The Enigma of Arrival Part 2

Play farmhouse, renovated church. Had that been a kind of play, too, the religion of the renovated church? Did the renovators share the old terrors? Or was this faith something quite different, something touched with the sense of history, the a.s.surance of continuity, the sense of something owed to oneself?

When you looked down on the plain from the viewing point in the windbreak on the hill, you could see Stonehenge to the west and the beginnings of the town of Amesbury to the east. The River Avon ran through Amesbury. There were chapels and abbeys here too, beside the river, wide and shallow at this point. Amesbury-now a military town, with little modern houses and shops and garages-was an old place. It was to a nunnery in Amesbury that Guinevere, Arthur's queen, the lover of Lancelot, had retired when the Round Table had vanished from Camelot, all of twenty miles away at Winchester. A sign on the road from Stonehenge, just before you entered Amesbury, celebrated the antiquity of the town: with a coat of arms and a date, A.D A.D. 979.

The historical feeling that had caused that sign to be put up had also brought about the restoration of the chapels and abbeys of Amesbury, as well as of the church that lay across the lawn from my own cottage: history, like religion, or like an extension of religion, as an idea of one's own redemption and glory.

Yet there was an uncelebrated darkness before the foundation of that town of Amesbury in A.D A.D. 979, as recorded by the sign. More than five hundred years before that, the Roman army had left Britain. And Stonehenge had been built and had fallen into ruin, and the vast burial ground had lost its sanct.i.ty, long before the Romans had come. So that history here, where there were so many ruins and restorations, seemed to be plateaus of light, with intervening troughs or disappearances into darkness.

We lived still on one such plateau of historical light. Amesbury, founded A.D A.D. 979. History, glory, religion as a wish to do the right thing by oneself-these ideas were still with some people in the valleys round about, though there had been some diminution in personal glory, and the new houses and gardens were like the small change of the great estates of the last century and the beginning of this century. These people-though they had come, many of them, from other places-still had the idea of being successors and inheritors. It was because of this idea of historical inheritance and succession that many new people in our valley went to the restored church. The church had been restored for people like them; it met their needs.

In this they were different from Bray, the car-hire man, who had lived all his life in the valley. Bray never went to the church, and was scornful of the motives of those who did. And the churchgoers were also different from Jack, who had lived the best part of his life in the cottage over the hill and, while he was vigorous, had celebrated the seasons with rituals of his own. On Sundays Jack worked in the morning in his garden, and went to the pub at noon; in the afternoon he worked again in his garden.

THE CHURCH stood on an old site. I could believe that. Beyond the churchyard, and more or less hidden by the church itself, the old flint churchyard wall, and trees on the other side, were the sheds and buildings of the dairy. Did they also stand on an old site? I had no trouble believing that they did. Because the world-in places like this-is never absolutely new; there is always something that has gone before. Shrine or sacred place before church, farm before farm, on the site of an old ford set in a wood, first "walden," then "shaw," then Waldenshaw. A hamlet between the water meadows and the flinty downs; a hamlet, one of many, on the river highway. stood on an old site. I could believe that. Beyond the churchyard, and more or less hidden by the church itself, the old flint churchyard wall, and trees on the other side, were the sheds and buildings of the dairy. Did they also stand on an old site? I had no trouble believing that they did. Because the world-in places like this-is never absolutely new; there is always something that has gone before. Shrine or sacred place before church, farm before farm, on the site of an old ford set in a wood, first "walden," then "shaw," then Waldenshaw. A hamlet between the water meadows and the flinty downs; a hamlet, one of many, on the river highway.

New to the valley, overwhelmed by the luck of the near-solitude I had found in this historical part of England, the solitude that had done away with my stranger's nerves, I had seen everything as a kind of perfection, perfectly evolved. But I had hardly begun to look, the land and its life had hardly begun to shape itself about me, when things began to change. And I had fallen back on old ideas, ideas now not so much of decay, as of flux and the constancy of change, to fight the distress I felt at everything-a death, a fence, a departure-that undid or altered or threatened the perfection I had found.

It could have been said that the perfection of the house in whose grounds I lived had been arrived at forty or fifty years before, when the Edwardian house was still fairly new, its family life fuller, when the ancillary buildings had a function and the garden was looked after. But in that perfection, occurring at a time of empire, there would have been no room for me. The builder of the house and the designer of the garden could not have imagined, with their world view, that at a later time someone like me would have been in the grounds, and that I would feel I was having the place-the cottage, the empty picturesque houses around the lawn, the grounds, the wild gardens-at its peak, living in a beauty that hadn't been planned for. I liked the decay, such as it was. It gave me no wish to prune or weed or set right or remake. It couldn't last, clearly. But while it lasted, it was perfection.

To see the possibility, the certainty, of ruin, even at the moment of creation: it was my temperament. Those nerves had been given me as a child in Trinidad partly by our family circ.u.mstances: the half-ruined or broken-down houses we lived in, our many moves, our general uncertainty. Possibly, too, this mode of feeling went deeper and was an ancestral inheritance, something that came with the history that had made me: not only India, with its ideas of a world outside men's control, but also the colonial plantations or estates of Trinidad, to which my impoverished Indian ancestors had been transported in the last century-estates of which this Wilts.h.i.+re estate, where I now lived, had been the apotheosis.

