A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [165]
Mr Biswas had always got on well with Dorothy; he was attracted by her loudness and gaiety and regarded her as an ally against the sisters. But on that hot still afternoon, when a holiday staleness lay over Arwacas, the hall, with its confused furniture, its dark loft and sooty green walls, with flies buzzing in and out of the white sunny spots on the long table, seemed abandoned, deprived of animation; and Mr Biswas, feeling Shekhar’s absence as a betrayal, could sympathize with the sisters.
Savi said, ‘This is the last Christmas I spend at Hanuman House.’
Change followed change. At Pagotes Tara and Ajodha were decorating their new house. In Port of Spain new lampposts, painted silver, went up in the main streets and there was talk of replacing the diesel buses by trolley-buses. Owad’s old room was let to a middle-aged childless coloured couple. And at the Sentinel there were rumours.
Under Mr Burnett’s direction the Sentinel had overtaken the Gazette and, though some distance behind the Guardian, it had become successful enough for its frivolity to be an embarrassment to the owners. Mr Burnett had been under pressure for some time. That Mr Biswas knew, but he had no head for intrigue and did not know the source of this pressure. Some of the staff became openly contemptuous and spoke of Mr Burnett as uneducated; a joke went around the office that he had applied from the Argentine for a job as a sub-editor and his letter had been misunderstood. As if in reply to all this Mr Burnett became increasingly perverse. ‘Let’s face it,’ he said. ‘Editorials from Port of Spain didn’t have much effect in Spain. They are not going to stop Hitler either.’ The Guardian responded to the war by starting a fighter fund: in a box on the front page twelve aeroplanes were outlined, and as the fund rose the outlines were filled in. Right up to the end the Sentinel had been headlining the West Indian cricket tour of England, and when the tour was abandoned it printed a drawing of Hitler which, when cut out and folded along certain dotted lines, became a drawing of a pig.
Early in the new year the blow fell. Mr Biswas was lunching with Mr Burnett in a Chinese restaurant, in one of those cubicles weakly lit by a low-hanging naked bulb, with lengths of flex loosely attached to the flyblown, grimy celotex partitions, when Mr Burnett said, ‘Amazing scenes are going to be witnessed soon. I’m leaving.’ He paused. ‘Sacked.’ As if divining Mr Biswas’s thoughts, he added, ‘Nothing for you to worry about, though.’ Then, in quick succession, he displayed a number of conflicting moods. He was gay; he was depressed; he was glad to leave; he was sorry to go; he didn’t want to talk about it; he talked about it; he wasn’t going to talk any more about himself; he talked about himself. He ate in spasms, attacking the food as though it had done him some injury. ‘Shoots? Is that what they call this? There’ll be damned little bamboo left in China at this rate.’ He pressed the bell, which lay at the centre of a roughly circular patch of grime on the wall. They heard it ring in some distant cavern, above a multitude of other bells, the pattering of waitresses’ feet and talk in adjacent cubicles.
The harassed waitress came and Mr Burnett said, ‘Shoots? This is just plain bamboo. What do you think I have inside here?’ He tapped his belly. ‘A paper factory?’
‘That was one portion,’ the waitress said.
‘That was one bamboo.’
He ordered more lager and the waitress sucked her teeth and went out, leaving the swing door swinging rapidly to and fro.
‘One portion,’ Mr Burnett said. ‘They make it sound like hay. And this damned room is like a stall. I’m not worried. I’ve got other strings to my bow. You too. You could go back to your sign-writing. I leave, you leave. Let’s all leave.’
They laughed.
Mr Biswas returned to the office in a state of great agitation. He had been associated, and zestfully, with some of the most frivolous excesses of the Sentinel. Now at the thought of each he felt