The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,149
skylarking. They ran behind a horse-drawn van belonging to a local firm. They jumped on the nose bags that were slung on the rear axle. The driver didn’t see them. They rode on the nose bags for a mile or two, eating apples. Then they got bored. They got off. A motorcar, unusual for those days, came along the road, kicking up white dust, dust that lay an inch or two thick on the unpaved country road. Both boys were involved in the white dust cloud. Bizarrely, then, another car came along and old Mr. Phillips saw his cousin knocked down. It was the only thing he could see, and he was frightened. He ran to the riverbank and hid in a bed of withies until midafternoon. From there he saw the dust cloud settle. He saw his aunt, his cousin’s mother, come. He saw the boy taken away in an ambulance. “To the military hospital—the army was here even in those days.”
There the boy died. No one thought of flogging old Mr. Phillips—that worry had been with him. In his aunt’s house that evening he saw the body of his cousin—with whom he had been riding that morning—laid out.
“These things strike you afterwards,” the old man said. The funeral was the next day. “His little coffin,” old Mr. Phillips said, and now real tears for that death more than sixty-five years before were running down his face.
Then he pulled himself up, altered his tone. “No, not little. Fair-sized coffin. My aunt asked me and the other boys to collect moss. That was how I spent the day of the funeral. Gathering moss. It was to put in the grave, to soften the whiteness of the chalk in the sun. It’s what the undertakers still do. They hang a mat, green and looking like grass, down the sides of the grave. Of course they come back later, after the mourners have gone, and take it away.”
The wet riverbanks, the downs: everyone saw different things. Old Mr. Phillips, with his memories of chalk and moss; my landlord, loving ivy; the builders of the manor garden; Alan; Jack; me.
THE ROOKS, prospecting, made such a racket that I wondered how I would endure it—another sound to be added to the noise of airplanes at certain hours in the day; the artillery barrages on some nights from the firing ranges (the sound of which made one conceive of air as a substance, elastic up to a point, and beyond that point liable to puncture); the end-of-day traffic increasing year by year and coming to my cottage through a thinning screen of beeches and yews.
But the racket of that day was unusual. The squawks of the big birds, flapping slowly around, were like the squawks of discussion; when the discussion and the prospecting were over the birds went away. And when the first party of settlers, the first nest-builders, came, they built only one nest. It was as though they were testing the trees, the site, the people. The rocky or pebbled lane below the beeches was littered with lengths of pliable twigs, material for the nest, fallen and useless, suggesting that for every twig successfully knitted into the nest three or four or five had been lost. At last it appeared, on the upper part of a beech: one rooks’ nest.
There was a pause then, long enough to make one feel that there would be no more rooks’ nests in those winter-stripped beeches. But then, very quickly, there appeared a second; and a third; and then many more, big dark burrs high up, beyond the reach of predators, and soon to be hidden by the foliage of the spring and summer. From the train to London, through Wiltshire and Hampshire, I saw the same colonization going on, rooks’ nests appearing where there hadn’t been any.
The elms had finally died in the valley. Many, before they had finally died, had been felled, cut up; others had died standing up, remaining bare, going grayer against the summer green. And the valley road became suddenly open. Curves once overhung with green, mysterious and full of depth, showed plain; tilled downs, without a border of elms and wild growth between the elms, sloped down simply to the asphalt road. House plots showed plain, and houses and their ancillary little corrugated sheds looked naked. The shallow river and its wet banks remained enchanting; but the land on either side became ordinary.