V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Embarrassed, in the presence of the old lady, by what I had done, I was also embarrassed to be what I was, an intruder, not from another village or county, but from another hemisphere; embarrassed to have destroyed or spoilt the past for the old lady, as the past had been destroyed for me in other places, in my old island, and even here, in the valley of my second life, in my cottage in the manor grounds, where bit by bit the place that had thrilled and welcomed and reawakened me had changed and changed, until the time had come for me to leave.

And it wasn’t until the old lady (with her memories of seventy years before) had come to my new house that I remembered the drive and the detour with my new neighbor; his talk of the people and the beauty of various “bits”; and his pointing out to me the cottages in the lane which at that time were still more or less like the cottages the old lady had known as a child but which, when she came to visit them, she found she had lost for good.

I T WASN’T for Mrs. Phillips that the ambulance came; it wasn’t for my landlord. It was for Mr. Phillips. He collapsed in the manor one day and was dead before the ambulance came.

And all at once it was understood — even by me, in my cottage — how much the manor relied upon him, his energy, his strength, his protectiveness. He was a protector, by instinct and training; he called up the weakness, the need to be protected, in the people he attracted; he was not capable of, would not have understood, a relationship between equals. For people who did not need him he showed only his grumpy, irritable side, which was his way of dismissing such people.

When I had first come to my cottage and, in my stranger’s accepting mood, had added Mr. Phillips to my mental catalog of English “types,” and seen him as exemplifying his role as country-house servant, he had in fact barely arrived, was almost as much a newcomer as I, was still testing out the job and his response to the semisolitude of the manor, and still hardly knew my landlord.

He had grown into the job and made it his own; and over the years he had developed a regard for my landlord, for the softness, the vulnerability, the pride, the obstinacy, all the things that made my landlord a man apart, and which might have been expected to make a man like Mr. Phillips impatient. He had developed especially a regard for the artistic side of my landlord. Though as politically irascible as Bray and as ready to adopt the “punchy” simplicities of the popular newspapers, Mr. Phillips didn’t scoff at my landlord’s artistic side, any more than Bray scoffed at it, Bray who one day, as though offering me the key to my landlord’s character, had with the clumsy gesture of a man not used to handling books handed me the illustrated verse tale my landlord had published in the 1920s. It was extraordinary, in both these tough, practical men, who almost certainly hated “modern” art: this idea of the artist or the man of artistic temperament as a man apart. Perhaps — like other ideas: the mad scientist, for instance, derived from the old figure of the obsessed and sinful alchemist — this idea of the artist, the man seeking to recreate the world, went right back to the time when all art or learning was religious, an expression of the divine, serving the divine.

I benefited from this regard of Mr. Phillips for the artistic side of my landlord. The regard was extended to me. It was part of the security of my second life in the valley, one of the accidents that made it possible. And now all at once that security was gone.

It was decided, by Mrs. Phillips, that just as Alan’s death had been kept by Mr. Phillips from my landlord, so now Mr. Phillips’s death was to be kept from him. She didn’t think he would take the news quietly; and she feared that she would not be able to manage my landlord if his behavior became in any way extreme. And so, though withdrawn for some time with her nerves, Mrs. Phillips stepped forward once again now and sought to take charge of things: Mrs. Phillips with the thin blue veins in the dark, finely gathered skin below her eyes, and the more prominent veins at her temples and below her thin hair that spoke of stress and pain.

She took to telephoning me; on the telephone now she became long-winded and repetitive. She told me again and again that Mr. Phillips was her second husband and though she meant no disrespect to his memory and didn’t want anyone to think that her love was less, the grief for Mr. Phillips had repeated, had been like a continuation of, the grief for her first husband; that the grief she had felt for him, Mr. Phillips, had been further absorbed by all the things she had had to do after he had collapsed, and all the trouble at keeping the news from my landlord.

She was repetitive. But she was reporting on a continuing discovery about herself and the development of her grief; the grief was like something with a life of its own. She was also perhaps saying — perhaps only to herself — that she intended to stay on at the manor, to try to do the job she and Mr. Phillips had done together.

And it was only several stages on in my response to the event and to Mrs. Phillips’s telephone conversations that I saw that a new uncertainty had suddenly come to Mrs. Phillips’s life. I had been shocked when I had first learned that the Phillipses had made no plans for their future, had not laid anything by. Then I had admired them for their adventurousness, their readiness to move on, to make their home in another place. Of course, they could be adventurous in this way because they never doubted that there would always be some new position for them — and it could be said that that kind of expectation was in itself a kind of security.

I don’t think they had even contemplated retiring. They knew very well that they had taken up an old-fashioned job; but they saw it as a kind of withdrawal; and they had probably seen themselves going on in this way until they were old. Now the active partner had been taken away; and Mrs. Phillips’s prospects, if she left the manor, seemed to me fearful.

No doubt I exaggerated. I didn’t know the Phillipses’ friends, didn’t know how they lived or joked together. Especially I didn’t know about their work, their world of work, and what adjustments they made as workers to preserve their pride. I remembered only how, out of her own security at the manor, Mrs. Phillips had been ready to see Pitton cast out; how much at a loss Pitton had been when he had to leave, how passive he had become, refusing to look for work, out of his unspoken dread of the figure of the employer.

But what was true about Mrs. Phillips’s grief was not true about old Mr. Phillips’s grief. He had coped with the deaths of his father, mother, sister, wife. The death of his cousin in 1911—as he had told me more than once — had prepared him for all their deaths. Now to his great surprise, in his mid-seventies and near the end of his life, he had found in the unexpected death of his son a grief that had surpassed that earlier grief. He was broken, Mrs. Phillips told me. The grounds of the manor that had given him such pleasure after Pitton had gone — he could no longer bear to be there. And he no longer came to work in the vegetable garden; or, formally dressed in a suit or jacket and trousers in the very pale colors he liked, to walk with his pronged staff.

It was as though he too had died. As though it was of this death — his son’s — that he had spoken when we had seen the first rooks squawking and flapping about the manor beeches.

I VY WAS beautiful. It was to be allowed to grow up trees. The trees eventually died and collapsed, but they had provided their pleasure for many years; and there were other trees to look at, other trees to see out my landlord’s time. So too it had been with people. They had been around; when the time came they had gone away; and then there had been other people. But it wasn’t like that with Mr. Phillips. He had been too important to my landlord. My landlord had awakened from his long acedia to the tenderness and regard of Mr. Phillips; and the death of this strong, protective man couldn’t be hidden beyond a fortnight.