The Family Arsenal

by Paul Theroux

  Before lunch he had asked, ‘What do we hear from Miss Nightwing?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Miss French. ‘Monty’s brought the second post. I’ve been through it myself.’

  ‘She’s very naughty,’ said Mr Gawber.

  ‘Oh, she looked lovely on telly the other night with Russell Harty. She’s going to play Peter Pan in the Christmas panto. I’m sure she’ll do it ever so much better than that rabbity Susan Hampshire. But I said to my mother. “She may be a great actress, but her tax is way overdue and she’s making our Mister Gawber sweat tears.” ’

  ‘Miss French, I think I should remind you that Miss Nightwing’s income tax is a confidential matter. She’s simply forgotten to send us details of her expenditure. Rumours could damage her reputation.’ He gave her a smile of rebuke. ‘Do let me handle it, won’t you?’

  Miss French said, ‘They say she’s a communist. She wants to outlaw Punch and Judy shows. Says they’re cruel and decadent. Punch and Judy!’

  He wanted to say how much they had frightened him as a child at the noisy fair in Ladywell Fields. He sighed, hearing Mister Punch’s reedy threats. The heat was a cloak that weighted his back and made him slump. He squinted and tasted dust and wished it would rain. He said, ‘I shall ring her.’

  He dialled the number, but before it could ring the line seemed to burst and acquire an odd resonating clamour. In his ear, a male voice said, ‘That’s marathon, I’m sure.’

  ‘Monetary,’ said a woman.

  ‘Marathon.’

  ‘Monetary.’

  Mr Gawber checked himself in an apology.

  ‘Not monetary.’

  ‘It fits. With tapir at seven down.’

  ‘Tapir perhaps. But what about that ovoid at eight down? That would put paid to your monetary.’

  Mr Gawber saw. They were doing The Times crossword. He had put his paper away; it was his practice to do half of it on the way into work and complete it on the way home in the evening. He had got tapir, but not marathon. He listened, fascinated, as if to friends, fellow puzzlers. But his embarrassment grew – and something else bothered him about the crossed line: the man and woman seemed shut in the same cellar room, and their voices murmured as if lost in utter darkness.

  ‘All right, marathon,’ said the woman. ‘So with Elba at twenty-seven down and piano-tuner at sixteen across we’re left with that enormous blank at twelve across. Eight letters. Gosh.’

  ‘ “Bitten but –”.’

  ‘Please don’t read the clue again, Charles.’

  ‘I’m stumped.’

  ‘It looks easy enough.’

  ‘Second letter “a”, ending in “n”. Could be another marathon.’

  Mr Gawber held the receiver away from his face and reached for his newspaper. He carried out the activity as if learning a stratagem. He was not used to deceptions. He turned the paper over and put his finger on twelve across. Of course.

  ‘You’re always saying how awfully good you are.’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘You’re so full of corrections.’

  ‘I won’t listen to much more of this.’

  ‘If you could only hear yourself.’

  The poor things, seeking the companionship of a puzzle in their darkness, had begun to row. Mr Gawber became anxious. He had been holding his breath for so long his eyes stung. The woman turned abusive; Mr Gawber blinked. He heard, ‘– bloody fed up,’ and took a deep breath.

  ‘The answer to twelve across,’ he intoned in a voice he did not recognize as his own, ‘is macaroon. Macaroon.’

  ‘Is that you, Charles?’

  ‘No, my dear – why it is macaroon!’

  ‘There’s someone on this line. Who’s there?’

  The alert voice, a shaft from the darkness, spun a burr of panic at him.

  ‘Who’s there!’

  Mr Gawber clapped the receiver down and covered his face with his hands. He felt that voice had been heard throughout Rackstraw’s. Shortly afterwards Miss French said, ‘Mister Gawber, you’re all flushed.’

  He said it was the heat. He had done no damage, but the episode was shaming – he should have put the phone down at the beginning. He respected privacy. If, on a train, the person beside him took out a letter and began reading it Mr Gawber doubled up to convey the impression that he knew it was a letter and was not reading it – he reminded others of their privacy. And he had frightened those people: what were they saying about him now?

