The Family Arsenal

by Paul Theroux

  ‘Hold it,’ said Sweeney. ‘Mayo’s my wife.’

  Hood said, ‘Then you should keep an eye on her.’

  ‘I’ve been told that before,’ said Sweeney softly.

  They faced each other and Hood saw an acknowledgement in Sweeney’s grey eyes, a recognition bordering on the saddest affinity: they had slept with the same woman. Hood did not feel guilty; he felt ensnared by a sense of shame, and angry that he had been brought so close to this stranger. What did that make him? Another member of the family. And he could see now how it had all gone wrong, why Mayo had kept him away – or perhaps Sweeney himself, out of pride, had avoided bringing him any further into the plot. He could hardly be expected to welcome his wife’s lover.

  ‘Her name isn’t Mayo. It’s Sandra.’

  Hood said, ‘I don’t have much to do with her these days.’

  ‘I know, but it wouldn’t bother me if you did. A man sleeps with your wife. It hurts at first – that’s pride. But then you realize what he’s putting up with and you almost pity the poor bastard.’ Sweeney laughed and reached for his glass.

  ‘I’m going,’ said Hood.

  Sweeney faced him. He said, ‘You’re going to help us. You’ve got ideas – the offensive is yours, if you want it.’

  ‘You’re really in a jam, aren’t you?’

  ‘It’s up to you. I think we can depend on you.’ Sweeney took a sip of his whiskey. ‘I’m getting used to you.’

  ‘That’s your problem,’ said Hood.

  ‘Sweeney’s a great bloke,’ said Murf, in the train back to Deptford. ‘He was like a father to me, he was. He taught me everything I know.’

  ‘Listen, Murf, most fathers don’t teach their kids to make bombs.’

  ‘Then they’re useless, ain’t they? ’Cause that’s what it’s all about, ain’t it?’ Murf slumped in his seat. ‘They done my old man. Didn’t give him a chance. He’s Irish, so they nobble him.’

  Hood looked over and just before Murf turned away he saw the boy’s face crease with grief: he had started to cry. Hood thought: But what have I taught him? He was going to comfort him – they were alone in the compartment – he was moved by the boy’s size, his small crushed face, the ridiculous ear-ring, and that black raincoat he wore in imitation of his own. Then he saw the handle of Murf’s knife and he held back. Suddenly, as if remembering, Murf sprang from his seat, whipped out the felt-tipped pen and wrote on the compartment mirror, ARSENAL RULE.

  At Deptford Station Hood said, ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘The pubs are shut,’ said Murf.

  ‘I’m not going to a pub.’

  He left Murf and walked up a side street to Lorna’s where, in front of the house, he watched a crumpled sheet of newspaper dragged by the wind from the gutter to the sidewalk. It rasped against the garden wall, altering its shape, then tumbled into a tree and flapped fiercely. Hood waited a moment, studying the caught thing animated by the wind, and he was about to go when he glanced up and saw the kitchen light burning. He rang the bell and the light went off. There was no sound from the house. He knocked, then poked open the letter-slot and called Lorna’s name. She didn’t answer. He drew out Weech’s key and unlocked the door.

  ‘Lorna?’

  He switched on the light and saw her cowering half-way down the hall, preparing to run upstairs. He almost recoiled at the sight of her, and she seemed not to recognize him – she registered slow fear, the negligent despair of someone wounded or doomed. And she was wounded. Her face was bruised, her blouse torn, and there were scratches on her neck. She watched him with swollen eyes as he rushed forward and took her in his arms. He could feel her frailty, her heart pumping against his chest.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘They was here – oh, God, I thought they got you too.’ She sobbed and then said, ‘I didn’t tell them anything!’

  ‘Love, love,’ said Hood, and heard the child cry out in an upper room.

