The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,116

as I heard, had been in the army in some capacity before coming to the manor—we were in a military area. And turning over this question of Pitton’s model after Tony’s visit—in fact, never losing the idea as long as I saw Pitton—it came to me that Pitton’s model (with the encouragement of Mrs. Pitton) would have been an army officer of twenty or twenty-five years before whom Pitton had served or served under (someone still alive in Pitton’s memory: Pitton’s imitation this officer’s chief memorial, perhaps).

The army was still important to Pitton. His son was in the army. The progress—or the postings—of this boy was the only topic which could make Mrs. Pitton, blinking fast, speak a sentence or two; normally she only smiled and looked pretty. We met occasionally at the bus stop, in the shade of the dark yews and beeches. There were not many buses; the road was fairly quiet; and voices at the bus stop sounded and echoed almost as in a room. We spoke about her son as though he were no more than a boy at school, as though, say, he was doing reasonably well with the books, but doing a little better in the swimming and the sports.

The word “school” did in fact come up in Mrs. Pitton’s talk of her son’s army life. She told me at the bus stop one day, “They’ve sent him to the artillery school.” This would have been at Larkhill. Apt name once: these downs around Stonehenge rang at the appropriate season with lark song. But now—untouched though the green downs looked—Larkhill was the name of the army artillery school, booming away during the day and sometimes during the night and sometimes, if there was a big exercise, night and day.

Because Pitton’s son was there, and because Pitton told me of the great event, I went in my first summer to the artillery school’s “open day.” It was like one of the summer rowing occasions at Oxford, when the families of undergraduates occupied the college barges. It was like the sports day at my school, Queen’s Royal College, in colonial Trinidad. I recognized the occasion at once. Instead of masters and boys, there were officers and soldiers; instead of sports, displays with guns, displays of great skill. But there was the same atmosphere of the fair, of food and women’s clothes, of unusual colors, of normally hidden family relationships now publicly exposed; the same half-humorous loudspeaker announcements, the same atmosphere of dressing up and showing off, the same atmosphere of a society especially mixed for that day—boys and masters showing off at the school sports, men and officers showing off here, whole families showing off, women and girls displaying themselves, the poorer very concerned not to be outfaced.

I could see the attraction of the occasion for the Pittons. I could see that it might well have been their most important social occasion for the year. And the open day did provide a little extra conversation for a while with Mrs. Pitton at the bus stop.

Then she told me one day that her son had finished his training at the artillery school. It had gone well. “His friends gave him a little momento.” And believing perhaps that “momento” might be an army word, another special army word, as new and puzzling to me as it had been to her, she repeated it and explained it. “A little momento of his time with them. An old-fashioned brass cannon set in clear plastic, like a diamond.”

A cheap souvenir; the smiling, empty-faced woman speaking of her son as of a child still. The “momento,” the bad art: the reality—the army, the soldier son—should have matched. But the reality was different. The reality was serious. The Pitton boy was being trained as a killer soldier, the new-style British soldier. And he was suited to the part. He was a giant, with very big feet. The fineness of the strain that had produced Mrs. Pitton’s features had ended with her or had skipped her son.

It was astonishing that now—after its ineptitude in the nineteenth century, which was yet the century of the great glory of the empire; and after its great but wasting achievements in the Second World War, at the end of that imperial glory—it was astonishing that now, when there were no more big wars for the country to fight, the British army should be concentrating on producing this kind of elite soldier. There were occasional incidents in the little