A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [263]
‘I don’t know,’ the man said. ‘But look. What you doing now?’
‘I got to go to the country. But with all this rain –’
‘You know what? You better come and have some lunch with me. No, not here.’ He looked around the café, and in his look Mr Biswas saw the chatterers rebuked for their callousness.
They went outside and hurried through the rain, brushing against people who stood close to walls. They turned into a side street and entered the grimy green hall of a Chinese restaurant. The coconut-fibre mat was damp and black, the floor wet. They went up bare steps and the solicitor’s clerk seemed to be continually meeting people he knew. To all of them he said, patting Mr Biswas on the shoulder, ‘Hell of a thing here, man. The man got notice. And he got nowhere to go.’ People looked at Mr Biswas, made sympathetic sounds, and Mr Biswas, muddled by the lager, the strange faces and the unexpected interest, became very tragic.
They went to a celotex-partitioned cubicle and the solicitor’s clerk ordered food.
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But look. My position is this. I living with my mother in a two-storey house in St James. But she a lil old now, you know –’
‘My mother dead,’ Mr Biswas said, finding himself, to his surprise, eating. ‘Blasted doctor didn’t want to give a death certificate. Write him a letter, though. A long one –’
‘Hell of a thing, man. But the position is this. The old queen have a lil heart trouble. Can’t climb steps and that sort of thing. It does strain the heart, you know.’ The solicitor’s clerk put his hand on his chest and his shoulders see-sawed. ‘And right at this moment I have a offer of a house in Mucurapo which would suit the old lady right down to the ground. Trouble is, I can’t buy it unless somebody buy mine.’
‘And you want me buy yours.’
‘In a sort of way. I could help you and you could help me. And the old queen.’
‘Upstairs house, you say.’
‘All modern conveniences and full and immediate vacant possession.’
‘I wish I had that sort of money, old man.’
‘Wait until you see it.’
And before the meal was over Mr Biswas had agreed to go to see the house. He knew what he was doing. He knew that he had no more than eight hundred dollars and was only wasting the clerk’s time and his own. But courtesy demanded no less.
‘You would be doing me a favour,’ the solicitor’s clerk said. ‘And you would be doing the old queen a favour.’
So in the pouring rain, the windscreen wiper occasionally sticking, they drove down St Vincent Street and around Marine Square and along Wrightson Road – settled by secure people – and across Woodbrook to the Western Main Road, past the vast grounds and the saman-lined drive of the Police Barracks, and turned into Sikkim Street.
It was still raining when the car stopped outside the house. The fence, half concrete, with lead pipes running between square concrete pillars, was covered with the vines of the Morning Glory spattered with small red flowers drooping in the rain. The height of the house, the cream and grey walls, the white frames of doors and windows, the red brick sections with white pointing: all these things Mr Biswas took in at once, and knew that the house was not for him.
When, racing into the house out of the rain, he met the old queen, not as old as the solicitor’s clerk had made out, he was overwhelmed by her courtesy. Continually, with his suit and tie and shining shoes and Prefect car, he felt he was deceiving the public. Here, in this house in Sikkim Street, so desirable, so inaccessible, deception was especially painful. He tried to respond to the old queen’s civility with equal civility; he tried not to think of his crowded room, his eight hundred dollars. Slowly and carefully, aware now of the lager, he sipped tea and smoked a cigarette. Hesitantly, fearing a frank appraisal would be rude, he took in the distempered walls, the washed celotex ceiling with strips of wood painted