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

I said, ‘Once you were all white, and that wasn’t true. Now you are trying to be all black and that isn’t true either. You are really a shade of grey, Blackwhite.’

‘Hooray for me, to use one of your expressions. This place is nowhere. It is a place where everyone comes to die. But I am not like Mano. You are not going to kill me.’

‘Blackwhite, you old virgin, I love you.’

‘Virgin? How do you know?’

‘We are birds of a feather.’

‘Frankie, why do you drink? It’s only a craving for sugar.’

And I said to him: ‘Dickie-bird, why do you weep? Sugar, sugar. A lovely word, sugar. I love its sweetness on my breath. I love its sweetness seeping through my skin.’

And in the funeral procession, which dislocated traffic and drew doffed hats and grave faces from passers-by, I wept for Mano and Lambert and myself, wept for my love of sugar; and Blackwhite wept for the same things and for his virginity. We walked side by side.

Selma said Henry was right. ‘I don’t think you should go around interfering any more in other people’s lives. People don’t really want what you think they want.’

‘Right,’ I said. ‘From now on we will just live quietly.’

Quietly. It was a word with so many meanings. The quietness of the morning after, for instance, the spectacles on my nose, quiet in an abstemious corner. I was a character now. I had licence. Sugar sweetened me. In Henry’s yard, in Selma’s house, and on the sands of the desolate bay over the hills, the healing bay where the people of the island sought privacy from joy and grief.

Priest’s denunciations of us, of me, grew fiercer. And Blackwhite, seen through the flapping curtain of his front room, pounded away at his typewriter in sympathetic rage.

Then one blurred aching morning I found on the front step a small coffin, and in the coffin a mutilated sailor doll and a toy wreath of rice fern.

They came around to look.

‘Primitive,’ Blackwhite said. ‘Disgusting. A disgrace to us.’

‘This is Priest work,’ Henry said.

‘I have been telling you to insure me,’ Selma said.

‘What, is that his game?’

Henry said, ‘Priest does take his work seriously. The only thing is, I wish I know what his work is. I don’t know whether it is preaching, or whether it is selling insurance. I don’t think he know either. For him the two seem to come together.’

To tell the truth, the coffins on Selma’s doorstep worried me. They kept on appearing and I didn’t know what to do. Selma became more and more nervous. At one moment she suggested I should take her away; at another moment she said that I myself should go away. She also suggested that I should try to appease Priest by buying some insurance.

‘Appease Priest? The words don’t sound right. Henry, you hear?’

Henry said, ‘I will tell you about this insurance. I don’t know how it happen on the island, but it becoming a social thing, you know. Like having a shower, like taking schooling, like getting married. If you not insured these days you can’t hold up your head at all. Everybody feel you poor as a church rat. But look. The man coming himself.’

It was Priest, wearing a suit and looking very gay and not at all malevolent.

‘Dropping in for a little celebration,’ he said.

Selma was awed, and it was hard to say whether it was because of Priest’s suit, the coffins, or his grand manner.

‘What are you celebrating?’ I said. ‘A funeral?’

He wasn’t put out. ‘New job, Frankie, new job. More money, you know. Higher commission, bigger salary. Frankie, where you say you living in the States? Well, look out for me. I might be going up there any day. So the bosses say.’

I said, ‘I’d love to have you.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘how in this insurance business I have this marvellous record. But these local people’—and here he threw up his beard, scratched under his chin, screwed up his eyes—‘but these local people, you know how mean they is with the money. Then this new company come down, you know, and they get to know about me. I didn’t go to see them. They send for me. And when I went to see them they treat me as a God, you know. And a damn lot of them was white to boot. You know, man, I was like — what I can say? — I was like a playboy in that crowd, a playboy And look how the luck still with me, look how the luck still in my hand. You know what I come in here to celebrate especially? You know how for years I begging Ma-Ho to take out insurance. And you know how he, Ma-Ho, don’t want to take out no insurance. He just saying he want to go back to China, back to the old wan-ton soup and Chiang Kai-shek. Well, he insured as from today.’

Henry said, ‘He pass his medical?’

I said, ‘Offhand, that man looks damn sick to me, you know.’

‘He pass his medical,’ Priest said.

‘He went to the doctor?’ Henry asked. ‘Or the doctor went to him?’

‘What you worrying with these details? You know these Chinese people. Put them in their little shop and they stay there until kingdom come. Is a healthy life, you know.’

Henry said, ‘Ma-Ho tell me one day that when he come to the island in 1920 and the ship stop in the bay and he look out and he see only mangrove, he started to cry.’

Selma said, ‘I can’t imagine Ma-Ho crying.’

Henry said, ‘To me it look as though he never stop crying.’

‘Offhand,’ I said, ‘no more coffins, eh?’

‘Let me not hear of death,’ Priest said in his preaching manner. He burst out laughing and slapped me on the back.

And, indeed, no more coffins and dead sailors and toy wreaths appeared on Selma’s steps.

I knocked on Selma’s door one day two weeks later. ‘Any coffins today, Ma’am?’

‘Not today, thank you.’

Selma had become houseproud. The little house glittered and smelt of all sorts of polishes. There were pictures in passe-partout frames on the walls and potted ferns in brass vases on the marble-topped three-legged tables for which she had a passion. That day she had something new to show me: a marble-topped dresser with a clay basin and ewer.

‘Do you like it?’

‘It’s lovely. But do you really need it?’

‘I always wanted one. My aunt always had one. I don’t want to use it. I just want to look at it.’

‘Fine.’ And after a while I said, ‘What are you going to do?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, the war’s not going to go on for ever. I can’t stay here for ever.’

‘Well, it’s as Blackwhite says. You are going to go back, we are going to stay here. Don’t weep for me, and’—she waved around at all the little possessions in her room—‘and I won’t weep for you. No. That’s not right. Let’s weep a little.’

‘I feel,’ I said, ‘that you are falling for old Blackwhite. He’s talked you round, Selma. Let me warn you. He’s no good. He’s a virgin. Such men are dangerous.’

‘Not Blackwhite. To tell you the truth, he frightens me a little.’

‘More than Priest?’

‘I am not frightened of Priest at all,’ she said. ‘You know, I always feel Priest handles the language like a scholar and gentleman.’

I was at the window. ‘I wonder what you will say now.’

Priest was running down the street in his suit and howling: ‘All-you listen, all-you listen. Ma-Ho dead, Ma-Ho dead.’

And from houses came the answering chant. ‘Who dead?’

‘Ma-Ho dead.’

‘The man was good. Good, good.’

‘Who?’

‘Ma-Ho.’

‘I don’t mean he was not bad. I mean,’ Priest said, subsiding into personal grief, ‘I mean he was well. He was strong. He was healthy. And now, and now, he dead.’

‘Who dead?’