A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [264]
‘Tout! Crook!’
They discovered that upstairs no door resembled any other, in shape, structure, colour or hinging. None fitted. One stood six inches off the floor, like the swingdoor of a bar.
‘Nazi and blasted communist!’
The upper floor curved towards the centre and from downstairs they noted a corresponding bend in the two main beams. Shama thought that the floor curved because the inner verandah wall it supported was made of brick.
‘We’ll knock it down,’ Shama said, ‘and put a wood partition.’
‘Knock it down!’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Be careful you don’t knock down the house. For all we know it is that same wall which is keeping the whole damned thing standing.’
Anand suggested a pillar rising from the drawingroom downstairs to support the sagging beams.
Soon they began to keep their discoveries secret. Anand discovered that the square pillars of the front fence, so pretty with Morning Glory, were made of hollow bricks that rested on no foundation. The pillars rocked at the push of a finger. He said nothing, and only suggested that the mason might have a look at the fence when he came.
The mason came to build a concrete drain around the house and a low sink below the tap at the back. He was a squat Negro with catlike whiskers and he sang continually:
There was a man called Michael Finnegan
Who grew whiskers on his chin again.
His gaiety depressed them all.
Daily they moved between the hostile Tulsi house and Sikkim Street. They became short-tempered. They took little joy in the morris suite or the rediffusion set.
‘ “I will leave the rediffusion set for you.” ’ Mr Biswas said, mimicking the solicitor’s clerk. ‘You old crook. If I don’t see you roasting in hell!’
The rental of the rediffusion set was two dollars a month. Landrent was ten dollars a month, six dollars more than he paid for his room. Rates, which had always seemed as remote as fog or snow, now had a meaning. Landrent, rediffusion set, rates, interest, repairs, debt: he was discovering commitments almost as fast as he discovered the house.
Then the painters came, two tall sad Negroes who had been out of work for some time and were glad to get a job at the very low wages Mr Biswas had to borrow to pay them. They came with their ladders and planks and buckets and brushes and when Anand heard them jumping about on the top floor he became anxious and went up to reassure himself that the house was not falling down. The painters did not share Anand’s concern. They continued to jump from plank to floor and he was too ashamed to tell them anything. He stayed to watch. The fresh distemper made the long, ominous crack in the verandah wall clearer and more ominous. While the rediffusion set filled the hot empty house with light music and bright commercials, the painters talked, sometimes of women, but mostly of money. When, from the rediffusion set, a woman sang, as from some near but inaccessible city of velvet, glass and gold where all was bright and secure and even sadness was beautiful:
They see me night and day time
Having such a gay time.
They don’t know what I go through –
one painter said, ‘That’s me, boy. Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.’ Yet he had never laughed or smiled. And for Anand the songs that came over and over from the rediffusion set into the hollow, distemper-smelling house were forever after tinged with uncertainty, threat and emptiness, and their words acquired a facile symbolism which would survive age and taste: ‘Laughing on the Outside’, ‘To Each His Own’, ‘Till Then’, ‘The Things We Did Last Summer’.
And more expense was to come. Sewer pipes had not been laid down in this part of the city and the house had a septic tank. Before the painters left, the septic tank became choked. The lavatory bowl filled and bubbled; the yard bubbled; the street smelled. Sanitary engineers had to be called in, and a new septic tank built. By this time the money Mr Biswas had borrowed had