V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

The rutted droveway, running past little houses and gardens (one of them the old farm manager’s house, with its full, many-colored suburban-English garden), became paved and then, very quickly losing mystery, met the public road. This road ran on a ledge or cutting in the down just above the river. It was the road Jack, after his drinking that Sunday lunchtime, had decided not to take. There was a steep drop down to the river. To the right there was a weir. And, beyond, water meadows that were like the water meadows Constable had painted one hundred and fifty years before.

After antiquity, Constable and also the more recent past. It was of Augustus John that I had first thought, very vaguely, when I had seen the gypsy caravan across the droveway from Jack’s cottage and the old farm buildings. Then (after I had got to know the book) the caravan brought to mind, at the same time as it gave a reality to, the drawings and colored illustrations by E. H. Shepard for The Wind in the Willows . That book itself, about a river like the one I now saw, still seemed new, contemporary. And the paint on the caravan — which appeared to be in such good order and seemed to have been temporarily parked — was still so bright that it was easy to imagine that the caravan might be on the road again one day, and that just around the corner on the droveway (by the silver birches, say) one might come upon the old world — in which that caravan once had a real place — going on.

Just in this way now the water meadows had the effect (in one corner of the mind) of abolishing the distance between Constable and the present: the painter, the man with his colors and brushes and boards, seemed as near and contemporary as what he made us now see: the water channels and pollarded willows he had settled down one day to paint. This idea of the painter, this glimpse of the painter’s view, made the past ordinary. The past was like something one could stretch out and reach; it was like something physically before one, like something one could walk in.

Shepard and Constable — they had imposed their vision on an old landscape. But on their vision was imposed something else now, a modern picturesque. Beeches as old as the century lined the narrow road. Hundreds, thousands, of young beeches grew on the leaf-strewn slope between the main row of beeches at the edge of the down and the asphalted road; and thousands more on the steeper slope from the road down to the river. All the shades of delicate light-shot green, of overlapping, transparent green leaves, hung over the road. This was the scenic drive the taxi drivers of the town took visitors along.

The beeches had been planted at the turn of the century by the father of my landlord and were now like a natural — wasting — monument of the father’s grandeur. This grandeur had come from the consolidation and extension in imperial times of a family fortune established earlier, during the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The family had its roots elsewhere; many branches of the family now flourished elsewhere. But my landlord lived on here — where once his family had owned nearly all the land and many of the houses — in a few acres beside the river.

And it was here, on this road, at the end of my walk, below the trees planted by his father before he, the son, had been born, that I had my first and only true glimpse of my landlord.

It was a confused glimpse. The road was narrow, curving. I was nervous of the car, as I was nervous of all cars or vehicles on this stretch of road with its blind curves. Then — rather late — I saw that it was the manor car; then I thought to look for Mr. Phillips, and to acknowledge him. Mr. Phillips was smiling. It was a friendly, happy smile, and it was odd in a man whose manner and instincts were authoritarian and protective, and whose usual expression in public was one of sternness and irritability. The smile, then, the conviviality and relaxedness of it, told me that the occasion was special and his passenger was special.

And I knew at once, I had an immediate idea, that the person sitting beside Mr. Phillips was my landlord, the man in the manor, the man I had got used to not seeing. And before — forgetting Mr. Phillips’s smile and the dangers of the road — I could properly focus on the stranger, the car had gone. This was my only glimpse of my landlord, his face; and I wasn’t sure what I had seen.

I had an impression of a round face, a bald head, a suit (or the jacket of a brown suit), a benign expression. What I most clearly remembered — it was the detail I was sure of: not the kind of detail that imagination could supply — was a low, slow wave of a hand. A wave just above the dashboard, so that from the road I saw the tips of his fingers making an arc at the bottom of the windshield.

We had never met. Mr. Phillips must have told him who I was; and — in spite of the bad sight he was said to have, one of his many afflictions — he must have seen me before I had seen him. And secure in the car, with Mr. Phillips at his side, he must have seen me more clearly than I had seen him. My glimpse had been so hurried, so shot through with the confusion of the moment — coming at the end of a swift sequence of little alarms and recognitions — that I wasn’t sure whether my imagination, as instantaneously as in a dream, hadn’t suggested certain of the details I thought I had seen, to supply me with a picture of the man I had more or less created in my head already.

I had an impression of benignity above the wave. But I had cause to question that impression when I spoke to Mr. Phillips on the telephone in the evening. With a laugh that was like a carry-over from the smiling good humor I had seen in him in the car that afternoon, he said yes, the man I had seen in the car was my landlord. And then, as though explaining my doubt, Mr. Phillips said, “He always wears dark glasses in the car. Otherwise his stomach gets upset, and then he gets a migraine.” How then, if he had been wearing dark glasses, had I seen a benign expression in his eyes?

So this glimpse of my landlord — this glimpse of someone unexpectedly ordinary — made him, after all, more mysterious. And more than the man, it was the occasion that was memorable: the manor car with the descendant of the manor builder and the planter of the trees, driving below the beeches on the ledge at the rim of the down, just above the river and the water meadows. So that more than ever for me the personality of the man continued to be expressed by his setting, by these beeches on the public road, by the permanently closed front gate of the manor and the overgrown garden at the back.

My imagination had given me a glimpse of a benign elderly man in a brown jacket making a shy wave from his car. This picture — created in a flash as the car had gone by — answered my own need. It was how I wished to think of the man in whose grounds I had so unexpectedly, for the first time in my adult life, found myself at peace.

I soon learned that the picture wasn’t true. Neither was the other picture which I carried, a contrary, slightly sinister picture I had allowed my fantasy to work up from details given then and at other times by Mr. Phillips: of a fat, round-faced man buttoned up in a suit, with dark glasses and a hat, being taken out for a spin through countryside he would never otherwise see; being taken out for thrilling but safe glimpses (safe, as for a child standing behind a rail at the top of a tower and looking down) of the world from which he had withdrawn; yet never too thrilling, not London, for instance; just the countryside, and the houses of a few people he knew very well, and some hotels on the south coast, where he went in fine weather to have lunch or to get his hair cut. (This last detail, given me quite innocently by Mr. Phillips one day, added long, lank hair to the dark-glassed and otherwise formally suited recluse of my fantasy: I saw my landlord being at once pushed and supported into the lobby of some Victorian hotel by Mr. Phillips, Mr. Phillips holding on with both hands to the left arm of his charge, while the free right hand of my landlord blindly groped.)