Paul Theroux - My Secret History

And I saw now that my death would not have mattered. I was a fool for ever believing in my importance. I felt I didn’t count. Knowing all this was like dying; not cut down with one swipe of a blade, but going slowly as the truth sank in and spread like an infection.

I had always thought the most cynical lines in literature were in the Jacobean play The White Devil , by John Webster, and went something like: Before your corpse is cold your wife will be screwing:

O man ,

That lie upon your death-bed and are haunted

With howling wives! Ne’er trust them; they’ll remarry

Ere the worm pierce your winding sheet ,

Ere the spider make a thin curtain for your epitaph .

It had seemed too cruel and taunting to be true.

It was true. I believed my case was worse, for I had not died but had only gone away.

She had said: I pretended to myself that you were dead .

She also said she had told me everything. Could that be so? I thought: There must be more. She said there was nothing.

“What’s his name?”

“What good will it do if I tell you that?”

“I’ll know who it is.”

“It’s all over,” she said. “You’re back. It’s different now. Don’t you see that I love you?”

“If you loved me you wouldn’t have done that.”

“I didn’t realize you’d take it so hard,” she said. “I hadn’t guessed it would hurt you.”

“It’s killing me.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be so melodramatic,” she said.

I grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, and then pushed her against the wall, abruptly banging her head. She was shocked, but she made no sound except a sudden gasp, so I did it again. This time she was frightened and hurt, and she began to cry.

“Please—”

“Melodramatic!” But I knew that melodrama is nearly always the result of that accusation.

My instinct was brutal. I only knew the effect of my anger on her after I was violent. I wanted to hit her again. I could only prevent myself by picking up an ashtray and smashing it on the floor. I succeeded in frightening her — indeed, she was terrified. Her terror gave me no pleasure, but it did calm me, by making her passive.

From the little room upstairs came Jack’s just-woken voice. “Daddy, what’s that noise?”

I knew that if he had not been there I would have gone much further.

How many times after that did I tell him, “I dropped something”?

He wanted passionately to hear me say that, though he knew it was a lie. Lying made me responsible. He feared that one day he would be burdened by the truth.

It was a storm that had broken over us. In old folktales witches have the gift of being able to whistle for a wind. I saw Jenny as having this witch’s gift, but the wind was still blowing, long after she wanted it to stop. We were all afraid; we all wanted it to be over.

In my jealous anger I looked for more proof and when I could not find anything I was only the more suspicious, because finding nothing at all seemed like definite proof that something was being concealed.

“Stop — you’re hurting me!”

“Tell me his name!”

“Daddy — Mummy!”

We were angry voices and thuds and screams. We were the worrying couple you hear from a window late at night, their voices so loud you can’t tell which window. Screaming at each other, screaming at the window so that someone might hear. At their most desperate they want everyone to hear them fight. And you think: They’re ignorant, they’re dangerous. We were them.

She said, “Why shouldn’t I have done that?”

I said, “I wanted you to be better than me.”

She said, “It’s absurd that you should hate me because you find I am just the same as you.”

“It’s not absurd — it’s logical,” I said. “But you’re worse!”

And in between these quarrels we sat down and ate, we watched television, we slept together. I did not hate her. We were in love, and I was dying.

Death was in all my dreams. I opened doors on familiar rooms and there was no one inside. I searched the woods for my son and saw him far-off, holding someone else’s hand. And when I looked down I saw that what I had taken to be a side of raw beef in a ditch was my corpse in a grave. There were never any mourners in my dreams, there was no grief, there was no evidence that I had ever existed. I dreamed constantly of flying — soaring low over hills and keeping to their contours. When I crash-landed, exhausted by the speed, my bones broke like chair legs snapping.

I woke from such dreams as if I had not slept, my body ringing with aches. And then I could not do anything except follow the brainless routine of an angry housewife. I took Jack to school, I dusted, and did the dishes, and then I met Jack and fed him and I forced him to have a nap because I needed one. I disliked the entire day, but was not capable of anything else. When Mrs. Trevor, the charlady came, I went out alone — usually to Drummond’s Bank, where I lurked, often following Jenny home, shadowing her, and then at the station hurrying to the ticket barrier and pretending that I was meeting her.

I saw nothing. She never spoke to anyone. She read her Evening Standard and that was that. And nothing was more dispiriting to me than to sit in a London train filled with homeward-bound commuters. They were tired and pale and rumpled; I was sure they dreamed, but they looked defeated. Being among them frightened and depressed me. Once I had felt like an alien: I was different, I had hopes and my own work, I was a bird of passage. Now I suspected that I resembled them — we were all being cheated.

I opened her mail, and I discovered that the phrase “steaming open a letter” is meaningless. There is no such process, none that serves any purpose. Steaming destroys the envelope, the ink runs, it makes a mess. It was the postman who showed me the best way.

A postage-due letter had come from the States and I had to pay twenty pence on it. The handwriting was irregular: a reader’s letter, care of the publisher. They could be very kind or intensely irritating. I needed a kind one; I didn’t want the other.

I hesitated with my money and said, “I wish I knew what was in it.”

The postman said, “Here, got a pencil?”

He inserted the pencil point under the flap at the side — not the one that is licked, but one that is stuck down already, one of the seams of the envelope — and by rolling the pencil he separated the glued seams, and opened the triangle at the side.

The letter began, I have never written to an author before . I read a bit more and then handed over the twenty pence. And nearly every day a letter came for Jenny. I opened them all the postman’s way, but they told me nothing. They were from Oxfam, and her college tutor, and the Labour Party.

The note I had found in her handbag I was sure had been passed to her at work. And the other week, when in my fury I had said that her lover had been someone at work she had merely sobbed. She had not denied it.

There were not many men in the bank, and I knew most of them by sight. One sat at a desk near the Enquiries window. He was about my age, early thirties, and he worked with an air of concentration, seemingly unaware of the noise and motion going on around him. He did not wear a suit like the other men in the bank. His corduroy jacket was slightly stained, but his tie was fashionably wide and bright. He looked out of place there. He reminded me of myself. The name-slot on his desk said A C SPEARMAN.

The other men in the office whose desks and name-slots I could see — Dinshaw, Roberts, Wilkie, Slee — all wore dark suits and looked dull and rather stupidly hardworking. They went home defeated, like the commuters I saw swaying on the 17:43 to Catford Bridge.