The Enigma of Arrival Part 11

Pitton's difficulty-as I understood when I put myself in his place, and examined myself and my own fears-was that he had lost touch with the idea of work. In fact, after the manor, the freedom there, the routine he had created, the calm he had established for himself, his relations.h.i.+p with the seasons, the year, time itself, what he feared was not work but employment-and perhaps not employment so much as the idea of the employer.

In the end, quietly, ashamedly, he took a job. He drove a laundry van. I knew about it only when I saw him driving the van, the laundry leather moneybag added to his country-gentleman clothes and slung over his shoulder and chest like a bandolier. And in the end he left his cottage and was given a council flat in the town, on the old London coach road.

It could not have been pleasant for him in the cottage towards the end, when he had been under pressure to leave, to release the property and the capital it represented to the estate. I expected that he would have been happy at having found another place to live, and quite a reasonable one. But, with the pa.s.sion and twisted emotions that had now become permanent with him, he complained. The flat was shabby. In what way? It hadn't been decorated. They expected him to do his own decorating; that was the way he was being treated.

It was always hard-so convincing was Pitton's manner-to understand that he was an obedient soul, the father of an obedient soldier; that-with all his pa.s.sion-servility, or dependence, ran deep in his nature.

BRAY SAID, "So our friend has moved out."

I was sitting beside him in his car, and he spoke out of the corner of his mouth, the corner that was on my side.

Bray said, "An arrogant man."

Below his driver's cap Bray's eyes, at once concentrating on the road and expressing an inward pleasure, were like slits, sloping sharply down to the sides of his face. And then, speaking of the manor family as though they were all still there, as though the manor organization of which his father had formed part still existed, Bray said, "They're a funny family." There was tribute in his words, and also pride.

He reached for a book on the shelf below the dashboard and pa.s.sed it to me, with the semiabstraction of a man concentrating on the road and also with the clumsiness of a man not used to handling books. He said, mysteriously, "Have a look at this when you get home." As though the book, the mysterious object, would explain much; as though the book would free him, Bray, of the need to say more.

The book was by my landlord. It was nearly fifty years old, something from the 1920s. It was a short story in verse, with many ill.u.s.trations. The paper was good, the book was expensively bound in cloth; and though it carried the name of a reputable London publisher of the period, it was clear that the production of such a slight work in this lavish way had been subsidized or paid for by the author.

The story was simple. A young woman gets tired of the English social round-many opportunities there for drawings of the costumes of the 1920s. She decides to become a missionary in Africa. Goodbyes are said; the lovers who are left behind pine in different ways. A s.h.i.+p; the ocean; the African coast; a forest river. The young missionary is captured by Africans, natives. She has fantasies of s.e.xual a.s.sault by the African chief to whose compound she is taken; fantasies as well of the harem and of black eunuchs. Instead, she is cooked in a cannibal pot and eaten; and all that remains of her, all that one of her London lovers finds, is a twenties costume draped on a wooden cross, like a scarecrow.

This was the joke knowledge of the world the young boy of eighteen had arrived at; this was the knowledge (which would have appeared like sophistication) that had been fed by the manor and the grounds. And perhaps later knowledge had not gone beyond the joke: outside England and Europe, a fantasy Africa, a fantasy Peru or India or Malaya. And perhaps pa.s.sion too had never gone beyond the t.i.tillation of the Beardsley-like drawings of this book. And that was the most amazing thing about the book Bray had preserved and cherished: the drawings.

They were in the very style of the drawings which Mrs. Phillips had brought over as gifts from my landlord during the previous summer, of the shopping expeditions and the champagne. He had struck his form and won admiration for his style at an early age; had early arrived at his idea of who he was, his worth and his sensibility; and he had stalled there. Perhaps he had stalled in what might be considered a state of perfection. But that perfection-that absence of restlessness and creative abrasion, that view from his back windows of a complete, untouched, untroubled world-had turned to morbidity, acedia, a death of the soul.

That morbidity had been like a long sleep. Then he had miraculously awakened, and he had found his world still about him. He knew that the s.p.a.ciousness of earlier days had gone. But he was prepared, as he had always been prepared, to live with what he found-that was how, projecting myself onto him, I read him.

He liked ivy. When the trees in his garden collapsed he did not complain. He had enjoyed the ivy for many years, and now he would have to content himself with other things. So it was with people; when their time came, it came. He had made no comment-from what I heard from the Phillipses-about the fall of the aspens, which he must have seen for fifty years at least. So, understanding now that there was no longer a gardener, he never-from what the Phillipses said-asked for Pitton, with whom the previous summer he had played and about whom he had made up his stories, to tell to the people remaining to him, like Alan. (Like a child of two or three who might play every day with its grandmother; but then, should that grandmother suddenly die, might never ask after her.) I saw Pitton driving his laundry van sometimes. Hard to recognize in him the man whose routine, whose appearance at the white gate, had been part of the new life and comfort and healing I had found in the valley.

Sometimes we met on a Sat.u.r.day in Salisbury. Once he came up behind me and called me by my name. Strange behavior, from a b.u.t.toned-up, wordless man. But I had known him in his glory; I had helped in the grand garden of the manor, helped with the gra.s.s, the dead beech leaves. And I had called him Mr. Pitton.