Fifty years ago there would have been no room for me on the estate; even now my presence was a little unlikely. But more than accident had brought me here. Or rather, in the series of accidents that had brought me to the manor cottage, with a view of the restored church, there was a clear historical line. The migration, within the British Empire, from India to Trinidad had given me the English language as my own, and a particular kind of education. This had partly seeded my wish to be a writer in a particular mode, and had committed me to the literary career I had been following in England for twenty years.

The history I carried with me, together with the self-awareness that had come with my education and ambition, had sent me into the world with a sense of glory dead; and in England had given me the rawest stranger's nerves. Now ironically-or aptly-living in the grounds of this shrunken estate, going out for my walks, those nerves were soothed, and in the wild garden and orchard beside the water meadows I found a physical beauty perfectly suited to my temperament and answering, besides, every good idea I could have had, as a child in Trinidad, of the physical aspect of England.

The estate had been enormous, I was told. It had been created in part by the wealth of empire. But then bit by bit it had been alienated. The family in its many branches flourished in other places. Here in the valley there now lived only my landlord-elderly, a bachelor, with people to look after him. Certain physical disabilities had now been added to the malaise which had befallen him years before, a malaise of which I had no precise knowledge, but interpreted as something like acedia, the monk's torpor or disease of the Middle Ages-which was how his great security, his excessive worldly blessings, had taken him. The acedia had turned him into a recluse, accessible only to his intimate friends. So that on the manor itself, as on my walks on the down, I had a kind of solitude.

I felt a great sympathy for my landlord. I felt I could understand his malaise; I saw it as the other side of my own. I did not think of my landlord as a failure. Words like failure and success didn't apply. Only a grand man or a man with a grand idea of his human worth could ignore the high money value of his estate and be content to live in its semi-ruin. My meditations in the manor were not of imperial decline. Rather, I wondered at the historical chain that had brought us together-he in his house, I in his cottage, the wild garden his taste (as I was told) and also mine.

I knew that the life I had in the manor grounds was temporary and couldn't last. The future was so easy to see: a hotel or school or foundation taking over the big house and setting the decayed grounds to rights, grounds where I now walked with such pleasure, and for the first time in my adult life, and more and more as my knowledge increased, felt in tune with the natural world. I dreaded change both here and on the droveway; and that was why, meeting distress halfway, I cultivated old, possibly ancestral ways of feeling, the ways of glory dead, and held on to the idea of a world in flux: the drum of creation in the G.o.d's right hand, the flame of destruction in his left.

So for a week or more I balanced between the two things-anxiety, the idea of flux-when I heard, from beyond the churchyard, the sound of a bulldozer or something like it. The noise traveled through the ground, in vibrations; it was not a noise that a window could shut out.

The cow sheds and dairy buildings beyond the churchyard were being pulled down-structures of clay tiles and red brick that had been so much part of the view as I came down the hill at the end of my walk, so natural and right, that I had not paid them too much attention. Now, with the sheds gone, the ground looked naked and ordinary; and the water meadows at the back were exposed, and the trees on the riverbank. The clay tiles from the roofs were stacked up; the roof timbers were stacked up (and how new they looked, though the buildings had seemed to me so old). And then very quickly the open view was blocked out again, with a wide prefabricated shed with slatted timber walls, and with the printed name of the shed makers on a board or metal plate just below the apex of the roof. (A shed like this, but without the slatted walls, had been put up, one or two owners or managers before, at the edge of the old farmyard over the hill, and not far from Jack's cottage, to store hay, to replace the cottage-shaped hayrick covered with black plastic sheeting on the droveway-that hayrick now moldering away, the black plastic itself weathered, without its l.u.s.ter and tension, no longer crackling when it flapped, its texture now rather like the skin of very old people, like a faded rose petal.) Change! New ideas, new efficiency. Before, on the roadside, at the entrance to the dairy yard, there had been a wooden platform where the milk churns were placed-set at that height to be easily picked up by the milk van or truck. There were to be no churns now. There were to be refrigerated tanks, and milk was to be collected by tanker.

Next to the metal-walled barn at the top of the hill, another prefabricated cow shed was set up; and next to that, a modern milking building. This milking building or milking "parlor" (quaint word) was a mechanical-looking affair. Its concrete floor, set in a sloping field, looked like a concrete platform. It had pipes and meters and gauges; and the men who worked the parlor, who corralled the dung-stained cattle into the pens or channels, had something of the grimness of industrial workers.

They drove up to the milking parlor in brightly colored cars (the colors noticeable up there, against the soft colors of the downs, green and brown and chalk and in the winter the blurred darkness of stripped trees). These cars, when parked, helped to make the milking parlor and the barn and the new prefabricated shed look like a little factory at the top of the hill.

