The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,125

I soon got to know the shop or “outfitters” where Pitton bought his country-gentleman clothes (and they were not particularly cheap), and the “sports” shop (much cheaper) where the Phillipses bought their padded anoraks or zip-up pullovers, and though I couldn’t help seeing the clothes as merchandise, not truly personal to the wearer, more as samples of a vast stock, and though the shops in Salisbury were so close to one another, yet this “difference” in their clothes was important to them all.

And all these people were tough—or insensitive, or partly blind to their condition; they needed to be. Bray earned the freedom he was so proud of. He never turned a job down and worked prodigious hours; he had nothing like a connected private life, and seldom had a full night’s sleep. The Phillipses were tough—even Mrs. Phillips, “nervous” and liable to headaches—living as they did with nothing put by, and with the knowledge that at any moment they might have to leave and live elsewhere, with other people, other relationships, other conditions.

And Pitton lived not only with the irritations of Bray and the Phillipses, but also with the knowledge that away from the vegetable garden all his labor—not voluntary like Jack’s, but paid, his job—was in the wilderness of the manor grounds: repetitive brute labor, with hardly anyone to notice, like the clearing away of the dead leaves of autumn; pointless labor, like the cleaning of the hidden garden, which had then been simply closed up again; labor in grounds awaiting a successor.

His improved agricultural cottage; the garden shed; the manor grounds. This was his little run—a dreadful constriction, if it was all he had. He needed the other idea that he had, the country-gentleman idea. Unsupervised, without fixed hours, he might, without that other idea and the “temperament” it gave him, have become slacker, might have degenerated into a tramp, become a Jack without the zest, the true coarseness, the life.

I had a taste of Pitton’s temperament myself in my second summer. I had gone away, done some traveling, and come back almost at the end of the summer. I found that the grass around my cottage had not been cut at all in my absence. A mere fringe of ground around the cottage was technically mine to look after and “keep in good heart.” Five minutes’ work with the mower, no more. But this little area Pitton had scrupulously left alone, though it spoilt the appearance of the lawn.

Mrs. Phillips said, “People are funny.” As though at last I had been given an idea of what they had to put up with.

She would have watched the grass and weeds grow during my absence. She would have waited with some pleasure for my reaction when I got back.

I had no wish, though, to get drawn into the resentments and quarrels at the manor. When I saw Pitton in the grounds I went to him and asked him to lend me his mower. He was abashed. He had set up a little quarrel, a little tension, and had done so for some weeks in the full sight of the Phillipses. And now—at what should have been the climax, quarreling time—he was abashed. What he had done he had done in the sight of the Phillipses. But he didn’t know how to quarrel with me, a stranger. It was touching. He began to mumble some explanation, but then thought better of it. He went directly to the shed and brought out the mower and a tin with the fuel mixture. He was solicitous; he even gave me a rag, to wipe the mower casing after I had filled the tank.

When I was finished with the mowing I took care to leave the mower and the fuel tin just outside the locked door of his garden shed—as though letting him know by this dumb show (I hadn’t been so careful before when I had used his mower) that I wasn’t taking him for granted. And he responded in a way I never expected. On the Thursday afternoon he took my dustbin to the manor courtyard for the Friday-morning dustbin collection. He lifted the filled metal bin by one handle only, using only one hand, and not altering his gait or normal walking pace: a demonstration of his great strength, in spite of his age and paunch and apparent slowness.

So we became friends. And on some afternoons of the late summer and early autumn—sunshine and shadow on the lawn—we worked together.