V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

In the Phillipses’ sitting room it was for a while as though Brenda’s sister’s call was a purely social one. But then she seemed suddenly to remember what had brought her.

She said, “You want to save everything. And then you want to throw everything away.” Her voice broke; her eyes went watery. “She left so little. Her clothes.” She tried to smile. “She was so particular about her clothes. But what can I do about her clothes?”

No ill will, no anger, no wish for revenge.

She said, “She was too much for him. He couldn’t handle her.”

Mrs. Phillips allowed Brenda’s sister to talk on.

Brenda’s sister said, “She even thought he was queer. Did you know that? She told me he washed his hair every morning. Not in the evening after work, because he didn’t want to sleep on it when it was wet. But in the morning. He is like my son Raymond. I hope nobody thinks he is queer because he does that. Raymond does it for the girls at his school.”

I had always assumed it was Brenda who had encouraged Les to dress up, and had thought that she had chosen things for him. This news about the washing of the hair suggested a lonelier and more desperate man.

Brenda’s sister said, “She expected so much from her life. My mother drilled it into us how much she suffered before the war, living in a little army house, hoping for great things to happen to my father. And that was all that ever happened to us. We lived in a little army house.”

The story she told us was that her father, a simple serviceman with some factory experience, had had a fleeting moment of inspiration early in the war. He had hit on a new way of mounting guns in the tail of an airplane; and from being a simple serviceman he had been taken up by the authorities for a few months. He was not alone, though; there were many others like him, men with ideas.

“Always he was on his way to Ministry of Defence. Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Defence, I heard those words all the time. When I see the advertisements in the paper today and see the same words, it brings it back.”

I didn’t think she was romancing. Her use of the words “Ministry of Defence” without the definite article — the the that the average person would have wanted to add — was convincing; it suggested that she knew the words as well as she had said.

But nothing had happened to her father. Guns were changed; aircraft were modified or replaced; and the serviceman had become ordinary again. But his daughters had inherited through their mother a dream of glory together with a general pessimism, a wishing to hope and a nervousness about hoping. It made for temperament, frustration, self-destructiveness. It is as if we all carry in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors, as if we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us.

Brenda’s sister said, “I can’t talk. I didn’t do so well myself.”

She had married a builder who — when she had at last got out into the world, got away from the little army house — had seemed to her immensely prosperous and stylish; but had then seemed less so; had fallen on hard times, had done even worse when, trying to change his luck, he had set up in business in Germany; and had then been unfaithful with a younger woman, as glamoured by his manner as Brenda’s sister once had been. He had finally left home, left his wife and child.

An old story — that was what Brenda’s sister said; and that was the way she told it, playing down the drama. “As usual, Muggins was the last to know.” All her care now was for her son; he was her sole interest; she had narrowed herself down to that.

So, though she didn’t make the point, there was a pattern to her life. Her father had been replaced by her husband, and her husband by her son. Her life had repeated; she had lived the same life or versions of the same life. Or, looking at it another way, almost as soon as it had begun, her life of choice and passion had ended — as it had ended for her father, her mother, and possibly for generations of her ancestors.

All Brenda’s sister’s talk of herself came out without prompting; and her hysteria became noticeable. So it was possible, after her early calmness, even formality, in Mrs. Phillips’s sitting room, with the grand view, to see Brenda’s sister as an ill person, someone more marked than Brenda had been by their family past, the past that had really been the absence of a great event. And it was possible at the same time to see in her not only more and more reminders of Brenda’s looks, but also something — like another side — of Brenda’s passions. Such varied passions, so many roots, so little understood, even by the people who had become victims of those passions.

Then the hysterical woman with the still smooth skin, the still un-blotched color, remembered her social graces. The call was over. She had to do what she had come to do: collect the things of her sister, who had left so little behind.

We left the sitting room. A corridor; thick walls, stone mullions in the window; a door to the big kitchen. And there at the portico Mrs. Phillips said good-bye.

When we were out of the manor courtyard and on the rough, stony drive, Brenda’s sister said — and it was sudden after her apparent trustingness in the sitting room—“I don’t think I will ever forgive Mrs. Phillips.”

She was distressed. I began to walk with her to the road. As we walked below the yews she told me of Brenda’s flight to Italy.

Michael Allen had gone by air. Brenda had gone by train. During that journey — hearing so little English, talking so little to people — she had thought a lot about what she was doing and she had become afraid. By the time she reached Rome she had decided not to go to Michael. She thought she would go and stay at a hotel and get a message to Leslie, even send for him. She had a little money, enough for a few days. She booked into a hotel near the railway station. There was no telephone at home, in the thatched cottage. So she had telephoned the manor and asked for a message to be passed on to Leslie.

Nothing had happened; no word came from Leslie. Then, swallowing her pride (because there had been some quarrel between them), Brenda had telephoned the people in Jack’s old cottage — the woman who drove fast up the hill in her motorcar to collect her children from the school bus every weekday afternoon and had never smiled at me; the woman who had leveled Jack’s garden. But still no message came from Leslie. By this time Brenda’s money had run out. She had then done what she had decided not to do. She had gone after all to Michael Allen and had been with him until, as we had all been told, he had kicked her out.

She had come back aggrieved, angry, in a mood to taunt the man she regarded or pretended to regard as a queer, not fully a man. She felt mocked by the romantic impulse that had thrilled and sustained her for a while in the hotel near the railway station in Rome: the girl in need, the girl in danger, the lover eager at the other end. Leslie should have done everything, sold everything, to go to her. But there had been no word from Leslie.

Brenda’s sister said, “Mrs. Phillips never passed the message to Leslie. She did it four or five days later, when Brenda had left the hotel and was with Michael. She said she forgot. She said other things came up. She said she didn’t think it was all that important. But I think it was deliberate.”

From the woman who lived in Jack’s old house Brenda’s sister said she didn’t expect anything. But this story gave a new character to the woman — and the shape and color of her car — racing up the hill to meet her young children off the afternoon school bus.

One day, late in the summer, walking past the old farm buildings and what had been Jack’s cottage and garden — the junk and ruins which had formed no part of Jack’s vision of a world ever renewed, ruins to which now, across the droveway, was added a burning pit in the chalk for industrial-looking rubbish, the fire of which occasionally singed the silver birches planted years before to screen the old patch of waste ground — one day, walking past the farm and its spreading litter and on up to where the Swiss rolls of hay had been stacked and were already going black and brilliant green with new shoots of grass, I heard the sound of a great fire behind the young wood — and that wood was no longer so young.