The parlor hissed mechanically, electrically. But the new prefabricated shed gave off a smell of dung. Some of the earth excavated for the foundations of the parlor had been dumped between the parlor and the paved lane; in this area, waste ground, gra.s.s grew thick and green, with a scattering of weeds and stray wheat.

The brightly colored cars, the hum and hiss of the milking machine (the cows, even with their dung, reduced to machine-managed objects), the tense young men, conscious of their style, their jeans and s.h.i.+rts, their mustaches and cars-they were all aspects of the new, exaggerated thing that had come upon us.

Twice a day the milk tanker went grinding up the hill, up the resurfaced lane, to empty the refrigerated milk tanks of the new milking parlor. With the farm tractors and the motorcars of the new workers, my walk in the lane beside the windbreak was at times like a walk on a public road; I had to watch for traffic.

On the public road, the thatched cottage with the pink walls and the straw pheasant on the ridge of the roof lost a little more of its first character. So pretty, so like a postcard, when I had first seen it, so like something one had always known, with its rose hedge and its small, polished windows. The dairyman would have loved it too, I am certain; but, like me at the beginning, he would have seen its beauty as a natural attribute of the country setting; and he had lived in the house as he might have lived in a house in the town from which he had come, without any feeling that anything was owed to the house in which he and his family lived; having all his life considered houses, even those in which he lived, as belonging to other people. Basins and pots and pans and bits of paper and tins and empty boxes had been left out in the garden; and some of those things had stayed there even after the dairyman and his family had gone.

Now part of the hedge and the wire fence were taken down, so that the car of the new couple could be parked off the public road. The car was important to the new people, more important than the house. They were young people, without children; and they handled the house in a new way. It was a place of shelter, no more: temporary shelter for a temporary job. The wife sunbathed in the front garden whenever she could; and perhaps this was why the front door was often open. That open front door was very unsettling.

The house as a place of shelter, not as a place to which you could transfer (or risk transferring) emotion or hopes-this att.i.tude of the new couple to the thatched house seemed to match the more general new att.i.tude to the land. The land, for the new workers, was merely a thing to be worked. And with their machines they worked it as though they intended to turn all the irregularities of nature into straight lines or graded curves.

One day I saw a heavy, wide roller being pulled by a tractor through a field of young gra.s.s, already fairly tall though, and succulent-looking. The roller appeared to be breaking the stalks of the gra.s.s and creating, as if spectrally, the effect of a striped, two-toned lawn. What was the point of that? The young man I asked seemed bemused. Perhaps he hadn't understood what I had said. He mumbled something which I couldn't understand-all his style breaking down at this moment of speech (and making me think back to the strangled speech, like gruff throat noises, of Jack's father-in-law: "Dogs? Dogs. Worry pheasants"). Even when what the young man said was made clear to me, it didn't make sense. The stalks were being crushed, he said, to encourage stronger growth.

Another man said, on another day, that the point of the roller was to press down the "Wilts.h.i.+re flints" into the ground, so that when the time came the gra.s.s could be cut without damage to the cutting machine. "One Wilts.h.i.+re flint," he said-and the flints of Wilts.h.i.+re and of the downs of my daily walk were given an importance and malignity I had never attached to them-"could do thousands of pounds' worth of damage to one of these machines."

One new machine in particular I noticed. It made great rolls out of hay, great Swiss rolls of hay, as it were. These rolls, too big to be lifted or unrolled by a man, were manhandled by another impressive machine, a machine with iron grapples like giant scorpion's tails. A store of these rolls-in two layers, like a store of hay against some epic winter-was established far from the old farm buildings, in an unfenced, flint-rubbled valley off the droveway, just below the hill with the larks and the barrows, and from the top of which you had a sudden, near view of Stonehenge.

So there were three stores of hay at different places: the Swiss rolls here, the golden rectangular-sided bales in the new hay shed at the edge of the old farmyard, and the bales, also rectangular-sided, in the rotting hayrick halfway down the straight stretch of the droveway. What was the point of the Swiss rolls? Was there an advantage over the traditional bales? I never knew until years later, when this section of my life was closed. The bales, tightly banded by the baling machines, had to be broken into by hand and then spread out for cattle. The big rolls had simply to be unrolled; a machine did the job in minutes.

Such refinement! But perhaps the scale-for farming-was wrong. Perhaps time should never be as valuable as that, day after day. Perhaps when routines became as tight as that, they could too easily go awry. One broken link-and human ventures were always liable to error-could throw the entire operation out of true.

Everything the new farm did was big. A very big silage pit was excavated at the bottom of the hill just across the lane from the windbreak, and not far from the cottages. There was only one old-fas.h.i.+oned aspect to that silage pit. It was covered by black plastic sheeting, and the things used to keep the plastic sheeting tight and in place were the things that in my experience had always been used for that purpose: old tires. They were bought in enormous numbers. Scores and scores of them must have been used; and scores and scores of them were about at the bottom of the valley, in the droveway, just across from what used to be Jack's goose ground.

Those tires, and the deep new silage pit with its braced-up wall of timber planks, and the banks of rubble from the digging for the pit, and the dark-brown silage additive trickling out at the bottom, gave a touch of the rubbish tip to that part of the droveway where, when Jack lived, geese and ducks wandered about.

