The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,126

He allowed me to help with the last cutting of the lawn—I always liked cutting the lawn. And I helped with the gathering of the leaves—a pleasant midafternoon activity (for an hour or so), oddly serene, stacking the leaves into a roughly carpentered two-wheeled caged trolley, pushing that through the orchard and past the children’s house to the “refuge,” removing the front of the trolley, tilting the trolley forward and then spreading out the leaves on the springy, slippery leaf hill.

A few days before Christmas I went to Pitton’s house to give him a bottle of whiskey. It was damp and cold; the road ran with wet; the beech trees and the sycamores, though without leaves now, still seemed to keep out the sun. Pitton’s gate and the paved path to his front door were in better shape than Bray’s. It was only when I was right at Pitton’s door that I noticed how badly in need of paint the door and timber surround were; and that the front casement windows were half rotted.

It was a long time before Pitton came to the door. Perhaps he had had to prepare, to dress. And there was an embarrassment about him, a tightening of his face, which let me know that he didn’t like being “caught” in his house.

The house was much poorer than I thought. The improved agricultural cottage of sixty-odd years before, however sturdy its external appearance, was a little ragged and knocked-about inside. The narrow hall was shiny with rubbing, hardly a recognizable color. The small front room was scrappily furnished.

Modest furniture which, though old, still made one think of the shops where it had been bought; modest television and hi-fi, which again made one think of cheap shops; cheap unlined curtains. Only the photographs—of Pitton and his wife together, younger; of Mrs. Pitton alone, twenty years before (a photograph with which she was clearly pleased, looking over her shoulder); a photograph of the son—only these photographs made the room, which had been Pitton’s for so long, personal.

The casement windows, as I could see more clearly from the inside, were warped; the room was drafty. Why hadn’t Pitton done something about the decorations? I know what he would have said. Decorations were the estate’s responsibility; the house wasn’t his. He was waiting for the estate to decorate his front room and no doubt the rest of his house; he was content to allow time, a portion of his life, to pass in drabness. It was disappointing. Here was the true servility, the true obedience, of the man. It was hard, faced with his gravity, his measured movements, his weighty manner, his self-cherishing, to grasp that other fact about him. So much of the money he earned, then, went on clothes, for himself and Mrs. Pitton, that show to the outside world about which they were both so particular.

I gave him the whiskey. He thanked me, but he didn’t look especially pleased; his tight expression didn’t go or soften. That expression softened, the muscles of his face grew slacker, only when, making conversation, covering up what I now recognized to be the error of my visit, I mentioned his hi-fi equipment. I said I had nothing like that myself. The tight, embarrassed look on Pitton’s face was replaced by a foolish, self-satisfied smile. He was glad—it was amazing—he was glad his possessions had surprised me.

And that foolish smile of Pitton’s took me back to early childhood—like a dream here, in this valley, in this house of Pitton’s—and to painful memories. Within our extended family our little unit was poor; and I remembered, on the one or two occasions when remote, richer branches came to visit us, how strong the instinct with us was to boast, to show off, to pretend that we were richer than we were letting on. Curious instinct: we didn’t boast with people who were as poor as ourselves; we boasted to people who were richer, who could easily see through our vanity. I had seen it in others too; my earliest observations as a child were about the lies of poverty, the lies that poverty forced on people. We were a very poor agricultural colony at the end of a great world depression. Very few people had money; great estates had to be sold for very little, money being so scarce; and among the laborers there was great distress. Yet as a child I saw people pretending to their employers, to the people who paid them