by Paul Theroux
“It can wait,” said Munday.
“No,” said Emma. “I want you to do it now.” She opened the door for him, and a damp draft rolled into the kitchen.
“I’d rather not go outside just now.”
“For my sake,” Emma said in a tremulous voice.
“You’re not going to cry,” said Munday.
“Alfred, please”
“As you wish,” he said.
The rain had stopped. He put the carton in the shed and shut the door, and he had just started back to the house when he heard an owl call him. It was a low distinct hoot, in bursts, like a bewildered child mispronouncing a curse in the dark. He went to it, it drew him through the yard. He couldn’t see the owl; it stopped; it began again, the clear notes reaching Munday and making him feel as if the hidden bird was speaking directly to his fear.
Munday walked into the road; the hoots ceased. He imagined the plump thing roosting above him in the row of oaks he had seen that morning. He could see their outer branches and the lower part of the trunks illuminated by the light from the windows of the house. A few steps down the road and he was in darkness; he smelled the wet trees and now in the black he heard them dripping—that dripping, it was fast, from many branches, a crackling patter on the dead leaves and on the road, a kind of sprinkling which went on and on, the rapidity insisting he remember. He was afraid; his fear was new, and the fear made his thoughts formal. He thought: There is no jungle as strange as this. He thought: When have I ever been in jungle? He admitted he never had, there was none. He had driven through rain-forest and he had camped in low bush with guides and porters; he had marveled at the pathless forest that stretched behind the Yellow Fever Camp. In the daytime, sun flashed on its wetness; at night it was loud with the scrapings of locusts, but not one low owl and all those quickly dripping trees. There, he had been prepared to endure remoteness, but here he was surprised seeing no human trace, no sign of habitation except lights so distant and small they were like an answer to the mist-shrouded sky with its meager scattering of stars. There was no moon or wind, only that pattering on the pillows of leaves and a rich vegetable smell.
He looked back and saw the windows of the cottage, shining yellow, lighting their own peeling sills and rhomboids on the road and patches of hedge. He smelled the acrid coal-smoke but couldn’t make out the chimneys. Apart from the owl squeezing out those clear hooting notes, and the falling drops from the tree branches, everything was still—a stillness he was unused to. He had forgotten that; had it always been like that? He heard his feet and his sigh, and anxiety gripped him by the throat. He was aware of having looked for someone and found no one, only the hiding dark and the sea-mist at the windows and the stillness, all suggesting their opposites: the bright clamor of a surprise, like a phantom huntsman waiting on a horse in the hills that lay in that blackness, who chose not to show himself. He had come back for that.
He tried to tell Emma his fear. As he spoke he felt it all retreating on his tongue.
“Oh, I once heard an owl,” she said. She was tasting the soup. “I once heard an owl in London.”
6
There was no relief the next day. They woke to the muffled pinking of the electric heater, to a motorbike passing under the window like a dying bee slowly losing its buzz, and they were in darkness so complete the bedknobs at their feet were impossible to see. Emma was up first, as always; she cooked breakfast, which they ate together, but it was still so dark at the windows they ate hurriedly, as if it were an extra undeserved meal. Dawn came soundlessly, more quickly than they expected and without warning, suddenly silvering the windows, clarifying and giving shadows to the layered twists in the mass of low clouds and showing the wet road and the shining slates of the shed. Some of the trees were full of trembling leaves, a copper beech near the shed, the laurel at the edge of the courtyard, the holly tree out back. The rest were bare, or nearly so, and leafless their branches seemed especially crooked; but their high trunks were thick with bushy bandages of ivy. Emma saw them and said, “They look as if they’re wearing green jerseys.”
Far off, mist dimmed the landscape and made the woods in the depressions of the rolling hflls into level rows, flat cutouts of trees, one behind the other, lighter and lighter, and at the greatest distance, white on the white horizon. Munday went from window to window, cursing the shadowy rooms and low ceilings; he stoked the fires and chewed the unfamiliar air and he muttered for sun. But it continued overcast, they ate their lunch of beef stew and bread in a flecked twilight that strained their eyes. In this poor light all their clocks seemed wrong—“What’s the right time?” Munday asked continually, sighing at Emma’s replies— and the lamps of the house burned orange throughout the day.
