The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,11
man, with glasses.
The lane was narrow; I had on more than one afternoon had to stand aside to let him pass. I had at first seen just the Land-Rover, the vehicle. Then I had seen the man inside, had become familiar with his features, and the contented rather than watchful look of the dog with him. I had assumed that he was the farmer, the owner or lessee of these well-kept acres, and I had accordingly given him a “farmer’s walk” when he got out of the Land-Rover at the barn and walked in to see how the grain was drying out or whatever it was he was going to check. I had endowed him with a special kind of authority, a special attitude to the land around us. But then I discovered, from the man himself, that he was not the landowner. And I had to revise my way of looking at him: he was only the farm manager, an employee.
His inspection drives covered part of my walk. The lane beside the windbreak led down to the public road. In the sunken ground across this road was the cow or dairy section of the farm. Behind the cow sheds were the water meadows and, in the distance, the willows and other trees on the riverbank. At the side of the road, at the entrance to this farmyard, there was a wooden platform three or four feet high. On this platform milk churns were placed, for collection by the dairy van. After this, the public road went past a thatched, pink-walled cottage and some plainer houses of flint and brick. Then came the yews and beeches of the manor. This was where my walk ended: a wide entrance in the dark-green gloom, and then the bright lawn in front of my cottage.
This was the part of the public road which, when I had come out onto it after the first four days of rain, had set me a puzzle: whether to turn to the right or the left. Now, if the manager’s Land-Rover came from behind and passed me here, I knew where it was going. Past the yews, along the beech-hung road high above the river, and then down to the little settlement at river level where the white-walled thatched cottage was being done up, and where an asphalted lane, progressively more broken, led past a number of small houses, some with raised monograms, to the wide, unpaved droveway.
My feeling for that wide, grassy way had grown. I saw it as the old bed of an ancient river, almost something from another geological age; I saw it as the way down which geese might have once been driven to Camelot-Winchester from Salisbury Plain; I saw it as the old stagecoach road.
But it was near there—the present encroaching all the time on something more than the past, encroaching on antiquity, sacred ground—that among the small houses I had not paid much attention to, in a small, neatly fenced plot with a paved drive and a low little bungalow and an extravagant, overplanted garden, full of tall flowers and dwarf conifers and tall ornamental clumps, it was there, on the paved drive, that I saw the Land-Rover one day and on other days. This, then, was where the manager lived and where his inspection drives ended: a little bit of suburbia at the very edge of antiquity. Yet I had taken the house for granted; in the gradual shaping of the land around me, the neat house had taken longer to come out at me, to be noticed. The antiquity—so much vaguer, so much a matter of conjecture—had made its impression more easily: I was ready for it.
Almost immediately, starting on his farm round, the manager would have driven down the deeply rutted droveway past the almost bare bank welted with ancient furrows. His thoughts no doubt of woods and fields and crops and cattle, seeing different things from those I saw, he would have driven down the straight length of the droveway now bisected by the barbed-wire fence he had himself put up or caused to be put up; past the roofless stone house with the tall sycamores, the old hayrick shaped like a cottage and covered with black plastic sheeting; past the caravan in the shade of the scrub and trees on one side, and the two rows of hives incorporated now into the barbed-wire enclosure on the other side; past the old farm buildings (with the new hay