as high as the lower rib of the user. The bark of the prong and of the wood an inch or so below the prong had been peeled. And just below that piece of stylishness was another: a brass-colored metal band. I hadn’t noticed that before, in the staff the old man used; and the staff that Mrs. Phillips had brought was so shiny with new varnish that I thought the old man might have bought a new one for me. But the inch-long black cap at the bottom of the staff, a cap in rubber or some composite material, was worn, front and back. It was the old man’s staff; he had prettied it up because he intended it to be a gift.
I said to Mrs. Phillips, “I will keep it as long as I live.”
Just a few years before, this would have seemed to me a big thing to say. Now the words, as soon as they were spoken, made me feel that the protection I offered the old man’s gift was hardly protection at all; that just as certain memories of down and river, chalk and moss, were to die with the old man, be untransmittable, so, even if I could bequeath the stick to some considerate inheritor, I could not pass on its associations. Without those associations, the stick, like the blond-and-dark disc of the ivy-choked cherry tree which I had had smoothed down and varnished, a souvenir and a record of the later life of the manor garden, would become no more than an object.
Mrs. Phillips said, “Funny old man.”
Strange words; strange distance between herself and the old man. The distance showed in her face as well: the smoother skin, the new clarity of the eyes, the lack of fatigue. And there was, in the tone of her speech, a reviving irony and love of life.
She said, “I think I should tell you before you hear it from somebody else. You know how gossip flies about the valley. I’ve given my notice.”
So the gift of the stick acquired another association. Mrs. Phillips’s bringing it over—that almost mischievous voice on the telephone, that distancing of herself from old Mr. Phillips, who had until recently walked with such privilege in the manor grounds—that gift was like the winding down of her manor life. How easily she seemed to do it! As soon as I had got to know the Phillipses, had stopped seeing them as exemplars of their job, I had admired them for their adventurousness, their getting by with so little, their readiness to move on. Yet now Mrs. Phillips’s news added a touch of desolation to the beauty of the gift she had brought.
She said, “I don’t have to tell you. It hasn’t been much of a life here since Stan died. Stan could have managed. I can’t do it by myself. He’s very difficult.” This was a reference to my landlord. “And it isn’t going to get better. That’s what makes it hard. It isn’t the kind of thing where you feel that what you do is going to make things better.”
She began to move towards the door. She paused; she looked through the high glass panes of the kitchen door at the broken aspens, growing vigorously again from their stumps.
She said, and her tone was intimate, half questioning, half looking for reassurance—I might have been a relation: “I met someone on holiday. He joined our group for dinner one day. So many matchmakers among one’s friends. You wouldn’t believe. Anyway. I thought I’d let you know before the gossip reaches you. Stan and I agreed on that. Whoever remained should marry again.”
It was strange. She had never been so easy with me, so without strain, the strain first of all of her strangeness in the manor, her uncertainty with me, then the strain of her illness, then the strain of her solitude. And perhaps, as I thought now, the strain of her life with Mr. Phillips, the man of great strength. And I, as if in response to her new personality, had never felt so close to her.
THE NEWS, as Mrs. Phillips said, spread fast about the valley. It got to Bray. His first thoughts were for my landlord, the master of the manor. He said, and it was as though he was speaking of himself as well, “Old age is a brutal thing. I suppose they’ll just sell up. In the end there’ll be nothing left.”
I said, “It’s lasted all his life.