by Paul Theroux
At nine-thirty – the bell shook him badly – the telephone rang. It was Araba Nightwing, breathless, drawling with apology in her deep attractive voice.
‘I’m at the theatre, Mr Gawber,’ she said. ‘It’s the interval, so this will have to be short, I’m afraid. I’m so glad I finally reached you. I’ve been thinking about you the whole day – well, ever since you rang –’
‘I understand,’ he said. ‘It’s quite all right.’ In the background he heard the thump of seats, the babble of the audience, shouts.
‘No, it’s not –’
He winced and held the receiver away from his ear.
‘– it’s unforgivable. I don’t know what got into me. It’s just this frightful business – all these rehearsals – and I’ve got so much on my mind these days. I’ve just been to the Continent – Rotterdam, nothing special. But I was rude to you.’
‘No harm done.’
‘I’m an absolute bloody bitch.’
He winced again: who was listening? ‘Miss Nightwing –’
‘You’re too kind to say it, but it’s true. I wouldn’t hurt you for the world. How can you be so kind to a bitch like me?’
‘I find it very easy.’
‘Because you’re so good! I don’t deserve it. But this play is such rubbish I can’t help myself. People say it’s destroying me. I can’t help that, and I was a bitch before it opened, as you know. Last year it was the same thing, that business with the fascist bank.’
‘Swiss bank, but that’s best forgotten.’
‘I tried to ring you before the show. Your wife said you weren’t there.’
‘No – I –’ Was she asking for an explanation? ‘I was held up. Rather a long story.’
‘It’s the story of my life. Mr Gawber, I want you to know that I’m very sorry. I don’t want you to get involved in this in any way.’
Involved in what? He said, ‘It’s just the small matter of your tax return. You’ve had a good year. An excellent year. Unfortunately.’
‘Oh, God!’
‘We’ll have a chat. It’ll sort itself out. You’ll see.’
‘But I don’t have the slightest intention – there goes the first bell. I must fly. My face –’
‘Don’t make yourself late, my dear.’
‘The reason I rang is that I have some tickets for you and your wife. They’re good seats, but the play’s pretty dreadful, utter crap really, a McGravy sit-com, Tea for Three. Naturally it’s a smash-hit, it’s always full – Americans and the coach-crowd. But it’s a night out and you could come backstage and meet Blanche and Dick. They’re awfully sweet.’
‘Are you sure it’s no trouble?’
‘I think that was another bell. No, no trouble at all. The tickets are for next month, the nineteenth – I hope that’s all right. I’d love to meet your wife. I just wish this play was better.’
‘We’ll be delighted –’
‘Tickets at the box office. Don’t pay attention to what I say. I don’t care if they expel me – I hate myself. You’re the kindest man I’ve ever met. Another bell! Bye!’
Norah watched him put the receiver into its cradle. He sighed and reported what the actress had said.
‘But that’s splendid,’ Norah said. ‘Tea for Three’s had wonderful notices.’
Glamour: he was glad. The day had been saved for her. He so seldom knew how to please her. She would have her hair done and meet him in town. An early dinner at Wheeler’s: Norah would have the prawn cocktail and he would have whitebait, and somehow Norah would find an occasion to say, ‘The lemon sole looks good.’ At the play she would eat half a pound of chocolates. She would remark on the scenery – she loved plays for that. Stage-sets dazzled her, and though she could never recall the title of a play, much less a line, she could describe in tedious detail the sets she’d seen before the war at the Lewisham Hippodrome in Catford, now torn down. There was nothing she liked more than to see the curtains go up and reveal on the stage a great frigate’s butt, fully rigged, with sails. Shakespeare was not always a good bet, but she remembered the fantastic trapezes in one play and the cushions when Araba had played Cleopatra; and still she mentioned the pyramids and the golden disc of sun in that play about the Incas. Tea for Three did not sound promising – perhaps a parlour – but Mr Gawber was hopeful. In any case, Norah would come away praising the bookshelves, the crockery, the wallpaper.
