by Paul Theroux
Mr. Flack said, “The rain.” He leaned back and squinted at the gray pouring sky as if to determine how long it would last.
“A Bwamba would call this rain a good omen,” said Munday. But he felt differently about it. He looked at the house. He did not want to go inside.
Mr. Flack said, “It’s got bags of character.”
Emma agreed. Munday heard her say, “Charming.”
“Thanks for the lift, Flack,” said Munday, and, already feeling let down, quickly sent the old man away so that he would not be able to report on their disappointment. The wind blew the rain against the trees and knocked shriveled leaves into the shallow courtyard puddles where some stuck and some floated. Behind them on the far side of the road the limbs of a stripped tree howled; the wind came in gusts, rain in rushing air, emptying the trees and pulling at their branches and blackening their trunks.
Even when Mr. Flack had gone the Mundays remained on the roadside, trying to make sense of the agent’s letter by comprehending the house. The sight of it was like an incomplete memory, the sort an adult has, faced with his childhood house: unfamiliar details Were intrusive and disturbing, the size, the color, the position, some black front windows with drawn curtains, the chimneys—absurdly, Munday had imagined smoke coming from the chimneys, and these cold bricks with empty orange flues depressed him and spoiled the memory.
The house looked small. Munday had not expected that nor its unusual position, directly on the narrow road; one long wall was flush with the road (leaves collecting at the foundation where it formed a gutter), and a high bushy bank, the edge of a field, rose up behind, dwarfing the house. It gave the impression of having once had some definite purpose on the road: the stone shed might have been a smithy’s or wheelwright’s.
“I don’t imagine it made any difference when the only traffic was a wagon passing once a day—” Munday continued speaking but his words were lost in the engine roar and hissing tires of a truck which passed just then, its green canvas bellying on top and flapping at the back. Munday finished hopelessly, “—stand this.”
The house was of stone, and squat, with a slate roof, the black slates shining in the rain; a sharp scalloped ridge on the roof peak was its only elegance. It was set plumply against the bank and looked older than that bank, as if the back pasture had risen, the verge at either end lifted in a grassy swell, sinking the house into the earth. The walls absorbed the damp differently, the pale new stone moistened like sand, the dark and almost black old stone, the brown hamstone extension at the back which was the bathroom and toilet (“low-flush,” the letter said) replacing the roofless brick shed half-hidden in tangled briars and a mature holly tree in the back garden. There was also a recent and unattractive coal shed across the courtyard, its cement blocks stained unevenly with wetness. The rain and damp defined the portions of the house by shading their ages variously, and the side that faced the road was darkened by soot and exhaust fumes, the stone foundation covered by dry inland limpets and a deep green moss like patches of felt, the shade of the cushions on the billiard table at The Yew Tree.
“Courtyard,” said Munday, kicking open the iron gate. The gate made a grinding sound as Munday walked across the flagstones. A puddle at the entrance was being filled by a gurgling drain-spout. “Double doors,” he said, fumbing with the large latchkey. He entered the gritty hall with its ragged rope mat, then the chilly damp kitchen. He taught himself the meanings, bitterly, by sight. Now he knew “snug” meant tiny and “character” inconvenience and “charming” old; the ceiling was low, and though it was unnecessary for him to do so—he was not tall—he stooped, oppressed by the confining room and making his irritation into a posture. He glanced around; he said, “Sunny breakfast room.” The house was cold and held a musty stale odor that not even the draft from the open door freshened—an alien smell, not theirs.
Munday came to attention before a still clock on a kitchen shelf which showed the wrong time on a bloodied face. He was afraid and heard his heart and felt it enlarge. He recovered, saw the rust, and feeling foolish went to the sink which was coated in grime. He turned on the faucet; it choked and spat, brown water bubbled out and patterned rivulets into the grime, and then it became colorless and Munday shut it off. What a stubborn place, he thought. He tried the lights; they worked. He opened the oven door, the furnace door, a cupboard. He peeked into a comer room and mumbled, “larder.” He sniffed and looked for more.
