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

The guest of honour changed from year to year, and Tomlinson in his telephone invitation always reminded Mr Stone that if he came he might make a few useful contacts. It seemed to Mr Stone that both he and Tomlinson were past the time for useful contacts. But Tomlinson, in spite of his age and an advancement which must have exceeded all his hopes, was still restless with ambition, and it amused Mr Stone to see him ‘in action’. It was easy at these dinners to distinguish the ‘contact’. Tomlinson stuck close to him, in his presence looked pained, sometimes distracted, as though awaiting punishment or as though, having cornered his contact, he didn’t know quite what to do with him; and he spoke little, contenting himself with asking questions that required no answer or with repeating the last three or four words of the contact’s sentences.

But when Mr Stone went to the dinner this year, he found that Tomlinson’s word about the contact had been only a matter of habit; that there was no one to whom Tomlinson stuck close and whose words he echoed; and that the centre of attention, the leader of talk, was Mrs Springer.

Mrs Springer was over fifty, striking in her garnets, a dark red dress of watered silk, cut low, the skirt draped, and a well-preserved gold-embroidered Kashmir shawl. Her manner went contrary to her dress; it was not a masculinity she attempted, so much as an arch and studied unfemininity. Her deep voice recalled that of a celebrated actress, as did her delivery. Whenever she wished to make a telling point she jerked herself upright from the waist; and at the end of one of her little speeches she subsided as abruptly, her knees slightly apart, her bony hand falling into the sink of the skirt thus created. So that the old-fashioned jewellery and the dress, which, though of irreproachable cut, appeared to accommodate rather than fit her body, seemed quite distinct from the personality of the wearer.

She had already established herself as a wit when Mr Stone arrived. There were smiles as soon as she began to speak, and Grace Tomlinson appeared to be acting as cheer-leader. What Tomlinson did for the ‘contact’ in previous years, Grace was now doing for Mrs Springer who, Mr Stone learned, was her friend.

They were talking about flowers. Someone had expressed admiration for Grace’s floral decorations (which, with her corsage and her dinner-party arrangements, were the result of a brief course at the Constance Spry school in St John’s Wood).

‘The only flower I care about,’ Mrs Springer said, cutting across the muttered approvals, ‘is the cauliflower.’

Grace laughed, everyone laughed encouragingly, and Mrs Springer, subsiding into her seat and seeming to rock, within her dress, on her bottom, widened her knees and briskly rearranged her skirt into the valley, a crooked smile playing about her face, emphasizing the squareness of her jaws.

So, destroying silences, hesitations, obliterating mumblings, she held them all.

The talk turned to shows lately seen. Up to this time, apart from an occasional loud Mmm, which could have meant anything, Tomlinson had been silent, his long thin face more pained, his eyes more worried than usual, as though without his contact he was lost. But now he sought to raise the discussion, which had already declined into an exchange of titles, to a more suitable intellectual level; this was acknowledged as his prerogative and duty. He had been, he said, to Rififi, had gone, as a matter of fact, on the recommendation of a person of importance.

‘Extraordinary film,’ he said slowly, losing nothing of his suffering appearance, looking at none of them, fixing his eyes on some point in space as though drawing thoughts and words out of that point. ‘French, of course. Some things these French films do extremely well. Most extraordinary. Almost no dialogue. Gives it quite an impact, I must say. No dialogue.’

‘I for one would be grateful,’ Mrs Springer said, tearing into Tomlinson’s reflections, which he at once abandoned, looking a little relieved. ‘I hate these subtitles. I always feel I’m missing all the naughty bits. You see people waving their hands and jabbering away. Then you look at the subtitles and all you see is. “Yes”.’ She spoke some gibberish to convey the idea of a foreign language and garrulousness. ‘Then you look and you see “No”.’

The observation struck Mr Stone as deliciously funny and accurate. It corresponded so exactly to his own experience. He longed to say, ‘Yes, yes, I’ve felt like that.’ But then Grace was offering sherry again and, infected by the witty mood, said when she filled Mrs Springer’s glass, ‘Especially for you, Margaret. Untouched by hand.’

Mrs Springer jerked herself up again. ‘When you hear that anything is untouched by hand,’ she said, ‘you can be pretty sure it has been touched by foot.’ And she took her glass to her lips, as though about to drain it.

Mr Stone sat speechless with admiration. When his own glass was being refilled he was emboldened to try one of the office jokes.

‘I see,’ he said, ‘that you are anxious to get me under the affluence of incohol.’

There was no response. Tomlinson looked distressed, Grace pretended not to hear, Mrs Springer didn’t hear. Mr Stone put his glass to his lips and sipped long and slowly. The joke wasn’t even his own; it was one of Keenan’s, of Accounts. People in the office pretended to groan when Keenan said it — that ought to have warned him — but Mr Stone had always thought it extremely funny. He knew that puns were in bad taste, though he didn’t know exactly why. He resolved to be silent, and his resolve was strengthened when, as they were getting ready to go to the dining-room, Grace informed him, with a touch of reproof, that Mrs Springer was in fact in profound mourning, having not long before buried her second husband. This then explained Grace’s solicitude, and the licence Mrs Springer appeared to enjoy. It also invested Mrs Springer with a glamour over and above her own brilliance, a glamour of which she appeared not unaware.

So far Mrs Springer had taken little notice of Mr Stone, and at dinner they were far apart, each barely perceptible to the other, in the candle-lit gloom, through the candles and flowers and the innumerable novelties in carved wood, manger scenes, pine trees, tarnished relics of an Austrian holiday which the Tomlinsons had managed to turn into their traditional decorations. On two small tables in the outer circle of gloom there were those Christmas cards, selected from the cards of more than a decade, which Grace said she couldn’t bear to throw away. They were either very large or very ornate, one or two edged with lace; and every year they were thus taken out and displayed. It was this display which now held the attention of the table, of Mrs Springer and Mr Stone. And indeed for him it was a pleasure and a reassurance to enter this festive room after twelve months, to find himself in the same atmosphere and to see the same decorations.

It wasn’t until after dinner, when the men joined the ladies, that Mrs Springer spoke directly to Mr Stone.

‘Here,’ she said flirtatiously, patting the seat beside her. ‘You sit next to me.’

He did as she asked. No subject of conversation immediately presented itself, and he noticed that she had the appearance, as he had seen three or four times that evening, of someone lost in thought or of someone thinking of something to say. And before the silence became embarrassing she had spoken.

‘Do you,’ she asked, turning upon him with that suddenness he had begun to associate with her, ‘like cats?’

‘Cats,’ he said. ‘Well, I suppose it depends. This thing happened the other day. Just last week, as a matter of fact—’

‘I think all these animal lovers talk’—she paused, and a mischievous light came into her eyes, as it did whenever she was about to use an improper word (she had already used bitch and bloody)—‘a lot of rubbish.’ She spoke these last words with a curious emphasis, as though they were in themselves witty; she made them sound like a lotta rubbish.