The Nightwatchman's Occurrence Book (61 page)

He collected his money, slipped it into a pocket of his robe, patted the pocket; then he seemed to go on patting. He patted each of his singers, either out of a great love, or to make sure that they had not hidden any of the coins they had received. Then: ‘Right-wheel!’ he called above their singing; and, patting them on the shoulder as they passed him, followed them to the grocery at the corner. His hymn meeting continued there, under the rusty corrugated-iron eaves.

It was now dark. A picnic atmosphere came to Henry’s yard. Meals were being prepared in various rooms; gramophones were playing. From distant yards came the sound of steel-bands. Night provided shelter, and in the yard it was very cosy, very like a family gathering. Only, I was not yet of the family.

A girl with a sling bag came in. She greeted Henry, and he greeted her with a largeness of gesture which yet concealed a little reserve, a little awe. He called her Selma. I noted her. I became the third in the party; I became nervous.

I am always nervous in the presence of beauty; and in such a setting, faced with a person I couldn’t assess, I was a little frightened. I didn’t know the rules of Henry’s place and it was clear that the place had its own rules. I was inexperienced. Inexperienced, I say. Yet what good has experience brought me since? I still, in such a situation and in such a place, move between the extremes of courtesy and loudness.

Selma was unattached and cool. I thought she had the coolness that comes either from ownership or from being owned. It was this as much as dress and manner and balance which marked her out from the others in the yard. She might have been Henry’s girl, the replacement for that other, abandoned on the pretty little island; or she might have belonged to someone who had not yet appeared.

The very private greetings over, Henry introduced us.

‘He’s quite a talker,’ he said.

‘He’s a good listener,’ I said.

She asked Henry, ‘Did he hear Priest talk?’

I answered, ‘I did. That was some sermon.’

‘I always like hearing a man use language well,’ she said.

‘He certainly does,’ I said.

‘You can see,’ she said, ‘that he’s an educated man.’

‘You could see that.’

There was a pause. ‘He sells insurance,’ she said, ‘when he’s not preaching.’

‘It sounds a wonderful combination. He frightens us about death, and then sells us insurance.’

She wasn’t amused. ‘I would like to be insured.’

‘You are far too young.’

‘But that is just the time. The terms are better. I don’t know, I would just like it. I feel it’s nice. I have an aunt in the country. She is
always making old style because she’s insured. Whenever she buys a little more she always lets you know.’

‘Well, why don’t you buy some insurance yourself?’

She said, ‘I am very poor.’

And she said the words in such a way that it seemed to put a full-stop to our conversation. I hate the poor and the humble. I think poverty is something we should all conceal. Selma spoke of it as something she was neither proud nor ashamed of; it was a condition which was soon to be changed. Little things like this occur in all relationships, little warning abrasions in the smoothness of early intercourse which we choose to ignore. We always deceive ourselves; we cannot say we have not been warned.

‘What would you do if you had a lot of money?’

‘I would buy lots of things,’ she said after some thought. ‘Lots of nice modern things.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘A three-piece suite. One of those deep ones. You sink into them. I’d buy a nice counterpane, satiny and thick and crisscrossed with deep lines. I saw Norma Shearer using one in
Escape.’

‘A strange thing. That’s all I remember of that picture. What do you think she was doing in that bed then? But that was an eiderdown she had, you know. You don’t need an eiderdown in this part of the world. It’s too warm.’

‘Well, whatever you call it, I’d like that. And shoes, I’d buy lots of shoes. Do you have nightmares?’

‘Always.’

‘You know mine?’

‘Tell me.’

‘I am in town, you know. Walking down Regent Street. People staring at me, and I feel: this is new. I don’t feel embarrassed. I feel like a beauty queen. Then I see myself in a shop window. I am barefoot. I always wake up then. My feet are hanging over the bed.’

I was still nervous. The conversation always seemed to turn away from the point to which I felt I ought to bring it, though to tell
the truth I had lost the wish to do so. Still, we owe a duty to ourselves.

I said, ‘Do you come from the city?’

‘I come from the country.’

Question, answer, fullstop. I tried again. Henry was near us, a bottle in his hand.

I said, ‘What makes a girl like you come to a place like this?’ And, really, I was ashamed of the words almost before I said them.

‘That’s what I call a vicious question,’ Henry said.

At the same time Selma slapped me.

