The London Embassy

by Paul Theroux

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  ‘This is our main man,’ Jeeps said, ‘the guest of honor.’

  I said, ‘I’d almost forgotten.’

  ‘It’s a very jolly party,’ the woman said. ‘I’m Grace Yarrow.’

  ‘I just met your husband.’

  ‘He’s gone to vote. But he’ll be back,’ she said.

  ‘The third reading of the finance bill,’ Jeeps said. ‘It’s going to be close.’

  ‘You Americans are so well informed,’ Mrs Yarrow said.

  Horton stepped over and said, ‘I’m going to drag our guest of honor away,’ and introduced me to a Times journalist, an antique dealer named Frampton, and a girl who did hot-air ballooning. The party had grown hectic. I stopped asking for names. I met the director of a chain of hotels, and then a young man who said, ‘Sophie’s been telling me all about you’ – as if a great deal of time had passed and I had grown in reputation. A party was a way of speeding friendship and telescoping time. It was a sort of hot-house concept of forced growth. We were all friends now.

  Someone said, ‘It rains every Thursday in London.’

  ‘We bought our Welsh dresser from a couple of fags,’ someone else said.

  The man named Frampton praised one of Horton’s paintings, saying, ‘It’s tremendous fun.’

  At about eleven, the first people left, and by eleven-thirty only half the guests remained. They had gathered in small groups. I met a very thin man who gave his name as Smallwood, and I could hardly match him to the man on the guest list who appeared as Sir Charles Smallwood. And I assumed I had the wrong man, because this fellow had a grizzled, almost destitute look and was wearing an old-fashioned evening suit.

  Edward Heaven, a name that appeared nowhere on the guest list, was a tall white-haired man with large furry ears, who vanished from the room as soon as he told me who he was, on the pretext of giving himself an insulin injection in the upstairs toilet. ‘Puts some people off their food, it does,’ he said, but he made for the front door, and the next moment he was hurrying down the street in the drizzle, without a coat.

  The party was not quite over, I thought. But it was over. Of the nine people remaining in the room, seven were Embassy people, and when the last guests left – the Times man and the antique dealer – Horton said to us, ‘Now, how about a real drink?’

  He then went out of the room and told the hired help they could go home. In his dark suit, and carrying a tray, Horton looked like a waiter. On the tray was a bottle of whiskey and some glasses. He poured himself a drink, urged us to do the same, and said, ‘Please sit down – this won’t take long.’

  I assumed this was one for the road. But it occurred to me, sitting among my Embassy colleagues, that I had said very little to them all evening. In a sense, we were meeting for the first time. Their party manner was gone, and although they were tired – it was well past midnight – they seemed intense, all business. This impression was heightened by the fact that Debbie Horton, Everett’s wife, had disappeared upstairs in the last hour of the party. Neither Miss Duboys nor I was married, and none of the others’ wives were present. We had all come to the reception alone.

  Horton sat in the center of the circle of chairs, like a football coach after an important game. Scaduto had told me that he liked to be called ‘coach.’ He looked the part – he was a big fleshy-faced man, who used body English when he spoke.

  He said, ‘To tell the truth, I didn’t expect to see Lord Billows here tonight. We were told he was going through a rather messy divorce.’

  ‘They’ve agreed on a settlement,’ Al Sanger said. Sanger had dark hair and a very white face and a bright, almost luminous, scar on his forehead. He was, like me, a political officer, but concerned with legal matters. ‘His wife gets custody of the children.’

  Miss Duboys said, ‘What happens to her title?’

  ‘She stays Lady Billows,’ Erroll Jeeps said. ‘If she remarries, she loses it.’

  ‘Find out what she’s styling herself now,’ Horton said to Jeeps. ‘We don’t want to lose touch with her. If we do, there goes one of our most persuasive strings.’ He turned to me and said, ‘I noticed our guest of honor chatting up Lord Billows. Did you make any headway?’

  ‘He wanted to put me up for a club,’ I said.

  ‘Jolly good,’ Horton said.

  ‘I told him I wasn’t interested.’

  ‘That was pretty stupid,’ Sanger said. ‘He was trying to do you a favor.’

  I could tell from Horton’s expression that he was in sympathy with Sanger’s remark.