He grew shabbier. Fragments of his country-gentleman clothes survived on him, in other combinations; but his style changed. The laundryman who did the valley round and knew Pitton said of him, but gently and understandingly, "He's a little grumpy."

But then Pitton changed. The valley laundryman-tolerant, as content with the rhythm of his weekly round, the rhythm of his year, his annual two-week holidays, as content with the pa.s.sing of time as Pitton had once been-the valley laundryman understood this change in Pitton, too, and said of Pitton's improving behavior, his lessening grumpiness, "You get used to it."

There was more to it than that. Pitton, in this last decade of active life, grew out of what he had been. He got to know more people, at work and on the council estate where he lived. Where he had feared anonymity, he found community and a little strength. He saw his former life as from a distance. He had always sought-in his clothes, his pride in his wife's looks, his odd poor-man's pretense about the other source of income-to maintain this distance from what he was. Now there was no need. Gradually he stopped acknowledging me from the laundry van. One day in Salisbury, in that pedestrian shopping street where he had tried to fill me with his own panic, one day he saw me. And then-the new man-he didn't "see" me.

ROOKS.

ALAN SAID, "So Pitton left. Tremendous figure of my childhood."

That was Alan the writer, the man with the childhood, the man with the sensibility. I understood this idea of the writer because it was so like my own when I had first come to England. Then I would have envied Alan the material available to him: my landlord, the manor, the setting, his deep knowledge of the setting; the London parties I occasionally saw him at. But Alan seemed to have as much trouble with his idea of the writer and his material as I had had with mine.

At first he used to hint that he was at work on a book-hinting that the part of him that one saw, the part he was displaying in the manor grounds or at a London party was just a fraction of his personality or even a disguise; that the true personality would be revealed in that book he was writing. His radio reviews and discussions and his short printed pieces had the same suggestion, that he was fully engaged elsewhere, in some bigger venture.

But no book came from Alan. No novel or autobiographical novel (setting the record straight, showing the truth behind the s.h.i.+ny bright clothes and the clowning manner); no critical study of contemporary literature (which he sometimes spoke about); no Isherwood-like book about postwar Germany, which he spoke about at other times. Eventually, with me, he stopped hinting that he was writing. But he still talked like a writer and behaved like a writer.

And that writer's personality of Alan's was partly genuine, and no more fraudulent than my own character, my idea of myself as a writer, had been in 1950. Just as, in my writing in those days, I was hiding my experience from myself, hiding myself from my experience, to that extent falsifying things, yet at the same time revealing them to anyone who looked beyond the conventional words and forms and att.i.tudes I was aiming at, so all the literary sides of his character that Alan exhibited, all the books he said he was writing, hinted at truths that were as hard for him to face as certain things had been for me.

That Isherwood-like book about postwar Germany hinted at the dissatisfactions and torments of his emotional life and his involvement with a young German for whose sake he had gone to live in Germany for some time. He spoke of this attachment obliquely at the beginning, as though testing my reaction to a confession of pa.s.sion from him (half a clown); as though testing my reaction to s.e.xual inversion. Either my reaction didn't satisfy him, or he changed his mind; or his att.i.tude to this unhappy affair altered as he began to talk about it to me, a stranger. He dropped the subject; the sketch of the young German remained unfinished; and Alan's references to Germany thereafter were straightforwardly political or cultural.

And there was his autobiographical novel, the story of his childhood and the development of his sensibility. It was to be an absolute compendium of such books. His wish (as I understood too well) was to say to the world: "I too have witnessed these things and felt these emotions." But below his wish to do all that had already been done, to display knowledge of all the settings (or their equivalents) that had occurred in similar books, there was something in his childhood or upbringing or family life which had deeply wounded him, had committed him to solitude, uncertainty, an imperfect life.

His literary approach to his experience, the self-regard that would have gone with its "frankness" (on approved topics, no doubt-h.o.m.os.e.xuality, masturbation, social climbing), perhaps hid the cause of his incompleteness from himself. And often in London, considering his overskittishness at parties, his startling, self-mocking dress, his nervousness in the presence of people he admired, his extravagant flattery of those persons, often in London, considering him, I felt I was considering an aspect of myself from some years back. And I had an intimation that those over-bright moments of Alan's would have been followed in the solitude of his rooms or flat by self-disgust, rage, wretchedness. And I could see how the solitude of the manor, the walks in the ruined garden, would have been (in addition to its literary suitability) a kind of therapy for him. Therapy over and above his pleasure at having "rich friends" (because writers, as Cyril Connolly had said, should have rich friends); over and above his pleasure at saying to me (because it was old-fas.h.i.+oned, "before the deluge"): "I telephone and have Phillips meet me at the station"-not saying "Mr. Phillips" or "Stanley" or "Stan."

And there was the house itself. It had a staff, and it still worked as a big house, more or less. It offered a room and a bathroom with refurbished plumbing. It offered from the back windows (as I supposed: I hadn't seen it) a view of the garden, the river, the water meadows on both sides of the river, with the empty downs beyond: an untouched view, a view without other houses or people, a calming view. For Alan it would have been a house without any kind of strain, making no demand on him, not requiring him to act or maintain a particular personality.

