The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,112

as house servants. And the ambiguity was real. Mr. Phillips had been a male nurse in a mental hospital; then he had worked in a hotel. In one of those places—a hospital or a hotel—Mrs. Phillips had begun to suffer from her nerves; and it was because of those nerves that they had come to the manor, to be a little withdrawn, to look after my landlord.

So far from being a servant, Mr. Phillips had been in the business of restraining and disciplining people. And as often happens, people attracting people they need, Mr. Phillips, the strong man, attracted people—like his wife, with her nerves—whom he had to look after. And perhaps there was an extra happiness of this sort as well in his job in the house, with his employer. Which would have explained his oddly happy, fulfilled look that day when I saw him driving his employer below the beeches on the ledge above the river.

He was a man of medium height; perhaps even a small man. The cold-weather clothes he wore—a heavy zip-up pullover, for the most part—concealed his physique. It was only in my second summer—perhaps because of what I had been told about him, and what he had told me about himself—I noticed his well-developed back, his great shoulders and powerful forearms, as of a man used to lifting weights.

Every afternoon at about three I heard him shout from somewhere beyond the vegetable garden. After some time I knew what he was shouting. He was shouting: “Fred!” It was his call to Pitton to tea. Whether this was a gesture of friendship; whether it was something he was required to do; whether they all had tea together in the Phillipses’ sitting room or in the kitchen, or whether Pitton just went and took away his tea, I don’t know. There was an irritation and authority in that shout that made me think of the other “Manor” (as it was known locally) where Mr. Phillips—and Mrs. Phillips as well, before her nerves—had worked.

ONCE THERE were sixteen gardeners. Now there was only Pitton. It was some time, a fortnight perhaps, before I got to know him, got to know that he wasn’t just a visitor to the grounds; and it was some time again before I understood that he was the gardener, the last of the legendary sixteen. He didn’t quite fit the role. There was nothing antique or forlorn or elegiac about Pitton’s appearance. He was in his mid-fifties, middle-aged rather than old; he certainly wasn’t one of the original sixteen. He was a sturdy man, with a firm paunch, and of the utmost respectability in his dress. He wore—it was winter when I first saw him—a felt hat, a three-piece tweed suit, and a tie. (Always a tie on Pitton, winter and summer.)

Not only did he not look like one of the sixteen, he didn’t even look like a gardener. At least, he wasn’t my idea of a gardener. And that is a better way of putting it, because this business of gardens and gardeners called up special Trinidad pictures and memories, called up the history of my own small Asiatic-Indian community, late-nineteenth-century peasant emigrants, and touched a nerve.

As a child in Trinidad I knew or saw few gardeners. In the country areas, where the Indian people mainly lived, there were nothing like gardens. Sugarcane covered the land. Sugarcane, the old slave crop, was what the people still grew and lived by; it explained the presence, on that island, after the abolition of slavery, of an imported Asiatic peasantry. Sugarcane explained the poor Indian-style houses and roughly thatched huts beside the narrow asphalt roads. In the smooth dirt yards of those little houses and huts there were nothing like gardens. There might be hedges, mainly of hibiscus, lining the foul-water ditches. There might be flower areas—periwinkle, ixora, zinnia, marigold, lady’s slipper, with an occasional flowering small tree like the one we called the Queen of Flowers. There was seldom more.

There were gardens in Port of Spain, but only in the richer areas, where the building plots were bigger. It was in those gardens that as a child, on my way home from school in the afternoons, I might see a barefoot gardener. And he would be less a gardener, really, less a man with knowledge about soils and plants and fertilizers than a man who was, more simply, a worker in a garden, a weeder and a waterer, a barefoot man, trousers rolled up to