V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

It was a good thing that the autumn was well advanced. No question now of Brenda’s having to show herself to anybody, to prove that she was unabashed and that life was going on. She could close her front door and stay indoors; just as Les could take out his tractor and hide behind the tinted plastic of his cab.

The farming organization that had brought these town people to the valley (and had in their own way remade parts of the valley) was fading, for reasons I didn’t know. With such ventures it was as with the military exercises on the ground or in the air that were so often with us: one saw a great deal, but understood little.

Les was looking, it was said, for another job. Three or four times I saw Brenda and Les on the road in their little dark-red motorcar. They had taken down part of the fence and the hedge to make a space for that car in the garden. And the thatched cottage had indeed been no more than temporary shelter. To have invested more in it emotionally would have been a waste, more of a waste than Les’s evening and weekend work in the manor grounds.

The first time I saw them in their car after they had stopped coming to the manor there was some kind of half recognition from Les. From Brenda there was none. Perhaps there had been some trouble with Mrs. Phillips over my letters — the letters being put forward by her as a cause — and I had not been forgiven. On the later occasions I saw them there was nothing at all. Our brief acquaintance was over.

There was a van that I also saw, the van of Michael Allen, going importantly about on its central heating business. Country-town success! Michael had given me a glimpse of that side of things here. But Italy! Who would have associated romance with that van and the name painted on the sides and the back of the van, painted in three places. Whenever I saw the van I thought of Mrs. Phillips’s words: “Michael kicked her out.” How hard it must have been for Les and Brenda to live with those words, which others must also have heard!

The days shortened. The way below the yews from the public road to the manor drive and to my cottage, that way was so dark at four in the afternoon that when I went shopping in Salisbury on the mid-afternoon bus I needed to take a flashlight for the short walk back from the bus stop.

Country darkness! Big things could happen almost secretly. And one such thing happened in the thatched cottage with the straw pheasant on the roof.

It was Mrs. Phillips who gave me the news.

She said, two days after the event, “Brenda’s dead.”

She added, and it seemed calmly, “Les murdered her.”

“Murdered,” the formal word, rather than “killed.” We use formal words, even empty words, when events are big.

I thought of the way they had both appeared on the lawn during the pear picking — two birds in bright plumage. I thought of the face of the satisfied lover offering me the vegetables at the kitchen door, the gift of the happy man. Then I thought of Italy and the Michael Allen van going about its money-making business, spreading the name around — while Les was running about in his red car looking for a new job.

So hard to contemplate, the physical act, the setting, the finality, the body, just a few hundred yards away. I thought of the least intrusive question I might ask. “Where did he kill her?”

“Right in that cottage. On Saturday night.”

Saturday night! Was it a night of drink and temper? It wasn’t what I associated with them.

Mrs. Phillips said: “She taunted him.”

And “taunted” I felt to be a technical word, as technical as “murdered.” It had sexual connotations. She, the Italian runaway, had done the sexual taunting. She had not come back abashed. She had done the taunting, the goading. How often, to punish someone for her Italian failure, she must have “taunted” him! And it was hard not to feel that she didn’t have some idea of what she was provoking. And how, having started on the job of destruction — he had used a kitchen knife — having started on that, from which very quickly there was no turning back, however much in a corner of his mind he might have been wishing it all undone, healed again, how he must have struck, until the madness and the life was over! All in that little thatched cottage with the ruined garden.

Worker bees work till they die. When they die other bees clear the hive, get rid of the bodies. Because bees work and are clean. And so, without disturbance, without many people knowing, even people on the bus, the cottage was cleansed and cleared of its once precious life, its once precious passions.

She “taunted” him — it was the verdict. And all hearts were with the living, the survivor, the man; as, had it occurred the other way, they would have been with the woman. The police were discreet, hardly seen, almost as secretive as the event itself. More information was to be had from the local weekly paper than from immediate neighbors. They had seen very little, and didn’t want to blame one partner more than the other: everyone drawn close at this moment to Brenda and Les, seeking to remember them, and responding to this very near event almost as to a family tragedy.

One local formality remained. Brenda’s “things” had to be collected. And some weeks later, before the winter turned to spring with the gales of spring, Brenda’s sister came to collect Brenda’s things from the unoccupied cottage, where there was no longer a dark-red motorcar.

Collecting the dead person’s things: it was like something from the old world — an aspect of the idea of sanctity, an aspect of decent burial, the honoring of the dead — and it seemed to call for some ritual. But there was none. The coming for the dead woman’s things was matter-of-fact. I wouldn’t have known about it if I wasn’t in the kitchen of the manor, settling some little bill with Mrs. Phillips, when Brenda’s sister came to call.

Mrs. Phillips knew Brenda’s sister. It was another indication of the Phillipses’ “town” life, their life outside the manor and the village. Mrs. Phillips became much graver when Brenda’s sister said what she had come for. I was moved myself. And we all went, after introductions, to Mrs. Phillips’s sitting room with its view of the down and the river, the water meadows and the big aspens of the garden, the old stone terrace, the urns, the moss, the mottled stone, the seed bells for the birds, the lines of washing — the mixture of big-house garden and backyard domesticity which I had seen (through rain and mist) on my first day in the grounds when, hardly knowing where I was or understanding what I saw, I had called on the Phillipses. Thereafter I had seen that view only at Christmastime (those years when I was not abroad), when I called on the Phillipses to give them my presents.

Brenda’s sister was not immediately like Brenda. She was older, fatter. There was a quality in the fatness, the puffiness, which suggested illness, a clinical condition, rather than grossness. Brenda’s heaviness, in hips and thighs, had been different; it had suggested someone spoilt, someone who felt that her beauty entitled her to luxurious sensations and felt at the same time that her beauty could support a certain amount of self-indulgence. But then I began to see Brenda’s full lips and wild eyes in her sister’s face, saw those features lost or altered in puffy flesh; saw, too, the smoothness of skin and purity of complexion which would have given the girl, when she was a girl, a high idea of herself and her potential, but which was now part of the breathy wreck she had become. Things had not gone well for these sisters; in different ways their gift of beauty had turned out to be a torment for them.

Brenda’s sister lived in a small, newish town to the south, between Salisbury and Bournemouth, not town, not country, not the sort of desolate place she had thought she would end up in.