  Sanger still faced me. I said, ‘So you approve of discrimination against people on the grounds of sex?’

  ‘It’s a London club,’ he said.

  ‘They don’t allow women to join.’

  Sanger said, ‘Are you afraid they’ll turn you down?’

  Horton and the others looked shocked, and Margaret Duboys said, ‘I don’t want to get drawn into this discussion.’

  I said, ‘Tell me, Sanger, is that remark characteristic of your tact? Because if it is, I’d say your mouth is an even greater liability than your face.’

  ‘Gentlemen, please,’ Horton said, in his coach’s voice. ‘Before this turns into a slanging match, can we move on to something less controversial? I need something on Mrs Whiting – the second Mrs Whiting. Did anyone have a word with her?’

  Scaduto said, ‘I didn’t get anywhere.’

  ‘She makes furniture,’ I said. ‘Very small furniture. For dollhouses.’

  Sanger said, ‘You dig deep.’

  ‘And cutlery,’ I said. ‘Very tiny forks and knives. If you wanted to stab someone in the back’ – here I looked at Sanger – ‘I don’t think you’d use one of Mrs Whiting’s knives.’

  Horton smiled. ‘Debbie wants her on a committee. We had no idea what her interests were. That’s useful. What about our MPs?’

  Jeeps said, ‘The finance bill passed with a government majority of sixteen. I’ve just had a phone call. There were eight abstentions.’

  ‘Good man,’ Horton said. ‘Were any of those abstentions ours?’

  ‘Six Labour, two Liberal. The Tories were solid.’

  Miss Duboys said, ‘Derek Yarrow filled me in on the antinuclear lobby. It seems to be growing.’

  Jeeps said, ‘I did a number on Mrs Yarrow.’

  ‘What did you make of Mr Yarrow?’ Horton asked me, and I realized that in spite of the crowded party my movements had been closely monitored.

  ‘Blustery,’ I said. There was no agreement. ‘Contemptuous. Probably tricky.’

  ‘He’s given us a lot of help,’ Sanger said.

  ‘He seemed rather untrustworthy to me. He described his constituency as “squalid.” I didn’t like that.’

  ‘That’s a snap judgment.’

  ‘Precisely what I felt,’ I said, and Sanger scowled at me for deliberately misunderstanding him. ‘He’s a born-again Tory. He lectured me on Europe. You realize of course that he was a Communist.’

  ‘That’s not news to us,’ Scaduto said.

  ‘I intend to read his book,’ I said.

  Sanger appeared to be speaking for the others when he said, ‘Yarrow doesn’t write books.’

  ‘He wrote one. It didn’t sell. It was political. Howlett published it.’

  ‘Yarrow’s a heavy hitter,’ Sanger said.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, scribbling. ‘I collect examples of verbal kitsch.’

  Horton said, ‘Do me a memo on Yarrow’s book after you’ve read it.’ Then, ‘Was Sophie Graveney alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ Steve Kneedler said. It was his one offering and it was wrong.

  ‘No,’ Jeeps said. ‘She left with the BBC guy – the one with the fake American accent. I think she lives with him.’

  ‘That would be Ramsay,’ Horton said.

  ‘She doesn’t live with Ramsay,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know that?’ Jeeps said.

  I said, ‘Ramsay’s address is gi
ven as Hampstead. Sophie Graveney doesn’t live in Hampstead.’

  ‘Islington,’ Jeeps said. ‘It’s not far.’

  ‘Then why is it,’ I said, ‘that she jogs around Battersea Park every morning?’

  The others stared at me. Horton said, ‘Maybe you can put us in the picture. If she’s living with someone there, we ought to know about it.’

  Scaduto said, ‘Her mother’s Danish.’

  ‘So was Hamlet’s,’ Sanger said.

  ‘I’ve just realized what it is that I don’t like about the English aristocracy,’ Scaduto said. ‘They’re not English! They’re Danes, they’re Germans, they’re Greeks, Russians, Italians. They’re even Americans, like Lady Astor and Churchill’s mother. They’re not English! My charlady is more English than the average duke in his stately home. What a crazy country!’

  Margaret Duboys said, ‘The Greek royal family is Swedish,’ and this seemed to put an end to that subject.

