A Bend in the River - V.S. Naipaul [89]
I said, “Did you know Indar before?”
“I met him here.” She put the cup down. Her slanting eyes considered it and then, as though she had decided on something, she looked at me. “You live your life. A stranger appears. He is an encumbrance. You don’t need him. But the encumbrance can become a habit.”
My experience of women outside my family was special, limited. I had had no experience of dealing with a woman like this, no experience of language like this, no experience of a woman with such irritations and convictions. And in what she had just said I saw an honesty, a daringness which, to a man of my background, was slightly frightening and, for that reason, bewitching.
I was unwilling for us to have Indar in common, as Indar and she seemed to have had Raymond in common. I said, “I can’t tell you how much I liked being in your house that evening. I’ve never forgotten the blouse you wore. I’ve always been hoping to see you in it again. Black silk, beautifully cut and embroidered.”
I couldn’t have touched a better subject. She said, “There hasn’t been the occasion. But I assure you it’s still there.”
“I don’t think it was Indian. The cut and the work were European.”
“It’s from Copenhagen. Margit Brandt. Raymond went there for a conference.”
And at the door of the Tivoli, before we went out again into the heat and the light, during that moment of pause which in the tropics is like the pause we make before we finally go out into the rain, she said to me, as though it were an afterthought, “Would you like to come to lunch at the house tomorrow? We have to have one of the lecturers, and Raymond finds that kind of occasion very trying these days.”
The steamer would have been about fifteen miles downriver. It would have been travelling through bush; it would have passed the first bush settlement. There, though the town was so close, they would have been waiting for the steamer since morning, and there would have been the atmosphere of a fair until the steamer passed. Boys would have dived off dugouts and swum towards the moving steamer and barge, trying to get the attention of passengers. Trading dugouts, poling out from their stations on the bank with their little cargoes of pineapples and roughly made chairs and stools (disposable furniture for the river journey, a specialty of the area), would have been attached in clusters to the sides of the steamer; and these dugouts would be taken—were being taken—miles downriver, to paddle back for hours, after that brief excitement, through the fading afternoon, dusk and night, in silence.
Yvette had cancelled the lunch. But she hadn’t let me know. The white-jacketed servant led me to a room which obviously awaited no visitors and was not at all like the room I remembered. The African mats were on the floor, but some of the upholstered chairs that had been taken away for that evening (and, as I remembered Yvette saying, stored in a bedroom) had been brought out again—fringed imitation velvet, in the “old bronze” colour that was everywhere in the Domain.
The buildings of the Domain had been run up fast, and the flaws that lamplight had hidden were noticeable in the midday brightness. The plaster on the walls had cracked in many places, and in one place the crack followed the stepped pattern of the hollow clay bricks below. The windows and doorways, without architraves or wooden facings, were like holes unevenly cut out of the masonry. The ceiling panels, compressed cardboard of some sort, bellied here and there. One of the two air conditioners in the room had leaked down the wall; they were not on. The windows were open; and with no projecting roof, no trees outside, just the levelled land, the room was full