V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

My landlord was enraged when he found out, enraged that he had been encouraged to think and talk of a man as living when the man had died. He quarreled and made scenes. He knocked down glasses, overturned full ashtrays, pushed meal trays off his bed, generally tried to make a mess. Grief was beyond him, was too frightening for him. He could express only resentment, and his resentment focused on Mrs. Phillips.

She thought it was unfair. What she had done, as she told me on the telephone, had been done for his sake. She thought it was selfish: in his rages there was no consideration for her own feelings about her husband’s death. And she thought it was childish. She said, “Nothing he can do is going to bring Stan back.”

In the early days she had been full of regard for the manor and its master. For the artistic side of my landlord, which was like another emanation of his privilege, she had had a corresponding reverence. She had had something like awe for the little gifts she had brought to me from my landlord — a poem in verse or prose, a drawing, a dainty little basket, a sandalwood fan, some sticks of Indian incense. Sometimes in those early days she had even typed out (perhaps without being asked) the prose poems or prose writings, the act of typing making her job more than that of a housekeeper. What she typed mightn’t have been always comprehensible; but that added to the mystery and the beauty for her.

She had passed on to Mr. Phillips her reverence for the artistic side of my landlord. But while Mr. Phillips had allowed this reverence to grow, Mrs. Phillips’s own reverence had lessened. She had become more matter-of-fact about everything. Gaining security in the manor, she had lost her original feeling of awe; gaining security, she had looked inwards, concentrated on her nerves, surrendered (like her employer) more and more to the protection of her husband.

Now that her husband had gone, she had lost her security. The manor job, which had been so easy for so long, became suddenly hard; the manor became full of tension. And in her dealings with my landlord she went right back to her nurse’s attitude. But she was without the strength now to back up that attitude. The man was childish, she said; he wanted attention for the sake of attention. She would have known how to deal with that once; now she didn’t. The job began to wear her out.

The vegetable allotment within the walled garden was abandoned. But there still came to the grounds some of the strange men whom Mr. Phillips had called in to do occasional pieces of work. While Mr. Phillips lived these men had walked and moved quickly, like people not anxious to draw attention to themselves, done their jobs and gone away. But now there was no authority; and there was a change in the attitude of these men. They walked more slowly; they walked past the windows of my cottage; they raised their voices.

On my way back one afternoon from the river walk I saw two men in the overgrown garden. They had billhooks. They were near the old pile of sawn aspen logs. One man was small, much smaller than Alan (who had worried so much about his size). This man had a sly, dangerous face; in his eyes there was a look that made me feel he had been caught out and resented it. The other man was taller, though not much taller, dark-haired, with dark skin around his dark eyes.

The taller man said, without being asked anything, “We are taking away the rotten logs. Margaret knows. She gave permission.” Margaret was Mrs. Phillips.

It was my policy not to interfere with people I saw in the grounds; not to act as a watchman. But the billhooks, and the dancing blue eyes of the small man, worried me.

I said to the man who had spoken, “What is your name?”

He straightened up. He almost held his hands at his sides. He said, “Mr. Tomm. With two m ’s. German.”

“German?”

“I’m a German. Mr. Tomm.”

Was this how he always introduced himself? Was being a German (he had an English Midlands accent) the most important thing to him, and something he felt he ought to get out of the way as soon as possible? Or was he joking?

He said, “My father was a prisoner of war. He worked on a farm near Oxford. He stayed on and married the old carter’s daughter. My father died five years ago. My mother died last Christmas in Birmingham. I used to live up there. But I lost my job and my wife left me. That’s why I’m here.” He made a scything, grass-cutting gesture with the billhook. “I love gardening. It’s all I want to do. I get it from my mother.”

I looked at the small man, to see what he was making of the story. He, the small man, was considering me intently. His little cheeks were working; he wasn’t going to talk to me. On his small, delicate forearms I saw tattoos done in green and red and blue-black. These colored tattoos, done with modern tools, were a new craze in the locality, spreading without publicity or overt promotion; Bray had told me about them. In tattoos at least the small man was keeping up with his bigger fellows.

The talker said, “I’m going through a bad patch.”

I left them. Just outside the box-bordered enclosure, quite wild now, there was a small pickup van reversed against the entrance, not far from my cottage. For rotten logs alone? I felt that other things — garden statues, urns, stone pots, even greenhouse doors — were at risk; that those two men were scavengers rather than serious thieves.

Mrs. Phillips seemed bemused when I telephoned. But she knew the name of the German. “He used to work for Stan. He’s a German, you know.”

Not many days after, the pickup van came again. The German got out, and a bigger, fat, unshaved man with reddish blond hair reaching down to his shoulders. The fat man wore bell-bottomed jeans and in his hand he held an empty rolled-up nylon sack that was almost the color of his hair. He didn’t look at me, the fat man, was quite indifferent to me. His eyes were small and preoccupied; his lower lip was thick and red and wet.

The German said, “He’s my brother. He has nowhere to stay. Last week he got a job with accommodation in an old lady’s house. The solicitor arranged it. But they wanted him to be a servant. The old lady used to start ringing for tea at five in the morning. He’s going through a bad patch.”

In the days of Pitton, the known and half-tolerated intruders in the gardens and water meadows had been local gentlemen looking for a little Saturday-afternoon shooting. Now there was no Pitton; his day and his order seemed as far away and as unreachable as the original grandeur of the garden had seemed to me when I had just arrived and, among the relics of that grandeur, found only Pitton. There was no Mr. Phillips now, neither old nor young. And the people who came to work in what remained of the garden had become marauders, vandals.

The very kind of people who, in the great days of the manor, would have given of their best as carpenters, masons, bricklayers, might have had ideas of beauty and workmanship and looked for acknowledgment of their skill and craft and pains, people of this very sort now, sensing an absence of authority, an organization in decay, seemed to be animated by an opposite instinct: to hasten decay, to loot, to reduce to junk. And it was possible to understand how an ancient Roman factory-villa in this province of Britain could suddenly, after two or three centuries, simply with a letting-go by authority, and not with the disappearance of a working population, crumble into ruin, the secrets of the building and its modest technologies, for so long so ordinary, lost.

And Mrs. Phillips didn’t really know what was happening in the grounds around her. She had no means of judging men, judging faces. Depending on herself now, she was continually surprised by people. That stored subjective knowledge of character and physiognomy which most people have — which begins simply enough, with the association of a particular kind of character with a particular kind of face, an association of greed, for instance, with a fat face, to put it at its simplest — that stored knowledge was denied her.