by Paul Theroux
We chatted among ourselves until Pippa called out to Lady Max, "Do you often have supper here?"
"What is supper? Is it something you eat?" Lady Max asked.
Pippa made a terse explanation of the word.
"Surely this is dinner," Lady Max said.
"Working-class people have supper," Marwood said.
"'Working class' is a euphemism I just adore," Lady Max said.
The waiter began serving the potted shrimps—a small ceramic dish of pink bubbly paste, with a stack of toast.
As we spread it on the toast, Lady Max, still smoking, said, "I do hate being served promptly. It's like rudeness, and I always think there's something wrong with the food."
"I come to that conclusion when my menu's sticky," Pippa said.
"Tea is a meal for them. Dinner is lunch," Marwood said. "I know this through my staff. They have 'afters.'"
"They are extraordinary," Lady Max said. "I always think inventing these ridiculous names for meals is a way of saving money on food."
"And," Heavage added in an announcing way, "they go to the toilet." He was at the teasing and silly stage of drunkenness—the teasing that turned cruel and then sadistic. "That is, working-class people."
Lady Max smiled disgustedly. She said, "I cannot stand that word. Does anyone actually say it?"
We laughed—everyone except Pippa—to please the hostess, as though none of us actually used the word.
'"Toilets' is an anagram of T. S. Eliot," Mr. Lasch said, but no one heard him because Marwood was being indignant again.
"And 'cheers' is another one I hate," he said.
Hearing him, or rather mishearing him, Heavage said, "Cheers," and emptied his glass.
Looking at me, Lady Max said, "I love the expression 'white trash.' Americans are so graphic. Do you suppose we could introduce it here?"
"I'm sorry, but I find this whole conversation quite objectionable," Pippa said.
Marwood leaned in front of me and put his face against Pippa's and said, "Miss Lower-Middle-Class-And-She-Knows-It is trying to be the sincere proletarian again."
"Of course, with the help of your staff, you're an authority on the subtle nuances of class," Pippa said, blinking but standing her ground.
"Yes, and rather more than I'm given credit for by second-rate book reviewers," Marwood said, making it obvious that at some point Pippa had given one of his novels an unfavorable review.
"Someone, I think it was a shop girl, said 'You're welcome' to me the other day," Lady Max said, ending the standoff between Marwood and Pippa.
"What a ridiculous American expression," Heavage said.
"Have a nice day," Mr. Lasch said to his wife, who replied, "Sony, I have other plans."
But no one took any notice of them, because Lady Max was saying, "'You're welcome' is not ridiculous at all. It's an effective response. Say 'thank you' in England and the other person simply mutters and chews his lips."
"I suppose it's no worse than prego," Heavage said. "It's less objectionable than bitte. It's rather like pozhal'st."
"You've lost us," Mr. Lasch said.
"One of those useful and happily ambiguous expressions like 'I'd like to see more of you,'" Lady Max said, and she smiled at me.
Then the jugged hare was served. It came in an earthenware crock submerged with carrots and chestnuts in a brown stew. The waiter hurried back and forth, sighing, laying out the dishes of vegetables, and when he waited on me his whole body radiated sweaty heat, and I could hear him breathing impatiently.
"Bring more wine," Lady Max said.
"Thank you," the waiter said.
"You're welcome," Lady Max said, and looked at Heavage. "You see?"
We were still on language. We discussed the correct pronunciation of certain English names, such as Marylebone and Theobalds and Cholmondley. This, I guessed, was all for my benefit.
Mr. Lasch spelled "Featherstonehaugh" and said, "Fanshaw."
Marwood smiled and said, "I've got one. It looks like 'Woolfardisworthy.'"
"Woolsey," Pippa said, and turned her cold eyes on him.
"My grandfather pronounced the word 'leisure' the American way," Lady Max said, with another glance at me. "Leezhah."
In a solicitous, almost servile way Marwood asked, "How is your daughter Allegra?"
