The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,156

me about what he had learned. In the beginning he hadn’t talked with great knowledge. That was one reason why I took some time to understand that he was talking seriously.

Gradually then there came out an account of his new religious life: the healing sessions, the “good book” opened at random for each one in turn, and its words interpreted. Gradually there came out too the new idea of community he had found and surrendered to: the discovery of people wounded in their minds and hearts, for whom the material world had proved too much, had passed out of control. Not the arbitrary medieval world of the Doomsday painting in St. Thomas’s: that was a world men had never understood or thought they could control. In that world men could get by only by appeasing, making sacrifice, performing rituals. In this healing world of Bray’s it was different: as in the ancient Roman world at the very beginning of Christianity, the grief and the communion came from the feeling that the world had once been under control, but was so no longer.

And at the center of this tenderness and compassion was the woman he had seen at the railway station, who had the very next day thrown herself on his mercy, the woman who was totally dependent on him. Of her appearance I gathered nothing more than I had already heard: the over-big tweed coat, the lank hair, the unhappy, close-set eyes, the bad skin. This was what Bray had reported to Mrs. Bray the first day and the next; that was all Mrs. Bray had to go by; that was all she had to embroider on.

I thought that part of the woman’s attraction for Bray would have been the absence of an overt allure. Allure in the woman might have made Bray uneasy, might have made him feel he was being used; it might have given him the idea that there were or could have been other men in the picture. In the woman he had found there was only a child’s need in a cruel world; and to that need Bray would have thought that he alone was responsive. And from time to time in those aggressive, unhappy eyes there might have been an acknowledgment of Bray’s ability to protect.

Mrs. Bray said of Bray, “If I told the taxi union or the council where he got his fancy woman from, I suppose they would take away his license.”

I didn’t think her power would run that far; I didn’t think she thought so herself; and I don’t believe she wanted any harm to come to Bray. It was his new serenity that enraged her. As far as he was concerned, he behaved as though there were no quarrels at home. And perhaps there were none; perhaps Mrs. Bray’s rages were for people like me, who might have known about Bray’s other life. But it was only from Mrs. Bray that I heard about the woman. From Bray I heard only about the healing and the meetings. His meetings took up more of his time. There were certain afternoons and evenings now when he was not free; but apart from that his taxi-driving, car-hire life continued as before.

He said to me one day in the car, after a silence which he had allowed to happen, perhaps to give greater effect to his words: “I’ve taken up tithing.”

He spoke the words with pride, boastfulness, pleasure. It was like the time he had spoken from the corner of his mouth about Pitton’s departure and from the dashboard shelf had handed me, with an air of mystery and favor, the book my landlord had published in the 1920s.

Tithing! Such an old word. The tenth of one’s produce for the church. Such a subject for radical protest. Perhaps even in the Middle Ages, when men lived in the world of the St. Thomas’s Doomsday painting, it had been resisted. But now Bray, a hater of privilege and taxation, boasted of offering his tithe to his healer—spoke of tithing as though he had toiled up to the top of the hill and seen the fine view.

He said, “And that has to be before tax, you understand. I give a tenth of my gross. It hurts. Of course it hurts. It’s meant to hurt. You have to make the sacrifice.” And then, not knowing that from his wife I had been given an idea of the person he was talking about, he said, “There’s someone I