Collected Short Fiction

by V. S. Naipaul

  Henry’s, as I said, seemed to have its own especial rules. It was a club, a meeting-place, a haven, a place of assignation. It attracted all sorts. Selma belonged to the type of island girl who moved from relationship to relationship, from man to man. She feared marriage because marriage, for a girl of the people, was full of perils and quick degradation. She felt that once she surrendered completely to any one man, she lost her hold on him, and her beauty was useless, a wasted gift.

  She said, ‘Sometimes when I am walking I look at these warrahoons, and I think that for some little girl somewhere this animal is lord and master. He. He doesn’t like cornflakes. He doesn’t like rum. He this, he that.’

  Her job in the store and Henry’s protection gave her independence. She did not wish to lose this; she never fell for glamour. She was full of tales of girls she had known who had broken the code of their group and actually married visitors; and then had led dreadful lives, denied both the freedom they had had and the respectability, the freedom from struggle, which marriage ought to have brought.

  So we settled down, after making a little pact.

  ‘Remember,’ she said, ‘you are free and I am free. I am free to do exactly what I want, and you are free too.’

  The pressing had always been mine. It wasn’t an easy pact. I knew that this freedom might at any time embrace either Blackwhite, shy reformer in the background, or the white-robed preacher whom we called Priest. They both continued to make their interest in her plain.

  But in the beginning it was not from these men that we found opposition after we had settled down in one of the smaller jalousied houses in the street – and in those days it was possible to buy a house for fifteen hundred dollars. No, it was not from these men that there was opposition, but from Mrs Lambert, Henry’s neighbour, the wife of the man in the khaki suit who sipped the glass of rum in the mornings and spoke in rhyme to express either delight or pain.

  Now Mrs Lambert was a surprise. I had seen her in the street for some time without connecting her with Mr Lambert. Mr Lambert was black and Mrs Lambert was white. She was about fifty and she had the manners of the street. It was my own fault, in a way, that I had attracted her hostility. I had put money in the Lamberts’ way and had given them, too late in life, a position to keep up or to lose.

  Mr Lambert had been excited by the boom conditions that had begun to prevail in the street. The words were Ma-Ho’s, he who ran the grocery at the corner. Ma-Ho had begun to alter and extend his establishment to include a café where many men from the base and many locals sat on high stools and ate hot dogs and drank Coca-Colas, and where the children from several streets around congregated, waiting to be treated.

  ‘Offhand,’ Ma-Ho said, for he was fond of talking, ‘I would say, boom.’ And the words ‘offhand’ and ‘boom’ were the only really distinct ones. He began every sentence with ‘offhand’; what followed was very hard to understand. Yet he was always engaged in conversation with some captive customer.

  The walls of his grocery carried pictures of Chiang Kai-shek and Madame Chiang. They also had pictorial calendars, several years out of date, with delicately tinted Chinese beauties languid or coy against a background of ordered rocks and cultivated weeds, picturesque birds and waterfalls which poured like oil: incongruous in the shop with its chipped grimy counter, its open sacks of flour, its khaki-coloured sacks of sugar, its open tins of red, liquid butter. These pictures were like a longing for another world; and indeed, Ma-Ho did not plan to stay on the island. When you asked him, making conversation, especially on those occasions when you were short of change and wanted a little trust from him, ‘You still going back?’ the answer was: ‘Offhand, I say two-four years.’

  His children remained distinctive, and separate from the life of the street: a small neat crocodile, each child armed with neat bags and neat pencil boxes, going coolly off to school in the morning and returning just as coolly in the afternoon, as though nothing had touched them during the whole day, or caused them to be sullied. In the morning the back door of his shop opened to let out these children; in the afternoon the back door opened to swallow them in again; and nothing more was heard from them, and nothing more was seen of them.

  The boom touched Ma-Ho. It touched Mrs Lambert. Mr Lambert called very formally one evening in his khaki suit and put a proposal to me.

  ‘I don’t want to see you get into trouble,’ he said. ‘Mrs Lambert and I have been talking things over, and we feel you are running an unnecessary risk in bringing these – what should I say? – these supplies to the needy of our poor island.’