There was my landlord. For me it would have been a strain to be in the house with him, a strain to meet him, and to note however involuntarily his idiosyncrasies and affectations; it would have undone the magic. But my landlord-in addition to his literary value to Alan as "material," someone from an earlier age-was the one person to whom Alan stood almost in a position of authority. To my landlord-recently recovered from his acedia-Alan was still an adventurer in the t.i.tillating world from which he, my landlord, had withdrawn. My landlord was the one person to whom Alan could bring news. And yet their meetings would have been few and wouldn't have lasted long. From Mr. Phillips I heard that my landlord tired quickly of conversation and people, social encounters; that he could suddenly become restless and dismiss even old friends. I heard-indirectly-from the Phillipses that Alan usually ate alone in the manor. (And the picture that came to my mind was not of a tray being taken to Alan's room, but of a dim ceiling bulb lighting a modest spread on an old lace tablecloth in a musty room smelling of old cedar and wood preservative.) So the solitude I saw was indeed solitude. And if Alan thought it "creepy" that I could live in the place for so long without getting to know my landlord, I thought it strange-until I understood the particular solace the place offered him-that he should want to visit, for the reasons he gave: to be in the place important to his childhood, for the sake of the novel he was working on or planning, and also (for the sake of another book) to be in the presence of my landlord, to study his speech and mannerisms, the mannerisms of a more gracious age, the age before the deluge (not the age that had finished in 1914, this time, but the age according to Alan that had finished in 1940), the age when houses like my landlord's were still important, not only socially but also in the making of literary and artistic reputations.

Alan suggested that in spite of his apparent idleness, his rambling about the orchard and gardens, his readiness to come to my cottage at any time, his visits to the manor were periods of work; that he was taking away volumes of "notes." Sometimes he let me into the secret of the notes he was making or had made. My landlord had said to him once: "Would you like some toast? Shall I get Phillips to bring you some toast in a chafing dish?" And Alan had roared with laughter as much as he had roared at the story about Pitton and the pink champagne. "A chafing dis.h.!.+" he said. "Have you heard anybody speak of a chafing dish?"

So that I felt not only that Alan (like me, twenty-five years before in Earl's Court) had a good idea of what as a writer he expected to find; but also that my landlord, even in his shrunken world, and through the darkness of his acedia, still had an idea of what was expected of him.

But there was Alan's solitude, so visible in the manor, so clear in the melancholy of his k.n.o.bby little face when he was caught unawares. That solitude was real enough, as real as the pain of his childhood; as real as the acedia of my landlord and the physical dereliction this acedia had created all around him. That solitude of Alan's as he walked about the garden and grounds was like a demonstration of the psychological damage he had suffered once upon a time. There was a part of him that hurt, a part where he could never be reached and where he was always alone; and the nature of his education, his too-literary approach to his experience, his admiration of certain writers and artists of the century, his wish to do again, but for himself, what they had done, all this conspired to conceal things from himself. The solitude of the manor grounds was a solace. Outside that was threat and the vision of his own inadequacy.

He made up for this by flattery of the people he admired and whose strength he wished he had. Like a child offering sweets to his fellows in order to buy peace, Alan told many people he was making notes about them for his big book about contemporary literature. He was keeping his eye on so many people, noting their conversation, keeping their letters; he was going to write about so many people. And it was hard, once Alan had told you he was making "notes" about you, to ignore him, hard not to start acting up (even like my landlord) to an intelligent, friendly man who might indeed be making notes about all the things you were saying.

He balanced this by a contempt for those writers in whom he saw versions of himself-mimics, people doing what others had done in social chronicles and wis.h.i.+ng to show that they could do it too. Towards these writers, whose faults he saw very clearly, he was merciless. One such writer-he was physically bigger than Alan, but was also something of a dandy in clothes-whom I saw in London told me: "The venomous little insect came galumphing across the room at Clarissa's and said to me, 'My dear, you must stay in this Sat.u.r.day and listen to The The Critics Critics. I've slaughtered you.' Ha-ha."

But there were not many people like that, people to whom Alan expressed open hostility. The public objects of Alan's dislike were mainly certain kinds of buildings, paintings, gardens, flowers. And here even my landlord was not exempt. My landlord liked gladioli. Pitton grew them for him in the garden. Alan hated them for their gaudiness and size. He said, closing his eyes, a shudder going right through him, "They should be that high"-bending and holding his open palm down to the level of his s.h.i.+n. He could shudder with distaste like this when he spoke of these things-flowers, pictures, buildings-as though making up, in the violence of his aesthetic responses, for all the coyness he imposed on himself with other people, all the talk about "notes" and the writing he was preparing to do about them ("All this is going down in the diary," he would say, or, personalizing it, "This is for Diary," or, "Diary will take due note"), all the sweets he offered the world to buy peace. It was this aesthetic violence-at bottom quite genuine, reflecting a genuine sensibility, a true concern for the life of the mind-that gave his radio talks and discussions their bite and attack and suggested that they were the merest glimpse of a fuller life and more prodigious personality.

