by Paul Theroux
“I’m worried about her,” said Anne.
“Good God,” said Munday, “you talk as if she’s fading away! Emma has survived Africa, and I assure you she’ll survive Four Ashes. She’s really very fit.” But the large paneled room and the hushed listeners gave his overloud denying voice a ring of falsity.
Caroline said, “I’m sure Doctor Munday is right.”
So they resumed, but Emma’s absence made the rest of the meal somber. Anxious, they ate quickly and to the scrape of the knives and forks on the plates they addressed each other inconsequentially, with a whispered respect. From time to time Awdry said, “More wine?” but only Munday accepted it, as if the others thought it unseemly to drink with Emma unwell in the next room. Munday went on eating, but his appetite left him. The rest made a show of dining. The strain was evident. Emma’s absence, so sudden, was an intensification of her presence, which was felt more strongly two rooms away than it had been when she was seated with them at the table. Her chair was empty, she was missing, and their excessively tactful avoidance of commenting on this was like a continual mention of her.
After the dessert of strawberries and clotted cream, which they ate as solemnly as mourners—not cheered by the vicar’s wife saying too clearly “These are awfully good,” inspiring several uncertain responses which diminished down the table, from “Yes, they are” to a grunt of agreement from Jerry Duddle— Mr. Awdry pressed his napkin to his mouth, scraped his chair backward, and said, “Shall we have our coffee in the lounge?” Emma sat on the sofa with a brave half-smile of pain on her face. There was a copy of The Field on her lap; her hands were on the cover, smoothing it. She looked up slowly as the guests entered the room, and Munday at the head of the procession said brusquely, as he might have to a student with a medical excuse, “How are you feeling now?” She shook her head. “I think you’d better take me home.”
“Emma, do you really—”
“Have an early night,” said Awdry. “Do you a world of good.”
“I’m very sorry,” said Emma. “I feel I’ve spoiled your lovely party.”
“Don’t be silly,” said Mrs. Awdry. “I only wish there was something we could do.”
“You’ve been most kind,” said Emma. “Perhaps Alfred could drop me and then come back.”
“Not if you’re sick,” said Munday.
“Do what you think best,” said Awdry, and he helped Emma on with her coat as Janet Strick, squinting in sisterly commiseration, said, “I know just how you feel.” Driving back in the car Emma was silent. Munday said, “There were no paintings on the library ceiling. Branch had that all wrong. Typical! And I saw the gold bell on the table. It was brass.” He pulled up at the Black House and said, “Do you want me to stay?”
“Not if you don’t want to.”
“So you’re leaving it up to me.”
“You’d only be keeping me company,” said Emma. “I think I’ll go straight to bed.”
“Awdry’s right. It’ll do you good.”
Emma opened the car door and said, “Isn’t it odd. For the first time in ages I’m not afraid to go into this house. I know it’s perfectly empty and secure. She’s not here—she’s there.”
“Don’t talk such nonsense,” Munday said.
“I thought I was going mad that day in the garden —imagining things,” said Emma. “Now I know I’m perfectly sane. I did see her.” Emma’s voice was assured, but in the car’s overhead light, a yellow lozenge of plastic, the illness dimming her face made her look complacent. Munday could raise little sympathy for her. Her insisting on being taken home was devious, a withdrawal from the challenge she saw in Caroline. He was ashamed of her. She had no life but his life, no friends aside from those he had made. She had pretended her sickness to chasten him, but her apologies only made him embarrassed for her. She was a part of him, but the weakest part, and he saw that without her he might have succeeded. There was still time for him; she had little claim upon him. Her weakness obliged him to be attentive, but he understood: what she feared he desired, and what had confused him before was that her fear had obsessed her in the same way as his desire. But she had deprived him of his pleasure. It had always been that way, from their first day at the Yellow Fever Camp, when the heat and the musky smells had possessed him physically, and the lushness had made him gasp even after the people themselves had lost all interest—to their arrival at the Black House, where she had been the first to name what they had both seen. She had called it fear, and so he had. But it was not fear at all.
