by Paul Theroux
‘Hoo!’ Murf leaped to the door, laughing crazily. He unlocked it and kicked it open. They were crossing Hungerford Bridge – the trestles banged, making the iron spans ring; below, the river was molten with sunlight.
The woman seized her shopping basket.
‘Piss off!’ said Murf and pointed to the open door.
The woman screamed and rocked back in her seat, and she stayed in this position, almost on her back – her feet raised – until they drew into Charing Cross.
‘I’m going to report you,’ the woman said on the platform.
Murf lifted two fingers at her, and they hurried past her, laughing.
In the Strand, Brodie said, ‘How much money have we got?’
‘Sixty p.’
‘I know where we can double it. Come on.’
They crossed the Strand and scuffed into the Crystal Room, an amusement arcade, making for the one-armed bandits. Side by side, they fed pennies into the machines, yanking the handles, watching the fruit spin. Near them, pin-tables coughed and came alight.
Murf said, ‘Cherries!’
There was a clatter, three pence rattled into the metal dish; Murf clawed it out and moved to a new machine, while Brodie continued to tug on hers. At the end of several minutes they counted their coins.
‘Rubbish,’ said Brodie. ‘Twenty-eight p.’
They went over to a machine with shifting trays and slides that nudged clusters of pennies into a chute. They fed nine in and won two very black ones. They lost five pence trying to raise a cigarette lighter with a metal claw. Then they went back to the one-armed bandits and lost all but seven pence.
‘Not a sausage,’ said Murf.
‘It’s fixed.’
‘I know where we can double it, she says. Bugger it,’ said Murf. He went to a tall machine with a rifle on a revolving stand. He put in his coin and began firing – tunk, tunk: bells rang, the scoring wheel spun, the lights flashed and boys playing machines nearby wandered over to see what the commotion was.
‘Look at the cowboy,’ said an old man, holding a ragged parcel in his arms.
‘Dead easy,’ said Murf, and picked off the last object, a wheeling tin bird with a light bulb on its wing.
The old man said, ‘You got a free game coming to you.’
‘It’s all yours, dad,’ said Murf.
‘Rather have the shilling.’
They weighed themselves with the last two pence – ‘We’re skint,’ said Murf, posting the coin – and set off, along the Strand to Trafalgar Square.
At the base of Nelson’s column Murf craned his neck for a look at the standing figure on top. He squinted as if solving a problem, then said, ‘I reckon you could do it. You could blow up this bitch beautyful if you legged it right.’
They wandered around the square, tiny in the basin of dark stone, the looming masonry. The buses circled, and on one of them, Mr Gawber looked down. He saw flocks of filthy pigeons, and people who looked like pigeons; he liked the size, the proportions of the square, and saw the people penned, sunning themselves, scaring the pigeons. It was the people who needed a scare: their idleness made this noble place a dago plaza. Two grubby ones were palavering under Napier. The panic would make them see, the crash would teach them. His bus turned into St Martin’s Place; he whispered his memo; ‘Lunch. Picture insurance. Arrow.’
Murf and Brodie speculated on the square. Murf said he could bring down the Admiralty Arch by blasting away the central supports with plastic explosive – ‘then nip on a Number One bus.’ Two well-placed charges were all that were needed to launch the colonnaded porch of the National Gallery across the square. Brodie, still giddy from the cigarette, saw the steeple of St Martin’s church toppling as Murf described how he’d bomb the pillars. Or an underground charge, a parcel of nitro in the tube station might do the trick, cause an earthquake in the Bakerloo cellar that would send the whole of South Africa House sprawling: they saw it leap in all directions, airborne columns, chunks of marble, glass splinters, all this hugeness in whirling motion. They saw it rising, in smithereens, but nothing more – not the levelling, the smoke: they could not peer beyond the explosion to the flat acres of still rubble and all the dead.
Up Cockspur Street to Pall Mall they swung along, elated, envisioning bursting buildings. They stopped before the Athenaeum, where dark-suited men were going into lunch. Murf said, ‘Wouldn’t that go beautyful, all them posts crashing –’
Brodie’s eyes drummed the wobbling pillars outward, drew the flaming rooms into the sky with cart-wheeling men and spinning hats, and the great gold statue pitching forward, dissolving to a sprinkle of dust, and all the paving stones in Waterloo Place flying.
