somehow sobering up sufficiently to appear neatly at nine, a Dr. Jekyll of the manor grounds, at the white gate of the lawn.
And it would be only at the end of the ride with Bray, or during the next ride, or the ride after that, that I would learn that Bray, for every kind of good reason—his passion for work, his self-reliance, his hatred of the idleness which was undoing the country, the unreliability of other people—for all these very good reasons Bray had been taking down or tuning motorcar engines in his paved yard until well after midnight.
In Bray there was an element of perverseness. He knew that his paved and oil-stained yard and his half-taken-down motorcars offended people. He knew that they were an especial offense to Pitton, who lived next door; he knew, too, that it was inappropriate, a noticeable disfigurement of the valley which he was anxious for his tourist passengers to see. But Bray, though he would have denied it or not found words for it, wished to offend Pitton’s idea of correct behavior and style. And there was the added reason that Bray felt he could do as he pleased with his ground and house because they were his and because he—unlike Pitton and unlike nearly every working man he knew—was a free man.
Freedom was important to Bray. And though he presented the car-hire business and the taking of people to the various terminals of the many airports and the picking up from the airports of foreign children, though he presented this as a high skill, almost a vocation, equal to anybody else’s, his vocation was really to be a free man, not to be what his father had been, a man “in service,” a servant.
Service—a world dead and gone. But not to Bray; his childhood lay there, just as my childhood lay in the vanished world of sugarcane fields and huts and barefoot children; and ditches and hibiscus hedges; and religious ceremonies which I accepted but didn’t understand; and the beauty of the lighting of the lamps after the prayer in the evening; and the fear of the rumshops and the quarrels and fierce fights. Just as “estate,” “laborers,” “gardeners” called up special pictures for me, so Bray lived with pictures of the valley I could only dimly visualize.
He spoke often of the past to me. He spoke of harvesttime and children taking tea to their fathers in the fields; of shepherds and their huts on the downs; of laborers who were granted vast daily allowances of beer, of picturesque clusters of laborers’ cottages, now knocked down. So far from concealing his background, he always brought it up, to remind himself (and me or whomever else he was talking to) of how far he had come.
What had Bray’s father been? He had said at first the “head gardener,” the top man of the legendary sixteen. And perhaps only someone like that would have had the privilege of buying his cottage at a very low price. But later he had also said that his father had been the butler, the chauffeur (and sometimes even the “coachman”—there were wagons in the sheds next to the antique, ivy-covered granary). So it is possible that this claim that his father had been head of the legendary sixteen was only Bray’s way of putting down the “arrogant” Pitton.
Whatever his father had done at the manor, Bray was proud of his father; did not reject him. But connected with the father’s service at the manor was a memory that touched Bray himself and still caused him pain.
He began to tell me one day of the time he had gone to work at the manor during the holidays from the village school (now no longer existing as a school, existing only as a building, a cottage, a desirable dwelling). It was an important memory; it still caused him pain. He could talk about it to me because I was a stranger; because I could understand; and because I was interested. I had developed a lot since 1950; had learned how to talk, to inquire, and no longer—as on the S.S. Columbia and in the Earl’s Court boardinghouse—expected truth to leap out at me merely because I was a writer and sensitive. I had discovered in myself—always a stranger, a foreigner, a man who had left his island and community before maturity, before adult social experience—a deep interest in others, a wish to visualize the details and routine of their lives,