A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul [266]
‘Yes, child.’
‘Shama!’ Mr Biswas called. ‘Tell that girl to go back and help that worthless husband of hers to look after their goats at Pokima Halt.’
The goats were an invention of Mr Biswas which never failed to irritate Suniti. ‘Goats,’ she said to the yard, sucking her teeth. ‘Well, some people at least have goats. That is more than I could say for some other people.’
Mr Biswas had divined only part of Shama’s motives. She knew that the time had come for them to move. But she did not want this to happen after a quarrel and a humiliation. She hoped that the estrangement between her mother and herself would disappear; and she regarded Mr Biswas’s action as rash and provocative.
He released the tremendous details one by one.
‘Five thousand five hundred,’ he said.
He had his effect.
‘O God!’ Shama said. ‘You mad! You mad! You hanging a millstone around my neck.’
‘A necklace.’
Her despair frightened him. But it made him suffer: he mortified himself to inflict pain on her.
‘Well, we still paying for the car. And you don’t know how long this job with the government going to last.’
‘Your brother hoping it won’t last at all. Tell me, eh. Deep down in your heart you really believe that this job I am doing is nothing, eh? Deep down you really believe that. Eh?’
‘If you think so,’ she cried, and went down the steps to the kitchen below the house, to the readers and learners and sisters and married nieces, working and talking in the light of weak, flyblown bulbs. She was surrounded by security; yet disaster was coming upon her and she was quite alone.
She went back up to the room.
‘How you going to get the money?’
‘You don’t worry about that.’
‘If you start throwing away your money I could always help you. Tomorrow I going to go to de Lima’s and buy that brooch you always talking about.’
He sniggered.
As soon as she went out of the room he was seized by panic. He left the house and went for a walk around the Savannah, along the wide, silent, grass-lined streets of St Clair, where open doors revealed softly lit, opulent, undisturbed interiors.
Having committed himself, he lacked the courage to go back yet found the energy to go ahead. He was encouraged by the gloom of Shama and strengthened by the enthusiasm of the children. He avoided questioning himself; and, dreading the return of Owad, he developed the anxiety that he might not after all be good enough for the house of the solicitor’s clerk and the old queen who baked cakes and served them with such grace.
It was this anxiety which made him drive on Thursday afternoon to Ajodha’s and tell Tara as soon as he saw her that he had come to borrow four thousand dollars to buy a house. She took it well; she said she was glad that he was at last going to be free of the Tulsis. And when Ajodha came in, fanning himself with his hat, Mr Biswas was equally forthright and Ajodha treated the matter as a petty business transaction. Four thousand five hundred dollars at eight per cent, to be repaid in five years.
Mr Biswas stayed to have a meal with them, and continued to be blunt and loud and full of bounce. It was only when he drove away that his exhilaration left him and he saw that he had involved himself not only in debt but also in deception. Ajodha did not know that the car had not yet been paid for; Ajodha did not know that he was only an unestablished civil servant. And the loan could not be repaid in five years: the interest alone would come to thirty dollars a month.
Still there were occasions he could have withdrawn. When, for instance, they went to see the house on Friday evening.
Anxious to show himself worthy of the house, he insisted that the children should put on their best clothes, and urged Shama to say as little as possible when they got there.
‘Leave me behind. Leave me behind,’ Shama said. ‘I have no shame for you and I will shame you in front of your high and mighty house-seller.’
And all the way she kept it up until, just