My Secret History

by Paul Theroux

  “Interesting,” I said, but I could tell from the angle of his head that he wasn’t listening, didn’t care, was only changing the subject.

  “I might be going back with Mum.”

  He hadn’t heard.

  He said, “I’ve got history and Russian to prepare for, too.”

  We had turned into Victoria Street.

  I said, “Is there anything you need—anything we can buy?”

  “Batteries for my Walkman.”

  “That’s all?”

  He shrugged, but it was not a large considered gesture—it was his body wincing towards his head, briefly burying his neck.

  I was annoyed and frustrated, because I wanted him to want something that I alone could give him. By not wanting anything, or perhaps refusing to tell me, he was making himself powerful.

  He was fifteen, and yet he seemed very old. His leather briefcase was battered and cracked, and seeing it and his loose fallen-down socks and his white ankles, I became sad. He was not a big boy but rather a small man, and he looked weary and harassed in his shabby black suit. Walking along I felt younger than him, in my blue jeans and leather jacket.

  I said, “Is there anything wrong, Jack?”

  He shook his head, meaning no, but too quickly, telling me yes.

  We went into a small cafe run by an irascible Italian just off Victoria Street. Condensation sweated upon the front windows, the tea urns gasped, and the smell of frying hung in the air with a clinging odor of boiled vegetables. Jack waited for me at the table, and I bought two cups of tea and two cakes. Once he began eating, Jack revealed both his hunger and his mood. Eden sometimes ate that way—the slow, sour, and disgusted way that people ate when they were depressed.

  “It’s your exams, isn’t it?” I said.

  His silence meant yes, just as his no had meant yes, and I thought then how if he had said yes I would not have known what he meant. “Maybe I can help. Please let me.”

  Only then did he raise his eyes. I saw cold resentment in them.

  He said, “Do you speak Russian, have you read Pushkin in Russian, do you know standard deviation in advanced maths?”

  I smiled fatuously at him, and seeing me draw back he became more insistent.

  “What about the Avignon Papacy? What did Charles the Fifth contribute to the recovery of the Valois cause in the Hundred Years War?”

  He looked as though he was going to cry.

  “I have to write an essay on that for tomorrow,” he said. “Four sides of foolscap. I haven’t even started.”

  Then I remembered how I had been sententious with him and said, The first thing to understand is that time passes, and I said, “Maybe I could help you with your English.”

  “I don’t want help,” he said. “I just want to get it over with.”

  He drank his tea in silence, the moment passed.

  “I’m hoping Mum will come with me to India,” I said. “Do you wish you could come?”

  “Why do you ask me that, when you know I have to stay here and take these exams?” he said, being logical again in a way that shamed me.

  “I never took exams like that in the States,” I said. I thought of myself at his age, of my rifle, of being an altar boy at St. Ray’s, of Tina Spector at the Sandpits, of three funerals equals one wedding; of the whale steaks a few years later. “I wish you didn’t have to.”

  He clawed his tie and said, “Then you shouldn’t have sent me to this school.”

  His expression was of someone who has been double-crossed. He had been trying to please me in studying hard. What right did I have to undermine him by insincerely wishing it otherwise? He was truer than I was.

  He said, “What does Manichaean mean?”

  “Something to do with duality—seeing that good and evil are mingled,” I said. “Good in the spirit, evil in the body and material things. Something like that.”

  “Where does the word come from? Is it Greek?”

  “From the name of the prophet—Manes. He was a Persian who kept being visited by an angel whom he realized was his double. He was also a painter. He was killed. His followers fled to central Asia. Why do you want to know?”

  “It was one of the heresies that the Papal—oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter,” he said, and pushed his cup and plate aside and put himself out of my reach. “I have to go back now. Thanks for the tea, Dad.”

  We left the cafe and I had the sense that the owner was staring at me, as though I was a pederast.

  Jack said, “You don’t have to go all the way back with me.”