  I said, ‘It’s worked quite all right so far. You should see all the stuff we throw away.’

  ‘Now don’t misunderstand,’ he said. ‘I am not blaming you for what you are doing. But Mrs Lambert is particularly concerned about the trucks. She feels that by having them come out with these supplies and then having them go back, there is a chance of them being checked twice.’

  ‘I see what you mean. Thanks, Mr Lambert. You mean that Mrs Lambert thinks that perhaps a truck might just slip out of the base and stay out?’

  ‘Mrs Lambert thought it might be safer. Mrs Lambert has a relation who knows all there is to be known about trucks and motor vehicles generally.’

  I said nothing just then, thinking of the possibilities.

  Mr Lambert’s manner broke up. It became familiar. All the people in the street had two sets of manners, one extremely formal, one rallying and casual.

  ‘Look,’ Mr Lambert said. ‘The truck go back to the base, they start one set of questioning. It stay out here, ten to one they forget all about it. You people own the whole world.’

  So into Mr Lambert’s yard a truck one day rolled; and when, a fortnight or so later, it rolled out again, it was scarcely recognizable.

  ‘Lend-lease, lease-lend,’ Mr Lambert said with pure delight. ‘The trend, my friend.’

  And it was this truck that the Lamberts hired out to the contractors on the base. The contractors provided a driver and were willing – in fact, anxious – for the truck to work two shifts a day.

  ‘We are getting twenty dollars a day,’ Mr Lambert said. ‘My friend, what luck! What luck you’ve given with a simple truck!’

  Part of this luck, needless to say, I shared.

  Yet all this while Mrs Lambert remained in the background. She was a figure in a curtained window; she was someone walking briskly down the street. She was never someone you exchanged words with. She never became part of the life of the street.

  ‘That is one person whose old age you spoil,’ Henry said. ‘You see? She behaving as though they buy that truck. I don’t think this is going to end good.’

  Twenty dollars a day, minus commission and gasoline. The money was piling up; and then one day we saw a whole group of workmen around the Lamberts’ house, like ants around a dead cockroach. The street came out to watch. The house, small and wooden, was lifted off its pillars by the workmen. The front door with the sign ‘Mr W. Lambert, Bookbinder’ swung open and kept on flapping while the house was taken to the back of the lot, to rest not on pillars but flat on the ground. The workmen drank glasses of rum to celebrate. The street cheered. But then we saw Mr Lambert pushing his way through the crowd. He looked like a man expecting news of death. He saw the pillars; he saw his house on the ground; and he said: ‘My house! My house brought low! But I did not want a bungalow. Here the old pillars stand, in the middle of naked land.’ He left and went to Ma-Ho’s. He became drunk; he addressed verse to everyone. The habit grew on him. It seemed to us that he remained drunk until he died.

  Henry said, ‘Once upon a time – and really now it sounded like a fairy tale – once upon a time Mrs Lambert was a very poor girl. Family from Corsica. Living up there in the cocoa valleys with the tall immortelle trees. Times was hard. You couldn’t even give away cocoa. And Lambert had this job in the Civil Service. Messenger. Uniform, regular pay, the old pension at the end, and nobody sacking you. Marriage up there in the
hills with the bush and red immortelle flowers. Oh, happy! Once-upon-a-time fairy tale. Wurthering Heights. Hansel and Gretel in the witch-broom cocoa woods. Then the world sort of catch up with them.’

  The pillars were knocked down, and where the old wooden house stood there presently began to rise a house of patterned concrete blocks. The house, I could see, was going to be like hundreds of others in the city: three bedrooms down one side, a veranda, drawing-room and dining-room down the other side, and a back veranda.

  No longer a doorstep at which Mr Lambert could sit, greeting us in the morning with his glass of rum. The old wooden house was sold, for the materials; frame by frame, jalousie by jalousie, the house was dismantled and re-erected far away by the man who had bought it, somewhere in the country. And then there was no longer a Mr Lambert in the morning. He left the yard early. In his khaki suit he was like a workman hurrying off to a full day. We often saw him walking with Mano. Mano, the walker in Henry’s yard, who after his morning’s exercise put on his khaki messenger’s uniform and walked to the government office where he worked. Their dress was alike, but they were an ill-assorted pair, Mano lean and athletic, Mr Lambert even at that early hour shambling drunk.

