by Paul Theroux
‘You’re bourgeois to like it,’ said Mayo.
‘You were bourgeois to take it,’ he said. ‘A real revolutionary would have burned it weeks ago.’
For Mayo it was the proof of her commitment, and when Hood challenged her with doing nothing she said, ‘At least I’ve got the picture,’ using the theft to seek exemption. Hood said, ‘Right, you’re stuck with it.’ She did not see that it was purely theatrical, the dramatic flourish of a well-publicized burglary. But incomplete, a hollow gesture, since there had been no word from the owners, no further response from the newspapers. The sanctimonious warnings had ceased, the aggrieved art critic who had called it ‘a national treasure’ was silent. The loss was accepted; its last mentions had the serene factuality of obituaries. And none of Mayo’s demands had been met. The reward offered was laughable and would hardly have covered the cost of reframing it. There was not much more that could be done with it. The frayed bottom edge had been sent to The Times; to send any more would mean cutting into the painting itself, slashing the finished work. Mayo appeared unwilling to do this, and Hood knew that he would prevent her from damaging it. She had threatened in one of her letters to burn it. He reminded her of that threat, but hoped she wouldn’t do it. It seemed more valuable to him now than anything he had ever known, the reassurance of a perfect man; and it filled him with resolve, like a summoning trumpet.
She kept it tacked to the wall of the bedroom cupboard, like a trophy, regarding it with embarrassed pride. Hood noticed her standing before it, inhaling it, growing hostile in a glum way, as if she saw nothing in it but a man. The image did not move her; the painting itself mattered. It was hers. Her attitude, then, was one of simple ownership: possessing it somehow bore witness to her dedication, enhanced her little role. That idea drugged her, helping her to ignore whatever remained of the plot. To steal money was crime; to steal a million-pounds’ worth of art was a political act. She was no ordinary thief. Once she had looked at the self-portrait and said, ‘It’s butch.’
Butch! Hood came to despise that in her; how casually she acknowledged the painting, with what pompous certainty she spoke of the future. The painting taught him all he knew about her.
She said nothing about her family, whom Hood guessed must be wealthy – they had left that mark on her, or rather no mark at all, but an absence of blemish which was itself vivid as a scar. The impression she gave was one of aggressive independence, as if she had simply arrived. She gave no hint of preparation; no doubt, hardly a motive, only the smug certitude that anything was possible. It was a snobbery of assurance Hood had seen in the rich, an awareness of power: what could not be changed could be bought wholesale and owned, or stolen without blame, or killed. Privilege: only the powerful knew the enemy; but they had no true enemies, they could not be touched. The poor might suspect a threat but the world for them was the world outside Rogier’s window, a confusion of the unseen.
Mayo, Lorna: he compared them and made his choice. The house on Albacore Crescent was a family, parents and children; the television, the kitchen, the bedroom. Hood had, in a modest way, supervised Brodie and Murf; and he had gone to bed when Mayo had, obeying a kind of marital signal, looking to her for sexual encouragement, the unspoken suggestion that meant they would make love. ‘I’m tired’ or ‘I’m not tired’. He had lingered, and finally he sat up reading and let her go to bed alone, penalizing her by pretending not to understand the hints that familiarity made obscure. She hadn’t insisted on sex. By mutual agreement he slept with her, watching how she stiffened on penetration and clung to him, relaxing as if unlocked with his blunt key. Then his feeling lapsed. He said nothing. Now, Mayo always went to bed alone.
Murder had brought him to the widow. He visited her out of a cautious curiosity; and, afraid of giving her false hope, he had kept his distance. The guilt he saw in her intensified his own. He regretted that. He did not want to think that in killing Weech he had done anything but rescue his victims – and Lorna was one of them. The murder was an act of preservation. But with Mayo’s refusal to bring him into the plot, and with her objections to the cache of loot in the room – fear again: he did not want her to know of the arsenal – he turned more and more to Lorna.
He had been treating her for her unspecified grief, a drug for her guilty anger. He liked her company, then he preferred it to Mayo’s; and finally he needed it, found in this widow’s trust the solace of the drug itself.
