The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,162

had passed on to Mr. Phillips her reverence for the artistic side of my landlord. But while Mr. Phillips had allowed this reverence to grow, Mrs. Phillips’s own reverence had lessened. She had become more matter-of-fact about everything. Gaining security in the manor, she had lost her original feeling of awe; gaining security, she had looked inwards, concentrated on her nerves, surrendered (like her employer) more and more to the protection of her husband.

Now that her husband had gone, she had lost her security. The manor job, which had been so easy for so long, became suddenly hard; the manor became full of tension. And in her dealings with my landlord she went right back to her nurse’s attitude. But she was without the strength now to back up that attitude. The man was childish, she said; he wanted attention for the sake of attention. She would have known how to deal with that once; now she didn’t. The job began to wear her out.

The vegetable allotment within the walled garden was abandoned. But there still came to the grounds some of the strange men whom Mr. Phillips had called in to do occasional pieces of work. While Mr. Phillips lived these men had walked and moved quickly, like people not anxious to draw attention to themselves, done their jobs and gone away. But now there was no authority; and there was a change in the attitude of these men. They walked more slowly; they walked past the windows of my cottage; they raised their voices.

On my way back one afternoon from the river walk I saw two men in the overgrown garden. They had billhooks. They were near the old pile of sawn aspen logs. One man was small, much smaller than Alan (who had worried so much about his size). This man had a sly, dangerous face; in his eyes there was a look that made me feel he had been caught out and resented it. The other man was taller, though not much taller, dark-haired, with dark skin around his dark eyes.

The taller man said, without being asked anything, “We are taking away the rotten logs. Margaret knows. She gave permission.” Margaret was Mrs. Phillips.

It was my policy not to interfere with people I saw in the grounds; not to act as a watchman. But the billhooks, and the dancing blue eyes of the small man, worried me.

I said to the man who had spoken, “What is your name?”

He straightened up. He almost held his hands at his sides. He said, “Mr. Tomm. With two m’s. German.”

“German?”

“I’m a German. Mr. Tomm.”

Was this how he always introduced himself? Was being a German (he had an English Midlands accent) the most important thing to him, and something he felt he ought to get out of the way as soon as possible? Or was he joking?

He said, “My father was a prisoner of war. He worked on a farm near Oxford. He stayed on and married the old carter’s daughter. My father died five years ago. My mother died last Christmas in Birmingham. I used to live up there. But I lost my job and my wife left me. That’s why I’m here.” He made a scything, grass-cutting gesture with the billhook. “I love gardening. It’s all I want to do. I get it from my mother.”

I looked at the small man, to see what he was making of the story. He, the small man, was considering me intently. His little cheeks were working; he wasn’t going to talk to me. On his small, delicate forearms I saw tattoos done in green and red and blue-black. These colored tattoos, done with modern tools, were a new craze in the locality, spreading without publicity or overt promotion; Bray had told me about them. In tattoos at least the small man was keeping up with his bigger fellows.

The talker said, “I’m going through a bad patch.”

I left them. Just outside the box-bordered enclosure, quite wild now, there was a small pickup van reversed against the entrance, not far from my cottage. For rotten logs alone? I felt that other things—garden statues, urns, stone pots, even greenhouse doors—were at risk; that those two men were scavengers rather than serious thieves.

Mrs. Phillips seemed bemused when I telephoned. But she knew the name of the German. “He used to work for Stan. He’s a German, you know.”

Not many days after, the pickup van came again. The German got out, and a bigger, fat, unshaved man