The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,111

biggish house. I attributed to them the manners of such people.

It was disappointing to me to learn, as I did after a few months, that the Phillipses had come to the manor less than a year before me; that their manners were not the manners of servants or household staff but simply their own manners, the manners of people looking for peace and relishing the peace they had found at the manor.

Though they looked settled in the quiet of the manor, and though they were of the region, they were not “country” people, but people of the town, with country-town tastes. Though they seemed to be absolutely part of the manor—at ease in their quarters and indifferent to the dereliction around them, as though that had come so slowly they had not noticed—they were in fact rootless people; less rooted than Jack, over the hill.

They had no house of their own, were planning for none. They lived in houses that went with the jobs they took; and though they were people nearing fifty, as I thought, they seemed unconcerned about the time when they would be too old to work. Like their employer, my landlord, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips appeared to think that there would always be shelter for them.

The car, the outings, the shopping in any one of the three or four towns that were near to us, the visits two or three times a week to a pub they knew well in any one of those towns—these were their pleasures: town pleasures, not country pleasures. And that appearance of being long settled and comfortable in their quarters (where the furniture, most of it, would have belonged to the manor), that appearance which so reassured and comforted me that first day, was part of their talent as rootless people. It was a talent not unlike Jack’s, though it was not so immediately apparent.

In the middle of farmyard dereliction and his own insecurity in his job and cottage, Jack kept his elaborate gardens and did his digging for vegetables and flowers and kept his plots in good heart. So, in the middle of an equal insecurity—since at any time their employer might die, and they would have to move on with their possessions to another job and another set of rooms—the Phillipses made their cozy home. Jack was anchored by the seasons and the corresponding labors of his gardens. The Phillipses had a different kind of stability. It was events outside their home, festivities outside, that gave rhythm and pattern and savor to their townish life: the outings, the visit two or three times a week to their pub, their annual holiday in the same hotel in the south.

Probably this aspect of their life would have given the Phillipses away. They were not by social habits people of the village; they were not by instinct or character servants of a big house; they were people of the town, the outer world. And—if I had been told nothing at all—Mrs. Phillips’s pruning of the old rose bed in the garden would have made me wonder about them. Such roses in the summer in that rosebush wilderness! And then in the autumn the bushes had been cut down to thick knotted stumps a few inches high, and Mrs. Phillips had often spoken of what she had done. “I’ve cut them right back.” Asserting so many things at once: boasting of her attempt to tame the wilderness at the back of the house; liking, at the same time, the severe business of cutting “right back”; and intending some slight rebuke to Pitton, the solitary gardener, who might so easily—had he been interested, had he really cared—have done the pruning she had had to do herself.

There were no more roses. In the next summer there was only brier, a rampant, flowerless thicket. Brier swallowed the evidence of Mrs. Phillips’s pruning; and she never mentioned it again, did nothing further in the manor gardens while Pitton was there. (And perhaps when the cycle of the manor has truly ended, when everybody who knew the place then has disappeared, and new people with new plans walk about the grounds, that wild brier patch will be noted as proof of what can happen to untended, unpruned roses.)

Where, as a new arrival, accepting everything, I had seen people exemplifying their roles, soon it was the ambiguity of the Phillipses that made an impression, caught in my mind. They were people of the outer world acting out their role