by Paul Theroux
She tapped a spot of snuff on the back of her hand. She raised it to inhale and the doorbell rang. Parting the curtains and peering down she saw a shadowy visitor, a woman, plainly dressed in an old coat and gazing up the street. She considered her snuff, then whistled it up her nose. Again, the bell. But it was her house, her painting. On the way downstairs she thought of moving in, finding a room for Mrs Pount and having stationery printed. She opened the door, delighted to be given a chance to test her ownership.
‘Yes?’
She saw the woman falter.
‘What is it?’
‘Jumble,’ said the woman. ‘I’m collecting for the church sale. It’s on Saturday.’
‘Come in. I’m sure we have something for you.’
Lady Arrow led her through the drawing-room and down the hall to the kitchen, saying, ‘I think it’s such a splendid idea to have jumble sales. Share things out – so many people throw away perfectly lovely toast-racks and napkin rings. I know my friends go all over London in search of good jumble. Here, have a seat. I’ll beaver around upstairs.’
‘Them tea-towels would do me.’
‘A wedding present, I’m afraid,’ said Lady Arrow.
She directed the woman back to the drawing-room and hurried upstairs to a bedroom, the one just off the landing. The bed, a mattress on the floor, was a tangle of sheets and blankets, and there were children’s posters on the wall. She pulled out a drawer: rags. In the bottom drawer she found an assortment of alarm clocks and lengths of wire. She selected a clock and was on her way downstairs when the doorbell rang again.
‘I say, will you see who that is?’ she called, and she thought: What a farce – what a lark! She would move here, Mrs Pount would get used to it. She heard the woman’s footsteps, the door opening, the greetings. She listened on the landing.
‘Yes, can I help you?’ It was the woman’s voice, and for a long moment there was no reply. Then a man’s voice sounded, polite astonishment. But his surprised intake of air, that gasp, had travelled up the stairwell to her.
‘Excuse me, is that you, Miss Nightwing?’
‘Mister Gawber.’
The clock in Lady Arrow’s hand started to tick. She threw it hard against the wall and descended the stairs, swearing under her breath. She found Mr Gawber and Araba in the parlour. They looked up when she entered, and masking his surprise with a smile Mr Gawber stood and gave a jaunty salute. Araba had removed her headscarf and changed her bite; but she said nothing. Lady Arrow thought the actress looked very gloomy and embarrassed.
Finally, Araba said, ‘Let’s apologize and say nothing more. I hate explanations.’
‘Let’s talk about Peter Pan,’ said Lady Arrow.
‘Yes,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘I must say, we’re all looking forward to it. Norah’s terribly keen.’
‘I’ll send you tickets,’ said Araba.
‘Tea?’ said Lady Arrow.
‘I was just leaving,’ said Araba.
‘My tea will be waiting at home,’ said Mr Gawber.
‘I won’t keep you,’ said Lady Arrow.
At the door Araba said, ‘I’ve got just the part for you, Susannah.’
‘Super,’ said Lady Arrow. ‘Now you know where to find me.’ She shut the door triumphantly, waited ten more minutes, and went back to Hill Street.
21
She had said – painfully and barely moving her swollen lips – ‘I don’t want to talk about it now,’ and he kissed her again. Pity or love, it didn’t matter; he saw her wounded and he was aroused, almost passionate. He touched her, felt for her breasts. She sucked air and her ribs lifted his hand. She was hysterical – she screamed; then she was the opposite, numbed and speechless. Her fright trembled away, and when he put her to bed she fell asleep at once. It was the child, Jason, whom he had difficulty in calming, but he dropped off in Hood’s arms. He put him in the cot and went into the other room to lay beside her. Anger kept him awake; he blamed himself for her bruises and claw-marks and he was disturbed by the fear that he could kill them for it – find the bastards and beat them to a pulp.
She had been beaten. He expected her to rebel, but she had no particular anger. She was forlorn, alone; the assault saddened her, like a reminder she was trapped – as if she’d broken her head against her own cage. She didn’t cry – she wasn’t even frightened. The violence that would have terrified another woman only weighted her with bruises and made her frail, brightened her eyes with fever; and lying next to her – it surprised him again – he felt her nakedness heating him, her body hot from her wounds. Now, sleeping, she was a small injured girl; but she burned against him, denying him rest.
