Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

She recruited them, broke them in with sexual tutoring, then paraded them at her lunch parties — the handyman, the African refugee, the poet, the Welsh Buddhist, the ex-convict, the terrorist, the actress, the shy girl she had loved the night before. And she invited her own contemporaries for witness — the successful, the powerful, the very rich: golden pigs, balding mice. There in her drawing room the Minister of Home Affairs might meet a sullen young man and never guess that the boy had, a few weeks before, been his prisoner in a London jail. To the eminent lady biographer of a dead queen she would say, ‘Jim and I have been reading your book with enormous pleasure, haven’t we, Jim?’, and the taxi-driver Lady Arrow had manfully seduced would nod, avoiding the biographer’s eyes. Later, Jim might gain courage and say to a guest, ‘I once had a fare from Lord Snowdon — seemed a nice bloke.’ Thieves and the people they burgled, bombers and their intended victims, agitators and their effigies in flesh and blood, the morally sententious and their mockers — how were they to know? — mingled freely, met and chatted in the Hill Street house, like parents and children. She tolerated one and encouraged the other, for she saw her role as essentially maternal: they were hers.

On the piano there were three framed photographs — her husbands in a curious sequence of age. The first, a painter, had been quite old — she married him when she was nineteen — the next a middle-aged banker, and the last, whom she had married in her own middle age, fairly young, a television director. The photographs might have shown her father, her brother, her son — they didn’t match her. But the three marriages had given her an even greater profusion of relatives, an extended family that verged on the tribal. This, taken with her aristocratic habit of referring to famous people with great casualness as her relations — ‘He’s supposed to be a cousin of mine,’ she would say of a man in the news — made it seem as if there was no one on whom she did not have some claim. Those whom she could not prove a relation either by marriage or blood, she collected in other ways, either confronting them with memorable directness (‘I want to get something straight between you and me, my darling’) or striking up occasional liaisons which she alluded to by saying — and it might be an African prime minister — ‘He’s an old boyfriend of mine!’ in that loud silencing voice.

There were always tragedies, disappearances, desperate phone-calls at odd hours. She understood: the poor were seized by the same tide as the rich, and jailed, or their friends were. She knew: she was a regular visitor to prisons. Yet that had started in the most conventional way, out of nervous concern, as a duty, her reply to the cautious gentility that led others to visit the sick in hospital wards, the lame and the blind, Chelsea pensioners and the like. Lady Arrow set off in a different direction, to Wormwood Scrubs and Pentonville. She brought gifts of cigarettes and fruit and spent afternoons helping the convicts with lessons from correspondence courses. She organized drama groups: lifers at the Scrubs put on Conrad’s stage-version of The Secret Agent (Lady Arrow played Winnie), Holloway did Beckett and Brecht, Brixton a Christmas pantomime. She had plans — for a murderer to play a murderer, a thief to play a thief; to do The Importance of Being Earnest with the girls at Holloway, herself as Lady Bracknell; and lately she had thought of Shadow of a Gunman done by IRA prisoners in Wandsworth. The convicts were released and she saw them at her house, those lunch parties. She was uncritical, helpful, attentive, welcoming; she performed, seeing herself as a character in an unwritten novel by someone like Iris Murdoch, and while she remembered any slight with unexampled malice she invited dependency for the way it obliged the dependent and so she could say without risking contradiction, ‘You can’t refuse me — you’re one of the family!’

She brought her pondering hands to the level of the doorknob, pulled it and crossed the landing. At the foot of the stairs, Mrs Pount, her cleaning woman, held the front door open a crack. Mrs Pount was plump, clean, correct and wore a floppy white cap which she tugged, peering through the crack, as if the cap was a badge of authority empowering her to turn away callers.

‘Two youngsters to see you, ma’am.’

‘Is it urgent?’

Mrs Pount muttered to them, then turned her face to Lady Arrow, towering at the top of the stairs: ‘They say no.’

‘Then send them up,’ shouted Lady Arrow.

Brodie and Murf crept past Mrs Pount into the house, and as if sensing the vastness of the place and startled by their movements repeated in the several mirrors — corridors of themselves prowling towards gilt frames — they bent slightly and hurried forward. Murf held his head down and seemed to paddle sideways to the stairs. Brodie pawed a greeting to the tall woman standing by a palm in a keg who, with the sun behind her and her face in the shadow was unreadable.

‘Dear Brodie!’ said Lady Arrow, watching the two ascend, pulling themselves up on the banister and kicking the carpet. It had always interested Lady Arrow to see how slowly strangers moved in her house, how uncertainly in all that space, as if they had plunged from the entry-way into a wide hole and had to fight their way up a vertical wall. She had met Brodie at Holloway, and had found her careless, intelligent and pretty; she had listened with horror to Brodie’s story of her parents, her ordeal — dreadful, and yet like her own, disturbing. She too had suffered. In the prison the girl had shown little interest, but her visits since to Hill Street had given Lady Arrow encouragement, and she longed for her in a way that made her feel old and foolish and vulnerable.

She wrapped a long arm around Brodie and hugged her warmly. ‘So sweet of you to come — and who is your charming friend?’

‘Murf,’ said Brodie. ‘He’s scared.’

Hearing his name, Murf drew back. He felt the woman’s gaze bump the top of his head and he stepped back to take her in. But after a single glance he looked down again at his feet.

‘Come in and sit down,’ said Lady Arrow. ‘You both look exhausted.’

She threw open the doors, making more light and space, another vastness from the vastness of the landing. She sat and put her legs out and said, ‘Now I want you to tell me what you’ve been doing. I haven’t seen you for ages.’

Brodie took a seat near her, holding a cushion for balance. Murf looked lost. He fled to a chair some distance away and sat on the edge gingerly, as if he feared it might collapse; his knees were together, there was a look of worry on his face, and his hands made the feeding gestures of smoking, his fingers straying to his mouth.

Lady Arrow said, ‘Walking the streets! I suppose that’s what you’ve been doing — walking the streets!’

‘Here and there,’ said Murf. But he choked on it. He cleared his throat and repeated it softly.

‘We had to come up this way,’ said Brodie. ‘I reckoned we should pop in and say hello.’

‘I’m so glad you did. But you caught me on one of my busy days.’ She waved her hand at the desk. ‘Look at all those letters. And every one of them wants a reply. It’s all rubbish. What do you do on your busy days, Murf?’

‘Me?’ He swallowed. ‘Sit around.’

‘Usually we just hang out,’ said Brodie.

‘Yeah, listen to the radio,’ said Murf.

Lady Arrow said, ‘I thought only blind people listened to the radio.’

Murf looked away wildly, as if searching for a reply, and finally fixed his anxious eyes on the row of photographs propped on the piano.

‘Them are all her husbands,’ said Brodie.