The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,148
irritability was like Bray’s peaked cap; it enabled Mr. Phillips to express many things. He could wear his irritability dead straight; or he could wear it mockingly or self-mockingly. He could use it to express authority, or to be an aggrieved worker; or it could be the irritability of a man protecting his good fortune, not wishing to exult.
Now his irritability bridged his human response to the death of Alan and his professional pride as a male nurse and as protector of the manor. He had spotted Alan immediately, he said. He had spotted Alan’s depressive nature. He had been right to forbid Alan the house. The drunkenness would simply not have done. Its effect on my landlord would have been calamitous; and then Alan could so easily have done in the manor what he had done at home. Think of the trouble, the confusion, the further effect on my landlord, holding on to the remnants of his own lucidity and health.
That was how he, Alan, was remembered at the place which he thought of as his special retreat. “I telephone Phillips and have him meet me at the station.” That was how (in one mood) Alan thought or wanted to think of his time and position at the manor. It was half a social idea, half a literary idea: the being met “at the station,” with all its old-fashioned country-house-weekend suggestions; the use of the name Phillips without the “mister”—though Alan called Mr. Phillips Stanley or Stan and Mr. Phillips called him Alan.
MR. PHILLIPS’S old father said to me, “So your friend Alan died. Nice man. I hardly knew him. I saw him a few times. He was always very pleasant.”
He, old Mr. Phillips, the small, neat man, had been walking in the grounds with his tall pronged staff (the sign that he had come to the grounds to walk and not to work). He was carefully dressed, in his very pale colors—no pattern in the fabric of his tie, jacket, or shirt, this absence of pattern together with the broad lapels, collars, and ties of the period adding to the pallor of the clothes, suggesting chalk below the tints, the way the chalk of the downs modified the color of young grass or corn and in dry weather whitened a plowed field.
The old man said, “Whenever I hear of something like this I think of my cousin. He died when he was eight. In 1911, coronation year.”
We were standing outside my cottage, below the beeches. The old man slightly lifted his face. He was smiling; his eyes were watering. I knew the expression. The smile wasn’t a smile, the tears were not tears. It was just what happened to his face whenever he began to talk about his childhood or early life.
But he couldn’t tell me about his cousin just then. We were both distracted by a great squawking noise. The noise was made by a flock of rooks circling overhead. Big black beaks, big black flapping wings. I had never seen them here before. I had got used to starlings arriving suddenly in screeching flocks, settling like black leaves on trees. But rooks in this number I hadn’t seen. They flew around slowly, squawking, as if assessing us. In my first year, on one of my early, exploratory walks, I had seen two or three downs away, on a wooded hill on the other side of Jack’s cottage, spread-eagled husks of these birds nailed to a fence by Jack’s very old and bent father-in-law.
Old Mr. Phillips said, “They’ve lost their nests right through the valley. They lost their nests when the elms died. They’re prospecting. They need tall trees. They’ll choose the beeches. You know what they say about rooks. They bring money to a house. Money is coming to somebody in the manor. Who do you think it’s going to be? Of course it’s an old wise tale.” “Old wise tale”—it was what he said; and the idiom, as he spoke it, with its irony and tolerance, sounded original rather than a corruption. “If you think they’re birds of death you can’t stand the noise. If you think it’s money, you don’t mind.”
And in that noise of the squawking, prospecting rooks, the old man told me about the death he had not forgotten, the first death against which he measured all other deaths, the grief that was more painful than any other and was still with him more than sixty-five years later.