V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

The gardener’s name was Pitton. I called him Mr. Pitton at the start, and called him that to the very end.

It was Pitton who one year, talking of the pear trees on the farmhouse wall, gave me a new determinative use of the preposition “in.” The pears were ripe. The birds were pecking at them. I mentioned it to Pitton, thinking that with all the things he had do he mightn’t have noticed. But he said he had noticed; the pears were very much on his mind; he intended any day now “to pick them in.” To pick the pears in —I liked that in . I played with it, repeated it; and though I don’t believe I heard Pitton use the word in that way again, I associated it with him.

Then (as the reader will learn about in more detail in a later place in this book) Pitton had to go. The manor couldn’t afford him. And there were no more regular gardeners, where there had been sixteen. No one to look after the vegetables in the walled garden or cut the grass or weed-kill the drive and paths or pick the pears in or keep the branches of the pear trees pinned to the squash-court wall.

The wind tore the upper branches of one tree free of the wall. The main trunk sagged forward, leaving a ghostlike outline in green-black on the wall; the branches drooped; the tree seemed about to break. But it didn’t. The tree flowered; and at the foot of the wall in the summer, beside the path Pitton had once weed-killed, there grew up tall weeds that might have been chosen for their picturesque effect: shades of green, different degrees of transparency, different sizes of leaf. Above that, delicate white pear blossom turned to heavy fruit, at last. The birds became interested. No one now to pick the pears in, officially.

But then one Sunday, from my bedroom window, I saw a curiously dressed man looking at the pear trees, assessing them, and then, tentatively, picking the pears on the lower branches.

Strange people came into the manor grounds at various times. Pitton, when he had been there, had let in certain people. The Phillipses, the couple in the manor, had their own friends and visitors; and there were certain odd-job people they employed. And very occasionally there were people connected with my landlord. The curiously dressed man was unusual. But I had no means of knowing whether he was a marauder, someone simply picking the pears; or whether he was someone who had authority, and was picking them in , for the use of the manor or people of whom the manor approved.

He was curiously dressed. In army camouflage clothes, trousers, tunic, round-brimmed hat. The clothes didn’t look like army surplus, or at any rate the stuff in the windows of the surplus stores. There was a quality of dash and swash in the cut, the camouflage pattern, and the muted colors; and, curiously, with the dressiness there was an element almost of disguise, which made the man seem dangerous, like an intruder.

As he looked at the trees, and with his tentative hands tugged at the lower pears, he turned from time to time to one side (his face still hidden by the camouflage collar and hat), in the direction of the manor courtyard, like a man nervous of being observed. But then, getting out the ladder from the garden shed next to the squash court, the shed that had been Pitton’s, placing the ladder against the wall, starting from the top and working methodically, carefully down, leaving nothing for the birds, bucket by bucket the man in army clothes picked the pears. And it became clear that he was picking them in , and that he was picking the pears of the old trees in because he had the blessing of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips in the manor.

He had looked shifty at the beginning, uncertain, as though expecting someone to appear behind him. The person he must have been looking for appeared while he was on the ladder; because then, like a man apparently satisfied, he had concentrated on the pears.

The person who had appeared was a girl or, rather, a young woman; and she was half familiar to me. She walked on the lawn, and directly in front of my windows. The Phillipses never walked in front of my windows; they allowed me my privacy in the openness of the lawn; they were careful to walk on the far path, beside the squash court and the pear trees. This woman was going nowhere; she had come from the manor for a saunter on the lawn. She was short and heavy-hipped; her tight jeans emphasized the slowness and smallness of her steps. She was like someone who had been granted the freedom of the grounds and was at that moment beginning to taste the new freedom.

She too was unusually dressed. The extravagance was in her top: a shirt with the tails knotted in front, just below her breasts, leaving her midriff bare — not quite suitable at that time of year.

She had been half familiar to me. Now I knew her. She was the woman I had seen sunbathing in the ruined garden of the thatched cottage. I had associated her so much with her cottage and garden and car and open front door that this sight of her in another, more open setting, and so close to me, was like the sight of a new person. And the man in army camouflage on the ladder was her farm-worker husband.

Here, on a Sunday afternoon, they were in the manor grounds; she strolling about the lawn, her hips tight in hard jeans folding horizontally, and almost in a straight line, into alternate lateral peaks; her husband picking pears, ripe fruit from old trees that might have been planted against the wall by the person who had designed the wall, trees once carefully tended and still, after years of neglect, showing signs of that early care.

They, the woman with the midriff and the man in the army-style camouflage, must have attracted the Phillipses in some way. Perhaps the women had got on; perhaps the men had got on; perhaps — the Phillipses were ten to fifteen years older — there might have been a cross-attraction of some sort. The woman with the midriff would have been important to the relationship; at any rate, the relationship between the four couldn’t have existed without her support or encouragement.

Already, and mainly from glimpses I had had of her in her ruined garden, lying on a cheap aluminum-framed easy chair, I had wondered about this woman. She had given me the impression of being at the center of passion, the cause of pain; a woman whose beauty caused pain to the man who at that moment was permitted to possess her; a woman who knew this.

That impression, arrived at from a distance, was added to now by the clearer and fuller sight I had of her on the lawn. To the narrow waist, the full hips, the firm thighs and upper arms, the breasts, flesh without muscle, half revealed, half flattened by her sunbathinglike top, to this voluptuousness were now added the stare (rather than the fire) in her unsteady light eyes, the greediness expressed by her mouth with its seemingly swollen lower lip, and by the distinct spaces between her top front teeth. Her sexuality was precious to her, more precious than anything else.

And here she was, in the grounds of the manor. And she was like someone in her own park, as though, just a few steps away from the clutter and constriction of the thatched cottage that had come with her husband’s agricultural job (and which she couldn’t therefore see as a real house), she had found a resort more suited to her style.

She walked slowly up and down the lawn, as though making herself familiar with a new pleasure. And the man in the army camouflage stood on the ladder and picked the pears, keeping his back to her, not turning round to look for her, as though he was now content, with his wife being where she was, with him.

Perhaps they and the Phillipses had come together as “town” people, working in the country but separate from the life of country people. Town people, but servants, all four, with their special style and pride, sharing now the grounds and privileges of the manor, offering and returning hospitality.