The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,43

with illusory depth where it reflected the thick, succulent growth on the banks, and especially below trees—after that first spring I would say: “At least I had a spring here.” And then I said: “At least I had a spring and summer here.” And: “At least I’ve had a year here.” And so it went on, as the years passed. Until time began to telescope, and experience itself began to change: the new season not truly new any more, bringing less of new experience than reminders of the old. One had begun to stack away the years, to count them, to take pleasure in the counting, accumulation.

One autumn afternoon I had a slight choking fit as I walked past Jack’s old cottage and the derelict old farmyard. The fit passed by the time I had got round the corner, cleared the farmyard, and left behind the old metal and tangled wire and timber junk below the beeches. (Not the birches near the fire pit; they were on the other side of the way. These beeches were at the edge of the farmyard, big trees now in their prime, their lowest branches very low, providing a wonderful, rich, enclosing shade in the summer that made me think of George Borrow and his wanderings in The Romany Rye and Lavengro.) Past the beeches and the farm, in the familiar solitude of the grassy way, I began to breathe easily again. Some irritation, something in the air around the farmyard, some passing allergy, I thought, and did nothing about it when I went home. That evening the fit returned. It was like a continuation of the moment near Jack’s cottage; but this time it stayed with me, and within two or three hours I was seriously ill.

This was the illness that did away with whatever remained of youthfulness in me (and much had remained), diminished my energy, and pushed me week by week, during my convalescence, month by month, into middle age.

It was the end, for me, of the manor cottage as well. The downs, the uplands, the river and its banks—the geography here was simple. Water drained off the downs to the river. After rain, on the paved lane beside the windbreak, there were the little pebbled rivulets I had minutely observed running between the asphalt edge and the grass verge, down to the public road and then, over the road surface or through culverts, towards the river. Little rivulets like that, but charged with beech mast, now fresh, now old, ran past my kitchen door after rain; and left little tide wracks, almost, of beech-mast debris all down the path. My cottage was cold. The solid stone and flint walls which I loved—for the warm color of the stone especially—kept in this cold. The beech trees that embowered it also kept out the sun. Even in summer it never got warm; even during the summer drought that killed the old mock orange shrub I needed heat at night.

The beauty of the place, the great love I had grown to feel for it, greater than for any other place I had known, had kept me there too long. My health had suffered. But I couldn’t say then, and can’t say now, that I minded. There is some kind of exchange always. For me, for the writer’s gift and freedom, the labor and disappointments of the writing life, and the being away from my home; for that loss, for having no place of my own, this gift of the second life in Wiltshire, the second, happier childhood as it were, the second arrival (but with an adult’s perception) at a knowledge of natural things, together with the fulfillment of the child’s dream of the safe house in the wood. But there was the cold of the cottage, and the damp and mist of the glorious riverbank; and the illnesses that come to people who have developed or inherited weak lungs.

It was some time before I went walking again. I was working on a big book. At a certain stage in that kind of labor, energy becomes one: mental energy, physical energy, the use of one depleting the other. And when I was sufficiently recovered, most of my energy went on my book.

I was also, sadly, preparing to leave. Just a few miles away, on a dry down, I was converting two derelict agricultural cottages into a house. The cottages had been built eighty years or so before on the site of an old