Read The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book Online
Authors: V.S. Naipaul
The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (43 page)
Gwen wanted to go away on holiday with Whymper.
Margaret, watching them both anxiously like a referee, asked, ‘Did you know about this, Richard?’
He didn’t reply. But his mind, ranging far and fast, instantly
settled on various incidents which, though ignored at the time, now turned out to have registered. The deceptions of the young never took in the young; they took in only the old. So much about Whymper’s recent behaviour was now explained. The burden of such secrecy had been too great, even for Whymper. And Mr Stone had no doubt that this secrecy had been maintained at the instance of Gwen: he could see the sour foolish face as, mistaking her own fulfilment for power, she childishly exacted promises and made threats in Whymper’s shabby front room with the bullfighting poster, Whymper’s tenants moving about the hall outside.
But Whymper!
‘Well, of course you’ll refuse. Gwen’s just being very foolish.’
He noted their hesitation.
Then Olive said that Gwen had left home that morning and gone to Whymper’s house.
‘This is ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.’ He got up and walked about the tigerskin. ‘And if you knew what I know about him you wouldn’t both be sitting there looking so pleased with yourselves.’ They were, in fact, both looking up at him with some apprehension. ‘Whymper! Bill! The man is—the man is immoral. I know him better than any of you. Immoral,’ he repeated, adding with satisfaction, ‘and common. Immoral and common.’
His violence startled them. The saliva in the corners of Olive’s mouth was perceptible.
‘We are as shocked and upset as you are, Richard,’ Margaret said unconvincingly. ‘But I don’t imagine Olive came here to hear you talk like this.’
‘All this talk about a pagan country,’ Mr Stone said.
There was a pause.
‘Wanting her tea,’ he said reflectively. ‘Well, she’s got it now. Running off with this man just like any shop assistant on holiday. And now you come to see me. Why don’t you go to
Bill?
But I imagine you want me to go and bring her home and read her a little Enid Blyton and tell her a little story about what I did at the office today.’
He saw himself entering Whymper’s house, saw Whymper’s frightened, contemptuous face; saw Gwen sulky, satisfied, triumphant; saw Whymper being ‘firm’ and offensive. It was too much. ‘But that’s something you and Margaret can see about.
You
can tell her about the big red bus and the choo-choo train.’
‘Richard!’ Margaret cried. The solemn scene she had visualized was all but destroyed.
Too late, then, it came out that Gwen was pregnant.
‘I’m not surprised! I’m not surprised!’ He was, deeply. ‘But the welfare state hasn’t run short of milk and orange juice and cod-liver oil.’
And incapable of further irony, he grew so violent in his language that it was all Margaret could do to prevent an open breach between brother and sister.
It was only later, when Olive had left, with nothing settled or even talked over, that he calmed down.
‘I don’t understand you, Richard,’ Margaret said that evening when they were getting ready for bed. ‘If you hate them both so much, why should you be so upset?’
‘You are quite right,’ he said, looking out of the bedroom window past the old thick brown velvet curtains. ‘You are quite right. They deserve one another. And I loathe them both.’ He even managed a laugh. ‘Poor Olive.’
*
Before the end of the week Whymper’s resignation was officially announced.
‘Bill’s had an offer from Gow’s,’ the junior accountant said importantly. ‘Sacred Gow’s, the gondemporary people.’
His master’s voice, Mr Stone thought.
And on Thursday afternoon the boy came into Mr Stone’s office with a copy of the
World’s Press News.
‘Have you seen this about Bill?’
Next to a photograph of a presentation of antique furniture to a retiring executive, Mr Stone read:
BILL WHYMPER JOINS GOW’S
Bill Whymper is leaving Excal at the end of this month to take up the newly created executive position of publicity director with Gow’s. ‘The appointment emphasizes the importance attached to progressive marketing and publicity policies in Gow’s expanding operations, and Mr Whymper will advise in the overall formulation and review of plans,’ a spokesman said.