In the black hours of the morning – around three – he knew he must roll a pill or stay awake cursing. He felt for his pouch and rolled the opium pill in the dark, then went to the bathroom for a glass of water to wash it down. Standing there in front of the sink he saw his reflection in the mirror and in his eyes those narrow crescents of yellow on the whites, the malarial stain, a mark of Hué. He swallowed the pill and closed his eyes and he was gliding from an inlet on the Perfume River, a rudder-stick crooked under his arm, and in the bow of the boat a Vietnamese girl knelt, the moon shining on her tight flank, her black mane of hair swaying as she worked with the small flame. Then she tossed her hair and smiled and passed him the pipe. It was a perfect memory: his mind had simplified the past, selected from it, and prettied it by making it whole. Twenty nights on the river had become one.
Yet he could not think of the past without embarrassment. It was primitive, mostly error or failure, and though the man in the boat had his name, it was another man, one he had grown to mistrust. So memory itself, that inaccurate glimpse of the past, he avoided or tried to suppress: he hated its futility.
He shut his eyes and saw the future. His mind plunged ahead in time, the landscape altered, his own figure dwindled. The future, always the future – why else would one fight? Memory was retreat. He rehearsed what was in store for him – not a matter of days or a month, but years and more, decades, and then he saw the same solitary man, slightly hunched, white-haired, in fading clothes, treading the dust in some tropical place, making his way in dazzling sunlight. It was what he wished to see. He closed his eyes and saw this old man who had cut himself off and chosen to end his life here, in the simplest way: a man with no country, unknown among strangers, who had rid himself of his family and who, at that distance, had fallen silent and ceased to act. A calm fugitive: he ridiculed the notion of exile – in this world there was no exile for an American.
Hood’s reflections were not memory but this modest vision he hoped was prophecy – as all truth was prophetic – and though at first he felt it was the effect of his drugs (the narcotic flash, the sight of himself in the future walking up and down in Asia), the process became habit. He was older, in a palmy place as dense as Guatemala, never speaking; but the road was always the same, the foliage a deep green and the blurred figures ignored him and passed by, water-carriers, naked children, slow bulls. To live abroad was to create a mythology about yourself, more than a new personality – a liberating fantasy you could believe in, a new world. He could only live in a country where he was willing to die, and it sometimes chilled him to think that he might die here, in this strangely lighted city, on this watery island. He did not want to be known or mourned; he wished only to act and then vanish, to choose his own gravesite. And it troubled him to think that the single reason he was in bed with this woman was that he had killed her husband. But who was that? Who killed him? The murderer was a man he scarcely knew.
In the morning Lorna was groggy. Rather than wake her he gave the child breakfast and took him to school.
‘Are you my daddy now?’ asked Jason, taking Hood’s hand at the end of the road. The faithless child, he thought; he would go with anyone. But Hood couldn’t blame him; the child’s safety lay in this deceit – perhaps he saw it as the only way of crossing the road.
Hood said, ‘Do you want
me to be?’
‘No.’ And after a while he added, ‘My real daddy’s coming back.’
Hood held the child’s hand, saying nothing.
‘He’ll duff you up when he comes back. My daddy’s a good fighter.’
Crossing the road, Jason tightened his grip, and he did not release it on the other side. Somehow he knew the terrifying fact without knowing any of the words.
At the school gate a group of mothers stood chatting in an oblong of sunshine. They dropped their voices when Hood approached, and he could see them avoiding meeting his eyes. They were young, several were pretty, and they looked is if they were dressed for more than a trip to the school. Jason yelled and ran to join his friends. Hood noticed how his presence had subdued the group, made the women self-conscious, awkward, with a kind of pedestrian envy and suspicion.
Hood said sharply, ‘Hi, sweetheart!’
They looked away. The teacher came out, an older woman in a smock, fussing with a toy, waving the mothers aside and calling the children by name. Hood was the first to leave. He had gone some distance down the road when he turned and saw them all, staring at him. He knew what they were saying: a new member of the family, her lover – or more likely, the fucker.
