The Family Arsenal

by Paul Theroux

  ‘I hated her,’ said Murf, who had started to sweat. ‘I wanted to brick her.’

  ‘No kidding. What for?’

  ‘She was laughing at me.’ He pushed at his ears again, a combing motion with his palms. Hood had noticed how he did this when he was upset, made self-conscious by a stranger. But the ears, as if exercised with brushes, sprang out wider. ‘Just standing there, laughing like a fucking drain. I could have smashed her face.’

  ‘I know the feeling,’ said Hood. ‘Don’t let it get you down.’

  ‘Hood?’ Murf sighed, whacked at his ears and shook his head. ‘There was something else. I said she didn’t see nothing. Well, maybe she did. But it wasn’t my fault. She come up here while I was changing. I caught her on the stairs. Laughing, she was. I don’t know for sure, but maybe she come in here.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Hood. ‘You couldn’t help it.’

  ‘Honest, I couldn’t. Brodie was supposed to be watching her. Maybe she seen your picture. Anyway, she didn’t nick it, did she?’

  ‘It’s still here,’ said Hood. Murf leaned and looked at it, cocking his head to the side as if trying to understand it better. ‘What do you think of it?’

  Murf said, ‘It’s a bloke, ain’t it? Old-fashioned bloke – them boots, them clothes. Yeah, I like it. First time I seen it I thought it was poxy. Who’s this flaming great tit, I says. Then Arfa sees it and he says it’s a antique, it’s worth something, they’re paying for them up the West End. He’s got ready money, he says. I thought maybe I could do you some kind of favour, flog it to Arfa. Sorry about that. Anyway, I had a crafty look at it. Later, this was. I’m knocked over! It’s all shiny, sort of moving and blowing up in me mush. Bloke’s looking at me, yeah, like he’s going to jump out and kick me in the goolies.’

  Hood loved him for that. He had despaired of ever changing Murf. The boy was unaffected by the afternoon concerts on the radio Hood had listened to before he began spending his afternoons with Lorna. No symphony, not the finest phrase had altered those blaring ears, and nothing Hood had ever shown him – the Chinese scroll, the carvings from Hué – had worked his eyes wider than a squint. He had given Murf a Chinese treasure and Murf, making a claw of his fingers, had handled it like a turd. The silk shirt from Vientiane, his present to Murf for helping shift the arsenal and the loot, had become a rag on his skinny shoulders; the pocket bulged and drooped where he kept his stash of tobacco. He carried himself like an ape, with his arms hanging loose. He had one skill: the clock-legged bomb. But a sense of loyalty had brought him to the room tonight; he had told the truth; his response to Lady Arrow was crudely accurate – Hood himself had wanted to smash her in the face. And his description of the painting – how civilizing a thing it was! – had insight. In that small crooked boy Hood saw a shy friend.

  Hood poked his pipe-stem at the painting. He said, ‘I’ve been trying to figure out who it is.’

  ‘Funny bloke.’ Murf scratched his head. ‘Sort of smiling and sad at the same time.’

  ‘And look at his eyes.’

  ‘You think he’s going to say something,’ said Murf. ‘Yeah, I like it.’ He caught his lips with his fingers in embarrassment and pinched them. He said, ‘Reminds me of you, he does.’

  ‘No.’ But Hood peered at the painting.

  ‘Maybe not,’ said Murf. ‘He’s posh like you, but not only that. Yeah, I think he does. Straight.’

  Hood said suddenly, ‘What do you want, Murf?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Nuffink. ‘I want to give you something, squire. Anything.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Murf carefully. ‘But there’s one thing.’

  ‘Name it.’

  ‘Just don’t,’ Murf began and caught his lips again with his fingers. ‘Just don’t laugh at me.’

  Hood waited for more. Was this a warning, a condition to prepare him for the wish – or the wish itself? Murf fidgeted and said no more, and Hood saw that it was all he wanted, to be free of ridicule. The woman’s laughter had wounded him and made her his enemy. Hood said, ‘Okay.’

  ‘Me mates don’t laugh at me.’

  ‘Then we’ll be mates.’

  Murf grinned, filling his cheeks, as if he had food in his mouth; and he put out his hand, offering it as an equal. He said, ‘Shake.’

