by Paul Theroux
In the hall, that little space, there had been a fusty odor from the net curtains and the window nailed shut and the rising damp that soaked the walls. He had breathed the bad air and it had made him more anxious by gagging him. He was off balance, he felt surrounded by a single man, and he was startled bumping into the man and meeting that broad warm face in his own hall. But Munday could not manage his fear, aAd what the stranger saw was a very angry man backing into the middle of a great pile of shredded paper and ripped cartons and wrappings and an assortment of thick objects of wood and stone. They were worn and oddly-shaped and scratched with feeble tracings of decoration, crude patterns, spirals, crosses and dots which attracted his eye but were too simple to engage it. Munday held his heavy club halfraised and Emma, behind him, a saucer with an unsteady tea cup rattling on it; she warned him about his heart in a pleading voice, “—Getting upset won’t do you any good at all, Alfred.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” the man said over Munday’s stammered complaint, and he smiled at Emma and shrugged as if to indicate that Munday was a slight embarrassment to them both.
“You damn well should be,” said Munday. The man in black clutching a wet hat in his hands had surprised him, but it was not what Munday feared or expected, so even the considerable ache of the shock he had just had gave him no relief: now he was no
leg's afraid and he was angered by this false alarm, an interruption of his older fear.
“Bob Crawshaw,” the man said and put out his hand. “I’m vicar up at St. Alban’s. I was just passing—”
“Will you have some tea, Vicar?” Emma said. She had risen, not as the vicar thought, to offer him the cup, but to be in a position to reach over and steady her husband, who had looked a moment earlier as if he was about to assault the man.
“That would be lovely,” said the vicar. He looked rescued. He stepped past Munday and took a long stride over the discarded packing material to accept the cup from Emma. He began stirring the spoon very fast and looking from husband to wife. With the offer of tea, order was established, and holding the cup in his hand the vicar felt he could cope.
“I’m not a well man,” said Munday.
“Sorry to hear that,” said the vicar.
“And I’m astonished that someone like you . . .” Munday began, his eyes bulging.
“Alfred, the sugar,” Emma said firmly. “Please.” Munday left the room.
“I think you gave him a turn,” Emma said. “But I really must apologize for him.”
“He’s quite correct,” said the vicar, “and I’m completely in the wrong. I don’t blame him a bit. I should know better.”
“He can sound awfully offensive—”
“No, no, he’s absolutely right,” said the vicar, insisting, and dismissing Emma’s apology. “But you see I used to visit the previous tenants and I know that knocker on the kitchen door can’t be heard from here. It’s such a confusing house. So when I saw your living-room light on—”
Munday, looking calmer and not carrying the club, returned to the room with the sugar bowl, and setting the spoon toward the vicar, offered it. He said in a subdued voice, “You gave me a turn.”
“Two for me, please. Thanks so much.” The vicar had smiled at Munday’s remark, a repetition of his wife’s. It was a habit of their marriage; they had reached that point of common agreement where language was shared and experience reported in identical words. Though they were unaware of it, they disputed their similarity using the same idioms, the speech— like a local dialect—that their marriage and their years in the bush had taught them.
“I was just telling Mrs. Munday that I used to visit the previous tenants, and I know that brass knocker on the kitchen door—”
He continued speaking. The information disturbed Munday: he wished he had not heard previous tenants; it gave the house the flavorless character of an inn, a shelter where occasional people, birds of passage, came and went, indistinguishable in the brevity of their stay. And the mystery of the house, the ghosts of other occupants, sensations hinted at by the old men at The Yew Tree that Munday had begun to savor, were diminished. Two opposing feelings occurred to him: a curiosity about the fate of the previous tenants, a dread that the vicar might tell him. But especially he disliked being associated with them or any other visitor (the choice of cider had marked him at the pub) and he was disappointed by all the vicar’s news—it had the effect of withholding the house from him by making him and his wife temporary guests, and it insulted his arrival home.
