The London Embassy

by Paul Theroux

  ‘She’s pretty,’ Horton said. ‘She’s living with a very hungry man.’

  ‘Let’s hope not,’ I said, and when Horton leered at me, I added, ‘For security reasons.’

  She had completely reorganized the Trade Section; she dealt with priority trade matters. It was unthinkable that someone in such a trusted position was compromising this trust with a foreigner who was perhaps only a sexual adventurer. It is the unthinkable that most preoccupies me with thought. Or was she giving all the food away? Or, worse, was she selling it to grateful English people? They paid twice what we did for half as much and, in the past, there had been cases of Embassy personnel selling merchandise they had bought at bargain prices at the American PX: they had been sent home and demoted, or else fired – ‘terminated’ was our word. We wondered about Miss Duboys. Her grocery bill was large and mystifying.

  The day came when these PX print-outs were to be examined by some visiting budget inspectors from Washington.

  Horton, who knew I was fond of Miss Duboys, took me aside that morning.

  ‘Massage these figures, will you?’ he said. ‘I’m sure they’re not as lumpy as they look.’

  I averaged them and I made them look innocent. Yet still they startled me. All that food! For any other officer it would not have looked odd, but the fact was that Miss Duboys lived alone. She never gave dinner parties. She never gave parties. No one had ever been inside her house.

  There was more speculation, all of it idle and some of it rather cruel. It was worse than ‘Miss Duboys has a friend.’ I thought it was baseless and malicious and, in the way that gossip can do real harm by destroying a person’s reputation, very dangerous. And what were people saying about me? People regarded her as ‘shady’ and ‘sly.’ ‘You can’t figure her out,’ they said, meaning they could if you were bold and insensitive enough to listen. And there was her ‘accident’ – doubting people always spoke about her in quotation marks, which they indicated with raised eyebrows. It was her hospital ‘scare.’ Miss Duboys, who was a ‘riddle,’ had been ‘rushed’ to the hospital ‘covered with bruises.’ The commonest explanation was that she ‘fell,’ but the general belief was that she had been beaten up by her mysterious roommate – so people thought. If she had been beaten black and blue no one had seen her. Al Sanger claimed he saw her with a bandaged hand, Erroll Jeeps said it was scratches. ‘Probably a feminine complaint,’ Scaduto’s wife said, and when I squinted she said, ‘Plumbing.’

  ‘Could be another woman,’ Horton said. ‘Women scratch each other, don’t they? I mean, a man wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘Probably a can of tuna fish,’ Jeeps said.

  Al Sanger said, ‘She never buys cans of tuna fish!’

  He, too, had puzzled over her grocery bills.

  Miss Duboys did not help matters by refusing to explain any of it: the grocery bills, the visit to the hospital, no home leave, no cocktail parties, no dinners. But she was left alone. She was an excellent officer and the only woman in the Trade Section. It would have been hard to interrogate her and practically impossible to transfer her without being accused of bias. But there were still people who regarded her behaviour as highly suspicious.

  ‘What is it?’ Horton asked me. ‘Do you think it’s what they say?’

  I had never heard him, or any other American Embassy official, use the word ‘spy.’ It was a vulgar, painful, and unlucky word, like ‘cancer.’

  ‘No, not that,’ I said.

  ‘I can’t imagine what it could be.’

  ‘It’s sex,’ I said. ‘Or one of its substitutes.’

  ‘One of the many,’ he said.

  ‘One of the few,’ I replied.

  He smiled at me and said, ‘It’s nice to be young.’

  The harsh rumors, and the way Miss Duboys treated them with contempt, made me like her the more. I began to look forward to seeing her at the dinner parties, where we were invariably the odd guests – the unmarried ones. Perhaps it was more calculated than I realized; perhaps people, seeing me as steady, solid, with a good record in overseas posts, thought that I would succeed in finding out the truth about Miss Duboys. If so, they chose the right man. I did find out the truth. It was so simple, so obvious in its way, it took either genius or luck to discover it. I had no genius, but I was very lucky.

  We were at Erroll Jeeps’s apartment in Hampstead. Jeeps’s wife was named Lornette, which, with a kind of misplaced hauteur, she pronounced like the French eyeglasses, ‘lorgnette.’ The Jeepses were black, from Chicago. A black American jazz trumpeter was also there – he was introduced as Owlie Cooper; and the Sangers – Al and Tina; and Margaret Duboys; and myself.