Unpacking the crates became a strenuous routine, but they welcomed the activity for the fatigue it gave them, and were calm with their regulated days. They noticed how the African artifacts lent their odor to the study, a dusty pungency of tropical grass and leaves, a slight spice of wood, and even a hint of the bitter smell of Africans—the sweat they had left on their tools. It consoled Munday and then it saddened him. He said little to Emma. She was always cooking or sweeping or leaning at the sink. “Playing house again?” he said; she didn’t reply. He had never seen her so occupied. The African kitchen had always been the province of the cook. Munday had felt uncomfortable in it; the order of things was the cook’s, who stood and worked in his tom laceless sneakers. Emma had left the cook alone. But here, Munday saw, their meals were like a ritual of settlement, a tribal ceremony involving food and certain actions which helped them to possess more and more of the house. Using the kitchen, which was the warmest room, made it their own; and the living room where they read and unpacked was theirs. But the extra bedrooms, the passages, the box room, the chilly stairs—so much of the house did not belong to them.
Then there were no more cases to unpack and their days were empty; Munday was restless and Emma worked with her dishmop and broom. They tried new routines, fumbling like people newly idle, to justify the passing of days. One afternoon, on an impulse, Munday bought a second-hand Mini; it was fire-engine red, and when Munday drove it back to the house to show Emma he said, “I’ve always wanted a car that color.” That night they drove to Lyme Regis, but on the way back Emma said, “You can wash it on Sunday mornings,” and Munday lost his temper. For several days they did not use the car. They stayed in, taking longer and longer to prepare the food, they ate it swiftly, in silence, and did the dishes meticulously, putting every plate and fork away. Munday made coffee after lunch and dinner, grinding the beans he bought from Pines, warming the milk, setting out the Demerara sugar. When the weather improved they went for walks, to force exhaustion on themselves and work up an appetite. They went to bed early and always got up in the dark and made breakfast in front of the black windows. But still the house was not theirs and they were like people on vacation, or visitors, or—but only Munday felt this—retired people trying to be busy in a secluded comer of the country. They spoke distractedly, their voices sounding older and fussier, reporting their thoughts and not expecting replies.
“We eat too much,” Emma said. And: “I must see about getting some new curtains.”
Munday said, “I can’t work in this light.”
Emma said, “There goes our friend,” speaking of a man in gaiters and a tweed cap who always passed the window at noon, walking his dog.
They both said, “Why am I so tired?”
Munday said, “I should do something about that talk at the church.”
Emma said, “We must have the vicar back.”
They discussed the vicar, and with the perspective of a week, that evening visit which at the time had seemed such an intrusion took on the character of an important event. Believing it might be typical, they prepared themselves for something similar to occur, but nothing did, no one dropped in, and so the vicar’s call came to be special, a way of measuring time, four days since the visit, then five and six,
like a historical date in a nonliterate culture. They began conversations, “He said—,” and didn’t need to name him. Munday spoke in a low voice. He believed they had a listener, that third presence whose traces were everywhere but impossible to name. He looked for it and he turned on lights in dark rooms (reaching around the doorway into the darkness for the light switch) expecting to see it seated, perhaps leaning in an accusatory posture, to scare him and make him sorry. He bit his lips with that expectation, and when he was alone he made faces.
“I think I’ll do a little work,” he said. He didn’t say write. He-didn’t write. He sat in his study, turning over the artifacts and sketching them and feeling a great pressure on the front of his head.