He would hate the play for its fakery, unless a door stuck, or some sudden accident intervened to give the play a brief jolt of reality. He always enjoyed seeing heavy men in blue boiler suits striding on stage between scenes to rearrange the furniture; those thumps and grunts; or simply an unexplained crash behind a closed curtain. Otherwise he would find it a mediocre puppet show – why didn’t they use puppets? – and he would sleep without changing position, the way he did on the train. Play dialogue and the presence of actors and even the heat and light of a theatre – the great mob ignoring itself – embarrassed him. It was like filing into church, but the wrong one.
That night in bed, he still heard voices in the road and the feet of people passing below. He wanted the limpers on their beam-ends. He had started the day happy, in that fog, and then the day had heated and turned strange for him, disturbing him to his very bones. He had tried to give it order, but failed: there were too many contending voices. So it closed in a babble, the people darting at his eyes – no wonder they called them gorillas. That was the whole of his life, a kind of concealment, guarding against alarm. And it was odd because it was all caution, so secretive, just the two of them hiding in their enormous shadowy house: it was the way he imagined conspirators to live.
5
‘The kids were asleep,’ Mayo hissed. ‘I had to climb the back fence and break the door to get in.’
Hood laughed, but darkly: she had given him a fright. He had entered by the back and seen the great crack in the door and the smashed tongue of the lock. Then in the kitchen he had seen a small man in an old pin-striped jacket, a tweed cap and gloves. He was on the point of kicking him in the ankles when the man turned: Mayo in her burglar’s get-up, and she said, ‘Where the hell have you been?’
Now she said, ‘Murf can fix it. I’ll buy a new door.’
They were still in the kitchen: her gloves and jacket were on the chair. She slipped her cap off and shook out her hair. Hood pulled the broken door shut and said, ‘I thought you were supposed to be good at that sort of thing.’
‘I got in, didn’t I?’
‘Don’t take house-breaking literally, sweetheart. You nearly tore it off its hinges! What a burglar. It’s lucky you don’t depend on it for your living. You’d starve.’
‘Don’t race your motor.’ He stared almost bewildered at the painting that had lain stiffly rolled on the kitchen table when he came in. It was Flemish, and though it had been pictured in most of the newspapers in the past week, the real thing had none of the clarity of the little black and white reproductions. It was smaller than he had expected; it had a coarseness of texture; it yielded to no pattern. The reflection of the over-bright kitchen light crazed its roughened surface with glare, giving it the opacity and flaky shine of a piece of old leather. It was creased and scratched; it wouldn’t lie flat. Hood looked for a long time at the dark varnish before he recognized under the layers of that leathery yellow the face, the hat, the arms, the long boots. It was not large, and yet he had to study it in parts, losing the order of its composition as his eye moved in ellipses from section to section. At first he saw only rough shapes, like separated jigsaw pieces, and it was not until he set it at an angle to the light – spread it on the floor and stood on a chair above it – that he grasped the whole of it: the figure in the chalk-white collar and sombre hat posed peevishly by the window; the summer landscape outside that was dead still, and the carved posts of the interior furniture. It was dark, nearly all shadow, almost crudely done in melting solids, and it had the rank smell of a dusty attic. Artists painted not moods but co
nditions in their self-portraits, and this one by Rogier van der Weyden showed the sullen impatience of an unwilling exile.
‘So this is what all the fuss is about,’ said Hood hopping from the chair. ‘It’s not as good as The Just Judges.’
Mayo said, ‘It’s a good painting, Val.’
‘Quit leering at it.’ He looked at it again, but now it had become again a dense curtain of cracks. He saw a curious unlit antique, smeared with yellow glaze. He said, ‘It’s as ugly as money.’
‘It got them screaming.’
‘Screaming for money – the ones who have it. Collectors and art-dealers. The rest don’t give a damn, and they’re the ones who matter. I think we should burn this turkey right now.’
‘You wouldn’t dare.’ Mayo was controlling her voice but could not conceal the tremble of anger in it.
Hood knelt and clicked his lighter. It spurted: a jet of flame shot to one corner, sparking at the fibres on the edge.
‘Stop that.’ Mayo stepped on his hand. She was still wearing her men’s shoes. She pressed the thick sole down, tangling the lighter in his fingers, then freeing it. But there was no mark on the painting, just the greasy smell of singed cloth in a thread of smoke. ‘You’re a barbarian.’
