She said, “This had better not be as bad as you make it sound.”
I knew it was worse. I had left all the bad parts out. But I was counting on their summary, and expected them to exclude the details: dripping on the table, yelling at Wilkie, saying “fucker,” and squirting piss in Slee’s eyes, not to mention making him chew and swallow the paper.
Just the way she slammed the door when she got home told me that it was going to be a long night. She did not say a word to me until Jack was in bed. We had taken turns reading him his current favorite, Ant and Bee and the Rainbow, how they created the colors. I lay in the darkness reading, and dreading what was to come.
“Are you out of your mind?” she said.
Fury had given her a different face. She had stiff unpleasant features and hateful eyes. Her skin was the color of cement. She loathed me.
“Are you crazy?” she said. “Do you realize what you’ve done?”
All these questions; and there were more.
“What are you playing at? Do you want to get me fired? What’s your problem?”
She then told me what I had done. It was a surprisingly accurate version of my caper at Greville Lodge — conning the maid, bursting in, interrupting the dinner, snapping at Wilkie, swearing, making Slee eat the paper, frightening everyone with the gun. The gun was the worst of it: the English hatred of firearms, their horror of all weapons as instruments of intimidation.
She told it meaning to shame me, but as she spoke it all came back to me and seemed wonderful. Remembering it, I smiled.
“It was a water pistol,” I said.
“He thinks you might have damaged his eyes. There were chemicals in it.”
“Piss,” I said.
“You’re sick,” she said, disgustedly.
“He deserved it. He deserved much worse than that. He was lucky.”
“It wasn’t only him, you know. You ruined their dinner party — you ruined their whole weekend.”
“If I’d had a real gun I would have shot him,” I said. I remembered the Mossberg I used to own when I was fifteen. I pictured Slee’s look of terror as I threatened him with it, and the way he wilted and bled as I shot him. “I will shoot him.”
“Wilkie thinks you should see a doctor. I was in his office an hour. He was so humiliated — and you can just imagine how I felt. He kept telling me that he would have gone to the police if it hadn’t been for Terry—”
“Stop calling him Terry!”
“I’ll call him anything I like. You should thank him. He persuaded Wilkie not to press charges.”
“What charges? Making him eat a piece of paper? Is that a criminal offense? Hah! I’d love to see him in court.”
I saw him saying, Then he made me put the paper into my mouth, Your Honor, while people in the public gallery laughed.
“You terrorized those people,” Jenny said. “You broke some valuable china. Mrs. Wilkie was hysterical. Oh, God, you’re pathetic. You think this is funny.”
When she said that I remembered the moment of squirting Slee, and the way he had put his hands over his face, and I laughed, thinking My eyes!
“You’re mad because I forced him to eat a piece of paper. Hey, it was his own piece of paper! It was funny. I’d do it again. I’d make him eat more.”
“I’m not cross about that,” she said. “I know your pride was hurt. I didn’t realize you’d take it so badly.” She had become very rational, but was still angry. I hated her in her logical moods, because she was intelligent, and I could only get the better of her when she lost her temper. “What I object to is your making a mess of things — ruining the weekend. And especially all that talk. You can’t keep your mouth shut, can you? Now everyone in the bank knows.”
It seemed to me appropriate that she should have to face them. She had wanted to hide and be blameless.
“You brought it on yourself,” I said. “If you hadn’t fucked the guy this would never have happened.”
“I told you I was sorry,” she said. “I told you that I still loved you, that I was glad you’re back, and that I wanted our life to continue as normal.” She had been looking at her hands; now she raised her head and looked me in the face. “But that wasn’t good enough for you.”
It wasn’t: true. I needed the triumph of humiliating that man. Now we could continue.
I said, “We’ll be all right.”
“No,” she said. “You’ve spoiled it. You’ve put me in a horrible position. I can’t forgive you for that.”
“That’s right — stick up for that asshole. He didn’t put me in a horrible position. Don’t think about me.” But sarcasm didn’t help, and I could not keep myself from adding, “I’ll shoot him!”
“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 detaiclass="underline" 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!”