Emma stood in the doorway, still holding her suitcases. A tractor went by and rattled the windows.
“Hello, what’s this,” said Munday in his sour voice, “power points.”
“Don’t,” said Emma. “Don’t say anything more. Please, Alfred. Or I’ll cry—”
Munday was silent; behind him his wife began to sob. She went to the kitchen table and sat down and took a lacy handkerchief from her bag. Munday wanted to touch her hair but he kept himself away and tried to give his feeling for the house a name. He told himself that this house was what he had surrendered Africa for, it was the object of his return home. It made him uneasy—not sad like Emma (if her tears meant that), but restless, exposed like a blunderer to staring cupboards and walls. It was as if someone in all that strangeness knew him and was hunting him.
It was not that the house was cold and unused, nor that it was so different from the agent’s description. It was not derelict, and if it had been truly empty he felt he could have possessed it; Munday—again sniffing and moving rapidly from room to room—was anxious for an opposite reason. He sensed, and he was searching for proof, that it held a presence that the apparent emptiness warned him of.
The dampness and that dusty odor lingered as a clammy insinuation in every comer of the house, and while Emma sat at the kitchen table and cried—the door open to the drizzling courtyard completing the picture of abandonment in which she occupied the foreground: the kind of portraiture she admired but could not achieve with her own paint-box—Munday busied himself with a coal hod he found in the shed, split some dry branches for kindling and tried to drive out the dampness with fires at each end of the house. After a smoky uncertain start in the living-room fireplace (the old newspaper smoldered, too damp to flare up), the pile of dry sticks Munday eventually shredded and splintered caught and burned noisily and filled the stone opening with slender flames. He heaped on it pieces of broken coal and short halved logs from a brass-studded keg near the hearth, and he watched the fire until he could smell its heat.
In the firebox of the kitchen stove, a low stout Ray-bum of chipped yellow enamel, he laboriously started a fire, following the instructions from a manual provided by the owner and using the fuel specified, anthracite knobs, like smooth black buns. He worked with a poker and tongs and several cubes of white crumbling firelighter. The firelighters flared and roared for minutes, then burned out, leaving red edges on the fuel which quickly cooled to blackness. It took him nearly an hour, but he had a good fire, and after he shut the door to the firebox he opened the vents so wide he could see the flickering light and hear the roar of the flames being sucked around the elbow of the stovepipe, their gasps in the chimney’s throat. With the stove alight he boiled a kettle and put hot water bottles in the double bed; he found the electric fires and plugged them in and turned them on high, making them ping like egg-timers. Later, remembering the cost, he adjusted them to warm.
Munday smiled at his fires and rubbed his hands before them. He went outside and was delighted to see smoke billowing from his chimneys—that signal, so poignant and reassuring, of active habitation; like winter breath, swirling from a man’s face. Emma cheered up in the warm house. She made tea and swept the floors, she put sheets and towels in the airing cupboards and discovered the view from the bedroom window that gave a glimpse of the sea. Munday joined her at the window; seeing that she had stopped crying he had paused in his brisk movements and shuffled and stooped to reassure her.
He said, “No need to cry.”
“It was that carpet in t
he kitchen,” she said. “It looked so worn and horrid. I couldn’t help myself. God, whose feet—”
“I’ll take it into the shed,” said Munday.
“No—your heart. Please.”
“It does look depressing,” he said in the kitchen. What he had taken for a floral pattern were dark tulip-shaped stains and spots like blossoms in the gray tattered nap.
“Let me help you,” said Emma.
The husband and wife knelt on the kitchen floor, side by side, and rolled up the carpet. The activity, seemingly so abrupt and insignificant, was important to them as an illustration of their marriage, what was best in it—and what both would remember when the apprehension they felt, the suspicion of the strange place, the fear of an unwelcome surprise which neither wished to call death, was answered by proof, so that in the end only one of them would be able to recall that rainy morning, the rolling carpet, and that movement, bumping forward on their knees.