"Flourishing," Lady Max said. "That foolish person Mr. Pieplate—well, that's what I call him—is still chasing her. He took her to an embassy party and she deliberately wore a transparent lace—absolutely in the noddy underneath. It scandalized the Muslims there and it drove him wild. He doesn't even know she's sixteen years old. What an ass he is."
"She might fall for him," Marwood said.
"Lucky old Pieplate if she did. But it won't happen. Allegra's much too heartless. They all are. That's why I don't worry about her. It's her loss. And I know how she feels. At her age I was being squired around by Boothby."
"Wasn't he a bit fruity?" Heavage asked.
"He was, but not exclusively. Anyway I fended him off."
She said orf, as she had said lorse.
Her mention of Lord Boothby turned the conversation to the Kray brothers, a pair of London murderers he had befriended, and to a lot of sixties gossip about the Profumo affair. And again I felt this was for my benefit, as though the dinner were a little seminar on English life that Lady Max had arranged for me.
Seeing a new waiter approach, Lady Max said, "Another waiter, another course. And this one has the implacable look of pudding on his face."
The waiter showed no sign that he had heard this. He said, "Shall I bring the trolley?"
"It will just be stale gâteau and puddings and sticky buns on wheels." She was not facing the waiter when she added, "Why don't you just flambé some crepes for us. There's a good chap."
For the next twenty minutes the waiter labored at his portable grill, first making the crepes—seven of them—and then folding them in a silver dish. He methodically made the sauce, scorching sugar cubes with melted butter in a frying pan and then sousing the crepes with this sauce. He poured gouts of Grand Marnier onto them after that, and set them on fire. He then rearranged them on individual plates, still spooning sauce, and served them.
This elaborate procedure killed conversation, and when we started eating the crepes, and Pippa made a remark about them—"Delicious. This is only the second time in my life..."—Lady Max cut her off, as though it were bad manners to comment on the food.
"Queen Mum's out of the hospital today, bless her," Lady Max said.
"The Royal Barge," Heavage said, frowning drunkenly.
"I know several of her intimates," Lady Max said. "They call her Cake, you know, behind her back, and I do think it suits her. Her staff are exclusively poufs. One night she got on the phone to them—they were in the kitchen. She said, 'I don't know about you queens down there, but this queen wants a drink!'"
It was well after midnight—you knew it from the gloomy resentment on the waiters' faces as they ostentatiously stood around after liqueurs and coffee. They had missed the last tube trains. There was only the chance of an irregular night bus from now on.
The bill, folded in half, had been resting on the saucer at Lady Max's elbow since coffee. She had taken no notice of it.
At last, exhaling smoke on it, she unfolded it by poking it open with her fingers and said, "I'm terrible at maths. What is ninety-six divided by seven?"
Ninety-six pounds was the amount of my monthly mortgage payment, and it seemed incredible to me that we had gobbled up a whole mortgage payment. And, worse, that I was being asked to pay my share. I remembered Lady Max saying, "Bring more wine."
"Is service included?" Marwood asked.
Heavage picked up the bill and squinted at it. "Call it fourteen each," he said.
The Lasches had gone pale, their faces displaying the agony I felt.
"And a quid each for the tip." Heavage dropped the bill.
"Fifteen even." Marwood began poking through
bank notes in a leather pouch.
Fifteen pounds. It was what I was paid for a book review. Heavage knew that but did not seem to care. I pretended to look through my wallet, but I knew when I heard the figure that I did not have it, nor any sum near it, and neither did Pippa, and this inspired in me a sort of kinship with her. She wrote Lady Max a check, and so did Mr. Lasch. I fingered a crisp five-pound note. I had some coins but needed them for the bus.
"I'll have to owe you the rest," I said.
"I'll collect it one way or another," Lady Max said.
The bus went only as far as the depot at the south end of Battersea Bridge, and so without enough money for another bus fare I walked the rest of the way home in a drizzling mist, kicking the paving stones.
