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

On the Tuesday evening, when the streets were full of great figures — Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Richard the Lionheart: men parading with concentration — Blackwhite was also abroad, dressed like Shakespeare.

*

Selma and I settled down into a relationship which was only occasionally stormy. I had taken Mr Henry’s advice that first morning and had gone around to the store where she worked. She did not acknowledge me. My rough clothes, which were really Henry’s, attracted a good deal of critical attention and much critical comment on the behaviour of Americans. She acknowledged me later: she was pleased that I had gone to see her in a period as cool and disenchanted as the morning after.

Henry’s, as I said, seemed to have its own especial rules. It was a club, a meeting-place, a haven, a place of assignation. It attracted all sorts. Selma belonged to the type of island girl who moved from relationship to relationship, from man to man. She feared marriage because marriage, for a girl of the people, was full of perils and quick degradation. She felt that once she surrendered completely to any one man, she lost her hold on him, and her beauty was useless, a wasted gift.

She said, ‘Sometimes when I am walking I look at these warrahoons, and I think that for some little girl somewhere this animal is lord and master. He. He doesn’t like cornflakes. He doesn’t like rum. He this, he that.’

Her job in the store and Henry’s protection gave her independence. She did not wish to lose this; she never fell for glamour. She was full of tales of girls she had known who had broken the code of their group and actually married visitors; and then had led dreadful lives, denied both the freedom they had had and the respectability, the freedom from struggle, which marriage ought to have brought.

So we settled down, after making a little pact.

‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you are free and I am free. I am free to do exactly what I want, and you are free too.’

The pressing had always been mine. It wasn’t an easy pact. I knew that this freedom might at any time embrace either Blackwhite, shy reformer in the background, or the white-robed preacher whom we called Priest. They both continued to make their interest in her plain.

But in the beginning it was not from these men that we found opposition after we had settled down in one of the smaller jalousied houses in the street — and in those days it was possible to buy a house for fifteen hundred dollars. No, it was not from these men that there was opposition, but from Mrs Lambert, Henry’s neighbour, the wife of the man in the khaki suit who sipped the glass of rum in the mornings and spoke in rhyme to express either delight or pain.

Now Mrs Lambert was a surprise. I had seen her in the street for some time without connecting her with Mr Lambert. Mr Lambert was black and Mrs Lambert was white. She was about fifty and she had the manners of the street. It was my own fault, in a way, that I had attracted her hostility. I had put money in the Lamberts’ way and had given them, too late in life, a position to keep up or to lose.

Mr Lambert had been excited by the boom conditions that had begun to prevail in the street. The words were Ma-Ho’s, he who ran the grocery at the corner. Ma-Ho had begun to alter and extend his establishment to include a café where many men from the base and many locals sat on high stools and ate hot dogs and drank Coca-Colas, and where the children from several streets around congregated, waiting to be treated.

‘Offhand,’ Ma-Ho said, for he was fond of talking, ‘I would say, boom.’ And the words ‘offhand’ and ‘boom’ were the only really distinct ones. He began every sentence with ‘offhand’; what followed was very hard to understand. Yet he was always engaged in conversation with some captive customer.

The walls of his grocery carried pictures of Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang. They also had pictorial calendars, several years out of date, with delicately tinted Chinese beauties languid or coy against a background of ordered rocks and cultivated weeds, picturesque birds and waterfalls which poured like oil: incongruous in the shop with its chipped grimy counter, its open sacks of flour, its khaki-coloured sacks of sugar, its open tins of red, liquid butter. These pictures were like a longing for another world; and indeed, Ma-Ho did not plan to stay on the island. When you asked him, making conversation, especially on those occasions when you were short of change and wanted a little trust from him, ‘You still going back?’ the answer was: ‘Offhand, I say two-four years.’

His children remained distinctive, and separate from the life of the street: a small neat crocodile, each child armed with neat bags and neat pencil boxes, going coolly off to school in the morning and returning just as coolly in the afternoon, as though nothing had touched them during the whole day, or caused them to be sullied. In the morning the back door of his shop opened to let out these children; in the afternoon the back door opened to swallow them in again; and nothing more was heard from them, and nothing more was seen of them.

The boom touched Ma-Ho. It touched Mrs Lambert. Mr Lambert called very formally one evening in his khaki suit and put a proposal to me.

‘I don’t want to see you get into trouble,’ he said. ‘Mrs Lambert and I have been talking things over, and we feel you are running an unnecessary risk in bringing these — what should I say? — these supplies to the needy of our poor island.’

I said, ‘It’s worked quite all right so far. You should see all the stuff we throw away.’

‘Now don’t misunderstand,’ he said. ‘I am not blaming you for what you are doing. But Mrs Lambert is particularly concerned about the trucks. She feels that by having them come out with these supplies and then having them go back, there is a chance of them being checked twice.’

‘I see what you mean. Thanks, Mr Lambert. You mean that Mrs Lambert thinks that perhaps a truck might just slip out of the base and stay out?’

‘Mrs Lambert thought it might be safer. Mrs Lambert has a relation who knows all there is to be known about trucks and motor vehicles generally.’

I said nothing just then, thinking of the possibilities.

Mr Lambert’s manner broke up. It became familiar. All the people in the street had two sets of manners, one extremely formal, one rallying and casual.

‘Look,’ Mr Lambert said. ‘The truck go back to the base, they start one set of questioning. It stay out here, ten to one they forget all about it. You people own the whole world.’

So into Mr Lambert’s yard a truck one day rolled; and when, a fortnight or so later, it rolled out again, it was scarcely recognizable.

‘Lend-lease, lease-lend,’ Mr Lambert said with pure delight. ‘The trend, my friend.’

And it was this truck that the Lamberts hired out to the contractors on the base. The contractors provided a driver and were willing — in fact, anxious — for the truck to work two shifts a day.

‘We are getting twenty dollars a day,’ Mr Lambert said. ‘My friend, what luck! What luck you’ve given with a simple truck!’

Part of this luck, needless to say, I shared.

Yet all this while Mrs Lambert remained in the background. She was a figure in a curtained window; she was someone walking briskly down the street. She was never someone you exchanged words with. She never became part of the life of the street.

‘That is one person whose old age you spoil,’ Henry said. ‘You see? She behaving as though they buy that truck. I don’t think this is going to end good.’

Twenty dollars a day, minus commission and gasoline. The money was piling up; and then one day we saw a whole group of workmen around the Lamberts’ house, like ants around a dead cockroach. The street came out to watch. The house, small and wooden, was lifted off its pillars by the workmen. The front door with the sign ‘Mr W. Lambert, Bookbinder’ swung open and kept on flapping while the house was taken to the back of the lot, to rest not on pillars but flat on the ground. The workmen drank glasses of rum to celebrate. The street cheered. But then we saw Mr Lambert pushing his way through the crowd. He looked like a man expecting news of death. He saw the pillars; he saw his house on the ground; and he said: ‘My house! My house brought low! But I did not want a bungalow. Here the old pillars stand, in the middle of naked land.’ He left and went to Ma-Ho’s. He became drunk; he addressed verse to everyone. The habit grew on him. It seemed to us that he remained drunk until he died.