Authors: Paul Theroux
She kissed me and snatched up her briefcase and was gone.
I unpacked my bag. I took a shower. I made more green tea and opened my mail: friendly readers’ letters, invitations to seminars, requests for me to give lectures, demands for autographs, appeals for comments on bound proofs—four of them, with the sort of letters my publishers had once sent out soliciting endorsements, so how could I chuck them aside? And bills, Jack’s school fees, tax assessments, and seven more including a phone bill for £600—a grand’s worth of telephone calls to Eden in Marstons Mills. It would take two days to work my way through this stack, but that was another penalty of being away.
The car was out of gas, which was why it wouldn’t start for Jenny. I bought a gallon for my gas can and then drove to the
Station and filled the tank. Three light bulbs were blown in the house. I replaced them. I went shopping in Vauxhall and filled the fridge. I made more green tea.
I sat by the window, looking out onto the Common, drinking Chinese tea. Clouds filled the sky and sank. I felt motionless and complacent—a sense of homely peace that was akin to inertia, as though in being at this house I was tethered to a slowly dragging sea-anchor, not at rest but steadied and safe. I had had this identical feeling in my other house. This was a lovely view and this was a comfortable chair; but I had treetops there, too, and a similar chair. I had a wide desk here and a wide desk there, a razor here and a razor there; books here and books there—two atlases of the world, two sets of Dickens, two Boswells, two Shakespeares, two
Obras Completas
of Borges. A bicycle here and one there; two canoes; two pairs of binoculars; two shortwave radios, two toothbrushes, two sets of clothes—a suit here, a suit there, and everything else, down to the bottle of Tabasco Sauce in each cupboard, in each house, in each country. This house was a different shape but its contents were an exact counterpart of my American house: two of everything.
Except
—and with that hesitating word I saw children on the Common and remembered Jack.
The clouds now filled the sky, and a light rain was falling. I dressed for bad weather—a felt hat with the brim tugged down, a leather jacket and thick trousers. I wheeled my bike out of the garden shed and rode it downhill to the river, and along Chelsea Embankment to Pimlico, thinking how much better this bike was than my American one. The river was full and flowing backward with a spring tide, and a cormorant disappeared into it as I turned into Bessborough Gardens. I was shocked to see workmen tearing the houses apart, the ones that faced the square, because in one of them Joseph Conrad had written his first words as a novelist. And now that house was a stack of broken bricks. One of the greatest things that writers did, I thought, was to isolate an event, and light it with the imagination, to make people understand and remember; and not just events, but people and their passions. Forgetting was much worse than failure: it was an act of violence. For all writing aimed at defeating time. No one could become a writer—no one would even care about it—until he or she experienced the impartial cruelty of time passing.
I cycled past the rubble of Conrad’s house, crossed Vauxhall Bridge Road and cut behind the Tate Gallery and took back streets to Smith Square and Great College Street. There I locked my bike against the railings of one of the school buildings, and I lurked.
I was always reminded, waiting for Jack, of how I had helplessly waited for my girlfriend Tina Spector, when I was fifteen, near her house on Brookview Road. Lurking, I felt an obscure sense of guilt, as though I was about to be found out and accused. And with Jack I felt awkward and vulnerable, because I had been away so long.
He seemed not to recognize me when he appeared from the doorway to the schoolyard, walking quickly to his house. He wore the school uniform—a black suit, a black tie, black shoes. His shoes were scuffed, his suit too tight—he was growing. His hair was spiky, he was pale. He looked tired and rumpled. He carried a briefcase. He looked like a serious little overworked Englishman.
He made quickly for me but did not greet me—did not look at me. He stood near me, and he turned his head away, staring across the grass that was enclosed by the old school buildings.
“Take that hat off, Dad. Take it off. Please take it off.”
“It’s raining, Jack.”
He had started to walk away. I was losing him. He said something more in that same desperate and insistent voice, but I could not catch it.
I took off the hat, stuffed it into my jacket, and followed him.
“And the bicycle clips,” he said.
I had forgotten those. I removed them.
“ ‘Hatless, I take off my cycle-clips in awkward reverence,’ ” I said.
