My Other Life

  The landlord was not at the bar to see us leave. I was glad of that. I felt somewhat furtive and sheepish, as if I were sneaking away with Lucy Haven. I was also ashamed of this furtiveness.

  "That's a parasite," she said as we passed under the mistletoe.

  She led me out to the narrow road, where the fog was swirling and drizzling in the dimmed Christmas lights of the pub windows; and then she turned into one of those country lanes that is like a deep trench. Although it was dark, Lucy did not hesitate, and I followed the sound of her footsteps grinding the damp pebbles in the lane. We had left the hamlet of hidden cottages and were headed for the cliffs. I could hear the waves dumping and sliding in the deep hollows below.

  "I always imagine there are people down there," she said of the sorrowing sound of the waves.

  "Very cold people," I said.

  "Very dead people," she answered, and then, "It's not much farther."

  At once her footsteps went silent as she started down a muddy path.

  I was baffled by her remark, trying to fathom her changes of mood, when she called out, "There it is."

  Lights burned in three or four pretty windows, and although they were blurred by sea mist they helped me pick out the contour of this cottage, the low slanting roof and the bulging walls. I could hear the sea clearly now: it was just beneath us, thrashing softly, sounds of anguish and collapse.

  It seemed a remote and solitary place, and I reflected that I would have been frightened to be alone here. But all its desolate characteristics made it an excitement and a pleasure to be here with Lucy Haven. I was about to enter this stranger's life. It is a traveler's thrill—to delve and then move on, like passing through a pool of light.

  "I always leave the lights on," Lucy said as she opened the front door. "I hate to come back to a dark house."

  On the way from the Crossed Keys I had entertained the fantasy that Lucy Haven might be a witch or a murderess. It had been a spooky encounter, the business with Mrs. Pickering and the chance meeting with Lucy. She killed her husband, and Not everyone is what they seem, and the sudden invitation to her cottage on the cliffs, and her remark Very dead people.

  Inside that sense of mystery vanished. It was a tidy place, penetrated with the odors of good bread and healthy cats and green plants. Its warmth heightened these odors and made them fragrant, and the warmth itself was a reassurance. If it had been cold in the cottage I am sure I would have been apprehensive. It was rather shadowy—only the lamps near the windows were burning—but I could see the pots of ivy and the fruit basket on the scrubbed pine table, a cat asleep on the sofa near the fireplace, and I could hear a clock's hurrying tick. Along one wall were bookshelves, and there were some pictures on another wall. But these were obscured by shadows. I did not want to see them, I did not want more light than this; I liked the fire and the dim lamps and the plump sofa and the thick rug.

  "I've been making a jumper," Lucy said. I suppose she thought I had been wondering about all that knitting paraphernalia that lay on the ladderback chair. "I had hoped to finish by Christmas, but there's not much chance of that. Christmas is Saturday."

  "Is it for someone special—the jumper?"

  "Yes," she said, and looked very serious and intense. "Someone in Africa. I'm a sort of godmother to a little girl in Lesotho. Actually she's quite a big girl now. I send a lot of knitted things to her. It can get very cold in Africa."

  She handed me a glass of white wine and we toasted each other.

  "Happy birthday," I said.

  She frowned and said, "Happy Christmas."

  I sat on the sofa, making room for her to sit next to me, but she chose to sit on the rug, before the fire. A cat went to her and she gathered it into her lap and stroked it.

  "She calls me Mummy," Lucy said, and smiled, but not at me. "She's a fifth-former now."

  We went on talking—about the work of the missions in Africa, about the Yorkshire weather, about the pleasures of radio programs and the tastes of herbal tea; but all I thought was how badly I wanted to make love to her. I could begin by getting down beside her on the rug in front of the fire. I did not want to make it obvious. As we talked, and as she refilled my glass, I grew steadily more dreamy with desire. Time passed; I was attentive, awaiting my chance.

  She said, "I think this silly cat has been in a fight. He's got a torn ear."