He got back to the house to find her up, and now he saw the disorder he had missed the night before – an ashtray tipped over, a smashed lamp, a buckled chairleg, and the carpet littered with glass shards and cigarette butts. Lorna was feebly sweeping the hallway.
‘Have you seen upstairs?’ she said. ‘I told them I didn’t have the key, so they broke down the door of the spare room, where the stuff was. That’s what did it – they saw it was empty. Willy starts screaming at me. The other one – I don’t know his name – he done his nut. He slaps me.’
‘I’ll kill them for this,’ said Hood through his teeth.
‘Leave me out of it. I don’t want trouble.’ She sighed and said bitterly, ‘I thought when Ron copped it I was free. No more fights, no more worrying about the police. I can live, I thought. Then this. The fuckers.’
‘What were they looking for?’
‘How should I know? They asked about you. They got really ugly – who are you? What do you do? Who do you work for? That kind of thing.’
‘And you didn’t tell them anything?’ He was almost incredulous, but he believed, and he was ashamed.
‘Nothing,’ she said; she smiled at the memory of it. ‘Because I knew they were just trying it on, testing me like. I mean, the fuckers know you, so why are they asking all these questions? Play dumb – that’s what Ron used to say – pretend like you don’t even speak English.’ She winced and picked up the broom, and beginning to sweep she said, ‘Well, it didn’t cut no ice. One of them grabs me – twisting me arm – and the other one starts slapping me. And Willy, he’s just standing there whistling out the window.’
‘They’ll be sorry.’ Hood paced the room.
‘I don’t know why I didn’t come out with it and tell them you had all that stuff.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Because I knew what they’d do. You think I’m stupid? I’m used to this. Me, they’d only slap me around – I wasn’t afraid, I wasn’t even mad. That’s the way they are – and they don’t kill women.’ She stared at him. ‘But they would have killed you.’
‘So you saved my life,’ said Hood.
‘But later, after they left, I thought they might have got you. I was frantic, and I almost cried when I saw you last night.’ She was silent a moment, then she said abruptly, ‘They’ll be back.’
‘Not if I nail them first,’ he said.
‘They’re probably looking for you now,’ she said. ‘Just leave me out of it. They’re the worst fuckers – they’re murderers.’
‘I’ve ruined your life,’ he said, and he wanted her to believe it, to take his word for it without asking him how.
She came over to him and touched his face. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You’re good. You made me happy. I don’t even know you, but I almost love you.’ She held him and said, ‘Sometimes I think everything you say is a lie. I don’t care about that. If you have to lie to make me happy, go ahead – tell me lies. I don’t want to know the truth if it’s going to spoil everything.’
He was moved by her complete surrender; she knew nothing, and yet without belief she trusted him. They were strangers, joined by a corpse: a dead man’s family. But the pity had been refined; she might not know him, but he knew her, and he feared that it would go further, to the narrowing sympathy that would deny him his future. She had been lost. He found her, but now he saw he could only save her by sacrificing himself; that love was all loss, an early death. Yet he could not help what he had felt when he saw her so badly beaten – passion, or blunter still, a kind of lust at seeing her so wounded. Even now, holding her, feeling her frailty, he was heated, and he wanted to hurry her upstairs and make love to her.
She said, ‘I don’t care what you do to those fuckers. But don’t leave me – please.’
‘Don’t say please.’
‘Last night you called me love,’ she said. ‘Say it again.’
He looked down at her. ‘You say I lie.’
‘I want you to lie!’
He kissed her lightly, but as he started to speak, the doorbell rang.
‘Go upstairs,’ he said. ‘I’ll see to them.’
He got a knife from the kitchen, but on his way to the door he threw it down in disgust. It clattered on the floor and was still spinning as he dragged the door open. He sighed and dropped his arms.
‘Yeah, sorry to bother you,’ said Murf, who was tugging at his ear-ring with one hand and pushing at his other ear. He was nervous; the quack was in his voice. He tried to laugh. ‘I hope you wasn’t on the job.’
‘Come in.’