They carried it to the shed and left it with other discarded things, the garden tools, the summer chairs which all appeared to be broken, a dog’s dish, a pitchfork, a scythe, paint cans and enamel basins and two porcelain chamberpots nesting on the worktable. Munday lifted the top one out. It was ornate and had flowers on it, still brightly colored. Its handle was whole.
“I haven’t seen one of these in years,” he said.
“When I was a girl,” Emma said, “I used to stay with my aunt and uncle in Eastbourne—”
Munday listened to the story; she was happy, he laughed appreciatively. She had told him the story before, but this telling of it was hopeful evidence that he had her support, that she was calmed and would share the solitude of the village with him as she did this memory.
With the fires going and the lamps blazing in the windows the house was alive, its personality was established with the heat and light; the dark late-aftemoon helped, and the gusts of wind blew gouts of raindrops against the side windows and then seemed to push at the glass with a pressure like spread fingers that strained every inch of it and then released it. The dark and the weather which was growing wild outside and perhaps threatening the slates made the house seem a good shelter: the exaggerated storm outside, the warmth inside, maintained in Munday’s imagination the illusion of the place as a refuge. And the husband and wife moved more freely knowing that the room they were about to enter would be warm.
But still the suggestion of a menacing presence, a half-formed fear, like a small creature of liquid, swayed and seemed to yawn in whatever room was adjacent to the one Munday happened to be in. He trusted the room he occupied; he was uncertain about the other rooms and could only verify his safety by entering them. Each time he stretched his arm to switch on a light in a darkened room he dared not step into, he was cautioned by a pain in his heart that was like a brief bright star.
“I must take it easy,” he said to his wife. “I think I’m overdoing it.”
“You’re restless,” she said. “Let me make you a drink.”
Munday was one of those men who looked at his watch before he had his first drink of the day. His rule on weekdays was no alcohol before sundown, and he was obedient to the rule. It was dark; he said yes; Emma poured the gin out, and only then did Munday look at his watch and see that it was four-fifteen, that sundown was at mid-afternoon and that he would be drunk before dinner.
“Emma, look at the time!”
Emma laughed and handed him his drink. She said, “It looks as if we’ll have to adjust our habits. It gets dark so early in winter. I’d forgotten. I must remember to get a bottle of sherry from Mr. Flack.”
“Amontillado,” said Munday. “That’s a good drink for this time of day.”
They talked at length about what drinks they would depend on through the winter. Then Munday said, “The freight hasn’t come. What do you suppose is keeping them?”
“This isn’t a very easy place to find,” said Emma. “And there’s just that brass knocker out front. I wonder if we can hear it from here?”
They were seated before the living-room fireplace. Munday said, “Is the outside light on? It should be. And if the kitchen’s dark they might be put off and go away.”
“I’ll have a look.”
“I’ll do it,” said Munday, bijt he didn’t rise. Then Emma was out of the room and her opening and shutting the door made a damp breeze from the dark hall settle on Munday’s shoulders. He shuddered and leaned towards the fire and warmed himself.
There were his fires, but still dark and cold parts of the house remained. Now they were in a place where doors were always kept shut; a house was not an open sunlit breezy place, but many separate closed rooms, one or two of suffocating smallness, and each with its own smell and temperature and purpose. Already the house had doubtful comers, the alarmingly cluttered box room where they put their empty suitcases, the drafty unlighted stairs with its protruding candle-holders on the walls, and the several doors which swung unaided by a hand and surprised him when their iron latches clanked; the dark back hall where there were so many rubber boots and raincoats and walking sticks—he’d find a light for it, but who did all that clobber belong to? He could not be certain they were alone. The unfamiliarly early darkness made him doubtful, or the old men whose suggestion of ghosts he had mocked, or maybe he was tired. It was not fear but doubt; and he told himself his heart was sick and half-broken. He would not admit superstition—he had seen too much of that. Emma had said he was restless, he was always that in new places. He felt stupid; something he had known since childhood he had now forgotten, and he believed the reminder of this knowledge, something to animate the thought that slumbered on a ledge in his mind—but it lay hidden—was in this house.
