V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Mrs. Bray had her own ideas. Towards the deep-freeze she was more squirrellike, hoarding, wishing to keep the granary full. And when one day I met her at the bus stop — unusually: she was usually driven by Bray to Salisbury or Amesbury or Andover or to some special discount supermarket on the outskirts of Southampton — she was still inflamed about the deep-freeze. So small, so thin, so inflamed.

She said, the rooks cawing and flapping above us: “If you have a deep-freeze, you build it up. You don’t keep emptying it.” She spoke as though, in an ideal world, she would keep her deep-freeze full forever and never touch it. She spoke as though — in spite of the manifest hardships, the absence of Bray and a car — the replenishing of the deep-freeze was the purpose of her trip to Salisbury. She repeated, “You build it up.”

At the end of the road — no longer hidden at its far end by the elms and the growth at the roadside between the elms — the red bus appeared.

She waited until the bus almost stopped. She said, “It’s that fancy woman of his.”

The words burst out of her. As though the arrival of the bus, the sudden darkening of the bus-stop area, the folding door opening back, the noise of the engine, had provided her with the correct dramatic moment for the disclosure, the abandoning of civility and talking about things she didn’t absolutely have on her mind. And having taken her inflamed mood up several degrees, she stamped into the bus, slapped her coins down on the driver’s little stand, and generally did as much as she could to draw attention to herself and her anger.

She sat in one of the front seats — such fuss, such commotion from such a small person — and paid no further attention to me. And I wondered whether in 1950, when I was eighteen and new to England, new to adult life, I wondered whether, seeing a woman of that age in a bus behaving in such a way, I would have thought it even likely that the anger of a woman so old and small and white-haired would have had to do with her husband’s “fancy woman.”

The words, coming from that little lady, were shocking to me. I had known her for so long as a friendly, brisk voice on the telephone, knowing my voice and taking pleasure in anticipating my name before I spoke it. “Can do,” “Will do,” “Thank you, sir”—those were the words (spoken swiftly on the telephone, to prevent me from having to put in new coins) I associated with her. “Fancy woman” was awful — demeaning to her, demeaning to the woman she was talking about (if such a woman existed), demeaning to her husband, demeaning (the way obscenities of speech are demeaning) to all of us.

And it was of this other woman that I now heard from Mrs. Bray, on the telephone, at the bus stop (where she began to appear more often), and in the shopping streets of Salisbury. How had Bray met this other woman? Who would be attracted to Bray? I had never thought of Bray as a partner for anyone; but that was a man’s way of looking. In this business of sensing or seeing partners, a woman would live in a different world.

In the beginning I had had my doubts about the existence of this woman. But then, quite quickly, from Mrs. Bray’s circumstantial stories, I believed there was a woman; and from Mrs. Bray’s stories I could see the point up to which Bray had directly and innocently spoken about the woman, speaking of the oddity of the meeting with her as he might have spoken of any other oddity connected with his taxi work.

She had arrived late one night at Salisbury railway station on a slow train from the south. (Only a few details, in Mrs. Bray’s stories, of the age and appearance of this woman; and I had no idea whether all these details had formed part of Bray’s story as he had told it to Mrs. Bray.) She had told the ticket collector that she had no ticket; no money; no place to spend the night. He or a colleague had telephoned the police; they (the curious, taken-for-granted humanity of the British state and its officials) arranged for the woman to be put up in a bed-and-breakfast place for the night; a decision about what was to be done with her was to be taken by higher officers the next day. The bed-and-breakfast place was run by a man supplementing his poor income from his original business, a picture framing-junkshop-antique shop.

It was at the request of the police (or a policeman), then, that Bray (the fair, the reliable, and ready for a job at any time of day or night) had gone to the railway station and taken the woman to the bed-and-breakfast place. That must have made an impression on him — the bright lights of the station, its near-emptiness, the solitude of the woman.

But it was the next day that his feelings were engaged, when in the morning he had gone to the place to take the woman to the police station. As she came down the short paved path from the front door he saw (as he had told Mrs. Bray) the rotten, spotty complexion of the woman, the over-big tweed overcoat (clearly somebody else’s) she had on, the general manner of the dropouts or “traveling people” of the neighborhood whom he so disliked. But then suddenly (as he had told Mrs. Bray), when she had come out past the wicket gate onto the pavement, she had turned on him with anger, sarcasm, scorn. And she — narrow, close-set eyes — had said, almost shouted, to him: “But I have no money, you know.”

Mrs. Bray reported the woman’s sarcasm with a sarcasm of her own. But it was possible, even with this, to see how Bray would have been taken aback and to see how, in the very aggression of the woman, the spirit she showed at that particular moment, he would have found an attraction, would have fallen for her weakness, her need, her dependence on him at that moment. She had then said to him with a continuation of her hostility and pride (which clearly at the same time contained an appeal to someone she had seen faltering): “You know where they’ll be sending me back to, don’t you?” Not jail; if it had been, Bray wouldn’t have responded. It was a kind of county home for people with nervous disorders. And in that grown woman there was something of the child who still expected its pleas to move adults, to move others.

That was what Bray had told Mrs. Bray. There his direct, early story stopped. And the reason was that for that wounded, appealing child in that woman’s body, for that soul imprisoned behind those eyes, Bray had felt an immense passion, and all the protectiveness of his nature. Whenever I thought of the woman and Bray, I thought of those sentences. Mrs. Bray spoke them often: the only intimacy of the couple to which she had been admitted. “But I have no money, you know.” “You know where they’ll be sending me back to, don’t you?”

He didn’t take her to the police station, didn’t get her involved in any paperwork there. He offered to keep her at the bed-and-breakfast place. He knew the man, the junkshop man who had begun his business as a picture framer and called his shop a gallery.

This man had been like so many others, shopkeepers or would-be shopkeepers, who had been attracted to Salisbury for the sake of its civility and wealth and countryside, but hadn’t sufficiently studied the pattern of its traffic, the location of the car parks, the very roundabout one-way-street system, or understood the way shoppers moved about the town center.

A shop might be just two or three minutes’ walk from the market square, but could be off the main shopping track. Many little businesses failed — quickly, visibly. Especially pathetic were the shops that — not understanding that people with important shopping to do usually did it in London — aimed at style. How dismal those boutiques and women’s dress shops quickly became, the hysteria of their owners showing in their windows! Not in the turbulence or disorder of their display but in the opposite, a melancholy unassertiveness, not the un-assertiveness of good taste or old-fashionedness, but something more like a nervous condition, as though the window wished it didn’t have to be seen, this unassertiveness of the window like an expression of the owner’s wish to abandon the project, run away.