The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,97
walls as carefully thought out as the walls of my own cottage. Next to that were the rough-timbered garages or wagon sheds. And then the antique, ivy-covered, flint-walled storehouse or granary whose back formed part of the churchyard wall. So that after the spaciousness of the downs and the water meadows, the country openness, there was suddenly here a remnant and a reminder of medieval huddle and constriction. And just as, along the droveway, the modernity of the old farm manager’s bungalow was set next to the antiquity of the worn, striated slopes, so here the modern fantasy of my cottage and the forester’s hut and the farmhouse was set next to, ran into, the Middle Ages.
And yet it made a whole. It worked. You could take it all for granted, as I had done at the beginning, and see it as something that went with an Edwardian big house in this part of the country. Or you could enter the fantasy, a child’s vision made concrete, child’s play by an adult or adults: extraordinary, this gratuitous expression of great security and wealth in this corner of an estate that once was so much bigger (and far from places like Trinidad, where the word “estate,” when I first got to know it, especially if it was a sugar estate, didn’t hold any idea of grandeur or style, carrying connotations instead only of size and sameness, and many small lives and small houses at the edges). And yet it was this element of play—the child’s play of the toy settlement around the manor green or lawn—which, when I recognized it, I yielded to.
Across the “lane” from the forester’s hut, and visible from the side window of my cottage, was what looked like a little country cottage on its own. It was really a shed, built against the wall of the manor’s vegetable garden; but it had been designed like a half cottage, a cottage sliced down through the middle from the ridge of the roof, to suggest, from certain angles, a cottage with a door and a window.
The lane that ran around this settlement and its green was lined with mushroom-shaped stones. These stones, I was told, were a local feature. Barns used to be built on them to keep the rats out. They had kept the rats out of the stable, the forester’s hut. But it was their decorative, fairy-tale quality that was exploited here. Every mushroom stone had been made to look different from every other. The tops were chipped differently and sometimes the supports were carved into a curve. Over the years many of these mushrooms had been damaged. They were too delicate a fantasy. Many of the mushroom tops had in fact disappeared, been got out of the way; and even some of the supporting stones had been knocked flat. But by a miracle, outside my cottage door, on the lane side, in front of the wall of the vegetable garden, there had been preserved five or six of these mushrooms as they had been originally designed: the tops chipped into different degrees of thickness, chipped rough, each mushroom top supporting a little moss forest in winter.
This was the fantasy to which I returned—the many-featured fantasy of manor, manor village around its green, manor garden—and always felt welcomed by, in that first winter, while I was working on my book. It was the fantasy of the original builder or builders, the family fantasy which my landlord had inherited and which now, I felt, as I entered more and more into it, best expressed his character.
The rest of the grounds—the orchard, the garden at the back of the main house, the water meadows, the walk along the river—all of that came later, in the late spring or early summer, when I was ill and couldn’t do the long walks along the droveway. This was the time I learned to fix that particular season, to give it certain associations of flowers, trees, river.
After I had finished my book (the one with the African centerpiece) I had gone abroad to do some journalism, for the money, the travel out of England, and the spiritual refreshment. The assignments had been exhausting, the second in a place not served by many airlines. I had fallen ill on the slow journey back, through many climates; and in one place had spent four days and nights in a hotel room, in a stupor of ache and sleep.