‘Put the kid to bed,’ he said one afternoon.
‘He won’t go,’ said Lorna. ‘He wants to go out.’
‘Can’t you do something with him?’
‘In the way, is he? Look, if he gets on your nerves you don’t have to come round here.’
‘My nerves? What about yours?’
‘I’m stuck with him,’ she said, and Hood could see that everything she had feared in her husband she hated in the child, who was the brute, blameless in miniature.
‘He should be in school. I see kids his size going to school. It’s September – they’ve started already.’
‘Playgroup,’ said Lorna. ‘He’d like it.’
Hood said, ‘Then send him.’
‘Just like a Yank,’ she said. ‘You never think of the money side. I’m on a widow’s pension. I can’t afford things like playgroups.’
‘They’d let him in free if they knew that.’
‘I’m not a beggar.’
Hood took out his wallet. He said, ‘How much?’
‘I don’t want your money.’
‘Please take it,’ said Hood. ‘You can pay me back.’
‘Stuff it.’
‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ he said angrily. ‘Understand? Don’t say that to me.’
It was the first time Hood had ever raised his voice with her. He was sorry; she looked scared: she had known other threats.
‘I’m not giving you the money. I’m giving it to him.’ Jason lay on the floor, playing happily. An uncommon sight; usually he screamed for his mother’s attention when Hood was around. Hood saw him as he saw the mother, through the narrow aperture of pity. He called the child and said, ‘Want to go to playgroup, sonny?’
‘No,’ said Jason, wrinkling his nose. ‘I want to do a shit on your head.’ He laughed a crass adult laugh.
‘Ron was sarky like that,’ said Lorna.
‘Look,’ said Hood to the boy, ‘you want to go to a playgroup. I know you do, so take this’ – he gave the boy a five-pound note – ‘give it to the lady and you can go.’
‘Keep digging,’ said Lorna. ‘It costs twelve quid.’
It rained the next day, a heavy downpour ending a week of sun and dropping autumn on to that part of London, chilling the trees and darkening the brickwork of the angular terraces and washing all the traces of summer away. Where there was green, as in the park on Brookmill Road, it was sodden and depleted; and the city looked smaller and fragmented in the mist – it was a sea of sinking islands. Hood put on his black raincoat, turned up the collar and trudged around the corner to Lorna’s.
She said, ‘I knew you’d be over today.’
Hood entered and opening his coat, took out a paper bag that was flecked with rain.
‘What’s that?’
‘I’m going to do some cooking.’
The house was cold and unusually quiet; the toys were put away; he could hear the clock ticking in the kitchen. He looked across the parlour and said, ‘It’s a good place for him. He’ll like it.’
‘So will you.’
‘What makes you say that?’
She looked at him; resignation tugged at her smile. ‘I know what you want.’
Hood ignored her and opened the paper bag. He took out a thick blackened pipe, some tweezers, a candle and a cigarette lighter. He pulled the cushions from the sofa and spread them on the floor; and he squatted, setting out the simple apparatus. She watched him and shook her head.
Her voice was flat: ‘You’re going to do me.’
Hood lit the
candle and broke off a piece of opium. He took it with his tweezers and heated it in the flame. It sparked, then grew black, but it did not light. It thickened to a rounded blob and became glossy and then was encircled by fire. He said, ‘Lie down.’
Lorna came near and sniffed. ‘What is it?’ She lay beside him propping herself on a cushion. Hood took the pipe, poked the softened plug of opium inside and clicked the lighter over the hole.
‘Put it in your mouth,’ he said, handing her the pipe. He told her how to puff it, and they passed it back and forth until the fragment was reduced to a coal. Then he scraped the bowl and started again. The candle lit her face, the flame giving her cat’s eyes: she was lovely, feline in this small light. The rain pattered against the window, while they lay on the floor smoking. She did it with her lips, holding the pipe-stem tentatively, using her tongue, kissing the smoke, and he was half in love with her as the room filled with the aroma of sweltering poppies. They lay side by side, barely touching, breathing slowly; they puffed the pipe and did not speak. He felt an urgent shudder, a dumb hilarity in his groin. Then it weakened and passed through him, warming him. There was thunder from the river, but the warehouses hid the lightning flashes. In the rain and opium smoke he smelled Hué, the fleeting gulp of a bobbing boat. She was the first to sleep. He watched her as he prepared a fourth pipe, then he moved very close to her and kissed her still lips: they were cool with sleep. He puffed and closed his eyes and he was travelling to the drum and whine of a raga, an Eastern lament, sorrowing for a love that was distant and danced like flame in water. He opened his eyes: already the dream had begun to roll.
