack in his red raincoat and waterproof hat and small boots, his face so warm and smooth, even in that chill, when I kissed him.

  “Time for the news—don’t worry about the dishes,” I said. “I’ll do them later.”

  We always watched the news these nights. A miners’ strike was in progress. It filled the newspapers, it was the first item on the news, it was the main topic in all the political debates, and the subject of most speeches. It was a noisy drama, and while there was always a new angle or an overnight development, it continued—the picket lines, the shouting, the signs, it was all obstruction. It went on changing subtly, but it did not end. It was English in the way its dullness seemed to matter so much. The event was played out and every move recorded, like a cricket match or a chess game or a huge tree being chopped down with a hatchet. We were all spectators. But a strike was a stoppage: inaction. In a country where nothing much happened, people not doing something constituted drama. This was workers not working.

  The news was always fat men in suits going into meetings and coming out of meetings, and you knew their opinions from their accents—educated right-wing, uneducated left-wing. They were all stubborn. The sameness of it fascinated me.

  “I’ll be home all day tomorrow,” Jenny said.

  “Is it a holiday?”

  “Bank’s closed. Everything closed. We’re going on a three-day week.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “Government order. It’s a way of saving coal. It’s to break the miners’ strike.”

  It did not worry me that the country was closing down for four days a week—in fact I liked the absurdity of it; but with Jenny at home I could not work. I
needed to be alone. She hated me, and I could not work in an atmosphere of her loathing. The more I thought of it the less I liked the three-day week. It was a vindictive piece of trickery. What a country it was for refusing to work!

  “What a stupid country.”

  “You could leave,” she said. “No one’s keeping you here.”

  I wanted to answer her, but when I opened my mouth to speak I began to cry. I thought of Jack asleep upstairs, and Jenny, the happy years of our marriage, and all my work. I had published six novels. They had been well-reviewed, they had sold moderately, but I had no money left. I knew that to make a living I would have to write a book a year, but I felt I was capable of that. Yet it was hard to be both praised and penniless; for a writer it seemed another kind of Siberia.

  “Why don’t you leave England, if you hate it so much?”

  I sobbed and said, “I don’t live in this country. I live upstairs in this house, like one of those crazy bastards who thinks the war is still on, hiding from everyone, and afraid—”

  What was I saying? My face was messy with tears.

  Jenny said, “God, you’re pathetic.”

  That was a typical day—the excitement of writing, the appearance of Jenny, a gloomy meal, the miners’ strike on the news and tears: sometimes hers, sometimes mine.

  I felt she had given up on me. I was alone. But I had a cure for loneliness: this book. I would never have been able to write a novel or a story. My imagination was blunted. But my trip in these notebooks was like a first draft; I only needed to improve it, and improvement usually meant no more than leaving things out, not adding anything. I had brought the whole trip back with me—all the trains, all the talk, all the people. I did not particularly like travel books—the form had fatal insufficiencies. It was usually geography, and potted history, and a kind of lifeless boasting about how far the writer had gone and what he ate. I wanted something different, but I wasn’t trying to devise a new form, I was only attempting to lift my mood. I always sat down sorrowful but as soon as I became engrossed in my notebooks I began to smile.