The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,91
flatter ground. At the farmyard at the bottom of the hill I had turned down the wide straight stretch of the droveway, bisected for some time now by the barbed-wire fence.
It was there, down the free part of the wide way, that I had seen Jack driving back early one Sunday afternoon after his midday drinking at the pub, bumping and banging along in his old car, plowing through the tussocky grass like a launch in choppy water. And it was along that way that on the Christmas Saturday before he died he had driven his car twice, once out, once back, to have his last evening with his friends in the pub.
On the barbed-wire fence there were still the shredded remains of one or two of the plastic-sack paddings Jack’s father-in-law had rolled at his crossing places. And at intervals down that way there were the older relics Jack would have known. On one side, the empty, abandoned gray beehives set down in the grass in two crooked rows; on the other side, in the shade of bush and silver birch, the abandoned gypsy caravan with its cambered roof and variegated colors, the caravan itself still appearing in working order. Further on, on that same side, past the young wood, there was the old hayrick shaped like a cottage and covered with the black plastic sheeting that had over the years grown ragged at the edges, had lost its shine and its ability to crackle, and had thinned and weathered to a texture like that of a faded rose petal or the skin of a very old person. Beyond that, the mysterious house ruin, all walls, with a boundary line of sycamores that had grown tall, those regularly spaced sycamores now like part of the mystery of the place. When they were planted, and for many years afterwards, the seedlings or saplings would have seemed far apart and would have made no impression in the wide way. Now the crowns of foliage on the sturdy trunks met and cast a solid cold shade in which even in the hottest summer no grass could grow; the earth, though flinty, was always damp and black around that ruin, like ground trodden on by sheep.
The straight stretch of the droveway ended in an abrupt bare slope marked with lines and welts and indentations that suggested old agriculture or old fortifications. The way itself curved, to run beside this slope, which, though not high, shut out a further view and led the eye up to the sky. Nothing now on that striated, antique hillside; hardly pasture. Only a water trough, no grass around it, the flinty soil trampled into black mud. From time to time steers (on the upper slope outlined against the old sky) were penned there, blank, healthy, heavy-bellied, responsive to every human approach, waiting now only for the covered trailer and the trip along the winding valley road to the slaughterhouse in the town.
On the other side of the way there was a wide tilled field that led gently up to a wood. The tilling of such flinty soil (and the flints could be big and heavy) was new. I had been told that it had started only during the war, when the discovery was made that (in addition, of course, to fertilizer) ground like that needed to be merely scratched rather than deeply plowed. In the wood at the top were reared pheasants for shooting, pheasants which, when grown, wandered all over the valley. It was in that wood that I had gone walking during my very first week in the valley and, in a muddy lane overhung with trees I had later learned to be blackthorn, I had met Jack’s father-in-law.
The droveway here was deeply rutted, tall grass growing in tufts on the ridges, the ruts themselves narrow and bare and flinty, with loose gravel. Hard to walk on; ankle-turning.
On this path one day—during my first or second year, when hares still delighted me, and I looked for them during every walk—I had seen the dusty, ragged, half-rotted-away carcass of a hare. The area was famous for its hares; a traveler in the previous century, William Cobbett, had once seen, not far away from here, a field full of hares. And there were still hare shoots—curiously feudal occasions in one way, with hired beaters driving the animals over the downs towards the shooters, hidden behind bales of hay on the droveway; and at the same time occasions on