A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [259]
So in the pouring rain, the windscreen wiper occasionally sticking, they drove down St Vincent Street and around Marine Square and along Wrightson Road – settled by secure people – and across Woodbrook to the Western Main Road, past the vast grounds and the saman-lined drive of the Police Barracks, and turned into Sikkim Street.
It was still raining when the car stopped outside the house. The fence, half concrete, with lead pipes running between square concrete pillars, was covered with the vines of the Morning Glory spattered with small red flowers drooping in the rain. The height of the house, the cream and grey walls, the white frames of doors and windows, the red brick sections with white pointing: all these things Mr Biswas took in at once, and knew that the house was not for him.
When, racing into the house out of the rain, he met the old queen, not as old as the solicitor’s clerk had made out, he was overwhelmed by her courtesy. Continually, with his suit and tie and shining shoes and Prefect car, he felt he was deceiving the public. Here, in this house in Sikkim Street, so desirable, so inaccessible, deception was especially painful. He tried to respond to the old queen’s civility with equal civility; he tried not to think of his crowded room, his eight hundred dollars. Slowly and carefully, aware now of the lager, he sipped tea and smoked a cigarette. Hesitantly, fearing a frank appraisal would be rude, he took in the distempered walls, the washed celotex ceiling with strips of wood painted chocolate and looking brand-new, frosted-glass windows and frosted-glass doors with white woodwork, white lattice work, a polished floor, a polished morris suite. And when the solicitor’s clerk, frank and trusting, ignorant of the eight hundred dollars, insisted that Mr Biswas should see the rooms upstairs, Mr Biswas went round quickly, seeing a bathroom with a toilet bowl and – luxury! – a porcelain wash-basin, two bedrooms with green walls, a verandah, so cool without the sun, the Morning Glory on the fence below, his Prefect in the road, and just for a moment he thought of the house as his own, and the thought was so heady he rejected it at once and hurried downstairs.
The old queen, whose heart had not permitted her to climb the steps, greeted him as though he had returned from a long journey.
He sat in one of the morris chairs and drank more tea and took another cigarette.
Not a word had been said so far about the price. Mr Biswas kept on fixing it in his mind at something high and impossible which would relieve him of responsibility and regret. He thought of eight thousand, nine thousand. So near the busy Main Road: an ideal site for a shop. And yet so quiet in the rain!
‘Not bad for six thousand,’ the solicitor’s clerk said.
Mr Biswas smoked and said nothing.
The old queen came out from the kitchen with a plate of cakes. The solicitor’s clerk insisted that Mr Biswas should try one. The old queen had made them herself.
Mr Biswas took a cake. The old queen smiled at him, and he smiled back.
‘Well, to be honest. We both want to make a sale in a hurry. So let’s say five five.’
Once Mr Biswas had read a story by a French writer about a woman who worked for twenty years to pay off a debt on an imitation necklace. He had never been able to understand why it was considered a comic story. Debt was a fearful thing; and with all its ifs and might-have-beens the story came too near the truth: hope followed by blight, the passing of the years, the passing of life itself, and then the revelation of waste: Oh, my poor Matilda! But they were false! Now, sitting in the clerk’s morris chair, Mr Biswas knew he was close to such a debt, a similar blight, a similar waste: and he was again lying awake at night, hearing the snores of the crowded house, looking through the window at the empty sky swept by silent searchlights.
‘Five five and we will throw in this morris suite.’ The clerk gave a little laugh. ‘I always hear that Indians