  Mr Lambert had a sideline. At sports meetings, on race days, at cricket and football matches, he ran a stall. He sold a vile sweet liquid of his own manufacture. On these occasions he appeared, not with his cork hat, but with a handkerchief knotted around his head. He rang a bell and sang his sales rhymes, which were often pure gibberish. ‘Neighbour! Neighbour! Where are you? Here I am! Rat-tat-too.’ Sometimes he would point to the poisonous tub in which hunks of ice floated in red liquid, and sing: ‘Walk in! Jump in! Run in! Hop in! Flop in! Leap in! Creep in!’

  This was the Mr Lambert of happier days. Now, after the degradation of his house, it seemed that he had given up his stall. But he had grown friendly with Mano and this friendship led him to announce that he was going to the sports meeting in which Mano was to take part.

  Henry said, ‘Mrs Lambert doesn’t like it. She feel that this old black man hopping around with a handkerchief on his head and ringing his bell is a sort of low-rating, especially now that she building this new house. And she say that if he go and ring that bell any more she finish with him. She not going to let him set foot in the new house.’

  So we were concerned about both Mr Lambert and Mano. We often went in the afternoons to the great park to cycle around with Mano as he walked, to help him to fight the impatience that made him run in walking races and get disqualified.

  Henry said, ‘Frankie, I think you trying too hard with Mano. You should watch it. You see what happen to Mrs Lambert. You know, I don’t think people want to do what they say they want to do. I think we always make a lot of trouble for people by helping them to get what they say they want to get. Some people look at black people and only see black. You look at poor people and you only see poor. You think the only thing they want is money. All-you wrong, you know.’

  One day while we were coming back in procession from the park, Mano pumping away beside us past the crocodile of Ma-Ho’s children, we were horrified to see Mr Lambert stretched out on the pavement like a dead man. He was not dead; that was a relief. He was simply drunk, very complicatedly drunk. Selma ran to Mrs Lambert and brought back a cool message: ‘Mrs Lambert says we are not to worry our heads with that good-for-nothing idler.’

  Henry said, ‘We are not doing Lambert any good by being so friendly with him. Mrs Lambert, I would say, is hostile to us all, definitely hostile.’

  Mr Lambert at this stage revived a little and said, ‘They say I am black. But black I am not. I tell you, good sirs, I am a Scot.’

  Henry said, ‘Is not so funny, you know. His grandfather was a big landowner, a big man. We even hear a rumour some years before the war that according to some funny law of succession Mr Lambert was the legal head of some Scottish clan.’

  The house went up. The day of the sports meeting came. Mano was extremely nervous. As the time drew nearer he even began to look frightened. This was puzzling, because I had always thought him quite withdrawn, indifferent to success, failure or encouragement.

  Henry said, ‘You know, Mano never read the papers. On the road yesterday some crazy thing make him take up the evening paper and he look at the horoscope and he read: “You will be exalted today.” ’

  ‘But that’s nice,’ I said.

  ‘It get him frightened. Was a damn funny word for the paper to use. It make Mano think of God and the old keys of the kingdom.’

  Mano was very frightened when we started for the sports ground. There was no sign in the street of Mr Lambert and we felt that he had in the end been scared off by Mrs Lambert and that to save face he had gone away for a little. But at the sports ground, after the meeting had begun and Mano was started on his walk – it was a long walk, and you must picture it going on and on, with lots of other sporting activities taking place at the same time, each activity unrelated to any other, creating a total effect of a futile multifarious frenzy – it was when Mano was well on his walk that we heard the bell begin to ring. To us it rang like doom.

  ‘Mano will not run today, Mano will walk to heaven today.’

  Exaltation was not in Mr Lambert’s face alone or in his bell or in his words. It was also in his dress.

