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

Their silence, their quarrel, continued at the hotel, the desk-clerk noting their mood with satisfaction.

Towards the end of the evening, however, her presence, which at the teashop he had wished away, had developed, because of this very silence, into a comfort. When in bed he wilfully stimulated the return of that moment of hallucination in the white void, the loss of reality, his alarm was real, and he said, ‘Doggie.’

‘Doggie.’

Her own hardness had vanished. He could tell she had been crying.

IT WAS ON THAT NIGHT that the idea of the Knights Companion — the name came later and was the creation of young Whymper, the PRO — came to Mr Stone. The idea came suddenly when he was in bed, came whole, and to his surprise in the morning it was still good. All the way to London he turned it over in his mind, adding nothing, experiencing only the anxious joy of someone who fears that his creation may yet in some way elude him.

As soon as he got home he announced that he was going to ‘work’ in the study. Such an announcement had been long hoped for, and the two women hastened to supply his wants, Margaret’s delight touched with relief that the silence she had noted all day was not moodiness. She adjusted the reading lamp, sharpened pencils; without being asked she took in a hot drink. Unwilling herself to withdraw, until she noticed Mr Stone’s impatience, she gave instructions to Miss Millington that the Master was working and was not to be disturbed. Miss Millington compressed her lips and attempted to walk on tiptoe. Her long black skirts made it difficult to tell whether she was succeeding; but so she persevered, whispering in hoarse explosions that carried farther than her normal gasping speech.

While, in the study, aware only of the baize-covered desk (Margaret’s) as a pool of light in the darkness, Mr Stone wrote, soft pencil running smoothly over crisp white paper.

Until late that night he worked. When he returned from the office on the following day he went directly to the study; and again it was announced that he was working. And so for more than a week it went on. He wrote, he corrected, he re-wrote; and fatigue never came to him. His handwriting changed. Losing its neatness, becoming cramped and crabbed, some of its loops wilfully inelegant, it yet acquired a more pleasing, more authoritative appearance, even a symmetry. The lines were straight; the margins made themselves. The steady patterning of each page was a joy, the scratch of soft pencil on receiving paper, the crossings out, the corrections in balloons in the margin.

And then the writing was finished. And though Mr Stone might go up in the evenings to the study, there was now nothing there to occupy him as before. The fair copy made, he put it in his briefcase one morning (giving that object a purpose at last), and took it out of the house to the office, where he persuaded one of the girls from the pool to type it. Two or three days later, receiving the typescript on rich Excal paper, he was struck anew by the perfection and inevitability of what he had written. And now he was overcome by shyness. He was unwilling to submit the typescript to the head of his department. He did not think he was a good advertisement for his work, and preferred it to be sent to someone who did not know him. This was why, ignoring correct procedure, he some days later addressed what he had written to Sir Harry, the head of Excal, enclosed a covering letter, and let the envelope fall into the Internal Post tray.

He felt exhausted, sad and empty. He might garden, watch television or read the newspapers: his evenings remained a blank.

He expected nothing to happen, but was not surprised when Keenan, from Accounts, a man who knew everything before it happened and took pleasure in making a secret of facts that were well known, came into the library one day and, negotiating the last steps to his desk on a ridiculous tiptoe, said in a whisper, ‘I believe they’ll be wanting you at Head Office, Stoney.’

Keenan didn’t say more, but it was clear he believed that Mr Stone was guilty of a misdemeanour. His moustache curled up above his small well-shaped teeth; his eyes twinkled behind his spectacles with one arm missing (a dereliction he cultivated); within his baggy trousers his long, thin legs appeared to be twitching at the knees.

And quickly the word went round the office. Mr Stone was wanted at Head Office! As though Mr Stone had committed an offence of such enormity that the department was incapable of handling it and had passed it on to Head Office, resulting in the present summons, such as only the head of the department received.