With the old farm workers the first caution with strangers, the sizing up, was followed by a dumb friendliness, the country sociableness of people who spent hours alone in the fields in their tractors. The new workers, who were like city people in the country, city people in a larger workplace, didn't have that kind of friendliness. They hadn't come to the valley to stay. They saw themselves as people with a new kind of job and skill; they were almost migrant agricultural workers; they were people on the move. Quite a few came and went.

I never got a smile from any of the people who moved into Jack's house after Jack's wife had left. She had said of the first lot of her new neighbors that they were "sn.o.bbish" people, who were interested in lawns and horses rather than old-fas.h.i.+oned cottage gardens. After some comings and goings, people who fitted that description settled in Jack's cottage.

His greenhouse, the one bought as it seemed from a catalog and once green with hanging plants, was empty, its gla.s.s murky with dust and rain, its timber frame weathered. One day it was taken down, revealing the concrete foundation or floor. The elaborate garden, with all its time-eating ch.o.r.es, was flattened. What was left didn't need much attention. No bedding out plants now; no forking over of the ground below the hawthorn tree; no delphiniums in the summer. The garden was flattened, all but two or three rose bushes and two or three apple trees which Jack had pruned in such a way that they bunched out at the top from a thick straight trunk. And the ground was gra.s.sed over. The hedge, once tight at the top, mud-spattered and ragged at the bottom, a half or quarter barrier between garden and rutted farm road, the hedge began to grow out into trees.

Now more than ever the cottages appeared to have neither front nor back, and to stand in a kind of waste ground. It matched the people and their att.i.tude to the place. It matched the new way of farming, logic taken to extremes, the earth stripped finally of its sanct.i.ty-the way the pink thatched cottage on the public road, once pretty with its rose hedge, had been stripped of its atmosphere of home by the people who looked to it only for shelter.

But that might have been only my way of looking. I had known-for a short time-the straight stretch of the droveway open and unfenced. It had been fenced down the middle in my first year and had remained fenced; but I carried that earlier picture. I had arrived at my feeling for the seasons by looking at Jack's garden, adding events on the river and the manor riverbank to what I saw in his garden. But there were other ways of looking. Jack himself, giving the attention he gave to a meaningless hedge-a hedge that ran down the length of his garden and then abruptly stopped-saw something else, certainly.

And perhaps the young children of the new people in Jack's cottage saw differently. They went to a junior school in Salisbury. The afternoon bus, bringing them back, set them down on the public road; their mother picked them up in her car. Often on my afternoon walk I had to stand aside on the paved lane to allow the mother's car to pa.s.s. She never acknowledged my stepping aside; she behaved as though the lane were a public road and her car had the right of way. And I also never took in or properly noticed what she was like. Her personality was expressed for me only in the color and shape of her car, speeding up or down the hill, going to get her children, or coming back with them.

I doubt whether any children in those farm cottages had been met like that off the school bus. What pictures of their time at the bottom of the valley-brief though that time was to be-would remain for them! What immense views, what a memory of emptiness, down the vast droveway and over the flinty slopes of the downs!

At the foot of the paved lane down the hill, across from the silage pit, there was a narrow, little-used track, overgrown, hardly showing as a track, that ran along a dip in the downs to a small abandoned farm building, weathered, not very noticeable, something perhaps from the last century. In that lane one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, when they were free from school and the bus, I saw the children from Jack's old cottage playing. Like prehistorical children, in a great solitude. But they were among the leftover tires of the silage pit (certain ones had been turned into their toys, their pretend paddling rafts); and the whitening banks and mounds of excavated rubble sprouting scattered weeds, pale green with bright yellow flowers; and concrete blocks left over from the building.

FRIENDs.h.i.+P HAS its odd ways. I had thought of the couple who looked after the manor, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, people in their forties, as stern and self-sufficient, locked away and content in their manor job, and having a private and much less stern leisure life with old friends in a town somewhere. But then they developed a local friends.h.i.+p, and for some time I felt this friends.h.i.+p threatened my own life in the manor grounds. its odd ways. I had thought of the couple who looked after the manor, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, people in their forties, as stern and self-sufficient, locked away and content in their manor job, and having a private and much less stern leisure life with old friends in a town somewhere. But then they developed a local friends.h.i.+p, and for some time I felt this friends.h.i.+p threatened my own life in the manor grounds.

Across the lawn from my cottage, against the "farmhouse" wall of the squash court-not farmhouse, not squash court-against that wall with its studied mixture of flint, red brickbats and bits of stone, there grew three old pear trees. They had been carefully pruned and trained at one time; and even now the main branches, still pinned to the wall, created a formal effect, making the trees look like large candelabra. The seasons dressed these branches in different ways; and the view from my cottage was always rich. The trees bore fruit. Always a surprise; always seemingly sudden. But to me they were not fruit to eat, and only partly because the fruit belonged to the manor: they were part of the picture.

