The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,153

he, Bray, the self-employed man, celebrating his freedom after his father’s and grandfather’s lifetime of servitude, looked down on. The man who scoffed at Pitton, exulted in his fall, now showed sympathy for people like Pitton, people for whom in England, even in this well-to-do part of England, there was no longer room: people coming down from the Midlands and finding themselves dispossessed, without lodgings or security, people (unlike the naked souls in the Doomsday painting in St. Thomas’s) who knew what it was to be in charge of their fates, but felt they had lost control.

The more I heard about Bray’s meetings the more I thought of that London meeting of twenty years before. And the scene reconstructed itself in one detail after another, down to the lamp painted HALL shining palely in the quiet street, quiet at night in that part of residential London in those days, with few people out and very few cars. So ordinary and dull the street, so desperate the people up there, in the room at the top of the tall flight of stairs.

“It’s as with everything else,” Bray said. “You can take out only what you put in. The more you put in, the more you take out. The good book is always open for you.”

From Mrs. Bray I heard more. She was someone I hardly knew. I knew her mainly as a voice on the telephone. She answered the telephone when Bray was out and made the bookings for him; he telephoned her regularly when he was out. She was brisk (Bray’s instructions, to save his customers telephone charges); she was efficient. No extra talk there. A cheerful little voice on the telephone; its possessor hardly seen. She lived in her house—there was no garden: Bray’s paved yard left little space for anything like that. She was driven into Salisbury or Andover by Bray to do her shopping; she seldom took the bus. Sometimes Bray, in the car, greeted her in Salisbury. Then I saw her: a very small, thin woman, a wisp of a woman, hardly there—as though life with Bray, the driver, the mechanic, the man with strong views, the hard worker, the perverse neglecter of the valley’s beauty, had worn her down. It was from her, now, that I heard more of Bray’s religion and “meetings.”

“I can’t answer for him these days. He’s at one of his meetings, I expect. He’s emptied the deep-freeze. That’s how I know. That’s not the way you treat a deep-freeze. I don’t understand him. If you have a deep-freeze, you build it up. You don’t keep emptying it.”

I had heard about the deep-freeze from Bray. It was important to him. I didn’t have one myself and he delighted in telling me about the rituals connected with it. The bulk buying (and at reduced prices from certain shops, apparently), the cooking and the storing of great batches—the deep-freeze made food the center of a new kind of ritual, provided a new kind of shopping, a new kind of excursion, restored an idea of plenty and harvesttime and celebration.

Mrs. Bray had her own ideas. Towards the deep-freeze she was more squirrellike, hoarding, wishing to keep the granary full. And when one day I met her at the bus stop—unusually: she was usually driven by Bray to Salisbury or Amesbury or Andover or to some special discount supermarket on the outskirts of Southampton—she was still inflamed about the deep-freeze. So small, so thin, so inflamed.

She said, the rooks cawing and flapping above us: “If you have a deep-freeze, you build it up. You don’t keep emptying it.” She spoke as though, in an ideal world, she would keep her deep-freeze full forever and never touch it. She spoke as though—in spite of the manifest hardships, the absence of Bray and a car—the replenishing of the deep-freeze was the purpose of her trip to Salisbury. She repeated, “You build it up.”

At the end of the road—no longer hidden at its far end by the elms and the growth at the roadside between the elms—the red bus appeared.

She waited until the bus almost stopped. She said, “It’s that fancy woman of his.”

The words burst out of her. As though the arrival of the bus, the sudden darkening of the bus-stop area, the folding door opening back, the noise of the engine, had provided her with the correct dramatic moment for the disclosure, the abandoning of civility and talking about things she didn’t absolutely have on her mind.