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

‘Lovely lawns and gardens?’

‘People are going in a lot for shrubs these days. It’s something you must have noticed. You’ll like the area. It’s very nice.’

It was a nice area, and Selma’s house was in the modernistic style of the island. Lawn, garden, a swimming pool shaped like a teardrop. The roof of the veranda was supported on sloping lengths of tubular metal. The ceiling was in varnished pitchpine. The furnishings were equally contemporary. Little bits of driftwood; electric lights pretending to be oil lamps; irregularly shaped tables whose tops were sections of tree trunks complete with bark. She certainly hated straight lines and circles and rectangles and ovals.

‘Where do you get the courage, Selma?’

‘This is just your mood. We all have the courage.’

Local paintings on the wall, contemporary like anything.

‘I always think women have a lot of courage. Imagine putting on the latest outrageous thing and walking out in that. That takes courage.’

‘But you have managed. What do you sell? I am sure that you sell things.’

‘Encyclopaedias. Textbooks. Inoffensive culture. Huckleberry Finn without nigger Jim, for ten cents.’

‘You see. That’s something I could never do. The world isn’t a frightening place, really. People are playing a lot of the time. Once you realize that, you begin to see that people are just like yourself. Not stronger or weaker.’

‘Oh, they are stronger than me. Blackwhite, Priest, you, even Henry — you are all stronger than me.’

‘You are looking at the driftwood? Lovely things can be found in Nature.’

‘But we don’t leave it there. Lovely house, Selma. Lovely, ghastly, sickening, terrible home.’

‘My home is not terrible.’

‘No, of course not to you.’

‘You can’t insult me. You are too damn frightened. You don’t like homes. You prefer houses. To fit into other people’s lives.’

‘Yes. I prefer houses. My God. I am on a treadmill. I can’t get off. I am surrounded by other people’s very big names.’

‘You are getting worse, Frank. Come. Be a good boy. Bargain, remember. Let me show you my bedroom.’

‘Adultery has its own rules. Never on the matrimonial bed.’

‘Not matrimonial yet. That is to come.’

‘I have no exalted idea of my prowess.’

‘You were always lousy as a lover. But still.’

‘What language, Selma. So snappy, man. Let me put on the old TV. I don’t want to miss anything.’

The man on the screen had changed his clothes. He was wearing a white gown. He had abandoned news; he was only preaching.

He said, ‘All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned everyone to his own way.’

As if in sympathy with his undress, I began unbuttoning my shirt.

In the bedroom it was possible to hear him squawking on. On the bed lay a quilted satin eiderdown.

‘You are like Norma Shearer in Escape.’

‘Shut up. Come. Be good.’

‘I will be good if I come.’

Our love-making was not a success.

‘It was bad.’

‘Drink is good for a woman,’ Selma said. ‘Bad for a man. You prepared yourself too well today, Frank. You waste your courage in fear.’

‘I waste my courage in fear. “Now look what you have done.” ’

‘Explain.’

‘It was what a woman said to me many years ago. I was fifteen. She called me in one afternoon when I was coming back from school and asked me to get on top of her. And that was what she said at the end. “Now look what you have done.” As though I had done the asking. Talking to me as though she was talking to a baby. Terrible. Sex is a hideous thing. I’ve decided. I’m anti-sex.’

‘That makes two of us.’

‘All I can say is that we’ve been behaving strangely for a very long time.’

‘You started it. Tell me, did you expect me to keep our bargain?’

‘I don’t know. It is like one of those stories you hear. That a woman always sleeps with the man who took her maidenhead. Is it true? I don’t know. Is it true?’

‘It is,’ Selma said, rising from the bed, ‘an old wives’ tale.’

In the drawingroom the television still groaned on. The black girls sang hymns. I went to the bathroom. The mat said RESERVED FOR DRIPS. On the lavatory seat there was a notice, flowers painted among the words: GENTLEMEN LIFT THE SEAT IT IS SHORTER THAN YOU THINK LADIES REMAIN SEATED THROUGHOUT THE PERFORMANCE. An ashtray; a little book of lavatory and bedroom jokes. The two so often going together. Poor Selma. I pulled the lavatory chain twice.

The wind was high.

‘Selma, be weak like me. Henry is right. Priest is right. It is all going to be laid flat. Let us rejoice. Let us go to the bay. Let us take Henry with us. And afterwards, if there is an afterwards, Henry will take us to his pretty little island.’

‘There are no more islands. It’s not you talking. It’s the wind.’

The oil lamp which was really an electric lamp was overturned. Darkness, except for the blue of the television screen. And the wind drowned Priest’s voice.

Selma became hysterical.

‘Let us get out of here. Let us go back to town. In the street with the others.’

‘No, let us go to the bay.’

Henry sat among disarrayed plastic flowers, in a deserted Coconut Grove.

‘The bay!’

‘The bay.’

We drove up and over the hills, the three of us. We heard the wind. We ran down onto the beach, and heard the sea. At least that couldn’t be changed. Once the beach was dangerous with coconut trees, dropping nuts. Now most had been cut down to make a parking lot. Standing foursquare on the beach was a great concrete pavilion, derelict: a bit of modernity that had failed: a tourist convenience that had served no purpose. The village had grown. It had spread down almost to the beach, a rural marine slum. Lights were on in many of the shacks.

‘I never thought you could destroy the bay.’

‘We might have a chance to start afresh.’

We walked in the wind. Pariah dogs came up to wait, to follow fearfully. The smell of rotting fish came fitfully with the wind. We decided to spend the night in the tourist pavilion.

Morning, dark and turbulent, revealed the full dereliction of the beach. Fishing boats reclined or were propped up on the sand that was still golden, but there were also yellow oil drums on the beach for the refuse of the fishermen, whose houses, of unplastered hollow-clay bricks and unpainted timber, jostled right up to the limit of dry sand. The sand was scuffed and marked and bloody like an arena; it was littered with the heads and entrails of fish. Mangy pariah dogs, all rib and bone, all bleached to a nondescript fawn colour, moved listlessly, their tails between their legs, from drum to yellow drum. Black vultures weighed down the branches of coconut trees; some hopped awkwardly on the sand; many more circled overhead.

Henry was peeing into the sea.

I called out to him, ‘Let us go back. It is more than I can stand.’

‘I always wanted to do this,’ he said. ‘In public.’

‘You mustn’t blame yourself,’ Selma said. ‘It is never very good in the morning.’

It hadn’t been good.

We drove back to the city. We drove, always, under a low dark sky. It was early, yet the island was alive. The streets were full of people. Their first hurricane, their first drama, and they had come out into the streets so as to miss nothing. All normal activity had been suspended. It was like a continuation of the night before; the streets were even more like aquaria, thick with life, but silent. Only the absence of the blackness of night seemed to have marked the passage of time; only that and the screens, now blank, of television sets seen through the open doors of houses — some still with useless lights on — and in cafés doing no business.