The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,157

know. Started a little secondhand business. Didn’t do well. Began taking in foreign students. French, German. We get a lot of those here. But that didn’t do well either. The agencies wanted the students to stay with families. He was ready to put his head in the oven. Then he began tithing. It hurt. It was like the last straw. But he kept at it. And you know what? In the last two months the social security have been sending him people. For the first time for a couple of years he’s making regular money. As Churchill said during the war, there’s a tide in the affairs of men. It goes out. But it also comes back in. It’s the same with tithing. You get back only what you put in. It has to hurt. Then you get double.”

So, beneath the noisy rooks—whose arrival portended death or money, according to the old wise tales, as Mr. Phillips’s father said—serenity came to Bray. He still took down engines in the mess of his paved yard (but he was more circumspect with his surveyor neighbor than he had been with Pitton); he still wore his formal-informal uniform of peaked cap and cardigan; he still talked a lot in the car. But his old readiness to snap and cavil and rant was abated or, rather, it ran into, meshed in with, his religious talk. He was a man at ease with himself, a man with a secret, an inner vision.

He was indifferent to the frenzies of Mrs. Bray. But perhaps, as I suspected, that frenzy was for outsiders: an act, a character, that made it easier for her (for so long living hidden away in her house) to go out among people. And because there was no change in this public character of Mrs. Bray’s, because I could see always what her talk would lead up to, I dreaded meeting her (once no more than a gentle old voice on the telephone) just as some time before I had dreaded meeting Pitton, whose early gardening rituals it had enchanted me to observe.

A BIG car stopped for me at the bus stop one day. It was a new neighbor. Newer than the surveyor. And this stopping, this offer of a lift to Salisbury, was his way of introducing himself. A big car, a middle-aged man, perhaps in his late fifties; a big house (I had heard it had been put up for sale, but hadn’t heard who had bought it, didn’t even know until now that it had been sold). The accent of the neighbor was still a country accent; he wanted me to know that he was a local man, that he had known the valley a long time, and that he was already (though new in the house) familiar with the people.

He said, “I gave Mrs. Bray a lift last week. She’s very fierce these days. Do you know John Bray? Why does he charge so little? He’ll have to work till he dies. He provides a good service. He’s dependable; he has a lot of regulars; people like him. I’ve often told him that as a car-hire man he should charge as much as the market will bear. But he goes his own way.”

We passed an old farm, ruined old walls, muddy yard.

My new neighbor said, “My mother grew up in that house. Different people now, of course.”

It was his way, not an unpleasant way, of claiming the valley, claiming kinship with the people of the valley. I thought of Mr. Phillips’s father, going watery-eyed at the thought of his early days, the beginning of the century, in the valley, and his first job as a carrier’s boy; his boy’s adventure of hiding in “a bed of withies” when the motorcar had knocked down his cousin. There was, in my neighbor’s talk, a wish to be linked to that kind of past, the past contained as well in Bray’s memories of harvesttime and children taking tea to their grandfathers in the fields. But at the same time there was an element in my neighbor—his big quiet car, being driven without hurry beside the river—of the rich man unbending.

“How’s Mrs. Phillips?”

I didn’t know there had been anything particularly wrong with her. I was aware only that, like my landlord after his two glorious outgoing summers, Mrs. Phillips had retreated, was less in evidence. But I hadn’t inquired why.

My neighbor said, “I believe her nerves are getting the better of her.”

Mrs. Bray’s rages,

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