5
The only certainty in my London life was my writing. I felt this was a way for me to make a place for myself in the city. Although the novel I was writing was a jungle book, it was penetrated with London. It was my London work. And I wondered whether the opposite might be true—if I wrote a London story in New Guinea, would the book seem jungly and overbright?
I needed to sit down alone and write the next day. Alison had asked without much interest how the evening had gone and I said fine.
"Rich food, small talk, gossip, and indigestion. I didn't even get drunk."
"I'm glad I stayed at home," she said.
I somewhat envied her indifference. It was the reason she could be so serene. But I was obnoxiously curious about everything and had to pretend not to be, because it was so un-English to be nosy and to ask probing questions.
I said almost nothing else to her about the strange meal, Lady Max's Dutch treat—the way she had invited us, ordered all the food and wine, and then charged us. I concealed my embarrassment, because I could not tell her the whole truth. How could I tell Alison these misleading details until I knew everything myself? This was a story without an ending, without even a middle. I felt sure there would be more. There would be consequences.
I sat down and continued my novel, as I did every day. I wrote a paragraph that day and a few pages the next. If I wrote nothing in the morning, I forced myself to write something after lunch. And on the days when I wrote well, I often turned aside and did a review—I had time for it because I had done my own work first. That week, after I made headway with my book, I read the first volume of The Letters of Henry James and made notes for what I hoped would be a lead review.
When I was stumped in my writing, I roamed around the damp yard behind my house, peering at plants. I tore old birds' nests apart to see how they had been made. I watched spiders feeding and ants hurrying and snails dragging themselves in their own spittle across the bricks. I put these London creatures into my Central American jungle. I observed a trickle of water and, for my fiction, turned it into a river, with mud slides and oxbows.
Sometimes, in the black late afternoon before the pubs opened, I walked—thinking with my feet. Walking the streets, I murmured to myself as my mind wandered. There were gaps in the day that baffled and intimidated me.
Musprat called, but I put him off. I did not want to be drawn into his life—the disorderly flat, the hasty meals, his intrusive borrowing and bitching, his writer's block, and wasted evenings at the Lambourne Club.
I wrote my book. I lived in my house. I loved my family. I had no other life in London, and indeed had not realized there was another life to be had, until Lady Max called again.
"Paul, is that you, dear boy?"
It was affectation, not fooling, and her voice was unmistakable, dark brown with cigarette smoke. I was alarmed, fearing another of her meals.
But no, she was calling to collect what I owed her. She used those very words. She said I had to go with her to the William Blake exhibition at the Tate Gallery.
"I'll meet you there inside the foyer in about an hour," she said.
That was my ten-pound repayment to her, my agreement to go. But I had done my work for the day. I did not feel I was being deceitful to Alison, though it was unfair to my sons—I knew that I would not be at the house when they returned home from school. I would miss Anton making tea and Will asking "What page are you on, Dad?" For that I resented Lady Max's sudden presumption and her insistent Be there.
She was late—Londoners who regarded themselves as powerful were seldom punctual, though they always expected you to be. She arrived in a taxi and she looked rather small, mounting the wet black stairs alone. But this was a passing illusion. I had always seen her in the company of other people, and when I was next to her I felt very plain and out of step, an American again.
Lady Max had hardly greeted me. She said, "I love being in a museum on a rainy afternoon."
It was not rain but a low cloud, the mist and drizzle of a London winter that made the dark city even blacker.
"There's only one better place to be," she said.
We were passing a sensual Rodin sculpture, all muscles and bumps, a couple entwined like a big bronze walnut.
"Between the sheets," she said, "and preferably not alone."
She had a knack for uttering statements to which there was no reply. It was like a verbal form of snooker in which I was left holding the cue and not being able to use it.