Mr Whymper moves to this top post with the asset of years of success in Excal’s P.R. division. He will be remembered as the man behind the energetic and resourceful promotion of Excal’s signally successful ‘Knights Companion’ scheme last year.
When at last he put the paper down, the office was silent. He went out into the corridor. Traffic noises came up from the street unchallenged. The typists’ room was empty, lights turned off, the machines all draped with black covers. The clock said twenty past four.
L
ONDON WAS WALKING
that day. He had forgotten the one-day transport strike which, only partial in the morning, had steadily mounted in drama, the evening papers issuing breathless front-page bulletins on the dislocation and suspension of services. He found the Embankment choked with unmoving cars and buses. People who had stood in hopeless queues and fought to get seats in buses remained where they were and stewed in the heat: the strikers had chosen a fine day. And still, scarcely noticeable in the slow two-way movement on the crowded pavements, the queues remained. At first he stood in a queue. Then he pursued a rogue bus down a side street into the Strand, boarded it without difficulty and discovered it was going no farther. So he decided to walk. And he walked with the city. Along the Embankment, across the bridge, losing all sense of time and distance in the steady tread of thousands of feet, here in the openness of the glinting river crisper and more resonant, he walked with swinging strides, enjoying the exertion, not looking forward to the end, wishing to exhaust himself, to numb the pain within him, hardly aware of the people about him, faceless, their clothes in the mass so uniform, the military-minded and the officerly alone distinguishing themselves by their stride and the little competitive knots about them. Across the river, many disappeared into Waterloo Station, and corner by corner thereafter the noise of feet diminished and the pavement cleared. The signs of commonplace public houses, open doors revealing empty cream-and-brown interiors, were like invitations to rest and relief. And now the walk required will, for it led through long streets of dark brick and stucco peeling like the
barks of the pollarded plane trees, past rows of small bright shops made more mean by signboards and display cards and samples bleaching in the windows. Nightly, from the warm, bright heart where they worked and to which they went back for their pleasures, the people of the city returned to such areas, such streets, such houses.
And as he walked through the long, dull streets, as with each step he felt his hips and thighs and calves and toes working, his mood changed, and he had a vision of the city such as he had had once before, at the first dinner party he and Margaret had given. (Gwen was there, and Olive, and Grace and Tony Tomlinson, and Miss Millington had cooked and served her inimitable chips.) He stripped the city of all that was enduring and saw that all that was not flesh was of no importance to man. All that mattered was man’s own frailty and corruptibility. The order of the universe, to which he had sought to ally himself, was not his order. So much he had seen before. But now he saw, too, that it was not by creation that man demonstrated his power and defied this hostile order, but by destruction. By damming the river, by destroying the mountain, by so scarring the face of the earth that Nature’s attempt to reassert herself became a mockery.
He had now reached Brixton, with its large, glass-fronted shops, its modernistic police station and antique food stalls, its crowds of black and white. Here the walkers were not noticeable. There were long but manageable queues at the bus stops. Several buses arrived; many people got off. He jumped a queue, found himself within the warding-off arm of a conductor on a 109 bus, and rode home. He was grateful for the ride. He was beginning to be fatigued and his breath was failing.
As he walked up the street to his home with long, hard strides, he felt himself grow taller. He walked as the destroyer, as the man who carried the possibility of the earth’s destruction within him. Taller and taller he grew, firmer and firmer he walked, past the petty gardens of petty houses where people sought to accommodate
themselves to life, past the blank, perceptive faces of cats, past the ‘To Let’ and ‘For Sale’ signs, and all the transient handiwork of Eddie and Charley.
At his door he rang. Harder, and longer. The house was empty. Margaret was with Olive and Grace. Happy band of sisters! He fetched out his own key, opened, let himself into the dark hall.
The eyes were green.
Fear blended into guilt, guilt into love.
‘Pussy.’
But before the word was fully uttered the young black cat was down the steps, and before any further gesture could be made was out through the open door.
*
He was no destroyer. Once before the world had collapsed about him. But he had survived. And he had no doubt that in time calm would come to him again. Now he was only very tired. In the empty house he was alone. He took the briefcase up to the study, to wait there and perhaps to do a little work until Margaret arrived.
