The London Embassy

by Paul Theroux

  ‘You’re very sweet,’ she said. She wrinkled her nose and kissed me. ‘Let’s not talk about atom bombs.’

  The matter was at an end. Everything she did made me love her more.

  We went on loving, and then something happened to London. In the late spring heat, the city streets were unusually full of people – not tourists, but hot idle youths who stared at passersby and at cars. Battersea seemed ominously crowded. They kept near the fringes of the park and they lurked – it seemed the right word – near shops and on street corners. They carried radios. There was a tune I kept hearing – I could hum it long before I learned the words. ‘Dancing on the Radio,’ it was called.

  We start the fire

  We break the wall

  We sniff the smoke

  Which covers all the monsters

  Look at us go

  Dancing on the radio,

  Hey, turn up the volume and watch!

  Turn up the volume and watch!

  And there was a chanting chorus that went, ‘Make it, shake it, break it!’ It was a violent love song.

  The youths on the streets reminded me of the sort of aimless mobs I had seen in Africa and Malaysia. These south London boys looked just as sour and destructive. They lingered, they grew in numbers, and their song played loudly around them.

  Flora called them lost souls. She said you had to pity people who were unprotected.

  ‘Then pity the poor slobs whose windows are going to be broken,’ I said.

  ‘I know. It’s a mess.’

  I said, ‘All big cities have these little underdeveloped areas in them. They’re not neighborhoods, they’re nations.’

  Flora said, ‘They scare me – all these people waiting. They’re not all waiting for the same thing, but they’re all angry.’

  Many were across the road from Overstrand Mansions. They sat at the edge of the park; sometimes they yelled at cars passing down Prince of Wales Drive, or they walked toward the shops behind the mansion blocks and paced back and forth. There was always that harsh music with them.

  ‘If this was the States and I saw those people I’d be really worried,’ Flora said. ‘I’d say there was going to be terrible trouble. But this is England.’

  ‘There’s going to be trouble,’ I said.

  She looked at me.

  ‘We’re getting signals,’ I said.

  The boys on the third floor, the ones who had filmed Flora, were now showing us films of idle mobs.

  Then the trouble came. It did not begin in London. It started from small skirmishes in Liverpool and Bristol, and it grew. It was fierce fighting, sometimes between mobs – blacks and whites fighting – sometimes against the police. The sedate BBC news showed English streets on fire. It did not have one cause; that was the disturbing part. But that also made it like the African riots I had seen. There was trouble in a town and all scores were settled – racial, financial, social, even family quarrels; and some of the violence was not anger, but high spirits, like dancing on the radio.

  When it hit London there were two nights of rioting in Brixton, and then, spreading to Clapham, it touched my corner of Battersea. One Sunday morning I saw every window broken for a hundred yards of shopfronts on Queenstown Road. There had been looting. Then the shop windows were boarded up and it all looked uglier and worse.

  I had been at Flora’s that night. We heard the news on her bedside transistor, and on the way home I had seen the police standing helplessly, and seen the running boys and the odd surge of nighttime crowds.

  I was then deeply in love with Flora. I had been looking for her, I knew. She said the same, and this well-educated woman quoted a Donne poem that began, ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee, / Before I knew thy face or name …’ Butin finding her I had discovered an aspect of my personality that was new to me – a kinder, dependent, appreciative side of me that Flora inspired. If I lost her it would vanish within me and be irretrievable, and I would be the worse for it.

  She was different, but that did not surprise me. All women are different, not only in personality but in a physical sense. Each woman’s body is different in contour, in weight, in odor, in the way she moves and responds. It is possible, I thought, that every sexual encounter in life is different and unique, because every woman was a different shape and size, and different in every other way. But what about men?

  Flora said, ‘I’ve stopped wondering about that. “Men” is just an abstraction. I don’t think about men and women. I just think about you and me.’

  We were at my apartment one Saturday, sitting on my Chinese settee from Malacca. I wanted to tell her I loved her, that sex was part of it, but that there was something more powerful, something to do with a diminishing of the fear of death. It was an elemental desire to establish a society of two.

  ‘Let’s talk about love,’ I said.

  ‘Folie à deux,’ she said. ‘It’s an extreme paranoid condition.’

  There was an almighty crash. I ran to the balcony and saw that a gang of boys had stoned a police car and that it had hit a telephone pole. The police scrambled out of the smashed car and ran; the boys threw stones at the car and went up to it and kicked it. Then I saw other boys, busy ones, like workers in an air raid scurrying around in the darkness, bringing bottles, splashing the car. They set the car on fire.

  I shouted. No one heard.

  Flora said, ‘It’s terrible.’

  ‘This is the way the world ends,’ I said.

  She hugged me, clutched me, but tenderly, like a daughter. She was afraid. The firelight on the windows of my apartment came from the burning car, but it looked more general, like the sprawling flames from a burning city. And later there were the sounds of police sirens, and shouts, and the fizz of breaking glass, and the pathetic sound of running feet slapping the pavement.

  We sat in the darkness, Flora and I, and listened. It was war out there. It seemed to me then as if we had been transported into the distant past or future, where a convulsion was taking place. How could this nightmare be the here and now, with us so unprepared? But we were lucky. We were safe and had each other. And, in each others’ arms, we heard the deranged sounds of riot and, much worse, the laughter.

  Past midnight, Flora said, ‘I’m afraid.’

  ‘Please stay the night,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I’m so glad we’re together. Maybe we have no right to be so safe. But nothing bad can happen to us if we’re together.’

