The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,84

all that it implied in homelessness and drift and longing—was final.

From Victoria to Vancouver. The very tall stewardesses in the very short skirts: a dreadful frivolity. Toronto; London. The grind and grind of the airplane engines, hour after hour; stages in a return I didn’t want. So that twenty years on I was making a journey that mimicked my first. If twenty years before I could have been granted a glimpse of myself as a writer, someone with a talent that had been developed, and with books to his name, I would have considered myself blessed. The blessing I felt as a blessing still; but—as with the pain that attends love—the disappointment that had come with the blessing I felt as a terrible solitude.

I had no house. In London I rented a serviced flat in Dolphin Square. It consumed my money in steady installments, every week so much. The bills came up in a woman’s handwriting: round, easy, the lower line of the writing creating a regular, almost scalloped pattern. The handwriting spoke of a woman absolutely at peace, sexually fulfilled, without anxiety. I envied her this calm, this absence of ambition. And when I went down to the office to settle the bill, I tried to work out which of the women it was—among the clerks who might have passed as wage slaves—which woman it was who, perhaps without knowing how blessed she was, had written out the figures of my fierce, debilitating demand.

The summer was over. For the first time in England, after nineteen years, I felt cold, imperfectly clad. Until this time I had had the same kind of clothes summer and winter and had not felt the need for a pullover or for warm underclothes or even an overcoat. I had longed for frosty weather, short days, electric lights in the early afternoon. Now, with this need for warm clothes, a need that seemed to grow and grow, I felt the winter as winter, darkness.

One day there were workmen somewhere below my window. They began to talk to one another. It was like listening to a play: different voices, careful dialogue, characters, sentences, ideas, showing off, acting, style. In all my time in England I had never heard workmen talk like that, among themselves, so loudly, in the open air, for so long. It was a little frightening, this eavesdropping on what was like an unknown country. I knew another side of England: Oxford, people in broadcasting, writers. I had never been brought into contact like this with the country I had been living in for so long. I hadn’t read about working men like the ones I was now listening to; I hadn’t seen films about them.

I went eventually to stay in a private house in the town of Gloucester. It was a wet day. The railway station was cold, damp, indicating the nearness of the River Severn. Gloucester, away from its grand cathedral, was a small, mean, common town. It was not a place I would have gone to out of choice. But now it offered a house, shelter, hospitality.

The house was at the edge of the town: mean houses making mean the fields they had been set down among: the pollarded willows, the narrow tainted brooks in which industrial litter floated, willows and brooks like features of city slum. It was not a house I would have chosen. But it was a home for someone and had been furnished like that and had the atmosphere. It was welcoming.

At lunchtime on this first day the house also offered a coal fire. The French windows looked out onto a long narrow garden, scrupulously stripped and forked over for the winter. Far off were the sounds of a railway marshaling yard—oddly comforting at this distance. Everything about this house was welcoming and good. And in this unambitious setting I felt protected, isolated, far from every wounding thing I had known. For the first time in many weeks I felt at ease.

That afternoon, in the front room of the house, where the furniture was old but cared for, I looked for the first time for weeks at the typescript of the book I had tried to get started on in Victoria, the sequence about freedom and loss. I found it better than I had during the writing. I even saw the sentence where it had come alive—a sentence written out of concentration, from within the mood created by the words. That critical creative moment had been missed