‘London’s great.’
‘Fantastic.’
It was the only way they could possess the city, by reducing it to shattered pieces. Exploded, in motion, it was theirs. The grandest buildings held them, because in that grandeur, in all the complication ornateness required, were secret corners for bombs. Nothing that could not be raised with a tremendous noise had any interest for them: they celebrated this part of London. They walked up to Piccadilly Circus, sharing another cigarette; then over to the Eros statue where they squatted among the youths with rucksacks and street guides who were roosting and stretching their necks like heavy birds.
‘I got it,’ said Murf. ‘There must be fifty or a hundred heads here. Let’s sell some of that pot. We could get a fiver at least.’
‘No.’ Brodie watched the circus spin, a cascade of lanterns and lighted tubes: the Magic Roundabout – it was here, among the freaks, the centre of London, her life, the world. She felt a kinship with everyone who chose to sit here by the statue.
‘Look, we don’t have any money.’
‘I don’t want any. I hate the shit.’ Brodie turned her pale querying face on the others who sat on the steps. They were perfect to her. She saw a girl with a tattoo: a sister.
‘You can walk back to Deptford,’ said Murf. Brodie yawned. He said, ‘Come on, let’s hustle some cash.’
‘I’d rather hang out,’ said Brodie.
‘Boom widdy-widdy.’
They sat, not speaking, for ten minutes.
Murf said, ‘I’m sick of hanging out.’
‘You’re a real pain.’
‘Me arse hurts. And what about the letter?’
‘I’ve got the stupid thing.’
‘I wish we had some money.’
‘Money, money,’ said Brodie. ‘I can get money – anytime I want.’
Murf grunted.
‘You don’t believe me?’
‘Yeah, every day.’ He grunted again. ‘I hate this poxy place.’
‘Follow me.’
They walked to Berkeley Square where, at the corner of Bru-ton Street, they paused to gape at the Rolls Royce showroom. A man was driving a Rolls into the square, a salesman in the street mimicking a traffic policeman, stopping the flow of cars so that the driver could negotiate his way off the pavement. Murf had been fretful since leaving Piccadilly, sucking his teeth at the expensive shops and complaining about Hood for only giving them a pound, cursing the machines at the Crystal Room for swallowing the last of their money. When he saw the cobalt blue Rolls and the plump face at the wheel he began to pant. The salesman stuck out his hand, demanding room for the bulky boat-like car.
‘Bastard!’ screamed Murf, holding his fists up to his ears. He was twitching with rage, and hopping, as if he was a small instrument of nerve strung on bone. He wanted to slash the tyres, burn the car, rip the man. He saw money lumbering slowly past his mouth, taunting him. ‘I’d like to brick that fucker,’ he said, but only Brodie heard him. He screamed again at a higher pitch, ‘Bastard!’
‘You crack me up,’ said Brodie. Murf was still trembling as they walked to the lower end of the square. Brodie tore the letter open and dropped the smaller envelope into the pillar box in front of the bank, then led Murf across the square.
A young man in a fawn-coloured sui
t and two pretty girls reclined on the grass sharing a bottle of champagne and food from a small basket.
Murf approached the picnicking group. He stiffened: ‘Bastards!’
The man got to his feet and turned his champagne glass slowly by its stem, eyeing Murf. The girls stopped eating. Murf stared at them, then pushed at his ears.
Brodie took his hand. ‘What are you doing?’
‘I’m going to flash it.’ He fumbled with his buckle.
Brodie giggled. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, and pulled him away.
They walked up the west side of the square and along Hill Street. Murf said, ‘If I ever see that fucker in Deptford I’ll brick him.’
‘It’s around here somewhere,’ said Brodie. She repeated the house numbers, then stopped. ‘There.’
‘What’s this supposed to be?’
‘Money. I know the old girl who lives here.’
‘You been here before?’
‘Lots of times,’ said Brodie. ‘Come on.’
‘I ain’t going in,’ said Murf quickly. He looked anxious and there was a note of appeal in his voice.
‘Why not?’ Brodie went up the steps and pointed her finger at the bell.
‘No,’ said Murf. ‘Don’t.’
‘Look at him!’
Murf’s face registered surprise and fear as Brodie darted her finger against the bell; and he quailed as he heard its distant purr in the enormous house.
