V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

The writer saw Pitton — it was summer now, and Pitton was in his summer clothes, with his straw hat — picking his way back slowly to the white gate. Pitton’s morning work was done; he was going home for lunch. He timed his lunchtime exit so that he would reach the white gate more or less at one o’clock. Pitton was on the far side of the lawn, not looking at my windows, staring ahead like the fawn-colored Labrador.

Tony said, “Is that your landlord?”

“He’s the gardener.”

Tony said, “It proves something I’ve long held. People get to look like their employees.”

I hadn’t truly seen my landlord and didn’t know what he looked like. Tony had perhaps seen him years before, in London, in the days when my landlord was socially active, a man about town, before he had withdrawn.

But Pitton’s resemblance to my landlord — if such a resemblance did exist — couldn’t have been induced in the way Tony was suggesting: the employee imitating the employer, and the employer then, out of laziness, out of being flattered, imitating the imitation of his employee. Pitton’s resemblance to my landlord would have been an accident, a coincidence; because Pitton had come to the manor at about the time my landlord had withdrawn, at the beginning of my landlord’s great depression. Even now, as I heard from the Phillipses, my landlord came out of his room only on the finest days; and Pitton hardly saw him. It was the Phillipses who mediated between my landlord and the gardener — or, more properly, the garden.

My landlord couldn’t have been Pitton’s model. But I felt at once that there was something in what Tony had said or implied about Pitton; that the style was modeled on that of a superior. Pitton, as I heard, had been in the army in some capacity before coming to the manor — we were in a military area. And turning over this question of Pitton’s model after Tony’s visit — in fact, never losing the idea as long as I saw Pitton — it came to me that Pitton’s model (with the encouragement of Mrs. Pitton) would have been an army officer of twenty or twenty-five years before whom Pitton had served or served under (someone still alive in Pitton’s memory: Pitton’s imitation this officer’s chief memorial, perhaps).

The army was still important to Pitton. His son was in the army. The progress — or the postings — of this boy was the only topic which could make Mrs. Pitton, blinking fast, speak a sentence or two; normally she only smiled and looked pretty. We met occasionally at the bus stop, in the shade of the dark yews and beeches. There were not many buses; the road was fairly quiet; and voices at the bus stop sounded and echoed almost as in a room. We spoke about her son as though he were no more than a boy at school, as though, say, he was doing reasonably well with the books, but doing a little better in the swimming and the sports.

The word “school” did in fact come up in Mrs. Pitton’s talk of her son’s army life. She told me at the bus stop one day, “They’ve sent him to the artillery school.” This would have been at Larkhill. Apt name once: these downs around Stonehenge rang at the appropriate season with lark song. But now — untouched though the green downs looked — Larkhill was the name of the army artillery school, booming away during the day and sometimes during the night and sometimes, if there was a big exercise, night and day.

Because Pitton’s son was there, and because Pitton told me of the great event, I went in my first summer to the artillery school’s “open day.” It was like one of the summer rowing occasions at Oxford, when the families of undergraduates occupied the college barges. It was like the sports day at my school, Queen’s Royal College, in colonial Trinidad. I recognized the occasion at once. Instead of masters and boys, there were officers and soldiers; instead of sports, displays with guns, displays of great skill. But there was the same atmosphere of the fair, of food and women’s clothes, of unusual colors, of normally hidden family relationships now publicly exposed; the same half-humorous loudspeaker announcements, the same atmosphere of dressing up and showing off, the same atmosphere of a society especially mixed for that day — boys and masters showing off at the school sports, men and officers showing off here, whole families showing off, women and girls displaying themselves, the poorer very concerned not to be outfaced.

I could see the attraction of the occasion for the Pittons. I could see that it might well have been their most important social occasion for the year. And the open day did provide a little extra conversation for a while with Mrs. Pitton at the bus stop.

Then she told me one day that her son had finished his training at the artillery school. It had gone well. “His friends gave him a little momento.” And believing perhaps that “momento” might be an army word, another special army word, as new and puzzling to me as it had been to her, she repeated it and explained it. “A little momento of his time with them. An old-fashioned brass cannon set in clear plastic, like a diamond.”

A cheap souvenir; the smiling, empty-faced woman speaking of her son as of a child still. The “momento,” the bad art: the reality — the army, the soldier son — should have matched. But the reality was different. The reality was serious. The Pitton boy was being trained as a killer soldier, the new-style British soldier. And he was suited to the part. He was a giant, with very big feet. The fineness of the strain that had produced Mrs. Pitton’s features had ended with her or had skipped her son.

It was astonishing that now — after its ineptitude in the nineteenth century, which was yet the century of the great glory of the empire; and after its great but wasting achievements in the Second World War, at the end of that imperial glory — it was astonishing that now, when there were no more big wars for the country to fight, the British army should be concentrating on producing this kind of elite soldier. There were occasional incidents in the little towns around Salisbury Plain; the taxi drivers sometimes had trouble at night. But in our valley we seldom saw a soldier or an army vehicle. Army vehicles seemed not to be allowed there; in our valley we lived protected from what surrounded us, just as in the nineteenth century the big industrialists lived in country estates outside the industrial towns where they made their fortunes.

Pitton’s boy came home one weekend with his “girl.” On Sunday afternoon he took her up to the viewing point. That was when I saw them. I was coming down the hill at the end of my own walk. The small girl clung to the giant, seeming to wrap herself around him, in a demonstrative way I had never seen in the valley. Or it might have been that I was at the age when I was able to observe these things with detachment, the detachment and knowingness I was aiming at when I was eighteen, and doing my drafts of “Gala Night.” The boy, the girl; the parents’ house; the walk before tea — the tribal ritual, setting the observer at a distance.

But how disquieting that boy’s face was! In spite of his size, one could see the child his mother still saw: the unformed features still, the conflation of the two gentle faces, Pitton’s and Mrs. Pitton’s, the two simple, inarticulate people I knew, inarticulate but with their own vanities, the two faces meeting in the dangerous obedience, the new vanity, of the soldier.

It was this quality of obedience in Pitton — the obedience he had passed on to his soldier son — that separated him from Jack. Over the hill, in a kind of no-man’s land beside the droveway and the half-abandoned farmyard, Jack did more or less what Pitton did in the wilderness of the manor grounds. But Jack was free in a way Pitton wasn’t and now could never be. Perhaps it was Jack’s intellectual backwardness, his purely physical nature, that made him content with what he had. And that was not little. Jack was lucky in his circumstances: his cottage, the land he could till, and, above all, his isolation, the silence and solitude he went to sleep in and woke up to. These circumstances, taken together, made his backwardness unimportant, and not the burden it might so easily have been in another place. These circumstances of Jack’s, together with the nature of the man, made his life appear like a constant celebration. That labor in his garden, after his paid work on the farm, that exhaustion, the pleasures then of food and the drive to the pub, the long, muzzying drinks, the sight year after year of the sweet or beautiful — and profitable — fruits of his labor: why not, then, the bare back in the summer, as much as the fire in winter?