  20

  The face was a success: even the dog barked at her, and McGravy was taken in for a few bewildered seconds. She had spent the morning at the mirror working on her eyes – it was too easy to wear sunglasses, and down there sunglasses in this dreary weather would attract as much attention as a full frontal. The headscarf and plastic boots were her greatest concession, since her first thought was to go as a man. She knew she could bring it off, but how to explain it? A woman, then, but anonymous. The skin had to have a pale crêpy texture and around the eyes a wrinkled suggestion of neglect and premature aging, with dull green mascara on the lids. It took her an hour to get the right crude stripe. She laboured with care for the effect and finally achieved it in exasperation, realizing afterwards that what she wanted most in her make-up that day was a look of hurry. A woman went out in the morning to shop, but no matter how rushed she was she did her eyes. She aimed at the haste and pretty fatigue of the housewife with a few lurid strokes of eye-liner. Instead of lipstick she practised her bite, clamping her jaw a fraction off-centre to convey, in a slightly crooked grin, that her teeth didn’t quite fit. Then she put on her boots and scarf and an old coat, seeing her Poldy had japped in his cowardly dance of aggression, diving at her and swivelling his hind end sideways until he sniffed her and whimpered into silence.

  McGravy said, ‘Don’t tell me. Let me guess –’

  ‘I’m in a rush,’ she said, rummaging in the trunk for the right handbag and selecting one in imitation leather with a broken buckle.

  ‘Of course, you’re taking the bus – Mother Courage doesn’t take taxis.’

  ‘I’m not Mother Courage,’ she said. ‘I’m invisible.’

  ‘Poldy doesn’t think so.’ But the dog had stopped barking. He was circling her cautiously, sniffing at her boots.

  ‘And I’m not taking the bus,’ she said, fixing her bite and crushing the handbag under her arm. ‘I’m walking.’

  She slipped out the back door and hurried down Blackheath Hill to where it dipped at the lights. Then she was only following signs and the map she’d memorized. She had never walked here, and it was odd, for once she plunged down from Blackheath, walking west to Deptford, the light altered – filtered by a haze of smoke it became glaucous – and it was colder and noisy and the air seemed to contain flying solids.

  But she had succeeded in her disguise, and the novelty of being invisible cheered her. She celebrated the feeling. There had been a time, before her political conversion, when the thought of going unrecognized would have depressed and angered her. Then, she required to be seen – not for herself, a compliment to her fame, but because she believed from the moment she had become an actress that the role and the person playing it were inseparable. An actress did not become another person in studying a part: the part slumbered in her, the character – not only Alison and Cicely, but Juliet and Cleopatra – was a layer in her personality like a stripe in a cake. Once she had been asked, after a hugely successful Sixties revival of the Osborne play she had taken on tour, how she had done the part so well. She replied, ‘But I am Alison.’ She was Paulina, Lady Macbeth, Blanche Dubois, and all of Ibsen’s heroines. They were aspects of herself, but more than that their words too were hers. Acting for her was a kind of brilliant improvisation; she gave language life, she reinvented a playwright each time she performed. There was nothing she hated more than the proprietorial way a writer or director regarded the text – they wanted to reduce actors to dummies and conceived the theatre as a glorified puppet show (it was this notion, and more, that made her want to ban Punch and Judy shows – her first political gesture).

  Acting was liberation. The theatre had shown her what possibilities people had – it was her political education. Everyone acted, but the choice of roles was always limited by social class, so the labourer never knew how he could play a union leader. True freedom, the triumph of political struggle, was this chance for people to choose any role. It was more than a romantic metaphor – she knew it was a fact. That old man, Mister Punch, leaving The Red Lion
at the far end of Deptford Bridge did not know how easily he had been cheated; in a fairer world he would have power. That took acting skill, but there were no great actors, there were only free men.

  And unseen, part of the thin crowd, she was free today, stamping in her old coat and faded scarf in the High Road, biting to make her face unfamiliar. This was political proof, not simple deceit, but evidence that the woman she was this grey afternoon was unalterable in a capitalist system. Freer, the woman she mimicked would be a heroine. The mimicry was easily mastered, and though once she had neded attention, now, the very absence of it encouraged her. She could be anyone; she was no one; she could walk through walls.

