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

Now the cat had penetrated into the house itself.

The beating of Mr Stone’s heart moderated and the shooting pain receded, leaving a trail of exposed nerves, a lightness of body below the heavy Simpson’s overcoat, and an urge to decisive action. Not closing the front door, turning on no lights, not taking off his overcoat or hat, depositing only his gloves and briefcase on the hall table, he went to the kitchen, where in darkness he opened the larder door and took out the cheese, still in its Sainsbury wrapping, from its accustomed place — Miss Millington shopped on Thursday mornings. He found a knife and carefully, as though preparing cocktail savouries, chopped the cheese into small cubes. These he took outside, to the front gate; and glancing about him in the sodden murk — some windows alight, no observer about — he laid a trail of cheese from gate to door, up the dark carpeted hall, now bitterly cold, and up the steps to the bathroom. Here, sitting on the cover of the lavatory bowl, still in his hat and overcoat, he waited, poker in hand. The poker was not for attack but self-defense. Often, walking down that cat-infested street, he had been surprised by a cat sitting sedately on a fence post at the level of his head, and he had always made as if to shield his face. It was a disgraceful action, but one he could never control. He feared the creatures; and there were all those stories of cornered cats, of cats growing wild and attacking men.

The damp air filled the hall and invaded the bathroom. The darkness and the silence emphasized the cold. He had visions of dipping the cat’s paws in boiling oil, of swinging the creature by its tail and flinging it down to the pavement below, of scalding it in boiling water. He got up from the lavatory seat and turned on the geyser. Instant hot water! The water ran cold, then after the whoomph! as the jets caught, lukewarm, then at last warm. The geyser needed cleaning; he must remind Miss Millington. He filled the basin and sat down again on the lavatory bowl. The water-pipes ceased to hum; silence returned.

Some minutes later, five, perhaps ten, he remembered. It was rats that ate cheese. Cats ate other things. He put on lights everywhere, closed the front door, and turned on fires.

The cheese he forgot. It was a pleasurably agitated Miss Millington who reported the next morning on the disappearance of her cheese from the larder, and its conversion into cubes laid in a wavering line from gate to bathroom. He offered no explanation.

*

This incident, which might be said to have led to his undoing, did not arise out of Mr Stone’s passion for gardens. Gardening as he practised it was no more than a means, well suited to his age, which was sixty-two, of exhausting the spare time and energy with which his undemanding duties in one of the departments of the Excal company, his status as a bachelor and his still excellent physique amply provided him. The habit had come late to him. He relished the activity rather than the results. It mattered little to him that his blooms were discoloured by pepper dust. His delight lay more in preparing the ground for planting than in the planting, which sometimes never occurred. Once his passion had been all for digging. When this came to an end — after he had punctured a water main — he decided to hoard his refuse, to spare none for the local council. Strict instructions were given to Miss Millington; and the refuse of his household, dutifully presented by her for his daily inspection, he spread afternoon after afternoon, with a miser’s delight in its accumulation, over the front garden. The following year he planted grass; but so ferociously did he mow the tender shoots — with a mower bought for the purpose — that before the end of the spring what he had thought of as his lawn had been torn to bare and ragged earth. It was after this that he had covered most of the garden with crazy paving, which proved to be a great absorber of moisture, so that even in a moderate summer his plants wilted as in a drought.

Still he persevered, finding in his activity a contented solitude and opportunity for long periods of unbroken reflection. And the incident of that evening could be said to have arisen out of his solitude, the return to a house he knew to be empty. It was in the empty house, on these occasions of Miss Millington’s absence, that he found himself prey to fancies which he knew to be grotesque but which he ceaselessly indulged. He thought of moving pavements: he saw himself, overcoated and with his briefcase, standing on his private moving strip and gliding along, while walkers on either side looked in amazement. He thought of canopied streets for winter, the pavements perhaps heated by that Roman system he had seen at Bath. One fantasy was persistent. He was able to fly. He ignored traffic lights; he flew from pavement to pavement over people and cars and buses (the people flown over looking up in wonder while he floated serenely past, indifferent to their stupefaction). Seated in his armchair, he flew up and down the corridors of his office. His imagination had people behave exaggeratedly. The dour Evans trembled and stammered; Keenan’s decadent spectacles fell off his face; wickedly giving Miss Menzies a wig, he had that jump off her head. Everywhere there was turmoil, while he calmly went about his business, which completed, he as calmly flew away again.

Miss Millington, returning on Friday mornings, sometimes found the fruit of her master’s solitude: a rough toy house, it might be, painstakingly made from a loaf of bread which, bought on Thursday morning, was on Thursday evening still new and capable of easy modelling; the silver paper from a packet of cigarettes being flattened by every large book in the house, the pile rising so high that it was clear that the delicately balanced structure had in the end become her master’s concern; objects left for her inspection, admiration and eventual dismantling, but which by an unspoken agreement of long standing neither he nor she mentioned.

That she should mention the cheese was unusual. But so was the incident, which was, moreover, not to be buried like the others. For how often, by a person still to him unknown, was the incident of that Thursday evening to be repeated in his presence, as a funny, endearing story, to which he would always listen with a smile of self-satisfaction, though on the evening itself, in the cold darkness of the empty house, he had acted throughout with the utmost seriousness and, even on the discovery that cats did not eat cheese, had found nothing absurd in the situation.

*

Exactly one week later, on the twenty-first of December, Mr Stone went, as he did every year at this time, to the Tomlinsons’ dinner party. He had been to teacher training college with Tony Tomlinson, and though their paths had since diverged, their friendship was thus annually renewed. Tomlinson had remained in education and was a figure of some importance in his local council. From initialing the printed or duplicated signatures of others he had risen to having other people initial his, which was now always followed by the letters T.D. On their first appearance these letters had led Mr Stone to suggest at one of these annual dinner parties that Tomlinson had become either a teacher of divinity or a doctor of theology; but the joke was not repeated the following year, for Tomlinson took his Territorial Decoration seriously.

According to Tomlinson, Mr Stone had ‘gone into industry’. And it was also Tomlinson who designated Mr Stone as ‘head librarian’. ‘Richard Stone,’ he would say. ‘An old college friend. Head librarian with Excal.’ The ‘with’ was tactful; it concealed the unimportant department of the company Mr Stone worked for. The title appealed to Mr Stone and he began using it in his official correspondence, fearfully at first, and then, encountering no opposition from the company or the department (which was in fact delighted, for the words lent a dignity to their operations), with conviction. And so, though Tomlinson’s dinners had increased in severity and grandeur with the years, Mr Stone continued to be invited. To Tomlinson his presence was a pole and a comfort, a point of rest; more, it was a proof of Tomlinson’s loyalty; it acknowledged, at the same time, that their present exalted positions made respectable a past which might otherwise have encouraged speculation.