Mr Stone was aware of the talk. He caught the looks. And he pretended to an indifference which he knew would be interpreted as an unexpected bravery. The situation was oddly familiar. Then he remembered the eater in the Cornwall teashop. ‘Of course there was a lot of whispering. But what’s so funny about a last day, I said.’ This was unsettling. But the familiarity went deeper. All the events of the morning seemed to have been lived through before.

And it was only towards the end of the morning, when he was walking past Evans’s open door, that he realized what it was. Evans was ex-RAF, a fact he never mentioned but which others invariably did. He wore dark-blue double-breasted suits, moved briskly on his short legs, leather heels giving each step a military sharpness, and he had the severe manner of an importantly busy man. He was suspect even when he descended among the ‘boys’, for he was a type of head-boy, a self-appointed office watchdog who permitted himself jokes about superiors and office organization which on analysis could always be seen to be harmless but which occasionally encouraged some of the boys to be indiscreet. Walking, then, past the always open door of Evans, Mr Stone found himself carrying the needless papers which, to give himself the appearance of being busy, he carried whenever he left the library. And it occurred to him that on that day of all days the papers were not really necessary, that the look Evans, sitting frowning at his desk, gave him was not the everyday look, but the look of awe which he had been receiving from everyone that morning. And at last he was able to place the familiarity of the morning’s happenings. What he felt now was the sensation he enjoyed in his fantasies when he flew calmly about in his armchair and the people in the office stared in astonishment.

So he exaggerated his calm, and it was only when he was on the train, the briefcase on his lap, that he relaxed. The delicate lines about his deep-set eyes became lines of humour; the lips curved. He smiled, a tired, elderly office worker oblivious of the crowd, his eyes fixed unseeing on the insurance poster.

After dinner that evening, when he was filling his pipe and Margaret was knitting, in light of painful dullness (she was sensitive to harsh light), he said, ‘I believe they’ll be wanting me at Head Office.’

The words meant little to her. And she simply said, ‘That’s very nice, Doggie.’

He fell silent. She did not notice it, so it did not develop into one of their silences. However, he resolved to tell her nothing more.

*

Old Harry — as he was known to those who did not know him, but Sir Harry to those whom he admitted to converse which they hoped to suggest was intimate — was a terrifying figure. In the eyes of their wives, men like Mr Stone and Tomlinson and Tomlinson’s friends had their forbidding public image as well. But whereas they dropped the public mask in private, Old Harry, such was his importance, dropped his public mask in public. He wrote letters to The Times. He wrote on the number of pins in new shirts, the number of matches in matchboxes; he wrote on concrete lamp-standards. He never entered the first cuckoo competition, but he made important contributions to ‘The Habits of the No. 11 Bus’ and initiated the correspondence on the London Transport bus ticket. (‘The smudged curling scrap of paper with which I am presented neither looks nor feels like an omnibus ticket, which is after all a certificate of travel, however humdrum. It is scarcely suitable for tucking into the hatband, like any respectable ticket. Rather, its flimsiness and general disreputable appearance encourage one heedlessly to crumple it into a ball or, in more creative moments, neatly to fold it into a miniature accordion, both ball and accordion vanishing at the moment when the omnibus inspector makes a request for their appearance.’) Transport was in fact his special subject, and he had built up a reputation, nowhere more formidable than at Excal, for his knowledge of the country’s railway system. (What he said to Miss Menzies at the garden party was famous. ‘So you live in Streatham? But that’s where the main line trains branch off for Portsmouth.’) Every letter Old Harry wrote to The Times was cut out by Miss Menzies together with the correspondence contents column, which made the title of the writer plain, pasted on to a sheet of thin white paper and circulated round the department, returning from its round impressively initialled in a variety of handwritings, inks and pencils. The effect of these frivolous letters over the years was to turn Old Harry into a figure of awe. With every letter he receded; his occasional references to himself as ‘a member of the travelling public’ were shattering; and the impression of grandeur and inaccessibility was completed by his reported left-wing leanings.