  "Let's see," I said, and scrambled next to her.

  The torn ear occupied us for a while, and the fire warmed my face, and I was sleepy with wine. At last, sensing that I was falling, I put my arm around her, then squeezed her shoulder and leaned to kiss her.

  She arched her back and stiffened as though I had driven a spike into her.

  "What are you doing?" Her voice was cold with contempt.

  I did not know what to say.

  "Do you think I'm just going to tumble into bed with you?"

  She said it with such a sneer that I was on my feet before she had finished speaking. She had made me ashamed of myself. I backed away, stumbling slightly—it was like being thrown out of bed. I said no, of course not, it was the furthest thing from my mind. And, my, look at the time!

  "I have to go," I said. "Where's my pack?"

  She switched on another light, and I was going to the door, eager to run. The overbright light made the cottage seem less friendly and rather poky and cluttered. Now I could see the books on the shelves. I was slinging on my knapsack and studying the shelves and, with nothing to lose—I had already touched bottom—I spoke the malicious thought that was in my mind.

  "Have you read him?" I said. I was at the door, waiting for her parting words.

  "Paul Theroux?" she said, and brightened; the good thought showed in her face. "Oh, yes, I love him. He's smashing."

  2

  I hesitated at the door of the cottage, then smiled at Lucy Haven and took hold of my beard. She did not have the slightest idea who I was. She had rebuffed the man she knew as Edward Medford. But, "Paul Theroux? Oh, yes, he's smashing." I wanted to laugh. I certainly wanted to stay longer. And I wanted to tell her my name.

  Lucy said, "You don't have to rush off like this."

  The words were hospitable, but they were face-savers; her ones insisted that I must leave soon.

  She said, "I think I've offended you."

  "Not at all!" I said—much too heartily, because I meant it. I had thought of teasing her a little and then saying, Guess who I really am!

  "I mean, I offended your masculine pride," she said.

  With a difficulty I hoped was not visible to her, I suppressed my reply to this.

  "I think you misunderstood me," she said.

  A lovely unattached woman's invitation to a half-drunk stranger to walk to her isolated cottage on the longest night of the year, her birthday, to split a bottle of wine—this was a misunderstanding? It seemed a reckless if wholly unambiguous offer of casual sex to me.

  Or had I misread her signals and jumped to conclusions? That was probably what she meant by "masculine pride." All the while she thought she was being kind to a lonely traveler. And yet in England, and in some other places, "Do you want to come to my place for a drink?" had nothing to do with thirst but a great deal to do with hunger. Didn't she know that?

  "But stay a little while longer," she said. "We might as well have the other half."

  In fact, I had leaped up so quickly I had left my glass with wine still in it. As she handed it to me, I dropped my knapsack to let her know that I planned to linger.

  "I think you had the wrong idea about me," she said. "It's strange when one lives alone. One is unaware of giving off a lot of contradictory signals. They think I'm a bit mad in the village. I know they talk about me behind my back. 'What does she do up there all alone?'"

  "What do you do?"

  "I have my wireless and my gramophone," she said. That sad old refrain. "And my books," she went on, and gestured at the shelves where perhaps a thousand paperbacks were tightly fitted.

&nbs
p; Following the bookshelves brought her back to the fireplace. I stayed where I was, near the books I had written.

  She put a few small pieces of coal on the fire and pushed them with the tongs. It was a statement, that she wanted the fire to burn quickly and die, and—specifically—for me to take the hint and go. She did not want to throw me out, but she was trying to make me understand that her friendliness was formal—the same sort of philanthropy that motivated her to send woolly jumpers to Africa.

  She was not generous; She had been kindly in a tentative way. All the presumption had been mine.

  I thought: She deserves to know that I have lied about my identity.

  I would have told her who I was, except that I had the strong feeling that she did not think Edward Medford was a very nice person. It was more than that business about my masculine pride—an expression I hated; it was that she did not like me much, didn't like my appearance. I had simply landed up here, an ignorant American. I wasn't jolly, as hikers were supposed to be. I was a bit of an oaf.

