A House for Mr. Biswas (75 page)

‘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 would have seen where the celotex panels on the eaves had fallen away, providing unrestricted entry to the bats of the neighbourhood. He would have seen the staircase that hung at the back, open, with only a banister, and sheltered by
unpainted corrugated iron. He would not have been deceived into cosiness by the thick curtain over the back doorway on the lower floor. He would have seen that the house had no back door at all. If he had not had to rush out of the rain he might have noticed the street lamp just outside the house; he would have known that a street lamp, so near the main road, attracted idlers like moths. But he saw none of these things. He had only a picture of a house cosy in the rain, with a polished floor, and an old lady who baked cakes in the kitchen.

If he had not been disturbed he might have queried the clerk’s eagerness more impolitely. But events were too rapid, too neat. A quarrel in the night, the offer of a house with immediate possession the very next afternoon. And before the evening was out the sum of five thousand five hundred dollars had become less inaccessible.

‘Somebody come for you,’ Shama was saying. He awoke and was puzzled to find it was evening. ‘Another destee?’ His fame had survived his resignation from the
Sentinel;
destitutes still occasionally sought him out. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so.’

He dressed, his head humming, walked through the house downstairs to the foot of the front steps and surprised the visitor, a respectably dressed Negro of the artisan class, who was waiting for him at the top of the steps.

‘Good night,’ the Negro said. His accent betrayed him as an illegal immigrant from one of the smaller islands. ‘Is about the house I come. I want to buy it.’

Everybody wanted to buy or sell houses that day. ‘I ain’t even pay down for it yet,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘The house in Shorthills?’

‘Oh, that. That. But I can’t sell that. The land isn’t mine. I don’t even rent it.’

‘I know. If I buy the house I would take it away.’ He went on to explain. He had bought a lot in Petit Valley. He wanted to build his own house, but building materials were scarce and expensive and he was offering to buy Mr Biswas’s house, not as a house, but for the materials. He said he was not prepared
to haggle. He had studied the building carefully and was prepared to offer four hundred dollars.

And when Mr Biswas went back to the room with the rumpled beds, the disarrayed furniture, the chaos on Shama’s dressingtable, he had twenty twenty-dollar bills in his pocket.

‘You don’t believe in God,’ he said to Anand. ‘But look.’

Between eight hundred dollars and one thousand two hundred dollars there is a great difference. Eight hundred dollars are petty savings. One thousand two hundred dollars stand for real money. The difference between eight hundred and five thousand is immense. The difference between one thousand two hundred and five thousand is negotiable.

A week before Mr Biswas would have dismissed any thought of buying a house for five thousand dollars. He wanted one at three thousand or three thousand five hundred; he never looked at any above four thousand. And the strange thing now was that, having raised his sights, it did not occur to him to look at other five-thousand-dollar houses.

He sought out the solicitor’s clerk the next day, paid him a deposit of one hundred dollars, and was shrewd enough to ask for a stamped receipt.

‘I going to take this money and pay down right away on the house I want to buy,’ the solicitor’s clerk said. ‘Wait until the old queen hear. She going to be so glad.’

When Shama heard she burst into tears.

‘Ah!’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Swelling up. Vexed. You could only be happy if we just keep on living with your mother and the rest of your big, happy family, eh?’

‘I don’t think anything.
You
have the money,
you
want to buy house, and I don’t have to think anything.’

And that was when Shama, leaving the room, encountered Suniti, and Suniti said, ‘I hear that you come like a big-shot. Buying house and thing.’

‘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 before they turned into Sikkim Street, Mr Biswas lost his temper and said, ‘Yes. You damn well will shame me. Stay and live with your
family and leave me alone. I don’t want you to come in with me.’

She looked surprised. But there was no time for the quarrel to subside. They were in Sikkim Street. He drove the car past the house, parked it some distance away, called to the children to come with him if they wanted to or stay with their mother and continue living with the Tulsis if they wanted to do that, slammed the door and walked away. The children got out and followed him.

So that the one glimpse Shama had of the house before it was bought was from the moving Prefect. She saw concrete walls softly coloured in the light of the street lamp, with romantic shadows thrown by the trees next door. And she, who might have noticed the grossness of the staircase, the dangerous curve of the beams, the lack of finish in the lattice work and in all the woodwork, she who might have noticed the absence of a back door, the absence of a hundred small but important touches, sat in the car overcome by anger and dread.

While the children, on their best behaviour, made conversation with the old queen and were pleased by the interest she showed in them and her approval of nearly everything they said. They saw the polished floor, the rich curtains, the celotex ceiling, the morris suite, and they wanted to see little more. They drank tea and ate cakes; while Mr Biswas, not at all displeased by the success of his children, smoked cigarettes and drank whisky with the solicitor’s clerk. When they went upstairs, the solicitor’s clerk went first. It was dark. They did not note the absence of a light on the staircase; the darkness masked the crudity of the construction. Used for so long to the makeshift and the oldfashioned, dazzled by what they had seen, and in the position of guests, they didn’t stop to inquire; and once they had got to the top they were too taken by the bathroom and the green bedrooms and the verandah and the rediffusion set.

‘A radio!’ they cried. They had forgotten what it was like to have one.

‘I will leave it here if you want it,’ the solicitor’s clerk said, as if offering to pay the rental of the set.

‘Well, you like it?’ Mr Biswas asked, when they left.

There was no doubt that they did. Something so new, so clean, so modern, so polished. They were anxious to win Shama over to it, to get her to see it herself. But in the face of Mr Biswas’s gaiety and triumph Shama was firm. She said she had no intention of shaming Mr Biswas or his children.

During the week Mrs Tulsi had been ill but placid. With Owad’s return she became maudlin. She spent most of the day in her room, asking for her hair to be soaked in bay rum, and listening for Owad’s footsteps. She sought to win him back by talking about his boyhood and Pundit Tulsi. Abusing no one, raging against no one, the tears flowing from the wells, as it seemed, of her dark glasses, she wove a lengthy tale of injustice, neglect and ingratitude. Her daughters came to listen. They came bowed and penitent and respected their brother’s silence by showing themselves solemn and correct. They spoke Hindi; they did not debase themselves; they all tried to look as though they had offended. But Owad’s mood did not break. He did not relate his adventures in Tobago; and the sisters directed their own silent accusations at Shama. Owad spent more time away from home. He mixed with his medical colleagues, a new caste separate from the society from which it had been released. He went south to Shekhar’s. He played tennis at the India Club. And, almost as suddenly as it had started, talk of the revolution ended.