Munday leaned against the bookshelves which covered the wall to the right of the chimney. On the facing wall there was a mirror and a color print of the Annigoni portrait of the Queen; he mocked it and remembered the Omukama’s portrait that hung in the camp bungalow, the leathery face of the aged king with the blank eyes whom Alec, a tea-planter friend of Munday in Fort Portal, had described as looking like a crapulous gorilla. Munday had made no comment; the African District Commissioner had insisted he hang it, and later he had been invited to the Omukama’s palace. (“Palace!” he had whispered to Emma; it was new, unswept, looked like a supermarket, and it smelled of dogs and cooking bananas.)
Emma said, “But how marvelous!”
Munday tried to read the spines of the books. He saw Walter Scott, Sketches by Boz, Hammond Innes and Agatha Christie, a child’s history of England, Readers Union in uniform bindings, some thick paperbacks with unfamiliar titles, probably American, Bibles in two sizes, church pamphlets, a school atlas, a row of Penguins, a woman’s annual, a guide to wildflowers. He had seen identical libraries in a dozen East African hotels and rest houses. Their condition was identical, too; they were unused, and unused books rotted and stayed moribund in their uniquely vile dust. Beside the shelf there was a patch on the wall, sweating paint, and this rising damp had made a trickle of water on the stone floor.
“—galloped like this through the back pasture there,” said the vicar. He put his tea cup down and imitated a horseman, his jowls shaking. His chirpy prattle and exaggerated friendliness was a result of being met by Munday and made uncomfortable by the challenge. Munday was behind him, not saying a word, but he saw how hard the vicar was trying.
The vicar went on to explain the rooms, the experiences of the other tenants with that inefficient knocker, and he finished, “It’s a very old place, you know. This room we’re in is Seventeenth Century, the back section and kitchen are Eighteenth, and the lavatory—well, that’s modem of course!”
Emma laughed, Munday stared—he objected to being told about his house. If it had secrets he wanted them to be his, to discover them for himself. He slid a book out—What Katy Did—pushed it back and noticed how low the ceiling was. Small men had built the house, laborers dwarfed by vast clouds and lit by a pearly glow from the sea; he saw them working in the rain, gathering stones in heavy wheelbarrows to claim a comer of the landscape. Then they had gone back to their cottages and seen other people inhabit the house, perhaps people from far away. Munday was not of the village; and Emma, in spite of her sentiment, and the vicar—his accent said it—neither were they. But the vicar was proprietorial; he wouldn’t admit what Munday had already reluctantly acknowledged: that they were all trespassers.
“Is it a big parish?” Emma asked.
“Quite,” said the vicar. “Marshwood Vale on the west and the Beaminster road on the east. We go straight up to Broadwindsor. I have a church there as well. But don’t be misled by the size—attendance is very poor. We’re trying to raise money for a new church hall. Hopeless!” he said, and he laughed.
“Maybe God intends that as a sort of—”
“Alfred.”
“I say,” said the vicar. His eye strayed over the objects on the floor. He knelt and picked up a short knife, the size and shape of a grapefruit knife, with a rusty hammered blade. “That’s an interesting little chap,” he said. “What does one do with that?”
“Ceremonial knife,” said Munday. “Used in puberty rites.” His gaze
caught the vicar’s. He said with a half-smile, “Circumcisions.”
The vicar squinted at it, holding it gingerly with his fingertips. He shook his head slowly.
Munday said, “That particular one’s seen a lot of service.”
“Absolutely fascinating,” said the vicar. He stooped and put the small knife on the floor near others that resembled it. He grinned at Emma. The vicar had a threadbare and slightly seedy aspect which made him seem somehow kindly; the seams of his black suit were worn shiny, his trouser cuffs were spattered with mud and his heavy shoes had been polished so often and were so old they were cracked, and scales of leather bristled where they flexed.
“It was a gift from a village headman,” said Munday.
The vicar nodded at the little knife.
“Alfred gave him a packet of razor blades in return.”
“Yes, I gave him my razor blades,” said Munday. “Do Africans shave?” asked the vicar. “I don’t think of them as having five-o’clock shadow.”
