V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

She spoke as though Pitton’s refusal the previous day to acknowledge his notice or his news — when she would have been waiting for his reaction — was wicked, and deserved the punishment it got. She spoke as though this wickedness of Pitton’s made everything explicable, absolved us all of the need to feel concerned for Pitton and frightened for ourselves.

And it was strange, Pitton’s silence of the previous day. Had he not understood, had he not taken in what had been said to him? Had he simply not listened? Had the words of the man in the gray suit been roundabout? Had the news been too shocking for Pitton to believe it? Or was it his own form of magic? I remembered how when Jack had fallen ill and his garden had grown wild, and the chimney was smoking in the summer, and Jack was in his bedroom trying to get warm, trying to unfreeze the blocks of ice that his lungs must have felt like, I remembered how Jack’s wife had denied that anything was wrong with the garden; and her manner had even suggested that I had said something discourteous and wrong.

S O QUITE suddenly, from one day to the next, part of the routine of the manor I had grown into, part of my new life and comfort, my private, living book of hours, was snapped.

I never saw Pitton unlatching the wide white gate at the end of the lawn at nine again, or walking back to it at one and then at five with the special slow step of a man who had done his morning’s and then his day’s labor. Were there personal things he had left behind in the garden shed — Wellingtons, a plastic raincoat, a jacket? Did he come back for these things later, or did he abandon them, with the garden-shed key? The key he had carried in that intimate way, on a chain that ran from a loop in his waistband to his right trouser pocket. That key he had to give up to Mr. Phillips.

And thereafter at odd hours the washed-out green-painted garden-shed door (beside the thick-stalked rose bush, now almost a small tree, that Pitton had pruned year by year) thereafter for long periods during the day that door remained open — Pitton’s shed exposed, Pitton’s territory no longer Pitton’s (neither shed, nor key, nor tools, nor the heavy, tilting gate to the vegetable garden). That open garden-shed door, which Pitton had been so particular to keep closed — I could see it from the window of my room, and it was unsettling. I wished to close it; it was like the wish to straighten a mirror or picture hanging crooked on a wall. That open door, together with other changes — it was as though the man concerned had died in some unsanctified way, and everything that had been his could now be treated without ceremony.

When Jack — over the hill — had fallen ill, his flower and fruit garden had grown wild; and his vegetable garden — created in the waste ground between the farmyard metal dump below the beeches and the beginning of the cultivated down — had gone to seed. Pitton’s vegetable garden didn’t go to seed. It was tended through the summer and its produce was gathered in. Many strangers now came to the manor grounds, to do irregularly, in bits and pieces, the job that Pitton had done with unhurried system, the job around which he had built his mornings and his afternoons, his week, his year, marking the end of each stage with his own kind of ritual. This fragmentation of his job was like a further downgrading of the man, downgrading him now, and downgrading all he had done and been in the past, all his careful routine.

Some of the strangers in the manor were casual workers, paid by the hour or the day and obtained by the Phillipses from I don’t know where, perhaps from the places Mr. Phillips had worked in before. Some were friends. One, who soon ceased to be a stranger, was Mr. Phillips’s widowed father.

He was much smaller than his son, and slighter. Physically he was of another generation, another world: one could see in him the physique of agricultural workers in old photographs. Since the death of his wife, Mr. Phillips’s mother, the old man had been solitary. This opening up of the manor grounds to him (where he had been only an occasional visitor on Saturday afternoons), and the opportunity for a little light work, was a blessing to the old man.

He lived much in the past, and liked to talk of the past. He was sociable. Solitude was not something he had chosen. It was like old age: something he had had to learn to live with. He had been born not far away and had lived all his life in the county. He told me at our first meeting, just outside my kitchen door, that he had started life as a carrier’s boy — the carrier for whom he worked making a living by carrying goods and parcels for people living along the eight miles between Amesbury and Salisbury. The old man spoke of this job, his first, as of something indescribably rich and rewarding, an enchantment.

He dressed neatly, in jacket and tie, like Pitton, and unlike his son, who preferred more casual and “sporty” clothes. And again unlike his son, the old man wore very pale colors: it was as though the chalk of the downs by which he had been surrounded all his life had affected his taste in colors, had made him see tints where another person might have seen something neutral. The old man often came now simply to walk about the grounds; and he dressed for these walks in the manor bush as though for an urban promenade — in this he was like Pitton, in my earliest memory of Pitton. Sometimes, with the suit or the sports jacket and tie, the old man also walked with a staff, of a sort I had never seen before: shoulder-high, with a prong or fork at the top in which the thumb was rested: the carrier’s boy now walking freely, privileged as the father of his son, walking with his old-fashioned staff in the overgrown grounds of a big house that was being built while he was a carrier’s boy. Did the old man make the connection?

The summer jobs were done. The fallen aspens — about whose wide, tangled spread of broken branches grass and weeds had grown tall and dark, a separate area of vegetation — the fallen aspens were cut up with a chain saw and the cut logs piled up in the back garden. Grass now grew tall around the log piles, just as grass and the plants they attracted grew into a bush around the trunk fragments that were too big to cut up and stayed more or less where they had fallen, soon looking old, like old debris, suggesting the further advance onto the back lawn of the water-meadow wilderness. The grass of that lawn was cut — the area of the aspen fall never recovered, never returned to grass, and was abandoned to weeds and marsh growth — and the lawn in front of my cottage was cut. And the vegetable garden was looked after.

This garden was hidden from my cottage by a high wall. Beyond the half-cottage that was my outbuilding there was, set in this wall, the heavy gate with the metal bars. This gate hung unevenly, but Pitton had developed the knack of closing it. His successors didn’t have this knack. The gate, unlatched, dragged more and more and was eventually left open: Pitton’s garden, the scene of his secret labors, was now quite exposed.

Astonishing now, when I went in to look, astonishing as always, the different sense of space, the openness on the other side of the garden wall. The wall on that side was warm, sun-bleached; old fruit trees had been trained and pinned against it. The wall on my side was damp, always in shadow, only summer weeds growing in the poor soil at its base. The wall that I saw from my cottage was a northern wall. The wall on the other side was Mediterranean: part of the grandeur of the original walled-garden design, with its paths, its nursery beds, its vegetable areas, its formal orchard. Pitton had been able to keep only part of the garden going; but he had honored its formality, design, and dignity. Now, after the bonanza of his vegetable garden, his successors were creating only an allotment.