  He did not touch the telephone again until after four, regarding it as a dangerous and unreliable instrument. But his in-tray still held the unfilled tax form of Araba Nightwing, and pinned to it a curt letter from Inland Revenue. He overcame his shyness and dialled the number again. It buzzed and was answered. He gave his name, apologized for his intrusion, and stated his business briefly.

  ‘I’m not paying,’ said the young woman in her famous voice.

  ‘It’s the law,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘We’ll have to get our skates on pretty smartly.’

  ‘Don’t they know – don’t you – there’s a war on!’

  ‘I couldn’t agree more –’

  But the line had gone dead, and he was now enquiring in darkness himself: ‘Miss Nightwing?’

  It had been an upsetting day, and not helped by the heat. Mr Gawber was glad to leave for home at five, to hurry away from the yakking that accused him of obscure errors. Lovely day, one woman says, smiling foolishly at the sun on the deranged street; Who’s there? demands the one on the crossed line; There’s a war on! the actress cries. These wrong voices moved through his mind, and he could not reply to any of them. For a moment in the cool stairwell at Rackstraw’s he felt his strength return. He damned them softly and wanted the city to be destroyed to silence them. It was coming, in any case: the thunderclap. He had seen the figures. Then he would walk out of the building, put his umbrella up, and cross the smoking rubble of the Strand, now an empty beach-head of destruction: the ruin proving him right.

  But it was an idle thought; the spite was unworthy of him. He boarded the train and resumed the crossword, and minutes later – while the train was stalled on its approach to Waterloo – completed it with unusual speed: Elba, piano-tuner, marathon. Those strangers had made it easy for him. He drowsed in the crowded carriage and slept, while the evening papers crashed at his ears; he dreamed of the Queen, the sun, her body. New Cross, Lewisham, Ladywell: still he slept, and at Catford Bridge, his stop, the Queen leaned towards him and tugged at the front of her glittering dress. The train raced on to Lower Sydenham, where he woke. The carriage was nearly empty and nothing outside had the smallest wrinkle of familiarity.

  He walked down the platform with such uncertainty his shoes seemed too large for him. He was walking with another man’s feet. The name on the station signboard was recognizable, but this particle of the familiar in so strange a place confounded him. The platform had no roof, and when the train drew out it was empty – the other passengers had quickly deserted it. And yet he enjoyed it and was surprised to notice how he lingered to savour the feeling and acquaint himself with the station. He said to himself with wondering pleasure, ‘I’ve never been here before!’

  Halfway down the platform a black man in a British Rail uniform was tipped against the door of a glassed-in waiting room. Mr Gawber saw that he was talking to a fat black woman who was seated on a bench with a basket between her spread knees, two dimpled aubergines. The man was making her laugh in a way that gagged her and shook the brown pads of her cheeks. It was a race of willing comics: he had never believed in their anger. His neighbours – Mr Wangoosa, the Aromas, the light brown Mr Palmerston, the almost purple Mr Churchill – positively skipped with good humour. The British Rail man yapped his lips, the woman’s laughter kicked in her throat and she raised her feet and stamped them. The glass door was cracked, the walls were daubed with large red names: ARSENAL RULE, CHELSEA FOREVER, SPURS WANK. But the black people inhabiting it with their chatter lent it an air of ramshackle charm.
In another mood Mr Gawber would have seen it all as an example of decay pushing towards ruin. This summer evening it amused him and he felt able to share in their laughter.

  ‘They all crazy like that up in Catford,’ said the black man. Then he straightened his cap and reached for Mr Gawber’s ticket. ‘Thank you.’

  Mr Gawber showed his season pass in the plastic wallet. He said, ‘Caught napping!’

  ‘Excess charge,’ said the black man. He plucked again at the fingerprints on his visor.

  ‘Kah,’ said the woman. She looked away and blew, recovering.

  ‘I’ve never been here before.’

  The black man took out a pad, inserted a carbon, and with a complicated care that interested Mr Gawber, wrote figures on the thin top sheet. This paperwork seemed a suitable acknowledgement for the degree to which Mr Gawber felt off-course, and he said again, ‘I’ve never been here before.’

  ‘Five pence additional,’ said the man. ‘Pay the cashier.’

