V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

It was part of her incompetence, her new unhappiness. And it came out again when she tried to get help, when she advertised for women to help in the manor and was surprised again and again to get people like herself, women adrift, incompetent, themselves without the ability to judge people, looking as much for emotional refuge as for a position, solitary women with their precious things (full of associations for them alone) but without men or families, women who for various reasons had been squeezed out of a communal or shared life.

The first of these ladies came upon me like a vision one lunchtime when I was going out to the bus stop. She was below the yews and she was in brilliant green; and the face she turned to me was touched with green and blue and red, green on her eyelids. The colors of the paint on the old lady’s face were like the colors of a Toulouse-Lautrec drawing; made her appear to belong to another age. Green was the absinthe color: it brought to mind pictures by other artists of forlorn absinthe drinkers; it made me think of bars. And probably a bar or hotel somewhere on the south coast was the lady’s background, her last refuge, her previous life.

How long she must have spent arranging that violently colored face, dusted with glitter even for lunchtime on this summer’s day! Where — and to whom? — was she going now on her day off? So dreadfully coquettish, so anxious to please, so instinctively obsequious in the presence of a man — everything about her caricatured by age, and the caricature further set off by the rural setting, the yews, the beeches, the country road.

What had Mrs. Phillips seen in this woman? How had she thought that this woman, rather than the other applicants she must have had, would have helped with looking after the house and my landlord?

Soon enough there were the complaints. Soon enough, complaining of the “staff,” Mrs. Phillips put herself once more on the side of my landlord, made common cause with him — almost in the way that Mr. Phillips had done — against the crude, uncomprehending world.

“He rang and asked for a glass of sherry. She went to his room with a bottle in one hand and a glass in the other, and looking as though she herself had had a drop too much. A bottle in one hand and a glass in the other — I ask you. He didn’t like it. ‘A little formality, Margaret,’ he said to me. ‘A little formality. It’s all I ask. A drink isn’t just a drink. It’s an occasion.’ And I think he’s entitled to a little formality. I told her, you know. Take in nothing without a tray. I told her.”

Poor lady in green! She did something else wrong very soon afterwards — I believe Mrs. Phillips said she again took up a bottle and glass without a tray: she was too old to learn. And she didn’t last out her period of probation. I didn’t see her go. That glimpse of her, green (the brilliant green of her dress) in the dark-green shade of yews and beeches, on the black asphalt lane to the public road and the bus stop, that glimpse of her in her brief rural exile (as she made it appear) was all that I saw.

One or two of her successors I saw. Many I didn’t. I just heard about them, heard the more sensational stories, from Mrs. Phillips. The arrival of one created consternation: a large removal van drove up to the manor courtyard with her “things.” None lasted. One wished to do nothing; one wished to take over and give instructions; one rearranged furniture in a number of rooms. Perhaps among them there was one who might have done very well, but had to go for that reason — Mrs. Phillips not wishing to train or nurture a rival and possible successor.

The whole situation with the “help” or “staff” became too much; the sharing of the kitchen and quarters became too much. It was decided that there were to be separate quarters for people from outside. One or two of the closed rooms of the manor were opened up. A decorator appeared.

And I felt that my time in my cottage — with the preparation of quarters for new staff, who might not always be single women, who might have families or friends with the privilege of roaming the grounds — I felt that my time in my cottage was coming to an end. Accidents, a whole series of accidents, had kept me protected in what was an exposed situation. Now that protection was coming to an end. The rooks building and cawing above in the beeches — perhaps this was what they had also portended.

The decorator — he seemed like an agent or instrument of change, but he wasn’t, any more than old Mr. Phillips had been when he had started working and walking in the manor grounds after Pitton’s departure — the decorator was a short, plump man, pink-complexioned, or seeming very pink in his white overall.

I grew to recognize the rhythm of his day, how he paced himself through his solitary physical labor. From time to time, for fixed periods, fifteen minutes in the morning and afternoon, an hour in the middle of the day, he withdrew from his scrapers and rollers and brushes and paint tins and sat in his car, holding the racing page of his paper over the steering wheel, drinking milky tea from his flask in the morning and afternoon breaks, eating sandwiches in the midday break, not being in a hurry then to open his sandwich tin, first giving himself another fifteen minutes or so with the racing page of his paper, and then, having unfolded the greaseproof wrapping of his neat parcel, eating slowly, steadily, without haste, but also without relish.

His car at first he parked on the lane just outside my cottage back door. When, using more gestures than words, I showed him what he had done, he without speaking moved nearer the manor courtyard to a spot where he was hidden from the manor and from me.

His car was like his castle. Out of it, he was at work, in somebody else’s place; in it, he was at home. He looked serene, self-sufficient. In the top pocket of his overall (over a very thick, hand-knitted blue pullover) he had an empty, open, flip-top cigarette packet. This was his ashtray; the gesture with which he flicked ash into this packet was practiced. It was clearly an old habit or procedure, part of his tidiness as a decorator. The tidiness, the concentration required for painting, the way sometimes his face went close to his painting hand, the silence in which he worked for ninety minutes or so at a time, his solitude — this gave him a disturbing presence, made him seem more than his job and his appearance, the pinkness of his skin and the whiteness of his overall. And I found, when I began to talk to him, that he had a curious voice: it was soft, evenly pitched, childlike, passive.

He took his cigarette-packet ashtray seriously. I said I liked the idea. He didn’t dismiss it or make a joke about it. He spoke very seriously about it. He told me when the idea had come to him and how it had come; people always remarked on it, he said.

And as we talked at various times over the days — he was ready to talk: his solitude was like something imposed on him, something he didn’t mind setting aside — I found that he took everything about himself seriously, that he regarded himself with a kind of awe. There was something else: he seemed to be looking at himself from a distance, all his habits, his rituals. He was awed by what he saw: he didn’t understand what he saw.

Even this sitting at intervals in his car — that was puzzling to him, because that was when he also took his pills. He took his pills and studied the racing page, because his dream was to be a full-time gambler, a serious gambler. Not betting like a pensioner on outsiders, but betting on favorites all the time: it was the only way to make a living out of gambling. He needed his pills; he took two sorts four times a day. He could do nothing without his pills; he went nowhere without his pills. The pills kept him going. And it was through Mr. Phillips, long ago, that he had discovered the pills. That was the connection with Mrs. Phillips, though, as he said, he didn’t know Margaret so well.