The mimic men - V. S. Naipaul [45]
This was far from lessening my admiration for them. In my imagination I saw my mother’s mother leading her cow through a scene of pure pastoral: calendar pictures of English gardens superimposed on our Isabellan villages of mud and grass: village lanes on cool mornings, the ditches green and grassy, the water crystal, the front gardens of thatched huts bright with delicate flowers of every hue. She was as brightly coloured a storybook figure as her husband. I imagined him sitting at a wooden table and by the light of an oil lamp scrupulously ‘fulling’ his bottles with a funnel, bringing to that labour a self-contained, almost religious, stillness, his inward eye fixed on a goal which transcended the frivolity of his present pursuit, the concoction of soft drinks, whose quality and measure yet remained of surpassing importance. The goal, when realized, would astonish the scoffing world. It would not astonish him. Nor would it astonish his wife who, as devoutly as himself, looked far beyond the flowery lanes through which, penitentially every morning, she led her milk-giving cow.
It was, as might be imagined, a slow humiliation for my father to find that he, who had married the shopkeeper’s daughter, was forced over the years into the position of the underpaid schoolteacher with whom the family of the rich industrialist had imprudently formed a marriage alliance. And it didn’t help that my mother’s behaviour was that of someone who quietly accepted her own guilt. My mother had received little English education and so was separated as by a generation from her brother and sisters who came later, at the period of wealth. One result was that she exaggerated her age. She liked to think that she was old-fashioned and had more in common with her parents than with her sisters and brother. In this way she tried to resolve a difficult situation. I think she succeeded. Her old-fashioned upbringing, which prescribed acceptance without complaint, was a help to her. She accepted my father’s abuse; she accepted her family’s tacit – in Cecil, open – disapproval of my father. By a display of perpetual guilt she continued to show loyalty to both sides, even after my father had stopped going to her parents’ house.
At an early age, then, I was made aware of the oddity of the arrangement whereby two human beings, who were in no way related, paired off. I suppose it is in this that I must look for an explanation of the scene which took place while I was still in a very junior class at school. We were, I remember, doing masculines and feminines from Nesfield’s Grammar. The master asked the masculines, the boys provided the feminines. Abbott, abbess; stag, roe; hart, hind; fox, vixen.
‘Husband?’
It was my turn. I was mortified.
‘Husband, boy.’
An answer was needed, and I knew. I got out of my desk and walked down the aisle to Mr Shepherd’s table. He looked puzzled. I went and stood in front of him. He bent down with concern and I whispered into his ear: ‘Wife.’
More than thirty years later, the man agrees with the child: it is a terrible word.
For Cecil childhood was the great time; he would never cease to regret its passing away. It was different with me. I could scarcely wait for my childhood to be over and done with. I have no especial hardship or deprivation to record. But childhood was for me a period of incompetence, bewilderment, solitude and shameful fantasies. It was a period of