“For circumcisions,” said Munday, wondering if the vicar’s innocence was a tactful way of allowing his host a chance to say that absurd thing. “He asked for them.”
“Of course,” said the vicar.
“A pity, really. Soon they’ll stop making those knives altogether. They’ll lose the skill. Notice how that blade fits into the handle—and those markings. They’re not random decorations. Each one has a particular social significance.”
“That’s progress, isn’t it?” said the vicar. “Using your Gillette blades for circumcisions, drinking beer out of old soup tins and whatnot. I suppose they’re frightfully keen on evening classes as well?”
Munday thought the vicar might be mocking him. He picked up another object, a fragment of polished wood. A fang of glass—it could have been a spiky shard from a broken bottle—protruded from one end, and this was circled by a fringe of coarse monkey hair.
“And this,” said Munday, “this is what the Sebei people use on girls.”
He offered it to the vicar, but the vicar put his hands behind his back and peered at the object in a pitying way.
“Girls?” he said, and he winced. “I had no idea—”
“They gash the clitoris,” said Munday.
“Goodness.”
“Hurts like the devil,” said Munday, “but it keeps them out of trouble. Blunts the nerve, you see. Sex isn’t much fun after that.”
“Alfred, your tea’s going cold.”
Munday took his cup from the bookshelf and drank with his lips shaped in a little smile; the smile altered, becoming triumphant when he swallowed.
“Last year my wife and I went to Italy,” said the vicar. “Such an interesting place. And you get used to
the food after a bit. They’re not fond of the English, you know—like your Africans, I expect.”
“My Africans—”
“The stories are so horrible,” said the vicar. “The killings, the tribal wars. It’s always in the papers, isn’t it That casual business of taking scalps. I have a friend —we were at Oxford together—he went out there, Ghana, I believe. The stories! Evidently, one of their presidents—this was a few years ago—called himself the Redeemer.’ Now, I ask you!”
“Kwame Nkramah,” Munday said. “But it doesn’t have quite the same meaning in the vernacular.”
“Yes,” said the vicar. “My friend runs a mission in what sounds the most unbelievable place. He’s a delightful man, takes it all in his stride, absolutely devoted to the people. And he’s marvelous about mucking in and seeing tilings get done. Once a year we take up a collection, send him bundles of old clothes, tattered books, and bushels of used postage stamps. I can’t imagine what he does with those stamps! I suppose they like the bright colors.”
Munday had put his tea down. He said, “My Africans didn’t take any scalps.”
“Not white scalps,” said Emma to the vicar.
“Not any,” said Munday.
“The vicar—”
“Call me Bob, please.”
“Very well, then. Bob was speaking figuratively, I’m sure.” She said, “They can be very nasty. They’re nasty to Indians and nasty to each other. Alfred says he likes them but sometimes I think he doesn’t like them any more than I do, and I don’t like them at all. They’re cruel and silly and they’re so ugly their faces scare you.”
“They speak figuratively, too,” said Munday. “And there were times when I wouldn’t have blamed them a bit for taking the odd missionary scalp.”
“He doesn’t really mean that,” said Emma.
“I’m sure your friend in Ghana is an angel,” said Munday. “But missionaries can be so arrogant. So damned righteous and discouraging. I’ve always felt there’s something fundamentally subversive about a mission—the vicarage, the church, vespers, the Land Rover, and those beautiful English children playing croquet on their patch of lawn while the village kids gape at them through the fence.”
“That used to happen to my children,” said the vicar, “when I had a parish in Gillingham!”
“I should have warned you, vicar,” said Emma. “Alfred’s an anthropologist.”
“So I gathered.”
“One never hears a good word about missionaries from them. Alfred won’t tell you this but our nearest hospital was run by Catholic priests—White Fathers. That’s where our friend here used to go when he was poorly.”
