The London Embassy

by Paul Theroux

  Cary frowned. He said, “‘That Old Chest in Your Attic Could Be Worth a Fortune.’”

  ‘Cary specializes in old chests. You have to watch him.’

  ‘You flaming wally!’ Cary said, and turning back to me, he said, ‘It’s absolute balls about the top prices, but we buy what we can afford, mainly tables, benches, mirrors, picture frames, and that. Windsor chairs. Welsh dressers if we’re lucky.’

  ‘There’s an awful lot of lifting,’ Lamb said. ‘I’ve done me back I don’t know how many times.’

  ‘He’s the original Welsh dresser, is Lambie,’ Cary said. ‘Aren’t you, sunshine?’

  ‘You’re just saying that because you like me drawers.’

  ‘That’s what we should have called the shop, you know – “Chests and Drawers.”’

  ‘Do me a favor!’ Lamb said in an actressy voice.

  But I noticed that everything they said, no matter how mocking, was tinged with what sounded like real affection.

  I said, ‘What is your shop called?’

  “‘Pining for You” – isn’t it horrid? We hate it,’ Lamb said. ‘We used to do stripping in our tank, to order. Anything you wanted stripped – within limits – we’d chuck in.’

  Cary said, ‘There’s a boom in stripped pine in London at the moment. You get knackered, scrubbing the paint off, but you can sell anything if it’s stripped. We got top whack for a coffin once. Can you imagine someone buying an old coffin? I suppose some clapped-out Dracula –’

  ‘We’ve got a lot of American customers. They adore our refectory tables,’ Lamb said. ‘Or any sort of shelving. They’re mad on shelving over there.’

  “‘Mad on shelving” – you make them sound a pack of flaming morons, Lambie.’

  ‘Well, they are,’ Lamb said, timing his pause after that word, ‘mad on shelving.’

  ‘Americans buy quality,’ Cary said.

  ‘Crawler!’ Lamb said. ‘You’re shameless!’

  Cary said, ‘And that’s what gave me the idea of the lorry. Did you know you can ship a lorry across the Atlantic and it costs the same whether it’s full or empty?’

  ‘That’s Cary’s brilliant scheme. We’re going to take a lorry-load of country pine furniture to California.’

  ‘And flog it,’ Cary said. ‘To pay our way.’

  ‘We reckon on making a tidy fortune on it.’

  ‘Don’t tell me too much,’ I said. ‘If you do, I’ll have to advise you about the regulations governing the import of dutiable goods.’

  ‘Muggins put his foot in it,’ Lamb said.

  ‘Oh, belt up,’ Cary said. But he was laughing.

  ‘I won’t report you,’ I said. ‘But you’d better go get your visas. The Consulate opens pretty soon.’

  ‘Crikey, I feel better. I needed that coffee. You’re awfully kind,’ Cary said.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ I said.

  ‘That’s nice, isn’t it? “You’re welcome.” English people never say that.’ He looked at Lamb and said, ‘You’re welcome, sunshine.’

  ‘Send me a postcard,’ I said.

  ‘We’ll do better than that,’ Lamb said. ‘We’ll report back.’

  ‘When English people go to California,’ I said, ‘they either come back the next day or stay there for the rest of their lives.’

  Lamb said, ‘I wonder what we’ll do.’

  ‘You could do both,’ I said. ‘After all, there are two of you. Each one could –’

  ‘There’s only one,’ Cary said. ‘I mean to say, we’re sticking together.’

  Lamb gave Cary an affectionate push, and Cary lowered his eyes. I noticed again the great difference between their ages. Lamb’s neck was loose and the roots of his hair were gray and his hands were mottled with liver spots. But his voice and his gestures, the promptness of his wit, made him seem youthful.

  ‘That’s the idea,’ I said. ‘Stick together.’

  ‘He’s my wife,’ Lamb said. ‘Aren’t you, petal?’

  I never thought I would see them again. I imagined them crossing the United States in an old English truck loaded with pine furniture – Cary at the wheel, Lamb riding shotgun, going west.