“We’re doing him,” Jack said. “We’re doing that poem.”
“Who else are you doing?”
Now I had caught up with him. He was walking quickly, heaving his briefcase, and taking a roundabout back way towards Victoria Street.
“Everybody—Chaucer, Jane Austen, Conrad. Two Shakespeare plays.” He spoke in a weary and almost defeated way. “Don’t ask me—I have so much work to do. I’ll never get A’s on these exams.”
“It doesn’t matter if you don’t get A’s.”
“It does, or else what’s the point of taking them?” He was disgusted at being forced to be logical because I was frivolous. “Besides, no university will look at me if I don’t get A’s.”
“What Conrad are you doing?”
“Heart of Darkness
. Where did you get that stupid hat?”
“Don’t forget to read ‘An Outpost of Progress’—that was the original of the story. And my favorite, ‘The Secret Sharer.’ When I was riding through Bessborough Gardens, I was thinking—”
“Dad, why—?”
“Listen to me. I was thinking—the first thing to understand is that time passes.”
He had hesitated to listen. His face was pale, a smudge of ink on his cheek, raindrops clung whole to his hair. I could see in his eyes that he would remember what I had said.
“Dad, why did you have to come on a bike?”
“It’s quicker. I can never find a parking space around here for the car. Why—does it embarrass you, like my hat?”
He said nothing, he continued walking, and then more softly he asked, “How was India?”
“Interesting,” I said, but I could tell from the angle of his head that he wasn’t listening, didn’t care, was only changing the subject.
“I might be going back with Mum.”
He hadn’t heard.
He said, “I’ve got history and Russian to prepare for, too.”
We had turned into Victoria Street.
I said, “Is there anything you need—anything we can buy?”
“Batteries for my Walkman.”
“That’s all?”
He shrugged, but it was not a large considered gesture—it was his body wincing towards his head, briefly burying his neck.
I was annoyed and frustrated, because I wanted him to want something that I alone could give him. By not wanting anything, or perhaps refusing to tell me, he was making himself powerful.
He was fifteen, and yet he seemed very old. His leather briefcase was battered and cracked, and seeing it and his loose fallen-down socks and his white ankles, I became sad. He was not a big boy but rather a small man, and he looked weary and harassed
in his shabby black suit. Walking along I felt younger than him, in my blue jeans and leather jacket.
I said, “Is there anything wrong, Jack?”
He shook his head, meaning no, but too quickly, telling me yes.
We went into a small cafe run by an irascible Italian just off Victoria Street. Condensation sweated upon the front windows, the tea urns gasped, and the smell of frying hung in the air with a clinging odor of boiled vegetables. Jack waited for me at the table, and I bought two cups of tea and two cakes. Once he began eating, Jack revealed both his hunger and his mood. Eden sometimes ate that way—the slow, sour, and disgusted way that people ate when they were depressed.
“It’s your exams, isn’t it?” I said.
His silence meant yes, just as his no had meant yes, and I thought then how if he had said yes I would not have known what he meant. “Maybe I can help. Please let me.”
Only then did he raise his eyes. I saw cold resentment in them.
He said, “Do you speak Russian, have you read Pushkin in Russian, do you know standard deviation in advanced maths?”
I smiled fatuously at him, and seeing me draw back he became more insistent.
“What about the Avignon Papacy? What did Charles the Fifth contribute to the recovery of the Valois cause in the Hundred Years War?”
He looked as though he was going to cry.
“I have to write an essay on that for tomorrow,” he said. “Four sides of foolscap. I haven’t even started.”
Then I remembered how I had been sententious with him and said,
The first thing to understand is that time passes
, and I said, “Maybe I could help you with your English.”
“I don’t want help,” he said. “I just want to get it over with.”
He drank his tea in silence, the moment passed.
“I’m hoping Mum will come with me to India,” I said. “Do you wish you could come?”
“Why do you ask me that, when you know I have to stay here and take these exams?” he said, being logical again in a way that shamed me.
“I never took exams like that in the States,” I said. I thought of myself at his age, of my rifle, of being an altar boy at St. Ray’s,
of Tina Spector at the Sandpits, of three funerals equals one wedding; of the whale steaks a few years later. “I wish you didn’t have to.”