  Deptford – especially those angular cranes and chimneys, the low narrow brick houses, the windowless warehouses – reminded her of Rotterdam. She remembered the errand as one of her most demanding roles, though she savoured it with a trace of regret: it had been robbed of completion. In the end it had failed, and yet nothing she had ever done had so satisfied her, no stage part could compare with it. It was all excitement, the smoky jangling train to Harwich, the Channel crossing that night in early summer, and then the brief electric train past the allotments on the canal to the neat station in that cheerless port. Passing through British immigration, looking the officer squarely in the eye, handing over the American passport – all of it was an achievement greater than her Stratford season. And there was that odd business with her cabin in the Koningin Juliana: she had been assigned a four-berth cabin but she had counted on privacy and had seen the rucksacks and stuffed bags of the other travellers and panicked. She hated the thought of being forced to sleep on this little shelf in a cupboard with three others. She had demanded a single cabin. ‘For your sole use,’ the Purser had said, handing her a new coupon in grudging annoyance and suspicion, believing her to be preparing a corner for a pickup. But she had gone back and sat up the whole night in the four-berth cabin with the hitch-hikers, smoking pot and haranguing them about Trotsky, and in the end she never used the expensive single cabin except to wash her face and check her disguise. She saw how the preposterous expense of the two cabins had shown her in safety how she only needed one; and she laughed at the money it was costing her to learn poverty.

  Then there was Greenstain – only an Arab would mis-spell his own alias – with large pale eyes and a fish’s lips, who had met her in the warehouse and touched her as he spoke, as if tracing out the words on her arm. His staring made him seem cross-eyed, and his lemon-shaped face, unnaturally smooth, frightened her. He had the infuriating manner that dull leering men occasionally practised on her – repeating what she had said and giving it a salacious twang. ‘What have you got for me?’ she said, and Greenstain wet his lips and replied, ‘What have you got for me?’ Then she said, ‘Show me,’ and he said the same, twisting it to make it the gross appeal in a stupid courtship. He had spit in the corners of his mouth and wouldn’t stop touching her arm. She was afraid, he was scaring her intentionally, and it was much worse than deceiving the immigration officers – even the friendly Dutch ones with their ropes of silver braid – because she was alone with Greenstain in that empty warehouse. He was pretending to be sly and he made her understand, using his pale eyes and greedy mouth, that he could kill her and take the money he knew she was carrying. At last, he led her to a corner of the warehouse and showed her the trunks. He kicked one open and took out a gun and pointed it at her and cackled, working his jaws like a barracuda. She paid – the first of the proceeds from Tea for Three, Greenstain counted the money, then examined each note, making her wait while he checked the bundle for forgeries. He gave her an absurd handwritten receipt with the name of the London agent and took her outside. It was dark; the canal lapped against the quayside. Greenstain belched, then embraced her and she looked up and in panic memorized a word painted on the warehouse, Maatschappij, and wondered how it was pronounced. Grenstain ran his hands down her body and then jumped away. For a moment she thought he might shout. She saw him nod; he broke into gaggling laughter. ‘A girl!’ he cried. ‘You are a girl!’ He pushed her lightly. Uninterested sexually, he became almost kind, and later on the way back to The Hook he pointed out the war-time bunkers and, in a settlement of houses, a still solitary windmill.

  Theatre: Rotterdam, the deal with Greenstain, the male disguise. Then, months later, it all went disastrously wrong – no trunks, no arms, excuses from the agent, and silence. Sweeney said, ‘You boobed.’ Nothing was delivered and she was expelled for the failure. She was disappointed, but she had felt safe until that night after the play, when the American had said, ‘Let me guess your passport number.’ She saw how dangerously near she was to being exposed. All the effort, all the lies and then – but she believed it was another lie designed to scare her off – she heard that Weech, the London agent with the trunks, had been killed.

  The November darkness enclosed Deptford; she was anyone in the twilight, trudging home. Ahead, half-way down the crescent, she saw the house. She snapped open her handbag and checked her face in the little mirror; she fixed her bite; she walked to the gate and nudged it open with her knee.