  But there was more. The guest list was gone through and each guest discussed so thoroughly that it was as if there had been no party but rather an occasion during which fifty British people had passed in review for us to assess them. Miss Duboys said that she had found out more on the Brownlow merger, and Jeeps said that he had more on his profile about the printing dispute at the Times, and Sanger said, ‘If anyone wants my notes on export licensing, I’ll make a copy of my update. Tony Whiting gave me a few angles. He’s got a cousin in a Hong Kong bank.’

  I said, ‘No one has mentioned that fidgety white-haired fellow.’

  ‘Howlett,’ said Scaduto.

  ‘No. I met Howlett,’ I said. ‘The one I’m talking about said his name was Edward Heaven. He wasn’t on the guest list.’

  ‘Everyone was on the guest list,’ Horton said.

  ‘Edward Heaven wasn’t,’ I said.

  No one had any idea who this man was; no one had spoken to him or indeed seen him. But there was no mystery. Before we left Briarcliff Lodge, Horton called the Embassy and got the telex operator, a young fellow named Charlie Hogle. Hogle took the name Edward Heaven and had the duty officer run it through the computer. The reply came quickly. Two years previously, Edward Heaven had been Horton’s florist. He was probably still associated with the florist and had found out about the party because of the flowers that had been delivered. Mr Heaven had crashed the party. Horton said that he would now get a new florist and would try to tighten security. You couldn’t be too careful, he said. They were kidnaping American diplomats in places like Paris.

  ‘I think we can adjourn,’ he said, finally. ‘It’s been a long day.’ At the door, he said, ‘You look tired, fella.’

  ‘I’m not used to working overtime,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve been spoiled by the Far East,’ he said. ‘But you’ll learn.’ He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘I know it’s expecting a lot – after all, you’re new here. But I like to start as I mean to go on.’

  Namesake

  Erroll Jeeps was a great talker and lively company; but his jokes could be savage. It was he who first told me the story about the truck with the load of bowling balls that overturns on the expressway outside Chicago. The police arrive and see a Polish workman slamming the bowling balls with a hammer and breaking them into pieces. They ask him what he’s doing and he says, ‘I’m trying to kill some of these niggers before they hatch!’

  He told these stories with the best of humor, but I could not repeat them without feeling guilty and bigoted. In any case, I saw a lot of Jeeps. Every day after lunch, which was usually a cheese sandwich in the Embassy cafeteria with him, I went for a walk in Hyde Park. They were long walks, but I timed them: I could quick-march down Rotten Row or around the Serpentine and be back at my desk in under an hour. When Jeeps came along, I took longer – I could justify it. Wasn’t this part of my job?

  He said that because he was black, he was treated as if he had an affliction. He had been at the London Embassy for three years and knew everyone. Some people behaved toward him as if he were an invalid – they were solicitous; others acted as if he had something contagious.

  ‘Then there’s people who think they understand me because they just spent four years in Mozambique!’ He deliberately mispronounced the name. ‘Mozam-bee-que,’ he said. It rhymed with ‘barbeque.’

  ‘You’ve got high visibility, Erroll,’ I said.

  ‘There’s all kinds of names for it,’ he said. ‘I used to be colored, right? Then I was a Negro. And then I turned into an Afro-American. After that, I was just a member of a Minority Group. Now, I’m black. Listen, when I joined the Foreign Service everyone figured I’d put in for Africa – that’s where blacks are supposed to go – like people with names like Scaduto angle for the Rome embassy.’

  ‘My first overseas post was Kampala,’ I said.

  ‘Better you than me. They’ve got tails there. I asked for New Zealand. I did my graduate work in economics – the effects on the labor force in depressed capital-intensive economies. New Zealand’s a good model – it’s going broke. I figured I could get some research done. Instead, I was posted here. England’s a good model, too. Three million unemployed, galloping inflation – hey, this place is mummified!’

  It was March, but spring comes early to London. The daffodils looked like flocks of slender-necked ducks in pale poke-bonnets, and the crocuses, bright as candy, dappled the ground purple and white. The sky was clear – bluer than any in Malaysia. Girls in riding coats and black velvet hats trotted along the bridleway.

