Anne Theroux - The Year of the End: A Memoir of Marriage, Truth and Fiction

Paul left today at 8am.

We had been married just over 22 years.

The previous evening we had gone out to eat at a local restaurant, where we drank champagne and reminisced. In a short story which he wrote about that final evening of a marriage, the central characters talk wittily and poignantly about the explorer Sir Richard Burton and the sad, misunderstood wife who burnt his books. The reality was different: we talked about the au pair girls who had cared for our sons while I went out to work and he wrote, and the amahs who had done the same job in Singapore. (In Africa they are called ayahs, but since we left Uganda when our first son was only four months old, we never employed one.) The conversation chronicled the years.

In 1968, a violent incident in Kampala prompted Paul to resign from his job at Makerere University and make plans to leave Africa. The poet D.J. Enright, Professor of English at Singapore University, was an admirer of my husbands writing and offered him a post as a lecturer. Just before we were due to leave Uganda, the Vice Chancellor, a top man in Singapores ruling party, discovered that some of this writing might be considered seditious and tried to get the appointment blocked. Dennis Enright threatened to resign. We waited nervously in Kampala; we had no money and nowhere else to go. A compromise was reached: Paul was offered a job on the lowest possible salary and on condition he promised not to write about Singapore politics. He accepted. We lived in Singapore from 1968 until 1971.

During most of the Singapore years I taught English too, at Nanyang, the Chinese language university, where the students had Chinese names, wore conservative clothes, and were more likely (I suspected) secretly to sympathise with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution than their English-educated counterparts with whom Paul studied the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and who had names like Annabel Chan and Reggie Chew. To enable us both to do our jobs, we shared our small house off Bukit Timah Road first with Ah Ho, a soft-faced Cantonese girl who left when she had a child of her own, and then with Susan, a svelte Hakka in black stretch-pants. On one very special occasion Susan came out of her room ready for the weekend in a short skirt. You got legs! remarked Marcel, who at eighteen months had the glottal stops of the Singapore Chinese. When Louis was born in 1970, a careworn woman, whose very name, Ai Yah, was like a cry of despair, was recruited as additional help.

I suppose I wouldnt recognise them now. We said goodbye to Singapore in November 1971, taking a final picture of Susan and Ai Yah holding the children, and flew to England. After a brief attempt at rural domesticity in Dorset, we moved to London.

In 1972, when Paul was writing Saint Jack, his revenge on the Singapore authorities, and I started work for the BBC, a north-country lass called Beryl moved into our terraced house in Catford; she was a latter-day Beatles fan but also liked the Bay City Rollers, the Jackson 5 and The Osmonds; Marcel and Louis, aged four and two, appreciated her taste in music and the house rang with shrill voices singing Ill be your long-haired lover from Liverpool. Beryl was a good companion when my husband left on his first long absence a term teaching at the university of Virginia. I had ordered a carpet for the hall. When it was laid, the living room door wouldnt open. Beryl helped me remove the door from its hinges and held it while I sawed half an inch off the bottom. A few weeks later she comforted me when I cried because rain had leaked through the roof and stained the new carpet. I was crying because I found it hard to do my job and run the household without my husband, because I was ashamed of my own weakness and because our home, the first we had owned, was flawed. I wanted it to be perfect.

At Christmas I flew with the children to Virginia to be reunited with Paul. He confessed to an affair with a student, the first admitted infidelity, and I kissed him and said it didnt matter, thinking this was true. We came back to London with a record player for Beryl, but the goodwill was marred when we found evidence of an unruly party held in our living room the previous night. Shortly afterwards Beryl left and her place was taken by a Norwegian girl called Inge, who broke the hearts of several local youths and seduced my young brother-in-law when he came to stay.

Inge was still with us when Paul went off on The Great Railway Bazaar journey, which was the beginning of his success as a writer. It was my turn to be unfaithful, and Inge shopped me when he returned. I had confessed myself, but she added further incriminating details. We span into a turmoil of misery and rage which Paul described much later in his novel, My Secret History. Miraculously we emerged, not unscathed but ready to resume a fairly happy family life. Inge was succeeded by a Welsh girl called Liz who became pregnant by a local fireman: her family made a day trip to London for the wedding. I think the next was Catherine, a lively seventeen year old who was soon part of the family. There was an Australian called Amy who ordered Louis to stand in the corner when he made a puking face at the food on his plate and a butchers daughter called Priscilla who entertained him by counting the planes that flew over our house. (By this time we had moved to a bigger house, in Wandsworth, and were on the flight path to Heathrow.) There was another Australian, Sue, who stayed twice, the second time with the man she married (many years later we visited them in New South Wales) and another English girl, Avril, who boiled her jeans in a saucepan used for stew and gave us all diarrhoea. And there was a German, Monika, who had a little dog called Idfix, and who, in return for some favour which I have since forgotten, painted our bedroom purple.