In the great days of the manor sixteen gardeners looked after the grounds and the orchard and the walled vegetable garden. So I was told. Sixteen! How could anyone not running a plant nursery find sixteen gardeners nowadays or pay their wages? How different the hamlets and villages round about must have been then, how many working people in little houses!

The cottage where I lived had once been the garden office. Now I, who did nothing in the grounds, lived there. And there was only one gardener. He had a system. He used a hover-mower to cut the lawns, at the back and side of the manor and in front of my cottage, two or three times in the summer, after a very low cut in the early spring. In the early spring he also laid down weed killer on the drive and the old graveled path around the cottage lawn and on all those paths that had not been surrendered to gra.s.s. Once a year, in late August, he cut the tall gra.s.s and stalky weeds in the old orchard, where in the hollow knots of untended trees nestlings cheeped in the spring, and the trees themselves grew on, flowering at the correct time, bearing fruit, dropping fruit, attracting wasps. In the autumn he had a great leaf gathering. But his main work for much of the year was on the vegetable and flower garden, separated from the path at the back of my cottage by a high wall. The system worked. The garden had its wild parts; the water meadows were marsh; but elsewhere the gardener's attentions, slight but regular and with method, suggested a controlling hand.

The gardener's name was Pitton. I called him Mr. Pitton at the start, and called him that to the very end.

It was Pitton who one year, talking of the pear trees on the farmhouse wall, gave me a new determinative use of the preposition "in." The pears were ripe. The birds were pecking at them. I mentioned it to Pitton, thinking that with all the things he had do he mightn't have noticed. But he said he had noticed; the pears were very much on his mind; he intended any day now "to pick them in." To pick the pears in in-I liked that in in. I played with it, repeated it; and though I don't believe I heard Pitton use the word in that way again, I a.s.sociated it with him.

Then (as the reader will learn about in more detail in a later place in this book) Pitton had to go. The manor couldn't afford him. And there were no more regular gardeners, where there had been sixteen. No one to look after the vegetables in the walled garden or cut the gra.s.s or weed-kill the drive and paths or pick the pears in or keep the branches of the pear trees pinned to the squash-court wall.

The wind tore the upper branches of one tree free of the wall. The main trunk sagged forward, leaving a ghostlike outline in green-black on the wall; the branches drooped; the tree seemed about to break. But it didn't. The tree flowered; and at the foot of the wall in the summer, beside the path Pitton had once weed-killed, there grew up tall weeds that might have been chosen for their picturesque effect: shades of green, different degrees of transparency, different sizes of leaf. Above that, delicate white pear blossom turned to heavy fruit, at last. The birds became interested. No one now to pick the pears in, officially.

But then one Sunday, from my bedroom window, I saw a curiously dressed man looking at the pear trees, a.s.sessing them, and then, tentatively, picking the pears on the lower branches.

Strange people came into the manor grounds at various times. Pitton, when he had been there, had let in certain people. The Phillipses, the couple in the manor, had their own friends and visitors; and there were certain odd-job people they employed. And very occasionally there were people connected with my landlord. The curiously dressed man was unusual. But I had no means of knowing whether he was a marauder, someone simply picking the pears; or whether he was someone who had authority, and was picking them in in, for the use of the manor or people of whom the manor approved.

He was curiously dressed. In army camouflage clothes, trousers, tunic, round-brimmed hat. The clothes didn't look like army surplus, or at any rate the stuff in the windows of the surplus stores. There was a quality of dash and swash in the cut, the camouflage pattern, and the muted colors; and, curiously, with the dressiness there was an element almost of disguise, which made the man seem dangerous, like an intruder.

As he looked at the trees, and with his tentative hands tugged at the lower pears, he turned from time to time to one side (his face still hidden by the camouflage collar and hat), in the direction of the manor courtyard, like a man nervous of being observed. But then, getting out the ladder from the garden shed next to the squash court, the shed that had been Pitton's, placing the ladder against the wall, starting from the top and working methodically, carefully down, leaving nothing for the birds, bucket by bucket the man in army clothes picked the pears. And it became clear that he was picking them in in, and that he was picking the pears of the old trees in because he had the blessing of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips in the manor.

He had looked s.h.i.+fty at the beginning, uncertain, as though expecting someone to appear behind him. The person he must have been looking for appeared while he was on the ladder; because then, like a man apparently satisfied, he had concentrated on the pears.

The person who had appeared was a girl or, rather, a young woman; and she was half familiar to me. She walked on the lawn, and directly in front of my windows. The Phillipses never walked in front of my windows; they allowed me my privacy in the openness of the lawn; they were careful to walk on the far path, beside the squash court and the pear trees. This woman was going nowhere; she had come from the manor for a saunter on the lawn. She was short and heavy-hipped; her tight jeans emphasized the slowness and smallness of her steps. She was like someone who had been granted the freedom of the grounds and was at that moment beginning to taste the new freedom.

She too was unusually dressed. The extravagance was in her top: a s.h.i.+rt with the tails knotted in front, just below her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, leaving her midriff bare-not quite suitable at that time of year.

