Paul Theroux - The Family Arsenal

PENGUIN BOOKS

Paul Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts in 1941 and published his first novel, Waldo, in 1967. His subsequent novels include The Family Arsenal, Picture Palace, The Mosquito Coast, O-Zone, Millroy the Magician, My Secret History, My Other Life, and, most recently, A Dead Hand. His highly acclaimed travel books include Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express, Fresh-Air Fiend, and Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. He divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian Islands.

FICTION

Waldo

Fong and the Indians

Girls at Play

Murder in Mount Holly

Jungle Lovers

Sinning with Annie

Saint Jack

The Black House

The Family Arsenal

The Consuls File

A Christmas Card

Picture Palace

London Snow

Worlds End

The Mosquito Coast

The London Embassy

Half Moon Street

Doctor Slaughter

O-Zone

The White Mans Burden

My Secret History

Chicago Loop

Millroy the Magician

The Greenest Island

My Other Life

Kowloon Tong

Hotel Honolulu

The Stranger at the Palazzo dOro

Blinding Light

The Elephanta Suite

A Dead Hand

CRITICISM

V. S. Naipaul

NON-FICTION

The Great Railway Bazaar

The Old Patagonian Express

The Kingdom by the Sea

Sailing Through China

Sunrise with Seamonsters

The Imperial Way

Riding the Iron Rooster

To the Ends of the Earth

The Happy Isles of Oceania

The Pillars of Hercules

Sir Vidias Shadow

Fresh-Air Fiend

Nurse Wolf and Dr Sacks

Dark Star Safari

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published by Hamish Hamilton 1976
Published in Penguin Books 1977
Reissued in this edition 2010

Copyright Cape Cod Scriveners Co., 1976
All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Typeset by TexTech International

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-24-195887-2

For Anne, with love
Alexander, with admiration
Jonathan, with thanks

I determined to see it she was speaking still of English society to learn for myself what it really is before we blow it up. Ive been here now a year and a half and, as I tell you, I feel Ive seen. Its the old regime again, the rottenness and extravagance, bristling with every iniquity and every abuse, over which the French Revolution passed like a whirlwind; or perhaps even more a reproduction of the Roman world in its decadence, gouty, apoplectic, depraved, gorged and clogged with wealth and spoils, selfishness and scepticism, and waiting for the onset of the barbarians. You and I are the barbarians, you know.

HENRY JAMES , The Princess Casamassima

Seated on a cushion at the upstairs window of the tall house, Hood raised the cigarette to the sun and saw that it was half full of the opium mixture. Filling it was pleasurable, like the wilful care of delaying for love: to taste confidence. He winked and sighted with it, as if studying violence from afar, to take aim. He had a marksmans princely squint and the dark furious face of an Apache; but he was only finding his landmarks with the unfinished cigarette.

He moved it slightly to the left and covered a church steeple on the next road. In the slow fire of the late afternoon the tall granite spire had the look of an old dagger. Then to the right, past the far-off bulb of the Post Office Tower, a matchstick in metal; past a row of riverside warehouses the sun had gutted, and more burnt spires, and the dome of St Pauls blue and simple as a bucket at this distance. Drawing the cigarette down he measured a narrow slice of the river between two brick buildings charred by shadow: part of a wharf, the gas works, the power station pouring a muscle of smoke into the sky, a crane poised dangerously like an ember about to snap, housetops shedding flames, then under his thumb the ditch at the end of the crescent where the trains ran.

The ditch wall was streaked with exulting paint: ARSENAL RULE and AGGRO and ALL WANKERS SUPPORT PALACE . That glint behind it was the river at Deptford, showing like a band of bright snake scales; but the snake lay hidden, and here when the wind was right on the creek it was a smell a tidal odour of mudbanks and exposed pebbles, a blocked sink holding a dead serpent. Up close, in Albacore Crescent, the severe summer shadow gave the bending terraces of plump-fronted houses the look of iron closets, clamped against thieves, and it was the emptiness of the street indeed, the emptiness of this part of South London that made Hood think that in each locked house there was at least one impatient man plotting a reply to his disappointment.

Spying with his cigarette in this way, Hood saw the father and son approach, sweeping the road. They made their way in a bumping procession, detouring around a blind abandoned Zodiac parked on flat tyres, passing the widely spaced trees whose slender trunks were sleeved in wire mesh. The old man was on the broom, shoving at the gutter; behind him, the boy no more than ten or eleven fought with the handle of the cart, a dented yellow barrel on wheels. Even with the window closed Hood had heard the scrape of the broom and the bang of the old mans tin scoop as he emptied a load into the barrel. Hood had been waiting since dawn for Mayo to arrive, and the suspense had made his hearing keen: his frustration amplified the slightest sound.

He was in a room of snoring children. He thought of them as children: they were young and slept like cats in a basket. They were not conspirators they didnt know the word. The girl, Brodie, was asleep across the room; Murf slept against the near wall, hugging a pillow. The crudely sketched tattoo on Brodies arm (a small chevron of needlemarks: a bluebird), and Murfs ear-ring and hunting knife, looked especially ridiculous on these contented sleepers. Sleep had removed anger from their faces and made their youth emphatic. Hood used his cigarette to study them. He thought: It is possible to believe in a sleepers innocence.