A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [237]
‘Six horse power?’ he said. ‘Eight?’
‘Ten,’ Anand said, pointing to the red disc below the bonnet.
‘Yes, ten.’ He turned to Shama. ‘Well, niece, where are you going in your new car?’
‘Balandra.’
‘I hope the wind doesn’t blow too hard.’
‘Wind, Uncle?’
‘Or you will never get there. Poof! Blow you off the road, man.’
They continued in gloom for some way.
‘Wanting to drive my car,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘As if I would let him. I know the way he does drive cars. Lick them up in no time at all. No respect for them. And getting vexed into the bargain, I ask you.’
‘I always say you have some low people in your family,’ Shama said.
‘Another man wouldn’t even ask a thing like that,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘I wouldn’t ask it. Feel how the car sitting nice on the road? Feel it, Anand? Savi?’
‘Yes, Pa.’
‘Poof! Blow me off the road. You wouldn’t expect an old man like that to be jealous, eh? But that is exactly what he is. Jealous.’
Yet whenever they saw another Prefect on the road they could not help noticing how small and fussy it looked; and this was strange, for their own car enclosed them securely and did not feel small in any way. They continued to listen for noises. Anand held the chain of the ignition key to keep it from striking the dashboard. When they stopped at Balandra they made sure the car was parked away from coconut trees; and they worried about the effect of the salt air on the body.
Disaster came when they were leaving. The rear wheels sank into the hot loose sand. They watched the wheels spinning futilely, kicking up sand, and felt that the car had been irremediably damaged. They pushed coconut branches and coconut shells and bits of driftwood under the wheels and at last got the car out. Shama said she was convinced that the car now leaned to one side; the whole body, she said, had been strained.
On Monday Anand cycled to school on the Royal Enfield, and the promise in the Collins Clear-Type Shakespeare was thereby partly fulfilled. War conditions had at last permitted; in fact, the war had been over for some time.
And during all this time W. C. Tuttle had remained quiet. He had not attempted to reply to Mr Biswas’s new suits, the new car, the holiday; so that it seemed that these reverses, coming one after the other, had been too much for him. But when the glory of the Prefect began to fade, when it was accepted that floormats became dirty, when washing the car became a chore and was delegated by the children to Shama, when the dashboard clock stopped and no one noticed the tinkle of the ashtray lid, W. C. Tuttle with one stroke wiped out all Mr Biswas’s advantages, and killed the rivalry by rising above it.
Through Basdai, the widow, he announced that he had bought a house in Woodbrook.
Mr Biswas took the news badly. He neglected Shama’s consolations and picked quarrels with her. ‘ “What is for you is for you”,’ he mocked. ‘So that is your philosophy, eh? I’ll tell you what your philosophy is. Catch him. Marry him. Throw him in a coal barrel. That is the philosophy of your family. Catch him and throw him in a coal barrel.’ He became acutely sensitive to criticism of the Community Welfare Department. The books on social work and juvenile delinquency gathered dust on the diningtable, and he returned to his philosophers. The Tuttles’ gramophone played with infuriating gaiety, and he banged on the partition and shouted, ‘Some people still living here, you know.’
Philosophically, he attempted to look on the brighter side. The garage problem would be simplified: with three vehicles the position had become impossible, and he had often had to leave his car on the road. There would be no gramophone. And he might even rent the rooms the Tuttles were vacating.
But the days passed and the Tuttles didn’t move.
‘Why the hell doesn’t he take up his gramophone and naked woman and clear out?’ Mr Biswas asked Shama. ‘If he got this house.’
Basdai came up with fresh information. The house was full of tenants, and W. C. Tuttle, for all his calm, was at that moment engaged in tortuous litigation