The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,158
Bray’s fares, Mrs. Phillips’s increased nerves—I was impressed by the minuteness of my new neighbor’s knowledge; and I believe he intended me to be impressed. In my mind—with the speeding up of the years, consequent on my own aging as well as on my repeating experience of the seasons in the valley (less and less new knowledge added every year), and with the dislocation of memory caused by recent events (like the departure of Pitton)—in my mind, he, my neighbor, had only just arrived in the valley.
We came to the village with the bridge over the river. My neighbor turned off the main valley road and steered his big car gently over the narrow railed bridge.
He said, “I often take this road. There are some pretty little bits.” He was at once proprietorial and celebratory, as celebratory of the valley and the river as I had been in my early years. For me, though, the years had begun to stack away, the seasons had begun to repeat. Not so for him. Yet he was an older man and had deep roots here. Perhaps it was that depth of knowledge, added to proprietorship, the ownership of the big house, that had given him his special, almost reverential, view.
The bridge was the only one over the river in the valley. The site of both bridge and village would have been old; and though there were no barrows or tumuli here, and the village buildings were mostly of this century, there was a feeling here of the past, not of temples or mysteries, but of human habitation, agriculture, fields or pasture existing over the centuries within the limits of the wet meadows.
The feeling was especially strong in the large field beside which we were now driving. I had never seen this field plowed. Its roadside hedge was marked with enormous oaks, thick straight trunks widely and evenly spaced, these oaks (which might have been allowed to grow out of the hedge) suggesting a planting done more than a hundred years before (and with what security, what a conviction that this corner of the earth would continue to be as the planter of the hedge and the oaks had known it).
In my second or third year in the valley, during a winter of great floods, when the river had overflowed its banks at many places and cut new, fast-moving, noisy channels through the water meadows up and down the valley, all this field with the great boundary oaks had been flooded, creating the effect sometimes, according to the light, of a great white lake; and the swans and the moorhens and coots and the smaller wild ducks and other river birds, leaving the familiar river course, had paddled about this field as long as the lake lasted, as if in addition to the joy of finding a big new feeding ground, there was also the excitement of being on water in a place where normally there was only land. The flood, receding after a few days, had left the field sodden, with little drifts of black mud caught in the grass, and ruffled-looking, as though the movement of the water had pushed the grass about in the wrong way. Every winter since then, whenever the black and yellow council noticeboard, FLOODS, was placed beside the road, I had waited for this drama to repeat.
The road ran along a ledge in the down, following the curve of the down. The river was on the right, now closer, now farther away, now almost level with the road, now some way below it. A narrow river, winding in a wide valley—it offered many different views. This drive was quite different from the drive on the other bank; it might have been another river.
The road twisted up sharply; the river fell away; fields separated it from the road. Then there was a bushy, overgrown lane that ran diagonally between the fields down to the lushness of the river.
My neighbor said, “I used to cycle around here when I was a boy. I loved coming to the top of this hill in order to go coasting down that lane. It ends in a footbridge over the river.”
When he was a boy: forty-five years before, perhaps, in the 1930s, with the war coming. Quiet roads, almost empty skies; no constant military roar, as now; no sight, miles away to the west and miles up, of the vapor trails one after the other of commercial airliners, vapor trails usually like disappearing