by Paul Theroux
"No, but Lady Max does."
I named the men at the dinner party—Marwood the novelist, the South African named Lasch.
"I suppose so. She's fairly rapacious. I know you're shocked and all that, but looking in from the outside, I must say I find it bores me rigid."
In his offhand way, blowing his nose, chewing shreds from his plastic cup, he named others, as though listing people involved in a conspiracy. They included journalists who must have put my name in "Londoner's Diary," publishers who sent me invitations to book launches, museum directors, and the editor of the travel magazine who asked me to write the piece about Brighton. And Walter Van Bellamy. I had thought she'd pulled a few strings, but it was more than that—she had manipulated all the attention that I had been receiving lately. She had tipped a wink to these old lovers, perhaps collecting on a debt from them.
"I'm not shocked," I said. But I was.
I decided to avoid the germ-laden commuters and walked home. It was only when I took a London bus or train in the rush hour that I caught a cold. It was an easy one-hour walk through St. James's Park, past the palace, and through Victoria and Chelsea, then across the river and uphill to Clapham.
Walking along, I thought again about Musprat. He seemed almost virtuous in his detachment and his mockery, and his ragged clothes gave him a look of sincerity, like a mendicant monk. His detachment had given him a perspective. He looked on, he was touched by forgivable envy. His strength was that he had not been lured into Lady Max's orbit.
Putting these questions to him about Lady Max, I understood Musprat better—and that had been the case in my talk to Bellamy, too. Lady Max was the key. She had shown me London, and because it was her London, and seen through her eyes, the city was distorted for me. Yet seeing Lady Max through the eyes of others had helped me to understand London better. And of course she had helped me. The more visible I became, the clearer I could see London, because she had given me access.
The price for this was a sense of woe and a feeling of obligation. What to do about her?
***
She phoned me again several more times. She did not give her name or say hello. She plunged in—"Well?"—and waited impatiently until I thought of something to say, and when I did, my evasiveness seemed to rouse her, as though she liked the challenge of what she took to be my lack of interest. She did not know it was fear.
"I'm afraid I'm not very gregarious."
Even then I did not say her name—still didn't know what to call her.
"We'll see about that." And she hung up.
She regarded me as an interesting problem. But as before, she worked obliquely. From other quarters came more invitations to parties, more offers of writing assignments. A television producer asked me whether I was interested in writing a play for television. Another literary editor inquired about the possibility of my reviewing for him. These were substantial offers, involving contracts and terms, with a promise of serious money.
As with Musprat, knowing these people helped me to know Lady Max better. I could place her now, I understood her society and what she needed, and that was a London knack, being able to put a person in his context. It was not a high-rise city but it was dense, and it sprawled all over the slopes of its river valley. Londoners fitted in, but each was a tight fit.
She phoned me once more, asking whether I was free for dinner that very night.
"No. I have another dinner"—and I did, with Alison, and one of her friends from work.
"Where will you be going?"
I named the restaurant.
She said, "I'd love to join you." She could not have been more blunt.
"And my wife?"
"I don't cope with wives ordinarily, but we do have something in common, she and I."
I could not imagine what that might be, and said so.
"You, dear boy," Lady Max said, but there was a contemptuous edge in her voice.
I resisted, feeling foolish, and out of cowardice canceled the dinner, fearful that Lady Max would show up and make a scene.
After that, I seemed to see her everywhere in London. It was a city of shadows, of memories and suggestions. It was a city of lowered voices, and at this dark and rainy time of year, with all its shining lights and the mirrors of its winter streets, a city of reflections.
It was also a city of look-alikes—people dressed similarly, a familiar hat, that identical coat, the same umbrella. There were London clothes, there was even a London walk. Londoners didn't saunter, they walked with purpose—rarely making eye contact, their faces fixed, chin up—as though going into battle, knowing it was another futile charge. Those people marching down Oxford Street were Londoners, the stragglers were foreign.
In those crowds I often saw Lady Max, her drawn-back hair, her white face, her cloaks and capes, and I believed she was watching me. Anonymity was a valuable asset here, but now I was afraid I had lost mine. Lady Max had shown me the city—its secret places; but now that I had begun to inhabit her London, it seemed that I was exposed. I felt she might turn up anywhere, at any time.
It was easy enough to stay home. Life in London had given me a taste for privacy. Londoners valued their isolation—they liked to be, as Musprat said of himself, in one of his own invented words, "un get-at-able." You could never get lost here the way you could in New York City, but you could hide and not be found.
I loved the seclusion of my house, and my absorption in my novel made me happy. Except for the ring of the telephone (but. it was never she these days, she had stopped calling), I worked without interruption or anxiety. What other cold northern city was so protective that it allowed you to be able to write, undisturbed, of the Honduran jungle? It was the effect of all that winter darkness. Yet even at the end of February there was a suggestion of spring, the first flowers of the year—snowdrops, camellias, some early crocuses, even in the little rectangles of London back gardens the sense of rural England, the residue of the old fertile land—old roots and shrubs, old bulbs and tubers blossoming in the mud.