One day, just at sundown, he went for a walk alone. On the way back he stopped in at The Yew Tree and bought the bottle of amontillado. He spent more than he planned because he refused the cheaper South African variety Mr. Flack recommended. The refusal, the mention of South Africa, gave Mr. Flack an opportunity to add more detail to his Capetown story, how he had stayed drunk on brandy for a week and how he had seen (he explained this closely to Munday) a black woman, “black as Newgy’s knocker," with a load of wood on her head walking along a road suckling her child, “as if it was the most natural thing in the world.”
While Mr. Flack told the story Munday nodded and watched Mrs. Flack kneeling at the fireplace with a coal hod and crumpled newspapers and bits of wood. Her hands were sooty, her back small and bent; she wore one of her husband’s jackets, a long apron, and high rubber boots, and she knelt in a way that allowed her to sit on her heels.
Munday offered to help her—it was one way of silencing Flack—but she said, “No, you’ll just get as filthy as me. Look.” She showed her black hands and made a horrible comic face, squashing her lips together until her toothless gums met. She said, “There’s no proper draft. We’re in a perpetual whirlwind."
Hosmer, who was drinking by the window, put his glass down and without a word took the center page from the Daily Telegraph on the bar and spread it and held it against the fireplace, blocking the opening. Inside a minute the fire flared at the bottom and soon lighted the back of the newsprint. Munday could see the fire growing through the paper. Then Hosmer took the paper away and folded it and creased it.
“I was going to do that,” said Mrs. Flack.
“Was ee?” said Hosmer. He laughed and took his seat.
They talked about fires, and Munday found himself adding to the conversation. As soon as he began speaking the others fell silent and became attentive. He said how he had gone into the cold damp house and started his own fires to drive out the chill, and how he had gone outside later to see the smoke curling from the chimneys.
He believed he had awed them, but Hosmer turned to Mr. Flack and, as if continuing a story Munday’s arrival had interrupted, said, “She were down by the river with her dogs, lying there on the grass, her legs open like this. That’s what Sam said. He walked by and looked up her dress and the dogs barked at him.”
“Disgusting,” said Mr. Flack.
The doorbell jangled. A man entered, about Mun-day’s own age, dressed in a heavy jacket and corduroy trousers and thick-soled shoes.
“The usual?” said Mr. Flack.
Munday, gathering up his sherry and his change from the bar, said hello.
“What will you have?” the man said to Munday. Munday was confused. He hesitated, then said, “A half of bitter.”
“Have a whisky,” said the man. “Give him a whisky, Bill.”
“A beer’s fine,” said Munday, and when he had it in his hand he said, “Cheers.”
The man said, “To your very good health,” and drank. Then he said, “You all moved in?”
“Just about,” said Munday.
“I had a moving job last month,” said the man. “Over Shaftesbury way.”
“I take it you’re in the transport business,” said Munday.
“I drive,” said the man. He mentioned the name of his employer and said, “He’s a good guv’nor.”
“When he ain’t got a drink in him,” said Hosmer. “A tickle of whisky and he’s drunk as a hand-cart.” Mr. Flack said, “Guess who Sam saw by the river exposing herself.”
But the man was looking at Munday. He said, “You like it here?”
“Very much,” said Munday.
“We’ll have you and your missus over some time,” said the man.
How dare you, Munday thought. He said, “Oh, will you?”
He was furious at the presumption in the driver’s vagueness; it was not an invitation, but a pronouncement of a possibility, with the assurance that Munday would come with Emma when the driver bade them.
The driver would never have said that to his employer. He thought: Supper at the driver’s cottage, a talk at the church hall; but he hid his anger and said, “Actually, we’re pretty busy at the moment seeing old friends.” The bottle was under his arm. “And we’ll be spending quite a bit of time in London.”
There was worse, but not from the driver. Munday had said good night and was at the door. There was a trampling of feet and a young man threw the door open. Munday faced him; he had long hair, red cheeks, and a bushy beard and wore a woolen checkered shirt. The hair and beard gave him the appearance of a Biblical figure. He smiled at Munday and said, “Evening, maister,” and looked past him and greeted the others.