It happened sometimes that months pa.s.sed without our meeting-he might not come down, or I might be away when he did come down. One day, quite unusually, he telephoned me from London; and I was aware only then that I hadn't seen him for perhaps a year or more. There were the sounds of music in the background. The music was very loud; it made me ask where he was telephoning from. It was from his flat. He said, "You talk like my neighbors. Of course I am blasting away." And he gave his great choking laugh.

The old Alan, it would have seemed. But it wasn't. He was drunk; and as he began to speak, it became clear that he was very drunk. Alcohol and music: the supports of solitude. This was new to me: not the solitude, but the drinking. I had never thought of Alan as a drinking man. But even drunkenness didn't alter Alan's character or show the other side of the man; drunkenness didn't liberate him. It exaggerated, made ludicrous, his appeasing public character. Hardly able to control his words, he was seeking only to send messages of love, to flatter, to speak to me about my work.

And he was asking nothing in return. For there was, as it were, no means of getting back to the person from whom all this issued. The person that wished to buy peace from the world was beyond the reach of the world, was hardly known, it might be said, to Alan himself. It didn't matter how much one flattered back; it didn't matter how much love one sent back; one could never touch the true person.

Some months later he reappeared at the manor. He had greatly changed. His eyes, once so seemingly unreliable and s.h.i.+fty, had become dead, lackl.u.s.ter; there was a very old sadness there. The k.n.o.bby little face had become white and soft; it had become like the face of a frail old woman. And it was as if this transformation gave a glimpse of the ambiguity in the personality, perhaps just one of the many ambiguities that had tormented Alan.

Especially noticeable to me was the skin of his cheeks. It was very white and seemed to have become very thin, seemed to flutter above the flesh (as though there was some vacancy between skin and flesh) whenever Alan spoke or closed his mouth too firmly. This thin, delicate skin made me think of the outer petal of a blown rose; it seemed to have something of the texture. It made me think also of the faded black plastic sheeting that covered the old cottage-shaped hayrick on the droveway, plastic sheeting so beaten about by wind and rain that it had not only lost its l.u.s.ter and snap but appeared also to have developed within its thinness little blisters and air pockets.

The man had changed. And-he was in my cottage, sitting in my wing chair, half reclined, looking small, the upholstered wings above his head, his knees neatly together-it was a little as if (this was the idea that came to me) the man that one knew had been subjected almost to a moral attack by the unacknowledged personality within; that the man had been pulled down by this inner personality, which now sat like a watchful guardian on the man's shoulder and was the only ent.i.ty with whom Alan could now have a true dialogue. Of the old personality there remained only the clothes that made the upholstery of the chair look grimy. These clothes were as carefully chosen as ever; but the man within was so quiet, so little ebullient, his movements were so slow and considered, that the clothes did not suggest the old personality.

From the Phillipses I later heard about the drunken telephone calls Alan had made to the manor at about the time-or perhaps a little before-he had telephoned me. The first three or four had been taken. But then-perhaps Alan had pushed his luck too far, had begun to make the telephone calls at odd hours, perhaps had said things he hadn't said to me-my landlord had become alarmed. Alan's disturbance, so manifest, had given my landlord fresh glimpses of his own acedia again, his own h.e.l.l. To fear that kind of illness was, in effect, to start being ill again. And for a while my landlord had had a relapse.

Alan's telephone calls had been refused; Mr. Phillips had ordered Alan not to telephone again. Alan had been forbidden to come to the house. All Mr. Phillips's protective feelings towards his employer, the sick man, were awakened; the prohibition on Alan's visits was lifted only when Mr. Phillips was sure that Alan had stopped drinking.

But the man who had reappeared in the manor was ravaged. That old lady's face was the face of a man beyond cure. And though he refused the gla.s.s of wine I offered (quite innocently, not knowing at the time his recent history), though he refused, while insisting (with beautiful courtesy, almost as though he were my host) that I should have a gla.s.s myself, his apparent cure was-as with some other bad diseases-only a remission, enabling him, perhaps cruelly, perhaps in a spirit of reconciliation, to look at the world he was leaving and to say his good-byes.

He said good-bye. He never came back. I heard him once or twice on the radio-as bubbling as ever. If only he could have lived there, at that pitch, in something like a radio-studio atmosphere, something of that artificial social arrangement, instead of having to go home and be alone. And then one day I heard-some days after the event-that he had taken some pills one night after a bout of hard drinking and died. It was a theatrical kind of death. Theater would not have been far from Alan's mind that evening. It might so easily have gone the other way. Somebody might have telephoned, or he might have telephoned somebody, gone to a party in brilliant clothes, been witty or flattering or outrageous, would have ridden over the theatrical moment of suicide. But his solitude would almost certainly have brought him there again.

The news was kept from my landlord. Mr. Phillips thought it would be bad for him to be told. But somehow my landlord found out. For him it was one person less in his shrinking world; another person not to be mentioned again.

