A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [111]
‘Yes, is all right. For a start.’
They went through the weeds and over the leaf-choked gutter to the narrow gravelly road.
‘Every month we build a little,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Little by little.’
‘Yes, little by little.’ Mr Maclean wasn’t animated, but some of his wariness had gone; he even sounded encouraging. ‘I will have to get some labour. Helluva thing these days, getting good labour.’ He spoke the word with relish.
And the word pleased Mr Biswas too. ‘Yes, you must get labour,’ he said, suppressing his astonishment that there were people who depended on Mr Maclean for a living.
‘But you better get a few more cents quick.’ Mr Maclean said, almost friendly now. ‘Otherwise you wouldn’t get any concrete pillars.’
‘Must have concrete pillars.’
‘Then all the house you going to build will be a row of concrete pillars with nothing on top of them.’ They walked on.
‘A row of coal barrels,’ Mr Biswas said.
Mr Maclean didn’t intrude.
‘Just send me a coal barrel. Yes, you old bitch. Just a coal barrel.’
He decided to borrow the money from Ajodha. He didn’t want to ask Seth or Mrs Tulsi. And he couldn’t ask Misir: their relationship had cooled since he had borrowed from him to pay Mungroo and Seebaran and Mahmoud. And yet he was unwilling to go to Ajodha. He walked out of the barrackyard but before he reached the main road decided to let the matter rest until the following Sunday. He walked back to his room and put on his bicycle clips, thinking he would spend the afternoon at Hanuman House instead. But he knew so clearly what he would find there that he took off his bicycle clips. Eventually it was the room that drove him out. He caught two buses and was at Pagotes in the late afternoon.
He entered Tara’s yard through the wide side gate of unpainted corrugated iron and went down the gravelled way to the garage and the cowpen. Nothing in this part of the yard seemed to have changed since he had first seen it. The plum tree was as desolate as ever; it bore fruit regularly but its grey branches were almost bare and looked dry and stiff and brittle. He no longer wondered what would be done with the heap of scrap metal, and he had given up the hope, which he had had as a boy, of seeing the rusting body of a motorcar reanimated and driven away. The mound of manured grass changed in size but remained where it always had been. For despite the cost and the trouble, and the multiplication of his business interests, Ajodha still kept two or three cows in his yard. They were his pets; he spent most of his free time in the cowpen, which he could never finish improving.
From the cowpen came the hiss of milk in a bucket and the mumble of conversation. It was Sunday; Ajodha would certainly be in the cowpen. Mr Biswas didn’t look. He hurried to the back verandah, hoping to see Tara first and to catch her alone.
She was alone, except for the servant girl. She greeted him so warmly that he at once felt ashamed of his mission. His resolve to speak directly came to nothing, for when he asked how she was she replied at length and, instead of asking for money, he had to give sympathy. Indeed, she didn’t look well. Her breathing had grown worse and she couldn’t move about easily; her body had broadened and become slack; her hair had thinned; her eyes had lost their brightness.
The servant girl brought him a cup of tea and Tara followed the girl back to the kitchen.
The top shelves of the bookcase were still packed with the disintegrating volumes of The Book of Comprehensive Knowledge, for which Ajodha had not paid. The lower shelves contained magazines, motor manufacturers’ catalogues and illustrated trilingual souvenir booklets of Indian films. The religious pictures on the walls were crowded out by calendars from the distributors of American and English motor vehicles, and an enormous framed photograph of an Indian actress.
Tara came back to the verandah and said that she hoped Mr Biswas would stay to dinner. He had intended to; apart from everything else,