Srinagar, August 1962
To Diana Athill
Contents
The Nightwatchman’s Occurrence Book
I
NEVER KNEW
her real name and it is quite likely that she did have one, though I never heard her called anything but Gold Teeth. She did, indeed, have gold teeth. She had sixteen of them. She had married early and she had married well, and shortly after her marriage she exchanged her perfectly sound teeth for gold ones, to announce to the world that her husband was a man of substance.
Even without her gold teeth my aunt would have been noticeable. She was short, scarcely five foot, and she was very fat. If you saw her in silhouette you would have found it difficult to know whether she was facing you or whether she was looking sideways.
She ate little and prayed much. Her family being Hindu, and her husband being a pundit, she, too, was an orthodox Hindu. Of Hinduism she knew little apart from the ceremonies and the taboos, and this was enough for her. Gold Teeth saw God as a Power, and religious ritual as a means of harnessing that Power for great practical good, her good.
I may have given the impression that Gold Teeth prayed because she wanted to be less fat. The fact was that Gold Teeth had no children and she was almost forty. It was her childlessness, not her fat, that oppressed her, and she prayed for the curse to be removed. She was willing to try any means—any ritual, any prayer—in order to trap and channel the supernatural Power.
And so it was that she began to indulge in surreptitious Christian practices.
She was living at the time in a country village called Cunupia, in County Caroni. Here the Canadian Mission had long waged war
against the Indian heathen, and saved many. But Gold Teeth stood firm. The Minister of Cunupia expended his Presbyterian piety on her; so did the headmaster of the Mission school. But all in vain. At no time was Gold Teeth persuaded even to think about being converted. The idea horrified her. Her father had been in his day one of the best-known Hindu pundits, and even now her husband’s fame as a pundit, as a man who could read and write Sanskrit, had spread far beyond Cunupia. She was in no doubt whatsoever that Hindus were the best people in the world, and that Hinduism was a superior religion. She was willing to select, modify and incorporate alien eccentricities into her worship; but to abjure her own faith—never!
Presbyterianism was not the only danger the good Hindu had to face in Cunupia. Besides, of course, the ever-present threat of open Muslim aggression, the Catholics were to be reckoned with. Their pamphlets were everywhere and it was hard to avoid them. In them Gold Teeth read of novenas and rosaries, of squads of saints and angels. These were things she understood and could even sympathize with, and they encouraged her to seek further. She read of the mysteries and the miracles, of penances and indulgences. Her scepticism sagged, and yielded to a quickening, if reluctant, enthusiasm.
One morning she took the train for the County town of Chaguanas, three miles, two stations and twenty minutes away. The Church of St Philip and St James in Chaguanas stands imposingly at the end of the Caroni Savannah Road, and although Gold Teeth knew Chaguanas well, all she knew of the church was that it had a clock, at which she had glanced on her way to the railway station nearby. She had hitherto been far more interested in the drab ochre-washed edifice opposite, which was the police station.
She carried herself into the churchyard, awed by her own temerity, feeling like an explorer in a land of cannibals. To her relief, the church was empty. It was not as terrifying as she had expected. In the gilt and images and the resplendent cloths she found much that reminded her of her Hindu temple. Her eyes caught a discreet sign:
CANDLES TWO CENTS EACH.
She undid the knot in the end of her veil,
where she kept her money, took out three cents, popped them into the box, picked up a candle and muttered a prayer in Hindustani. A brief moment of elation gave way to a sense of guilt, and she was suddenly anxious to get away from the church as fast as her weight would let her.
She took a bus home, and hid the candle in her chest of drawers. She had half feared that her husband’s Brahminical flair for clairvoyance would have uncovered the reason for her trip to Chaguanas. When after four days, which she spent in an ecstasy of prayer, her husband had mentioned nothing, Gold Teeth thought it safe to burn the candle. She burned it secretly at night, before her Hindu images, and sent up, as she thought, prayers of double efficacy.