Of Alan's books and "notes" there was of course almost nothing. Out of his love for the life of the mind, and the artist's eye and hand, he had flattered very many people. And it was this flattery that was his odd memorial for a week or so. A number of people who wrote about Alan after his death wrote with that part of their personalities that had almost been created by Alan's flattery. Their obituaries were curiously self-regarding; as much as to Alan-who came out in these notices as an eccentric, an anachronism, someone from "before the deluge" (the words were actually used in one piece)-these people paid tribute to themselves for having known and befriended Alan, for having spotted his talent and sensibility, having been singled out by him for his confidences, his confessions of sadness. No one spoke of his flattery. And more than one person, it turned out, had been telephoned by Alan in distress just a few days before he had died.

Mr. Phillips, mentioning Alan's death, permitted himself a look of sadness, a twinge of regret. But then almost immediately his face clouded with the irritability which I thought of as his usual public expression. This irritability was like Bray's peaked cap; it enabled Mr. Phillips to express many things. He could wear his irritability dead straight; or he could wear it mockingly or self-mockingly. He could use it to express authority, or to be an aggrieved worker; or it could be the irritability of a man protecting his good fortune, not wis.h.i.+ng to exult.

Now his irritability bridged his human response to the death of Alan and his professional pride as a male nurse and as protector of the manor. He had spotted Alan immediately, he said. He had spotted Alan's depressive nature. He had been right to forbid Alan the house. The drunkenness would simply not have done. Its effect on my landlord would have been calamitous; and then Alan could so easily have done in the manor what he had done at home. Think of the trouble, the confusion, the further effect on my landlord, holding on to the remnants of his own lucidity and health.

That was how he, Alan, was remembered at the place which he thought of as his special retreat. "I telephone Phillips and have him meet me at the station." That was how (in one mood) Alan thought or wanted to think of his time and position at the manor. It was half a social idea, half a literary idea: the being met "at the station," with all its old-fas.h.i.+oned country-house-weekend suggestions; the use of the name Phillips without the "mister"-though Alan called Mr. Phillips Stanley or Stan and Mr. Phillips called him Alan.

MR. PHILLIPS'S old father said to me, "So your friend Alan died. Nice man. I hardly knew him. I saw him a few times. He was always very pleasant." old father said to me, "So your friend Alan died. Nice man. I hardly knew him. I saw him a few times. He was always very pleasant."

He, old Mr. Phillips, the small, neat man, had been walking in the grounds with his tall p.r.o.nged staff (the sign that he had come to the grounds to walk and not to work). He was carefully dressed, in his very pale colors-no pattern in the fabric of his tie, jacket, or s.h.i.+rt, this absence of pattern together with the broad lapels, collars, and ties of the period adding to the pallor of the clothes, suggesting chalk below the tints, the way the chalk of the downs modified the color of young gra.s.s or corn and in dry weather whitened a plowed field.

The old man said, "Whenever I hear of something like this I think of my cousin. He died when he was eight. In 1911, coronation year."

We were standing outside my cottage, below the beeches. The old man slightly lifted his face. He was smiling; his eyes were watering. I knew the expression. The smile wasn't a smile, the tears were not tears. It was just what happened to his face whenever he began to talk about his childhood or early life.

But he couldn't tell me about his cousin just then. We were both distracted by a great squawking noise. The noise was made by a flock of rooks circling overhead. Big black beaks, big black flapping wings. I had never seen them here before. I had got used to starlings arriving suddenly in screeching flocks, settling like black leaves on trees. But rooks in this number I hadn't seen. They flew around slowly, squawking, as if a.s.sessing us. In my first year, on one of my early, exploratory walks, I had seen two or three downs away, on a wooded hill on the other side of Jack's cottage, spread-eagled husks of these birds nailed to a fence by Jack's very old and bent father-in-law.

Old Mr. Phillips said, "They've lost their nests right through the valley. They lost their nests when the elms died. They're prospecting. They need tall trees. They'll choose the beeches. You know what they say about rooks. They bring money to a house. Money is coming to somebody in the manor. Who do you think it's going to be? Of course it's an old wise tale." "Old wise tale"-it was what he said; and the idiom, as he spoke it, with its irony and tolerance, sounded original rather than a corruption. "If you think they're birds of death you can't stand the noise. If you think it's money, you don't mind."

And in that noise of the squawking, prospecting rooks, the old man told me about the death he had not forgotten, the first death against which he measured all other deaths, the grief that was more painful than any other and was still with him more than sixty-five years later.

He and his cousin were skylarking. They ran behind a horse-drawn van belonging to a local firm. They jumped on the nose bags that were slung on the rear axle. The driver didn't see them. They rode on the nose bags for a mile or two, eating apples. Then they got bored. They got off. A motorcar, unusual for those days, came along the road, kicking up white dust, dust that lay an inch or two thick on the unpaved country road. Both boys were involved in the white dust cloud. Bizarrely, then, another car came along and old Mr. Phillips saw his cousin knocked down. It was the only thing he could see, and he was frightened. He ran to the riverbank and hid in a bed of withies until midafternoon. From there he saw the dust cloud settle. He saw his aunt, his cousin's mother, come. He saw the boy taken away in an ambulance. "To the military hospital-the army was here even in those days."

There the boy died. No one thought of flogging old Mr. Phillips-that worry had been with him. In his aunt's house that evening he saw the body of his cousin-with whom he had been riding that morning-laid out.

"These things strike you afterwards," the old man said. The funeral was the next day. "His little coffin," old Mr. Phillips said, and now real tears for that death more than sixty-five years before were running down his face.

