Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

‘You crack me up,’ said Brodie. Murf was still trembling as they walked to the lower end of the square. Brodie tore the letter open and dropped the smaller envelope into the pillar box in front of the bank, then led Murf across the square.

A young man in a fawn-coloured suit and two pretty girls reclined on the grass sharing a bottle of champagne and food from a small basket.

Murf approached the picnicking group. He stiffened: ‘Bastards!’

The man got to his feet and turned his champagne glass slowly by its stem, eyeing Murf. The girls stopped eating. Murf stared at them, then pushed at his ears.

Brodie took his hand. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m going to flash it.’ He fumbled with his buckle.

Brodie giggled. ‘Let’s go,’ she said, and pulled him away.

They walked up the west side of the square and along Hill Street. Murf said, ‘If I ever see that fucker in Deptford I’ll brick him.’

‘It’s around here somewhere,’ said Brodie. She repeated the house numbers, then stopped. ‘There.’

‘What’s this supposed to be?’

‘Money. I know the old girl who lives here.’

‘You been here before?’

‘Lots of times,’ said Brodie. ‘Come on.’

‘I ain’t going in,’ said Murf quickly. He looked anxious and there was a note of appeal in his voice.

‘Why not?’ Brodie went up the steps and pointed her finger at the bell.

‘No,’ said Murf. ‘Don’t.’

‘Look at him!’

Murf’s face registered surprise and fear as Brodie darted her finger against the bell; and he quailed as he heard its distant purr in the enormous house.

‘Fuck it,’ said Lady Arrow, hearing the bell go and banging her fist so hard on the desk-top a silver snuff-box the shape of a beetle jumped open and spilled some of its fine dark powder over her papers, the pages of a financial statement. She pushed her work aside and stood up, still cursing. But her diction shaved obscenity from the words; she enunciated them overprecisely and with the wrong stress, as if speaking a foreign language from a phrase book.

She was a grey large-boned woman and had a long lined face, a look of coarsened hauteur with highlights of fatigue. Her hair was drawn back tightly across her skull and fixed behind with a ribbon of ragged velvet. She was not pretty, she made no attempt to appear so, she had a disregard even for neatness, she was not clean; she was very tall. The height that in another woman would be an embarrassment, causing an awkward stoop, Lady Arrow gave its full length which was well over six feet; and she could accentuate it by holding her head up and slightly back, giving herself another inch. She would appear clumsy, but her clumsiness intimidated: she was an insulting size.

She wore a roughly-woven smock, open at the throat and bound at the waist by an expensive piece of silk rope; a pair of crushed slippers, a man’s watch. Although her hands were large her fingernails, which were bitten to the quick, gave her fingers the blunt stubby look of garden tools; those of her right hand were smudged with inkstains, those of her left with traces of snuff, the same shade that darkened her nostrils and now her financial statement. These hands were active, limbering and foraging, making repeated clutchings. She allowed them this movement and she seemed at times, as she watched them closing on her lap, like a strangler practising alone in a room.

Lady Arrow was a collector. It was from her mother, an early campaigner for women’s rights — there was a statue of her, flourishing a bronze banner, in a London park — that she got her height and interest, as a girl, in social justice. Her father, a Labour member of Parliament, had been an amateur art historian — some of his collection was still in the house, as he had left it, now dusty and much neglected; the rest was in museums on permanent loan. She had inherited his taste for acquisition but not his eye. Though she dramatized it by exaggerating her early unhappiness, it had been a close family, a secure and humane upbringing; and yet the family traits, combined in Lady Arrow, formed something new. The result was a greed for possession, not of objects but of people. She had always believed that she was carrying on a family tradition; she was a proprietress of fame. Her money mattered: the assurance of her wealth blinded her to difference and allowed her a vulgarity that was beyond affectation. It also made her unassailable. She said the opposite. She spoke of the difficulty of being rich, the impossibility of anyone understanding her except the very poor, with whom she felt a special kinship.

It was a unique arrogance of emotion, the sentimental belief that both great wealth and the distress of poverty granted a simplicity of feeling. To be rich or poor from birth was to know a kind of bravery, and Lady Arrow insisted that rich and poor alike enjoyed a common scepticism; neither experienced true shock or the deception of awe; they were hidden, immovable and did most to turn the world. Lady Arrow’s belief was a wish mingled with envy: in a restaurant she would see waiters hurrying to the kitchen laughing, whispering, perhaps mocking, and she would want to leave her table of chinless companions and join those waiters. She envied them their confident humour, and she could share it — she frequently did at her own lunch parties on Hill Street — because they shared an enemy. The middle-class threatened both — selfish, predatory, unprincipled, artless, exposed and lacking any warmth; drooling and cowardly in the most wolfish way. They were the mob — the accountants in Lewisham, the parvenus in Barnes, the trend-spotters in Islington, the predictable Guardian readers in their Basingstoke bungalows; she feared the children most, their enamelled souls, all their hunger and outrage.

The poor could not be outraged, nor could the rich be moved. Her mother had described to her the first night of Pygmalion (Shaw had been to Hill Street, the play was a great favourite in the family), when, at Liza’s sharp reply ‘Not bloody likely’ the whole theatre had suddenly broken into applause — it was joy, relief, a cheer for vitality. Lady Arrow herself, on the radio programme Any Questions? , had used the word ‘fuck’, pronouncing it in her usual way, as if she was conjugating a German verb. She was the first to do so, and there was a hush, but there was no applause. She was not asked back to the show, and later another man, a mediocre drama critic, claimed credit for first saying the word. The BBC, dominated by the wolfish middle-classes, had demanded an apology. Lady Arrow refused and only hoped that she had wounded them or terrorized them in some practical way.

She would not be ordered by them, or anyone. The privilege of ownership was hers, by right, amounting itself almost to a duty: she was the collector. But the proprietorial instinct extended beyond mere objects, the assembling of pictures or jars in a room catalogued and gaped at. She had known from an early age that she could do anything she wished: the vision excluded nothing. It encompassed the country which, when she first knew this, was nearly the world. So she took up — not causes, but those who promoted them, not ideas but those who held the ideas, not action but those who acted. She chose the people with swift skill, like fruit tested for ripeness with a pinch. It was a deliberate campaign of recruitment and she carried it out with persuasive gusto. She offered what she believed to be the considerable protection of her friendship, and sometimes temporary shelter, to the mother and child fleeing a mistake, the working-class poet putting a book together, the rising painter, or simply the man who had come to mend the pipes and agreed to stay the night. She made no distinction between friends and lovers, men and women: she slept with both and found a wicked delight in teaching an anxious girl the narrow pleasure of her own sexuality, introducing her to the taste with her foraging fingers and watching her surprise — the small, astonished, moonlit, frightened face.