‘That’s what they say about you.’
‘Let them.’
‘But they’re wrong, because if you were you wouldn’t think it was such a big deal to score an old master. You wouldn’t have set that stately home on fire. Anyway, why didn’t you leave a bomb behind?’
‘I think I know how to deal with them.’
‘I think I know why,’ he said. ‘You’re a barbarian with taste.’
‘Stop getting at me,’ said Mayo. Angry, she lost her slight Irish accent; her voice rose to a higher register of annoyance, gained precision and assumed a smart pitch of indignation that was haughty. ‘Besides, you’re missing the point.’
‘Lay it on me.’
‘It’s a symbol, you idiot.’
‘Now there’s a word that’s really hot shit. Where’d you pick that up?’
‘Stop playing dumb. You know what I mean.’
‘Sure I do. But symbols are a bad substitute for reality – they’re always the wrong size. Go the whole way or don’t go at all. Set the bastards on fire, don’t pick their pockets.’ Hood spat into the sink. ‘Jesus, I’d like to meet the guy that sent Brodie to Euston. A railway station? You must be joking. Who was it?’
‘You’ll find out,’ she said, growing calm at his sudden anger. ‘All in good time.’
‘I’d like to have a word with him. I’m not getting anywhere with Brodie. She sits around staring at her cartoon posters and watching television. She worries about her complexion. And what did she do? Blew a hole in a locker. Now they’ve roped off the lockers and closed the Left Luggage window. You give them a symbol and they give one back to you.’
‘All you can do is mock,’ she said. ‘Well, go ahead – no one’s hunting you.’
‘Not yet, but listen, honey, I think you underestimate yourself. You’ve got your painting and you’re tickled to death. So we’ll hang it up. Very expensive, right? The art world is horrified. But I’ve got news for you – we’re not declaring war on the art dealers and you won’t get anywhere with symbols.’
‘That’s what you say.’
‘It won’t work. You don’t want to win, you just want a few famous enemies.’
‘And what do you want?’
‘I want scalps,’ he said. ‘I’ll get them. You can’t lose if you make all the rules.’
Mayo swore and stooped to roll up the painting. Hood looked at her back and for a moment felt sorry for her. It was a small job but she had done it well; she had taken it seriously. But she hadn’t seen beyond the theft, to the time when that pretty painting would only be a burden.
‘Be serious, May,’ he said. ‘Would you get into the sack with a phallic symbol?’
‘I go to bed with you, don’t I?’ she said lightly, regaining her Irishness and tucking the last few inches of the painting into the roll.
He had met Mayo at Ward’s in Piccadilly in the late spring soon after he arrived. She was drunk; she told him, a perfect stranger, of her plan to steal the painting; and that carelessness worried him: who else would she tell? He spent the night with her and at last moved in and tutored her in caution. They agreed to work together and afterwards – long after he made love to her, since they isolated themselves and hid from each other in sex – he came to know her. She was a short brisk woman in her mid-thirties, habituated to gestures of tidying, as if attempting to sort the clutter in the house and match the order in her mind. But she was the only neat one in the place, and it made her preoccupation hopeless. She was slim, but the men’s work clothes she wore, the blue bib-overalls, the loose denim shirt with baggy sleeves, made her seem stocky, and she tramped clumsily in her heavy shoes. Her hands were small and beautiful, her face plain but unmarked. The clothes made her seem convincingly a man until she turned and showed her face. Then she seemed wrong for the clothes, and the posture – the up-turned collar, the masculine stress in her voice – only exaggerated the prettiness of her mouth. There was something else: the workclothes were clean and the shirt still bore the vertical creases from the box. And yet, in her mask and gloves she had succeeded; her description had been repeated in all the papers with the photograph of the Rogier self-portrait – they were looking for a person, probably armed, with a slight build, a black jacket and the trace of an Irish accent: a man.
Mayo put the painting on the table. She said, ‘Are they still asleep?’
‘Apparently.’
‘How do they do it?’
