The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,15

Bray, the car-hire man, their near neighbor; from other things said by the people who looked after the manor; and from words occasionally spoken on the afternoon shopping bus that went to Salisbury—the story was that the new dairyman and his family had had a rough time in a town somewhere, and that they had been “saved” by coming to the valley.

The man was tall, young, with a long head, thin-haired; with a heaviness rather than a coarseness about his features. He had the face of a man who had endured abuse. But it was still a young face. His wife looked aged; whatever it was the family had endured had marked her face. She could have passed as his mother. Where his face and head were long, she was square-faced; and her square face was crushed, wrinkled. She wore rimless glasses (an unexpected attempt at style). She was withdrawn. In time smiles came to her husband’s face. But I never saw her smile.

What terrors must there have been in the town for them! How could people like these, without words to put to their emotions and passions, manage? They could, at best, only suffer dumbly. Their pains and humiliations would work themselves out in their characters alone: like evil spirits possessing a body, so that the body itself might appear innocent of what it did.

This couple had two children, boys. The elder had something of his father’s abused, put-upon look; but there was about him an added touch of violence, of mischief, of unconscious wickedness. The younger boy was more like his mother. Though he was very small and neat in his schoolboy’s gray flannel suit, he already had something of his mother’s distant, withdrawn air.

There was a bus that, leaving Salisbury in the early afternoon, served as a school bus for the little towns and villages just to the north. It picked up young children from the infant schools in one direction, and then on the way back it picked up bigger children from the secondary schools. This bus picked up both the dairyman’s boys. I sometimes used the bus myself. Life in the valley being what it was, this gave me my closest look at the boys. And I began to feel that though the boys might have been “saved” by the valley, as people said, the ways of the town pressed on them still.

The older children, though noisy, were generally well mannered. It was their custom when the bus was full to stand and offer their seat to an adult; rebellion with them sometimes took the modest form of delaying the gesture. The dairyman’s elder son added another tone or mood to the school bus. Noisiness became rowdiness; and one day I saw him not only refusing to stand but also continuing to keep his feet on the seat beside him. He was embarrassed when I got on the bus—I was a neighbor, I knew his house and his parents. But he was also among his friends, and he couldn’t let himself down.

The bus dropped us both off in the shade of the great manor yews, near his house and mine.

I said, “Peter.”

He stood to attention, like a cadet or a boy in a reformatory, threw back his head, and said, “Sir!” As though expecting at the very least a slap; and at the same time not truly intending apology or respect. In that reaction, which made me nervous, I felt I had a glimpse of his past, and saw his need for aggression, his only form of self-assertion. I didn’t know how to go on with him; I didn’t particularly want to. I didn’t say any more.

He was odd man out on the bus, and like an intruder in the village. In fact, there were no other boys of his age around; people with growing families tended to move out. And though there were a number of young children, the dairyman’s younger boy was also a little strange. Among the children from the infant schools on its route, the school bus picked up two or three near idiots. The dairyman’s younger son, delicate and small, attached himself to one of these: a fat little boy, thick-featured, with a heavy, round head, a boy dressed in startling colors, bright red sometimes, bright yellow at other times, with pale-blond eyelashes and eyebrows that, oddly, suggested someone dim-sighted. This fat child was restless on the bus. He moved from seat to seat and—as though knowing that the constrictions