V. Naipaul - The Mimic Men

The incident brought my father considerable local renown and not a little respect among the idlers of the neighbourhood. It was the loaders’ cursing of Cecil’s father all over again. No one had anything against the shopkeeper, who was always ready to give trust and didn’t charge interest; he would give you a glass of water if you asked for it, even if you bought nothing. It was only that the shopkeeper was rich and the idlers were poor and were glad to see how easily the rich could be made ridiculous. But what was most unsettling about this unhappy incident was its effect on my father. He behaved as though he had had an access of madness and couldn’t be held responsible for what he had done that Monday evening. But it was clear he enjoyed the new renown. He sported his bandages and plaster with quiet pride — his hands had been badly cut about, and there were also cuts on his face and chest — during the fortnight’s sick leave he got from the Education Department. He began to presume on the affection of people on the street. He, who before had kept himself to himself, now had no hesitation in asking a street idler to help him mend a bicycle puncture or dig the garden. It was astonishing how readily he got the help he asked for. Madness, but there was method in it, even if the method came afterwards.

My sisters and I spent more of our time with my mother’s family. We went there every week-end and soon our clothes and other possessions were divided between the two houses. My sisters joined Sally’s court and so became even more removed from me. This was no loss. They were good-looking girls, but their looks were a source of mortification to me. It was the tradition among schoolboys in Isabella, as perhaps elsewhere, that the brothers of beautiful girls were in some way effeminate, and were to be ridiculed on that account. As much as I suppressed my father, then, I suppressed my sisters. They grew away from me as a result; they never again became close. I thought their attitude to my father extreme. They said to Sally and the others that they were not responsible for him and were generally more severe than Cecil even, who saw some humour in the parlour incident.

Cecil’s father built a beach house and decreed a long holiday there. He was one of the first in Isabella to build a beach house. Today of course the beaches of tropical islands have been turned into suburbs and have the same regulated meanness of population and aspect. I have no doubt they will fall into the same disrepute; but by then the work of destruction will have been complete. At the time of which I write, however, it was still held that beaches were to be wild and uninhabited and without even a shed for changing. You took care to put two or three hundred yards between yourself and the next bathing party; and if that was impossible you said that the beach was crowded and went home, hoping for better luck next time. At that time a beach house was a novelty, and throughout the school term we had heard talk about it from Cecil and Sally.

But there was an awkwardness. My sisters and I had not been invited. About a trip to the beach, wild and uninhabited, there was still, among us, an element of venture-someness, as about a voyage itself; and no one was willing to take the responsibility for us during a beach holiday of some weeks. Neither Cecil’s parents nor my mother wished to ask my father for his permission, for fear of underlining our separation from him; and we were unwilling to ask ourselves, for fear of being refused. Accordingly, exercising our rights of dual residence, we did nothing. Cecil’s parents’ house was going to be shut up; we doubted that we would be shut up with it or ordered back to our own house. My mother encouraged us by her silence. The day of departure found us packed with the others and, still without invitation, waiting to go. Of course we went.

The sea broke on us almost without warning. Only a height of sky and a quality of openness behind the tops of trees suggested that a little way beyond there was no more land. And then, at the end of an avenue of coconut trees, was the living, destroying element, almost colourless at this distance. The trees swayed and rustled and crackled. The white surf crashed and hissed on the wide beach. Among the trees, the two-storeyed timber house. No garden, no yard, no fence: just sand and the unnatural plants and vines, glittering green, that grew in hot salt sand. Not my element. I preferred land; I preferred mountains and snow.

Night came, moonlit or black, spectral or empty; and nothing could be heard except the wind and the trees. Beach houses were not for me. Not for me this feeling of abandonment at the end of the empty world. Even Cecil appeared chastened. The girls gathered around an oil-lamp and, in all the sea din, spoke in whispers. At the end, when it was not really very late, we played draughts. I was good at draughts and with every game got better. I played Cecil. He said ‘Aah!’ and scrambled the counters when he saw he was losing. I played my sisters and beat them. I beat Sally. She offered to play me again. I beat her again and she cried. She stamped up to bed, shouting that I was conceited.

It was a relief to find in the morning that the world was still there. As soon as I could I went outside. There was dew on the vines and the coconut husks. The tide was ebbing; there was a new tidewrack of wet litter; the wind was fresh. Far away on the beach I could see the stripped remains of a great tree, washed up, I had been told, months before, coming from heaven knows what island or continent, drifting on the ocean night and day for weeks, for months, for a year, until stranded on our island, on this desolate beach. I had thoughts, too alarming to pursue, about things existing only when seen. I went back to the house and found them getting ready for breakfast. Above the salt of the wind was the smell of simmering chocolate and fried plantains.

Then Sally came stamping down the stairs in her yellow seersucker housecoat. Both the garment and the material had come to Isabella at the same time and had become the rage; even my sisters wandered about after school in wide-lapelled seersucker housecoats, showing little bits of slip as they walked. In her yellow seersucker housecoat, then, Sally came stamping down the stairs. She was as distressed as she had been when she went up the previous night. ‘Somebody used my toothbrush!’ she sobbed, and waved the tainted instrument.

The older women were at once concerned — Sally the beautiful, the delicate — and they hurried to console the melodramatically outraged daughter of that melodramatic family. Their concern did not exceed mine. As soon as Sally spoke I knew it was I who had used her toothbrush. I could taste the toothpaste again. I felt dreadfully unclean. I ran up the steps past her to rinse my mouth out. ‘It’s him! It’s him!’ Sally shouted. Her tears vanished even while she stamped. She giggled; she laughed. At breakfast she didn’t let me forget.

Afterwards I walked by myself along the shining desolate beach. I observed vines and shells and weed and sand-crabs and the almost transparent small fish that each roller brought right in and very nearly stranded. I wondered whether I shouldn’t take the bus back to the city. I walked towards the village. It was grey, rusty and rotting: the rust of old tin, the grey of rotting wood. In a café shack I had a Pepsi-Cola and a turnover cake with hot sugared coconut inside. I walked along the bumpy asphalted road out of the village, away from the sea. I got queer looks from people behind their hibiscus hedges, people to whom this part of the island was the world, people who, I had been told, all their lives never travelled five miles beyond their birthplace. It was the looks that after an hour or so turned me back towards the village. It was hot. The leaves were still and appeared about to quail. The asphalt, laid on in pure, rippled pats, was already soft underfoot. Here, away from the sea, the freshness of the day had already been burnt off.