  ‘Kah,’ said the woman.

  ‘And that not all,’ said the man. ‘You know the George up Rushey Green?’

  Mr Gawber smiled: he knew the George. He wanted to enter the conversation, to give a conclusion to this oddly-spent day, and hear the couple cluck: You mean you never been here before? He waited for the black man to see him waiting.

  After a moment the black man turned to him and said, ‘But if you come here again, mister, get the right ticket.’

  Mr Gawber said, ‘I’m looking for a call-box.’

  ‘Don’t have to take no train for that,’ said the man. He chopped the air with his hands. ‘Down the footpath. Pass the shed. On you left. The Motive. Can’t miss it.’

  Mr Gawber paid his fare and found the path. The late-afternoon brightness cooked a smell of hot pollen from the cat mint, the cow parsley and the tall weighted weeds swayed in a thickness of foraging bees. The path narrowed, and soon Mr Gawber was alone in the greenery, his suit flecked with seeds. He could smell the oily dirt and brake dust from the train tracks, but he could not see above the tops of the stalks and grasses. He almost laughed; he was delighted by this sense of being lost so near his home. Norah, I’m somewhere in Lower Sydenham! The sun heated the insects and made them crackle under the dusty over-sized weeds which, left to grow here undisturbed, were exaggerations of the small pulpy ones in his garden. He saw tall saw-toothed things, spiky blossoms, dragon-tailed leaves, white-haired stalks, thistles and wild garlic: assertive castaways. And he was gladdened by them. It was the perfect end to a day which had from the first seemed unusual: freedom!

  He had been jostled out of his routine and he wanted to know every detail of its difference. He poked at this place with his umbrella’s point. His life had been without surprises; he did not want surprises. But this was manageable and it cheered him. Past the shed and a terrace of eight houses with useless numbers and corrugated iron sheets nailed to their windows he saw the public house and its sign, The Locomotive. He entered, and breathing wood planks and sawdust and beer he went to the bar to celebrate his arrival instead of flying to the telephone to tell Norah he’d be late.

  3

  All the way to the bus stop on the hill the pursuer was hidden from the man he chased by mothers smiling at the sun and turning their bodies gently as they walked. Pursuit was an easy secret in this crowd of casual shoppers, the women bringing a waist-high tide of children forward. Hood rolled steadily behind them as they paused and gathered like hookers – offering smiles, soliciting nods, not going anywhere – and he kept his eye on the plum-coloured shoulder thirty feet ahead. He boarded the bus with him and followed him up the stairs to the top deck; the man dropped into a front seat, Hood fell into the seat at his back. The conductor appeared, bowing as the bus lurched, clutching the knobs of his ticket machine: ‘Thank you.’ The man asked for a five pence ticket; Hood did the same. The bus swayed through the traffic, its roof occasionally striking branches – the leaves wiping streaks on the side windows. Hood stared forward at the man’s head and found a dent in it, and just above the expensive collar saw the futile contour of cowardice in the furrow of the man’s neck.

  Hood shredded his bus ticket, impatience jerking his fingers. He had never been on that bus or gone in that direction, south in South London; so it seemed to him, on the move again, as if he was continuing the journey he had so abruptly started in Vietnam months before. This was part of that same world. He forgot Mayo and her painting, Murf and his ear-ring, tattooed Brodie. He longed to act; to abandon this chase would be an evasion of his strength. He craved the kind of blame that would release him honourably from the charge of inaction, a guilt-like grace. There was only one way: to frighten the bully and prove to himself not his own strength but that weeping boy’s. An accident had brought him here; but there were no accidents – instinct was offered expression by a hollowing of chance, and impulse seized it. You didn’t choose, you were chosen, claimed by an impulse that knew more than wisdom did of pain. That was justification enough: there was no law before passion’s anger. A year ago a man had said, These people are not worth it, and Hood had gone quite close to him and punched his face. Within an hour Hood had been suspended by the ambassador and ordered to Washington: he had punched a government minister. The act had freed him, and what looked in Hood to have been savagery, a casual reckoning of penalties, was extreme disobedience. He had launched himself blindly and doing so was granted the gift of sight. He had always, even as a consul, acted with simple energy and then, examining his work, seen how the pattern had been fixed for him. So it had been since he had arrived in London: Mayo’s plan at Ward’s Irish House, the room in Deptford, the snoring children; those sweepers, that drunk, this bus: he belonged here since he could not deny that boy his strength.