She said, “I know you want to go back.”
“Would you rather I stayed?”
“I’m fine now,” she said. “I’m safe. Please go.”
Emma pressed his hand and got out of the car, and Munday felt that she understood how, in leaving her in the last hour of the year, the parting was crucial; and in saying what she did, she had to accept a share of the responsibility for his going. That touched him, and driving back to the party he felt a tenderness for Emma that he had never known before, as if she was his sad jilted sister, whom he might console but never rescue from her disappointment.
He returned to what seemed a different party. The guests’ mood had changed—the men were talking loudly, some angrily, and he heard bursts of bitter laughter. He saw Caroline but she was the only one who did not look up at him when he entered the room. “Ah, he’s come back,” one of the younger men said. The men were seated, hunched forward on the edge of their chairs with brandy snifters. They went on competing with successive interruptions. The women, holding coffee cups, were in more relaxed attitudes, watching closely but offering little to the discussion. Munday saw it as the conventional after-dinner posture of men and their wives, arranged like contestants and spectators. He heard, “—trouble is, we’re too nice to the Irish.”
“Help yourself to a drink,” said Awdry, who was nearest the fireplace. He lit and relit his pipe, and puffing, used the burnt match to make his point. He concluded his argument by tossing the match into the fire.
Munday’s glass of port had the texture of silk. And he had taken one of Awdry’s cigars; he stood magisterially, just behind the sofa, sucking at the cigar and turning it in his mouth. He heard Anne say to Caroline, “—told me the thing about people nowadays is they never touch each other. Here we are in a permissive age and we don’t even touch! Well, I told him I agreed with him and’that it was really very sad—and I thought so, too. It is terrible, I suppose. But I couldn’t help feeling he was spying that because he wanted to touch me ” He turned to the men’s argument and tried to follow it. Michael Strick was saying, “I know one thing, the Russians wouldn’t handle it this way.” He nodded and sipped at his brandy. “They’d go in there with tanks—that’s the way to do it.”
“I’ll tell you how they could have done this and saved themselves a lot of trouble,” said Jerry. “Internment was a mistake. They know who they want. They have a list of known IRA men. It’s simple. You just wake ’em up at night and bash ’em. By that I mean, kill ’em.”
“It may come to that yet,” said Awdry, and flipped a dead match into the fire.
“But that’s cold-blooded murder,” said Anne, who was clearly shocked. Now she sat forward. She looked to the others for a reaction.
“What is it when they kill one of our young men?” said Michael. “That’s murder too.”
“Jerry said we should shoot them in their beds,” said Janet. “Do you agree with that?”
“Please,” said the vicar. “You’re upsetting my wife.”
“I’m sorry,” said Michael, shaking his head, “but I’ve got no time for the Irish.” Caroline looked from one face to another. She said, “I think it’s disgraceful the way you’re talking.” Janet turned to Munday. “I suppose you were following this Northern Ireland business when you were in Africa.”
“Not really,” said Munday. “But I wouldn’t be foolish enough to take sides, as some of you are doing, when every side is so barbarous.�
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“Wrhat would you do?” asked Anne.
“Disarm them, isolate them, and leave them to themselves,” said Munday. “Just as I would any minority tribe that became dangerous. I certainly wouldn’t expect to convert them.”
“I know what I’d do with them,” said Michael.
“They need you to say that,” said Munday, aiming his cigar at the young man. “They need that contempt—it justifies them, and the British army legitimizes their quarrel. They want attention—you see, I believe they like being photographed throwing stones and marching and holding press conferences. They’re performing and they need witnesses badly, because without witnesses you have no spectacle.”
“What you’re actually saying, Munday, is that if we ignore them they’ll stop their fighting,” said Awdry.
