The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,23

to suit the setting. Perhaps it had been used as a squash court for some time. But—its “front door” permanently closed, its corrugated-iron roof sagging in places, some of the glass panes of its windows fallen out—it had no function now, had had none for many years. Like the boathouse on the riverbank; like the round, two-story children’s house with the conical thatched roof in the overgrown orchard.

The life of the manor had altered; the organization had shrunk. Needs that had once ramified as if to match the resources and organization of the big house had not been permanent. The manor too had its ruins.

Between granary and mock farmhouse, and beyond the manor wall, was the church. To me in the beginning a church was a church, something built in a particular way, with windows of a particular shape: ideas given me by the Victorian Gothic churches I had seen in Trinidad. But I had that village church before my eyes every day; and quite soon—this new world shaping itself about me in my lucky solitude—I saw that the church was restored and architecturally was as artificial as the farmhouse. Once that was seen, it was seen; the church radiated its own mood, the mood of its Victorian-Edwardian restorers. I saw the church not as “church,” but as part of the wealth and security of Victorian-Edwardian times. It was like the manor to which my cottage was attached; like many of the other big houses around.

The church stood on a pre-medieval site; that was what was said. But little about the church as it now was had come down from that time. Not a piece of flint; not a slab of dressed stone that framed the Gothic windows. And perhaps not even the faith was old.

Just as it was hard to imagine the lives and religious impulses of the people who had with immense labor turned this plain into a burial ground and preserved its sanctity for centuries, so it was hard, though one stood on the very ground and was exposed to the same weather (but not now the same dawns or sunsets: always the vapor trails of aircraft), to enter into the spirit, the terrors and the need for redemption, of the people who had worshiped a thousand years before in the first Christian church on this site—that lay so close to me, just across the lawn and beyond the play farmhouse.

Play farmhouse, renovated church. Had that been a kind of play, too, the religion of the renovated church? Did the renovators share the old terrors? Or was this faith something quite different, something touched with the sense of history, the assurance of continuity, the sense of something owed to oneself?

When you looked down on the plain from the viewing point in the windbreak on the hill, you could see Stonehenge to the west and the beginnings of the town of Amesbury to the east. The River Avon ran through Amesbury. There were chapels and abbeys here too, beside the river, wide and shallow at this point. Amesbury—now a military town, with little modern houses and shops and garages—was an old place. It was to a nunnery in Amesbury that Guinevere, Arthur’s queen, the lover of Lancelot, had retired when the Round Table had vanished from Camelot, all of twenty miles away at Winchester. A sign on the road from Stonehenge, just before you entered Amesbury, celebrated the antiquity of the town: with a coat of arms and a date, A.D. 979.

The historical feeling that had caused that sign to be put up had also brought about the restoration of the chapels and abbeys of Amesbury, as well as of the church that lay across the lawn from my own cottage: history, like religion, or like an extension of religion, as an idea of one’s own redemption and glory.

Yet there was an uncelebrated darkness before the foundation of that town of Amesbury in A.D. 979, as recorded by the sign. More than five hundred years before that, the Roman army had left Britain. And Stonehenge had been built and had fallen into ruin, and the vast burial ground had lost its sanctity, long before the Romans had come. So that history here, where there were so many ruins and restorations, seemed to be plateaus of light, with intervening troughs or disappearances into darkness.

We lived still on one such plateau of historical light. Amesbury, founded A.D. 979. History, glory, religion as a wish to do the right thing by