V. Naipaul - The nightwatchman's occurrence book - and other comic inventions

It seemed to me that the police were a long time in entering. When they did, the Inspector shook Henry by the hand and said, ‘The old Adult Education class, eh?’

‘As you see,’ Henry said. ‘Each one teach one.’

The Inspector closed his fingers when he took away his hand from Henry’s. He became chatty. ‘I don’t know, boy,’ he said. ‘We just have to do this. Old Blackwhite really on your tail. And that Mrs Lambert, she too lodge a complaint.’

*

I wonder, though, whether I would have become involved with Selma and the others, if, during that first evening after I had undressed and was lying with Selma, I hadn’t seen my clothes dancing out of the window. They danced; it was as though they had taken on a life of their own.

I called out to Selma.

She didn’t seem surprised. She said, ‘I think they are fishing tonight.’

‘Fishing?’ I ran to the window after my disappearing clothes.

‘Yes, you know, fishing through the windows. Lifting a shirt here, a pair of trousers there. It is no good chasing them. Carnival coming, you know, and everybody wants a pretty costume.’

She was right. In the morning I woke up and remembered that I had no clothes except for my pants and vest. I threw open the back window and saw naked Americans hanging out of windows. We looked at one another. We exchanged no words. The evening was past; this was the morning.

Boys and girls were going to Mr Blackwhite’s college. Some stopped to examine contraceptives thrown into the gutters. Selma herself was fully dressed when I saw her. She said she was going to work. So it seemed after all that Henry’s story about some of his girls working in stores was right. Henry himself brought me a cup of coffee.

‘You can have one of my shirts. I just pass around and ask them for one, you know.’

The morning life of Henry’s yard was different from the evening life. There was a subdued workaday bustle everywhere. A tall thin man was doing limbering-up exercises. He wore a vest and a pair of shorts, and from time to time he rubbed himself with oil from a little phial.

‘Canadian Healing Oil,’ Henry said. ‘I like to give him a little encouragement. Mano is a walker, you know. But a little too impatient; he does always end up by running and getting disqualified.’

‘This is terrible,’ I said. ‘But what about my clothes?’

‘You’ve got to learn tolerance. This is the one thing you have got to learn on the island.’

Mano was squatting and springing up. All about him coalpots were being fanned on back steps and women were preparing morning meals. A lot of green everywhere, more than I had remembered. Beyond the sewerage trace I could see the equally forested backyards of the houses of the other street, and it was in some of these yards that I saw khaki uniforms and white sailor uniforms hanging limp from lines.

Henry followed my eyes. ‘Carnival coming, Frank. And you people got the whole world. Some people corporate in one way, some in another.’

I didn’t want Henry’s philosophy just then. I ran out as I was on to the pavement. By the standards of the street I wasn’t too badly dressed in my vest and pants. Next door an old negro sat sunning himself in the doorway of a room which looked like a declining secondhand bookshop. He was dressed in a tight-fitting khaki suit. The open door carried on its inside a flowery sign — MR W. LAMBERT, BOOKBINDER — so that I understood how, with the front door closed, the house was the respectable shuttered residence I had seen the day before, and how now, with the front door open, it was a shop. Beside Mr Lambert — I thought it safe to assume that he was Mr Lambert — was a small glass of rum. As I passed him he lifted the glass against the light, squinted at it, nodded to me and said, ‘Good morning, my Yankee friend, may God all blessings to you send.’ Then he drank the rum at a gulp and the look of delight on his face was replaced by one of total torment, as though the rum and the morning greeting formed part of an obnoxious daily penance.

‘Good morning.’

‘If it is not being rude, tell me, my good sir, why you are nude.’

‘I don’t have any clothes.’

‘Touché, I say. Naked we come, and naked go away.’

This was interesting and worth exploring but just then at the end of the road I saw the jeep. I didn’t know what the punishment was for losing your uniform and appearing naked in public. I ran back past Mr Lambert. He looked a little startled, like a man seeing visions. I ran into the side of Henry’s yard and went up to the front house by the back steps. At the same time Mano, the walker, began walking briskly out from the other side of the house into the road.

I heard someone say from the jeep, ‘Doesn’t it look to you that he went in white and came out black?’

A window opened in the next room and an American voice called out, ‘Did you see a naked white man running down here this morning, a few minutes ago?’

A woman’s voice said, ‘Look, mister, the morning is my period of rest, and the last thing I want to see in the morning is a prick.’

A pause, and the SPs drove off.

For me there remained the problem of clothing. Henry offered to lend me some of his. They didn’t exactly fit. ‘But,’ he said, ‘you could pass around by Selma’s store and get a shirt. Look, I’ll give you the address.’

A bicycle bell rang from the road. It was the postman in his uniform.

‘Henry, Henry,’ he said. ‘Look what I bringing today.’

He came inside and showed a parcel. It was for Mr Blackwhite and had been sent to him from a publisher in the United States.

‘Another one come back, another one.’

‘O my God!’ Henry said. ‘I’m going to have Blackwhite crying on my hands again. What was this one about?’

‘Usual thing,’ the postman said. ‘Love. I had a good little read. In fact, it was funny in parts.’ He pulled out the manuscript. ‘You want to hear?’

Henry looked at me.

‘I am a captive audience,’ I said.

‘Make yourself comfortable,’ the postman said. He began to read: ‘ “Lady Theresa Phillips was the most sought-after girl in all the county of Shropshire. Beautiful, an heiress to boot, intelligent, well-versed in the classics, skilful in repartee and with the embroidery needle, superbly endowed in short, she had but one failing, that of pride. She spurned all who wooed her. She had sent frustrated lovers to Italy, to the distant colonies, there to pine away in energetic solitude. Yet Nemesis was at hand. At a ball given by Lord Severn, the noblest lord in the land, Lady Theresa met Lord Alistair Grant. He was tall, square-shouldered and handsome, with melancholy eyes that spoke of deep suffering; he had in fact been left an orphan.” ’

‘Christ! Is this what he always writes about?’

‘All the time,’ Henry said. ‘Only lords and ladies. Typing like a madman all day. And Sundays especially you hear that machine going.’

The front door was open and through it now came the voice of Mr Blackwhite. ‘Henry, I have seen everything this morning, and Mrs Lambert has just been to see me. I shall be typing out a letter to the newspapers. I just can’t have naked men running about my street.’ He caught sight of the postman and caught sight of the manuscript in the postman’s hand. His face fell. He raced up the concrete steps into the room and snatched the manuscript away. ‘Albert, I’ve told you before. You must stop this tampering with His Majesty’s mail. It is the sort of thing they chop off your head for.’

‘They send it back, old man,’ Henry said. ‘If you ask me, Blackwhite, I think it’s just a case of prejudice. Open-and-shut case. I sit down quiet-quiet and listen to what Albert read out, and it was really nice. It was really nice.’