8
‘Fuck it,’ said Lady Arrow, hearing the bell go and banging her fist so hard on the desk-top a silver snuff-box the shape of a beetle jumped open and spilled some of its fine dark powder over her papers, the pages of a financial statement. She pushed her work aside and stood up, still cursing. But her diction shaved obscenity from the words; she enunciated them overprecisely and with the wrong stress, as if speaking a foreign language from a phrase book.
She was a grey large-boned woman and had a long lined face, a look of coarsened hauteur with highlights of fatigue. Her hair was drawn back tightly across her skull and fixed behind with a ribbon of ragged velvet. She was not pretty, she made no attempt to appear so, she had a disregard even for neatness, she was not clean; she was very tall. The height that in another woman would be an embarrassment, causing an awkward stoop, Lady Arrow gave its full length which was well over six feet; and she could accentuate it by holding her head up and slightly back, giving herself another inch. She would appear clumsy, but her clumsiness intimidated: she was an insulting size.
She wore a roughly-woven smock, open at the throat and bound at the waist by an expensive piece of silk rope; a pair of crushed slippers, a man’s watch. Although her hands were large her fingernails, which were bitten to the quick, gave her fingers the blunt stubby look of garden tools; those of her right hand were smudged with inkstains, those of her left with traces of snuff, the same shade that darkened her nostrils and now her financial statement. These hands were active, limbering and foraging, making repeated clutchings. She allowed them this movement and she seemed at times, as she watched them closing on her lap, like a strangler practising alone in a room.
Lady Arrow was a collector. It was from her mother, an early campaigner for women’s rights – there was a statue of her, flourishing a bronze banner, in a London park – that she got her height and interest, as a girl, in social justice. Her father, a Labour member of Parliament, had been an amateur art historian – some of his collection was still in the house, as he had left it, now dusty and much neglected; the rest was in museums on permanent loan. She had inherited his taste for acquisition but not his eye. Though she dramatized it by exaggerating her early unhappiness, it had been a close family, a secure and humane upbringing; and yet the family traits, combined in Lady Arrow, formed something new. The result was a greed for possession, not of objects but of people. She had always believed that she was carrying on a family tradition; she was a proprietress of fame. Her money mattered: the assurance of her wealth blinded her to difference and allowed her a vulgarity that was beyond affectation. It also made her unassailable. She said the opposite. She spoke of the difficulty of being rich, the impossibility of anyone understanding her except the very poor, with whom she felt a special kinship.
It was a unique arrogance of emotion, the sentimental belief that both great wealth and the distress of poverty granted a simplicity of feeling. To be rich or poor from birth was to know a kind of bravery, and Lady Arrow insisted that rich and poor alike enjoyed a common scepticism; neither experienced true shock or the deception of awe; they were hidden, immovable and did most to turn the world. Lady Arrow’s belief was a wish mingled with envy: in a restaurant she would see waiters hurrying to the kitchen laughing, whispering, perhaps mocking, and she would want to leave her table of chinless companions and join those waiters. She envied them their confident humour, and she could share it – she frequently did at her own lunch parties on Hill Street – because they shared an enemy. The middle-class threatened both – selfish, predatory, unprincipled, artless, exposed and lacking any warmth; drooling and cowardly in the most wolfish way. They were the mob – the accountants in Lewisham, the parvenus in Barnes, the trend-spotters in Islington, the predictable Guardian readers in their Basingstoke bungalows; she feared the children most, their enamelled souls, all their hunger and outrage.
The poor could not be outraged, nor could the rich be moved. Her mother had described to her the first night of Pygmalion (Shaw had been to Hill Street, the play was a great favourite in the family), when, at Liza’s sharp reply ‘Not bloody likely’ the whole theatre had suddenly broken into applause – it was joy, relief, a cheer for vitality. Lady Arrow herself, on the radio programme Any Questions?, had used the word ‘fuck’, pronouncing it in her usual way, as if she was conjugating a German verb. She was the first to do so, and there was a hush, but there was no applause. She was not asked back to the show, and later another man, a mediocre drama critic, claimed credit for first saying the word. The BBC, dominated by the wolfish middle-classes, had demanded an apology. Lady Arrow refused and only hoped that she had wounded them or terrorized them in some practical way.