  Her head lay against my chest. We had not made love, but we would sleep holding each other and we would keep death away.

  She relaxed and laughed softly and said, ‘You didn’t really think that I’d leave you tonight. I’m not brave –’

  ‘You’re brave, you’re beautiful,’ I said, and I told her how every night that we spent together was special and how, when it came time to part, it hurt and made me feel lopsided. I told her how happy I was, and how many places in the world I had looked for her – in Africa and Asia – and had practically given up hope of ever finding her, though I had never doubted that she existed. All this time the windows were painted in fire, and I heard Flora’s heart and felt her breathe in a little listening rhythm. Tonight was different, I said, because we could spend the whole night together – it was what I had wanted from the moment of meeting her. And what was so strange about liking her first of all for her hair and her green eyes? That’s how I had recognized her! She had been funny and bright and had made me better, and this nightmare world did not seem so bad now that we were together, and –

  ‘To make a long story short,’ I said.

  And then she laughed.

  ‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’ she said.

  Memo

  When I took up my post at the London Embassy I entered into a tacit agreement to share all the information to which I became privy that directly or indirectly had a bearing on the security of the United States of America or on my own status, regardless of my personal feelings.

  I feel it is my du
ty therefore to report on an American national new resident in Britain.

  The Subject is a thirty-two-year-old female Caucasian; slight build, blond hair, green eyes, no visible marks or scars. She is single. She has no criminal record, although our files show that she was arrested once on a charge of Obstruction; the charge was later dropped. She was born in Windsor, New Jersey, of mixed Scottish-Mexican ancestry. Education: Wellesley College and Oxford University, England. She is presently on a one-year sabbatical from Bryn Mawr College, where she is a member of the Department of English, specializing in Women in Literature.

  As an undergraduate at Wellesley, the Subject was a founder-member of several feminist groups, and at Bryn Mawr she has continued to support feminist organizations by acting as faculty adviser. She was arrested in 1980 at a sit-in protesting against the nonadoption of the Equal Rights Amendment; as stated above, the charge against her was dropped. More recently, she led a demonstration at a nuclear power station in central Pennsylvania.

  The Subject entered the United Kingdom on a student visa in January 1981 and became caretaker-tenant of an apartment in Stamford Brook, West London. Her stated reason for being in London was to complete her research for a biography of Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein (1818), and Lodore (1835), as well as Valperga, or the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823). This research did not fully occupy the Subject, and soon after her arrival, together with some British nationals, the Subject founded a group calling itself Women Opposed to Nuclear Technology.

  The US Embassy Fact-Finding Task Force on Security here in London has a substantial file on this (legally registered) organization, as well as tapes and films of its activities, and a membership list on which the Subject’s name appears as Chairperson of the Agitprop Committee. The Subject attends the weekly Friday meeting of this committee.

  What the Fact-Finding Task Force on Security is evidently not aware of is that the Subject has twice been entertained as a guest of Ambassador L. Burrell Noyes at Winfield House. Ambassador Noyes and the Subject’s father are graduates of Franklin and Marshall College, Class of ’43.

  It was at Winfield House earlier this year that I became acquainted with the Subject, though it was some weeks before I learned of her activities in the areas of feminism and antinuclear protest. She struck me as tough-minded, independent, and somewhat combative intellectually. She is extremely personable. She is also lovely. In a short time in England she has managed to make friends with British people – most of them women, most of them opinion-formers – representing a wide spectrum of political thought.

  The Home Office has refused to extend the Subject’s visa, claiming that her student status is no longer applicable, as she has completed her work on Mary Shelley. Personally, I think the Home Office is somewhat antagonized by the Subject’s political activities, but there has been no direct comment on this by the Home Office.

  The foregoing may be necessary to you because of the sensitive nature of my job, and my involvement with the Subject. But none of it is really of much importance, and the only fact worth recording is that roughly two months ago I fell in love with the Subject. Yesterday, having consulted no one – why should we? – we met at the Chelsea Registry Office, where my part of the dialogue went as follows:

  Registrar: ‘Do you, Spencer Monroe Savage, promise to take Flora Christine Domingo-Duncan as your lawfully wedded wife,’ etc.

  And I said, ‘I do.’

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  This collection first published by Hamish Hamilton 1997

  First published in Penguin Books 2011

  Some of these stories first appeared in Atlantic, Commentary, Confrontation, Encounter, Harper’s, Harper’s Bazaar, London Magazine, Mademoiselle, Malahat Review, New Review, New Statesman, New Yorker, North American Review, O. Henry Prize Stories 1977, Penthouse, Playboy, Punch, Shenandoah, Tatler, The Times, The Times Anthology of Ghost Stories and Transatlantic Review. Except for ‘Polvo’, ‘Low Tide’, ‘Jungle Bells’ and ‘War Dogs’, these stories have previously been published by Hamish Hamilton and Penguin Books in World’s End, Sinning with Annie, The Consul’s File and The London Embassy.

  Sinning with Annie and The Consul’s File copyright © Paul Theroux, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1975 and 1977

  World’s End and The London Embassy copyright © Cape Cod Scriveners Co., 1980 and 1982

  ‘Polvo’ copyright © Cape Cod Scriveners Co., 1982

  ‘Low Tide’ copyright © Cape Cod Scriveners Co., 1983

  ‘Jungle Bells’ copyright © Cape Cod Scriveners Co., 1993

  ‘Warm Dogs’ copyright © Cape Cod Scriveners Co., 1996

  Introduction copyright © Cape Cod Scriveners Co., 1997

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-241-96373-9