A House for Mr. Biswas (76 page)

THE SOLICITOR’S
clerk was as good as his word, and as soon as the transaction was completed he and the old queen hurriedly abandoned the house. On Monday night Mr Biswas made his final decision. On Thursday the house awaited him.

Late on Thursday afternoon they went in the Prefect to Sikkim Street. The sun came through the open windows on the ground floor and struck the kitchen wall. Woodwork and frosted glass were hot to the touch. The inside of the brick wall was warm. The sun went through the house and laid dazzling stripes on the exposed staircase. Only the kitchen escaped the sun; everywhere else, despite the lattice work and open windows, was airlessness, a concentration of heat and light which hurt their eyes and made them sweat.

Without curtains, empty except for the morris suite, with the hot floor no longer shining and polished, the sun showing only grit and scratches and dusty footprints, the house seemed smaller than the children remembered and had lost the cosiness they had noted at night, in the soft lights, with thick curtains keeping out the world. Undraped by curtains, the large areas of lattice work left the house open, to the green of the breadfruit tree next door, the bleedingheart vine thick and tendrilled on the rotting fence, the decaying slum house at the back, the noises of the street.

They discovered the staircase: unhidden by curtains, it was too plain. Mr Biswas discovered the absence of a back door. Shama discovered that two of the wooden pillars supporting the staircase landing were rotten, whittled away towards the bottom and green with damp. They all discovered that the staircase was dangerous. At every step it shook, and at the lightest breeze the sloping corrugated iron sheets rose in the middle and gave snaps which were like metallic sighs.

Shama did not complain. She only said, ‘It look as though we will have to do a few repairs before we move.’

In the days that followed they made more discoveries. The landing pillars had rotted because they stood next to a tap which emerged from the back wall of the house. The water from the tap simply ran into the ground. Shama spoke about the possibility of subsidence. Then they discovered that the yard had no drainage of any sort. When it rained the water from the pyramidal roof fell directly to the ground, turned the yard into mud and spattered walls and doors, the bottoms of which appeared to have been sprayed with wet soot.

They discovered that none of the windows downstairs would close. Some grated on the concrete sill; others had been so warped by the sun that their bolts could no longer make contact with the grooves. They discovered that the front door, elegant with white woodwork and frosted panes and with herringbone lattice work on either side, flew open in a strong wind even when locked and bolted. The other drawingroom door could not open at all: it was pinned to the wall by two floorboards which had risen, pressing against each other, to make a miniature and even mountain range.

‘Jerry-builder,’ Mr Biswas said.

They discovered that nothing was faced and that the lattice work was everywhere uneven, and split in many places by nails which showed their large heads.

‘Tout! Crook!’

They discovered that upstairs no door resembled any other, in shape, structure, colour or hinging. None fitted. One stood six inches off the floor, like the swingdoor of a bar.

‘Nazi and blasted communist!’

The upper floor curved towards the centre and from downstairs they noted a corresponding bend in the two main beams. Shama thought that the floor curved because the inner verandah wall it supported was made of brick.

‘We’ll knock it down,’ Shama said, ‘and put a wood partition.’

‘Knock it down!’ Mr Biswas said. ‘Be careful you don’t knock down the house. For all we know it is that same wall which is keeping the whole damned thing standing.’

Anand suggested a pillar rising from the drawingroom downstairs to support the sagging beams.

Soon they began to keep their discoveries secret. Anand discovered that the square pillars of the front fence, so pretty with Morning Glory, were made of hollow bricks that rested on no foundation. The pillars rocked at the push of a finger. He said nothing, and only suggested that the mason might have a look at the fence when he came.

The mason came to build a concrete drain around the house and a low sink below the tap at the back. He was a squat Negro with catlike whiskers and he sang continually:

His gaiety depressed them all.

Daily they moved between the hostile Tulsi house and Sikkim Street. They became short-tempered. They took little joy in the morris suite or the rediffusion set.

‘ “I will leave the rediffusion set for you.” ’ Mr Biswas said, mimicking the solicitor’s clerk. ‘You old crook. If I don’t see you roasting in hell!’