She would not be ordered by them, or anyone. The privilege of ownership was hers, by right, amounting itself almost to a duty: she was the collector. But the proprietorial instinct extended beyond mere objects, the assembling of pictures or jars in a room catalogued and gaped at. She had known from an early age that she could do anything she wished: the vision excluded nothing. It encompassed the country which, when she first knew this, was nearly the world. So she took up – not causes, but those who promoted them, not ideas but those who held the ideas, not action but those who acted. She chose the people with swift skill, like fruit tested for ripeness with a pinch. It was a deliberate campaign of recruitment and she carried it out with persuasive gusto. She offered what she believed to be the considerable protection of her friendship, and sometimes temporary shelter, to the mother and child fleeing a mistake, the working-class poet putting a book together, the rising painter, or simply the man who had come to mend the pipes and agreed to stay the night. She made no distinction between friends and lovers, men and women: she slept with both and found a wicked delight in teaching an anxious girl the narrow pleasure of her own sexuality, introducing her to the taste with her foraging fingers and watching her surprise – the small, astonished, moonlit, frightened face.
She recruited them, broke them in with sexual tutoring, then paraded them at her lunch parties – the handyman, the African refugee, the poet, the Welsh Buddhist, the ex-convict, the terrorist, the actress, the shy girl she had loved the night before. And she invited her own contemporaries for witness – the successful, the powerful, the very rich: golden pigs, balding mice. There in her drawing room the Minister of Home Affairs might meet a sullen young man and never guess that the boy had, a few weeks before, been his prisoner in a London jail. To the eminent lady biographer of a dead queen she would say, ‘Jim and I have been reading your book with enormous pl
easure, haven’t we, Jim?’, and the taxi-driver Lady Arrow had manfully seduced would nod, avoiding the biographer’s eyes. Later, Jim might gain courage and say to a guest, ‘I once had a fare from Lord Snowdon – seemed a nice bloke.’ Thieves and the people they burgled, bombers and their intended victims, agitators and their effigies in flesh and blood, the morally sententious and their mockers – how were they to know? – mingled freely, met and chatted in the Hill Street house, like parents and children. She tolerated one and encouraged the other, for she saw her role as essentially maternal: they were hers.
On the piano there were three framed photographs – her husbands in a curious sequence of age. The first, a painter, had been quite old – she married him when she was nineteen – the next a middle-aged banker, and the last, whom she had married in her own middle age, fairly young, a television director. The photographs might have shown her father, her brother, her son – they didn’t match her. But the three marriages had given her an even greater profusion of relatives, an extended family that verged on the tribal. This, taken with her aristocratic habit of referring to famous people with great casualness as her relations – ‘He’s supposed to be a cousin of mine,’ she would say of a man in the news – made it seem as if there was no one on whom she did not have some claim. Those whom she could not prove a relation either by marriage or blood, she collected in other ways, either confronting them with memorable directness (‘I want to get something straight between you and me, my darling’) or striking up occasional liaisons which she alluded to by saying – and it might be an African prime minister – ‘He’s an old boyfriend of mine!’ in that loud silencing voice.
There were always tragedies, disappearances, desperate phone-calls at odd hours. She understood: the poor were seized by the same tide as the rich, and jailed, or their friends were. She knew: she was a regular visitor to prisons. Yet that had started in the most conventional way, out of nervous concern, as a duty, her reply to the cautious gentility that led others to visit the sick in hospital wards, the lame and the blind, Chelsea pensioners and the like. Lady Arrow set off in a different direction, to Wormwood Scrubs and Pentonville. She brought gifts of cigarettes and fruit and spent afternoons helping the convicts with lessons from correspondence courses. She organized drama groups: lifers at the Scrubs put on Conrad’s stage-version of The Secret Agent (Lady Arrow played Winnie), Holloway did Beckett and Brecht, Brixton a Christmas pantomime. She had plans – for a murderer to play a murderer, a thief to play a thief; to do The Importance of Being Earnest with the girls at Holloway, herself as Lady Bracknell; and lately she had thought of Shadow of a Gunman done by IRA prisoners in Wandsworth. The convicts were released and she saw them at her house, those lunch parties. She was uncritical, helpful, attentive, welcoming; she performed, seeing herself as a character in an unwritten novel by someone like Iris Murdoch, and while she remembered any slight with unexampled malice she invited dependency for the way it obliged the dependent and so she could say without risking contradiction, ‘You can’t refuse me – you’re one of the family!’