  Hood reached up and wrung his hand – Murf’s palm was damp with nervousness – and he said, ‘Now I’m going to hit the sack.’

  Murf hesitated. ‘Mayo didn’t show.’

  ‘No,’ said Hood. ‘Maybe it’s something big.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Murf sniggered. Something big: now it was a private joke they could both share. ‘Are you going to tell her about the old girl?’

  ‘Do you want me to?’

  ‘She’ll laugh at me.’

  ‘I can say I was here the whole time.’

  ‘Right.’ Murf brought up another gobbling grin. ‘And she’s bending your ear, this old girl. Then you’re out of the room, you’re having a wash. You don’t know nothing. Then she goes sneaking upstairs. You hear this fucking laugh of hers.’

  ‘And I caught the bitch in this room.’

  ‘Beautyful.’

  ‘That’s what I’ll tell her then.’

  Murf said, ‘Goodnight, mate.’

  Mayo did not arrive until the next morning, and showing her face at that early hour, with an over-brisk apology but no explanation for her lateness, and yet with a guilty pallor made of smugness and fatigue – the satisfied smile and yawn – she had the cagey adulterous look of a woman returning to her husband and children after spending the night with her lover. Romance: if not actual, then a metaphor, since she had always treated her political involvement like an affair, her energy hinting at brief infatuation.

  Brodie stirred her bowl of cornflakes with a spoon and said, ‘There’s no more milk.’

  ‘I’ve had my breakfast,’ said Mayo. ‘I was up hours ago. I’ll just have a coffee. Any post?’

  ‘A letter from the National Gallery,’ said Hood. ‘They want their picture back.’

  ‘That’s not funny.’

  Murf looked at Hood and laughed.

  ‘Look, sugar,’ said Hood, touching Brodie on the arm, ‘why don’t you and Murf do the dishes. I’ve got a bone to pick with the klepto.’

  ‘I always have to do the dishes,’ said Brodie, complaining.

  Murf rose and began gathering empty cups. ‘You heard what he said.’

  ‘Go to it, squire.’

  In the parlour, Mayo said, ‘I’m exhausted.’ Hood didn’t react. ‘The meeting went on for hours.’

  ‘The offensive,’ said Hood lightly, as if repeating a familiar joke.

  ‘That was part of it,’ she said. ‘And we expelled someone.’

  ‘Do I know him?’

  ‘Her,’ said Mayo. ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘We had a visitor yesterday.’

  ‘Not the police,’ Mayo held her breath.

  ‘No. A friend of Brodie‘s.’

  ‘I didn’t think she had any friends.’

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ said Hood. ‘It was a lady – in the technical sense.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘I’ll tell you in a minute. But first I want you to tell me something. Where exactly did you get your picture?’

  ‘The self-portrait? Highgate House – why?’

  ‘Who lives there?’

  ‘No one lives there, you fool. It’s a museum.’

  ‘That’s the first I’ve heard of it. I thought it was a private house. I imagined you sneaking through the window, tip-toeing down the corridors – the folks snoring in their beds. I thought it was pretty cool. She’s a gutsy chick, I thought. But, for Christ’s sake, it was a museum. So it wasn’t such a big deal after all, was it?’

  ‘There was a burglar alarm,’ she said. ‘There were risks. What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Just this. You gave me the impression you knocked off a private house – and all you
really did was waltz into a museum and rip off a picture. If it had been a private house you might have gotten somewhere, and if you’d chosen the right one you’d have scored in spades – you’d have had them screaming their heads off. But you’re a genius. You went for a museum and came out with one picture – you could have taken a dozen!’

  ‘What’s wrong with a museum?’

  ‘Museums don’t have money. They don’t pay ransoms, no one lives in them, they’re empty.’ He sighed and said, ‘How’d you happen to settle on Highgate House?’

  ‘I told you all this at Ward’s – that first day.’

  ‘You were drunk. You didn’t have a plan. All you talked about was a picture.’

  ‘Yes, and I knew where it was.’

  ‘You sussed it out?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘my parents used to take me there.’

  She stated it as a simple fact; but it was a revelation. It was the most she had ever told him about herself, and it was nearly all he needed to know.