“That doctor was about as pious as I am,” said Munday. “An Irishman. Dowle. Drank like a fish. Father Tom, they called him. He was a cunning devil, and he had the usual prejudices—a regular old quack. But he was first-class at curing dysentery. ‘Bug in your bowel, eh?’ he’d say. ‘Take some of the muck, then. And he’d hand me a bottle of gray liquid. Did the trick practically overnight.” Munday smiled. “We used to call it Father Tom’s Cement.”
“Sounds jolly useful.”
Munday said, “Dowle sent me home. Said I had a dicky heart.”
“Don’t start,” said Emma.
“I imagine you boiled your water?” said the vicar. “We boiled our water,” said Munday.
“And we had one of these filters,” said Emma, outlining the shape of the container with her hands.
The vicar straightened up and jerked his lapels. “I’m going to let you good people have your dinner.” Emma rose from the chair. “Don’t rush off,” she said. “We’ve just had tea.”
“I’ll come again. I’d love to hear all your stories,” said the vicar. He turned to Munday and said, “I can’t wait for your book.”
“Book?”
“The one you mentioned in your letter to The Times”
“Oh, that,” said Munday.
“I was intrigued by your letter,” said the vicar. “Really, it held me.”
“Just dashed it off,” said Munday. “Wanted to set the record straight. Glad you liked it.”
“Yes, I did,” said the vicar: “Actually, Mr. Awdry put me on to it. And that’s why I sneaked in here tonight. Once a month we have a sort of educational do at the church, a film-show or a talk, refreshments beforehand. It’s partly to get people together in some kind of fellowship. We have so many new people in the village, like yourselves. We charge a small admission—that goes toward the new hall and the fuel bill. Last month we had a lecture on Hardy.”
“How appropriate!” said Emma.
“Chap came over from Drimpton. He’d actually met Hardy—acted in the stage version of Tess, though I’d no idea there was such a play. It was fascinating.”
“It sounds fascinating,” said Emma.
“And you want me to do one of these talks?”
“I was hoping you’d be December. I’d be very pleased if you would. Perhaps talk about some of your experiences. Your travels.”
“I never saw it as travel,” said Munday. “For me it was residence. Travel bores me—it constipates me. All those bad meals. Surly staff. Strange beds.”
“Your residence then,” said the vicar. “That wo
uld be perfect Have you any slides or pictures? They’d be most appreciated.”
“Very little of it’s unpacked, I’m afraid. You understand we’ve just moved in.”
“Absolutely,” said the vicar. “We won’t make any firm dates. But if you agree in principle I can announce it in the church bulletin.”
“Go ahead,” said Emma, urging Munday to agree. “All right,” said Munday. It was not what he had planned, the learned society, the paper read to scholars at the Institute of African Studies. It ridiculed that image of himself journeying to London or' Oxford to deliver a lecture.
“Thanks very much,” said the vicar. “And now I will let you good people have your dinner!”
“I’ll see you to your car,” said Munday.
“Don’t bother,” said the vicar. “I know my way out I’ve been here dozens of times.”
When the vicar’s car drove past the window, Munday said, “Dozens of times. That reminds me—”
“You embarrassed me,” said Emma. “You were horrid to him. That poor man—he was so uncomfortable.”
“It’s like a sickroom in a hospital. Hundreds of people have been in it. The vicar knows it well, that room, all the others who’ve died in your bed. He knows something you don’t.”
“You’ve been so morbid lately.”
“I have reason to be,” said Munday. “Emma, my heart.”
“But you go on about it.”
“So would you.”
“No,” she said. “I’d try not to think about it.”
“People come here to die,” said Munday. “New people in the village. Did you hear him? He means retired people—‘like yourselves.' ”
“I’ll start the dinner.”
“Emma—” There was something more Munday wanted to say; he had the will and he opened his mouth, but the words eluded him, the thought had been wiped from his mind. He struggled dumbly with what he recognized as stupidity; his mind wouldn’t move. He said, “Nothing. I’ll see to this unpacking.”
Just before they sat down to eat, Emma said, “Do take that carton of rubbish outside.”
