The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,37

hardly knowing where I was or understanding what I saw, I had called on the Phillipses. Thereafter I had seen that view only at Christmastime (those years when I was not abroad), when I called on the Phillipses to give them my presents.

Brenda’s sister was not immediately like Brenda. She was older, fatter. There was a quality in the fatness, the puffiness, which suggested illness, a clinical condition, rather than grossness. Brenda’s heaviness, in hips and thighs, had been different; it had suggested someone spoilt, someone who felt that her beauty entitled her to luxurious sensations and felt at the same time that her beauty could support a certain amount of self-indulgence. But then I began to see Brenda’s full lips and wild eyes in her sister’s face, saw those features lost or altered in puffy flesh; saw, too, the smoothness of skin and purity of complexion which would have given the girl, when she was a girl, a high idea of herself and her potential, but which was now part of the breathy wreck she had become. Things had not gone well for these sisters; in different ways their gift of beauty had turned out to be a torment for them.

Brenda’s sister lived in a small, newish town to the south, between Salisbury and Bournemouth, not town, not country, not the sort of desolate place she had thought she would end up in.

In the Phillipses’ sitting room it was for a while as though Brenda’s sister’s call was a purely social one. But then she seemed suddenly to remember what had brought her.

She said, “You want to save everything. And then you want to throw everything away.” Her voice broke; her eyes went watery. “She left so little. Her clothes.” She tried to smile. “She was so particular about her clothes. But what can I do about her clothes?”

No ill will, no anger, no wish for revenge.

She said, “She was too much for him. He couldn’t handle her.”

Mrs. Phillips allowed Brenda’s sister to talk on.

Brenda’s sister said, “She even thought he was queer. Did you know that? She told me he washed his hair every morning. Not in the evening after work, because he didn’t want to sleep on it when it was wet. But in the morning. He is like my son Raymond. I hope nobody thinks he is queer because he does that. Raymond does it for the girls at his school.”

I had always assumed it was Brenda who had encouraged Les to dress up, and had thought that she had chosen things for him. This news about the washing of the hair suggested a lonelier and more desperate man.

Brenda’s sister said, “She expected so much from her life. My mother drilled it into us how much she suffered before the war, living in a little army house, hoping for great things to happen to my father. And that was all that ever happened to us. We lived in a little army house.”

The story she told us was that her father, a simple serviceman with some factory experience, had had a fleeting moment of inspiration early in the war. He had hit on a new way of mounting guns in the tail of an airplane; and from being a simple serviceman he had been taken up by the authorities for a few months. He was not alone, though; there were many others like him, men with ideas.

“Always he was on his way to Ministry of Defence. Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Defence, I heard those words all the time. When I see the advertisements in the paper today and see the same words, it brings it back.”

I didn’t think she was romancing. Her use of the words “Ministry of Defence” without the definite article—the the that the average person would have wanted to add—was convincing; it suggested that she knew the words as well as she had said.

But nothing had happened to her father. Guns were changed; aircraft were modified or replaced; and the serviceman had become ordinary again. But his daughters had inherited through their mother a dream of glory together with a general pessimism, a wishing to hope and a nervousness about hoping. It made for temperament, frustration, self-destructiveness. It is as if we all carry in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors, as if we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us.

Brenda’s sister said, “I can’t talk. I didn’t do so