We passed a set of big, flat Motherwells, all black shapes like moth-eaten shadows, a slashed and assertively striped Rauschenberg, a Hockney interior that sloped in three directions, a soft sculpture like a big toy, a rusty bike hung on wires, and a triptych the size of three billboards surfaced entirely with broken crockery.
The Blakes were behind this laborious frivolity, in a darkened exhibition room in low-lighted showcases. Walking just behind Lady Max in the darkness I felt her warmth, and her perfume stung my eyes with sweetness. Her white face, her full lips, her large eyes were reflected in the glass, layered with scenes from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
"Ruskin called him a primitive," Lady Max said.
"So unfair. He had great technique, subtle color, and a kind of visionary quality. Look at that composition of flesh and spirit."
"Everyone says that about Blake." She had not even paused or turned.
But this was a standard London put-down, the accusation that you were being hopelessly unoriginal. Everyone says that. It sounded cruel, but it was just another move in a chess game. In my earlier years in London I would have hated her for saying it. Now I saw it as glibly defensive—a weak kind of teasing—and she would mock me if I reacted. The London response was not to complain but to do it back and do it better.
"Everyone says that because it's so obvious and because it's true," I said. "Ruskin was the weirdo, if you ask me. Not Blake. Ruskin was shocked by his wife's pubic hair. He thought she was the only woman in the world who had it, like a physical abnormality."
"There is so much more to Ruskin than that," Lady Max said.
"But the rest isn't as interesting," I said.
She liked that. "I rather like the nympholepsy. He adored little girls."
"Kiddie porn," I said.
"You sound so shocked. And yet Ruskin was an incredible romantic." She was staring down at the Blakes. "Speaking of pubic hair, some people shave it into peculiar designs."
"And some people twine marigolds into it," I said, "according to D. H. Lawrence."
"That's such a silly book," Lady Max said. "It's completely unbelievable. It's all Lawrence's lurid fantasies about the English class system—virile gamekeeper, sex-mad aristocrat, emasculated lord. And apart from anything else it gives an utterly inaccurate picture of oral sex technique."
She was bent over a lighted case of Blake etchings, her face shining at God the Father holding a set of gold compasses among jubilant angels and puffy clouds.
"She could hardly have sucked him off playing with his old job as though it was a cocktail sausage."
She said orf again, slightly dignifying the shocking expression. A shadowy man nearby grunted with unease and disapproval.
Though we were still in the dar
kened room and I could not see Lady Max's face, I had the impression she was smiling.
"The sexual virtuosity in your novels is much more impressive than Lawrence's."
This was an advance on You're much better than Hugh Walpole.
"Sexual description is the great test of literary ability, I always think," she said.
"It's a problem, sex on the page. You have to choose the lingo of the clinic, the gutter, or the moralist. I use all three."
She was not listening. She said, "The way you handle sodomy."
My mouth had gone dry.
"You have marvelous penetration," she said.
Snookered.
"William Blake got married in a church near here," she said. "Want to see it?"
She took charge and we were soon outside, in the wet air, walking along the Embankment next to the whitish, depthless water, which seemed turbulent today.
"There was once a prison here," she said at the river's edge. "Millbank. James described it in The Princess Casamassima."
I had just reviewed a Henry James book and did not know that.
"Notice how the river seems to be flowing upstream?" she said.
It was true—a burst cushion, a broken branch, and bits of plastic foam were floating towards Vauxhall Bridge.
"That's because it is floating upstream," she said. "It's all tidal as far as Richmond, you know. People in London are forever staring at the river, but they never see its real character, that its current changes direction four times a day."
As she spoke she raised a gloved hand.
"I can't walk any farther in these shoes."
These were the ones Musprat called her fuck-me shoes.
Her hailing a cab made me feel useless. And after the privacy, the intimacy of the taxi—the driver isolated, her hand resting on my thigh—there was something unexpected and punitive in the way she stepped out after the short ride and walked on, leaving me to pay the fare. In my confusion I gave the driver an absurdly large tip—he made a mocking noise at me to indicate that he was not impressed.
