Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

Theatre: Rotterdam, the deal with Greenstain, the male disguise. Then, months later, it all went disastrously wrong — no trunks, no arms, excuses from the agent, and silence. Sweeney said, ‘You boobed.’ Nothing was delivered and she was expelled for the failure. She was disappointed, but she had felt safe until that night after the play, when the American had said, ‘Let me guess your passport number.’ She saw how dangerously near she was to being exposed. All the effort, all the lies and then — but she believed it was another lie designed to scare her off — she heard that Weech, the London agent with the trunks, had been killed.

The November darkness enclosed Deptford; she was anyone in the twilight, trudging home. Ahead, half-way down the crescent, she saw the house. She snapped open her handbag and checked her face in the little mirror; she fixed her bite; she walked to the gate and nudged it open with her knee.

Hello, more decay — the place was a shambles. Judging by the decrepit houses he had seen from the top deck of the Number One bus, it was already happening. He got off: the street stank. Perhaps it originated here, the crack that had started the slump, and was eating its way to the City, shrivelling everything in its path. The sewers smelled as if they’d burst, the very bricks looked friable, and where was all that smoke coming from? It raked his eyes and made a fog of the twilight, so dense the weak light made everything small and gave the limpers on the street wraith-like, almost ghostly proportions.

He was fascinated by it. It was as if he was seeing the first evidence of the coming quake, the proof that he had been right all along. And how subtle it was! He had always thought it would be a terrible crash, thunder and lightning, screams, people holding their heads, and great steaming pits appearing all over London; buildings becoming dust and the city slipping sideways. A tremendous seizure, striking at the foundations and buckling the whole ant-hill from its sewers to its ramparts. Food disappearing from the shops and small children chewing their chin-straps and ragged Londoners crowding the streets in panic, breaking his windows on Volta Road and howling at him. Confusion!

No: that was fancy’s need for theatre, the mind’s idle picture, inaccuracy’s enlargement. Catastrophe was like this, it was this — smoke, silence, emptiness and slow decay, an imperceptible leeching that was a strong smell long before it was a calamity. The knotting of the City’s innards into dead hanks, not combustion, but blockage, the slowest cruellest death. And if he had not known in advance that it was going to happen he might have missed it, like an eclipse of the sun on a cloudy day. He might have thought a Cup Final had emptied the streets, and as for the aroma of ruin — that someone had left the lid off his overflowing dustbin or allowed his dog to foul the footpath, nothing more. But he knew the stink and smoke were calamitous, and he felt — as he made his way along the Deptford back streets — like an explorer who, having made his shocking discovery in the strange place, looks for confirmation and realizes that he is the sole witness — he will not be believed. It was an intensification of a feeling he’d had often this year, that he was the only one who knew how the country was dying, who saw its bricks crazing, its fate (as he had just read) written in blood on the station wall, ARSENAL RULE — he understood the warning. The message was everywhere, but it was ignored. He alone saw it and bore it as if it was a sorrowful secret, like the memory of his dead child. They were smiling in the High Road, in the lights from the fish and chip shop, beefy labourers turned to wraiths in fog that was smoke, and banging carelessly into public houses. They didn’t know; ignorance was part of the disease, because the illness would kill them before they understood it was fatal.

He adjusted his bowler hat and swung his briefcase into his free hand, treading an unvarying track, as if at the edge of a precipice. He would be late for his tea, and Norah might be upset. But the fellow didn’t answer his phone and didn’t reply to letters — very naughty — and how else was one to put a flea in his ear? It was a curious address, and he got a further shock when he saw it in the ragged yellow lamplight, for it was how Volta Road would look when the disaster crept further south. He looked up the road into the future.

She had entered the back door with Brodie’s key, and finding no one at home, had gone upstairs to look at her painting. She sat and studied it with gluttonous interest, more than she had ever summoned at home, where most of her father’s collection was stacked against the wall. She had never guessed how valuable the Rogier self-portrait was until it was stolen — the newspapers had given it an extraordinary price. A lovely piece, but awfully cluttered — a very busy painting — and yet the face, the posture, the hands, the bones beneath that flesh: superb. She thought: But I would have stolen a Watteau; and then: Self-portraits always show wounded men and broken promises, not living men but dying men, the poor artist with his nose against a mirror.

She plumped the Indian cushions and lay on the floor. The theft had made a greater claim on her imagination than possession had ever done. And she liked the secrecy of this visit, prowling to the top floor and closing the curtains in the house at the margin of the city — a hideout. It seemed to her as if she was the thief, the knowledgeable accomplice; and this was her prize. Risking her reputation, her great name, she had stolen the painting. She smiled at the wounded Fleming and felt great satisfaction, the sense of being an outlaw. And she toyed with the thought that she was resident here. This was her hidden house, her room, her loot. Here she was safe with all her secrets. The painting shimmered from the closet.

She tapped a spot of snuff on the back of her hand. She raised it to inhale and the doorbell rang. Parting the curtains and peering down she saw a shadowy visitor, a woman, plainly dressed in an old coat and gazing up the street. She considered her snuff, then whistled it up her nose. Again, the bell. But it was her house, her painting. On the way downstairs she thought of moving in, finding a room for Mrs Pount and having stationery printed. She opened the door, delighted to be given a chance to test her ownership.

‘Yes?’

She saw the woman falter.

‘What is it?’

‘Jumble,’ said the woman. ‘I’m collecting for the church sale. It’s on Saturday.’

‘Come in. I’m sure we have something for you.’

Lady Arrow led her through the drawing-room and down the hall to the kitchen, saying, ‘I think it’s such a splendid idea to have jumble sales. Share things out — so many people throw away perfectly lovely toast-racks and napkin rings. I know my friends go all over London in search of good jumble. Here, have a seat. I’ll beaver around upstairs.’

‘Them tea-towels would do me.’

‘A wedding present, I’m afraid,’ said Lady Arrow.

She directed the woman back to the drawing-room and hurried upstairs to a bedroom, the one just off the landing. The bed, a mattress on the floor, was a tangle of sheets and blankets, and there were children’s posters on the wall. She pulled out a drawer: rags. In the bottom drawer she found an assortment of alarm clocks and lengths of wire. She selected a clock and was on her way downstairs when the doorbell rang again.

‘I say, will you see who that is?’ she called, and she thought: What a farce — what a lark! She would move here, Mrs Pount would get used to it. She heard the woman’s footsteps, the door opening, the greetings. She listened on the landing.

‘Yes, can I help you?’ It was the woman’s voice, and for a long moment there was no reply. Then a man’s voice sounded, polite astonishment. But his surprised intake of air, that gasp, had travelled up the stairwell to her.