  Of all the get-rich-quick schemes I had ever heard – and I had heard many – this was the best. It was a truckload of furniture, but they paid only for the truck. This would transport them to California, and the sale of the furniture paid for the trip. It had everything – sunshine, freedom, a good product, a free ride, and a guaranteed profit. It had taken a little capital, but even more enterprise; and it gave me hope. Whenever London went dead on me, whenever I thought of ditching my job and clearing out, I thought of Cary and Lamb in their truck, with their pine furniture, bumping down the highway underneath a big blue sky. It made me want to get married and go.

  I was sure they would wind up in San Francisco, overstay their visas, and go to ground. Many Europeans did these days – it was only Arabs who had the confidence to head home when their visas expired. I had met the two men in early January. In late February, the security man at the main entrance phoned me and said, ‘A Mr Cary and friend down here, sir. Doesn’t have an appointment – name’s not in the book – but he says he wants to talk to you. What shall I tell him, sir?’

  A Mr Cary and friend: they were back!

  ‘Send them up,’ I said.

  But Lamb was not the friend, and I barely recognized Cary. He was thinner, he had grown a beard, and he was dressed like a man in the English Department bucking for a promotion – tweed sports jacket, leather tie, corduroy trousers, argyle socks, and shiny shoes. He was a far cry from the junk dealer in the ragged scarf and flat cap and greasy raincoat of six weeks ago. Some people look worse, much stranger, even crooked, when they dress stylishly. That was how Cary seemed to me – as if he were trying to pull a fast one on me. He was frowning, pushing out his lips, jerking his beard with his cheeks.

  And the friend was a girl with a big soft face, who chewed gum with her mouth open. She wore a man’s pea jacket and a woolly hat. Cary introduced her to me as ‘Honey.’

  There are some nicknames that are obstacles to friendship. ‘Honey’ is one of them. At first it seems overaffectionate, and then it seems like mockery, and finally it sounds like a word of abuse.

  Cary was holding her hand. He did not let go of it, even to smoke. He shook out a cigarette, put it to his lips, and lit it, all with one busy hand. In itself his hand-holding was not strange, but he had never once touched Lamb.

  I said, ‘I’m glad you kept your word about giving me a report.’

  Cary didn’t smile. He sat stiffly in his chair with a look of vague incomprehension on his face.

  ‘Just stopped in to say hello,’ he said. ‘And to introduce you to Honey.’

  The girl snapped her gum at me and said, ‘Cary told me how you helped him’ – she was American – ‘and he really appreciated it. Usually Embassy people are such assholes. I remember once when I was in Mexico.’

  Cary coughed and said, ‘You must be busy.’ He looked as if, already, he wanted to go.

  ‘Tell me about the trip,’ I said.

  ‘There’s so much to tell.’

  ‘The crossing,’ I said. ‘What was the ship like?’

  ‘I was seasick most of the time. It was a Polish freighter, full of butch sailors. The food was dreadful – turnips, swedes, boiled cabbage, stews of rancid mince. It was a week of misery. I stayed in my bunk the whole time.’

  ‘What about your friend?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Lamb,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, him. He started acting strange. He’d disappear for hours and then when I asked where he’d been he’d say, “In the bowels of the ship.” He thought he was being incredibly funny.’

  I smiled, remembering Lamb, imagining how he would have said that. Where was the little old comedian? Where was the old Cary, for that matter? This one was entirely new – disapproving and full of seriousness. He was grave, but what was the point?

 
; ‘It wasn’t funny,’ Cary said. ‘He was always cracking jokes. When people who aren’t funny start to make jokes it sounds stupid.’

  His accent was gone, too.

  I said, ‘New York must have been quite a surprise.’

  Cary shrugged. ‘Lamb met a chap in a bar and got very excited. “He’s giving us a place to kip – he’s got bags of room!”’ It was a flash of the old Cary – he did Lamb’s effeminate voice very well, and it reminded me of how his own voice had deepened. He glanced at the girl whose hand he was holding and said, ‘The chap was into S and M. Well, S really. Very keen on spanking. “How do you know you don’t like it if you’ve never tried it?”’

  ‘How did you get out of that one?’ I asked.

  ‘A cobbler’s bench and a lot of pleading. I reckon he’s cobbling someone on it right this minute.’ He weighed the girl’s hand in his own, lifting it and considering it. ‘Hungry?’

