The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,134

back garden, the young man said, “It’s a cruel thing to say. But the best thing would be to cut down all the beeches and plant afresh.”

It was a cruel thing to say. It would do away with the place and setting I lived in. But the young man wasn’t speaking with any great conviction or concern. His eyes were quite bright with pleasure. He had been slightly oppressed by being all morning in the company of his superior, the man in the gray suit; and now, in the cottage, he—younger than he looked from a distance—was oddly skittish and playful and relaxed. Not at all agent material, I would have thought. And it turned out, very soon, that his heart wasn’t in the business.

His comment about the trees was just something he had said because—perhaps—he had heard it said in various circumstances by other people in the agency. As was his comment, looking at the paddock where the dairyman from the neighboring farm had kept his pony, and where the once famous old racehorse had come to die: “You could put a couple of beeves in there and fatten them up.”

A couple of beeves—was that really his language, his style? It wasn’t; and that self-awareness or self-knowledge lay so close to the surface of his thoughts that it required only the beginning of conversation to bring it out. His father was a gamekeeper on a proper estate not far away. Through the recommendation of his father’s employer he had been taken on for a trial period by the agency; and he had accepted the offer—this thin young man with the smiling, blank, unformed face—to please both his father and his father’s employer. But his heart was elsewhere: he didn’t know exactly where. He would have liked service life, would have dearly liked to be an officer. But some physical disability—and perhaps also some examination failure—had kept him out of that.

He said, “You’re never one of them.”

Them? Who were his “them”? The “them” he was concerned with turned out to be the other young men from the agent’s. At the end of the day they simply went home. There was no question of going to a pub with “them” or of “them” asking him home.

And simply, in his skittish, restless, shallow way, he bared his personality in a few minutes. And there was almost nothing more he had to say when the big man in the gray suit came to call with Mr. Phillips. The young man in the blazer then stopped talking and continued to smile in his friendly, empty way.

The big man sat down in my shabby armchair and he seemed genuinely tired, genuinely happy to sit down, happy to sip the coffee he was offered. He tried to suggest that, without looking, he really was looking; but I didn’t feel he was looking now; I felt he had seen enough already. He was puffy, a recent puffiness over a body that had once been sturdy and active. He was in his late forties; his breathing was difficult; and his hair was thin and flat and lackluster. The polka-dotted handkerchief in his breast pocket was an odd touch of gaiety.

He was not interested in me, my past, or what I did. He had ceased already to be interested in Mr. Phillips. He was already, though sitting in my armchair, far away, with himself, his solitude. What could interest such a man? What kinds of things had once pricked his curiosity or caused him surprise? Perhaps now—he gave that impression—he was a little melancholy that active life had gone by so quickly already. Perhaps he had been moved by the dereliction of what he had seen in the manor and in the manor grounds; perhaps it had chimed in with his own mood, reinforced that mood.

He said, no doubt having been briefed by Mr. Phillips, “Nice spot for writing.”

I said, “It’s nice. But I know it can’t last.”

He said quietly, “No one can be certain of anything.” And the words, though so ordinary, seemed to be spoken less to me than to himself and about himself.

All at once the inspection—if it had been that—was over. All three men left. They walked back to the manor along the lane between the cottage and the vegetable garden. The man in the gray suit walked heavily, carefully, making me aware of the hard lane, with chippings of stone or heavy limestone beaten into the surface; with water-carried drifts of beech mast and