by Paul Theroux
Once, looking through the back pages of The Times, Munday said, “There’s a job going in Algiers. Looks interesting. But the salary’s quoted in dinars ”
Emma sighed. “What about your book?”
“I could work on it in the mornings,” he said. “Do a little teaching in the afternoons.”
“You could do that here.” She was polishing the brass fire tongs; she didn’t look up.
He said, “I think we need someone around to help you out.”
“You don’t think I’m capable of doing the housework?”
“I hate to see you looking so tired at the end of the day,” he said. Emma went on polishing. He said, “I’ll bet there are lots of people in the village who’d be glad of a chance to earn a few pounds.”
The advertisement in the Bridport paper, a weekly, appeared that Friday. They had a dozen phone calls, most of them preceded by rapid pips, inquiring whether child-minding or cooking was involved. Emma explained the duties and invited all the callers for interviews. But only three women came. The first was old and inquisitive and said she had enjoyed Munday’s talk at the church hall. She was not so much interested in the job, she said, as eager to meet someone who’d seen a bit of the world. She warned Emma to be careful whom she hired for the job; there were so many layabouts in the village and they were so undependable. She told a story about one: Munday had heard it before, told by one of Alec’s cronies of a Bwamba herdsman he had employed. She said the only way to get things done was to do them yourself. She had learned that in Bromley, which was her home until her husband had retired. Before she left she sold Emma a raffle ticket for the Christmas Draw.
The next woman, Mrs. Branch, was young. She came with her sister-in-law who, confusingly, did most of the talking, asked all the questions and stated the fee; it became clear to Munday after some while that it was not she who was applying for the job, but the big worried girl with her, who sat twisting her handbag in her lap and looking anxiously around the kitchen. They left abruptly, and from the window Munday saw them walking down the road, deep in conversation.
It was dark when Mrs. Seaton came. Munday was at The Yew Tree, borrowing a hoe-shaped poker for cleaning the soot and dust from the Rayburn. Emma told him what had happened. She had been taken by surprise; there was no warning, no sound of a bus or car. The brass knocker sounded and Mrs. Seaton was at the door, shaking the wet from her umbrella. In spite of her mysterious arrival she was businesslike and looked capable. She accepted the cup of tea the others had refused and she said she had done similar work for the summer people. It was she who raised the subject of money. And she was candid: her husband was out of work, he was on the dole, they were having trouble making ends meet.
“We’ll be in touch with you,” Emma had said, and the woman left as she had come, stepping into the darkness and the sea-mist that glowed in a drifting nimbus around the ouside lamp.
“She sounds just the ticket,” said Munday, and the next day, which was sunny and cold, the kind of bright cloudless day that seemed to follow a dreary wet one, they walked the half mile into the village to find her and tell her she could begin work immediately.
Bowood House, like The Yew Tree, was not in the village of Four Ashes; with some other cottages —The Thistles, Rose Dene, Ladysmith, and Aleppo —it comprised a nameless hamlet on the village’s fringe. Four Ashes (one of the original trees still stood) had some local fame as a place of great charm, but the charm was all on the main road, Hogshill Street: in the market cross and the several antique shops with plates and prints in the windows; in the chemist’s, White’s, where in his first week Munday had bought a bottle of Friar’s Balsam for his cold; in Watkins’ Bakery, the two tea shops, the sweet shops, all severely old-fashioned; in Pines (“High-Class Groceries & Quality Vegetables”) which displayed in a glass case whole wheels of cheeses, and sold Stilton in stone jars, unusual spices, and freshly ground coffee; in Lloyd’s of Four Ashes, the men’s outfitter: and in the hotel, The White Hart, a former coaching inn, which retained the look of another century in its heavily rendered and whitewashed front, its archway and courtyard and mullioned windows. The church, St. Alban’s, on the crest of Hogshill Street, had a Norman font and some thirteenth-century stonework, and a vast yew tree in the cemetery which spread itself over the deeply pitted gravestones.