  Was he embarrassed or ashamed of me? I didn’t know for sure, but I guessed he was. We passed a shop window selling clerical vestments and in the reflection I saw Jack dressed like a mortician and myself in the drizzly monochrome of London dressed like a cowboy, with wild hair. No wonder Jack felt conspicuous.

  I walked with him to the large stone archway, which was a side entrance to the school, and Jack hesitated. He didn’t want me to go any farther.

  I said, “After you’ve finished these exams you’ll be through with school. We’ll go to the States and have fun. You can take driving lessons.”

  He looked up excitedly for the first time that afternoon and said, “I can hardly wait. I really want my license. Will you let me drive your car?”

  “You can have my car, Jack,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve got two of them.”

  Then I saw him behind the wheel, driving away and vanishing on an American road.

  He looked energized, still pale and tired but with spirit in his eyes, the vitality inspired by wanting something, even if it was years away. His wet hair was plastered against his head.

  “Thanks for the tea, Dad,” he said. “It’s really good seeing you.” He was smiling—thinking of driving a car.

  I could not restrain myself from taking him in my arms. I hugged him—he was so thin. He stiffened slightly in surprise but he allowed me to hold him. Then I kissed his cheek, and in the way he returned the kiss I sensed the affection that I had not heard in his voice. He was like me and so he had a horror of revealing it.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been traveling so much.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said. “As long as you come back.”

  He picked up his briefcase and passed his fingers through his wet hair.

  “But when you were away Mum was depressed and quite upset,” he said.

  “I think I know why.”

  “Please don’t tell me,” he said, and I knew he feared having to bear the burden of knowing that story. It was a burden enough to be my son—to try to please me without being overwhelmed by me, without being a lackey. “Dad, I really have to go.”

  He was suddenly self-conscious and urgent again. He said “ ’Bye” and broke away from me. Would he ever know how much power he had over me—how in my love for him I needed his encouragement and approval, perhaps more than he needed mine? I watched him until he got to the end of the walkway and had grown small, like a figure out of my past. It was still raining. I put on my old hat and went to my bicycle.

  7.

  “Does it seem strange, going to India with another person?” Jenny asked in the taxi on the way to the airport.

  I said truthfully no.

  “I know how you prefer to travel alone,” she said.

  I said nothing. I smiled at her. I was grateful to her for coming. I took her hand but she was too nervous to be conscious of the gesture. Her hand went dead when I touched it and she did not notice what I had done until I let it drop. She was agitated at the prospect of a ten-hour flight, worried that she might not have brought the right clothes, fretful that she had left inadequate instructions for her replacement at work.

  “Imagine. India. So soon,” she said. “I’m going to be a little out of my element.”

  “We’ll have a good time,” I said. “All I have to do is get enough for my article and then we can enjoy ourselves. Our only problem will be the heat. This month and next are the two hottest in In
dia.”

  “I don’t care. It’s been a horrid spring in London. I don’t mind missing Wimbledon, And it’s a good thing you didn’t insist that I go with you last month.” She was half talking to herself, fussing, murmuring, smoothing her skirt. “That would have been out of the question. Budget Day. The Chancellor had a few surprises for us, I can tell you.”

  Jenny was an accountant with a large firm in the City, having left the bank which had been her first job. Her work was as remote from mine as it could possibly have been. Its remoteness and its obscurity perhaps made it bearable for me. I had very little idea what she did. It wasn’t tax. She analyzed corporate expenditure. I sometimes saw the results—her name on reports. And she saw mine on books. But she had never seen me write one, no one had, no one—not even another writer—knew how a particular book was written. It had nothing to do with fluency. It was a clumsy, messy, and mysterious process that was done in the dark.

  Jenny did not have the severe look of an accountant. You might have taken her in her casualness for an art teacher or magazine editor. She was browny blonde. She dyed her hair so regularly with Born Blonde that I did not know what her natural color was now. Perhaps underneath it all she was going gray. She had greeny-blue eyes, and sometimes wore thick glasses and sometimes contact lenses. I hated knowing how a woman achieved an effect of stylishness or beauty; I did not want to hear about wires or makeup. I wanted to see the final result.