10
Pitchforked awake by a sharp pain in her back, Norah sat up in bed quickly, pushing at the mattress with her hands, making Mr Gawber’s whole body leap. She switched on the bright bedside lamp, blinding her feebly enquiring husband, who turned and groaned. He lifted his pocket watch from the side table and swung it to his eye. It was just past eleven-thirty – he’d had one hour’s sleep. Norah, motioning to stifle a sigh, managed to amplify it. She jerked on the bed, testing her back, drummed her legs and sighed again, drawing the noise slowly through a grievous scale, high to low, the sound of a person spinning down a deep shaft and never striking bottom, only whimpering at the end and growling into silence. They were both fully awake now, and in pyjamas and night-dress, their hair fluffed into tangled white wigs, they looked blanched and ancient, whitened by frailty, two-hundred years old. Mr Gawber quaked. The light jarred him like noise. Norah said, ‘I can’t sleep.’
Mr Gawber pretended not to hear; but how typical of her to wake him to tell him that! She was no solitary sufferer. She demanded a witness, involving him in her discomfort, made him endure it. Invariably she touched him with her pain, and there was not an upset she’d had that he had not somehow shared. She sighed, he groaned. It was in part the penalty of the double bed, marriage’s narrow raft.
‘Wake up, Rafie, I can’t sleep.’
‘What is it?’ He exaggerated his drowsiness.
‘I feel ghastly. Yes, I think I’m coming down with something.’ She tried her fingers, tasted her tongue, blinked – to locate symptoms.
‘Probably’ – he yawned: a stage-yawn, almost a pronouncement – ‘probably just wind.’
‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve pins and needles. A splitting headache. I’ve gone all hot.’ She got a grip on her head and out of the corner of his eye Mr Gawber saw her swivel it. She looked as if she might be trying to unscrew it.
‘Leave your head alone. You’ll just make it worse.’
‘I’m feverish.’
‘Poor thing.’ Without wishing to he yawned again, an authentic rebuke.
‘You don’t care.’ She started to cry softly. ‘Oh, my head. It won’t stop.’
He said, ‘I believe you’re coming down with something.’
‘It’s flu,’ she said and was calm. She listed her symptoms once more.
‘I’m not surprised. There’s a lot of it around. Thornquist was out all last week.’
He wanted to be sympathetic, but Norah’s illnesses were always so laborious that it annoyed him to hear her complain of their annoyance. He resisted consoling her. Then her aches and pains gave him some satisfaction – she deserved them for the pain she caused him. By a queer process of reversal, charity made antagonistic, he came to enjoy hearing her say how it hurt.
The bright lamp knocked against his eyes. He said, ‘Do turn the light off.’
‘How can I find my medicine in the dark?’
She thumped the mattress again, bouncing him, and went to the bathroom, switching on lights. She returned with a bottle of Doctor Collis Browne’s Mixture. It was an old bottle, containing a fluid now unlawfully potent, the active ingredient being opium. She was a regular user of patent medicines and pills: green lung tonic, fruit drops, stinging ointments, syrup of figs, dragées that stained her tongue purple. She was troubled by wind; she took iron for her blood. Old ailments, old cures. She measured the Collis Browne into a soup spoon and sucked it noisily.
‘Do you a world of good,’ Mr Gawber muttered.
Norah lay panting. Mr Gawber reached across and turned the light off. She snored.
But he stayed awake, alert, panic preventing sleep. Perhaps it would happen like this, a fiscal cramp that couldn’t be unknotted with a dose of the old mixture; a sickening for which there was no name or cure; a fever that couldn’t be shaken off. The workers all down with something, brokers with their fingers badly burned, industry halted at a stage of senility, a hardening in the usually swift canals, blockage, and the old country supine, helpless on her back like he himself in a ridiculous parody of repose.