  All this prevented me from blurting out my name. And at last, thinking about it, I was glad I had given her a false name, especially a ridiculous one like Edward Medford. I wanted her to mock my name privately to herself and be mistaken. Americans have such extraordinary names ... Wrong!

  I said, "You know, back there at the pub, you really didn't have to ask me to your cottage for a drink."

  "You looked a bit lost," she said. "And it's almost Christmas."

  "So I'm your Christmas act of charity," I said.

  "And it's my birthday. Perhaps it was a little present to myself, too."

  "Make up your mind," I said.

  "You sound cross."

  It was unreasonable of me, perhaps, but I felt she was being patronizing. I was still stung by the rebuff, by her exaggerated words—all the futile theater in Do you think I'm just going to tumble into bed with you? But more than that, she made me feel I was just another muddy hiker who had stumbled into Blackby Hole.

  "I'm not cross. I appreciate your taking me in," and when I saw the effect this had on her, I added, "But don't worry, I won't stay long." She did not react. I said, "Frankly, I thought you wanted a little company."

  "You thought I was lonely," she said, and she laughed gently. "That's actually quite funny."

  "Don't you ever get lonely?"

  "I don't have time! I'm desperately busy." And her one word shout was like an explanation: "Christmas!"

  "Have you ever been married?"

  "No," she said, interrupting me.

  "Do you—?"

  "Questions," she said, and then looked away. "I had a fiance once. He died, regrettably."

  "The world is full of good men," I said by way of consolation.

  She was insulted by this, and stiffened as she had when I had touched her. "I didn't think of him as a man."

  I said nothing—allowed a moment of silence out of respect for this man's memory.

  "A few years ago I was seeing someone."

  She hesitated. I thought: Seeing means everything.

  "But he went away."

  The words were sad, but she was fairly bright. There was no remorse or self-pity in her tone, only a wistful echo. That was what I had found so attractive in her—her spirit, her sense of freedom; and I had thought she had chosen me. I knew better now. She only wanted chat. So I chatted.

  "You must read a great deal."

  "You find that strange," she said.

  That irritated me. I did not find it strange at all. I was glad! But it was her way of being smug.

  "It's not only you. A lot of people find it strange. They wonder what I see in an author or a book. But I can't describe the experience. It is magnificent—entirely imaginative and creative." She smiled at me from a tremendous height of accomplishment and intelligence. "Look at it this way. It is my version of hiking. New paths, new scenes, new people. What rambling is to you, reading is to me. It's my fresh air."

  In the raw, simple tones of an untutored hiker I asked her, "Would you recommend any of these books to me?"

  "All of them," she said. "I only keep the books I intend to reread. The rest I give away."

  "So you wouldn't say that some of these"—and I waved my hand at them—"are better than others?"

  Something sadistic in me demanded that she say my name before we could go further.

  She said, "I love reading about distant places."

  "What—this stuff?" I said, and let my fingers hesitate on The Mosquito Coast, The Great Railway Bazaar, and the rest of them standing under the author's name, between Thackeray and Thomas.

  "Anything that feeds my fantasies," she said.

  "I'd love to know your fantasies."

  "It's to do with travel mostly. I dream of sunny countries and blue skies. Steinbeck—the wonderful towns he writes about. Monterey, Fresno, Pacific Grove—such lovely names. Fruit trees. Just the words 'orange groves' make me sigh. I think of the sun on the rows of pretty trees, and heating the roads and the rooftops. I see the bright houses and the little patches of shade under the green trees and the vines. I dream of Mexico too. Very hot and dry—the desert is sort of odorless, you know. Nothing decays, everything withers beautifully, like pressed flowers. I dream of small towns in endless summer..."

  She was describing the opposite of Blackby Hole, where the rising wind of December pushed at the windowpanes and howled under the eaves, and the sea that reminded her of murmuring ghosts spilled its cold surf down below on the hard shelf of beach.

