A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [261]
‘You don’t believe in God,’ he said to Anand. ‘But look.’
Between eight hundred dollars and one thousand two hundred dollars there is a great difference. Eight hundred dollars are petty savings. One thousand two hundred dollars stand for real money. The difference between eight hundred and five thousand is immense. The difference between one thousand two hundred and five thousand is negotiable.
A week before Mr Biswas would have dismissed any thought of buying a house for five thousand dollars. He wanted one at three thousand or three thousand five hundred; he never looked at any above four thousand. And the strange thing now was that, having raised his sights, it did not occur to him to look at other five-thousand-dollar houses.
He sought out the solicitor’s clerk the next day, paid him a deposit of one hundred dollars, and was shrewd enough to ask for a stamped receipt.
‘I going to take this money and pay down right away on the house I want to buy,’ the solicitor’s clerk said. ‘Wait until the old queen hear. She going to be so glad.’
When Shama heard she burst into tears.
‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Swelling up. Vexed. You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family, eh?’
‘I don’t think anything. You have the money, you want to buy house, and I don’t have to think anything.’
And that was when Shama, leaving the room, encountered Suniti, and Suniti said, ‘I hear that you come like a big-shot. Buying house and thing.’
‘Yes, child.’
‘Shama!’ Mr Biswas called. ‘Tell that girl to go back and help that worthless husband of hers to look after their goats at Pokima Halt.’
The goats were an invention of Mr Biswas which never failed to irritate Suniti. ‘Goats,’ she said to the yard, sucking her teeth. ‘Well, some people at least have goats. That is more than I could say for some other people.’
Mr Biswas had divined only part of Shama’s motives. She knew that the time had come for them to move. But she did not want this to happen after a quarrel and a humiliation. She hoped that the estrangement between her mother and herself would disappear; and she regarded Mr Biswas’s action as rash and provocative.
He released the tremendous details one by one.
‘Five thousand five hundred,’ he said.
He had his effect.
‘O God!’ Shama said. ‘You mad! You mad! You hanging a millstone around my neck.’
‘A necklace.’
Her despair frightened him. But it made him suffer: he mortified himself to inflict pain on her.
‘Well, we still paying for the car. And you don’t know how long this job with the government going to last.’
‘Your brother hoping it won’t last at all. Tell me, eh. Deep down in your heart you really believe that this job I am doing is nothing, eh? Deep down you really believe that. Eh?’
‘If you think so,’ she cried, and went down the steps to the kitchen below the house, to the readers and learners and sisters and married nieces, working and talking in the light of weak, flyblown bulbs. She was surrounded by security; yet disaster was coming upon her and she was quite alone.
She went back up to the room.
‘How you going to get the money?’
‘You don’t worry about that.’
‘If you start throwing away your money I could always help you. Tomorrow I going to go to de Lima’s and buy that brooch you always talking about.’
He sniggered.
As soon as she went out of the room he was seized by panic. He left the house and went for a walk around the Savannah, along the wide, silent, grass-lined streets of St Clair, where open doors revealed softly lit, opulent, undisturbed interiors.
Having committed himself, he lacked the courage to go back yet found the energy to go ahead. He was encouraged by the gloom of Shama and strengthened by the enthusiasm of the children. He avoided questioning himself; and, dreading the return of Owad, he developed the anxiety that he might not after all be good enough for the house of the solicitor’s clerk and the old queen who baked cakes and served them with such grace.
It was this anxiety which made him drive on Thursday afternoon