The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,38

well myself.”

She had married a builder who—when she had at last got out into the world, got away from the little army house—had seemed to her immensely prosperous and stylish; but had then seemed less so; had fallen on hard times, had done even worse when, trying to change his luck, he had set up in business in Germany; and had then been unfaithful with a younger woman, as glamoured by his manner as Brenda’s sister once had been. He had finally left home, left his wife and child.

An old story—that was what Brenda’s sister said; and that was the way she told it, playing down the drama. “As usual, Muggins was the last to know.” All her care now was for her son; he was her sole interest; she had narrowed herself down to that.

So, though she didn’t make the point, there was a pattern to her life. Her father had been replaced by her husband, and her husband by her son. Her life had repeated; she had lived the same life or versions of the same life. Or, looking at it another way, almost as soon as it had begun, her life of choice and passion had ended—as it had ended for her father, her mother, and possibly for generations of her ancestors.

All Brenda’s sister’s talk of herself came out without prompting; and her hysteria became noticeable. So it was possible, after her early calmness, even formality, in Mrs. Phillips’s sitting room, with the grand view, to see Brenda’s sister as an ill person, someone more marked than Brenda had been by their family past, the past that had really been the absence of a great event. And it was possible at the same time to see in her not only more and more reminders of Brenda’s looks, but also something—like another side—of Brenda’s passions. Such varied passions, so many roots, so little understood, even by the people who had become victims of those passions.

Then the hysterical woman with the still smooth skin, the still un-blotched color, remembered her social graces. The call was over. She had to do what she had come to do: collect the things of her sister, who had left so little behind.

We left the sitting room. A corridor; thick walls, stone mullions in the window; a door to the big kitchen. And there at the portico Mrs. Phillips said good-bye.

When we were out of the manor courtyard and on the rough, stony drive, Brenda’s sister said—and it was sudden after her apparent trustingness in the sitting room—“I don’t think I will ever forgive Mrs. Phillips.”

She was distressed. I began to walk with her to the road. As we walked below the yews she told me of Brenda’s flight to Italy.

Michael Allen had gone by air. Brenda had gone by train. During that journey—hearing so little English, talking so little to people—she had thought a lot about what she was doing and she had become afraid. By the time she reached Rome she had decided not to go to Michael. She thought she would go and stay at a hotel and get a message to Leslie, even send for him. She had a little money, enough for a few days. She booked into a hotel near the railway station. There was no telephone at home, in the thatched cottage. So she had telephoned the manor and asked for a message to be passed on to Leslie.

Nothing had happened; no word came from Leslie. Then, swallowing her pride (because there had been some quarrel between them), Brenda had telephoned the people in Jack’s old cottage—the woman who drove fast up the hill in her motorcar to collect her children from the school bus every weekday afternoon and had never smiled at me; the woman who had leveled Jack’s garden. But still no message came from Leslie. By this time Brenda’s money had run out. She had then done what she had decided not to do. She had gone after all to Michael Allen and had been with him until, as we had all been told, he had kicked her out.

She had come back aggrieved, angry, in a mood to taunt the man she regarded or pretended to regard as a queer, not fully a man. She felt mocked by the romantic impulse that had thrilled and sustained her for a while in the hotel near the railway station in Rome: the girl in need, the girl in danger, the lover eager at the other end.