The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,145

heard—indirectly—from the Phillipses that Alan usually ate alone in the manor. (And the picture that came to my mind was not of a tray being taken to Alan’s room, but of a dim ceiling bulb lighting a modest spread on an old lace tablecloth in a musty room smelling of old cedar and wood preservative.)

So the solitude I saw was indeed solitude. And if Alan thought it “creepy” that I could live in the place for so long without getting to know my landlord, I thought it strange—until I understood the particular solace the place offered him—that he should want to visit, for the reasons he gave: to be in the place important to his childhood, for the sake of the novel he was working on or planning, and also (for the sake of another book) to be in the presence of my landlord, to study his speech and mannerisms, the mannerisms of a more gracious age, the age before the deluge (not the age that had finished in 1914, this time, but the age according to Alan that had finished in 1940), the age when houses like my landlord’s were still important, not only socially but also in the making of literary and artistic reputations.

Alan suggested that in spite of his apparent idleness, his rambling about the orchard and gardens, his readiness to come to my cottage at any time, his visits to the manor were periods of work; that he was taking away volumes of “notes.” Sometimes he let me into the secret of the notes he was making or had made. My landlord had said to him once: “Would you like some toast? Shall I get Phillips to bring you some toast in a chafing dish?” And Alan had roared with laughter as much as he had roared at the story about Pitton and the pink champagne. “A chafing dish!” he said. “Have you heard anybody speak of a chafing dish?”

So that I felt not only that Alan (like me, twenty-five years before in Earl’s Court) had a good idea of what as a writer he expected to find; but also that my landlord, even in his shrunken world, and through the darkness of his acedia, still had an idea of what was expected of him.

But there was Alan’s solitude, so visible in the manor, so clear in the melancholy of his knobby little face when he was caught unawares. That solitude was real enough, as real as the pain of his childhood; as real as the acedia of my landlord and the physical dereliction this acedia had created all around him. That solitude of Alan’s as he walked about the garden and grounds was like a demonstration of the psychological damage he had suffered once upon a time. There was a part of him that hurt, a part where he could never be reached and where he was always alone; and the nature of his education, his too-literary approach to his experience, his admiration of certain writers and artists of the century, his wish to do again, but for himself, what they had done, all this conspired to conceal things from himself. The solitude of the manor grounds was a solace. Outside that was threat and the vision of his own inadequacy.

He made up for this by flattery of the people he admired and whose strength he wished he had. Like a child offering sweets to his fellows in order to buy peace, Alan told many people he was making notes about them for his big book about contemporary literature. He was keeping his eye on so many people, noting their conversation, keeping their letters; he was going to write about so many people. And it was hard, once Alan had told you he was making “notes” about you, to ignore him, hard not to start acting up (even like my landlord) to an intelligent, friendly man who might indeed be making notes about all the things you were saying.

He balanced this by a contempt for those writers in whom he saw versions of himself—mimics, people doing what others had done in social chronicles and wishing to show that they could do it too. Towards these writers, whose faults he saw very clearly, he was merciless. One such writer—he was physically bigger than Alan, but was also something of a dandy in clothes—whom I saw in London told me: “The venomous little insect came galumphing across the room at Clarissa’s and said to me, ‘My dear,