A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [232]
In a dream that night this accident was to happen, and Kamla was to wake gratefully, yet to find herself in a new dread, for she had forgotten the room where they had all gone to sleep, in the large bare house at the top of the hill, impenetrably black all round, with the sea beating a little distance away and the coconut trees groaning in the perpetual wind.
They had arrived in the late afternoon and had not had much time to explore. Miss Logie, the chauffeur and the Buick had gone back; and finding themselves alone, in a large house, on holiday, they had all grown shy with one another. Night brought an additional uneasiness. In the strange, musty, blank-walled drawingroom they sat around an oil lamp, the contents of the hamper gone stale and unappetizing, the cream cheese, bought from the Dairies the day before, already gone bad. The house was large enough for them to have had one room each; but the noise, the loneliness, the unknown surrounding blackness had kept them all in one room.
Wind and sea welcomed them in the morning. Light showed them where they were. The wind and the sea raged all night, but now they were both fresh, heralds of the new day. The children walked about the shining wet grass on the top of the hill; the sea, glimpsed through the tormented coconut trees, lay below them; their hands and faces became sticky with salt.
Their shyness slowly wore away. They went to deserted beaches, where lay the partly buried wrecks of strange trees brought across the sea. Beyond the wavering tidewrack the dimpled sand was pitted with the holes of sand crabs, small, nervous creatures the colour of sand. They made excursions to the places with French names: Blanchisseuse, Matelot; and to Toco and Salybia Bay. They picked almonds, sucked them, crushed the seeds; in land so wild and remote it was inconceivable that anything was owned by anyone. From trees that bordered the road they picked bright red cashew nuts, sucked the fruit and took the nuts to the house and roasted them. The days were long. Once they came upon a group of fishermen who were talking a French patois; once they met a group of well-dressed, noisy Indian youths, one of whom asked Myna what Savi’s name was, and Mr Biswas saw that as a father he now had fresh responsibilities. In the evenings, with the noise of sea and wind, comforting now, around them, they played cards: they had found four packs in the house.
Another discovery, in a cupboard full of tinned food, was Cerebos Salt. They had never seen salt in tins. The shop salt they knew was coarse and damp; this was fine and dry, and ran as easily as the drawing on the tin showed.
They forgot the house in Port of Spain and spread themselves about the house on the hill. It seemed there was no one in the world but themselves, nothing alive but themselves and the sea and the wind. They had been told that on a clear day they could see Tobago; but that never happened.
And then the Buick came for them.
As they drove back to Port of Spain the new shy pleasure they had found in being alone was forgotten. They were preparing for the two rooms, the city pavements, the badly concreted floor under the house, the noise, the quarrels. On the way out they had feared arrival, a casting off into the unknown; now they dreaded returning to what they knew. But they spoke of other things. Shama spoke about the evening meal, remembered she had nothing. The car stopped at a shop in the Eastern Main Road and they enjoyed a brief distinction as the occupants of a chauffeur-driven car.
There was no reception for them in Port of Spain. It was evening. The readers and learners were reading and learning. Everything was as they had left it: the weak light bulbs, the long tables, the chanting of some readers as they attempted to learn