  Lucy Haven was still talking—now about small hot towns in the American Midwest: fresh air, good food, friendly folk, and sunshine. She also saw herself in the African sun, and in a bungalow in Malaysia, and taking a stroll in China. They were simple visions, and strange because they were not at all extravagant. They were not expensive or luxurious—no five-star hotels or gourmet dinners or native bearers.

  "We're on a picnic," she was saying, "sitting on very green grass on a riverbank in the sun. We have food—I've made sandwiches, and everyone is drowsing, and someone says, Let's do this again tomorrow!'"

  And then I saw it, too. We were together, Lucy Haven and I, in California or Mexico, packing a picnic basket and setting off under a blue sky. I had an intense sight of it, which was the more passionate for its simplicity. It was possible and more than that—it was easy. She did not know how attainable it was. I could tell her. I had so often bought tickets and visited such places, but I had been alone and restless, and I had left thinking: Someday I will come back with someone and be happy.

  Lucy had risen from the sofa. I smiled at her and prepared myself to say everything that was on my mind, and I was eager to know what form her astonishment would take.

  But before I could speak, she smiled—a smile that took effort—and she said through her teeth, "Hiking boots!"

  We both looked at my feet.

  She said, "Those little treads pick up mud and carry it indoors and drop it. Look."

  I was standing on a green square of carpet. There were small pellets of mud like chocolate bonbons all around my boots.

  "I'm really sorry," I said, and raised one boot, balancing myself unsteadily on the other. "What a mess I've made."

  "Please don't move. You're making it worse."

  "Shall I take these muddy things off?"

  "I don't know," she said. She was exasperated and upset, and there was a squint of pain in her eyes as she looked down. "I wove that carpet myself—on a hand loom. I did a weaving course in York. It took me ever such a long time. You can't see the pattern very clearly, but I've based it on a Kashmiri design. It's vines and lotuses."

  "Muddy lotuses."

  "I'm afraid so, yes."

  Her voice was flat and disappointed. She wanted me to go through that door and keep going—hike out of her life. She had not asked where I was planning to stay. I had no place to stay! I suspected that she wanted me to know that I was no longer welcome. I had drunk all her wine and asked too many
questions and tracked mud on her handmade carpet.

  People who live successfully in solitude live with elaborate rituals and strict rules. I had broken a number of her rules. She wanted me out. She now wished she had never seen me.

  And that made me stubborn and rebellious. I smiled at her. I knelt and untied one filthy boot and then the other, and stepped out of them. I walked across the room stroking my beard, making her wait, and then walked back to the bookshelves and said, "But what do you really think of him?"

  "Dylan Thomas?"

  "No." I could not utter my own name to her. I feared it might give me a sudden brainstorm and that everything would come out. I tried to be casual; I wagged my fingers. "Him."

  "Paul Theroux?" she said.

  I clutched my beard merely to make my head move in a noncommittal way.

  "I've read practically everything he's written that's in paperback. The novels, the short stories, the travel books. The Great Railway Bazaar was the one that started me off. That's travel, but it's not an ordinary travel book. It's mostly him, so you feel at the end of it that you know him pretty well. He's wonderful on people. The men he writes about are very vivid—funny, too—but most of his women are absolutely awful. Your stockings must be wet through. You're leaving damp footprints on my floor."

  It was a stone floor. My feet were so cold my toes were turned up like Turkish slippers. She had not asked whether I was comfortable, nor invited me to sit down. She was too absorbed talking about this smashing writer who was so wonderful on people.

  "They'll be here tomorrow," she said, looking down at my footprints on the flagstone floor—not disappointment this time but disgust. "I hate feet." She was grimacing at mine. "The Thais are right. There's something really sickening about them. If you point your foot at a Thai, he will be so insulted he might try to kill you."

  "No kidding. I didn't know that," I said, and made a mental note to write it down as soon as I could.

  "It was in one of Theroux's books."

  "Are you sure?" And I thought: Surely not.