Then came a sound like a pistol shot, just as sudden, the same shock; the worst, most dreaded noise in London, a loud rapping at your door. It was she again.
9
London taxis with their engines idling make an unmistakable rattle and clack, an impatient shivering of metal that accompanies the paying of the fare. The door slams, the window is banged shut, still shaking as the cab drives off. All this I was dimly aware of as I sat upstairs at the back of the house, writing my novel, growing doubtful of its title.
It was an afternoon of white winter light, the flowers in the back gardens showing some small, brilliant tongues of color.
That was when the rapping came, and the doorbell a moment later, and only then did I connect this uninvited visitor to the sound of the taxi.
"Aren't you going to ask me in?"
Nightmare was the right word: it was a mixture of the familiar and the strange. Only in bad dreams did you meet someone you knew in the oddest place—your mother in a locker room; or it might be a total stranger, or someone you feared, in the seclusion of your home.
I wanted her to go away. But she had a slender claim on me, so how could I be rude?
Inside the house, looking at pictures, touching furniture, she said, "This is not at all what I had expected."
Already she was sneering, as though anticipating rejection.
"Have I ever shown you my Lears?" she said, glancing at an Edward Lear watercolor of the Nile and quickly sizing it up.
As she passed me on her way into the sitting room—she had not waited to be asked—I had a sense of other men on her, and I recalled how the bronze shell of the turtle door knocker at her house was stained and black with fingerprints, all the men who had entered. But this was more an odor than anything visible, and it enclosed her body in a layer like an atmosphere she carried with her, like the murk of dust and smoke that lay over London, so that London was never distinct except up close. From a plane, from a distance, the
city was blurred, as she was.
"How very interesting," she was saying.
Her manner was a little chilly. Every encounter, every conversation I had had with Lady Max was like a job interview; but it was she who was turned down. Today was slightly different. She was responding to me in a defensive and remote way, treating me as a male—not a friend, or someone with a name, but a man. There had been so many other men. And men were so predictable. This was her weakness, her poor judgment, her bad timing, and the reason she would fail in the end; she believed all men were the same.
This made me dislike her and fear her even more, because a woman with that belief would blame me for the harm another man had done her. Seeing her prowling in my house, looking two stories down at the garden below, gave me pause. Impulsive and greedy, loving to shock, capable of howling—these traits made her seem destructive.
"Don't worry. I'm not going to throw myself out the window."
It was precisely what I feared.
"But if I did, you'd be in a jolly awkward position explaining it."
"If you jumped out this window," I said, and looked down at the wet paving stones, "it seems to me that you'd be the one in the awkward position."
"Yes. Maybe I should push you instead."
"Why would you do a silly thing like that?"
I tried to appear calm, but what she said terrified me, and I was watching her, so that she couldn't lunge and catch me off balance.
"Because you've been avoiding me. I don't like that."
Was it so simple? That what made her passionate was that I was unwilling? But she was also stubborn. My refusal had made me different from the others, and it made her more insistent.
She had paused near a stack of magazines and papers on a side table. Each of them contained something I had written.
"I put those people on to you."
"But I did the writing."
She raised her face to me and pursed her lips, to jeer. "There are so many writers in London," she said. "Many of them are just as clever as you, but much more polite. They would have thanked me."
She lit a cigarette, and again I had the impression, when she exhaled, of someone blowing smoke into the room.
"I don't think you quite realize what I've done for you."
"Do I seem ungrateful?"
"Very," she said, and looked around. "Your little house. Your little life. Your little wife."
She peered across the back garden to the row of houses beyond, and the sun was casting its last redness over the roofs and through the black branches and the air was thickening with twilight.
"Places like this make my heart sick," she said.
"I can't do what you want me to do."
"I don't know why I came here," she said.
In that moment she looked abandoned—truly lost. Some women could seem so pathetic in their rejection, almost tragic, as though they were about to lose their lives. If they met the right man, they had a new life. Their fantasy was that a man could work miracles for them. But for most rejected men it was not tragedy, simply bad luck—the breaks, fooled again; move on, pal.
"I don't think I want you anymore," she said, turning away, looking sad. I had never seen her in this mood and it shocked me, her mute face, her small shoulders, her slightly hunched, defeated-looking posture.
Perhaps she wanted me to say, Tell me what to do to please you, and I'll do it. But I could not utter those words to her. It was not a fear of sex—on the contrary, I was attracted to her. But sex for her was not the meal—it was only the first course. She would not have been satisfied until she had all of me. She wanted more than passionate afternoons and the occasional party. I had the powerful fear that she wanted to suck my soul out of my body.
Without speaking again, she wandered out of the room and found the telephone in the hall. She picked up the receiver and dialed, and I felt sorry for her again. I said nothing, only watched her struggling, calling for help. I assumed she was calling a taxi.
"Julian!" she said.