Then he pulled himself up, altered his tone. "No, not little. Fair-sized coffin. My aunt asked me and the other boys to collect moss. That was how I spent the day of the funeral. Gathering moss. It was to put in the grave, to soften the whiteness of the chalk in the sun. It's what the undertakers still do. They hang a mat, green and looking like gra.s.s, down the sides of the grave. Of course they come back later, after the mourners have gone, and take it away."

The wet riverbanks, the downs: everyone saw different things. Old Mr. Phillips, with his memories of chalk and moss; my landlord, loving ivy; the builders of the manor garden; Alan; Jack; me.

THE ROOKS, prospecting, made such a racket that I wondered how I would endure it-another sound to be added to the noise of airplanes at certain hours in the day; the artillery barrages on some nights from the firing ranges (the sound of which made one conceive of air as a substance, elastic up to a point, and beyond that point liable to puncture); the end-of-day traffic increasing year by year and coming to my cottage through a thinning screen of beeches and yews.

But the racket of that day was unusual. The squawks of the big birds, flapping slowly around, were like the squawks of discussion; when the discussion and the prospecting were over the birds went away. And when the first party of settlers, the first nest-builders, came, they built only one nest. It was as though they were testing the trees, the site, the people. The rocky or pebbled lane below the beeches was littered with lengths of pliable twigs, material for the nest, fallen and useless, suggesting that for every twig successfully knitted into the nest three or four or five had been lost. At last it appeared, on the upper part of a beech: one rooks' nest.

There was a pause then, long enough to make one feel that there would be no more rooks' nests in those winter-stripped beeches. But then, very quickly, there appeared a second; and a third; and then many more, big dark burrs high up, beyond the reach of predators, and soon to be hidden by the foliage of the spring and summer. From the train to London, through Wilts.h.i.+re and Hamps.h.i.+re, I saw the same colonization going on, rooks' nests appearing where there hadn't been any.

The elms had finally died in the valley. Many, before they had finally died, had been felled, cut up; others had died standing up, remaining bare, going grayer against the summer green. And the valley road became suddenly open. Curves once overhung with green, mysterious and full of depth, showed plain; tilled downs, without a border of elms and wild growth between the elms, sloped down simply to the asphalt road. House plots showed plain, and houses and their ancillary little corrugated sheds looked naked. The shallow river and its wet banks remained enchanting; but the land on either side became ordinary.

And time altered for me. At first, as in childhood, it had stretched. The first spring had contained so much that was clear and sharp-the moss rose, the single blue iris, the peonies under my window. I had waited for the year to repeat. Then memories began to be jumbled; time began to race; the years began to stack together; it began to be hard for me to date things.

Bray, the car-hire man, once the neighbor of Pitton, the gardener (whose house had been bought, for a price that had a sobering effect on Bray, by a young surveyor with a Salisbury practice), Bray began to talk to me of religion. Was that before or after the rooks came? Before or after the discovery of the young vagrant who had been camping for some time in the manor grounds?

He had been living, this man, in the children's house in the overgrown orchard, near Pitton's garden "refuge." There had been wanderers in previous summers; but this man was one of the many new itinerants-not gypsies now, but young city people, some of them criminals-who moved about Wilts.h.i.+re and Somerset in old cars and vans and caravans looking for festivals, communities, camping sites. The discovery of this man created alarm. It would have been easy for others to follow him, and for knowledge of the children's house to spread. So at last, sixty or seventy years after it had been built, the children's house, seldom used by the children for whom it had been intended, and still more or less whole, even though its thatch had slipped in one place, was closed, its door and windows nailed up and barred with timber planks. And, as a further deterrent, Mr. Phillips had the round building wound about with barbed wire.

Like the closing of the wide white gate at the end of the lawn after Pitton left, and the piling up of dead branches on the inside of the gate, to keep the gate closed, this abandoning of the children's house was an event. But I couldn't date it. The order that Pitton had imposed not only on the grounds but also on my idea of the seasons, that order had gone. I no longer had that order to set events against, events which now, as time raced, became jumbled-even the coming of the rooks, even the talk from Bray of religion.

AS MUCH as any comparable area of Egypt or India, the region (once a vast burial place) was full of sacred sites: the circles of wood or stone, the great burial mounds, the medieval cathedrals and abbeys, and the churches that were often no less grand. And faith hadn't stopped there. Scattered about these monuments, cultural shrines, and side by side with them sometimes, were relics of more recent ways of wors.h.i.+p. as any comparable area of Egypt or India, the region (once a vast burial place) was full of sacred sites: the circles of wood or stone, the great burial mounds, the medieval cathedrals and abbeys, and the churches that were often no less grand. And faith hadn't stopped there. Scattered about these monuments, cultural shrines, and side by side with them sometimes, were relics of more recent ways of wors.h.i.+p.

