Pitton for not knowing about gardens, had so little feeling for gardens and even for the valley in which he lived that he had turned all the front part of his house plot into a concrete area for his various, always changing, vehicles.
The Phillipses, who gave Pitton tea every day—the cry of “Fred!” from Mr. Phillips had tones of authority rather than friendship or fellowship—made no direct statements about Pitton to me. Bray wasn’t like that. Bray was more open. It was his “independent” style; he was proud of this style. He was open about my landlord; he wished that openness to be noted. He said, raising the topic himself, “Wouldn’t have him in the car. Like a bloody bird. Wants to sit in the front. Then he wants to sit in the back. Then he wants to sit in the front again.” And of Pitton Bray said more than once, “He’s a very arrogant man.”
“Arrogant,” like “commonest,” was one of Bray’s words. “Arrogant,” was primarily Bray’s version of “ignorant”; but it also had the meaning of “arrogant”; and this word, when used by Bray, with its two meanings and aggressive sound, was very strong.
Pitton and Bray lived in adjoining semidetached cottages on the public road. The cottages had slate roofs and walls of flint and red brick, with the brick in regular two-course bands. Both cottages had once belonged to the manor; and like the “picturesque” thatched cottages not far away, like the manor itself, had been built by the manor estate before the First World War. Pitton’s cottage still belonged to the manor, the cottage went with the job. But Bray owned his cottage. He had inherited it from his father, who had worked all his life at the manor and had bought the cottage for very little—the sale was in the nature of a benefaction to him—when the manor estate had begun to shrink, the family being active elsewhere.
The smallness, sturdiness, the straight lines and the materials (red or orange-colored brick and flint) had made me think of those cottages as semiurban. But then, getting my eye in, I had seen the style in old farm buildings for many miles around, had seen it as the local way with flint, which was so plentiful here; and I had grown to understand that the cottages had been built as experimental “improved” agricultural cottages. They were as a result more genuinely “period” now than the thatched cottages just down the road. The thatched cottage still stood for an idea of the rural picturesque; and thatching was far from being a vanishing skill; thatchers were at work in all the valleys of Wiltshire. But the building style of the improved cottages—the flint and the bands of brick—was no longer practiced by the local masons. That particular skill with flint was hard to come by; and the social idea, of improving cottages for agricultural workers, no longer had a point.
Similar houses, then, for Bray and Pitton, houses with an easily readable past. But on Bray’s side of the party wall and fence there was the idea of proprietorship. Bray owned his house; he wanted that to be known. And to that he added the idea that he was a free man, a man who worked for himself. On Pitton’s side there was the idea of style. Pitton kept a tidy garden, with a hedge, a patch of lawn, and small flowering trees. Bray’s garden was more a concrete yard for his cars and minibuses. And that was the cause of some trouble between the two men.
Pitton said nothing about Bray. Everything I learned about the running dispute between the two men I learned from Bray—I used his cars. Bray told his stories in his own way. He suppressed his own actions and provocations; he reported only what Pitton did. And the effect of this was to turn Pitton—so well dressed, so steady in the manor grounds, his gait so measured—the effect was to turn this man who was a paragon in public into a madman at home.
Bray would say as he was driving me to the railway station, “Our friend has taken up building these days. Drilling holes in the party wall at three o’clock in the morning. What do you think of that?”
And so Bray would allow one to play for a while with this picture of Pitton as a madman with the electric drill, raging about his house at night, a Mr. Hyde with a modern ray gun, yet