The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,40
was a working woman from Shrewton. When she lived at Amesbury, she said, she had regularly done the walk we were both now doing. She had come out now to look for the deer. So we had that in common as well. She said she had worked out the circuit of the deer; she knew roughly where they crossed the public road. And it was extraordinary, the survival of the family of deer in a piece of land bounded on three sides by busy highways and on one of those sides in addition by the army firing ranges.
No decay in that woman’s eye. Downs, walks, deer: the wonder of the natural world as available as it had always been.
And no decay in the eye of the old farm manager either. I saw him one day on a horse on the rising stretch of the droveway between the wood on one side and a treeless field or pasture on the other, before the hill with the larks and the barrows on the brow of the hill. In the old days he had seldom come so far on his inspection tours in his Land-Rover. But now he was retired and could roam; and he was on a horse, a further sign of leisure.
It was a big horse, of a beautiful color, white or gray spotted or spattered with red-brown. It was a difficult horse, he said. It was the gift of his daughter, who had married and gone to live in Gloucestershire. And that was what his talk was about: his daughter (so good with horses) and her gift of the horse (no trouble to her, that animal).
His suburban house at the very edge of the antique droveway; his neat garden; his daughter grown up and gone away; and now the empty days. How quickly his time had passed! How quickly a man’s time passed! So quickly, in fact, that it was possible within a normal span to witness, to comprehend, two or three active life cycles in succession.
That wasn’t what I thought about when I met him. When I met him on the horse that he was finding so difficult—he dismounted, with some relief, to talk to me—I thought at first only that it was true what some people said: that people who retired after active or physically energetic lives aged fast. He had aged; he had become bent; his walk was stiff (the walk in which, when I had first seen him and thought him to be an exemplar of the farmer “type,” I had seen a “farmer’s walk”).
The other thought, about the shortness of a man’s active cycle, his doing period, came to me afterwards, when I had left the manor and my cottage, when that section of my life had closed, and I had begun to feel, myself, that energy and action were things no longer absolutely at my command, that everyone had been given his particular measure of energy, and that when it was used up it was used up. These thoughts came to me not many years after I had seen the manager on his difficult horse, and seen the gap between us in age and energy and expectations. But middle age or the decline associated with it comes abruptly to some people; and middle age had come as abruptly to me as old age appeared to me then to have come to the old manager.
I would have liked to hear the old manager say something about the new farm people. I would have then said—more in tribute to him as someone from my past, than because I understood what I saw of the farming around me—how much I preferred his way. But he wasn’t interested. So the solidarity went unexpressed. And it was just as well. Because eventually, mysteriously (at least to me), the new venture failed, after two harsh, dry summers, summers so harsh that the old mock orange shrub outside my cottage died.
During one of those droughts I heard talk—on the bus, and from Bray, the car-hire man—that water wasn’t to be brought to the cattle, but that the cattle were to be transported to where there was water, transported perhaps to Wales! Such was the scale and style and reputation of the new venture. I don’t know whether anything like that happened, or whether it was just excited local exaggeration. Soon, however, it didn’t matter. The venture failed. And even this failure—large as it was, affecting so many people, affecting the eventual