V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

He said, “I gave Mrs. Bray a lift last week. She’s very fierce these days. Do you know John Bray? Why does he charge so little? He’ll have to work till he dies. He provides a good service. He’s dependable; he has a lot of regulars; people like him. I’ve often told him that as a car-hire man he should charge as much as the market will bear. But he goes his own way.”

We passed an old farm, ruined old walls, muddy yard.

My new neighbor said, “My mother grew up in that house. Different people now, of course.”

It was his way, not an unpleasant way, of claiming the valley, claiming kinship with the people of the valley. I thought of Mr. Phillips’s father, going watery-eyed at the thought of his early days, the beginning of the century, in the valley, and his first job as a carrier’s boy; his boy’s adventure of hiding in “a bed of withies” when the motorcar had knocked down his cousin. There was, in my neighbor’s talk, a wish to be linked to that kind of past, the past contained as well in Bray’s memories of harvesttime and children taking tea to their grandfathers in the fields. But at the same time there was an element in my neighbor — his big quiet car, being driven without hurry beside the river — of the rich man unbending.

“How’s Mrs. Phillips?”

I didn’t know there had been anything particularly wrong with her. I was aware only that, like my landlord after his two glorious outgoing summers, Mrs. Phillips had retreated, was less in evidence. But I hadn’t inquired why.

My neighbor said, “I believe her nerves are getting the better of her.”

Mrs. Bray’s rages, Bray’s fares, Mrs. Phillips’s increased nerves — I was impressed by the minuteness of my new neighbor’s knowledge; and I believe he intended me to be impressed. In my mind — with the speeding up of the years, consequent on my own aging as well as on my repeating experience of the seasons in the valley (less and less new knowledge added every year), and with the dislocation of memory caused by recent events (like the departure of Pitton) — in my mind, he, my neighbor, had only just arrived in the valley.

We came to the village with the bridge over the river. My neighbor turned off the main valley road and steered his big car gently over the narrow railed bridge.

He said, “I often take this road. There are some pretty little bits.” He was at once proprietorial and celebratory, as celebratory of the valley and the river as I had been in my early years. For me, though, the years had begun to stack away, the seasons had begun to repeat. Not so for him. Yet he was an older man and had deep roots here. Perhaps it was that depth of knowledge, added to proprietorship, the ownership of the big house, that had given him his special, almost reverential, view.

The bridge was the only one over the river in the valley. The site of both bridge and village would have been old; and though there were no barrows or tumuli here, and the village buildings were mostly of this century, there was a feeling here of the past, not of temples or mysteries, but of human habitation, agriculture, fields or pasture existing over the centuries within the limits of the wet meadows.

The feeling was especially strong in the large field beside which we were now driving. I had never seen this field plowed. Its roadside hedge was marked with enormous oaks, thick straight trunks widely and evenly spaced, these oaks (which might have been allowed to grow out of the hedge) suggesting a planting done more than a hundred years before (and with what security, what a conviction that this corner of the earth would continue to be as the planter of the hedge and the oaks had known it).

In my second or third year in the valley, during a winter of great floods, when the river had overflowed its banks at many places and cut new, fast-moving, noisy channels through the water meadows up and down the valley, all this field with the great boundary oaks had been flooded, creating the effect sometimes, according to the light, of a great white lake; and the swans and the moorhens and coots and the smaller wild ducks and other river birds, leaving the familiar river course, had paddled about this field as long as the lake lasted, as if in addition to the joy of finding a big new feeding ground, there was also the excitement of being on water in a place where normally there was only land. The flood, receding after a few days, had left the field sodden, with little drifts of black mud caught in the grass, and ruffled-looking, as though the movement of the water had pushed the grass about in the wrong way. Every winter since then, whenever the black and yellow council noticeboard, FLOODS, was placed beside the road, I had waited for this drama to repeat.

The road ran along a ledge in the down, following the curve of the down. The river was on the right, now closer, now farther away, now almost level with the road, now some way below it. A narrow river, winding in a wide valley — it offered many different views. This drive was quite different from the drive on the other bank; it might have been another river.

The road twisted up sharply; the river fell away; fields separated it from the road. Then there was a bushy, overgrown lane that ran diagonally between the fields down to the lushness of the river.

My neighbor said, “I used to cycle around here when I was a boy. I loved coming to the top of this hill in order to go coasting down that lane. It ends in a footbridge over the river.”

When he was a boy: forty-five years before, perhaps, in the 1930s, with the war coming. Quiet roads, almost empty skies; no constant military roar, as now; no sight, miles away to the west and miles up, of the vapor trails one after the other of commercial airliners, vapor trails usually like disappearing chalk marks, but in exceptional atmospheric conditions coming together to make a thick white arc of cloud from end to end of the horizon, clearly showing the curvature of the earth.

My neighbor nodded towards the pair of run-down red-brick cottages in the lane. They were the only buildings in the lane.

He said, “I often think it would be nice to live there. Shepherds used to live there in the old days, when there were more sheep about.”

This was my first glimpse of the cottages I was to move to when I left my cottage in the manor grounds. But I didn’t remember when I was negotiating for the cottages that I had seen them in the company of my new neighbor; that he had pointed them out to me. At the time I paid little attention to the cottages. I was more interested in my neighbor, seeing in his wish to live in a pair of agricultural cottages another sign of his “unbending,” another sign of the softness that hinted at other strengths held in reserve.

I remembered the drive and the cottages much later, after I had moved and was living in the lane.

A car came down the lane one Saturday afternoon. It overshot the cottages and then with difficulty (the lane beyond the cottages was very narrow, barely the width of a car) it reversed into my entrance and parked there. The car was driven by a young man; his passenger was a very old woman.

The old woman got out and walked down the lane, past the cottages, then back up the lane. She peeped through the hedge. The young man explained: his grandmother was visiting old places in her life, and she had come to look for the cottage where as a child she used to come to stay with her shepherd grandfather. She remembered a lane narrowing down to a footpath and then a footbridge over the river; that was the way she used to go in the mornings to get milk from the farm on the other side of the river. The lane she had come to seemed right, the young man said; but his grandmother didn’t recognize her grandfather’s cottage.

And I was horribly embarrassed. Embarrassed to have done what I had done with the cottages, all the things that had disorientated the old lady and made her question where she was: the new entrance and drive; the remodeling of what the old lady would have remembered as the back of the cottages into the front of the renovated house; the extension to the house that had done away with the half of the building her grandfather had lived in; the landscaped garden that had replaced the fruit-and-vegetable cottage garden the old lady probably remembered. (But there would also have been years of unburnable household refuse, some of which had been passed down to me, banking up the hedge mounds; and the garden, choked with bush when I took over, would have gone through many changes, many cycles, before that.)