She had been half familiar to me. Now I knew her. She was the woman I had seen sunbathing in the ruined garden of the thatched cottage. I had a.s.sociated her so much with her cottage and garden and car and open front door that this sight of her in another, more open setting, and so close to me, was like the sight of a new person. And the man in army camouflage on the ladder was her farm-worker husband.

Here, on a Sunday afternoon, they were in the manor grounds; she strolling about the lawn, her hips tight in hard jeans folding horizontally, and almost in a straight line, into alternate lateral peaks; her husband picking pears, ripe fruit from old trees that might have been planted against the wall by the person who had designed the wall, trees once carefully tended and still, after years of neglect, showing signs of that early care.

They, the woman with the midriff and the man in the army-style camouflage, must have attracted the Phillipses in some way. Perhaps the women had got on; perhaps the men had got on; perhaps-the Phillipses were ten to fifteen years older-there might have been a cross-attraction of some sort. The woman with the midriff would have been important to the relations.h.i.+p; at any rate, the relations.h.i.+p between the four couldn't have existed without her support or encouragement.

Already, and mainly from glimpses I had had of her in her ruined garden, lying on a cheap aluminum-framed easy chair, I had wondered about this woman. She had given me the impression of being at the center of pa.s.sion, the cause of pain; a woman whose beauty caused pain to the man who at that moment was permitted to possess her; a woman who knew this.

That impression, arrived at from a distance, was added to now by the clearer and fuller sight I had of her on the lawn. To the narrow waist, the full hips, the firm thighs and upper arms, the b.r.e.a.s.t.s, flesh without muscle, half revealed, half flattened by her sunbathinglike top, to this voluptuousness were now added the stare (rather than the fire) in her unsteady light eyes, the greediness expressed by her mouth with its seemingly swollen lower lip, and by the distinct s.p.a.ces between her top front teeth. Her s.e.xuality was precious to her, more precious than anything else.

And here she was, in the grounds of the manor. And she was like someone in her own park, as though, just a few steps away from the clutter and constriction of the thatched cottage that had come with her husband's agricultural job (and which she couldn't therefore see as a real house), she had found a resort more suited to her style.

She walked slowly up and down the lawn, as though making herself familiar with a new pleasure. And the man in the army camouflage stood on the ladder and picked the pears, keeping his back to her, not turning round to look for her, as though he was now content, with his wife being where she was, with him.

Perhaps they and the Phillipses had come together as "town" people, working in the country but separate from the life of country people. Town people, but servants, all four, with their special style and pride, sharing now the grounds and privileges of the manor, offering and returning hospitality.

I couldn't tell who out of the four was benefiting most from the relations.h.i.+p. The person with most at stake was Les, the farm worker, who spent hours away from his wife, in his own solitude, in his tractor cab, seeing the tedium of a particular job physically expressed in the extent of a great down, perhaps without trees or windbreak, moving slowly back and forth, his thoughts no doubt often going back to the woman in the thatched cottage.

The grandeur of the manor, the grounds, the gardens, the river-these were like things he could present her with now, another side of what was to be found in the country, some little reward for the desolation of her life in that valley which others thought beautiful, and in that thatched cottage which others thought picturesque, but was picturesque only to people with another kind of life, different resources, another idea of what was owed them.

I was nervous of Brenda. She had no great regard for me. She had her own idea of what was to be respected; and the way I lived-a middle-aged man in a small cottage-and the work I did (if she had found out) didn't fit into that idea. In this she was different from the Phillipses, who saw me as "artistic," a version of their employer, and had always been protective. There was a difference of generations here. But it was this difference that (over and above common interests) lay at the heart of the relations.h.i.+p between the four: the older people glamoured by the style and boldness of the younger.

Brenda was being groomed to serve in the manor when the Phillipses were on holiday or wished to take a day off. They had been looking for some time for a suitable person, someone compatible as well, a friend, yet someone who would not be a threat. And the prospect of a part-time light job in the manor for Brenda, the prospect of having the run of the little wild estate, the gardens, the orchard, the riverbank walks, this bound the younger people to the Phillipses.

And that took some understanding, that people like Brenda and Les, who were so pa.s.sionate, so concerned with their individuality, their style, the quality of their skin and hair, it took some understanding that people who were so proud and flaunting in one way should be prepared in another corner of their hearts or souls or minds to go down several notches and be servants. They were servants, all four. Within that condition (which should have neutered them) all their pa.s.sions were played out. But that might have been my own special prejudice, my own raw nerves. I came from a colony, once a plantation society, where servitude was a more desperate condition.

Les was under pressure. From his work on the farm, and his uncertainty about what was going to happen with that very big venture; if it failed, he would have to move on, find another position. From his obsession with Brenda, whose beauty so obviously tormented him: possession of the woman not enough, constantly reminding him of what he might lose. And pressure, too, from his increasingly dependent relations.h.i.+p with the Phillipses.

He wished to keep the footing he had obtained in the manor; he wished Brenda-to whom it mattered-to continue to enjoy the freedom of the grounds. To do so he had to put himself in some ways in the power of the Phillipses; had to some extent, after the servitude of his own job, to serve them.