He clawed his tie and said, “Then you shouldn’t have sent me to this school.”
His expression was of someone who has been double-crossed. He had been trying to please me in studying hard. What right did I have to undermine him by insincerely wishing it otherwise? He was truer than I was.
He said, “What does Manichaean mean?”
“Something to do with duality—seeing that good and evil are mingled,” I said. “Good in the spirit, evil in the body and material things. Something like that.”
“Where does the word come from? Is it Greek?”
“From the name of the prophet—Manes. He was a Persian who kept being visited by an angel whom he realized was his double. He was also a painter. He was killed. His followers fled to central Asia. Why do you want to know?”
“It was one of the heresies that the Papal—oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter,” he said, and pushed his cup and plate aside and put himself out of my reach. “I have to go back now. Thanks for the tea, Dad.”
We left the cafe and I had the sense that the owner was staring at me, as though I was a pederast.
Jack said, “You don’t have to go all the way back with me.”
Was he embarrassed or ashamed of me? I didn’t know for sure, but I guessed he was. We passed a shop window selling clerical vestments and in the reflection I saw Jack dressed like a mortician and myself in the drizzly monochrome of London dressed like a cowboy, with wild hair. No wonder Jack felt conspicuous.
I walked with him to the large stone archway, which was a side entrance to the school, and Jack hesitated. He didn’t want me to go any farther.
I said, “After you’ve finished these exams you’ll be through with school. We’ll go to the States and have fun. You can take driving lessons.”
He looked up excitedly for the first time that afternoon and said, “I can hardly wait. I really want my license. Will you let me drive your car?”
“You can
have
my car, Jack,” I said. “Anyway, I’ve got two of them.”
Then I saw him behind the wheel, driving away and vanishing on an American road.
He looked energized, still pale and tired but with spirit in his eyes, the vitality inspired by wanting something, even if it was years away. His wet hair was plastered against his head.
“Thanks for the tea, Dad,” he said. “It’s really good seeing you.” He was smiling—thinking of driving a car.
I could not restrain myself from taking him in my arms. I hugged him—he was so thin. He stiffened slightly in surprise but he allowed me to hold him. Then I kissed his cheek, and in the way he returned the kiss I sensed the affection that I had not heard in his voice. He was like me and so he had a horror of revealing it.
“I’m sorry I’ve been traveling so much.”
“I don’t mind,” he said. “As long as you come back.”
He picked up his briefcase and passed his fingers through his wet hair.
“But when you were away Mum was depressed and quite upset,” he said.
“I think I know why.”
“Please don’t tell me,” he said, and I knew he feared having to bear the burden of knowing that story. It was a burden enough to be my son—to try to please me without being overwhelmed by me, without being a lackey. “Dad, I really have to go.”
He was suddenly self-conscious and urgent again. He said “ ’Bye” and broke away from me. Would he ever know how much power he had over me—how in my love for him I needed his encouragement and approval, perhaps more than he needed mine? I watched him until he got to the end of the walkway and had grown small, like a figure out of my past. It was still raining. I put on my old hat and went to my bicycle.
“Does it seem strange, going to India with another person?” Jenny asked in the taxi on the way to the airport.
I said truthfully no.
“I know how you prefer to travel alone,” she said.
I said nothing. I smiled at her. I was grateful to her for coming. I took her hand but she was too nervous to be conscious of the gesture. Her hand went dead when I touched it and she did not notice what I had done until I let it drop. She was agitated at the prospect of a ten-hour flight, worried that she might not have brought the right clothes, fretful that she had left inadequate instructions for her replacement at work.
“Imagine. India. So soon,” she said. “I’m going to be a little out of my element.”
“We’ll have a good time,” I said. “All I have to do is get enough for my article and then we can enjoy ourselves. Our only problem will be the heat. This month and next are the two hottest in India.”
“I don’t care. It’s been a horrid spring in London. I don’t mind missing Wimbledon, And it’s a good thing you didn’t insist that I go with you last month.” She was half talking to herself, fussing, murmuring, smoothing her skirt. “That would have been out of the question. Budget Day. The Chancellor had a few surprises for us, I can tell you.”