The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,132

upon these visits by the agent as inspections and they prepared accordingly. They didn’t overdo the zeal, but it was possible, from a certain amount of activity in the manor courtyard, and sometimes even from hints dropped to me about the drift of leaves against my north wall (impossible absolutely to clear: that wall was the natural resting place of beech leaves for two or three hundred yards around), it was possible to tell that a visit from “the agent” was expected.

But then the agent often turned out to be a very young man, a junior, someone fresh from school or college, someone who had just joined the firm and was using our estate to cut his teeth in the land-agenting business. Agents here handled mile upon mile of fishing rights, beat upon beat; thousands of acres of farmland, thousands of acres of woodland. Our few acres of wasteland, virtually untilled, though a world to us, offered no land agent a challenge or even a training. And it often happened that the young men who came, moving on quickly to higher or bigger things within their firm or another firm, never came again. It was hardly worthwhile, therefore, cultivating them or even getting to know their names. And from looking upon the visits of “the agent” as inspections we began—or at any rate the Phillipses began—to look upon them as occasions to ask for things, repairs here, a lick of paint there. And from making ourselves spruce to attract commendations (which might be reported at a higher level somewhere far away) we sought to look as ragged as we could.

After that wonderful summer of the motorcar drives and the flowers and the champagne we began to get very ragged indeed. Three of the beeches at the edge of the lawn were judged to be dangerous, liable to fall into the manor courtyard. And within a week they were cut down and their branches cut up and corded, some stacked in one of the outbuildings, some carted away by the tree cutters as part of their fee. So all at once, within a week, I lost some of the green shade, the green gloom by which I had felt embraced whenever I returned to the manor from any journey, however short or long.

Only the yews and beeches at the front of the house separated me from the road; and though the beech trees—big as they were—were not really a form of sound protection, I fancied after those three beeches went that the road noises were louder, especially after five—so that, for the first time here, I became aware of the end-of-day traffic. And I fancied I heard the military airplanes more clearly too.

How fragile my little world was here! Just leaves and branches. Just leaves and branches created the colors and the enclosure I lived within. Remove them—a morning’s work with a chain saw—and the public road would be just there, less than a hundred yards away, and all would be open and exposed.

How often, with Pitton’s mower, I had cut the thin, pale-green, straggly grass under those beeches, going right up to the end of the lawn, next to the overgrown yews, going right up to where the ground was not grass or lawn so much as old twigs and beech mast and old, light-starved dust. It was never satisfying to use the mower there; but it was necessary, because it completed the job, gave the complete, swept, cared-for effect all over, so that for a day or two after a grass-cutting it was a pleasure for me to look at what I had done, the swaths I had created myself in rich grass and poor grass, from end to end of the lawn.

Now, in the openness after the three beeches had been felled, grass began even in the autumn to appear on that twiggy, dusty soil. And all that winter and spring, until the grass began truly to grow again, there remained, quite literally, impressions of the felled beeches on the lawn. The tree fellers had made them fall at a particular angle, so that in the new openness, the new light around the manor courtyard, the beeches, though they had ceased to exist, seemed for half a year to cast ghostly shadows.

The decision to cut the beeches was a prudent one. The gales were severer than usual in the spring. So severe that I stood in my cottage kitchen to watch (through a low window) the effect on