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

About himself Whymper spoke continually, but about his family he had little to say. He was a Londoner. His father still lived in Barnet, but when Whymper spoke of him it was as of someone far away and unimportant. His mother he never mentioned. He was a man without a family, someone who belonged only to the city. As secret as his parents he kept his house. He seldom spoke of it except to indicate that it was fully owned by him. All his important activities appeared to take place outside it, and Margaret and Mr Stone began to feel that his house was not a place to which Whymper invited anyone. They were both surprised, then, when one evening after dinner he said, ‘I just can’t keep on eating this muck of Margaret’s. You must come and have dinner with me, just to see what can be done with food.’

His house was Kilburn, on that side of the High Road which gave him a Hampstead telephone number. It was an undistinguished terrace house with no garden. Whymper lived on the ground floor; the basement and other floors he rented out. Margaret and Mr Stone sat in the front room while Whymper busied himself in the kitchen, which was at the end of the hallway, on the landing of the basement stairs. The front room was roughly and sparsely furnished. There was a type of buff-coloured matting on the floor. The two armchairs were perfunctorily modern, their simplicity already turned to shabbiness. A bullfighting poster, dusty at the top, was fixed with yellowing adhesive tape to one wall; the other walls were bare. The bookcase was a jumble of paperbacks, old newspapers and copies of Esquire, Time and the Spectator; separate from this was a neat shelf of green Penguins. To Margaret and Mr Stone, who had expected something grander, something more in keeping with Whymper’s clothes, the room spoke of loneliness. While they sat waiting, they heard footsteps in the hall and on the stairs: Whymper’s tenants.

He brought in the food plate by plate. His plates and dishes had been chosen with greater care than his furniture. The first thing he offered was a plateful of cold sliced beef below a thick layer of finely chipped lettuce, cabbage, carrots, capsicums and garlic, all raw. Then he brought out a tall, slender bottle.

‘Olive oil,’ he said.

Margaret let a few drops fall onto her plate.

‘It isn’t going to explode,’ he said, taking the bottle away from her. ‘Like this.’ He poured with a slow, circular motion. ‘Go on. Eat it up.’ He did the same for Mr Stone, then went out to the kitchen.

Margaret and Mr Stone sat silently in the dim light, staring at the plates on their napkined knees.

‘You remember during the war,’ Whymper said, coming back, ‘how those starving Poles didn’t have nice white bread like ours and were living on black bread? It’s just ten times as good as our cotton wool, that’s all. Don’t have a slice, Margaret. Break off a hunk. None of your fish-and-chips graces tonight, dear. Have some butter with it. You too, Stone.’

They broke off hunks.

He left them again.

‘What are we going to do, Doggie?’

He returned with a label-less bottle of yellow fluid.

‘Don’t wait for me,’ he said. He filled three tumblers. ‘This used to be a great wine-drinking country. Today you people with your one bottle of Beaujolais think it’s something you sip. What do you think of that, Stone? It’s the resin that gives it the flavour.’

He sat opposite them. ‘Mm!’ he said, sniffing at his plate with mock disgust. ‘Those dirty foreigners, eating all this garlic and grease. Where’s the tomato ketchup?’ He started champing through his chipped grass and olive oil, drinking retsina, biting at his hunk of black bread, and maintained a steady flow of cheerful talk, mainly about food, while they nibbled and sipped.

Afterwards they had biscuits with brie and camembert. And then he gave them turkish coffee out of a long-handled, shining copper jug.

They returned home extremely hungry, but feeling extraordinarily affectionate towards the ridiculous young man. A day or two later they were agreeing that the dinner was ‘just like Whymper’.

And it was as though, having invited Mr Stone to his home, he had decided that there was no longer to be any reserve between them. Now they often had lunch together, Whymper initiating Mr Stone into the joys of traveling about London by taxi in the middle of the day at Excal’s expense. And Mr Stone was subjected to Whymper’s confessions.

It turned out in the first place that Whymper had a ‘mistress’. He used the word with a tremendous casualness. She was a radio actress whose name Mr Stone knew only vaguely but which for Whymper’s sake he pretended to know very well. Whymper spoke of her as a public figure, and was full of stories of her sexual rapacity. It appeared that food had a disturbing effect on her. Once, according to Whymper, when they were in a restaurant she had suddenly abandoned her main course, picked up her bag and said, ‘Pay the bill and let’s go home and—’

‘She tears the clothes off you,’ Whymper added.

Mr Stone regretted encouraging Whymper, for Whymper’s talk became increasingly of sex. The details he gave of his actress mistress were intimate and embarrassing. And once, after a dinner at the Stones’, he said of Gwen, ‘I feel that if I squeeze that girl she will ooze all sorts of sexual juices.’

Overwhelmed by the word ‘mistress’ and by Whymper’s talk, Mr Stone was beginning to doubt that the actress existed, when Whymper arranged a meeting one lunchtime in a pub. (‘Daren’t give her lunch,’ Whymper said.) She was, disappointingly, over thirty, with a face that was overpowdered, lips that were carelessly painted, and teary eyes. She gave an impression of length: her face was thin and long, she had no bust to speak of, and her bottom, long rather than broad, hung very low. There was nothing of the actress, as Mr Stone had imagined the type, about her, either in looks or voice. He could not imagine her tearing the clothes off anyone, but he was glad that she was sufficiently excited by Whymper to wish to tear off his clothes; and he was glad that Whymper was sufficiently excited by her to permit this. Towards them both he felt paternal: he thought they were lucky to find one another.

‘She’s a very charming person,’ he said afterwards.

And Whymper said: ‘I can put my head between her legs and stay there for hours.’

He spoke with an earnestness that was like sadness. And thereafter the sight of Whymper rolling a cigarette between his lips always brought back this unexpected, frightening, joyless sentence.

After this meeting, Mr Stone heard nothing of the actress for some time. Instead Whymper let drop talk, disconnected and vague, as though the humiliations were still close, of his childhood and army experiences. ‘We were listening to the Coronation on the wireless, with some of my mother’s friends. And I was quite big, you know. My mother said, “Come and look, Bill. They’re coming down the street.” And I went and looked. I went. They all roared with laughter. I could have killed her.’ ‘They say the army makes a man. It nearly broke me. You know the old British soldier. “Terribly” stupid and “frightfully” brave. I was neither.’

Sometimes he kept up a running commentary of contempt on everything he saw. This could be amusing. Once, just as they turned into a street, he said, ‘Look at that idiot.’ And before them, as though conjured up by Whymper’s words, was a man in bloated motorcyclist’s garb, the low-hanging seat of which was stained with monkeylike markings. There were days when the sight of black men on the London streets drove him to fury; he spent the whole of one lunchtime walk loudly counting those he saw, until both he and Mr Stone burst out laughing. But these midday walks with Whymper also had their embarrassments. Well-dressed women with their daughters infuriated him as much as black men; and once, when they were behind such a couple on a traffic island at Oxford Circus, Mr Stone heard him mutter, ‘Get out of the way, you old bitch.’ He frequently muttered abuse like this in crowds. But this time he had spoken too loudly. The woman turned, gave him a slow look of deep contempt, at which he seemed to cringe; and the depression that came upon him persisted until they returned to the office.