A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [267]
W. C. Tuttle played with the hairs in his nose and smiled.
‘I don’t want anything bigger,’ Shama said. ‘This is just right for me. Something small and nice.’
‘Yes,’ W. C. Tuttle said. ‘Something nice and small.’
And they had a moment of panic when he jumped up from his chair and, going to the wall with the lattice work, began measuring it by extending his fingers, gathering them up again and extending them once more. But it was only the length of the wall, not the quality of the work, that interested him. He measured, gave a little laugh and said, ‘Twelve by twenty.’
‘Fifteen by twenty-five,’ Shama said.
‘Nice and small,’ W. C. Tuttle said. ‘That, to me, is the beauty of it.’
And Shama had another uneasy moment when W. C. Tuttle asked to be shown upstairs. But it was night. They had enclosed the staircase with lattice work from banister to roof, with strips of wood from banister to steps, and it had all been painted. A weak bulb lit up the landing, threw the yard into darkness, and the effect of cosiness was maintained.
And how quickly they forgot the inconveniences of the house and saw it with the eyes of the visitors! What could not be hidden, by bookcase, glass cabinet or curtains, they accommodated themselves to. They mended the fence and made a new gate. They put up a garage. They bought rose trees and planted a garden. They began to grow orchids and Mr Biswas had the exciting idea of attaching them to dead coconut trunks buried in the ground. At the side of the house, in the shade of the breadfruit tree, they had a bed of anthurium lilies. To keep the lilies cool they surrounded them with damp, rotting immortelle wood which they got from Shorthills. And it was on a visit to Shorthills that they saw the concrete pillars rising out of tall bush on the hill where Mr Biswas had once built a house.
Soon it seemed to the children that they had never lived anywhere but in the tall square house in Sikkim Street. From now their lives would be ordered, their memories coherent. The mind, while it is sound, is merciful. And rapidly the memories of Hanuman House, The Chase, Green Vale, Shorthills, the Tulsi house in Port of Spain would become jumbled, blurred; events would be telescoped, many forgotten. Occasionally a nerve of memory would be touched – a puddle reflecting the blue sky after rain, a pack of thumbed cards, the fumbling with a shoelace, the smell of a new car, the sound of a stiff wind through trees, the smells and colours of a toyshop, the taste of milk and prunes – and a fragment of forgotten experience would be dislodged, isolated, puzzling. In a northern land, in a time of new separations and yearnings, in a library grown suddenly dark, the hailstones beating against the windows, the marbled endpaper of a dusty leather-bound book would disturb: and it would be the hot noisy week before Christmas in the Tulsi Store: the marbled patterns of oldfashioned balloons powdered with a rubbery dust in a shallow white box that was not to be touched. So later, and very slowly, in securer times of different stresses, when the memories had lost the power to hurt, with pain or joy, they would fall into place and give back the past.
Though Mr Biswas had mentally devised many tortures to which he was going to put the solicitor’s clerk, he took care to avoid the café with the gay murals. And it was with surprise and embarrassment that he came back one afternoon, less than five months after he had moved, to find the solicitor’s clerk, a cigarette hanging from his lips, pacing with some method about the lot next to his house.
The clerk was unabashed. ‘How, man? How the wife? And the children? Still getting on all right with their studies?’
Instead of replying, what he felt, ‘Stop asking about my children and their studies, you nasty old crooked communist tout!’ Mr Biswas said that they were all well and asked, ‘How the old queen?’
‘Half and half. The old heart still playing the fool.