Just like the rat. That hurrying rat in the African bungalow, at the Yellow Fever Camp. Seeing it enter the kitchen he had stamped, and the rat had scuttled into the pantry. Munday had yelled for the cook and together they cornered it. But the terrified thing had leaped at his legs, and fear made Munday recoil when he should have kicked out. Then the rat was past him, in the hall, under the bookcase, in the bedroom, the study, cowering and scampering wildly when it was threatened with the cook’s broom. Munday was separated from the cook; the rat shot along the passage, skidding on the waxed floor, and into the living room. The cook shrieked, and when Munday entered the room the cook told him the rat had run into the garden. But Munday had not seen it go, and long after, even on the sunniest day, he could not make himself believe that the rat had gone as the cook said. He smelled (—it smelled of sex, musky and genital—and he heard at the level of the floor the rat hurrying through the bungalow with a querulous panic, clawing with its forepaws, rising up and nibbling with its yellow teeth. He had not told Emma his fear, but he had often lain awake at night and listened to the sounds near his bed.
So the sense of a substantial shadow in the house remained with him, in spite of the fires and the warmth. He sat massaging his knees like a man who has not arrived at his destination but is only stopping in a place too unfamiliar to afford him the rest he expected, who may get up at any moment and move out But he stayed where he was.
The nine crates arrived tfiat evening. The driver, his eyes bright from driving in the dark, said he had got lost in the country lanes.
“You should use a map,” said Munday.
“I do,” said the driver. “You’re not on it.” The crates were not large; some were put in the shed unopened, the rest in the house. The driver used his crowbar to open the heavier ones, and when he had finished Munday saw him to his truck. The man looked around, like someone caught in a wilderness, and said, “Now how the hell do I get out of here?”
Munday showed him the way.
In the living room, unwrapping the taped parcels of artifacts (weapons, tools, and ornaments; but all resembling each other), he constantly heard sounds in the kitchen. Though he knew Emma was making tea he stopped what he was doing and wondered if there were someone with her only he could see. He considered warning her of th
e danger, but checked himself and went on unpacking, because if it was a danger it was one to which he could not assign a name.
“I didn’t realize we had collected so much junk,” said Emma. She entered the living room carrying a tray and had that erect stateliness of the tray-bearer. She held a teapot, cups and saucers, a milk jug, a plate of sandwiches, and a small cheese board. She put the tray on a footstool in front of the fire and began preparing the tea things, arranging the plates, pouring the milk.
Munday was handling a short knobbed club. He tested it, wagging it back and forth. He said, “I’d be lost without my collection.”
He looked fondly over the objects he had already unwrapped, the neatly labeled knives, the clay pots, the digging sticks, the beaded necklaces. “They’ve stopped making clubs like this,” he said. The old fool in the decayed coat at The Yew Tree, with his treasured clasp knife: had he said that? Something like it. “I feel very lucky to have these things.”
“The necklace there,” said Emma. “We made ones like that when I was a Girl Guide.”
Munday said, “That’s the sort of remark—”
“No,” she went on, “they don’t make clubs like that anymore. They don’t have to. Why make a club when you can steal the window bars from an Indian shop and use those to beat—”
“You’re being rather a bore,” said Munday, still admiring the club. “This was carved from a single piece of wood—a mangrove root.”
“Damn, I’ve forgotten the sugar.”
“I’ll get it.”
Munday rose and went into the dark hall and came face to face with a man in black. His heart wrenched and a searing bulb of pain stung him with fire and threatened to burst through his chest. He stepped back into the lighted living room and said with a stammerer’s effort, “Do you always walk into people’s houses without knocking?”
The man was calm; there was a smile on his pink face. He said, “Not if I know they’re carrying weapons,” and he pointed to the club Munday held tightly in his hand.