  She seldom dressed fashionably, but she had conviction which was possibly a greater asset. Her clothes were large and loose, and she always looked comfortable. I had first been attracted to her by her looks, and she had not lost her beauty.

  There was something in the way she sat, and in her loose clothes and big bag, that suggested she needed space—elbow room. She seldom held my hand, she recoiled slightly when I hugged her. If I touched her or took her arm she always smiled, and then her arm seemed to go dead. I often spoke to her and saw her smile; but she was not listening to me—she was smiling at something in her mind. She had a powerful memory and she sometimes lived in it, outside my reach. She reminded me of Jack in her seriousness. She was logical and at times very quiet, and those times I imagined her heart fluttering and her breathing very steady and that she was unaware of what was happening around her. She was intensely alert but not particularly watchful. She walked fast and had no sense of direction. She was defeated by the simplest mechanical object and always had trouble with so-called childproof caps on aspirin bottles. She laughed at the thought that she might have to apologize for her eccentricities. “That’s the way I am,” she said. She did not find fault with anyone who was different. Her own oddness had made her tolerant. But she could be very impatient.

  This compassion in her, this logic and intelligence I relied on and needed. She had English good sense and English modesty, and was without the English envy. I was deficient in all her strongest qualities, and I knew it. Because of that she had become a part of me. Was there anything in me that she valued? I think she was fascinated by my various weaknesses and my self-assurance. She had told me that she wondered: How could someone like Andre, so incomplete, be so bold? She had once thought it was because I was an American. But no, it was because I was a writer. That conundrum had made me a writer.

  She knew me well and could be very quiet beside me, or else could read my mind. We had been married nearly sixteen years. She hated the word “wife.”

  In the Transit Lounge of Terminal Three at Heathrow I said, “The plane’s not boarding yet. Let’s look at the Duty-Free Shop. I want you to buy something for yourself. Will you do that?”

  “Of course, if you insist. I think I’ll buy a diamond wristwatch.”

  I stood by with my credit card but all she bought was a liter bottle of whiskey.

  She said, “Someone in the office had one of those fake Rolex watches. She bought it in Singapore for about twenty quid. It was actually quite nice—so nice, in fact, that it put me off the idea of ever buying a real one.” She clasped the bottle. “This is all I need. I’ve heard you can’t get the stuff in India.”

  She held my hand as the plane taxied to the runway, and she squeezed it tightly until the plane took off. But just as we passed over Windsor Castle she let go. When I put my arm around her she said, “Please don’t, Andy. I’m so hot. Oh, God, are you offended?”

  Night came on quickly because we were flying east. We ate, we slept, we were woken for breakfast; and we landed in hot early morning, in blinding light. It was much steamier than on my previous visit, and because I was mentally comparing it I found it harder to bear than Jenny. I had not expected it, but she had been ready for anything.

  The heat made me bad-tempered. When the taxi driver told us that his meter was broken I laughed sarcastically. I said, “Anyway, I know the fare is a hundred and twenty rupees.”

  “One fifty, sah,” he said. He was unshaven and thin, and another grubby man sat with him in the front seat of the jalopy.

  I tried to insist.

  “Don’t make a fuss,” Jenny said. “You’re always trying to get a bargain. You should be ashamed of yourself, haggling with this poor man.”

  After we checked into the hotel and were shown to our room, Jenny stood at the window and said softly, “It’s a moral dilemma, isn’t it—the luxury hotel in the poor hungry country?” She turned to me and laughed in a helpless and self-mocking way. “It’s wickedness.”

  “So what should we do about it?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m going for a swim,” she said, and she pulled off her T-shirt.

  I said it was too hot to swim and that it seemed almost perverse for people to sunbathe in a tropical country.

