Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

Hood ignored her and opened the paper bag. He took out a thick blackened pipe, some tweezers, a candle and a cigarette lighter. He pulled the cushions from the sofa and spread them on the floor; and he squatted, setting out the simple apparatus. She watched him and shook her head.

Her voice was flat: ‘You’re going to do me.’

Hood lit the candle and broke off a piece of opium. He took it with his tweezers and heated it in the flame. It sparked, then grew black, but it did not light. It thickened to a rounded blob and became glossy and then was encircled by fire. He said, ‘Lie down.’

Lorna came near and sniffed. ‘What is it?’ She lay beside him propping herself on a cushion. Hood took the pipe, poked the softened plug of opium inside and clicked the lighter over the hole.

‘Put it in your mouth,’ he said, handing her the pipe. He told her how to puff it, and they passed it back and forth until the fragment was reduced to a coal. Then he scraped the bowl and started again. The candle lit her face, the flame giving her cat’s eyes: she was lovely, feline in this small light. The rain pattered against the window, while they lay on the floor smoking. She did it with her lips, holding the pipe-stem tentatively, using her tongue, kissing the smoke, and he was half in love with her as the room filled with the aroma of sweltering poppies. They lay side by side, barely touching, breathing slowly; they puffed the pipe and did not speak. He felt an urgent shudder, a dumb hilarity in his groin. Then it weakened and passed through him, warming him. There was thunder from the river, but the warehouses hid the lightning flashes. In the rain and opium smoke he smelled Hué, the fleeting gulp of a bobbing boat. She was the first to sleep. He watched her as he prepared a fourth pipe, then he moved very close to her and kissed her still lips: they were cool with sleep. He puffed and closed his eyes and he was travelling to the drum and whine of a raga , an Eastern lament, sorrowing for a love that was distant and danced like flame in water. He opened his eyes: already the dream had begun to roll.

Pitchforked awake by a sharp pain in her back, Norah sat up in bed quickly, pushing at the mattress with her hands, making Mr Gawber’s whole body leap. She switched on the bright bedside lamp, blinding her feebly enquiring husband, who turned and groaned. He lifted his pocket watch from the side table and swung it to his eye. It was just past eleven-thirty — he’d had one hour’s sleep. Norah, motioning to stifle a sigh, managed to amplify it. She jerked on the bed, testing her back, drummed her legs and sighed again, drawing the noise slowly through a grievous scale, high to low, the sound of a person spinning down a deep shaft and never striking bottom, only whimpering at the end and growling into silence. They were both fully awake now, and in pyjamas and night-dress, their hair fluffed into tangled white wigs, they looked blanched and ancient, whitened by frailty, two-hundred years old. Mr Gawber quaked. The light jarred him like noise. Norah said, ‘I can’t sleep.’

Mr Gawber pretended not to hear; but how typical of her to wake him to tell him that! She was no solitary sufferer. She demanded a witness, involving him in her discomfort, made him endure it. Invariably she touched him with her pain, and there was not an upset she’d had that he had not somehow shared. She sighed, he groaned. It was in part the penalty of the double bed, marriage’s narrow raft.

‘Wake up, Rafie, I can’t sleep.’

‘What is it?’ He exaggerated his drowsiness.

‘I feel ghastly. Yes, I think I’m coming down with something.’ She tried her fingers, tasted her tongue, blinked — to locate symptoms.

‘Probably’ — he yawned: a stage-yawn, almost a pronouncement — ‘probably just wind.’

‘No,’ she insisted. ‘I’ve pins and needles. A splitting headache. I’ve gone all hot.’ She got a grip on her head and out of the corner of his eye Mr Gawber saw her swivel it. She looked as if she might be trying to unscrew it.

‘Leave your head alone. You’ll just make it worse.’

‘I’m feverish.’

‘Poor thing.’ Without wishing to he yawned again, an authentic rebuke.

‘You don’t care.’ She started to cry softly. ‘Oh, my head. It won’t stop.’

He said, ‘I believe you’re coming down with something.’

‘It’s flu,’ she said and was calm. She listed her symptoms once more.

‘I’m not surprised. There’s a lot of it around. Thornquist was out all last week.’

He wanted to be sympathetic, but Norah’s illnesses were always so laborious that it annoyed him to hear her complain of their annoyance. He resisted consoling her. Then her aches and pains gave him some satisfaction — she deserved them for the pain she caused him. By a queer process of reversal, charity made antagonistic, he came to enjoy hearing her say how it hurt.

The bright lamp knocked against his eyes. He said, ‘Do turn the light off.’

‘How can I find my medicine in the dark?’

She thumped the mattress again, bouncing him, and went to the bathroom, switching on lights. She returned with a bottle of Doctor Collis Browne’s Mixture. It was an old bottle, containing a fluid now unlawfully potent, the active ingredient being opium. She was a regular user of patent medicines and pills: green lung tonic, fruit drops, stinging ointments, syrup of figs, dragées that stained her tongue purple. She was troubled by wind; she took iron for her blood. Old ailments, old cures. She measured the Collis Browne into a soup spoon and sucked it noisily.

‘Do you a world of good,’ Mr Gawber muttered.

Norah lay panting. Mr Gawber reached across and turned the light off. She snored.

But he stayed awake, alert, panic preventing sleep. Perhaps it would happen like this, a fiscal cramp that couldn’t be unknotted with a dose of the old mixture; a sickening for which there was no name or cure; a fever that couldn’t be shaken off. The workers all down with something, brokers with their fingers badly burned, industry halted at a stage of senility, a hardening in the usually swift canals, blockage, and the old country supine, helpless on her back like he himself in a ridiculous parody of repose.

He found his small radio and put in his earplug. He moved the dial. Radio Three had gone off the air. He spun the wheel to the World Service. He heard,

… let no star

Delude us — dawn is very far.

This is the tempest long foretold –

Slow to make head but sure to hold.

Stand by! The lull ‘twixt blast and blast

Signals the storm is near, not past;

And worse than present jeopardy

May our forlorn tomorrow be.

Kipling, the old mixture, favourite of puzzle-setters. Mr Gawber passed the night like this, worrying about England as if she was a dear old aunt in failing health and not whether or how soon the death would come, but how she would look, laid out among her indifferent mourners. The medical analogy he knew to be fanciful, and Kipling’s storm-cone was romance. Whenever he thought of the catastrophe ahead one image remained in his mind: the war. He hadn’t fought, yet he had felt it keenly. It was a dark brown newsreel in his memory he could run at any time, and that flicker from the past was a flicker of the future. Powdered eggs, rationed sweets, sugar coupons, bread queues, the occasional bombed building in the middle of a terrace, like a decayed tooth in a bad denture; books printed illegibly on villainous paper, the brave voice of Churchill on the steam radio and the officious Mr Mullard from number twenty-nine over the road — and now in Bognor — in his warden’s helmet. Coley for tea, the sizzle of snoek, the sound of buzz bombs. War! It had shaped him. He remembered it on this long night with a certain cheer, because the war had helped him to find himself an access of strength. He was not afraid.