He found his small radio and put in his earplug. He moved the dial. Radio Three had gone off the air. He spun the wheel to the World Service. He heard,
… let no star
Delude us – dawn is very far.
This is the tempest long foretold –
Slow to make head but sure to hold.
Stand by! The lull ‘twixt blast and blast
Signals the storm is near, not past;
And worse than present jeopardy
May our forlorn tomorrow be.
Kipling, the old mixture, favourite of puzzle-setters. Mr Gawber passed the night like this, worrying about England as if she was a dear old aunt in failing health and not whether or how soon the death would come, but how she would look, laid out among her indifferent mourners. The medical analogy he knew to be fanciful, and Kipling’s storm-cone was romance. Whenever he thought of the catastrophe ahead one image remained in his mind: the war. He hadn’t fought, yet he had felt it keenly. It was a dark brown newsreel in his memory he could run at any time, and that flicker from the past was a flicker of the future. Powdered eggs, rationed sweets, sugar coupons, bread queues, the occasional bombed building in the middle of a terrace, like a decayed tooth in a bad denture; books printed illegibly on villainous paper, the brave voice of Churchill on the steam radio and the officious Mr Mullard from number twenty-nine over the road – and now in Bognor – in his warden’s helmet. Coley for tea, the sizzle of snoek, the sound of buzz bombs. War! It had shaped him. He remembered it on this long night with a certain cheer, because the war had helped him to find himself an access of strength. He was not afraid.
Still Norah snored, and dayspring – who said that? – dayspring was mishandled. The traffic began on Catford Hill, and on Volta Road the clank of the bottles in the milk float, the grinding front gates, the plunk of the letter-slot. And the September sun – for once he was glad dawn came early. He went down, made tea and brought Norah a cup. She slept as if she had been coshed, bludgeoned there on her half of the raft: her mouth was open and she sprawled face-up, ventilating her sinuses with rattling snores. He woke her gently. She blinked and smacked her lips and said, ‘I had a dreadful night.’
He was silent at breakfast, though he allowed himself a glance at the crossword, the letters, the obituaries. An item
on the front page shocked him.
‘You know what that means, don’t you?’ Norah said.
… unclothed and partly decomposed body, he’d seen. Why did they print such things, and which ghouls read them? He folded the paper and said, ‘What’s that, my dear?’
‘I won’t be able to go to the play.’
Indecent – worse: hideous. He saw the body and tasted it on his toast. ‘What play is that?’
‘Tea for Three,’ said Norah. ‘I was so looking forward to it.’
That too? How trivial and sour the title seemed over breakfast. He said, ‘I’d completely forgotten about it. You might be feeling better tonight. I must say, I’m feeling a bit off. That’s enough breakfast for me.’
‘I won’t enjoy it. It won’t be the same.’
‘Then I shall cancel the tickets.’
‘You can’t do that. It’s a gift – Miss Nightwing will be terribly upset. She was counting on us to go.’
‘But what will I do with the extra ticket?’
‘You can take someone from the office. Miss French.’
‘The inevitable Miss French.’
‘One of the clerks. Mr Thornquist. They’d be glad of a chance. And you can tell me all about it.’
‘Are you sure you can’t go?’
‘Rafie, I feel ghastly. I have this rotten feeling in my stomach –’
She described it with disgusting care, checking Mr Gawber’s reverie. Sick people knew their ailments so thoroughly. He clucked and tilted his head in concern; he listened and felt a vengeful glee rising to his ears. He was ashamed, but even that did not diminish the pleasure of hearing her drone on about her stomach. She had deprived him of a night’s sleep.
He promised to get tickets for another play: they’d see Peter Pan at Christmas. A penance – he would have to sit through two plays for her gastric flu. And she said she couldn’t face making his lunch. So the crush of a noon-time pub as well, elbows and soapy beer and the yakking of loud clerks in the smoke. The catastrophe would finish them, but he wanted it soon. Sometimes he wished there was a chain he could pull to start the landslip quickly.