He cut the gra.s.s on the various lawns, a big job. He made himself busy on Sat.u.r.days and Sundays with his hammer and saw, mending bridges over the creeks (black with rotting leaves) in the water meadows, keeping a path clear to the riverbank. He even tried to revive some of the vegetable plots of the walled garden-between the paths, a wilderness of weeds in the old sifted earth, many times forked over and fertilized, but the garden as a whole still showing a fair amount of its original design and (like the pear trees) preserving after many years of care something of its formality, even with the wire netting and coops and rough carpentry and basins, all the abandoned intentions of the various odd-job people who had worked in the garden and grounds after Pitton had left.

Les worked on the vegetable plots in the evenings, after his work on the farm. Energy! But this late work on the vegetables became an irritation to me. He used the sprinkler then; and the flow of water there set up a high-pitched vibration in the old metal pipes that ran through my own cottage; so that my cottage hissed and hummed while the sprinkler played.

Pitton and his successors had used the garden hose or sprinkler during the day; but the noise then had been m.u.f.fled by the noises of the day. In the silence of the evening-the old silence of the country (even with the electric-light glow in the sky of the towns all around), a silence so pure that the trains going in and out of Salisbury station six or seven miles away could be heard sometimes when I went out of my cottage door-in the evening those hissing pipes could be clearly heard, and couldn't be ignored.

I did something I hadn't done before. I telephoned Mrs. Phillips at the manor to complain. I was expecting her to be combative, and protective towards her friends. To my surprise she made no fuss. She accepted what I said about the peculiar nuisance of the hissing pipes in the evening, and said she would go and turn the sprinkler off herself. She did that; and the abrupt silence in the cottage-coming at first like a ringing in the ears or the head, a noise of cicadas-was like a blessing.

What accidents had given me my life in the cottage! What accidents protected it! How little it would have taken to alter the whole feel of the place, and to drive me away! A disturbance like the sprinkler late in the evening; or Brenda walking too often outside my window; or too many strangers making free of the lawn outside; or too many parties and visitors in the servants' quarters of the manor.

Mrs. Phillips had been cooperative. But I expected after this that there would be a certain awkwardness with her, and a more p.r.o.nounced awkwardness-long building up-with Brenda and Les. And such was my mood, my acceptance of the inevitability of change, my idea that things lasted for their season, such was the effect of my training myself to say, "Well, at least I have had this for a year," and, "At least I have had this for two years," that I was half prepared to feel that my life on the estate had changed for good.

But there was no awkwardness with Mrs. Phillips or Mr. Phillips. And no awkwardness at all with Les. In fact, Les, with whom I had so far had little to do, made a friendly move towards me. And he did so the very next day.

At the time when the sprinkler might have been turned on-and from my kitchen door I might have seen the arc or fan of the parallel water jets, hypnotically appearing and disappearing, waxing and waning against the late southern sky, above the high wall of the vegetable garden, the wall that ran beside the little lane at the back of my cottage-at that time he knocked at my kitchen door. Technically, it was a back door; but it was the only door I used to go in and out of my cottage.

I saw him through the high gla.s.s panes in the door. He was bareheaded when I opened. His camouflage hat (a relic of the camouflage outfit) was in one hand, and he was offering some vegetables in a basin. The gesture, of offering, was graceful, cla.s.sical; and he was smiling. The picture remained with me: the lean, sunken-cheeked, tanned face; the hat held in one hand, the two hands together holding the basin with the vegetables; the smile.

Yet what was also noticeable about him was his lack of beauty. And this was now noticeable because I had expected a man of good looks, from his physique, the way he carried himself, his clothes. His chin was heavy; his teeth were bad: they mocked his smile; his skin was marked. And yet he had worked hard at his looks. His hair was stylishly cut, soft, freshly washed. I understood now why he always wore unusual or elegant hats. They helped; from a distance he looked good in hats. I understood also a little of the anxiety I had sensed in him about Brenda; as well as a little more of Brenda's manner, the manner of a woman who was still owed a lot.

When the Phillipses went on their holiday, Brenda took over at the manor. She moved into the Phillipses' quarters. Les stayed on in the thatched cottage.

I had to be away for a few days at this time. On the morning after I got back I went to the manor to get my letters. My letters were kept there when I was away; that was the arrangement with the Phillipses.

I rang at the kitchen door in the manor courtyard. I heard music inside. Brenda was a long time coming.

She would have been deep in the Phillipses' quarters. They had elegant rooms. They had a sitting room with a stone terrace leading out onto the back lawn, which had been laid out fifty or more years before and had big trees and flower beds and old rose bushes and old pieces of garden statuary: in the distance, the marsh of the water meadows, the river, and the meadows and the down on the other bank. To this, on the stone terrace just outside, the Phillipses had added bird tables and pendant seed bells, at which t.i.ts and other birds pecked.

Brenda was carefully got up. Jeans and blouse; her full lips painted, something done to her eyelashes, emphasizing the stare of her unsettling blue eyes; her appearance at the same time suggesting an immense idleness in the Phillipses' quarters. Servant and not servant; and now not particularly attentive to me. She said she had seen no letters.