  Hello, more decay – the place was a shambles. Judging by the decrepit houses he had seen from the top deck of the Number One bus, it was already happening. He got off: the street stank. Perhaps it originated here, the crack that had started the slump, and was eating its way to the City, shrivelling everything in its path. The sewers smelled as if they’d burst, the very bricks looked friable, and where was all that smoke coming from? It raked his eyes and made a fog of the twilight, so dense the weak light made everything small and gave the limpers on the street wraith-like, almost ghostly proportions.

  He was fascinated by it. It was as if he was seeing the first evidence of the coming quake, the proof that he had been right all along. And how subtle it was! He had always thought it would be a terrible crash, thunder and lightning, screams, people holding their heads, and great steaming pits appearing all over London; buildings becoming dust and the city slipping sideways. A tremendous seizure, striking at the foundations and buckling the whole ant-hill from its sewers to its ramparts. Food disappearing from the shops and small children chewing their chin-straps and ragged Londoners crowding the streets in panic, breaking his windows on Volta Road and howling at him. Confusion!

  No: that was fancy’s need for theatre, the mind’s idle picture, inaccuracy’s enlargement. Catastrophe was like this, it was this – smoke, silence, emptiness and slow decay, an imperceptible leeching that was a strong smell long before it was a calamity. The knotting of the City’s innards into dead hanks, not combustion, but blockage, the slowest cruellest death. And if he had not known in advance that it was going to happen he might have missed it, like an eclipse of the sun on a cloudy day. He might have thought a Cup Final had emptied the streets, and as for the aroma of ruin – that someone had left the lid off his overflowing dustbin or allowed his dog to foul the footpath, nothing more. But he knew the stink and smoke were calamitous, and he felt – as he made his way along the Deptford back streets – like an explorer who, having made his shocking discovery in the strange place, looks for confirmation and realizes that he is the sole witness – he will not be believed. It was an intensification of a feeling he’d had often this year, that he was the only one who knew how the country was dying, who saw its bricks crazing, its fate (as he had just read) written in blood on the station wall, ARSENAL RULE – he understood the warning. The message was everywhere, but it was ignored. He alone saw it and bore it as if it was a sorrowful secret, like the memory of his dead child. They were smiling in the High Road, in the lights from the fish and chip shop, beefy labourers turned to wraiths in fog that was smoke, and banging carelessly into public houses. They didn’t know; ignorance was part of the disease, because the illness would kill them before they understood it was fatal.

  He adjusted his bowler hat and swung his briefcase into his free hand, treading an unvarying track, as if at the edge of a precipice.
He would be late for his tea, and Norah might be upset. But the fellow didn’t answer his phone and didn’t reply to letters – very naughty – and how else was one to put a flea in his ear? It was a curious address, and he got a further shock when he saw it in the ragged yellow lamplight, for it was how Volta Road would look when the disaster crept further south. He looked up the road into the future.

  She had entered the back door with Brodie’s key, and finding no one at home, had gone upstairs to look at her painting. She sat and studied it with gluttonous interest, more than she had ever summoned at home, where most of her father’s collection was stacked against the wall. She had never guessed how valuable the Rogier self-portrait was until it was stolen – the newspapers had given it an extraordinary price. A lovely piece, but awfully cluttered – a very busy painting – and yet the face, the posture, the hands, the bones beneath that flesh: superb. She thought: But I would have stolen a Watteau; and then: Self-portraits always show wounded men and broken promises, not living men but dying men, the poor artist with his nose against a mirror.

  She plumped the Indian cushions and lay on the floor. The theft had made a greater claim on her imagination than possession had ever done. And she liked the secrecy of this visit, prowling to the top floor and closing the curtains in the house at the margin of the city – a hideout. It seemed to her as if she was the thief, the knowledgeable accomplice; and this was her prize. Risking her reputation, her great name, she had stolen the painting. She smiled at the wounded Fleming and felt great satisfaction, the sense of being an outlaw. And she toyed with the thought that she was resident here. This was her hidden house, her room, her loot. Here she was safe with all her secrets. The painting shimmered from the closet.