The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,141
kitchen door in answer to his imperious, angry knocking. Still that expression on his face: as though our meeting—which by chance took place in a pedestrian shopping street not far from the shop where Pitton bought his clothes, and where clothes like Pitton’s could be seen in the window still—as though our meeting revived all the twisted emotions in him that could find no resolution or outlet in words.
He had been told, he said, that the estate wanted his house in order to sell it. But he didn’t believe that story. Who would want to buy a house next to Bray? It was an agricultural cottage, a tied cottage, something for a gardener, something that no one had particularly taken care of. And just as when I had gone to his house that Christmastime he had suggested that he had a source of income other than his gardener’s wages, so now when he spoke of the house where he had lived for twenty-five years and more, it was to suggest that if it had been another kind of house he would have looked after it differently; and it was almost as if he were suggesting that his real house was somewhere else. Yet he didn’t want to leave his agricultural cottage. And though many months had passed since he had stopped working at the manor, he wasn’t really trying to find another job. It was as though he had begun to feel that if he didn’t start looking for another job he mightn’t after all have to find another job.
He was confused, pulled in many directions, helpless. He seemed to be proving the point made by Mrs. Phillips. She had been continuing to look for some explanation of Pitton’s dismissal that would make it easier for everyone to bear; and she had settled on the idea that in his last year at the manor Pitton had gone very strange, that he had been finally undermined by the solitude of his labor—a pretense of work, a kind of half idling—in the wilderness, and that he had “gone to pieces.”
In her previous job, Mrs. Phillips said, she had seen any number of people who had gone to pieces; it wasn’t only people you read about in the newspapers who went to pieces. I had thought that Mrs. Phillips was straining too hard to find an explanation. But then, meeting Pitton at the bus stop in the valley and meeting him sometimes in Salisbury, and talking about his problems, which he kept on insisting were insoluble, I thought it was possible that Mrs. Phillips was responding to the odd mixture in his personality of passion and servility and affectation and pride and independence.
He didn’t want to be a gardener again, he told me. He could do the job at the manor; but he couldn’t do it anywhere else or for anybody else—it was too undignified. Nor did he want a town job. The country gentleman in him, or rather the free country laborer in him, feared the anonymity, the nothingness of the town worker.
I would meet Pitton at the bus stop in the valley. We would talk then until the bus came. We never talked on the bus. We sat on different seats. We also continued to meet in Salisbury; and sometimes we met in the village on the public road when I was coming back from my walk over the downs. Our talks were circular. He would put ideas to me about what he might do; I would encourage him; and then he would reject my encouragement, returning to the idea of the “grudge” against him.
Pitton’s difficulty—as I understood when I put myself in his place, and examined myself and my own fears—was that he had lost touch with the idea of work. In fact, after the manor, the freedom there, the routine he had created, the calm he had established for himself, his relationship with the seasons, the year, time itself, what he feared was not work but employment—and perhaps not employment so much as the idea of the employer.
In the end, quietly, ashamedly, he took a job. He drove a laundry van. I knew about it only when I saw him driving the van, the laundry leather moneybag added to his country-gentleman clothes and slung over his shoulder and chest like a bandolier. And in the end he left his cottage and was given a council flat in the town, on the old London coach road.