  “You used to criticize me for swimming in Uganda.”

  “Yes, at the swimming pool, with all the Africans hanging on the fence.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” she said. She changed into her bathing suit quickly and efficiently, hardly conscious of her nakedness, as though she were alone. She was healthy and had a good figure—in fact, she was beautiful, with a youthful bloom still on her clear skin. But she was frowning at herself in the mirror. She said, “I’ve just been through a beastly English winter and some sun is just what I need. You can sit here and sulk and feel virtuous.”

  While she was swimming I called Indoo at his agency. He said that we must meet—that he had some plans for me.

  “I’m here with my wife,” I said. “That woman you met—Eden—was not my wife. You understand?”

  “Don’t worry, old boy,” Indoo said.

  Later that day I took Jenny to the Red Fort. I showed her the Moti Mahal, the Throne Room; we walked on the battlements. I said, “That’s the Hathi Pol—the elephant gate.”

  “This is fun,” Jenny said. She wore a straw hat she had bought at a stall, and a blue dress and sandals. “I can’t believe I’m really in India. If it weren’t for the smells and all these ragged people I would find it hard to believe. It’s splendor and misery together, isn’t it?”

  An Indian man was following us. He had a stack of postcards which he showed us and then held in Jenny’s face, obstructing her.

  “I don’t want any postcards, thank you,” she said.

  But the mere fact that she had spoken to him was taken by the man to be a sign of encouragement and he began grunting and whining and shuffling the cards.

  Jenny ignored him and tried to walk on.

  “Muddhoom, muddhoom—”

  “No,” Jenny said, and smiled stiffly at him. But he made the mistake of trying to put a postcard into her hand, insisting that she buy it, and she snapped, “Pack it in!”

  This made some children playing nearby turn to us and laugh. Jenny’s expression softened.

  She said, “Do you remember when Jack was that age?”

  She became serene with reflection, and she seemed impervious to the heat. The temperature was in the nineties and the afternoon sun was cruelly slanted, striking from just above the rooftops into our eye
s.

  “So sweet,” she said as the children continued to laugh in a hiccupping way. “We’re not too old to have another child, you know.” She was still smiling. “And they can be such a damned nuisance, too.”

  We moved on, to the alleys of the fort that had been converted into a bazaar. I kept stopping at the stalls and looking at the brassware, the antique jewelry, the carvings, the leather goods and woven bags.

  “You and your knickknacks,” Jenny said, laughing impatiently. “You can buy that stuff in London, you know.” She went ahead. “I’m going to look at the marble screens.”

  “Aren’t you tired of sightseeing?”

  “Not yet. I want to finish looking at this place. I don’t want to have to come back here tomorrow. That’s for somewhere else—the mosque, I think.”

  Another postcard seller approached her and began gabbling.

  Jenny stared at him and in a level voice she said, “Bugger off.”

  The next day we met Indoo at the bar of the hotel. He looked rather stunned, and I wondered whether he was drunk, but then I realized he was just being respectful, because of Jenny. He did not remark on her beauty—it was regarded as unseemly to speak that way of a man’s wife. I wasn’t flattered—I was annoyed that he had taken a liberty in gushing about Eden on my last trip.

  “Perhaps you would enjoy meeting my wife,” Indoo said. He spoke to Jenny in the solicitous tone that he might have used for an invalid.

  “I’d love to,” Jenny said. “Only we don’t have a lot of time.”

  “She would show you all the shops in Delhi,” he said. “The best-quality ones. You could indulge yourselves in shopping sprees.”

  “I’m afraid that’s not my line,” Jenny said, smiling pleasantly.

  Indoo—his idea rejected—became even more formal. He said, “I understand perfectly” in a way that suggested he did not understand at all.

  To lighten the mood I said, “Indoo doesn’t really approve of material things. He probably agrees that shopping is a sinful waste of time.”

  This made him smile. “True,” he said. “But India needs hard currency. So I make an exception.”