Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“You’ve made my job practically impossible,” she said. The hatred in her voice hurt me, because the voice itself sounded so logical. “I have no respect for you.”

She was pale, and had the thin starved look that always emerged in her when she was infuriated. But there were no tears. No matter what I said she would not lose her temper.

“You’d better find another place to sleep.”

“This is my house!”

“Then find another room,” she said coolly, “because I don’t want you in my bed.”

My study had no heat, but it had a sofa, and there I slept that night, snoring under my overcoat and still wearing my socks, like an alienated madman in a Russian novel.

The next day, waking alone in the cold room, I had the impression that I was still in Siberia, sniffing the frozen dusty air of Khabarovsk; that I was somehow marooned, and that something terrible was about to happen.

I lay there in the darkness, clutching my coat, at first frightened and depressed by these Siberian impressions, but at last reassured when I saw the glint at the window. The bright winter morning in London had cast a frosty white shine across my desk, my typewriter, my papers, and the stack of thick notebooks I had brought back from my trip.

I did not dare to open them then, but after I had dropped Jack at school I went upstairs, into the cold room, and began reading. I realized only then how much I had written down. I had written everything, and because I had done that I had forgotten it all. The notebooks surprised me in their detail: skies, food, trains, faces, smells, clothes, weather; and they were full of talk. It was exact talk, scribbled first on pieces of paper and then written faithfully as dialogue.

I turned pages, skipping until my eye lighted on the description of an Indian civil servant on the train to Simla, the dark circles under his eyes, the unsmiling mouth and brown suit. He was telling me of an incident in Bengal, where he had been an accountant; of a man who had threatened him. “I’ll charge-sheet you,” I said, and I fetched the blighter a kick—

I laughed out loud. Then I stopped, hearing the echo of the strange sound. For a moment in my reading I had been transported, and I had forgotten everything — all my worry and depression, the crisis in my marriage, my anger, my jealousy. I had seen the Indian sitting across the aisle from me in the wooden carriage, and the terraced fields on the steep slopes, and the way the train brushed the long-stemmed wild flowers that grew beside the track.

It was half a world away, and because it was so separate from me, and yet so complete, I laughed. It was a truthful glimpse of a different scene. It cheered me up. It was like looking at a brilliant picture and losing myself in it.

And I knew my own laugh. I had laughed in the grounds of Greville Lodge — that was a worrying whickering laugh. And I had laughed last night at Jenny when I remembered squirting Slee with the pistol. That had been wilder, with a victimizing howl in it. But this was like a shout of health, like a foreign word that meant “Yes!”

After I met Jack and fed him I hurried to my study again and brought out the notebooks. The room was cold until I began reading.

Within a few days, stimulated by reading, I started to write. I worked from the notebooks; but it was not copying. I enlarged and clarified and invented. I thought of it as fabulating.

I had not finished reading the notebooks. I had gone through most of the first one, and had skimmed the rest, my eye always lighting on funny phrases or pieces of exact description. The Booking Hall in Calcutta , I read, and: I woke near the window with coal smuts on my face then peeled a finger-banana for breakfast .

Such completeness was a gift: I had needed a new world. I propped up the first notebook next to my machine and began typing, improving and ordering the narrative I had scribbled as I had traveled. In the past I had always written in longhand, copying and recopying, and feeling like a monk on a stool. But this was a speedy business. The first day I wrote five pages. It was like singing, or storytelling, because my heart was like a stone, and I discovered that I had to write in this particular way, breezing along, for me to feel better. It worked. For the hours that I sat at my desk I was — not happy, but supremely contented. I was engaged, making something happen: fabulating.

I was back on my trip, but it was a better trip, much odder, with nuisances and delays left out; no pain, no suspense, no wife. I was the fortunate traveler. The chance encounters I left in and buffed up a little. Cutting improved them. Now I was in Paris, and now in Italy, and on the next page Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. That night while I slept we crossed the frontier . And there was still so much to come, in India and Burma. It would be a long book.

On the first day, at six-thirty or so, the front door opened and shut. “It’s me,” I heard, and then “Mum!” as Jack ran from the back room where he had been watching television.

Hearing those voices, I was swept out of the world and I was back in Siberia. My room was cold, my fingers had gone stiff.

“I’ll be right down,” I called out.

I could not write another word. I doused the lights and shut the door and went downstairs.

“You look pale,” Jenny said.

We kissed for Jack’s sake.

“I’ve been working.”

“How is it coming?”

“I don’t know.”

It was the truth. As soon as I was out of that room I could not think of anything I had written — I had no memory of it. It was gone, I had left it behind; and I was gloomy.

I did not ask Jenny about her work — didn’t want to, didn’t dare. We put Jack to bed, then had dinner. We took turns at cooking, at reading Jack his bedtime book. It was not kindness, but a practical effort to avoid conflict. We talked politely, like two strangers who happen to find themselves at the same table, people who begin by saying: Is this seat taken?

“I hate these dark afternoons,” she said. “This bloody weather.”

“It’s been raining a lot lately.”

It was the first time we had ever spoken about the weather. I almost laughed thinking of the married couple, at last alone, who talked about the rain.

But I liked the rain. One of my few pleasures in England was the bad weather. I liked the rain hitting the window like sleet, I liked the black afternoons; and it cheered me to see people blown and beaten by the wind. London always turned black in a gale, and black suited the city. The cold and wet kept me indoors and made me feel cozy. I had always found stormy weather an aid to writing. I liked seeing Jack in his red raincoat and waterproof hat and small boots, his face so warm and smooth, even in that chill, when I kissed him.

“Time for the news — don’t worry about the dishes,” I said. “I’ll do them later.”

We always watched the news these nights. A miners’ strike was in progress. It filled the newspapers, it was the first item on the news, it was the main topic in all the political debates, and the subject of most speeches. It was a noisy drama, and while there was always a new angle or an overnight development, it continued — the picket lines, the shouting, the signs, it was all obstruction. It went on changing subtly, but it did not end. It was English in the way its dullness seemed to matter so much. The event was played out and every move recorded, like a cricket match or a chess game or a huge tree being chopped down with a hatchet. We were all spectators. But a strike was a stoppage: inaction. In a country where nothing much happened, people not doing something constituted drama. This was workers not working.