But Mrs. Seaton’s house was at the back of the village, in an unexpectedly crowded settlement of new and old terrace houses and cottages—the old ones leaning into the narrow street. There was a tiny pub, with a swinging sign, “The Eight Bells,” on one corner, and a low block of new council flats stood at the end of the street, a dead end, next to a coal yard.
“I had no idea the village was this big,” Emma said. She saw another street, packed with houses, running off Mrs. Seaton’s, and like Mrs. Seaton’s hidden from the main road.
“Funny little place,” said Munday. He knocked on the scarred door.
A boy of about ten opened the door. He wore an undershirt and pajama bottoms. He stared at Munday.
“Hello,” said Munday. “We’re looking for Mrs. Seaton.”
The boy shook his head. “Not here,” he said softly, and started to close the door.
“Hold on,” said Munday. “When will she be back?”
“She don’t live here.”
“Where does she live?”
Again the boy shook his head.
“What’s your name?” Munday asked.
“Peter Tuck.”
“Is your mother at home?”
The boy nodded, jerking his head forward.
“Tell her I’d like to have a word with her.”
The boy shut the door.
Munday whispered to Emma, “I think he’s a bit simple.”
The door opened. A middle-aged woman stood there with a baby on her hip. The woman’s fatigue looked like suspicion. The baby plucked at a button on her dress.
“Mrs. Tuck?”
“Yes.” She lifted the child and held it tightly to her shoulder, shielding herself with it.
“We’re looking for a Mrs. Seaton,” Munday said. “We were told she was at this address, and—”
“Over there,” said the woman. She pointed across the street at a house with a green door.
“Thanks very much,” said Munday. “We must have misheard the number.”
“Welcome,” said the woman, and shut the door. Munday was knocking on the green door when Emma said, “I didn’t mishear the number—she wrote it down. Look.” The penciled address was distinct on the scrap of paper.
An old lady answered the door. “What do you want?” she asked.
Munday told her.
“I’m Mrs. Seaton,” said the woman. She wore a frayed sweater—it was buttoned to her neck—and she carried a large wooden spoon.
“Perhaps a relative of yours,” said Munday. “Your son’s wife? You’re not the woman we’re looking for.”
“My children are dead. There’s only Sam.”
Munday laughed, but without pleasure. He said, “This is all very confusing.”
The woman looked closely at Munday. She said, “Are you from the Water Board?”
“No,” said Munday. He explained his errand and showed the woman the scrap of paper with the address written on it.
She said, “That’s over there.”
“They sent us over here.”
“I’m sorry,” said the woman. There was a cry from within the cottage, an old man’s voice cracking with impatience. The woman said to Munday, “Sam.”
“Is there any other family by the name of Seaton in the village?”
“Used to be. This was years ago. But they went to Australia.” The woman was closing the door. “Bye now—mind how you go.”
Munday said, “Are we losing our minds?”
Emma closed her eyes.
“Looks like we’re stuck with that Mrs. Branch,” he said.
Emma called her by her first name, Pauline; Munday called her “Branc
h,” and sometimes “Mrs. B.” She began work the week before Christmas, and her first chores were those hard ones, the neglected windows, the rugs that had lain unbeaten for over a month, the jumble of boots and walking sticks in the back passage that needed sorting out. Mrs. Branch had been nervous in the interview; occupied with housework she was calm, single-minded, but apt to overdo things. She washed the windows in the shed and she beat the hall carpet so hard she broke the rope on which it was suspended. Munday took an interest in her and watched her closely, but his unfriendly humor only bewildered her.
He saw that she carried envelopes of artificial sweetener in her handbag, for the tea she drank in the middle of the morning. She explained that she was dieting.
“Then you won’t want a lunch hour, will you,” said Munday, masking his irony with briskness.
“Sir?” Mrs Branch was uncertain. She gave Emma a slow puzzled look.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” said Emma. “He’s joking.”