  ‘On me some alien blood has spilt. I make a final statement, I wear a kilt.’ And then came all his old rhymes.

  And Mano didn’t run. He walked and won. And Mr Lambert rang his bell and chanted: ‘Mano will not run today. He will walk into the arms of his Lord today.’

  We had worked for Mano’s victory. Now that it had come it seemed unnatural. He himself was like a stunned man. He rejected congratulations. We offered him none. When we looked for Mr Lambert we couldn’t find him. And with a sense of a double and deep unsettling of what was fixed and right, we walked home. We had a party. It turned into more than a party. We did not notice when Mano left us.

  Later that night we found Mr Lambert drunk and sprawling on the pavement.

  He said, ‘I led her up from the gutter. I gave her bread. I gave her butter. And this is how she pays me back. White is white and black is black.’

  We took him to his house. Henry went to see Mrs Lambert. It was no use. She refused to take him in. She refused to come out to him.

  ‘To my own house I have no entrance. Come, friends, all on my grave dance.’

  We had a double funeral the next day. Mano had done what so many others on the island had done. He had gone out swimming, far into the blue waters, beyond the possibility of return.

  ‘You know,’ Henry said, as we walked to the cemetery, ‘the trouble with Mano was that he never had courage. He didn’t want to be a walker. He really wanted to be a runner. But he didn’t have the courage. So when he won the walking race, he went and drowned himself.’

  Albert the postman was in our funeral procession. He said, ‘News, Frankie. They send back another one of Blackwhite’s books.’

  Blackwhite heard. He said to me, ‘Was your fault. You made me start writing about all this. Oh, I feel degraded. Who wants to read about this place?’

  I said, ‘Once you were all white, and that wasn’t true. Now you are trying to be all black and that isn’t true either. You are really a shade of grey, Blackwhite.’

  ‘Hooray for me, to use one of your expressions. This place is nowhere. It is a place where everyone comes to die. But I am not like Mano. You are not going to kill me.’

  ‘Blackwhite, you old virgin, I love you.’

  ‘Virgin? How do you know?’

  ‘We are birds of a feather.’

  ‘Frankie, why do you drink? It’s only a craving for sugar.’

  And I said to him: ‘Dickie-bird, why do you weep? Sugar, sugar. A lovely word, sugar. I love its sweetness on my breath. I love its sweetness seeping through my skin.’

  And in the funeral procession, which dislocated traffic and drew doffed hats and grave faces from passers-by
, I wept for Mano and Lambert and myself, wept for my love of sugar; and Blackwhite wept for the same things and for his virginity. We walked side by side.

  * * *

  Selma said Henry was right. ‘I don’t think you should go around interfering any more in other people’s lives. People don’t really want what you think they want.’

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘From now on we will just live quietly.’

  Quietly. It was a word with so many meanings. The quietness of the morning after, for instance, the spectacles on my nose, quiet in an abstemious corner. I was a character now. I had licence. Sugar sweetened me. In Henry’s yard, in Selma’s house, and on the sands of the desolate bay over the hills, the healing bay where the people of the island sought privacy from joy and grief.

  Priest’s denunciations of us, of me, grew fiercer. And Blackwhite, seen through the flapping curtain of his front room, pounded away at his typewriter in sympathetic rage.

  Then one blurred aching morning I found on the front step a small coffin, and in the coffin a mutilated sailor doll and a toy wreath of rice fern.

  They came around to look.

  ‘Primitive,’ Blackwhite said. ‘Disgusting. A disgrace to us.’

  ‘This is Priest work,’ Henry said.

  ‘I have been telling you to insure me,’ Selma said.

  ‘What, is that his game?’

  Henry said, ‘Priest does take his work seriously. The only thing is, I wish I know what his work is. I don’t know whether it is preaching, or whether it is selling insurance. I don’t think he know either. For him the two seem to come together.’

  To tell the truth, the coffins on Selma’s doorstep worried me. They kept on appearing and I didn’t know what to do. Selma became more and more nervous. At one moment she suggested I should take her away; at another moment she said that I myself should go away. She also suggested that I should try to appease Priest by buying some insurance.