“Excuse me,” said Munday and moved sideways. But the young man blocked the door.
“You be Doctor Munday?” he asked politely.
“That’s right. And I’m on my way home.”
“Out in the tractor today,” the young man said, still blocking the door, and raising his voice, “and wasn’t she making a howling! Pugger, I says, and throws up them flaps on her bonnet. Got my arm inside her and the wind picked up and blowed the bloody flaps down. Here, look.”
He rolled up his right sleeve with care and showed Munday a long cut, opened and roughened on his forearm, a rip with the appearance and texture of the burst part of a cooked sausage. It was uncovered and raw and edged with black pepper-flakes of dried blood, and part of it was smeared with bubbly yellow ointment.
He offered the wound to Munday and said, “What have you got for him, Doctor?” Then he cried, “Don’t he hurt!”
“I can’t help you,” said Munday.
“Now hold on there—”
“I’m not that kind of doctor.”
“I thought there were only one kind,” said the young man, smiling as Munday pulled at the doorhandle.
Munday was nearly out the door; a thought came to him, and he said stiffly to the young man who had started toward the fire and whose back was to him, “No, as a matter of fact, there are as many varieties of doctor as there are varieties of farm laborer—perhaps more. Good night.”
He walked angrily away from The Yew Tree, past the pillar box at the cross roads and the lighted telephone booth. The lights in the pub window illuminated the road, but the road curved off to the right and when Munday turned and lost the lights he stumbled, peering into the darkness for the house lights and trying to stay in the center of the road. The perfect darkness clasped his body and slowed him. What he feared most was meeting someone who would startle him, maybe injure him, by slamming against him in the dark. He felt there was someone walking near him, just in front of him, in the dark, and as always the pinching was in his heart, hurting his blood. A car appeared—the mild glow and engine noise, then the blinding lights and the terrifying rush of wind and metal sweeping past him, forcing him to lean against the bank. The car left him dazed in an even more confusing darkness. He plodded on, taking elderly steps, and then he saw the lighted windows of the house and was guided by them. But he knew he would remember that stretch where the road curved, the lights of The Yew Tree lost at one end, the house lights lost at the other, the elbow in the road, marked by oaks, completely dark. He knew he would always hesitate before walking down it at night, and the experience came
to represent so much of his arrival home, the rediscovery of old fears, aimlessness he hadn’t bargained for, and a feeling of age and loss he mocked in a way that seemed to make his mockery an expression of greater fear.
“I hate this place,” he said, stepping into the kitchen. There was no reply. He called, “Emma?”
“In here.” Her voice was weak, but Munday was reassured by it. She was in the living room, stretched out on a chair, her hand over her eyes. She said, “I don’t know what came over me. I had to sit down.”
“Have a glass of sherry,” said Munday. He peeled the plastic from the bottle top. “I’m going to have one myself and then ring the vicar about that talk.”
“Didn’t you say Silvano was coming down one weekend from London?”
“Yes,” said Munday. “One weekend.”
“Give your talk then. You could exhibit him—they might never have seen a real African before.”
“I’m not in the mood for that.”
“Bad joke, I suppose,” said Emma. “I’m feeling awful, I must say.”
“But Til show him around, you bet I will. And the first place I take him will be The Yew Tree. I want to see what these local people have to say for themselves when Silvano walks in. You know how very English he is.”
“They’ll laugh at him,” said Emma. “They’ll laugh at you, too. That myth about these African students being frightfully English, with their silly faces and their five-syllable names—as if Englishness were simply a case of smoking a pipe and wearing a suit and subscribing to the New Statesman and saying ‘bloody.’ And taking taxis—they all take taxis. Who pays for it all? English people, of course, to flatter themselves that they’re being imitated. I remember Silvano, with that book he used to carry around the village. How he used to struggle so to pronounce the simple English word ‘situation. How did he say it? ‘Stoowation,’ something like that.”
“You’re ranting,” said Munday. “You always rant when you’re under the weather.”
