The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,135

leaf debris in the ruts made by motor tires. They walked past the hidden garden Pitton had some summers before spent a week clearing—Mr. Phillips muscular and steady and already half-protective towards the heavy, breathless man in the gray suit on his left; and with the slender, frivolous, even slightly skipping, gamekeeper’s son in his blazer on the right.

ABOUT HALF an hour or so later, before lunch, Mrs. Phillips came to see me. She was wearing her blue padded cardigan or jacket that bloated her and suggested someone wearing an emergency life jacket—as in an illustration in an airline card about emergency exits and what to do when the aircraft came down in water. The dark skin below her eyes, the darkness and pouches of her nerves, had lost some of its gathers and fussy lines; had lost even some of its darkness. Though she still had the manner of an invalid, someone who needed to be looked after, she had long ago begun to heal. Her hair had gone thin, had begun to go back from her forehead, giving her the high white forehead of a lady in an Elizabethan painting. So there was in her face a mixture of coarseness and delicacy.

She stood in the kitchen doorway, not coming in. Behind her, the stony lane, the abandoned cold frames, the vegetable-garden wall with the tiled coping, and the blackthorns that had grown up in the past five years on both sides of the wall: flourishing on the other, sunny side of the wall, rising above the wall; but thin and long-stalked on my side, the side I could see, growing in a poor corner and dragged up mainly by light, it seemed. Those blackthorn seedlings, the flowers and then the fruit, had worried the Phillipses. Though they had lived here, in the region, all their life (and Mr. Phillips’s father had been born just a few miles away), their knowledge of country things was restricted. Far away, rising now from what more than ever had become a water-meadow wilderness, against the big southern sky which I loved looking at, there was the damaged, the mutilated, aspen fan, with the jagged torn stumps of the two side aspens clearly showing. It would be fifteen or twenty years before aspen greenery such as I had known would again shade and give scale to the view.

Mrs. Phillips said, “I thought I should let you know.”

This was her nurse’s manner, which she shared with Mr. Phillips and perhaps to some extent copied from him. The other side of this manner, with Mr. Phillips, was his authority, his power, his irritability. With Mrs. Phillips it was her invalid’s manner, the thin dark skin darkening and gathering below her eyes, the thin veins getting blue and prominent, seeming about to rupture, suggesting with the very many fussy shallow lines on her forehead infinite suffering and fragility.

She said, “I thought I should let you know. I know you are close to him. They’re letting Mr. Pitton go.” The “mister” was for my sake; that was how I called him and referred to him. She and Mr. Phillips called him Fred. “Of course,” she said, a little more jauntily, “it’s been coming for some time.”

And that was true, though I had never wanted to face the facts or to inquire too carefully into them, half wishing to believe in magic, in things going on as I had found them, believing—like Alan, to some extent—in the great wealth of my landlord and the ability of the people who looked after his affairs to perform great financial feats. But I knew that Pitton and his house were costing money; and the Phillipses were costing money; and the manor itself was very expensive to maintain, even in the way it was. And I could see that the estate—more a nature reserve than workable land—provided little revenue.

The great inflation of the mid-seventies would have cut cruelly into whatever income my landlord had. And the manor required too much attention. It wasn’t a place that could simply be let go. It wasn’t like my cottage; its scale was more than human; it exaggerated human needs. People had to be trained to use buildings like the manor; and that was why—like the ancient Roman villa at Chedworth in Gloucestershire—these buildings were perishable. People could easily do without them.

When the boiler exploded at the manor, and the ceramic or concrete or asbestos casing of the tall metal chimney against one wall had shattered