  My parents used to take me there. He knew her parents, he saw them on a misty Sunday in winter guiding their daughter to the museum, the mother apart, the doting father holding the girl’s hand. They had planned it carefully; they knew they were paying a high compliment to the little girl’s intelligence in the family outing – part of her education, while the rest of her school friends idled at the zoo. A restful, uplifting interlude, strolling among the masterpieces. Privilege. And he saw the daughter, a spoiled child, small for her age, but bright, alert, in kneesocks and necktie, noticing details her parents missed – that Bosch cripple in his leather vest, the thread of piss issuing from the bow-legged man in the Brueghel, the Turner thundercloud and tidewrack of sea-monster’s jaws, the tiger launching itself from the margin of the Indian engraving. Look, dear, an angel. And finally the attentive parents brought her to the Flemish self-portrait and urged her to admire the tall man in black: What do you see through that window? Later, they bought postcards and chatted about them over tea; but the parents never knew how that afternoon they had inspired the girl – made her see the value of art even if she could not see its beauty; how the gentle stress that particular day, the origin of all her careless romance, had made that little girl into a thief.

  Hood knew her parents, he saw them, because he could see his own. The same encouragement in a different museum, a different light: a Minoan snake-goddess had marked his eye. They had been taught to respect art, so thievery mattered; and the parents’ legacy was this taste, a hesitation. Only Brodie and Murf acted without hesitation. They could destroy easily because they had never seen what creation was – they did not know enough to be guilty; but Mayo, and he, knew too much to be innocent.

  Mayo saw the strain of memory on his face. She said, ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You blew it. You’re a flop.’

  He told her the version he had promised Murf, and what Lady Arrow had said. Mayo understood immediately, quicker than Hood himself had. She closed her eyes and he could see she was relieved – as he had been, but perhaps for a different reason: he had never wanted to lose the picture and she had worried about jail.

  He said, ‘Maybe you’ll listen to me now.’

  ‘Do you think she’ll cough?’

  ‘Not a chance,’ said Hood. ‘She’s on your side – whatever side that is.’

  Mayo said, ‘You’ll find out soon enough.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t you see? That’s one of the reasons I was held up last night. We expelled someone –’

  ‘So there’s a post vacant,’ he said.

  ‘You can put it that way. I was trying to convince them you were clean. Well, they’re convinced.’ Mayo lowered her voice. ‘There’s a problem, Val. They want to talk to you. They think you can help them.’

  ‘I used to think that.’

  ‘Oh, God, don’t tell me you’re getting cold feet!’

  ‘Cold feet,’ said Hood, sneering. ‘Wise up, sister.’

  ‘I knew it. As soon as things started to go your way you’d begin your consul act – the big, cool, non-committal thing.’

  ‘I’ll play it by ear.’

  ‘They’re coming tonight.’

  ‘I might be out tonight.’

  ‘I told them they could count on you.’

  ‘They can count on me tomorrow. I’ve got other plans.’ He stood up and moved towards the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘That shouldn’t be hard for you to figure out. You’ve got training – you said so! You’re a conspirator, aren’t you? You don’t have to ask questions like that. Get your raincoat and shadow me.’

  ‘Don’t go now, Val. Stay awhile – it’s nine o’clock in the morning! Don’t make me wait, please.’

  ‘You made me wait last night, sweetheart.’ He looked at her imploring face. He wouldn’t stay. There was Lorna, but more, he was punishing Mayo for her past, for betraying her parents’ trust; the picture. My parents used to take me there.

  ‘So that’s it. You’re going to get your own back on me. God, it’s as stupid as a marriage! It’s sickening. You’ve got other plans. All these secrets. You’re hiding something from me. Why don’t you just come out and say it – you’re not interested in me anymore.’

  ‘But I am. Come on, smile.’

  ‘The painting,’ she said. ‘They trusted me after that. If they find out it belongs to that woman they won’t like it – it’s no good to them.’

  ‘I won’t tell them.’

  ‘Thanks, Val,’ she said. ‘I feel such a failure.’

  ‘Bullshit,’ said Hood. ‘Think of the painting! It’s yours – you’ve committed the perfect crime!’