In the center of Salisbury, across a narrow pedestrian lane from a well-known cake shop, there was a magnificently windowed Gothic church. On the wall of the chancel at the far end, and just below the roof, there was a primitive painting of Doomsday: the colors of the painting magenta and green, both faded: with naked medieval figures in heaven on the left, h.e.l.l on the right, the quality of the painting and the knowledge of anatomy appearing to match the quality of medieval mind and soul: men naked in a world beyond their control, the wings of the consoling angels as fearful and unnatural as the bird or reptile swallowing the d.a.m.ned. Opposite this monument of medieval piety was the busy cake shop, the inner room of which had been a Victorian Sunday school. A carved stone slab, like an escutcheon, recorded this fact and the date of the foundation of the school in Victorian Gothic characters. Gateaux and quiche and coffee at varnished pine tables in a room where not long before children had learned Bible stories and hymns and respect.

In one of the river valleys outside Salisbury, at the top of a footpath running up from the river, there was still a small, one-roomed "mission hut." It was a rough shed of timber and corrugated iron and had perhaps been built just before the First World War. There had been as much pride and religion in its plainness then as there had been medieval awe in medieval grandeur. Now the hut was without a function. Further along the road on this side of the river there was a redbrick building with Victorian Gothic windows. This building was still marked at the top WESLEYAN CHAPEL WESLEYAN CHAPEL. It had ceased to be that a long time ago; it was now a private house, the Victorian Gothic arches and lettering part of its unusual "character" as a dwelling place.

Quite different-and not only because it was still in use as a church-was the renovated parish church near the manor and my cottage. This church was an age away from the religious anxiety of the Doomsday painting of St. Thomas's in Salisbury: the sense of an arbitrary world, full of terrors, where men were naked and helpless and only G.o.d gave protection. The parish church had been renovated at the time the great Victorian houses and manors of the region were being built. And it was of that confident period: as much as a faith, it celebrated a culture, a national pride, a power, men very much in control of their destinies.

That was still its atmosphere, though the people it attracted were now, in terms of wealth, lesser than the Victorian magnates, less predominating, and though their houses were like the small change of the great Victorian dwellings. The very scantiness of the parish-church congregation-enough now for only one service a month rather than one a week-supported the idea of an enclosed, excluding cultural celebration: the sound of car doors, the gentle chatter before and after the service, with hymn singing in the interim to the sounds of an organ (still there in the little church, still working!) m.u.f.fled by the thick renovated walls of stone and flint in a checkered pattern.

No room for Jack there, Jack who celebrated life while he lived. No room for Mr. Phillips or for the strange, townish people who came now to do a few hours' rough work in the manor garden. And no room, I would have thought, for the old Bray, the man of puzzling views, a mixture of high conservatism and wild republicanism, a wors.h.i.+p of the rich (the users of his cars) with a hatred of inherited wealth and t.i.tles. The old Wesleyan chapel (as a private dwelling extended, with matching Gothic windows), the empty mission hut, the Victorian Sunday school now part of the cake shop-that was the nineteenth-century popular religion which, lingering into the twentieth, had partly made people like Bray, the religion of constriction and discipline rather than celebration. That was the constriction that Bray, and thousands like him, had grown out of; that was why those relics of recent Christianity dotted the region. So many kinds of religion here, so many relics.

But now-Bray talked of religion. It crept up on me, the talk. I wasn't aware of how seriously he was speaking when he spoke of "the good book." I barely took it in, heard it simply as part of his chattering everyday irony. I sat beside him in his car, had a sideways glimpse of his peaked cap and the slope and slit of his eyes, eyes squinting at the road. The squint-and-slit, the set of his face, and what I knew of his temperament led me to feel that he was joking.

I had a.s.sociated his appearance and manner for too long with the man who spoke glibly and cynically about politicians, certain members of the royal family, trades unions, businessmen in the news or in the courts, and every other kind of pa.s.sing topic. Like the new pound note, for instance, introduced by a Labour government and rejected by him purely for that reason: "I call it Mickey Mouse money." He had probably heard somebody say that. With Bray it was the combination of the views that was original. The views themselves-as I found again and again-were borrowed from radio or television programs, popular newspapers.

As soon as I understood that he was speaking in earnest, my vision of him changed. In the same features, the same way of speaking, I saw not the glibness of his cynicism but personal feeling and, soon, pa.s.sion.

I thought later that there would have been another reason why it took me some time to understand that Bray was speaking seriously when he spoke of religion. It was that he was learning himself, that he was being inducted into some new doctrine which he had accepted without fully understanding, and had then had to learn about. A new doctrine: because the religion Bray had embraced was not the religion of the Victorian relics which he and thousands with him had rejected. The religion that emerged from his talk, the religion into which he was sinking week by week, had to do with healing, or more specifically a healer: a wise person (the s.e.x of the person concealed by Bray); a Bible opened at random during a "service"; the words on the pages interpreted; the kneeling believers receiving each a personal message, personal guidance. A healer; "meetings" around a Bible as a sacred object; shared food; a hint of companions.h.i.+p, even conviviality, in piety.

This talk of meetings made me think of a "spiritualist" gathering I had gone to in a north London suburb twenty years before, out of interest (seeing the sensational meetings so matter-of-factly advertised outside the red-brick building) and also in the hope of finding copy for a five-minute radio talk for one of the magazine programs of the BBC overseas services.

