V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

As soon as I understood that he was speaking in earnest, my vision of him changed. In the same features, the same way of speaking, I saw not the glibness of his cynicism but personal feeling and, soon, passion.

I thought later that there would have been another reason why it took me some time to understand that Bray was speaking seriously when he spoke of religion. It was that he was learning himself, that he was being inducted into some new doctrine which he had accepted without fully understanding, and had then had to learn about. A new doctrine: because the religion Bray had embraced was not the religion of the Victorian relics which he and thousands with him had rejected. The religion that emerged from his talk, the religion into which he was sinking week by week, had to do with healing, or more specifically a healer: a wise person (the sex of the person concealed by Bray); a Bible opened at random during a “service”; the words on the pages interpreted; the kneeling believers receiving each a personal message, personal guidance. A healer; “meetings” around a Bible as a sacred object; shared food; a hint of companionship, even conviviality, in piety.

This talk of meetings made me think of a “spiritualist” gathering I had gone to in a north London suburb twenty years before, out of interest (seeing the sensational meetings so matter-of-factly advertised outside the red-brick building) and also in the hope of finding copy for a five-minute radio talk for one of the magazine programs of the BBC overseas services.

It was in an upstairs room, reached directly by steps from the pavement; the lamp above the entrance was marked simply HALL. Most of the people waiting inside were regulars. Among them were some children, healthy, playful, a little restless. They sat in the front row. The medium was a heavy, ordinary, middle-aged woman. She apologized for being late; she said she had had to travel from somewhere south of the river. Very briskly, then, she started. There were messages for all of us. There was even one for me, from my grandfather, who was very far away, the medium said, and whose voice came only faintly to her.

But most terrible were the messages for the children, three or four of them, so handsome and well cared for, with their restless feet. These messages were preceded by the medium clutching at her throat and saying that she was choking, could hardly breathe. And the woman with the children, clearly their mother, gravely and without anguish, leaning forward (she sat in the row behind the children), nodded, as if to corroborate the identity of the spirit who was transmitting this message. Her husband, the father of the children, had been hanged. And I never got to know (I never asked the person who had told me) whether the father had been hanged by the state — in England or abroad — or had hanged himself. Every fortnight now the hanged man’s family came to have this communion with him — which no doubt explained their composure: they were believers. There was a simple message for each child — help Mummy, be good at school; and each child waited for his or her message; and became grave when the message came. What memories they would retain of these visits! New characters, new passions, were being given them, to separate them from their fellows. Twenty, thirty years from then, those characters (in adult bodies and with adult needs) would act out those passions.

Something of that chill of twenty years before came to me when Bray talked to me of his meetings. He himself was as composed as the children and wife of the hanged man twenty years before. They had been driven by a dreadful need, clear for all to see. What was the need that had driven Bray?

He was so full of talk, so opinionated, so full of noise, that I hadn’t stopped to think about the satisfactions or otherwise of his life. A married daughter lived in Devon, where she had moved after her husband had found “a piece of ground” (Bray’s words); she never came back to visit. Bray gave many reasons when he first mentioned the fact; but then he gave none. What did she have to come back to? And thinking of Bray in this way, attempting to see him from the point of view of the daughter who had resolved to stay away, I had another idea of the man, saw how overpowering he might be, how constricting life in his house could be. And this new idea of Bray was added to the idea of the man with memories of the fields full of laborers at harvesttime, of allowances of beer, of children taking tea to their fathers and grandfathers; the man with his undisclosed memory of taint from his short holiday job as a boy in the manor; his wish to be independent, combined with his unwitting possession, as a servant, someone trained to please, of three or four characters.

I had sensed a little of his instability. But what had now befallen him? From what I heard, in those meetings (in some town on the south coast) and in this sharing of food, this communion, Bray had joined people whom the radical conservative in him despised: workers, people looking for employment, the kind of person he, Bray, the self-employed man, celebrating his freedom after his father’s and grandfather’s lifetime of servitude, looked down on. The man who scoffed at Pitton, exulted in his fall, now showed sympathy for people like Pitton, people for whom in England, even in this well-to-do part of England, there was no longer room: people coming down from the Midlands and finding themselves dispossessed, without lodgings or security, people (unlike the naked souls in the Doomsday painting in St. Thomas’s) who knew what it was to be in charge of their fates, but felt they had lost control.

The more I heard about Bray’s meetings the more I thought of that London meeting of twenty years before. And the scene reconstructed itself in one detail after another, down to the lamp painted HALL shining palely in the quiet street, quiet at night in that part of residential London in those days, with few people out and very few cars. So ordinary and dull the street, so desperate the people up there, in the room at the top of the tall flight of stairs.

“It’s as with everything else,” Bray said. “You can take out only what you put in. The more you put in, the more you take out. The good book is always open for you.”

From Mrs. Bray I heard more. She was someone I hardly knew. I knew her mainly as a voice on the telephone. She answered the telephone when Bray was out and made the bookings for him; he telephoned her regularly when he was out. She was brisk (Bray’s instructions, to save his customers telephone charges); she was efficient. No extra talk there. A cheerful little voice on the telephone; its possessor hardly seen. She lived in her house — there was no garden: Bray’s paved yard left little space for anything like that. She was driven into Salisbury or Andover by Bray to do her shopping; she seldom took the bus. Sometimes Bray, in the car, greeted her in Salisbury. Then I saw her: a very small, thin woman, a wisp of a woman, hardly there — as though life with Bray, the driver, the mechanic, the man with strong views, the hard worker, the perverse neglecter of the valley’s beauty, had worn her down. It was from her, now, that I heard more of Bray’s religion and “meetings.”

“I can’t answer for him these days. He’s at one of his meetings, I expect. He’s emptied the deep-freeze. That’s how I know. That’s not the way you treat a deep-freeze. I don’t understand him. If you have a deep-freeze, you build it up. You don’t keep emptying it.”

I had heard about the deep-freeze from Bray. It was important to him. I didn’t have one myself and he delighted in telling me about the rituals connected with it. The bulk buying (and at reduced prices from certain shops, apparently), the cooking and the storing of great batches — the deep-freeze made food the center of a new kind of ritual, provided a new kind of shopping, a new kind of excursion, restored an idea of plenty and harvesttime and celebration.