The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,21
to Jack’s cottage and then along the droveway with the beehives and the caravan and stone shell of a house and farm manager’s bungalow and suburban-style garden; there would have been a river all there, a flat gray flow, debouching into or filling the valley of the present river, a remnant, small-scale, human, beside which I sometimes walked and where people now fished for trout, released by keepers. In that vast geography created by the miniature landscape, and the fantasy of the droveway as river channel, there was no room for men; that vision was a vision of the world before men.
Beyond the brow of the hill the wind was keen; shelter was no longer provided by the hill or the windbreak. A livid gray sky, a gray but warm dirtiness, hung over the great plain, where the barrows were like pimples: the stone circles lost in the snow, blurring the view at the edges, no sight of the colored artillery targets. At the bottom of the hill, among the farm buildings (made monumental by the snowfall), was the dead cottage of Jack: snow lying on the ground about it (the droveway there normally so muddy and black) like a great clean thing, like a remaking of the world.
The snow made for hard walking. But weather like this in this usually mild valley revived in me a wish for extremes, though it was the cold and the damp and the wet that had carried away Jack. His damaged lungs, in that damp valley bottom, had denied him warmth even in the summer. (Something else, of course, if there had been no cold or damp, would have carried him away.)
On my early walks, after having my fill of the Henge and the barrows, I had looked for hares on one slope. Then, on another hill, at another season I had looked for larks, trying to keep them in sight as they rose and rose, lift upon lift, and watching for them as they dropped down. Now I looked for deer. A family of three had appeared in the valley, coming from no one knew where, and surviving in our well-tilled, well-grazed valley, dangerous over large tracts with military gunfire, crossed at many places by busy highways, surviving among us no one knew how.
They, the deer, had their run too. And it was in the hope of seeing them—in addition to my excitement at the snow and the wind—that I tramped round the farm buildings and up the droveway to the point from which there was a view of the wood and the untilled open slope where the deer sometimes grazed. And unbelievably—my Christmas reward!—they were there, in the snow. Usually, against the wood, the deer were hard to see; lower down, against the chalky green and brown of the bare slope, they were reddish-brown, warm, but they had to be looked for. Now (like the rabbits of my very first week, coming out to feed on the lawn in front of my cottage) the deer were dirty-looking, gray, dark against the snow, easy marks for anyone who wished to knock them off.
I longed for those deer to survive. And they did. Towards the end of the winter I discovered one in the wilderness at the back of my cottage, in the marshland beside the river. He was a young deer and I caught sight of him one morning, all eyes, among the beaten-down brown reeds. And there for many mornings in succession I saw him. I stood on the rotting bridge over the black creek and looked. The secret, then, to see him, to keep him where he was, was to hold his eyes and to be still oneself. As long as you looked, he looked; as soon as you moved or made a gesture he was away, running at first through the reeds and tall grass and then giving the lovely leap that could take him clear over fences and hedges.
The spring came. The new surface of the lane up the hill held. The new life of the farm continued. And for the second year running Jack’s cottage and garden were apart from the activity. His death, his funeral—like the death and funeral of his father-in-law some years before—seemed to have happened secretly: one of the effects of the country life, the dark road, the scattered houses, the big views. His vegetable plot, overrun with weeds, was barely noticeable. His fruit and flower garden grew more wild, the hedge and