  Honey squeezed her face into an expression that said, Sorta, and Cary said to me, ‘We have to go. I promised to show Honey around the neighborhood where I grew up – Stepney Green.’

  ‘But what about your scheme?’ I asked. ‘What about the trip?’

  ‘Don’t ask. The lorry broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike. Turnpike! Why is it that the most horrid places in the States have the prettiest names?’

  ‘Like Stepney Green – the jewel of East London?’

  Cary did not respond to that. He said, ‘We were towed to a garage. It seemed we needed a water pump. Two hundred for the tow, another two hundred for the pump. Nice round figures. We hadn’t a penny.’

  ‘How did you pay?’

  ‘A refectory table, lovely it was, from a boys’ school in Eastbourne. It was covered with carved initials, some of them going back to the eighteenth century. Just the thing for a garage mechanic in New Jersey.’

  I had the strong sense that I did not know this man at all; that we were talking about nothing; that he did not know me.

  ‘The radiator packed up in Virginia, on something called the Skyline Drive – Lamb loved the name. The radiator cost us a beautiful Victorian chest – two drawers, brass fittings, lots of carvings.’ He looked at Honey again and waggled her hand and said, ‘Hi.’

  ‘Hi,’ she said.

  ‘Bored?’

  She snorted a little air.

  He kissed her. I felt I was watching someone taking a bite of candy. He licked his mouth when he finished kissing her.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  ‘So you didn’t make it to California?’ I said.

  ‘We did, after a fashion. By the time we got to Missouri we’d traded most of the big pieces. And over the next three weeks, the rest of it went, to buy petrol and food. We slept in the lorry. It was getting emptier and emptier. Pretty soon, all the best pieces were gone. We’d turned them into cheeseburgers.’

  ‘Not all of them,’ Honey said. She surprised me. Her voice was brighter than Cary’s, and a little malicious and lively.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I asked.

  ‘Pomona?’ She made it a polite question, as some uncertain Americans do when they give information. ‘I go outside one morning and who do I see in the front yard but these two English guys.’

  ‘So you met Mr Lamb,’ I said.

  ‘And his friend,’ she said.

  ‘Not me,’ Cary said in a disgusted way. ‘It was a chicken he found in Arizona. A hitchhiker. “Oh, let’s pick him up – he looks lost!”’ Cary squinted at me, giving me a powerful look of indignation, and he said, ‘Lamb was really beastly to that kid. It was a revelation to me.’

  Honey said, ‘They were fags.’

  Cary swallowed and said, ‘I think he’s sick. I think he’s strange. I think he lost his bottle.’

  Now Honey was smirking. ‘My first husband is into English antiques. They really hit it off.’ She uttered a coarse laugh and dragged Cary’s hand off her lap and said, ‘Let’s go, sailor; we’re wasting this man’s valuable time.’

  ‘We’re looking for a flat,’ Cary said. ‘I’m not going to live over the shop anymore – especially after I’ve seen the way they live in America.’

  ‘We’ve got this grubby little room,’ Honey said, ‘in a dump called Kilburn!’

  ‘We’ll find something,’ Cary said in a solicitous voice.

  ‘What about Lamb?’ I said.

  Cary pretended not to recognize the name for a moment, and then he said, ‘We were really shocked. It opened my eyes. Lamb’s a corrupter. That’s where he belongs – Pomona.’

  ‘Shut up about Pomona,’ Honey said. ‘It’s a hundred times better than this dump. Hey, are we going or aren’t we?’

  So they left. What had gone wrong on the ideal trip, I could not say. But what worried me was that in a half-hour of talking, in the presence of a woman he obviously loved, this very funny man had not smiled once.

  A Little Flame

  ‘I’m downstairs.’ It was a dead man’s voice, like my father talking from his grave. ‘They say they can’t let me see you without an appointment.’ It had a slight stammer of fear or anger in it. ‘I want to talk to you about my wife.’

  ‘I didn’t catch your name,’ I said.

  ‘Whiting.’

  ‘Anthony?’

  ‘James Whiting, from Hong Kong,’ he said. ‘Anthony’s my cousin. He said he’d met you. But Mei-lan –’

  ‘Yes! You’re married to Mei-lan! Now I remember.’

  He said, ‘It’s in that connection that I want to talk to you. It’s very important.’

