A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [242]
Philosophically, he attempted to look on the brighter side. The garage problem would be simplified: with three vehicles the position had become impossible, and he had often had to leave his car on the road. There would be no gramophone. And he might even rent the rooms the Tuttles were vacating.
But the days passed and the Tuttles didn’t move.
‘Why the hell doesn’t he take up his gramophone and naked woman and clear out?’ Mr Biswas asked Shama. ‘If he got this house.’
Basdai came up with fresh information. The house was full of tenants, and W. C. Tuttle, for all his calm, was at that moment engaged in tortuous litigation to get them out.
‘Oh,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Is that sort of house.’ He imagined one of those rotting warrens he had visited when investigating destitutes. And now at one moment Mr Biswas wished W. C. Tuttle out of the house immediately and at another moment wanted him to fail in his litigation. ‘Throwing those poor people out. Where they going to live, eh? But your family don’t care about things like that.’
One morning Mr Biswas saw W. C. Tuttle leaving the house in a suit, tie and hat. And that afternoon Basdai reported that litigation had failed.
‘I thought he was going to Ace Studios to take out another photo,’ Mr Biswas said.
Overjoyed, he did what he had so far resisted doing: he drove to see the house. To his disappointment he found that it was in a good area, on a whole lot: a sound, oldfashioned timber building that needed only a coat of paint.
Not long after Basdai reported that the tenants were leaving. W. C. Tuttle had persuaded the City Council that the house was dangerous and had to be repaired, if not pulled down altogether.
‘Any old trick to throw the poor people out,’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Though I suppose with ten fat Tuttles jumping about no house could be safe. Repairs, eh? Just drive the old lorry down to Shorthills and cut down a few more trees, I suppose.’
‘That is exactly what he is doing,’ Shama said, affronted at the piracy.
‘You want to know why I can’t get on in this place? That is why.’ And even as he spoke he recognized that he was sounding like Bhandat in the concrete room.
The Tuttles left without ceremony. Only Mrs Tuttle, braving the general antagonism, kissed her sisters and those of the children she found in the way. She was sad but stern, and her manner suggested that though she had nothing to do with it, her husband’s piracy was justified and she was ready for trouble. Cowed, the sisters could only be sad in their turn, and the leave-taking was as tearful as if Mrs Tuttle had just been married.
Mr Biswas’s hopes of renting the rooms the Tuttles had vacated were dashed when it was announced that Mrs Tulsi was coming from Shorthills to take them over. The news cast a gloom over the whole house. Her daughters now accepted that Mrs Tulsi’s active life was finished, that only death awaited her. But she still controlled them all in varying ways, and her caprices had to be endured. Miserable herself, Basdai made the readers and learners miserable by threats of what Mrs Tulsi would do to them.
She came with Sushila, the sickroom widow, and Miss Blackie; and at once the house became quieter. The readers and learners were quelled, but Mrs Tulsi’s presence brought them an unexpected advantage: they knew that if they howled loud enough beforehand they would be spared floggings.
Mrs Tulsi had no precise illness. She was simply ill. Her eyes ached; her heart was bad; her head always hurt; her stomach was fastidious; her legs were unreliable; and every other day she had a temperature. Her head had continually to be soaked in bay rum; she had to be massaged once a day; she needed poultices of various sorts. Her nostrils were stuffed with soft candle or Vick’s Vaporub; she wore dark glasses; and she was seldom without a bandage around her forehead. Sushila