The enigma of arrival: a novel - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,99

of my cottage made two deep points of color in an otherwise green expanse, edged with wilderness.

ONCE THERE were sixteen gardeners. Now there was only Pitton. He grew vegetables in the walled garden; there he also grew certain flowers for the manor and my landlord; he looked after a private lawn of my landlord’s somewhere else in the grounds. He was like Jack, marking out and maintaining areas of cultivation in the midst of wasteland. But much of what Pitton did was hidden from me. What I saw was mainly wilderness, through which once or twice in the season Pitton would cut—for him and me—the narrowest of paths, quite literally. One swath up; one swath down.

This two-swathed path of Pitton’s began at the end of the lawn, almost opposite the shaded lane that led from the public road. The path ran through an enclosure hedged with old box, unpruned, grown out now almost into trees, meeting above the entrance to make an arch, almost as if that had been intended. The enclosure was empty, without any sign of old planting or old flower beds. In one corner a sycamore had been planted or had seeded itself (there were a number of sycamores about, growing apparently at random); and on this sycamore, a tree now rather than a sapling, someone had trailed a wisteria vine—itself now an old thing, speaking of the old days and the many gardeners and of people having the time and means and wish to embellish a hidden corner.

In the winter the enclosure had been full of the dried-up stalks of weeds, sometimes as tall as dried maize plants, and clumps of thin, long-bladed grass. Now the weeds, on succulent, thick, green stalks were growing tall again. But in spite of those weeds and the wild grass, the path Pitton had cut, one swath up, one swath down, showed grass as tight and fine and level as the grass of a lawn—as though the wilderness was only on the surface and awaited only this cut to reveal the old order and beauty and many seasons’ tending that lay beneath.

This enclosure seemed to be part of the garden of the manor. But I was told by Bray, the car-hire man, that it was older; and the overgrown box hedge suggested a greater age. The enclosure belonged to the house that was here before the manor, Bray said; and he said that before that, there had been a monastery or nunnery on the site. The idea was not a fantastic one. In medieval times everything would have lain along the little river; just a few miles away, at Amesbury, where the river went wide and shallow and clear, there was an abbey and perhaps also the remnant of the nunnery to which Guinevere came from Winchester-Camelot when the Round Table of King Arthur broke up.

An enclosure, then, as stripped of human presence as that damp stone ruin on the droveway, the stone ruin surrounded by sycamores that, ignoring the decay and death of the house they were intended to shelter, continued to grow, casting a cold shade on the black, grassless earth—as stripped as that far-off ruin, this emptiness within the tall box hedge, just a few steps from my cottage, where (if Bray was right) religious men or women of another age, renouncers of the world perhaps, pampered people, possibly also half prisoners, had taken the air or told their beads, secluded in the medieval huddle of a village, between the village center of church and churchyard and the busy river and wet fields, water meadows, busy with peasant labor turning over the heavy, rich black earth.

At the end of this enclosure was the orchard. Old, even decayed, it stood among older forest trees; and the box hedge here was straggly; at the exit the top branches did not meet to form an arch. From here, until the summer green hid it, the river and the willows could be seen across the water meadows—not cropped now, the meadows, no hay taken off them, never busy, and closed even to cattle. No question of taking a shortcut across the water meadows to the river. The land was permanently “drowned,” cut up by choked channels, and with the remnants (like minor Roman engineering ruins) of abandoned control hatches.

It was said that the secrets of drowning and draining the meadows were now lost—labors once as matter-of-fact and seasonal as, say, the water bailiffs’ cleaning of the river and cutting of the