A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [116]
Mr Biswas said, ‘You think they going to send me a bill for the food they give me?’
‘Laugh if you want. But that is the way they treat poor people. My consolation is that they can’t bribe God. God is good, boy.’
They were in the Main Road, not far from the shop where Mr Biswas had served under Bhandat. The shop was now owned by a Chinese and a large signboard proclaimed the fact.
The moment came to separate from Jagdat. But Mr Biswas was unwilling to leave him, to be alone, to get on the bus to go back through the night to Green Vale.
Jagdat said, ‘The first boy bright like hell, you know.’
It was some seconds before Mr Biswas realized that Jagdat was talking about one of his celebrated illegitimate children. He saw anxiety in Jagdat’s broad face, in the bright jumping little eyes.
‘I glad,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Now you could get him to read That Body of Yours to you.’
Jagdat laughed. ‘The same old Mohun.’
There was no need to ask where Jagdat was going. He was going to his family. He too, then, lived a divided life.
‘She does work in a office,’ Jagdat said, anxious again.
Mr Biswas was impressed.
‘Spanish,’ Jagdat said.
Mr Biswas knew this was a euphemism for a red-skinned Negro. ‘Too hot for me, man.’
‘But faithful,’ Jagdat said.
Knocked about on the wooden seat of the rackety rickety dim-lit bus, going past silent fields and past houses which were lightless and dead or bright and private, Mr Biswas no longer thought of the afternoon’s mission, but of the night ahead.
Early next morning Mr Maclean turned up at the barracks and said he had put off other pressing work and was ready to go ahead with Mr Biswas’s house. He was in his poor but respectable business clothes. His ironed shirt was darned with almost showy neatness; his khaki trousers were clean and sharply creased, but the khaki was old and would not keep the crease for long.
‘You decide how much you want to start off with?’
‘A hundred,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘More at the end of the month. No concrete pillars.’
‘Is only a sort of fanciness. You watch. I will get you a crapaud that would last a lifetime. Wouldn’t make no difference.’
‘Once it neat.’
‘Neat and nice,’ Mr Maclean said. ‘Well, I suppose I better start seeing about materials and labour.’
Materials came that afternoon. The crapaud pillars looked rough; they were not altogether round or altogether straight. But Mr Biswas was delighted by the new scantlings, and the new nails that came in several wrappings of newspaper. He took up handfuls of nails and let them fall again. The sound pleased him. ‘Did not know nails was so heavy,’ he said.
Mr Maclean had brought a tool-box which had his initials on the cover and was like a large wooden suitcase. It contained a saw with an old handle and a sharp, oiled blade; several chisels and drills; a spirit-level and a T square; a plane; a hammer and a mallet; wedges with smooth, fringed heads; a ball of old, white-stained twine; and a lump of chalk. His tools were like his clothes: old but cared-for. He built a rough work-bench out of the materials and assured Mr Biswas that all the material would be eventually released for the house and would surfer little damage. That was why, he explained in reply to another of Mr Biswas’s queries, no nail had been driven right in.
The labour also came. The labour was a labourer named Edgar, a muscular, full-blooded Negro whose short khaki trousers were shaggy with patches, and whose vest, brown with dirt, was full of holes that