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

‘Miss Millington,’ he heard Margaret say, ‘did you hear what the Master’s just been saying? What do you think?’

He slackened his step.

He heard Miss Millington begin, ‘Well, mum—’ and after that the diplomatic old soul only pretended to speak and made a series of gasps which could have stood for anything.

He walked on, was going up the steps. A light came on, feet were wiped on the wire mat, and then there was Margaret saying in her party voice:

‘Well, I think it’s a lotta rubbish.’

*

One Sunday twelve years before, when Olive was living in Balham, Mr Stone went to have tea with her and Gwen, who was then just six. He had learned the importance of tea in their lives from an incident that had occurred not long before. They had gone for a walk on Clapham Common. About four Olive said they should be getting back; but he insisted on going on, to prolong the pleasure he felt at taking them both out. ‘You can go on if you wish,’ Olive said. ‘But Gwen will be wanting her tea.’ There was a sharpness in the words, a distinct ruffling of feathers, and Mr Stone felt himself heavily rebuked for his thoughtlessness. The incident did not increase his affection for the fat child who was ‘wanting her tea’. And tea with Gwen and Olive became an entertainment he dreaded, particularly as in those days Olive was ‘living for her child’, and facing life with a degree of bravery Mr Stone thought excessive.

At the tea table in Balham, then, he was constrained. There was nothing to constrain Gwen, and Olive herself was fully and happily occupied with Gwen, supplying food as well as the occasional sharp word. (What delight Olive had taken in the food ritual imposed by a government so conscious of Gwen: the milk and orange juice and cod-liver oil beneficently doled out, sacramentally received and administered!) At length, the feeding drawing to a close, his constraint became noticeable and Olive asked him to tell Gwen about the holiday in Ireland from which he had just come back.

He had so far failed miserably in his attempts to amuse Gwen, and he knew that the performance which Olive required would be carefully assessed, for Olive was at the stage where, with the instincts of the school-teacher and the widowed mother forbiddingly allied, she graded people according to their ability to ‘get on’ with children and with Gwen in particular.

So after the tea things had been cleared away, and Olive had seated herself in her brown-leather armchair (typical of her furniture) and taken out her knitting — how, in her bravery, Olive had tried to age herself! Did he ever see her with knitting needles nowadays? — Mr Stone took Gwen on his lap, and the ordeal began.

Trying to see it all with the eye of a child, he told as simply as he could of the train journey and the boarding of the great liner. He had a good time giving her an idea of the size of the liner, and he thought he was doing well. Then he came to the first glimpse of Cobh. It had been a misty, drizzling morning, and on a hill of the palest rain-blurred green there had appeared a tall, white building, rising like a castle in a storybook. It was an enchantment which he thought a child might share, and as he spoke he re-lived that moment at dawn on the rainswept deck of the liner, the sea grey and restless, men in oilskins in small, tossing boats, the lines of sea and land and sky all blurred by rain and mist.

‘Too self-conscious and namby-pamby,’ Olive said at the end.

And there was something in what she said. What he felt now, standing in the dark bathroom, watching the lights of the houses brightening in that period of pause between the activity of day and the activity of evening, was something like what he felt then. Nothing that came out of the heart, nothing that was pure ought to be exposed.

‘Well, I think it’s a lotta rubbish.’

And of course Margaret was right.

Nothing that was pure ought to be exposed. And now he saw that in that project of the Knights Companion which had contributed so much to his restlessness, the only pure moments, the only true moments were those he had spent in the study, writing out of a feeling whose depth he realized only as he wrote. What he had written was a faint and artificial rendering of that emotion, and the scheme as the Unit had practised it was but a shadow of that shadow. All passion had disappeared. It had taken incidents like the Prisoner of Muswell Hill to remind him, concerned only with administration and success, of the emotion that had gone before. All that he had done, and even the anguish he was feeling now, was a betrayal of that good emotion. All action, all creation was, a betrayal of feeling and truth. And in the process of this betrayal his world had come tumbling about him. There remained to him nothing to which he could anchor himself.

*

In the routine of the office, as in the rhythm of the seasons, he could no longer participate. It all went without reference to himself. Soon it would go on without his presence. His earlier petulance—‘Why do you ask me? Why don’t you ask Mr Whymper?’ At which the ridiculous young man from Yorkshire with the ridiculous clothes had actually sniggered, and reported that ‘Pop’, the foolish and common nickname which that foolish and common boy had succeeded in popularizing, wasn’t in a good mood that morning — his earlier petulance had given way to weariness and indifference and then at last to a distaste for the office which was like fear.

There were days when the office was made unbearable for him by the knowledge that Whymper was present. He felt that Whymper’s indifference had turned to contempt, of the sort which follows affection; he thought it conveyed reassessment, rejection and offended disgust. There were times when he felt that he had brought this contempt on himself, that his own revulsion and hostility had been divined by Whymper, who was demonstrating his disregard for the judgement by an exaggerated heartiness with the other members of the staff. He had certainly unbent considerably towards them in these last weeks, and the Whymperish gambit of joviality followed by coldness was less in evidence. ‘Tell them a joke,’ Whymper used to say in the early days. ‘They will laugh. The fresh ones will try to tell you a joke in return. You don’t laugh.’

The young accountant had frequently fallen victim to this tactic. Now, fortified by Whymper’s friendship — he was Whymper’s new lunch companion — he attempted to use it on more junior staff. He also tried to embarrass typists by staring at their foreheads, an ‘executive ‘s’ gambit which Mr Stone had heard of but had never seen practised. The detestable young man now tapped his cigarettes — it was his affectation to smoke nothing but Lambert and Butler’s Straight Cut, with the striped paper — in the Whymper manner. And — these young men appeared to be having an effect on one another — Whymper came back to the office one afternoon wearing an outrageous bowtie: the junior accountant sometimes wore bowties. Mr Stone could imagine the abrupt decision, the marching off to the shop with the young accountant, the determined yet slack-jawed expression as Whymper bought perhaps half a dozen. Thereafter Whymper always wore bowties; and, since he was Whymper, they were invariably askew. Mr Stone thought they looked a perfectly ridiculous pair of young men, particularly on Saturday mornings, when the young accountant came to work in a ‘county’ outfit, with a hat far above his station. The hat Mr Stone especially loathed. It was green, with a green feather, as though the boy might at any moment be setting off across the moors.

On calmer days Mr Stone felt that Whymper might only be reacting against his former indiscretions, though he was convinced that these indiscretions and perhaps others were being repeated to the junior accountant. He also saw in Whymper’s strange behaviour proof of the now persistent rumour that Whymper was soon going to leave the Unit and might indeed be resigning from Excal.