  The bus continued to wheeze, leaning the upper deck at lamps and pub signs and parlour curtains as it rounded bends, and flinging a bridge’s shadow down the aisle. All this was new – the long rows of terraces breaking into segments of eight and four, then further down Brockley Rise clusters of two, pebbledash semis with brick and timber cowls, name-boards on the gate and roses set in rectangles of lawn. Down there on the pavement a running child, and twenty yards later a solitary sprinter, the one he chased. Hood glanced to the right as the bus stopped, and saw at the end of a rising road a wooded hill and a biscuit-brown church lying in a declivity of the slope, nearly hidden by the trees. The hill rose above the housetops; Hood studied the foliage which, at this distance, had the density of a box hedge. It was unexpected in the closely mapped city to see a place that looked nameless, but he knew from his own neighbourhood, near the tail of the Deptford Creek, how an ordinary street would close in and stop and show a fence; and beyond that was another district, all corners overgrown and broken glass and discarded motor gaskets and bushes spilling into the blocked street. The area, no more than a white trapezoid on a map, a blankness that might have been labelled Unexplored or Here Live Savages, was sealed from view in the huge exposed city, as neatly hidden as if it was an island that lay under the sea, the ultimate hiding place. He marked the hill on his memory.

  The terraces had begun again, tinier now, their front doors directly on the street. They slid back and gave onto a row of shops – fruiterer, chemist, newsagent, butcher, off-licence, pub – then resumed, to be interrupted further on by a similar parade of shops. They were far now from Deptford, and Hood wanted the man to get off the bus. He thought: If you know what’s good for you, go. The time passed and Hood felt the consequences worsen, for with each mile the urgency he was rehearsing moved by degrees he could compute, from simple assault, to grievous bodily harm, to maiming. The man was leading him to that, delaying an incidental fight by an interval of waiting which made Hood only more angry.

  A gas works lying behind a brick building, enclosed by a steel fence; a warehouse; a breaker’s yard; a bath-house of brown tiles standing like a cottage at a junction; and the man in the plum-coloured suit rose and started down the aisle, balancing him
self by gripping the seats. He stared directly at Hood but did not see him. When the man was on the stairs, in a corner of the mirror’s bulge, Hood jumped up.

  The man walked unsteadily down Bell Green, as if the sidewalk was in motion under him. He turned into Southend Lane and stopped at a house front. Hood memorized the number before he noticed that the man was only tying his shoe. It struck him as comic, the man attending to this detail, thinking it mattered. That morning in Hué Hood had set out his suit for a ministerial reception, and the same evening he was in Singapore; the minister – tearing off a bandage to show the wound – was shouting to the press. The suit remained on its hanger, the dress shoes beside the bed; and Hood was running. A year ago, another life.

  On a corner, beneath a railway bridge, Hood saw the sign, The Locomotive, and saw the tall man pause and push at the door to the Saloon Bar. Hood followed him in and stood beside him. On Hood’s right a man in a bowler hat and wearing a heavy suit leaned over and smiled. Hood nodded, but said nothing.

  Mr Gawber said, ‘I’ve never been here before.’

  ‘Neither have I,’ said Hood.

  ‘Ah, two lost souls! But first things first – what will you have? I’d like to push the boat out.’

  ‘Large whisky for me,’ said the tall man in the plum-coloured suit on Hood’s left. Then he laughed, ‘Sorry, mate, I thought you was talking to me.’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ said Hood.

  ‘I’ll let you know, but it’ll hurt.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Step outside,’ said the man, passing his hand over his face and distorting it with that gesture, seeming to pull his mouth into an expression of rage. ‘They’ll have to carry you home.’

  Hood said, ‘They won’t be carrying you home, pal.’

  ‘You trying to slag me?’

  ‘Just a minute gentlemen,’ said Mr Gawber, touching Hood’s arm.