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

‘In India,’ Margaret said, gazing at the cake, ‘they always offer little bits like this to the fire before they cook or eat anything.’

Mr Stone was outraged. Starting to put down his plate gently, as he always did, but changing his mind right at the last moment and setting it down hard, he got up and made for the door, kicking at the tiger’s head, against which he had nearly tripped.

‘Doggie!’

He held the door open. ‘I–I don’t believe you’ve ever been to India.’

‘Doggie!’

He locked himself in the former junk room, which Margaret had furnished with some of her furniture and presented to him as a ‘study’, a place for male solitude. And there, despite Margaret’s knocks and calls and coos, he remained, thinking in the dark of the past, of Olive, himself, childhood. He beheld a boy of seventeen walking back alone from school on a winter’s day, past the shops of the High Street. The boy was going home, unaware of what awaited him there. Whether the picture was true or composite he no longer knew; whether there was a reason for remembering this stretch of the way home he couldn’t say. But it was what he saw when he wished to think of his childhood in a tender way. This boy didn’t know that his life would unroll without disturbance, the years flow evenly; and for him Mr Stone felt an ache of pity.

At length the passion passed. It was quite late and he was stiff and cold. He nevertheless prolonged his stay in the study until past ten. Then, for no reason, he went down to the sitting-room. Margaret did not speak; she was reading a library book. He said nothing to her. He went up to the bathroom. It had become the rule that he should go first. It was also a rule that he should smoke his pipe there; it warmed the room up, Margaret said, and she loved the smell of his tobacco. It was his custom therefore to puff vigorously on his pipe four or five times before leaving the bathroom. Tonight, because of their quarrel, he went without his pipe.

From the bedroom he listened to her own preparations. When she came in he was under the sheets, motionless. She did not put the light on. She set the alarm and got into bed.

He was falling off to sleep when he heard her.

‘Doggie.’

He didn’t reply.

Minutes later she spoke again.

‘Doggie.’

He mumbled.

‘Doggie, you’ve made me very unhappy.’

Whereat he almost lost his temper. Fatigue alone kept him silent.

She started to sob.

‘Doggie, I want to eat a piece of your cake.’

‘Why don’t you go and eat the damned thing?’

She sobbed a little more.

‘Won’t you come and eat a little piece with me, Doggie?’

‘No.’

‘A little piece, Doggie.’

‘For heaven’s sake!’ he said, throwing the bedclothes off.

She was sitting up.

They went to the bathroom and got their teeth. They went down to the sitting-room, almost stuffy after the cold bedroom, and ate large pieces of Olive’s cake in silence.

Then they went up to the bathroom and took out their teeth, and went to bed, still silent.

He was now wide awake.

‘Doggie,’ she said.

‘Doggie.’

It was some time before they could fall asleep, and they suffered frightfully from indigestion.

Olive continued to send her cakes. But Mr Stone knew that the relationship between his sister and himself belonged to the past.

*

So step by step he became married; and step by step marriage grew on him. For Margaret revealed a plasticity of character which abridged and rendered painless the process of getting to know her, getting used to her. He was at the core of their relationship; she moulded herself about him so completely and comfortingly that it was with surprise, when he observed her with her friends, that he remembered she did have a character of her own, and views and attitudes. And just as at first it seemed that Margaret had become an extension of Miss Millington, so he now saw them both as extensions of himself. It was, too, with a growing pleasure, which he did not in the beginning care to acknowledge even to himself, that he thought of the suspension that came to the house as soon as he left it in the morning, and of its reanimation in the afternoon in preparation to receive him.

His habits were converted into rituals; they grew sacred even to him. He succumbed to gardening, of the type that Margaret desired, his attentions to beds and bulbs being regarded as sacramental by both Margaret and Miss Millington, willing acolytes (Miss Millington, whose only concern with the garden before had been to dust it, in her uncontrolled, deluging and expensive way, with pepper dust, and perhaps, when flowers appeared, to make some reference to their loveliness). So it was established that he was ‘fond of gardening’. But he drew the line when Margaret, saying, ‘Something for you, Doggie,’ tried to get him to become a regular listener to Country Questions and In Your Garden. He soothed her disappointment by repeating, what he had heard in the office, that the people who spoke on the radio with rustic accents about country matters lived in Mayfair; window-boxes were the only land they knew. This became one of his ‘sayings’; his statements had never before been regarded as ‘sayings’.

It was established, too, that the black cat next door was an enemy. The two women entered into a sweet conspiracy to conceal the creature’s activities from the Master. An intermittent afternoon watch was kept and ravages hastily repaired so that the Master might not be upset when he returned. The women succeeded better than they knew. The war taken out of his hands, Mr Stone’s hostility towards the cat diminished, leaving him with a sense of something lost.

But beneath the apparent calm which marriage had once more brought to him, there grew a new appreciation of time. It was flying by. It was eating up his life. Every week — and how quickly these Sundays followed one another on the radio: Coast and Country after the news, or The Countryside in October, The Countryside in November, monthly programmes that seemed like weekly programmes: Sundays which made him feel that the last one was yesterday — every racing week drew him nearer to retirement, inactivity, corruption. Every ordered week reminded him of failure, of the uncreative years once so comfortingly stacked away in his mind. Every officeless Sunday sharpened his anxiety, making him long for Monday and the transient balm of the weekdays, false though he knew their fullness to be, in spite of the office diary he had begun to keep, tabulating appointments, things to be done, to flatter himself that he was busily and importantly occupied.

The tree, changing, developing with the year, made its point every day. And when, sitting at the Sunday tea, trying to reassure himself by his precise, neat, slow gestures, he sometimes said, ‘You are part of me, Margaret. I don’t know what I would do without you,’ he spoke with an urgency and gratitude she did not fully understand.

LATE IN MARCH, the buds white in sunlight on the black branches and daily acquiring a greenish tinge, Mr Stone and Margaret left London for a fortnight. It was his holiday — he who would soon be in need of no holiday — and it was also their honeymoon. They went to Cornwall. Mr Stone preferred to spend his holidays in England. He had thought after the war that he would go abroad. In 1948 he went to Ireland; but the most enjoyable part of that holiday was the journey from Southampton to Cobh in a luxurious, rationing-free American liner. A fortnight in Paris two years later had been, after the first moment of pleasure at being in the celebrated city, a tedious torment. He had dutifully gone sightseeing and had been considerably fatigued; he often wondered afterwards why he followed the guidebook so slavishly and went to places as dreary as the Panthéon and the Invalides. He had sat in the cafés, but hated the coffee, and to sit idling in an unfamiliar place was not pleasant, and the cups of coffee were so small. He had tried aperitifs but had decided they were a waste of time and money. He was very lonely; his pocket was playfully picked by an Algerian, who warned him to be more careful in future; everything was hideously expensive; the incessant cries from men and women of le service, monsieur, le service! had given him a new view of the French, whom he had thought a frivolous, fun-loving people made a little sad by the war. And for the last two days he was afflicted by a type of dysentery which made it impossible for him to take anything more solid than mineral water.