The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,19
in clothes, were important to them. They were not particularly friendly. They might have been reflecting the seriousness and modernity of the new management; or they might have been anxious to make the point that, though they did farm worker’s jobs, they were not exactly that kind of person.
The man in the pink cottage had a new or newish car. On fine afternoons his wife sunbathed in the ruined garden, seemingly careless of showing her breasts. She was a short woman with heavy thighs. The contemporary fashions she followed didn’t flatter her figure; they made her look heavy, badly proportioned, a little absurd. But one day I saw how the long dresses of an earlier era, with high, narrow waists and full hips, might have been absolutely right for her, would have made her voluptuous. And I felt that this was how she saw herself, immensely desirable; and that this sunbathing in the wreck of the garden, this care of what had at first seemed to me a slack, heavy body, was something she might have thought she owed to her beauty. The new car, her husband’s careful clothes—these were further tributes.
New people, young people as well, took over the other two cottages in Jack’s row at the bottom of the valley. New brooms down there, in both cottages: they swept clean. They dug up what had been left behind in both gardens, leveled the ground and planted grass.
Jack’s garden was wild.
I saw Jack’s wife outside the cottage one day. She said, talking of her new neighbors but making no gestures that might have betrayed her, “Have you seen? All lawn, my dear.”
The turn of speech, the irony, was a surprise. I had never thought Jack’s wife capable of such things; but then I had thought of her—and she seemed to have been content to be regarded—as an appendage of Jack’s.
“And the horses,” she said.
The people in the middle cottage had a horse.
I said, “How’s Jack?”
“He’s all right, you know. He’s working again.”
“There’s a lot for him to do in the garden.”
She said, “You think so?”
As though I had said something untrue. Why did she want to deny what was so obvious? We were standing outside the garden. Had I mentioned something she felt I shouldn’t have mentioned? Was I putting a curse on the sick man?
Because Jack was sick. Though she said he was working again he was not well. And intermittently all that summer, for two or three weeks at a time, even on those sunny days which in previous years he would have celebrated by working bare-backed in his garden, the smoke rose from one of the chimneys of the cottage like a symbol of his sickness, like a sign of the cold he felt, the sick man in his room. While the new farm workers, young men with young wives, drove up and down the big fields in their new tractors, and went out in their new or newish cars after work.
Jack’s wife commented gently, ironically, on the changes. But she seemed more and more to accept that Jack’s hold on his job, his cottage, and his garden was going, and that her own time there was coming to an end.
His car stopped beside me one day. It was the first time I had seen him since the previous autumn. His face was waxen. I knew the word, from books. But never till now, seeing what it described on a white face, had I truly understood the word. All the brown of Jack’s face, all the sun to which he had exposed himself in his garden, had gone. His skin was white and smooth, and it seemed to have the texture and false color of waxen fruit; it was as though a bloom, as on a plum, covered the living skin. His beard was trimmed and neat. Yet even that had a waxen, even waxed, quality. Not many words; quiet words of greeting, friendship, reassurance. His obstreperous eyes were quiet too. Wax. And the smoke came out of his cottage chimney in the autumn and in the winter; and then it stopped.
THE LANE that led up the hill to the new barn and then down to the cottages and old farm buildings, the lane beside the windbreak of beech and pine and the subsidiary hedge of field rose and hawthorn, had grown rough and broken. You could easily have turned your ankle on it. The new farm management began to have that lane mended.