The rental of the rediffusion set was two dollars a month. Landrent was ten dollars a month, six dollars more than he paid for his room. Rates, which had always seemed as remote as fog or snow, now had a meaning. Landrent, rediffusion set, rates, interest, repairs, debt: he was discovering commitments almost as fast as he discovered the house.

Then the painters came, two tall sad Negroes who had been out of work for some time and were glad to get a job at the very low wages Mr Biswas had to borrow to pay them. They came with their ladders and planks and buckets and brushes and when Anand heard them jumping about on the top floor he became anxious and went up to reassure himself that the house was not falling down. The painters did not share Anand’s concern. They continued to jump from plank to floor and he was too ashamed to tell them anything. He stayed to watch. The fresh distemper made the long, ominous crack in the verandah wall clearer and more ominous. While the rediffusion set filled the hot empty house with light music
and bright commercials, the painters talked, sometimes of women, but mostly of money. When, from the rediffusion set, a woman sang, as from some near but inaccessible city of velvet, glass and gold where all was bright and secure and even sadness was beautiful:

one painter said, ‘That’s me, boy. Laughing on the outside, crying on the inside.’ Yet he had never laughed or smiled. And for Anand the songs that came over and over from the rediffusion set into the hollow, distemper-smelling house were forever after tinged with uncertainty, threat and emptiness, and their words acquired a facile symbolism which would survive age and taste: ‘Laughing on the Outside’, ‘To Each His Own’, ‘Till Then’, ‘The Things We Did Last Summer’.

And more expense was to come. Sewer pipes had not been laid down in this part of the city and the house had a septic tank. Before the painters left, the septic tank became choked. The lavatory bowl filled and bubbled; the yard bubbled; the street smelled. Sanitary engineers had to be called in, and a new septic tank built. By this time the money Mr Biswas had borrowed had run out altogether, and Shama had to borrow two hundred dollars from Basdai, the widow who took in boarders.

But at last they could leave the Tulsi house. A lorry was hired – more expense – and all the furniture packed into it. And it was astonishing how the furniture, to which they had grown accustomed, suddenly, exposed on the tray of the lorry in the street, became unfamiliar and shabby and shameful. About to be moved for the last time: the gatherings of a lifetime: the kitchen safe (encrusted with varnish, layer after layer of it, and paint of various colours, the wire-netting broken and clogged), the yellow kitchen table, the hatrack with the futile glass and broken hooks, the rockingchair, the fourposter (dismantled and unnoticeable), Shama’s dressingtable (standing against the cab, without its mirror, with all the drawers
taken out, showing the unstained, unpolished wood inside, still, after all these years, so raw, so new), the bookcase and desk, Théophile’s bookcase, the Slumberking (a pink, intimate rose on the headrest), the glass cabinet (rescued from Mrs Tulsi’s drawingroom), the destitute’s diningtable (on its back, its legs roped around, loaded with drawers and boxes), the typewriter (still a brilliant yellow, on which Mr Biswas was going to write articles for the English and American Press, on which he had written his articles for the Ideal School, the letter to the doctor): the gatherings of a lifetime for so long scattered and even unnoticed, now all together on the tray of the lorry. Shama and Anand rode with the lorry. Mr Biswas drove the girls; they carried dresses which would have been damaged by packing.

They could only unpack that evening. A rough meal was prepared in the kitchen and they ate in the chaotic diningroom. They said little. Only Shama moved and spoke without constraint. The beds were mounted upstairs. Anand slept in the verandah. He could feel the floor curving below him towards the offending brick wall. He placed his hand on the wall, as if that might give him some idea of its weight. At every footstep, particularly Shama’s, he could feel the floor shake. When he closed his eyes he experienced a spinning, swaying sensation. Hurriedly he opened them again to reassure himself that the floor had not sunk further, that the house still stood.

Every afternoon they had seen an elderly Indian rocking contentedly in the verandah of the house next door. He had a square, heavy-lidded face that was almost Chinese; he always looked impassive and sleepy. Yet when Mr Biswas, pursuing his policy of getting on good terms with the neighbours, greeted him, the man brightened at once, sat forward in his rockingchair and said, ‘You have been doing a lot of repairs.’