‘The thing is, she’s back,’ he said, stepping in and smoothing his ears with both hands. It occurred to Hood that this was a variation of the gesture balding men usually made with their hair, the pushing and smoothing. ‘The old girl – that filthy great giant, Brodie’s mate. I was having a kip, see, and I heard her come in. I gets behind the door and she sneaks around like. I didn’t know what to do, so I come over here. You want me to put the wind up?’
‘Where’s Mayo?’
‘Out with Brodie. Either in Kilburn or maybe shopping. I don’t know. They took the van.’
‘Maybe the offensive,’ said Hood, smiling.
‘Not a chance,’ said Murf. ‘Like Mayo told me straight. You’re going to do it now, the English offensive – you’re the guv.’ He grinned and widened his eyes and said, ‘Yeah, arsenal rule!’
‘So the secret’s out.’
‘That’s why I got worried. The old girl might find something and rumble us.’
Hood said suddenly, ‘Murf, remember those guys that jumped me at the dog track?’
‘The villains. Shorty and them.’
‘Who are they?’
‘Never seen them before.’
‘But you can find out. They’re agents – fences.’
‘Arfa might know.’
‘Go ask him,’ said Hood. ‘The guy’s name is Willy Rutter. There are some others, but Rutter’s the one I want. He must live around here. I want to catch him at home.’
‘I’ll smash on Arfa’s door,’ said Murf. ‘But what about the old girl?’ He guffawed and showed his teeth. ‘Maybe she wants me to raise her.’
‘Forget it. Find out about Rutter.’
When Murf had gone, Hood went upstairs and told Lorna who it was. Lorna lay on the bed, stiffly crouched, hugging her stomach; but hearing there was no danger, she stretched and relaxed and said, ‘Sit beside me.’
He sat on the edge of the bed and pushed her hair out of her eyes.
‘Tell me a lie.’
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I love you.’
‘Tell the truth,’ she said impatiently, getting up on one elbow.
He said, ‘I don’t love you.’
She fel
l back. He thought she was pouting until he realized her lips were swollen that way from a slap. She said, ‘I don’t care if you don’t love me. Anyway, everyone says it, so it’s just another lie. I know you like me, or else why would you stick with me?’ She smiled slowly. ‘And I know something else.’
‘What is it?’ He knew an instant panic.
She said, ‘You’re not a fucker.’
‘But all men are fuckers – that’s what you said.’
‘Not you.’ She drew him down, hugging him and moving her face against his. And as she did he felt his cheeks grow wet, his eyes sting, but it was her tears trickling into his eyes. She was crying softly, and though she tried to control it he could hear the groan in her throat and feel the convulsion; she was sobbing. ‘Don’t leave me,’ she said and held his arms tightly – so tight he felt his wrists tingle and go numb. The girl in her wept, but a woman’s strength held him. ‘Please don’t leave me – please, please, please!’
He thought: Yes, but there is something to do. He was crowded, haunted by the men who had wounded her. The punishment he planned lingered in his mind – that remained, an intrusion between their bodies as obvious as her wounds. The thought prevented him from responding to her plea, but he saw an end to it. He would get them and be finished – discard everything, abandon the house on Albacore Crescent and begin with her. He had enough hope for her, and there was freedom in that hope. Ridding her life of those bastards would rid him of that part of his own past that now seemed a moment of uncontrolled fury, when murdering her husband he had murdered the worst in himself. He embraced her and kissed her and she sobbed, but he felt nothing except an impulse to find Rutter and hammer him. Kill that lurking rival.
She was still pleading, but her mouth was against his neck and he heard nothing.
‘We can’t stay here,’ he said at last. ‘Murf’s coming back.’
Murf arrived an hour later with Arfa Muncie. Seeing Lorna’s bruises, Murf said, ‘Hey, who done you?’ Then he changed the subject, perhaps suspecting that Hood might have beaten her. Muncie looked alarmed; he was silent and eyed Hood carefully as if waiting for a signal to run. But Hood saw how rattled Muncie was (he was picking up Lorna’s china dolls and examining their seals, and testing the firmness of chairs: the junk-dealer’s nervous reflex), and he deliberately put him at his ease, slapped him on the back – Muncie jumped – and said casually, ‘Now where does our friend live?’