V. Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Ten years before, illness had heightened, had given a special quality to, my discovery of spring in the manor garden. The illness of that time — brought on by mental fatigue and travel — had been, to me, though it had lasted for many weeks, like the passing tropical fevers of my childhood, fevers associated with the rainy season, fevers which I thought ran their course too soon and which I longed for again. These fevers of childhood had been welcome because, with their great relaxing internal warmth, they pleasingly distorted the sense of touch and the sense of hearing, made the world remote, then very close, played tricks with time, seeming to awaken me at many different times to the same event; and with this drama and novelty (and the special foods and “broths”) fevers always gave a feeling of home and protection.

With something like that kind of fever (and all that it implied, for the first time in England, of protection and ease) I had seen the peony below my window (in my half-waking delirium the tight red bud had grown tall on its stalk and tapped on my window in the wind); and the single blue iris among the nettles; and the thorny, scented moss roses; and the rotting bridges over the black creeks to the glory of the river, “freshing out.”

It was with real illness now, a more than passing incapacity, a fatigue that seemed to have gone beyond the body to the core and motor of my being, a fatigue that made it necessary for me to judge very carefully first how many minutes I could be up and about for, and then how many hundred yards I could walk without burning up my strength and falling ill again, it was with true illness that when I came back from the Infirmary I began, after some time, to take short turns in the sodden, ruined manor garden. Indifferent to winter for many years after I had come to England, never feeling the need for an overcoat or gloves or even a pullover, I now had a sensation of internal coldness such as I had never had before; I felt chilled in my lungs.

Grass and weeds were tall and wet, black at the roots with different kinds of vegetable rot. Autumn had once had an enchantment of its own, with the trees and bushes “burning down” in their different ways, with different tints, with the wild mushrooms imitating the color and the shape of the dead leaves they grew among; with last year’s dead aspen leaves like lace or tropical fan coral, the soft matter rotted away between the ribs or veins or supporting structure of each leaf, which yet preserved its curl and resilience. I had slowly learned the names of shrubs and trees. That knowledge, helping me visually to disentangle one plant from another in a mass of vegetation, quickly becoming more than a knowledge of names, had added to my appreciation. It was like learning a language, after living among its sounds. Now, with the growth of weeds and the advance of marsh plants, and the disappearance of the rose bed, to be in the garden was like being in the midst of undifferentiated bush. The sections of the fallen aspen trunks that had been too big to saw up or remove had disappeared below bush.

The colors of the autumn in the garden were now brown and black. I had learned to see the brown of dead leaves and stalks as a color in its own right; I had collected grasses and reeds and taken pleasure in the slow change of their color from green to biscuit brown. I had even taken pleasure in the browned tints of flowers that had dried in vases without losing their petals; I had been unwilling to throw away such flowers. On autumn or winter mornings I had gone out to see brown leaves and stalks outlined with white frost. Now the hand of man had been withdrawn from the garden; everything had grown unchecked during the summer; and I felt only the cold and saw the tall grass and the wet and saw black and brown. On these short walks in the ruined manor garden, going a little farther each time, past the aspens, then past the great evergreen tree, then approaching the big white-framed greenhouse, after all this time as solid and whole-looking as it had ever been, on these walks brown became again for me what it had been in Trinidad: not a true color, the color of dead vegetation, not a thing one found beauty in, trash.

And it was against this brown that one day, going past the greenhouse to where on my earliest walks towards the river I had found a gate (which still worked when I first came upon it) and bridges over the black, leaf-filled creeks, it was against this black and brown that I saw a new post-and-rail timber fence, the new wood blond and red, like the color of the hair of the unshaved fat man the German had said was his brother, like the color of the nylon sack the unshaved fat man was carrying, to take away the rotten logs or whatever it was he had intended to pillage.

I hadn’t heard about this fence or the sale of land it implied. The ground all about was wild; even if I had the energy it would have been hard to go beyond the first creek. But I could see that the line of the new fence ran diagonally across the line of the old path and bridges that led from the garden to the river. A surveyor’s line, drawn on a land map; not a line that made allowances for the way the land had been used.

I had trained myself to the idea of change, to avoid grief; not to see decay. It had been necessary, because the setting of this second life had begun to change almost as soon as I had awakened to its benignity. The moss roses had been cut down; the open droveway had been bisected by a barbed-wire fence; fields had been enclosed. Jack’s garden had been destroyed in stages and finally concreted over. The wide gate at the end of the lawn outside my cottage had been closed after Pitton left, and cut branches had blocked the way there. And then barbed wire — of all chilling things — had been wound around what had been built as a children’s play house in the orchard.

I had lived with the idea of change, had seen it as a constant, had seen a world in flux, had seen human life as a series of cycles that sometimes ran together. But philosophy failed me now. Land is not land alone, something that simply is itself. Land partakes of what we breathe into it, is touched by our moods and memories. And this end of a cycle, in my life, and in the life of the manor, mixed up with the feeling of age which my illness was forcing on me, caused me grief.

I liked the neighbor. I had nothing against him — he had unwittingly shown me where I was to move. He was reverential about what he wished to acquire; the valley and the land were his in a special way as well. His mother had lived as a girl in a farmhouse (now partly in ruin) beside the river. No lack of reverence there; and I had always known that there was no means of preserving a landscape which — in its particular purity for me — existed for me after that first spring only in my heart. From that first spring I had known that such a moment was going to come. But now that it had come, it was shocking. And as at a death, everything here that had been a source of pleasure and surprise, everything that had welcomed me and healed me, became a cause for pain.

T HE MANOR help came, lived for a while in the two redecorated rooms, each woman in her own way and with her own hallowed things; and then went away. But someone at last seemed to suit; and Mrs. Phillips felt secure enough to start taking up the threads of her private life again.

The private life, the one she had shared with Mr. Phillips, had been full of public pleasures — pubs, clubs, hotel bars, modest country-town restaurants with dance floors or cabarets — pleasures which, more than house or the sense of place or job or vocation, had given stability and rhythm to the Phillipses’ year. This rhythm, overriding her grief, now claimed her; and in the early spring, at what had been one of her and Mr. Phillips’s two holiday times, she went off for a fortnight with old friends.