Mr Biswas took the man’s words as an invitation to his verandah. His house was new and well-built; the walls were solid, the floor even and firm, the woodwork everywhere neat and finished. There was no fence; and a shed of rusted
corrugated iron and grey-black boards abutted at the back of the house.

‘Nice house you have here,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘With the help of God and the boys we manage to build it. Still have to put up a fence and build a kitchen, as you see. But that could wait for the time being. You had to do a lot of repairs.’

‘A few things here and there. Sorry about the septic tank.’

‘You don’t have to be sorry about that. I did expect it to happen even before. He build it himself.’

‘Who? The man?’

‘And not only that. He build the whole house himself. Working on Saturday and Sunday and in the afternoons. It was like a hobby with him. If he employ a carpenter I didn’t see it. And I better warn you. He do all the wiring too. The man was a joke, man. I don’t know how the City Council pass a house like that. The man used to bring all sort of tree-trunk and tree-branch to use as rafters and beams.’

He was an old man, pleased that after a lifetime, with the help of his sons, he had built a solid, well-made house. The past lay in the shed at the back of his house, in the ruinous wooden houses still in the street. He spoke only out of a sense of achievement, without malice.

‘A strong little house, though,’ Mr Biswas said, looking at it from the old man’s verandah. And he saw how the old man’s breadfruit tree framed the house to advantage, how elegant the lattice work looked through the bleedingheart vine, its lack of finish unimportant at this distance. But he noticed how pronounced the crack was that spread from the brick wall in the verandah. And it was only then that he noticed how many of the celotex panels had fallen from the eaves; and even as he looked bats flew in and out. ‘Strong little house. That is the main thing.’

The old man continued to talk, no hint of argument in his voice. ‘And those pillars at the four corners. Anybody else woulda make them of concrete. You know what he make them of? Just those clay bricks. Hollow inside.’

Mr Biswas could not hide his alarm and the old man smiled benevolently, pleased to see his information having such an effect.

‘The man was a joke, man,’ he went on. ‘As I say, it was like a hobby to him. Picking up window frames here and there, from the American base and where not. Picking up a door here and another one there and bringing them here. A real disgrace. I don’t know how the City Council pass the place.’

‘I don’t suppose,’ Mr Biswas said, ‘that the City Council woulda pass it if it
wasn’t
strong.’

The old man paid no attention. ‘A spec’lator, that’s what he was. A real spec’lator. This ain’t the first house he built like this, you know. He build two-three in Belmont, one in Woodbrook, this one, and right now he building one in Morvant. Building it and living in it at the same time.’ The old man rocked and chuckled. ‘But he get stick with this one.’

‘He live in it a long time,’ Mr Biswas said.

‘Couldn’t get anybody to buy it. Is a good little site, mark you. But he was asking too much. Four five.’

‘Four five!’

‘If you please. And look. Look at that little house down the road.’ He pointed to a new neat bungalow, which Mr Biswas, with his newly acquired eye for carpentry, had recognized as of good design and workmanship. ‘Small, but very nice.
That
sell this year for four five.’

A Tuttle boy, the writer, came unexpectedly to the house one afternoon, talked of this and that and then, casually, as if delivering a message he had forgotten, said that his parents were going to call that evening, because Mrs Tuttle wanted to ask Shama’s advice about something.

Rapidly, they made ready. The floor was polished and walking on it was forbidden. Curtains were rearranged, and the morris suite and the glass cabinet and the bookcase pushed into new positions. The curtains masked the staircase; the bookcase and the glass cabinet hid part of the lattice work, which was also draped with curtains. The door that couldn’t
close was left wide open and curtains hung over the doorway. The door that couldn’t open was left shut; and a curtain hung over that. The windows that couldn’t close were left open and curtains hung over them as well. And when the Tuttles came they were greeted by an enclosed, shining, softly-lit house, the morris chairs and the small palm in the brass pot reflecting on the polished floor. Shama seated them on the morris chairs, left them to marvel in silence for a minute or so, and, as cosily as the old queen herself, made tea in the kitchen and offered that and biscuits.