The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,169

life of the manor, mixed up with the feeling of age which my illness was forcing on me, caused me grief.

I liked the neighbor. I had nothing against him—he had unwittingly shown me where I was to move. He was reverential about what he wished to acquire; the valley and the land were his in a special way as well. His mother had lived as a girl in a farmhouse (now partly in ruin) beside the river. No lack of reverence there; and I had always known that there was no means of preserving a landscape which—in its particular purity for me—existed for me after that first spring only in my heart. From that first spring I had known that such a moment was going to come. But now that it had come, it was shocking. And as at a death, everything here that had been a source of pleasure and surprise, everything that had welcomed me and healed me, became a cause for pain.

THE MANOR help came, lived for a while in the two redecorated rooms, each woman in her own way and with her own hallowed things; and then went away. But someone at last seemed to suit; and Mrs. Phillips felt secure enough to start taking up the threads of her private life again.

The private life, the one she had shared with Mr. Phillips, had been full of public pleasures—pubs, clubs, hotel bars, modest country-town restaurants with dance floors or cabarets—pleasures which, more than house or the sense of place or job or vocation, had given stability and rhythm to the Phillipses’ year. This rhythm, overriding her grief, now claimed her; and in the early spring, at what had been one of her and Mr. Phillips’s two holiday times, she went off for a fortnight with old friends.

In her absence, her assistant came out of the manor shadows, showed herself, and explored the grounds without constraint. A thin woman of about fifty, as pleased with the solitude and spaciousness of the manor grounds as that other woman or girl had been all those years before, the one who had tied the tails of her shirt above her bare midriff. A different kind of dress on this older woman: she wore an expensive tweed skirt. She had invested much in this skirt. She was like Pitton, I thought: living up to the place and, though a servant, slightly in competition with it. How she changed the place for me! I felt myself, after all these years, under inspection again.

When Mrs. Phillips came back, the strange lady withdrew, became timorous, nervous, as though unwilling for her relationship with Mrs. Phillips to be seen too clearly by me.

The holiday had done Mrs. Phillips much good. Her forehead was smoother; the skin below her eyes was less dark, less gathered up; and her voice was lighter. This lightness of voice was especially noticeable on the telephone. She sounded quite mischievous when, two weeks after she had come back from her holiday, she telephoned to say she had a gift for me and wanted to bring it over.

She was in her sporty quilted anorak. She held a walking stick lightly in both her hands, holding the stick horizontally; and when she held it in one hand it was with the gesture of someone not used to a walking stick, not knowing how to hold it or walk with it.

She said, “I went to see Stan’s father on Sunday. He wants you to have his stick.”

It was the pronged stick, the staff in the prong of which he rested his thumb as he walked in the grounds of the manor. He was the first person I had seen using this kind of stick. I was myself a user of sticks on my walks. From my father—who had made them for pleasure in Trinidad, from certain forest trees—I had inherited a feeling for walking sticks; and in my early days as a traveler I had always tried to bring back a stick from the country I was traveling in.

His pronged staff was the first thing old Mr. Phillips and I had talked about. He knew that when he walked with it in the manor grounds he had my attention. And now it was his gift. Examining it as a new object, a gift, I found it was shorter than I had remembered. I had remembered it as tall as the old man’s shoulder, it was in fact the height of the stick fighter’s staff,