A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [261]
‘Cha!’ the woman next door said. ‘Bother with people business.’
Govind patted Mr Biswas on the shoulder, gave a little laugh and left the room.
The whispers downstairs subsided. The light which came through the jalousies from the yard and striped the room was extinguished. The laughter in the drawingroom died away. Throats were cleared with faint satiric intonations, and there were muted apprehensive chuckles. There were shuffles on the floor, and whispers. Then the light went out and the room was in darkness and the house was absolutely silent.
They remained appalled in the room, not daring to move, to break the silence, unable in the dark and the stillness to believe fully in what had just happened.
Presently, exhausted by their inactivity, the children went downstairs.
Morning would show the full horror of the past few minutes.
They awoke with a sense of unease. Almost at once they remembered. They avoided one another. They listened, above the hawking and spitting, the running taps, the continuous scuffling, the fanning of coal-pots, the metallic hiss of the lavatory flush, for the footsteps and voices of Mrs Tulsi and Owad. But the house was quiet upstairs. Then they learned that Owad had left early that morning for a week’s tour of Tobago. The instinct of Mr Biswas’s children was to get away at once, to escape from the house to the separate reality of the streets and school.
Mr Biswas’s anger had gone stale; it burdened him. Now there was also shame at his behaviour, shame at the whole gross scene. But the uncertainty that had been with him ever since he heard that Owad was returning from England had disappeared. He found it easy to ignore his fears; and after he had had his bath he felt energetic and even light-headed. He too was anxious to get out of the house. And as he left it his sympathy went out to Shama, who had to remain.
The sisters looked chastened. Unpersecuted, they believed in their righteousness; and though Owad’s departure, in anger, as was reported, involved them all in disgrace and threatened them all, every sister was sure of her own hold on Owad, and her attitude to Shama was one of blame and recoil.
‘So, Aunt,’ Suniti, the former contortionist, said, ‘I hear you moving to a new house, man.’
‘Yes, my dear,’ Shama said.
At school Anand defended Eliot, Picasso, Braque, Chagall. He who had been leaving copies of the Soviet Weekly in the readingroom between the pages of Punch and The Illustrated London News now announced that he frowned upon communism. The phrase was thought odd; but the action, coinciding with the widespread renunciation of communism by distinguished intellectuals in Europe and America, caused little comment.
Shortly after he had been taken on the Sentinel Mr Biswas went late one night to the city centre to interview the homeless people, whose families among them, who regularly slept in Marine Square. ‘That conundrum – the housing question —’ he had begun his article; and though the words were excised by Mr Burnett, Mr Biswas was taken by their rhythm and had never forgotten them. They drummed in his head that morning; he spoke them and sang them under his breath; and throughout the Monday conference at the office he was exceptionally lively and garrulous. When the conference was over he went down St Vincent Street to the café with the gay murals and sat at the bar, waiting for people he knew.
‘Got notice to quit, man,’ he said.
He spoke lightly, expecting solicitude, but his lightness was met with lightness.
‘I expect I will be joining you in Marine Square,’ a Guardian reporter said.
‘Hell of a thing, though. Married with four children and nowhere to go. Know any places for rent?’
‘If I know one I would be there right now.’
‘Ah, well. I suppose it will be the square.’
‘It look so.’
The café, close to newspaper offices, government offices and the courts, was frequented