‘They don’t do anything else,’ said Hood. ‘They fight, make love, then fall asleep. When they wake up they start fighting.’ It was true: the quarrelling of Brodie and Murf invariably turned into love-making. He had seen it enough times to know when to avoid them. They didn’t take off their clothes; they wrestled themselves into an embrace and fumbled until their threats became sighs. It was sexual struggle made out of the most childish assault, and in the same fighting postures they slept, with their faces close.
‘Are you giving them coke?’
‘It’s not coke – it’s low-grade opium. And I’m not giving it to them, they’re taking it.’
‘I wish they’d take a little interest in the movement. And I can tell you one thing – the Provos don’t allow their people to take drugs. It’s an offence.’
‘I should have known. All that clean living,’ said Hood. ‘It shows.’
Mayo waited, then said impatiently, ‘Sometimes I can’t stand you. You wonder why I don’t tell you anything. Listen to yourself. You’re always asking about the Provos, but if I told you about it you’d only laugh.’
Hood said, ‘Just tell me what you do in Kilburn.’
‘That’s my business,’ she said. ‘I’m going to make myself some scrambled eggs. I’m hungry.’ She slid the frying pan onto the stove and started the burner. She said, ‘Hard drugs. You’ll turn her into an addict. And she’s –what? Sixteen? Jesus.’
‘She’s already been in the slammer – you said so yourself.’
‘So what? She’s a child.’
‘Tell that to the Provos.’
Mayo went into the larder saying, ‘Has she told you about her family?’ There was a clatter, a thud; Mayo came out cursing, carrying a box of eggs.
‘I’ve heard all about it.’
‘Terrifying,’ said Mayo.
‘It didn’t sound so bad to me,’ said Hood. ‘I must have disappointed her.’
‘I suppose you laughed.’
‘Not very loud.’
‘You should spend more time with her.’
‘The anxious parent,’ said Hood. ‘She’s a screamer and he’s a latent tip-toe. I try to treat them as equals – it’s quite a challenge.’
At Ward’s in June, where Mayo had introduced Brodie to Hood, the young girl was refused a drink.
But she had taken it as a great joke and in the Ulster and Munster Room, while Mayo and Hood were drinking, had said, ‘I’m under-age!’ She had started to roll a joint and Hood showed her how to do it with one hand. Mayo said, ‘She’s on the run,’ and Brodie, with the tobacco in her hand, had watched Mayo say this; she smiled as if she had been complimented on her clothes. They treated her with excessive kindliness, as if they had just adopted her. Hood remembered how they had driven back to Deptford in the ice-cream van, how he had said, ‘So you’re the Euston bomber.’ She had looked at Mayo and giggled. Then she had asked Hood to stop at a corner shop. She had gone in and bought a bag of toffees, which she poked into her mouth for the rest of the drive. Hood said, ‘She looks scared to death.’ Murf had come later, with his satchel of powder and his case of clocks. The dark curtains went up on the front windows in the house on Albacore Crescent. Hood had trusted Mayo, but from the moment he set eyes on Brodie and Murf he felt insecure with this fragile family. He knew he could not rely on them: they were too reckless to be trusted, they took no precautions. They had no experience, so they had no belief; but still he felt protective towards them.
He had asked Brodie what it had been like to plant a bomb. She said, ‘It was in this carrier bag. I shoved it in one of them lockers. Is that what you mean?’ He pressed her for a motive. She was imprecise, uncomprehending. Yet she could be specific when she talked about herself. ‘Mayo saved me,’ she said. ‘I was a mess.’ He enquired further. She said, ‘Anorexia.’ Her smile appalled him more than the word.
The frying pan smoked with overheated fat. Mayo seemed not to notice it. She cracked the eggs on the side of the bowl, but they broke and dripped in her hand. Hood said, ‘Let me do that. You’re making a hash of it.’
‘Get away,’ said Mayo. She moved aside, spinning the bowl to the floor. ‘Now look what you made me do.’
She knelt quickly to pick up the fragments of yolk-smeared glass, and Hood helped, tossing them into the waste-basket. Then he saw Brodie’s bare feet, her thin ankles. She was at the door to the hall, squinting in the light, yawning lazily like a child whose sleep has been disturbed.