“They’d go on fighting in a small way, as they’ve always done,” said Munday. “They wouldn’t do much damage. What none of you seems to realize is that they enjoy it. This squabbling has a social value for them—it gives purpose and shape to their lives. Murder is traditional in a culture of violence, which theirs certainly is. And I suppose you could say headhunting is an aspect of their religion. Religion makes more warriors than politics—God’s a great recruiting officer.” He paused and drew on his cigar. “But as I say, I don’t know very much about it.”
“It doesn’t sound that way,” said Awdry.
“You should talk to Emma,” said Munday. “She’s well up on it.”
“Oh?” Anne inquired. “And does she have a personal interest in it?”
“Well, she has family there, you see,” said Munday, and he smoked and watched their faces register shame, the ungainly muteness that had fallen like a curse on Alec’s cronies when in full cry against Africans they remembered his mistress was black. Before they could become conciliatory, Munday said, “It will be midnight soon.” The guests looked sheepishly at their watches.
“Has everyone got a drink?” asked Awdry.
The empty glasses were filled. They sat in silence, waiting for the hour to strike. Just before midnight, Anne said, “I loathe New Year’s Eve. You look over the past year and you can’t remember a blessed thing that matters.” Awdry rose, and with his back to the fire he said, “I’m not going to bore you with a speech. I just want to say how pleased I am that you’re here tonight, and may I wish you all a happy and prosperous New Year.” He lowered his head and began to sing “Auld Lang Syne.” The others stood up and joined in the song. When it was over Awdry said, “Listen.” Church bells were pealing at the windows, faintly, but the unusual sounds at that hour of the night captured their attention; the muted clangs had no rhythm, they continuously rose and fell, in an irregular tolling, one tone drowning another. Awdry walked through the guests to the front door and threw it open. The bells were louder now and resonant, pealing at various distances in the darkness, their clappers striking like hammers against an anvil.
“I can hear St. Alban’s,” said the vicar. “And there, that tinkling, that’s All Saints.” They rang and rang in different voices, dismay, joy, male and female, coming together and then chiming separately, descending and growing more rapid, and after a few moments competing, like bell buoys in a storm on a dangerous shore, signaling alarm with despairing insistence.
“It’s a beautiful sound,” said Caroline.
Munday walked away from the others, into the drive, then onto the lawn behind the boxwood hedge. The night was cold, but the chill, after that hot brightly-lit room, composed him. The guests’ voices echoed, traveling to him from the very end of the garden where there was only darkness. Gray and black tissues of clouds hung in the sky above the high branches of bare trees, which stood out clearly. Here and there in the tangle of trees he saw the dark slanting shapes of firs. He walked to a white fountain which materialized in the garden as he studied the darkness. He touched the cold marble. Details came slowly to his eye, nest-clusters in some trees and others heavily bundled with ivy, the bulges reaching to the upper branches; he saw nothing hostile in these densely wrapped trees. As he watched, the church bells diminished in volume and number, and those that remained were like lonely voices sounding distantly in different parts of a nearly deserted land, calling out to all those still trees. Then they ceased altogether. But the silence and the darkness he had imagined hunting him at the Black House no longer frightened him. He welcomed and celebrated it as more subtle than jungle. There was no terror in the dark garden, only an inviting shadow, the vague unfinished shapes of hedge, the suggestions of pathways in the blur of lawn, and the dark so dark it had motion.
“In the summer this garden is full of flowers.” Caroline’s voice was just behind him. But he did not turn.
“I prefer it this way,” said Munday. “The dark. Look, that shroud or hood there. In the daylight it’s probably something terribly ordinary.”
“You must be very lonely to say that”
“No,” he said, “I just like things that can’t be photographed.”
“That’s an odd statement from a scientist.”
“I'm not a scientist,” he said. He turned to her and said, “Why did you ask me at the lecture if I ever got depressed?” .
She said, “Why did you remember that?” She was beside him now, and she spoke again with a suddenness that jerked at his heart, “Do you know Pilsdon Pen?”
“That hill outside Broadwindsor?”
“Right,” she said. “It’s not far from here. It’s a sharp left, just as you enter the square. The road to Birdsmoor Gate goes around the hill, but quite high. It’s a beauty spot, so there’s a small parking lot for the view.”
