A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [264]
The old queen, whose heart had not permitted her to climb the steps, greeted him as though he had returned from a long journey.
He sat in one of the morris chairs and drank more tea and took another cigarette.
Not a word had been said so far about the price. Mr Biswas kept on fixing it in his mind at something high and impossible which would relieve him of responsibility and regret. He thought of eight thousand, nine thousand. So near the busy Main Road: an ideal site for a shop. And yet so quiet in the rain!
‘Not bad for six thousand,’ the solicitor’s clerk said.
Mr Biswas smoked and said nothing.
The old queen came out from the kitchen with a plate of cakes. The solicitor’s clerk insisted that Mr Biswas should try one. The old queen had made them herself.
Mr Biswas took a cake. The old queen smiled at him, and he smiled back.
‘Well, to be honest. We both want to make a sale in a hurry. So let’s say five five.’
Once Mr Biswas had read a story by a French writer about a woman who worked for twenty years to pay off a debt on an imitation necklace. He had never been able to understand why it was considered a comic story. Debt was a fearful thing; and with all its ifs and might-have-beens the story came too near the truth: hope followed by blight, the passing of the years, the passing of life itself, and then the revelation of waste: Oh, my poor Matilda! But they were false! Now, sitting in the clerk’s morris chair, Mr Biswas knew he was close to such a debt, a similar blight, a similar waste: and he was again lying awake at night, hearing the snores of the crowded house, looking through the window at the empty sky swept by silent searchlights.
‘Five five and we will throw in this morris suite.’ The clerk gave a little laugh. ‘I always hear that Indians was sharp bargainers, but I never know till now just how sharp they was.’
The old queen smiled as charitably as ever.
‘I will have to think about it.’
The old queen smiled.
On the way back Mr Biswas decided to be aggressive.
‘You so anxious to sell your house I don’t understand why you don’t go to an agent.’
‘Me? You mean you didn’t hear what those people was saying in the café. Those agents are just a bunch of crooks, man.’
He felt he had seen the last of the house. He did not know then that, in the five years of life left to him, that drive along the Western Main Road, through Woodbrook to Wrightson Road and South Quay was to become familiar and even boring.
Alone once more, his depression, his panic returned. But when he got back to the house he assumed an air of confidence and sternness and said loudly to Shama, who was surprised to see him back so soon. ‘Didn’t go to the country today. Been looking at some properties.’
The headache which had been nagging him, which he had put down to his uneasiness, now defined itself as the alcoholic headache he always had when he drank in the day. He went up to the room, stripped to pants and vest, tried to read Marcus Aurelius, failed, and soon fell asleep, to the astonishment of his children, who wondered how in a crisis which affected them all their father could find time for sleep so early in the afternoon.
He had seen the house like a guest under heavy obligation to his host. If it had not been raining he might have walked around the small yard and seen the absurd shape of the house. He