What was this new voice? It was gleeful, it was false. There was something diabolical in the way this wholly different voice rang out of her body, as though she were a lump of ectoplasm that could be sorrowful one moment and coquettish the next. Like London itself, Dickensian in one street, dreary in another, renovated, crass, cozy, dangerous—not one city but many.
"It's me. What about our drink then?" she was saying. She stopped and listened, then said, "Perfect."
In this new voice she rattled on, mentioning a publisher, a magazine, an editor, a cafe, and she settled on a day and a time—tomorrow, in fact. The voice quacking like a duck at the other end of the line sounded surprised and grateful—a young man's eager voice, thankful for the sudden interruption on an otherwise empty afternoon. I knew that feeling.
She kept me waiting a while longer while she chattered with this man, and then she hung up and said over her shoulder, "Must be off. Thanks for the use of the phone."
I touched her arm, so that she would turn and listen to me.
"A prostitute did that to me once in a hotel," I said. "She had finished with me. She was calling her next customer."
"You are a shit," Lady Max said.
I opened the front door. In our passing from one room to the other, from the back of the house to the front, night had fallen. The word "shit" was still on her lips as she stepped onto the landing. I had always regarded her as lovely, even in her pestering and greed, but now I felt I knew her well, and she seemed ugly, bony, bloodless, witchlike.
"Don't be surprised if you find life in London rather different after this."
It was a threat, and she left believing that I was doomed, that I would be lost and forgotten. She went into the street and disappeared, swallowed by the London darkness. I was not afraid. At once my house seemed large and safe. I did not mind being left behind if it meant that I would never have to see this woman again.
The children came home from school a few minutes later. It was Friday, two free days ahead of them, and they purified the house with their laughter. From that day, the weather in London improved.
***
Spring came. Alison knew nothing except that for a period I was very happy and productive. My book was still unfinished. But a book was not a job or a project—it was part of my life, and I liked my life.
Still, when I wrote a review or took a trip, I remembered Lady Max's threat, which more and more sounded like a witch's curse. Defying it strengthened me—and I was even bolder when I realized that she could not destroy me. It meant that my writing mattered, and that she had not created me, nor was she involved in my achievement. Public relations were her game, and so it was with witches.
Once I saw her at a publisher's party. She seemed ugly, almost monstrous to me, with her huge white forehead and popping eyes and her greedy mouth and red claws. I intended to say hello, but I had ceased to exist for her. There was a London way of dealing with people you had written off. She froze me and then cut me—did not see me, although she certainly noticed me. She radiated a poisonous awareness of me as she made a beeline for a young writer at the far side of the room, the same Julian she had called from my house that last day.
I went home happy and did not see her again. Lady Max had taken Julian as her lover. He was her project now. He was a northerner, new to London, and he lived in Hampstead and wrote of misery in provincial coal towns. Was Lady Max the reason he was all over the papers, being helpfully mentioned and reviewed and offered work and short-listed for the spring book prizes? Time would tell. In the meantime, Julian became known—as perhaps I had been—as one of Lady Max's young men.
"I think Julian is a fearful little tick," Musprat said.
We had resumed our snooker games, but not at the Lambourne. Musprat was avoiding the Lambourne because he owed so much money, both in club dues and bar bills. We played these days at the Regency Snooker Hall in Clapham Junction, two pounds an hour, tea and pork pies extra, and a Cockney lad with ea
rrings and tattoos at the cash register saying, "Is that the lot then, guv?"
"But she's worse," Musprat said. "You know that."
I said I didn't. I wanted to encourage him, to hear his version.
"I think about her every time I do my taxes," he said. "She doesn't pay, she's not English."
"Of course she is. Her mother's a marchioness."
"But Lady Max is American. She took out citizenship—for tax reasons. Carries a U.S. passport. How else do you suppose she manages to go on living in London?"
I should have known. Yet I was grateful to Lady Max. She had shown me that I would never be a Londoner. That was a valuable lesson. And because I had not been her lover I could see her clearly, and London too.
FIVE
Sisterhood
WHEN The Mosquito Coast was published, many people took a sudden interest in me; some offered me work. Then the movie came out and everyone was nice to me for a whole year. I seemed to be on good terms with the world. People sent me books, birthday cards, ideas, and invitations. Lonely people in far-off places wrote me long letters swearing that the main character in my book was exactly like their husband or father. In writing my book I had become part of their lives. Even complete strangers were eager to make my acquaintance. Once again I thought: A book is a miracle.
I did not need to explain myself. Certain people, of whom writers are one kind, acquire a peculiar celebrity, become famous but remain obscure. I had a sort of public biography—who I was, what I stood for, a character and persona. It was a collection of colorful fragments that, added up, was so untrue I still retained all my privacy. And because jacket photographs are misleading, no one knew my face. Only my name was accurate. That was convenient; it was all I wanted.
Friends whom I had not spoken to for years began to look me up. A popular book had that effect, of putting you in touch; the publishing house became like a post office for forwarding letters. The letters pleased me, because they gave me access to the past. If I were cut off from these old friends, I would wither like a plant with severed roots. So I prospered for all sorts of reasons.