  The Sangers’ dog had just come out of quarantine. When he heard that it had cost three hundred dollars to fly the dog from Washington to London, and close to a thousand for the dog’s three months at the quarantine kennel in Surrey (‘We usually visited Brucie on weekends’), Owlie Cooper kicked his feet out and screamed his laughter at the Sangers. Tina asked what was so funny. Cooper said it was all funny: he was laughing at the money, the amount of time, and even the dog’s name. ‘Brucie!’

  The Sangers looked insulted; they went into a kind of sulk – their eyes shining with anger – but they said nothing. You knew they wanted to say something like Okay, but what kind of a name is Owlie? But Owlie was black and it was possible that Owlie was a special black name, maybe Swahili, or else meant something interesting, which – and this was obvious – Brucie didn’t.

  Unexpectedly, Margaret Duboys said to Cooper, ‘Taking good care of your dog – is that funny? People go to much more trouble for children. Look at all the time and money that’s wasted on these Embassy kids.’

  ‘You’re not serious,’ Cooper said. ‘I mean, what a freaky comparison!’

  ‘It’s a fair comparison,’ Margaret said. ‘I’ve spent whole evenings at the Scadutos’ listening to stories about Tony’s braces. Guess how much they cost the American taxpayer? Three thousand dollars! They sent him to an orthodontist at the American base in Frankfurt –’

  ‘I’m thinking of going there,’ Lornette Jeeps said. ‘I’ve got this vein in my leg that’s got to come out.’

  ‘They didn’t even work!’ Margaret was saying. ‘Skiddoo says the kids still call him Bugs Bunny. And Horton’s kid, eight years old, and he’s got a bodyguard who just stands there earning twenty grand a year while Horton Junior plays Space Invaders at these clip joints in Leicester Square –’

  ‘It’s an antikidnap measure,’ Erroll Jeeps said. ‘It’d be easy as shit for some crackhead in the IRA to turn Horton Junior into hand luggage –’

  And then the two Sangers smiled at each other, and while Margaret continued talking, Al Sanger said, ‘We’re pretty fond of Brucie. We’ve had him since Caracas –’

  There were, generally speaking, two categories of bores at the Embassy dinner parties: people with children, and people with animals. Life in London was too hectic and expensive for people to have both children and animals. When they did, the children were teenagers and the animals disposable – hamsters and turtles. One group had school stories and the other had quarantine stories – and they were much the same: both involved time, money, patience, and self-sacrifice.

  ‘You certainly put up with a lot of inconvenience,’ I said to one woman with a long story.

  ‘If that’s what you think, you completely missed my point,’ she said.

  She was proud of her child – or perhaps it was a puppy.

  Margaret Duboys was still talking!

  I said, ‘Are we discussing brats or ankle-biters?’

  ‘It’s still Brucie,’ Tina Sanger said.

  ‘Give me cats any day,’ I said, sipping my gin and trying to keep a straight face. ‘They’re clean, they’re intelligent, and they’re selfish. None of this tail-wagging, no early-morning sessions in the park, no “walkies.” Dogs resent strangers, they get jealous, they get bored – they stink, they stumble, they drool. Sometimes dogs turn on
you for no reason! They revert! They maul people, they eat children. But cats only scratch you by accident, or if you’re being a pest. Dogs want to be loved, but cats don’t give a damn. They look after themselves, and they’re twice as pretty.’

  ‘What about kids?’ Al Sanger said.

  ‘They’re in between,’ I said.

  Erroll said, ‘In between what?’

  ‘Dogs and cats.’

  Margaret Duboys howled suddenly. A dark labored groan came straight out of her lungs. I had a moment of terror before I realized that she was just laughing very hard.

  I had been silly, I thought, in talking about cats that way, but it produced an amazing effect. After dinner, Miss Duboys came up to me and said in a purr of urgency, ‘Could you give me a lift home? My car’s being fixed.’

  She had never accepted a ride from me before, and this was the first time she had ever asked for one. I found this very surprising, but I had a further surprise. When we arrived at her front door, she said, ‘Would you like to come in for a minute?’

