The nightwatchman's occurrence book_ and other comic inventions - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,204

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.

‘Appease Priest? The words don’t sound right. Henry, you hear?’

Henry said, ‘I will tell you about this insurance. I don’t know how it happen on the island, but it becoming a social thing, you know. Like having a shower, like taking schooling, like getting married. If you not insured these days you can’t hold up your head at all. Everybody feel you poor as a church rat. But look. The man coming himself.’

It was Priest, wearing a suit and looking very gay and not at all malevolent.

‘Dropping in for a little celebration,’ he said.

Selma was awed, and it was hard to say whether it was because of Priest’s suit, the coffins, or his grand manner.

‘What are you celebrating?’ I said. ‘A funeral?’

He wasn’t put out. ‘New job, Frankie, new job. More money, you know. Higher commission, bigger salary. Frankie, where you say you living in the States? Well, look out for me. I might be going up there any day. So the bosses say.’

I said, ‘I’d love to have you.’

‘You know,’ he said, ‘how in this insurance business I have this marvellous record. But these local people’—and here he threw up his beard, scratched under his chin, screwed up his eyes—‘but these local people, you know how mean they is with the money. Then this new company come down, you know, and they get to know about me. I didn’t go to see them. They send for me. And