V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

The water bailiffs had released young trout near here, and they hadn’t wandered far. They were unexpectedly unattractive, as nervous as rats, of that color as well, and as swift and devious and silent as rats as they made for the camouflage of the dark river weeds.

This was the river walk, barely ten minutes, hardly a walk to someone used to walking most days for about an hour and a half. But the walk was always new; the river and what I saw always changed. There was the blue iris I saw in my first spring. Solitary among the weeds and nettles at the edge of the water meadow. I was transported at the sight, and instantly had the wish, if I ever were to plant a garden of my own, to try to achieve that effect. And then, in the light-headedness of my convalescence, I began (until I sobered up again) to walk through the nettles to the iris, as though the beauty of what I saw lay not in the setting, but in that particular iris.

There were the scented old roses in the wild rose bed. And the roses I saw that first summer were the last: I was in at that particular death. Because in the autumn Mrs. Phillips pruned them, “cut them right back,” as she said; and those old rose bushes, cut down to the quick, all turned to brier again.

There was a time of the spring or summer — every year — when a pale blue lawn weed floated like a blue mist above the daisy-spotted lawn. And always there was the river. It was the river, with its overwhelming beauty of reeds and weeds and moving water and changing reflections, that made me say, long before I felt myself in tune with other plants and truly in tune with the seasons: “At least I’ve had a year of this.” And then: “At least I’ve had two years of this.”

And just as, on the walk over the downs past Jack’s cottage, I always in the beginning looked for the warm brown fur of the hares, so on this shorter river walk I looked for the miniature volcano of the salmon’s nest in the white chalk of the riverbed; and the still, dark pike waiting in a deep pool where the water was dark in the shadow of reeds. And I looked for the vole or water rat. I knew the little tree on whose lower branch he liked to sun himself, after shaking his fur. I often saw him swimming across the river; and once I saw him so soundly asleep that — thinking he was dead — I went and stood over him. I often heard the surprised plop of his fellows as they dived into their river holes, sending up silent muddy clouds.

Every winter and spring created fresh havoc in the manor gardens and water meadows. The bridges over the channels decayed and decayed. The gate at the very last (or the first) bridge was eventually left open one year and collapsed finally of its own rot. The river changed its course by a few feet, washing over the path that the water bailiffs had kept clear; and the planks that spanned the channels were lost below water. New two-plank bridges were built, one plank plain, one covered with wire netting, for the grip it gave both to shoes and to the wheels of the bailiffs’ barrows.

On this walk, as on the longer walk on the downs past Jack’s cottage, I lived not with the idea of decay — that idea I quickly shed — so much as with the idea of change. I lived with the idea of change, of flux, and learned, profoundly, not to grieve for it. I learned to dismiss this easy cause of so much human grief. Decay implied an ideal, a perfection in the past. But would I have cared to be in my cottage while the sixteen gardeners worked? When every growing plant aroused anxiety, every failure pain or criticism? Wasn’t the place now, for me, at its peak? Finding myself where I was, I thought — after the journey that had begun so long before — that I was blessed.

And then one day, quite unexpectedly, walking with freedom at the back of the manor, walking at the edge of both the ruined water meadow and the wild manor lawn, I saw my landlord.

T HIS WAS my second glimpse of my landlord; there never was to be another. And it was as confusing as my first, when I had seen him sitting beside Mr. Phillips in the motorcar, driving along the narrow road below the beeches planted by his father. I had barely seen him that time in the motorcar, had barely had time to focus on him, and the car had moved on, leaving me with a more precise, and surprising, picture of Mr. Phillips — happy, not at all irritable in the company of his master, more like an impresario, like a man who was fully himself, had a proper idea of his duties and worth.

And just as after that first sighting my imagination had played with a half-impression of my landlord, now making him benign, now making him buttoned up, with dark glasses and the long hair of a Howard Hughes recluse, so now, because (being as nervous myself of being seen as he was) I turned away as soon as I saw him and never looked back, my memories were as much of the shock of the moment as of the man I had glimpsed.

I saw him from a great distance, almost as soon as I had walked past the old rose bed (without roses now, a brier wilderness, long after that first summer of thorny, densely petaled, scented, lilac-pink roses) and had stepped onto the lawn proper, full of daisies.

He was sitting in the pool of sunlight between the great evergreen that shaded much of the lawn, the big, partly broken greenhouse, and the wood at the side of the house, through which I had seen little paths, which I had never explored, for fear of intruding, for fear of disturbing my landlord, for fear of something very like this moment.

He was sitting (as I thought or felt afterwards) in a canvas-backed easy chair in the sunlight, facing south, with his back to me. He was wearing a wide-brimmed hat. That hat obscured the shape or the baldness or otherwise of his head, just as the canvas back of his chair obscured the bulk or otherwise of his back or torso.

From the first sighting I had had of him I had retained one clear physical detail: the little low wave he had given against the dashboard of his car. I had invested that wave with his shyness, the shyness of his illness, the shyness that went at the same time (as I thought) with a great vanity, the shyness that wasn’t so much a wish not to be seen as a wish to be applauded on sight, to be recognized on sight as someone stupendous and of interest; and I had also invested that wave with his benevolence.

From this second glimpse I again retained just one clear physical detail: it was of his crossed leg and his bare bent knee — shining in the sun. He was wearing shorts; they were tight around the plump thigh I saw. This wish of my landlord for nakedness and physical self-cherishing — stories had come my way, from the Phillipses and from Bray, the car-hire man, whose father had worked in the manor long ago, of the great beauty of my landlord as a young man — this idea of beauty and the flesh now went with an opposite reality: the fatness of self-indulgence and inactivity.

It is that detail — the pool of sunlight in the wilderness, the sun on the fat shining leg — that fixes the season for me. I knew of course that he kept to his room in the cold weather, and went out of doors only in fine weather. He had been granted at birth a great house and a wide view in the dampest part of the county, on the riverbank, in a valley (which often, looking down from the viewing point on my other walk, I had seen covered entirely with mist). But his instincts were Mediterranean, tropical; he loved the sun. Inertia, habit, friendships, a wish to be where his worth was known — perhaps these things had kept him in his inherited house. Perhaps if he could have taken friends and social connections, the knowledge in others of his social worth, everything that protected him, he might have moved. But he stayed in his house, which was his setting, and dreamed of being elsewhere, dreamed in his own way.