  I was – if the Embassy rumors were correct – the first human being to receive such an invitation from her. I found it hard to appear calm. I had never cared much about the Embassy talk or Miss Duboys’s supposed secrets; but, almost from the beginning, I had been interested in offering her a passionate friendship. I liked her company and her easy conversation. But how could I know anything about her heart until I discovered her body? I felt for her, as I had felt for all the women I wanted to know better, a mixture of caution and desire and nervous panic. A lover’s emotions are the same as a firebug’s.

  There was a sound behind the door. It was both motion and sound, like tiny children hurrying on their hands and knees.

  ‘Don’t be shocked,’ Miss Duboys said. She was smiling, she looked perfectly serene. In this light her eyes were not green but gray.

  Then she opened the door.

  Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats –

  She was stooping to embrace them, then almost as an afterthought she said, ‘Come in, but be careful where you step.’

  There were six of them, and they were large. I knew at once that they resented my being there. They crept away from me sideways, seeming to walk on tiptoe, in that fastidious and insolent way that cats have. Their bellies were too big and detracted from their handsomeness. Why hadn’t she told anyone about her cats? It was the simplest possible answer to all the Embassy gossip and speculation. And no one had a clue. People still believed she had a friend, a lover, someone with a huge appetite, who sometimes beat her up. But it was cats. That was why she had not left Britain for the duration of nearly two tours: because of the quarantine regulations she could not take her cats, and if she could not travel with them she would not travel at all.

  But she had not told anyone. I was reminded then that she had never been very friendly with anyone at the Embassy – how could she have been, if no one knew this simple fact about her that explained every quirk of her behavior? She had always been remote and respectful.

  That first night I said, ‘No one knows about your cats.’

  ‘Why should they?’

  ‘They might be interested,’ I said, and I thought: Don’t you want to keep them from making wild speculations?

  ‘Other people’s pets are a bore,’ she said. She seemed cross. ‘And so are other people’s children. No one’s really interested, and I can’t stand condescension. People with children think they’re superior or else pity you, and people with cats think you’re a fool, because their beasts are so much better behaved. You have to live your own life – thank God for that.’

  It was quite an outburst, considering that all we were talking about were cats. But she was defensive, as if she knew about her mysterious reputation and ‘Miss Duboys has a friend’ and all those coarse rumors.

  She said, ‘What I do in my own home, on my own time, is my business. I usually put in a ten-hour day at the Embassy. I think I’m entitled to a little privacy. I’m not hurting anyone, am I?’

  I said, no, of course not – but it struck me that her tone was exactly that of a person defending a crank religion or an out-of-the-way sexual practice. She had overreacted to my curiosity, as if she expected to be persecuted for the heresy of cat-worship.

  I said, ‘Why are you letting me in on your little secret?’

  ‘I liked what you said at Erroll’s – about cats.’

  ‘I’m a secret believer in cats,’ I said. ‘I like them.’

  ‘And I like you.’ She was holding a bulgy orange cat and making kissing noises at it. ‘That’s a compliment. I’m very fussy.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘It’s time for bed,’ she said.

  I looked up quickly with a hot face. But she was talking to the cat and helping it into a basket.

  We did nothing that night except drink. It had got to the hour – about half-past two – when to go to bed with her would have been a greater disappointment than going home alone to Battersea. I made it look like gallantry – I said I had to go; tomorrow was a working day – but I was doing us both a favor, and certainly sparing her my blind bumbling late-night performance. She seemed to appreciate my tact, and she let me know, with her lips and a flick of her tongue and her little sigh of pleasure, that someday soon, when it was convenient, I would be as welcome in her bed as any of her cats.

  Cat-worship was merely a handy label I had thought of to explain her behavior. Within a few weeks it seemed an amazingly accurate description, and even blunt clichés, such as cat-lover and cat-freak, seemed to me precise and perfectly fair. Cats were not her hobby or her pastime, but her passion.

