Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

The mutterings from behind the curtain grew louder, the bump of furniture quickened, and the curtain itself bulged on the backs of the stagehands. There was a crash and a muffled cry: ‘Balls!’

‘This is the part I like,’ said Mr Gawber.

Hood glanced at him, puzzled. He wondered if the old man was cracked. The curtain had not risen. Mr Gawber relaxed and clasped his freckled hands.

It happened again, porkers’ grunts preceding a wooden thud that made the hem of the curtain dance.

‘Forgive me,’ said Mr Gawber, shaking with laughter. He snorted into his handkerchief. He was enjoying himself now, his look of fear replaced by a cheery appreciation of the random bangings. This, for him, was the only comedy: harmless error, unplanned and unexplained.

The house-lights dimmed, silencing the murmurs in the audience and bringing a hush like piety.

The curtain went up on a modern kitchen the width of the stage, as efficient-looking as an operating room, with chrome and bright fittings and a muted yellow decor. Sunbeams leaned against the windows. A large stove, a refrigerator the size of a wardrobe and a series of oblong cupboards at eye-level, one with its door open revealing shelves crammed with cans of food: there was a gasp of approval from the audience. On counters that ran between the appliances, and on a table at the centre, cooking paraphernalia had been set out — spice-jars, bowls, a pitcher of milk, an electric blender, copper pots and whisks, ingredients in cartons, and a varnished firkin labelled Flour .

‘That’s the kind I want,’ said a woman behind Mr Gawber, biting on a chocolate wafer.

‘Looks awfully expensive,’ said the man next to her.

‘But there’s masses of working surface. Nice units. Fitted cupboards. Vinyl.’

‘Is that a gas cooker?’

‘Electric,’ said Gawber softly to himself.

A red light flashed on the back panel of the stove and a loud buzzer rang. It rang continuously in the empty kitchen and after a minute of this piercing sound a ripple of mirth — embarrassed, expectant, then confident — ran through the audience, responding to the buzz. This unattended signal mimicking rage, went on for another few minutes, causing hoots and finally shouts of laughter.

At the side of the stage a door opened and a woman in an apron rushed across the kitchen. She was recognized by the audience and applauded. She acknowledged this with a small girl’s pout. She was a plump, aged woman with loose heavy arms, brittle make-up, stiff blue hair and a wet drooping mouth. She wore bracelets that flopped and tinkled above the sound of the buzzer. She glared at the noise, making impatient passes with her hands.

‘Blanche Very,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘She’s an old timer. Norah loves her. We saw her as Ophelia at the Hippodrome in Catford. That’s going back a few years.’

The buzz droned on. Blanche Very took a wooden spoon from a counter and whacked the control panel, magically stopping it. This sent the audience into peals of laughter. The hilarity depressed Hood; and Mr Gawber sat with his mouth fixed in a grim bite.

Blanche Very drew on a pair of thick red mittens, then peeked through the window of the stove and groaned — more laughter: it was abrasive and forced — and pulled the oven door open, releasing a tremendous cloud of black smoke.

‘Knickers!’ she cried, bringing out a tray of burned scones.

The audience was now hysterical and a woman sitting near Hood was stamping her feet and wiping her eyes and nearly gagging with croaks of merriment.

‘It’s her timing,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘Can’t see it myself, but there it is.’

For the next several minutes Blance Very measured and sifted flour, broke eggs, poured milk and banged about the kitchen, making each busy gesture into casual blundering and repeating it when she raised a laugh. At one point she opened a cupboard, revealing another assortment of food, impressive for the size of the packages and the way it was stacked, from top to bottom. There was a significant hush in the audience at the sight of it that did not quite conceal an envious hunger.

— Now let’s see here. ‘Baby’s Bottom Muffins’. That’s it.

She worked from a hefty cookbook, which she held up in one hand and read slowly, satirizing the recipe by giving it a Shakespearian stress and intonation. As she spoke the side door opened and a man came in. He wore slippers, clenched a newspaper in his shaking hands and puffed a pipe. He was recognized and applauded.

‘Dick Penrose,’ said Mr Gawber. ‘They’re married. I mean, in real life. Though Norah says it’s touch and go.’

Penrose winked at the audience and Hood saw that all the movement of the head and hands was not for comic effect but rather an elderly twitching that was uncontrollable. It was as if he was being pelted with acid. He shook and walked arthritically, fooling with his paper, blowing on his pipe. Like the woman, he was dressed and made to look more youthful than he was. The programme notes described them as ‘a childless couple in early middle age, perhaps forty,’ but their pinkness was powder. Hood saw two old people in clown’s masks.

— Did you call me, love?

— No, I said ‘knickers’. I’ve burned the scones. They looked like pieces of coal.

— Save them. Might come in handy this winter when the miners are on strike and the Arabs are squeezing our liquid assets.

There were bawls of appreciation, and even scattered clapping, for this.

‘Right,’ said Hood. ‘I’ve seen enough. I’m leaving.’ He hitched forward and started to rise.

But Mr Gawber was asleep. He slept upright, facing the stage, holding the pound of chocolates on his lap, like a train passenger in a tunnel. His posture was attentive; only his eyes, tightly shut, indicated his slumber.

— Speaking of Arabs. Hear about the one that was trying to get back? Goes into an airline booking office and hands over a hundred quid for his ticket. Feller at the desk says ‘You’re ten p. short.’ So this Arab walks outside and stops a City gent. ‘May I have ten p. sir? I want to go back to Arabia.’ ‘Here’s a pound,’ says the gent, ‘take nine more of the buggers with you .’

Hood folded his arms angrily.

There was some business with the electric blender. The woman left the top off and switching it on sent the mixture flying in blobs that plastered the kitchen and shot into their faces. The jokes were about food — the shortage of sugar, the cost of flour, the hoarding of butter; and the audience reacted as if their own grievances were being accurately represented.

— Three weeks on the Costa Packet. Isn’t it smashing to be back? Imagine, a cup of tea without grease in it !

— And no enterovioform for dessert anymore .

— Blimey, they even put garlic in the cornflakes.

— Wasn’t it shocking? Why did we do it?

— Perversion, that’s Europe. But I’ve been looking forward to this. High tea. Good English food after all that Spanish muck.

Mr Gawber swayed in sleep. Hood was restive; the stupid happy faces of the audience, the idiocy on-stage, the gaping at food, the ineffectual humour put him in the mood of the sharpest rage. He could destroy them for this fooling. They were acting out their strength, celebrating their petty hatred. But the worst of this malice was the acceptance of things as they are, the assumption of oily foreigners, the assumption of greed, the assumption of funny little England. That and the moronic display of food stacked, burned, thrown about — which titillated the audience like naked flesh. Hood saw it as the coarsest pornography — hunger’s greedy ridicule.