  ‘Kiss me,’ she said.

  He hesitated, then he drew near to her.

  She said, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to kiss you, sister.’

  ‘Don’t,’ she said. She faced the wall and said, ‘Go! That’s what you really want to do, isn’t it?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want to kiss you.’

  She turned expectantly and lifted her arms in hope to embrace him, but Hood was on his way out of the room.

  As he passed through the kitchen, he slapped Murf on the shoulder. Murf said, ‘Take me with you,’ and whispered, ‘I don’t want to stay here with these two hairies.’

  ‘Next time, pal.’

  It was a lovely autumn day and Hood was so distracted by the sunshine he did not at first see the sweeper – just the father today, with his shovel and broom and the yellow barrel on wheels. The man pushed at the papers and dead leaves, then stooped to pick up a button. He looked at Hood with mistrust and said, ‘That your ice-cream van?’

  ‘Not mine,’ said Hood.

  ‘I can’t sweep there unless it’s moved.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about it,’ said Hood, and he heard the man mutter a curse.

  15

  – Because when it came, Mr Gawber was thinking, the thunderclap and the short circuit in the heavens, announcing itself there in the City like the rumble and flash of summer lightning, it would travel in every direction and be most evident here on the pitches of this bald heath: a sudden airless fissure streaking across the grass to that silent church, dividing Blackheath into two treeless slopes. Already there were no trees, so the slightest crack would heave open the unrooted ground and make it a place where there was no shelter; no place to squat either. It could be horrific: London’s most mammoth sewer ran under this heath.

  The morning, so beautiful, with tufts of white cloud racing in the sky, intimated a ripeness that was next to decay – the season’s warning. And more than this, Blackheath, a square mile of grass, was like a roomy cemetery, all that space awaiting diggers and coffins. How lonely sat the city that was full of people! She was a widow, she who had had an imperial fortune. The princess of cities was supine with tramplings. The prospect made him sad, remembering. He had protected himself from life, which was pain, but the last pain was
unavoidable. Yet if the eruption came, the fissure underfoot, the storm overhead, he might be granted the life he had denied himself, as the war had briefly proven his resourcefulness; and he came to see in the quake he imagined a humbly heroic retirement, testing him with the repeated whisper ‘Die!’ He would say no and live.

  Mr Gawber puffed his morning pipe on the top deck of a bus. His mind, undistracted by a crossword puzzle, sped easily to thoughts of doom; he looked up from the simple puzzle and there was the unsolvable world. He lingered over his annoyance. She had rung again, as she had done a month ago, with the same weepy haste. I must see you, she’d said, it’s very important. You’re the only one who can help me. A dirty trick, that; singling him out to throw herself on him. Perhaps you can stop by on your way to work. I live quite near you now – Blackheath. But only the map made it near. In every other way it was a troublesome detour. He would not get to Rackstraw’s before lunchtime. Charity blunted his anger, and he made his objection general: I’m glad we never had a daughter.

  He recognized her house at once, Mortimer Lodge, the fresh coat of pale green paint and white trim subduing the Georgian plumpness. In the western edge, it faced directly onto the heath, like a fort fronting an open plain, defying intruders. It was secure, unshakeable, detached, not crowded by nearby houses; and though it was not tall, its weight was apparent in the spread of its bay-windowed wings. Its hedge had body, its garden balance. The girl was luckier than she knew, but as Mr Gawber swung open the gate he had a vision – he did not know why: perhaps it was an effect of the sunlight slanting explosively on the rooftiles – a vision of Mortimer Lodge bursting open; the front toppling forward into the fountain and birdbath and the roof caving in and a puff of smoke rising from its shattered design. He endured it, let it pass across his mind, and he was left breathless. Now the house was unmarked. He thought he had rid himself of these punishing visions, but since the day he had uttered ‘macaroon’ to the strangers on the crossed line he had sensed a fracture in his life. It surprised him; he was strengthened by it, enlivened, like an old man who senses the onset of magic in his eyes. He wondered if he was mad, then dismissed the thought. He was only late for work, and Araba’s phone-call the previous night had made his dreams anxious and disconnected (searches, a son, ruins). He thought: I hope she doesn’t cry.