  ‘I see. I wonder if we could make it tomorrow. Lunch, say – somewhere pleasant.’

  ‘I’ll be on my way back to Hong Kong tomorrow.’ He spoke with a finality in which there was no emotion.

  I said, ‘I’m terribly tied up at the moment.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’ He sounded as if, already, he had been waiting a long time for me.

  ‘Perhaps we could meet the next time you’re here?’

  ‘I’ll never be in London again.’ His voice was stone.

  ‘I might be in Hong Kong one of these days,’ I said.

  ‘You won’t find me. I’m leaving the bank for good. What time do you finish work?’

  ‘I’ll be here forever, I’m afraid.’ His silence demanded that I explain. ‘The Vice-President’s flying in next week from Washington. We’re all working overtime. It might be eleven before I can get away.’

  ‘Midnight, then,’ he said, and I saw blackness.

  ‘Impossible,’ I said.

  ‘I must see you.’ The words rapped against my ear.

  ‘Is Mei-lan with you?’ I asked.

  ‘Mei-lan is dead.’

  ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right down.’

  He was older than I had guessed he would be, but his frailty was partly grief. The strain was on his face, in his sideways glance, and his odd, bereaved smile. He was a tough man who had been stricken with sorrow. His hair, raked into gray and white strands, was as dull as metal. His face was shadowy; there was no light behind the skin. It is that light which can make a person seem old or young.

  Now that I was with him I was less anxious. He was just over sixty – I knew him to be sixty-one – not elderly, but rather old to be the husband of a Chinese girl in her mid-twenties. He had the shaky gaze of a widower. I could not match him to Mei-lan. He looked a little wild.

  I had greeted him. I was still talking, commiserating, and walking much too fast. He replied in a breathless way. He followed me outside and down the Embassy steps. He seemed to be chasing me. I stayed just ahead of the flap of his footsoles, one stride away from him.

  He said, ‘I’m at the Connaught. Shall we go there?’

  That was a bad moment. I said, ‘The Connaught,’ and made it an idiot’s echo.

  ‘I’m sorry to have interrupted your work.’

  Was this irony? Mei-lan was dead! We were heading across the square for Carlos Place.

  ‘It’s perfectly al
l right. I hadn’t understood. I should have asked.’

  ‘I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. I find it hard to talk about. It’s only been a month. The odor of her scent is still in the house. Flammette. It’s very upsetting.’

  He said no more until we reached the Connaught Hotel. The doorman saluted us. James Whiting raised his head and showed the man his bereaved smile, and we went inside. In the little lobby of armchairs and engravings, he said, ‘Wouldn’t we be more comfortable upstairs?’

  He scratched the air with his hands, pointing the way.

  ‘Right here is perfect,’ I said. I sat down to show him I was satisfied and would not go farther. I hoped he would sit down.

  I felt very young then, and sad and swindled, not just visited but haunted. This man had seemed to materialize in London with terrible news, and he looked terrible – the menace was a shadow on his face. I did not want to go upstairs. I did not want a white door to close behind me, in a room smelling of burning lavender, with a blue ceiling and the purifying light from tall windows.

  He frowned at the chair across from mine. He blew out his cheeks in anger – but it may have been only impatience. He sat down in that chair, he sighed, he blinked at me, he tried to start.

  ‘She stayed here, you know,’ he said.

  ‘They say it’s a lovely hotel.’

  ‘This is where she said she was happiest in London, when she came in October for her tests. That’s why I’m staying here.’

  ‘Those tests. I thought she was taking exams. She mentioned she was studying law.’

  ‘To take her mind off it. She was trying to overcome it by means of will power. She had so many tests! She didn’t believe them. The best hospitals. The findings were always the same, even the same words – “the Black Spot,” she said, when she got the reports. When she was too weak to travel – bedridden – she seemed to accept it. They gave her heroin injections. “Heroin for the heroine” – that was her joke. It was wonderful stuff. It made her death almost peaceful.’

  I said, ‘Please don’t feel you have to talk about it.’

  ‘I think it does me good.’ He wore a look of wonderment for a few seconds. It lighted his face briefly; it made him look selfish and a little wild once more. Then it was gone, and with a kind of grumpy deference he said, ‘Unless you’d rather I didn’t.’