“I was wondering,” said Mrs. Branch, and seemed glad to return to scraping soot from the stovepipe.
She had a full round face and grew hot when she worked, and heavy arms, and when she sat she pushed her hands together, hugging herself with her elbows to hide her bulk. She wore high leather boots with her plain clothes, and eye make-up—green lids and black streaks on her plucked eyebrows. She said she was twenty-three, but she had the careworn movements and sighing obedience of a woman twice that age. After a day or two Munday knew her habits. She was noisy, and appeared bewildered when Munday called attention to her noise. She banged pots and slammed doors and dragged chairs back and forth on the hard kitchen floor. She walked through the house setting her feet down as if she were dropping bricks. Munday detested her boots and told Emma that she knew how to go up the wooden stairs on her heels. He said angrily, “Listen to her!” She played the radio and murmured to the music, and when she was vacuuming she turned the radio louder so that she could hear it over the racket of her cleaning. Munday, calling out “Branch!” put a stop to the radio, and he urged her to be quieter. She said, “Yes, Doctor” in the broad accent that Munday associated with ridicule.
But she was useful, she was of the village, a local. She brought them news; of deaths and accidents, of animals she had seen flattened on the road on her way to work. She was their only link with the village, so after the first few days Munday approached her with inquiries, about his stolen dagger and the mysterious Mrs. Seaton—but she said she couldn’t help him. She was cheerful and came each morning with a weather report; her predictions were usually accurate. Apart from her talk of the weather she said very litde.
Munday refused to eat with her, but he still attempted to engage her in conversation. She let it drop that she had been bom in Toller Porcorum. Munday said, “Tell me a little bit about it.” It was from Mrs. Branch that Munday learned the pronunciation of local place-names, Beaminster, Puncknowle, and Eype. And Munday often found himself (holding up a pair of secateurs or an axe from the shed) asking, “What do you call this?” Like the Africans whom he had also questioned in this way, she was at first suspicious of his interest in details of puzzling insignificance.
He asked her how she heated her cottage and was not satisfied until she described every stage of the procedure; why did she butter the end of the bread loaf before she sliced it? How had she met her husband? How long had they courted? Why had they moved to Four Ashes? He led up to intimate questions by telling her of Bwamba customs. “In Africa, he said, “if a pregnant girl marries a man who is not the father of her child she has the option of strangling it at birth.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” she said, but talked more easily of childbirth then. She had two children, she said, and would bring them around one day for Munday to see.
“That won’t be necessary,” said Munday. He went on to tell her of the Bwamba marriage ritual, the groom’s brothers joyously pissing on a stool, the groom placing his hands in it and then the naked bride sitting on his hands; the consummation that was virtually rape, and the brothers’ freedom in sharing the wife later. Simply, he described the patrilineal society. Mrs. Branch was outraged, but talked about her own marriage. Munday established contact with her, and though his questions were intimate his manner was academic, and he maintained an interviewer’s distance. He saw that she enjoyed being questioned about herself; she was discovering with curious surprise that her life, seemingly so dull, was worthy of attention and even important to this stranger.
“We call that a rake,” she said one day in answer to a question of Munday’s. He threw the tool aside and went into the house.
On her fourth day she arrived early, before eight, in the morning darkness that was like night. Coming down to breakfast Munday saw her seated at the kitchen table, tapping a small envelope of sweetener into her coffee.
“Morning, Branch,” he said, but nothing more. He had no conversation at breakfast—breakfast being for him not so much a meal as a way of preparing himself for surroundings his sleepless nights seemed to rearrange: breakfast was over when he was calm. He was slightly antagonized by the girl seated at his table while he was standing. He would not join her. He decided to stall for time by reading the paper. But it was not on the table and not outside the door.
“They haven’t brought my Times ” he said.
“I put it on the chair,” said Emma, who was at the Rayburn, frying Munday’s egg.