‘You think that’s a nice question?’ Henry said. ‘I think that’s a vicious question. I think that’s obscene.’ He pointed through the open doorway to a little sign in one of the inner rooms: Be obscene but not heard. ‘It’s not something we talk about.’

‘I am sorry.’

‘It’s not for me that I am worried,’ he said. ‘It’s for Selma. I don’t know, but that girl always bringing out the vice in people. She bring out the vice in Blackwhite across the road. Don’t say anything, but I see it in his eye: he want to reform her. And you know what reform is? Reform mean: keep off, for me alone. She bring out the vice in Priest. He don’t want to reform. He just want. Look, Frankie, one set of people come here and then too another set come here. Selma is a educated girl, you know. Cambridge Junior Certificate. Latin and French and geometry and all that sort of thing. She does work in one of the big stores. Not one of those little Syrian shops, you know. She come here every now and then, you come here. That is life. Let us leave the vice outside, let us leave the vice outside. A lot of these girls work in stores. Any time I want a shirt, I just pass around these stores, and these girls give me shirts. We have to help one another.’

I said, ‘You must have a lot of shirts.’

‘Yes, I have a lot of shirts. Look, I will tell you. Selma and one or two of the other people you see here, we call
wabeen.’

‘Wabeen?’

‘One of our freshwater fish. A lil loose. A
lil.
Not for any and everybody. You understand? Wabeen is not
spote.’

‘Spote?’

‘Spote is—don’t make me use obscene language, man, Frank. Spote is what you see.’ He waved his hands about the yard.

The steel-bands sounded nearer, and then through a gate in the corrugated iron fence at the back of the lot the musicians came in. Their instruments were made out of old dustbins, and on these instruments they played a coarse music I had never heard before.

‘They have to hide, you know,’ Henry told me. ‘It’s illegal. The war and so on. Helping the war effort.’

There was a little open shed at the back. It had a blackboard. I had noticed that blackboard and wondered about it. In this shed two or three people now began to dance. They drew watchers to them; they converted watchers into participants. From rooms in the houses on Henry’s lot, from rooms in other back-yards, and from the sewerage trace at the back, people drifted in steadily to watch. Each dancer was on his own. Each dancer lived with a private frenzy. Women among the watchers tore twigs from the hibiscus hedges and from time to time, as though offering benediction and reward, beat the dancer’s dusty feet with green leaves.

Henry put his arm over my shoulder and led me to where Selma was standing. He kept one hand on my shoulder; he put the other on her shoulder. We stood silently together, watching. His hands healed us, bound us.

A whistle blew. There were cries of ‘Police!’ and in an instant the yard was transformed. Dustbins appeared upright here and there; liquor bottles disappeared inside some; the dancers and the audience sat in neat rows under the shed and one man stood at the blackboard, writing. Many of Henry’s girls put on spectacles. One or two carried pieces of embroidery.

It seemed to me that the police were a long time in entering. When they did, the Inspector shook Henry by the hand and said, ‘The old Adult Education class, eh?’

‘As you see,’ Henry said. ‘Each one teach one.’

The Inspector closed his fingers when he took away his hand from Henry’s. He became chatty. ‘I don’t know, boy,’ he said. ‘We just have to do this. Old Blackwhite really on your tail. And that Mrs Lambert, she too lodge a complaint.’

*

I wonder, though, whether I would have become involved with Selma and the others, if, during that first evening after I had undressed and was lying with Selma, I hadn’t seen my clothes dancing out of the window. They danced; it was as though they had taken on a life of their own.

I called out to Selma.

She didn’t seem surprised. She said, ‘I think they are fishing tonight.’

‘Fishing?’ I ran to the window after my disappearing clothes.

‘Yes, you know, fishing through the windows. Lifting a shirt here, a pair of trousers there. It is no good chasing them. Carnival coming, you know, and everybody wants a pretty costume.’

She was right. In the morning I woke up and remembered that I had no clothes except for my pants and vest. I threw open the back window and saw naked Americans hanging out of windows. We looked at one another. We exchanged no words. The evening was past; this was the morning.

Boys and girls were going to Mr Blackwhite’s college. Some stopped to examine contraceptives thrown into the gutters. Selma herself was fully dressed when I saw her. She said she was going to work. So it seemed after all that Henry’s story about some of his girls working in stores was right. Henry himself brought me a cup of coffee.

