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

‘And last — aha!’ He looked up roguishly from his typewritten script. ‘You thought I was going to say “and last but not least”! And last and also least, the person who intends to keep you no longer from the main business and true star of the evening.’

He sat down amid frenzied applause, a little wiping of rheumy eyes, and cries of ‘Good old Harry!’ from those whom the occasion roused to a feeling of fellowship greater than they had known during their service. As soon as he sat down he looked preoccupied and indifferent to the applause and busied himself with a grave conversation with the man beside him.

Whymper was the next speaker. He spoke of the competition and of the difficulty they had had in coming to a decision. One man would get the prize, but the prize was in a way for all of them, since they were meeting, as Sir Harry had so rightly stressed, to celebrate their fellowship.

And the climax came.

‘Silence! Silence!’ the toastmaster called.

There was silence.

‘Let Jonathan Richard Dawson, Knight Companion, rise and advance!’

(The ritual and words had been devised by Whymper.)

From one end of the horse-shoe table an old man in a tweed suit arose, bespectacled, vaguely chewing and looking rather wretched. Followed by hundreds of watery eyes, and in absolute silence, he advanced right up to the centre to Sir Harry, who, standing once more, took a sword from an attendant and presented it. A score of camera bulbs flashed, and in the newspapers the next morning the scene appeared: the presentation of the sword Excalibur to the Knight Companion of the year.

*

It was a week of Christmas lunches and dinners and staff parties, and on the next evening Mr Stone and Margaret had to go to the Tomlinsons’. To this Mr Stone looked forward with greater pleasure than he had to the Round Table dinner. For he was going as a private person among friends who had not that day had the advantage of seeing their names, and a photograph in which they were clearly visible, in the newspapers; and he was going as someone who was not at all puffed up by such publicity but was taking it calmly, someone who still among his friends could be natural and unspoilt.

Mr Stone could tell, from the welcome they received at the door and from Tony Tomlinson’s lingering attentions, that he and Margaret were the stars of the party. The photograph was not mentioned, and it was with an indescribable pleasure that he led the conversation to perfectly normal and even commonplace subjects. His gestures became slower and more relaxed. He studied himself, and the word that came to him was ‘urbane’. He was perceptibly fussy and longwinded in deciding between sweet and dry sherry, as one who felt that his decision was of importance and was being watched by many. Still, he felt, with the steady erosion of the main course and the imminent approach of the dessert, that the determination of Tomlinson and Tomlinson’s guests to maintain a silence on the issue which he felt was consuming them was a little excessive. He even slightly withdrew from the commonplace talk in which he had earlier so actively participated. And it was with relief that he heard Grace say, ‘It’s so nice for Richard and Margaret, don’t you think?’

There was an instant chorus of undemonstrative approval.

‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ Grace went on. ‘But they met under this very roof just two years ago.’

‘… just two years ago,’ Tomlinson echoed.

Margaret at once took over.

‘For the last six months I’ve been hearing about nothing else,’ she said. ‘If I hear another word about those doddering old men of Richard’s I believe I’ll scream.’

‘Well, of course, it’s your own fault, Margaret,’ Grace said. ‘We’ve been telling Richard for years that every man needs a woman behind him.’

‘How unsatisfactory!’ Margaret said, rocking in her seat, as she did after delivering a witticism.

Mr Stone recognized the influence of Whymper and covertly examined the table for reactions. But there was only pleasure. Even the demure, unspeaking wife of the unspeaking chief accountant, though red to the tips of her ears, was smiling at her plate. At this dinner, it was clear, Margaret could set the tone and dictate her own terms.

And if he needed further proof of their position of command that evening, it came when the ladies had been led away, and the men, standing drinkless and cigarless, with funny hats on their heads, prepared to make conversation. Now all the delight he had bottled up throughout the evening overflowed. His funny hat pushed to the back of his head, his face a constant smile, absently taking the nuts which Tomlinson gravely pressed on him, he led the talk. And now it was his words that Tomlinson listened to, it was his words that Tomlinson echoed.

‘It’s like a religious movement,’ he said, rising on his toes, making a lifting gesture with both arms and throwing a handful of nuts into his mouth.

‘… yes, a religious movement,’ Tomlinson said, with the pained expression with which he always uttered his echoes.

‘Why not get our old boys to visit the old boys of clients, they said. But’—wagging a nut-filled hand and chewing— ‘ “Why?” I said. “This is not to help Excal. This is to help all those poor old people without friends, without relations, without — without any thing.’ ” He threw more nuts into his mouth.

‘… of course, helping the poor old people …’

‘Of course,’ said the chief accountant, speaking through a mouthful of half-chewed nut and swallowing hurriedly when his words issued blurred, ‘an idea is one thing, but the packaging is another. And that’s where I hand it to you. Packaging. Everybody’s interested in packaging these days.’

‘Packaging, of course,’ Mr Stone said, momentarily faltering before delight again swept him on. ‘We had to get the old boys out on the road and up to the various front doors.’

‘… yes, packaging …’

But before Mr Stone could modify his views on packaging Tomlinson said they ought to be joining the ladies.

And to the ladies Margaret was saying, ‘Well, that’s what I tell Richard when he gets depressed.’ (When was he depressed?) ‘It’s so much better to have success now than to have a flash in the pan at thirty.’

Dear Doggie! When did they ever discuss the point? When did she ever say such words to him?

It was an evening of pure delight. He would look back and see that it marked the climax of his life.

FOR AS SOON as the door closed behind them and they were alone in the empty lamplit street, he no longer wished to talk. He wished only to savour the unusual mood. Margaret, sensing the change in him, was silent. And as the minutes passed, steadily separating him from the brilliance, it was as though the brilliance was something already lost, a hallucination that could never be captured again; and his silence developed into a type of irritability, which might never have found expression had not Margaret, no longer able to keep herself in, begun to talk, party platitudes, party comments, while they were in the taxi. By that shrug of his shoulders with which he expressed his distaste for her, his wish to be alone and separate from her, he forced her to silence, and in silence they returned home. So, unexpectedly, the evening ended.

And the further the brilliance receded the more clearly he recognized its unusual quality. It was a brilliance which was incapable of being sustained, yet a brilliance of which every diminution was a loss to be mourned, a reminder of darkness that had been lived through and a threat of the darkness that was to come.

It was again that difficult time of year when with Christmas and the New Year the workaday world was in abeyance, the season of rest and goodwill which throws everyone more deeply into himself and makes the short days long. The holiday was not at all what they had planned. His mood did not lift. The brilliance he sought to repossess grew more shadowy; and with helpless rage, both rage and helplessness stimulated by the absence of the people against whom he raged, his mind returned again and again to certain things which during his brilliance he had ignored but which now could not be denied. There was Sir Harry’s speech. There was Whymper. There was the chief accountant’s knowing little remark about packaging, doubtless picked up from some magazine or newspaper. Other people had made his idea their property, and they were riding on his back. They had taken the one idea of an old man, ignoring the pain out of which it was born, and now he was no longer necessary to them. Even if he were to die, the Whympers and Sir Harrys would continue to present Excaliburs. He would be forgotten together with his pain: a little note in the house magazine, then nothing more.