“I’ve driven past it,” said Munday.
Caroline glanced behind her and then at Munday, and he saw her teeth when she said quickly, “Meet me there in half an hour.” She left him and walked towards the doorway where the others were still standing under the bright carriage-lamp. He heard her call out in a new voice, “Doctor Munday’s been showing me the Dog Star!” So all the moves were hers; but it excited him to hear her conceal them—that disguise was proof of her sincerity. Munday looked at his watch and then followed her across the vapor that lay on the grass.
13
It was a high windy spot, on the crest of a hill, with room for a dozen cars, and it was empty. Though Caroline had left the party before he did, and Munday was delayed for what seemed to him a long while at the door by Awdry urging him to explain what he meant by his letter to The Times (Awdry knew the letter by heart and kept repeating, “But why misfits?”), she was not at the parking lot when he arrived. A light rain began to fall, making a pattering like sand grains on the car roof; the sound of the rain isolated him and made him think she wouldn’t show up.
Past the gorse bushes, shaking stiffly at the front of the car, was the valley, some lighted windows which were only pinpricks, and a glow at the horizon, the yellow flare of Bridport. He saw through the dribbling side window an arrow-shaped sign lettered To Trail. He sat in the car with his gloves on wondering if he was being made a fool of: he was not used to acting with such haste. He knew the risk, but it would be far worse if she didn’t meet him. The wind sucked at the windows—he wanted relief. But the moments of his suspense, instead of provoking in him calm, only recalled similar suspense in Africa, Claudia’s eye orbiting his unease, her saying in a tone her clumsiness vulgarized into a threat, “Why don’t you ever come over and see me when you’re in town?” The first night at her house while he was talking she had got up from the sofa and left the room, just like that, and called to him. He found her naked, smoking in bed: “Are you very shocked?”
“I think it’s ill-advised to smoke in bed.”
Later, she had wanted to know what African girls were like in bed. Munday said, “Fairly straightforward, one would guess—I don’t really know. I’ve never had one.”
She said, “You’re lying. Martin’s always screwing them.”
“I’m not Martin, thank God.”
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��Are you trying to get at me?”
He had made love to Claudia on three occasions; the first time it was her desire, the second his curiosity, the third time routine—the unchanged circumstances of time and place made it so—and that last time was disappointing for both of them, though only she said it. Those nights returned to him now with horrible clarity: how she had stubbed out her cigarette and then rolled onto her back and lifted and spread her legs, holding her buttocks up with the hands, waiting with a kind of anonymous patience for him to enter her. And he had thought: it was this that troubled women most, it gave them fear, the position that made them most vulnerable, the lifted cunt opened and exposed like a smarting valve the slightest force could injure. Pity killed his desire, but he knew that any hesitation on his part would have ridiculed her surrender. “No, don’t stop,” she had said when he finished, and she had reached down and held him inside her and chafed his penis against her with her hand, finally dropping it and crying out—the cry that reached Alice. “Never mind her,” Claudia had said, but she had changed the bottom sheet so the houseboy wouldn’t see the stain. The next time she didn’t stub out her cigarette, but rested it in the ashtray next to the bed, as if she would return to it shortly. It was a rebuke Munday turned into a challenge, and he had made love to her until the cigarette had burned to ashes.
Ten minutes passed like this. The rain was hitting the car with force now. He was sure Caroline wasn’t coming, and he prepared to leave, but slowly, hoping that in his delay she would appear. The road was dark, there was only the rain and wind; his face was against the glass-and he was peering down the road when the offside door opened. Caroline got in—the overhead light had gone on and off, but he saw only her hands and a wet unfamiliar coat.
“I thought you weren’t coming,” he said.
“I’m glad you waited,” she said. “I was parking my car.”
“It’s windy up here.”
She did not reply to that. She said, “Back up and drive a little further on. But don’t go too fast or you’ll miss the turning.”