“Oh, here it is, Doctor,” said Mrs. Branch. “I were sitting on it.” She handed it to him with an apology.
Munday tossed it on the sideboard. The paper was crushed, rounded to a template the shape of her bottom. He could not read it; he could not bear to put his fingers on it or have it near his food. He went into the living room and sat brooding until he heard the bangings and clatter that told him Mrs. Branch had begun her work.
While she worked, padding busily from room to room on the stocking feet Munday demanded of her, Munday sat at his desk in the study. Mrs. Branch had restored a superficial order to the house and Munday felt some of his solitude return. The balance was Mrs. Branch’s, for it was a house that needed a servant and Munday had come to depend on houseboys; the house was too large to be run by a man and wife; a marriage could not fill it or make it work. Mrs. Branch did more than clean; she aided the marriage, she justified the size of the house—without her he sometimes felt the house would have been insupportable. Emma’s cleaning had made him guilty, Mrs. Branch’s efforts gave him freedom—the attraction of any good servant—and allowed him time to think. Soon, without using his notes he started to write—an introductory paragraph, a page of description, then several. It was the way, he imagined it would be, working by a country window, writing in longhand, the fan-heater whirring at his feet, his privacy secured by watchful women.
But it was a false start. He had groped in his mind for that distant landscape and tried to be faithful to the memory he had kept of those people who lived in the steamy exposed swamps beyond the mountains, in huts they knocked down regularly every two years. Talking with Alec in the Wheatsheaf, he had seen them clearly and remembered so much. He wrote eagerly, his writing flowed; but the eagerness and the speed was deceptive. He reread his pages and the words capsized his heart, for in every word he wrote were the dripping oaks, the gorse and broom around the Black House in Four Ashes, the mood of that particular day when they had been trapped in the cow pasture and seen in the fading light those pathetic boys carrying empty bottles, and later his sight of the two dead dogs under the canvas.
He crumpled the pages and began again to describe Africa; but he described an English day, withered leaves, the pale winter sun. Fear.
This new place, a looming vision, drove out all the others—the African scenes which his familiarity only blurred—and it even banished all his earlier memories of England, everything except childhood fear and childhood loneliness. At his desk he saw a young boy with inky slender fingers reading Malinowski in a South London lib
rary and guiltily looking up from time to time at men holding newspapers fixed to bamboo rods who he believed could read his deepest thoughts and who despised his ambition. The image of that frightened boy stayed in his mind, and it was as if in the forty years that lay between that afternoon and this, nothing had happened. The years had passed but every detail of experience was lost to him. And he was sorry, because the boy in the library who had imagined himself in a canoe in the western Pacific, and living among naked savages, and famous for it, could not know that the years would fall away and not even all the intervening failure was preparation enough for a return to this room and more fears and a sadder image of himself.
He was distressed to see Emma repeating his disappointment in her painting. She worked from sketches she had made in the back garden. Her colors floated; the pictures were indistinct, a child’s primitive vision of earth and sky. Attempting to paint over her mistakes she made the mistakes stand out or else muddied them with greater error. Munday could see that outwardly the Black House resembled the African bungalow: Emma was painting, the servant was cleaning, he was going through his notes. They had never spoken about it, but what had sustained them in Africa was the thought that if they failed there they could always return home. Now they were home, there was nowhere else to go and it seemed there was nothing more for him.
His sense of the fugitive woman in the house grew fainter with Mrs. Branch’s cleanings. He had both regretted and longed for that third presence; he had anticipated the event of her appearing, revealing herself to him and uncovering his memory. He yearned for a great passion, a great idea, a future to complete and release him. He sat in his study, simulating work, to prepare himself for inspiration, believing that his memory was like a dark room which the eye of his imagination would accustom itself to. He labored without motion or progress. He heard sounds and looked up to see the awkward girl at the study door. In irritation he said, “Yes, Branch, what is it?”
