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

So Miss Millington had to go. But before she went there were discussions, which enabled Margaret to taste power and even sweeter compassion. Whereas before the two women had entered into conspiracies to keep disagreeable things from the Master, now Margaret attempted to engage Mr Stone in conspiratorial discussions about Miss Millington. But he was not interested; he appeared reluctant to come to a decision. So Margaret turned to Grace. And often, in whispers, when Miss Millington was out of the room, the old servant’s failings were talked over, and it was agreed that firmness was as much in order as compassion. When Miss Millington entered the room there was silence. For a moment the women stared at the creature’s pallid, puffy baby-face, her netted hair below her scarf, her long skirts. Then Margaret would speak to her in a voice that was just too loud, as one might do when requiring an animal to perform its tricks. And the decrepit creature, like an animal scenting the slaughterhouse, would make hurried, gasping and unintelligible talk, still anxious to prove her activity and usefulness, appealing, it seemed, not to Margaret but to Grace, whose full tanned face remained as seeming-smiling and full of teeth as always.

There came a day when Margaret was out of the house — she had gone to a sale with Grace, such shopping occasions having become more important to them both — and Mr Stone was alone at home with Miss Millington. He announced that he was going up to the study. He did nothing there which he could not have done more easily in the office, but he preferred now to bring some of his work home, as though hoping to find again in the study the passion and vigour which had once driven him night after night, working in the warm pool of light at the desk that had come to the house with Margaret.

It was while he was there that he heard a voice booming up indistinctly through the house. He called: ‘Miss Millington!’ But the booming did not abate. He opened the door and went out to the landing.

It was Miss Millington. He saw her below him in the hall, sitting in the chair next to the telephone table, talking into the telephone in a voice which held conspiracy and which she must have felt to be a whisper, but which was a breathless shouting that echoed and reechoed in the hall and up the stairs. She was wearing her white apron. Her head scarf was on the table, and he could see the net on her grey hair.

‘She thinks I tried to kill her,’ she was saying. ‘With the bread knife. She doesn’t say so. But I know that’s what’s on her mind. It will be stealing next. Though there’s precious little of hers to steal. I believe she’s gone mad. The Master? He’s gone very strange. To tell the truth, I don’t know what’s happening to the place. I don’t see how I can stay on here, not with all that’s going on.’

To whom was she speaking? Who, in all the huge city, was the person to whom Miss Millington could turn for comfort, to whom she was speaking with such security, such an assurance of sympathetic reception? Of her life outside the house — her relationship with Eddie and Charley, ‘just finishing the fish shop’, the children for whom she bought sweets, the nephew in Camden Town she sometimes went to see — he knew very little. And now this saddened him. But more than this was the warmth that started in him for the creature who could scarcely disguise her hurt by her show of dignity, which both he and Margaret had assumed to be dead.

And all he could say was, ‘Miss Millington! Miss Millington!’

But she was deafened by her own booming.

It wasn’t until he was half way down the stairs, shouting her name ever more loudly as he approached her own thundering, that she looked up, tears drying on her cheeks, less like the marks of emotion than of physical decay, no guilt on her face, no realization of having been caught out.

‘Yes, sir,’ she said into the telephone. And in the same soft tone, which was like silence, she said, ‘I have to ring off now.’ Then, as though there was still need for secrecy, she pressed her lips together and put the telephone lightly into its cradle, pressing her lips harder when the telephone bell gave its tinkle.

He said, ‘I wonder what’s keeping Mrs Stone?’

What could he say?

And Miss Millington, by a reflex action dusting the telephone table with her head scarf, quite ineffectually, said, ‘Well, you know how it is with these sales, sir. And Mrs Tomlinson is with her.’

*

Margaret sometimes talked to Grace about moving to the country after Mr Stone retired. She had no intention of doing so — she never spoke of it to Mr Stone — but she felt that such talk was suitable. It also enabled her to indicate to Grace her helpless awareness that the street was no longer what it was. For some time, in fact, and even before Margaret came to it, the street had been changing. Once the habitation mainly of the old and the settled, it was now being invaded by the married young. More prams were pushed about the street. Houses were being turned into flats. Bright ‘To Let’ and ‘For Sale’ notices in red, white and black appeared with growing frequency amid the green of hedges, and were almost fixtures in the gardens of some houses which continually changed hands: petty speculators had moved in. Eddie and Charley — E. Beeching and C. Bryant, Builders and Decorators — cheerful red faces between grey caps and white overalls, popped up regularly in the street, now painting this wall, now mending that roof, now visible through uncurtained windows in some stripped front room. A Jamaican family of ferocious respectability (they received no negro callers, accepted no negro lodgers for the room they let, and they kept a budgerigar) moved into one of the houses, which Eddie and Charley promptly repainted, inside and out: its gleaming black-pointed red brick was like a reproach to the rest of the street.

In this ferment the people next door decided to move. So Margaret reported. The house, she said, was too big for the Midgeleys. She had found out their name, and was quoting Mrs Midgeley, with whom, in spite of the black cat, the rank garden and the ruined fence, she appeared to be on cordial terms. They were moving to a new town, where, Margaret said, sticking up for the street, they would be ‘more comfortable’.

To Mr Stone the Midgeleys were still newcomers — he slightly resented learning their name — and he did not realize the importance of Margaret’s news until the following morning, when he saw the cat sitting in the gap in the fence, its back expressive of boredom, waiting for those early arrivals among the young girls who, with the warmer weather, now drifted up to this end of the school grounds.

At breakfast he said, ‘Well, I imagine we’ll soon be seeing the last of that cat.’

‘They’re having it destroyed,’ Margaret said. ‘Mrs Midgeley was telling me.’

He went on spooning out his egg.

‘The children liked him when he was a kitten. But they don’t care for him now. Mrs Midgeley was telling me. My dear’—she seemed to be echoing Mrs Midgeley’s tone, which was oddly touched with pride—‘they say he is an absolute terror among the lady-cats of the street.’

His morning play with the cat acquired a new quality. Every morning the animal awakened in sunshine, all its grace intact, all its instincts correct, and all awaiting extinction. He wished to see these instincts exercised, to reassure himself that they had not begun to wither, to wonder at their continuing perfection. He tapped; the cat was instantly alert. He studied its body, followed its sure-footed walk, gazed into its bright eyes. He felt anger and pity. The anger was vague and diffused, only occasionally and by an effort of will focusing on the Midgeleys and their dreadful children. The pity was like love, a desire to rescue and protect and cause to continue. But at the same time there was a great lassitude, an unwillingness to act. And his impulse of love never survived the bathroom.