V. Naipaul - Collected Short Fiction

We were aghast.

So the Literary Club broke up.

* * *

It wasn’t long after that Titus Hoyt got his Inter Arts degree and set up a school of his own. He had a big sign placed in his garden:

TITUS HOYT, I.A. (London, External)

Passes in the Cambridge

School Certificate Guaranteed

One year the Guardian had a brilliant idea. They started the Needy Cases Fund to help needy cases at Christmas. It was popular and after a few years was called the Neediest Cases Fund. At the beginning of November the Guardian announced the target for the fund and it was a daily excitement until Christmas Eve to see how the fund rose. It was always front In the middle of December one year, when the excitement was high, Miguel Street was in the news.

Hat showed us the paper and we read:

‘FOLLOW THE EXAMPLE OF THIS TINYMITE!

‘The smallest and most touching response to our appeal to bring Yuletide cheer to the unfortunate has come in a letter from Mr Titus Hoyt, I.A., a headmaster of Miguel Street, Port of Spain. The letter was sent to Mr Hoyt by one of his pupils who wishes to remain anonymous. We have Mr Hoyt’s permission to print the letter in full.

‘ “Dear Mr Hoyt, I am only eight and, as you doubtless know, I am a member of the GUARDIAN Tinymites League. I read Aunt Juanita every Sunday. You, dear Mr Hoyt, have always extolled the virtue of charity and you have spoken repeatedly of the fine work the GUARDIAN Neediest Cases Fund is doing to bring Yuletide cheer to the unfortunate. I have decided to yield to your earnest entreaty. I have very little money to offer — a mere six cents, in fact, but take it, Mr Hoyt, and send it to the GUARDIAN Neediest Cases Fund. May it bring Yuletide cheer to some poor unfortunate! I know it is not much. But, like the widow, I give my mite. I remain, dear Mr Hoyt, One of Your Pupils.” ’

And there was a large photograph of Titus Hoyt, smiling and pop-eyed in the flash of the camera.

I SUPPOSE LAURA holds a world record.

Laura had eight children.

There is nothing surprising in that.

These eight children had seven fathers.

Beat that!

It was Laura who gave me my first lesson in biology. She lived just next door to us, and I found myself observing her closely.

I would notice her belly rising for months.

Then I would miss her for a short time.

And the next time I saw her she would be quite flat.

And the leavening process would begin again in a few months.

To me this was one of the wonders of the world in which I lived, and I always observed Laura. She herself was quite gay about what was happening to her. She used to point to it and say, ‘This thing happening again, but you get use to it after the first three four times. Is a damn nuisance, though.’

She used to blame God, and speak about the wickedness of men.

For her first six children she tried six different men.

Hat used to say, ‘Some people hard to please.’

But I don’t want to give you the impression that Laura spent all her time having babies and decrying men, and generally feeling sorry for herself. If Bogart was the most bored person in the street, Laura was the most vivacious. She was always gay, and she liked me.

She would give me plums and mangoes when she had them; and whenever she made sugar-cakes she would give me some.

Even my mother, who had a great dislike of laughter, especially in me, even my mother used to laugh at Laura.

She often said to me, ‘I don’t know why Laura muching you up so for. Like she ain’t have enough children to mind.’

I think my mother was right. I don’t think a woman like Laura could have ever had too many children. She loved all her children, though you wouldn’t have believed it from the language she used when she spoke to them. Some of Laura’s shouts and curses were the richest things I have ever heard, and I shall never forget them.

Hat said once, ‘Man, she like Shakespeare when it come to using words.’

Laura used to shout, ‘Alwyn, you broad-mouth brute, come here.’

And, ‘Gavin, if you don’t come here this minute, I make you fart fire, you hear.’

And, ‘Lorna, you black bow-leg bitch, why you can’t look what you doing?’

Now, to compare Laura, the mother of eight, with Mary the Chinese, also mother of eight, doesn’t seem fair. Because Mary took really good care of her children and never spoke harshly to them. But Mary, mark you, had a husband who owned a shop, and Mary could afford to be polite and nice to her children, after stuffing them full of chop-suey and chow-min and chow-fan, and things with names like that. But who could Laura look to for money to keep her children?

The men who cycled slowly past Laura’s house in the evening, whistling for Laura, were not going to give any of their money to Laura’s children. They just wanted Laura.

I asked my mother, ‘How Laura does live?’

My mother slapped me, saying, ‘You know, you too fast for a little boy.’

I suspected the worst.

But I wouldn’t have liked that to be true.

So I asked Hat. Hat said, ‘She have a lot of friends who does sell in the market. They does give she things free, and sometimes one or two or three of she husbands does give she something too, but that not much.’

The oddest part of the whole business was Laura herself. Laura was no beauty. As Boyee said one day, ‘She have a face like the top of a motor-car battery.’ And she was a little more than plump.

I am talking now of the time when she had had only six children.

One day Hat said, ‘Laura have a new man.’

Everybody laughed, ‘Stale news. If Laura have she way, she go try every man once.’

But Hat said, ‘No, is serious. He come to live with she for good now. I see him this morning when I was taking out the cows.’

We watched and waited for this man.

We later learned that he was watching and waiting for us.

In no time at all this man, Nathaniel, had become one of the gang in Miguel Street. But it was clear that he was not really one of us. He came from the east end of Port of Spain, which we considered dirtier; and his language was really coarse.

He made out that he was a kind of terror in the east end around Piccadilly Street. He told many stories about gang-fights, and he let it be known that he had disfigured two or three people.

Hat said, ‘I think he lying like hell, you know.’

I distrusted him myself. He was a small man, and I always felt that small men were more likely to be wicked and violent.

But what really sickened us was his attitude to women. We were none of us chivalrous, but Nathaniel had a contempt for women which we couldn’t like. He would make rude remarks when women passed.

Nathaniel would say, ‘Women just like cows. Cow and they is the same thing.’

And when Miss Ricaud, the welfare woman, passed, Nathaniel would say, ‘Look at that big cow.’

Which wasn’t in good taste, for we all thought that Miss Ricaud was too fat to be laughed at, and ought instead to be pitied.

Nathaniel, in the early stages, tried to make us believe that he knew how to keep Laura in her place. He hinted that he used to beat her. He used to say, ‘Woman and them like a good dose of blows, you know. You know the calypso:

Every now and then just knock them down .

Every now and then just throw them down .

Black up their eye and bruise up their knee

And then they love you eternally .

Is gospel truth about woman.’

Hat said, ‘Woman is a funny thing, for truth, though. I don’t know what a woman like Laura see in Nathaniel.’

Eddoes said, ‘I know a helluva lot about woman. I think Nathaniel lying like hell. I think when he with Laura he got his tail between his legs all the time.’