‘You can have one of my shirts. I just pass around and ask them for one, you know.’

The morning life of Henry’s yard was different from the evening life. There was a subdued workaday bustle everywhere. A
tall thin man was doing limbering-up exercises. He wore a vest and a pair of shorts, and from time to time he rubbed himself with oil from a little phial.

‘Canadian Healing Oil,’ Henry said. ‘I like to give him a little encouragement. Mano is a walker, you know. But a little too impatient; he does always end up by running and getting disqualified.’

‘This is terrible,’ I said. ‘But what about my clothes?’

‘You’ve got to learn tolerance. This is the one thing you have got to learn on the island.’

Mano was squatting and springing up. All about him coalpots were being fanned on back steps and women were preparing morning meals. A lot of green everywhere, more than I had remembered. Beyond the sewerage trace I could see the equally forested backyards of the houses of the other street, and it was in some of these yards that I saw khaki uniforms and white sailor uniforms hanging limp from lines.

Henry followed my eyes. ‘Carnival coming, Frank. And you people got the whole world. Some people corporate in one way, some in another.’

I didn’t want Henry’s philosophy just then. I ran out as I was on to the pavement. By the standards of the street I wasn’t too badly dressed in my vest and pants. Next door an old negro sat sunning himself in the doorway of a room which looked like a declining secondhand bookshop. He was dressed in a tight-fitting khaki suit. The open door carried on its inside a flowery sign—
MR W. LAMBERT, BOOKBINDER
—so that I understood how, with the front door closed, the house was the respectable shuttered residence I had seen the day before, and how now, with the front door open, it was a shop. Beside Mr Lambert—I thought it safe to assume that he was Mr Lambert—was a small glass of rum. As I passed him he lifted the glass against the light, squinted at it, nodded to me and said, ‘Good morning, my Yankee friend, may God all blessings to you send.’ Then he drank the rum at a gulp and the look of delight on his face was replaced by
one of total torment, as though the rum and the morning greeting formed part of an obnoxious daily penance.

‘Good morning.’

‘If it is not being rude, tell me, my good sir, why you are nude.’

‘I don’t have any clothes.’

‘Touché, I say. Naked we come, and naked go away.’

This was interesting and worth exploring but just then at the end of the road I saw the jeep. I didn’t know what the punishment was for losing your uniform and appearing naked in public. I ran back past Mr Lambert. He looked a little startled, like a man seeing visions. I ran into the side of Henry’s yard and went up to the front house by the back steps. At the same time Mano, the walker, began walking briskly out from the other side of the house into the road.

I heard someone say from the jeep, ‘Doesn’t it look to you that he went in white and came out black?’

A window opened in the next room and an American voice called out, ‘Did you see a naked white man running down here this morning, a few minutes ago?’

A woman’s voice said, ‘Look, mister, the morning is my period of rest, and the last thing I want to see in the morning is a prick.’

A pause, and the SPs drove off.

For me there remained the problem of clothing. Henry offered to lend me some of his. They didn’t exactly fit. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you could pass around by Selma’s store and get a shirt. Look, I’ll give you the address.’

A bicycle bell rang from the road. It was the postman in his uniform.

‘Henry, Henry,’ he said. ‘Look what I bringing today.’

He came inside and showed a parcel. It was for Mr Blackwhite and had been sent to him from a publisher in the United States.

‘Another one come back, another one.’

‘O my God!’ Henry said. ‘I’m going to have Blackwhite crying on my hands again. What was this one about?’

‘Usual thing,’ the postman said. ‘Love. I had a good little read. In
fact, it was funny in parts.’ He pulled out the manuscript. ‘You want to hear?’

Henry looked at me.

‘I am a captive audience,’ I said.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ the postman said. He began to read: ‘ “Lady Theresa Phillips was the most sought-after girl in all the county of Shropshire. Beautiful, an heiress to boot, intelligent, well-versed in the classics, skilful in repartee and with the embroidery needle, superbly endowed in short, she had but one failing, that of pride. She spurned all who wooed her. She had sent frustrated lovers to Italy, to the distant colonies, there to pine away in energetic solitude. Yet Nemesis was at hand. At a ball given by Lord Severn, the noblest lord in the land, Lady Theresa met Lord Alistair Grant. He was tall, square-shouldered and handsome, with melancholy eyes that spoke of deep suffering; he had in fact been left an orphan.” ’