At her back was the big kitchen of the manor, which (from what they told me) the Phillipses had done up or caused to be done up. A warm, inviting kitchen, with a big stove and many cupboards; thick walls, small windows set in deep embrasures, the electric lights on; a feeling of s.p.a.ce and protection, of doors opening into corridors and big room standing beside big room.

Shortly after she came back Mrs. Phillips telephoned me to say that there were many letters for me at the manor. When I went to her kitchen to get them I told her that Brenda had told me there were none. Mrs. Phillips didn't seem displeased to hear this. No explanation, no comment; just a hint of a nod. She was like someone digesting a piece of news, adding it to what she already possessed.

And I felt that Mrs. Phillips had changed her mind about Brenda; that once again-as had happened with other people she had tried out as her holiday replacement-Mrs. Phillips had found a reason for recoiling from having a stranger in her kitchen and rooms. Brenda might have been the central person at the beginning of the relations.h.i.+p between the four. But now Mrs. Phillips was more important.

I was not surprised then when Brenda stopped appearing in the manor. But I was not prepared for the news Mrs. Phillips gave one day.

"She's run off to Italy with Michael Allen," she said.

Michael Allen was a central heating contractor. He was a young man with a newish business. He had profited from the old-fas.h.i.+oned ways of the older central heating and plumbing firms, used to dealing with big houses, used to being well thought of, but burdened by the expensive town-center premises and large staffs of older days.

I had got to know Michael Allen after he had come to the manor to do something about a boiler that had exploded. I asked him about the hissing pipes in my cottage. He said in his brisk way that the only cure for that as well as for other things in the manor was to sc.r.a.p the entire plumbing system, all those antiquated metal pipes. I remembered his confidence, the way he walked, the way he came into my cottage: he actually had a little strut. He was a country fellow and a great boaster. In the short time we spoke he boasted about many things; he asked me nothing about myself. He employed six people, he said; he intended to retire when he was forty.

In a bigger town, in London, say, people like Michael Allen do not really have personalities: their personalities seldom make an impression and do not matter. They or their employees come out of the streets, do their jobs, and return to the streets. They disappear; they are hardly their names; they are more their telephone numbers and their bills. In a place like the valley the entry of the same kind of person into your house is more of a social occasion. He comes with more readable attributes and many more points of contact: his village or small town, his neighbors sometimes, his education, his background, the houses and people he has served, and the services and shops he in his turn shares with you.

Michael Allen boasted. He saw himself as a man of energy and ambition, and for this reason untouched by the recession other people complained about. He saw himself as adventurous, several cuts above the general run of people who didn't have the courage or the spirit to go into business on their own and were content to be employed by others. His looks were pa.s.sable; he had a mustache, of the current fas.h.i.+on. But after that meeting I remembered more his absurd pride and boastfulness, and the strutting, almost hands-in-pockets way he came into the cottage, as though he were doing it and me a favor.

I saw his van sometimes in Salisbury. Once or twice I saw him and his van outside the Safeway supermarket. Michael didn't like that: being seen using his van as a car. I saw his van outside Brenda and Leslie's cottage, and in the courtyard of the manor. But that wasn't surprising. I was used to seeing his van (as well as the vans of certain local builders) up and down the valley; certain tradesmen were never idle.

But Italy! What old-fas.h.i.+oned idea of romance had sent Michael and Brenda there? What film or television show? Or was it, more simply, that Michael had been there on a package holiday and felt safer with what he knew? But wasn't that going abroad itself a sign of the brevity of the pa.s.sion? How could Michael give up his six employees, his local reputation, his van with his name painted on the sides and the back? How long before he wished to return, not only to that fame and career, but also to his old life?

And so it happened.

Brenda reappeared. Not in the manor. That interlude was over. Even before Brenda had gone away Les had stopped coming to the manor, had given up the vegetable garden, the hammering on weekends, the doing of odd jobs about the grounds. All that effort to put things right, all that effort of heart and hand, had gone to waste; the manor had swallowed it up. Waste; but the manor had given things in return, had given pleasure, had given Les for many weeks the freedom of its wild grounds. Just as, before Les and Brenda had come to the thatched cottage, the country life and its seeming secrecy had given the dairyman from the town some genuine new idea of the beauty of the days.

Now the manor was in the past, and Les had retreated to his thatched cottage-never romantic to him, and now no doubt the wretchedest of places for him; had retreated to the solitude and noise of his tractor cab, going up and down the immense slopes of the downs, considering earth and dust, now black, now brown, now white, and the physical desolation of his fields. I had seen him at one of his best moments: appearing at the door with his vegetables, offering them with that cla.s.sical gesture, and a smile of pure goodwill, the smile of a man receiving at that time a little love from the person he loved, and pa.s.sing a bit of it back to the people around him.

For Brenda that return, not just from Italy, but from Italy to the cottage, must have been awful. After half queening it in the grounds of the manor, and queening it for a full fortnight in the quarters of the Phillipses, with that grand view from the sitting room of the lawn and statues and old trees and the river. She had asked for so much from her beauty; so much, and then she had asked so much again.