The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,22

the rose bushes growing out. His greenhouse at the back (really the front) became empty.

So much that had looked traditional, natural, emanations of the landscape, things that country people did—the planting out of annuals, the tending of the geese, the clipping of the hedge, the pruning of the fruit trees—now turned out not to have been traditional or instinctive after all, but to have been part of Jack’s way. When he wasn’t there to do these things, they weren’t done; there was only a ruin. The new people in the other cottages didn’t do what he had done. They seemed to have little regard for their bit of cottage land. Or they saw it differently, or they had another idea of their lives.

The first year of Jack’s illness Jack’s wife had pretended that nothing had changed; that Jack’s garden was still a garden. Now she didn’t pretend. She was making ready to leave. And she was doing so in a matter-of-fact way. As though, after all, in spite of appearances, in spite of the antique ways of her father, in spite of Jack, little had been invested by her in that cottage, the life attached to it, and those years of the garden.

She now had no connection with the farm or the land. The local council was going to find a house or flat for her on a housing estate in the valley or in one of the nearby towns, Amesbury, Salisbury, Shrewton, Great Wishford, or elsewhere. She would meet more people; she would be nearer the shops. She was looking forward to the move. The “traditional” life, at the bottom of the valley, in the mud and damp around the farm, far from people, where you were shut up for the evening if you didn’t have a car, the traditional life hadn’t been to her taste.

Still, she thought that Jack had had a good life.

She said, “On the Christmas Eve he got up and went to the pub, you know. He knew he was going to die and he knew it was his last chance.”

She spoke quite casually, giving me this news, now more than a year old. She was just making conversation.

She said, “He wanted to be with his friends for the last time.”

To be with his friends; to enjoy the last drink; to have the final sweetness of life as he knew it. What an effort it would have taken! To have those blocks of ice for lungs; to be incapable of getting warm; to be fatigued and faint; to want nothing more than to lie down and close one’s eyes and sail away into the fantasies that were claiming one. And yet he had roused himself and found the energy to dress and had driven to the pub for the holiday, before his death.

Did he drive along the lane up and down the hill beside the windbreak? Or did he, because it required less judgment, drive along the wide, rutted droveway? That way, along the droveway, would have been more likely to get him to the pub and back. But it would have shaken him up dreadfully—as I had seen him, in another mood, shaken up one spring or summer Sunday afternoon, when his shout had been touched with beer. That final trip to the pub served no cause except that of life; yet he made it appear an act of heroism; poetical.

ACROSS THE lawn from my cottage there was a small old flint building. It was covered with ivy, and the ivy was so thick and firm that pigeons roosted in it. The building was square in plan and had a pyramidal roof. This roof appeared to be open at the apex, and above that, on four stilts, was a second, miniature roof of the same pyramidal shape. I was told that the building had been a granary or storehouse and that it was some centuries old. It was not used now; I never saw anyone go into it. It was preserved for its beauty and as something from the past.

Not far from it, and still on the far side of the lawn, was a building that pretended to be a rough old farmhouse. Its walls were made up of bits of brick and stone and flint, the mixture suggesting rubble, peasant pickings. It was about fifty years old and had been put up as one of the ancillary buildings of the manor: a fives court or squash court, but built in this “picturesque” way