  I got to know her garden apartment. It was in Notting Hill, off Kensington Park Road, in a white building that had once been (I think she said) the residence of the Spanish Ambassador. Its ballroom had been subdivided into six small apartments. But hers was on the floor below these, a ground-floor apartment opening into a large communal park, Arundel Gardens. The gardens, like the apartment and most of its furnishings, were for the cats. The rent was twelve hundred dollars a month – six hundred pounds. It was too much, almost more than Miss Duboys could afford, but the cats needed fresh air and grass and flowers, and she needed the cats.

  On her walls there were cat calendars and cat photographs and, in some rooms, cat wallpaper – a repeated motif of crouching cats. She had cat paperweights and cat picturebooks, and waste-baskets and lampshades with cats on them. On a set of shelves there were small porcelain cats. There were fat cats stenciled on her towels, and kittens on her coffee mugs. She had cats printed on her sheets and embroidered on her dinner napkins. Cats are peculiarly expressionless creatures, and the experience of so many images of them was rather bewildering. The carpet in the hall was cat-shaped – a sitting one in profile. She had cat notepaper, a stack of it on her desk (two weeks later I received an affectionate message on it).

  And she had real cats, six of them. Five were nervous and malevolent, and the sixth was simple-minded – a neutered, slightly undersized one that gaped at me with the same sleepy vacuity as those on the wall and those on the coffee mugs. The largest cat weighed fifteen or twenty pounds – it was vast and fat-bellied and evil-spirited, and named Lester. It had a hiss like a gas leak. Even Margaret was a bit fearful of this monster, and she hinted to me that it had once killed another cat. Thereafter, Lester seemed to me to have the stupid, hungry – and cruel and comic – face of a cannibal.

  There was nothing offensive in the air, none of that hairy suffocation that is usual in a catty household. The prevalent smell was of food, the warm buttery vapor of homecooking. Margaret cooked all the time; her cats had wonderful meals: hamburg in brown gravy, lightly poached fish, stews that were never stretched with flour or potatoes. Lester liked liver, McCool adored fish, Miss Growse never ate anything but stews, and the others – they all had human-sounding names – had different preferences. They did not eat the same thing. Sometimes they did not eat at all – did not even t
aste it but only glanced and sniffed at the food steaming in the dish and then walked away and yowled for something else. It made me mad: I would have eaten some of that food! The cats were spoiled and overweight and grouchy – ‘fat and magnificent,’ Margaret called them. Yes, yes; but their fussy food habits kept her busy for most of the hours she was home. Now I understood her huge shopping bills. She was patient with them – more patient than I had even seen her in the Embassy. When the cats did not eat their food, she put it into another dish and left it outside for the strays – the London moggies and the Notting Hill tomcats that prowled Arundel Gardens. Why the other dishes? ‘My cats are very particular about who uses their personal dishes!’

  I said, ‘Do you use the word “personal” with cats?’

  ‘I sure do!’

  And one day she said, ‘I never give them cans.’

  It was the sort of statement that caused me a moment of unnecessary discomfort. I ate canned food all the time. What was wrong with it? I wanted to tell Margaret that she was talking nonsense: Good food, fresh air, no cans! Me and my cats!

  No, absolutely no cans – the cats drew the line there – but they were not particular about which chair leg they scratched, or where they puked, or where they left their matted hairs. They sharpened their claws on the sofa and on the best upholstered chairs, and went at the wall and clawed it and left shredded, scratched wallpaper, like heaps of grated cheese, on the carpet. The cats were not fierce except when they were protecting their food or were faced with the London strays; but they were very destructive – needlessly so – and it made me angry to think of Margaret paying so much money for rent and having to endure the cats’ vandalism. She did not mind.

  I made the mistake of mentioning this only once.

  She replied, ‘But children are a hundred times worse.’

  I said, ‘How does it feel to have six children?’

  If it seemed that way, she said – that they were like children – then how did it seem from the cats’ point of view? I thought she was crazy, taking this line (look at it from the cats’ point of view!), but she quoted Darwin. She said that Darwin had concluded that domesticated animals which grew up with people regarded human beings as members of their own species. It was in The Voyage of the Beagle, where the sheepdogs treated sheep in a brotherly way in Argentina. From this, it was easy to see that cats regarded us as cats – of a rather inconvenient size, but cats all the same, which fed them, and opened doors for them, and scratched them pleasantly behind their ears, and gave them a lap to sit on, and pinched fleas from around their eyes and mouths, and wormed them.