  Hyde Park is a series of meadows, big enough so that the habitual park-users – dog-owners, kite-fliers, lovers, and tramps – have plenty of room. They need it. There was heavy traffic in Kensington Road; I mentioned to Jeeps that in three weeks I had yet to hear anyone blow his horn here.

  ‘They know it’s no use,’ he said. ‘Look at all those cars. It’s worse than Chicago. And the price of gas! Those people are paying almost four bucks a gallon to sit there in that jam. Hey, life can be kind of abrasive here. I wouldn’t stay, except that from an economist’s point of view this is the front lines. This is where all the casualties are.’

  ‘You’d hardly know it here. It’s very peaceful.’

  ‘People have been mugged in Hyde Park,’ Jeeps said. He spoke with satisfaction and now he had a spring in his step.

  We had walked along the margin of the park. Jeeps had pointed out the Iranian Embassy at Princes Gate, where the siege had taken place; he had shown me the scorch marks on the windows. We walked farther. At the Albert Memorial he stopped. He smiled at me.

  ‘Hey, some people have had even worse experiences.’

  ‘Killed?’

  ‘Maimed for life,’ he said.

  He was still smiling.

  ‘That’s hilarious,’ I said. But my sarcasm had no effect on him.

  ‘I’m thinking of a particular case,’ he said, and went on chuckling. Then he turned to the Albert Memorial; the exaggerated grief in the monument, and all that expensive sculpture, only cheapened it and made it more pompous. I looked at it – it was frantic gazebo – and thought of money.

  Jeeps was saying, ‘England is a terrible place for Anglophiles. This post attracts snobs, you know. They end up so disappointed.’

  I said, ‘I’ve never known a snob who wasn’t also a liar.’

  ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Baldwick was a liar.’

  ‘Baldwick – is that a name?’

  ‘Baldwick is only a name. He was CAO before Vic Scaduto took over. It was the only interesting thing about him – his name. He was really proud of it. It was an old English name, he said, one of the great English families, the Baldwicks of Somewhere – he wasn’t sure where. He was about forty-five or so; he’d been posted around the world. He kept asking for London and getting a negative. Like these people who want Africa so they can find their roots – he wanted to find his roots in England. Someone – was it his grandfather? – anyway, someone had told him there was a family estate, a castle, property, shields,
suits of armor, all the rest of it. The Baldwicks were in the Domesday Book, the old man said, only where do you find the Domesday Book? Certainly not in Dacca, which was Baldwick’s first post. Not in La Paz, not in Addis, not in Khartoum – his other posts. All he found were telephone books.

  ‘That was it, see? Wherever he went, even if it was Baltimore, he picked up the telephone book and looked for his name. It’s probably not so strange. I’ve done it myself. But the world is full of people called Jeeps – although you might not think so – and it is not exactly crawling with Baldwicks. He never found one! He found Baldwins and Baldicks and even Baldwigs – I love that one – but he couldn’t find Baldwick. Was he discouraged? No, sir – it made him real proud, because this meant he was the only claimant to the family fortune.

  ‘And it also made him a little obsessive. He wanted to find another Baldwick, but he didn’t want to hear that there were a million of them running around the place. He kept looking in telephone books wherever he was posted. No luck – but he had hopes. After all, the Baldwicks were supposed to be in England. By this time he had worked himself up to public affairs officer. It was a pretty glorious job for a guy who wasn’t very bright and whose field was visual aids. But that’s what happens when you go to Dacca and Khartoum.

  ‘He was finally posted to London. In order to swing it, he took a cut in salary and agreed to be demoted to CAO. Was he eager, or what? They say his wife threatened to leave him, but this was what he had always wanted. At last, a chance to climb the family tree! His wife never forgave him. She was the one who told me this story. She was really bitter – she didn’t leave anything out.

  ‘The first thing Baldwick did in London was get a telephone book. He looked up his name, and bingo! He found one – only one, so that was perfect. It was a John Baldwick, living in some armpit in East London. But then, having found the name, he really didn’t know what to do. Should he tell him he was a long-lost relative? The man might not believe him. And what if the family fortune was in dispute? What if the will was being probated? He figured they might make it tough for him – cut him out of it altogether. And the last thing he wanted to do was reveal that he – one of the noble Baldwicks – was doing a fairly humdrum job at the American Embassy.