It was in an upstairs room, reached directly by steps from the pavement; the lamp above the entrance was marked simply HALL HALL. Most of the people waiting inside were regulars. Among them were some children, healthy, playful, a little restless. They sat in the front row. The medium was a heavy, ordinary, middle-aged woman. She apologized for being late; she said she had had to travel from somewhere south of the river. Very briskly, then, she started. There were messages for all of us. There was even one for me, from my grandfather, who was very far away, the medium said, and whose voice came only faintly to her.

But most terrible were the messages for the children, three or four of them, so handsome and well cared for, with their restless feet. These messages were preceded by the medium clutching at her throat and saying that she was choking, could hardly breathe. And the woman with the children, clearly their mother, gravely and without anguish, leaning forward (she sat in the row behind the children), nodded, as if to corroborate the ident.i.ty of the spirit who was transmitting this message. Her husband, the father of the children, had been hanged. And I never got to know (I never asked the person who had told me) whether the father had been hanged by the state-in England or abroad-or had hanged himself. Every fortnight now the hanged man's family came to have this communion with him-which no doubt explained their composure: they were believers. There was a simple message for each child-help Mummy, be good at school; and each child waited for his or her message; and became grave when the message came. What memories they would retain of these visits! New characters, new pa.s.sions, were being given them, to separate them from their fellows. Twenty, thirty years from then, those characters (in adult bodies and with adult needs) would act out those pa.s.sions.

Something of that chill of twenty years before came to me when Bray talked to me of his meetings. He himself was as composed as the children and wife of the hanged man twenty years before. They had been driven by a dreadful need, clear for all to see. What was the need that had driven Bray?

He was so full of talk, so opinionated, so full of noise, that I hadn't stopped to think about the satisfactions or otherwise of his life. A married daughter lived in Devon, where she had moved after her husband had found "a piece of ground" (Bray's words); she never came back to visit. Bray gave many reasons when he first mentioned the fact; but then he gave none. What did she have to come back to? And thinking of Bray in this way, attempting to see him from the point of view of the daughter who had resolved to stay away, I had another idea of the man, saw how overpowering he might be, how constricting life in his house could be. And this new idea of Bray was added to the idea of the man with memories of the fields full of laborers at harvesttime, of allowances of beer, of children taking tea to their fathers and grandfathers; the man with his undisclosed memory of taint from his short holiday job as a boy in the manor; his wish to be independent, combined with his unwitting possession, as a servant, someone trained to please, of three or four characters.

I had sensed a little of his instability. But what had now befallen him? From what I heard, in those meetings (in some town on the south coast) and in this sharing of food, this communion, Bray had joined people whom the radical conservative in him despised: workers, people looking for employment, the kind of person he, Bray, the self-employed man, celebrating his freedom after his father's and grandfather's lifetime of servitude, looked down on. The man who scoffed at Pitton, exulted in his fall, now showed sympathy for people like Pitton, people for whom in England, even in this well-to-do part of England, there was no longer room: people coming down from the Midlands and finding themselves dispossessed, without lodgings or security, people (unlike the naked souls in the Doomsday painting in St. Thomas's) who knew what it was to be in charge of their fates, but felt they had lost control.

The more I heard about Bray's meetings the more I thought of that London meeting of twenty years before. And the scene reconstructed itself in one detail after another, down to the lamp painted HALL HALL s.h.i.+ning palely in the quiet street, quiet at night in that part of residential London in those days, with few people out and very few cars. So ordinary and dull the street, so desperate the people up there, in the room at the top of the tall flight of stairs. s.h.i.+ning palely in the quiet street, quiet at night in that part of residential London in those days, with few people out and very few cars. So ordinary and dull the street, so desperate the people up there, in the room at the top of the tall flight of stairs.

"It's as with everything else," Bray said. "You can take out only what you put in. The more you put in, the more you take out. The good book is always open for you."

From Mrs. Bray I heard more. She was someone I hardly knew. I knew her mainly as a voice on the telephone. She answered the telephone when Bray was out and made the bookings for him; he telephoned her regularly when he was out. She was brisk (Bray's instructions, to save his customers telephone charges); she was efficient. No extra talk there. A cheerful little voice on the telephone; its possessor hardly seen. She lived in her house-there was no garden: Bray's paved yard left little s.p.a.ce for anything like that. She was driven into Salisbury or Andover by Bray to do her shopping; she seldom took the bus. Sometimes Bray, in the car, greeted her in Salisbury. Then I saw her: a very small, thin woman, a wisp of a woman, hardly there-as though life with Bray, the driver, the mechanic, the man with strong views, the hard worker, the perverse neglecter of the valley's beauty, had worn her down. It was from her, now, that I heard more of Bray's religion and "meetings."

"I can't answer for him these days. He's at one of his meetings, I expect. He's emptied the deep-freeze. That's how I know. That's not the way you treat a deep-freeze. I don't understand him. If you have a deep-freeze, you build it up. You don't keep emptying it."

I had heard about the deep-freeze from Bray. It was important to him. I didn't have one myself and he delighted in telling me about the rituals connected with it. The bulk buying (and at reduced prices from certain shops, apparently), the cooking and the storing of great batches-the deep-freeze made food the center of a new kind of ritual, provided a new kind of shopping, a new kind of excursion, restored an idea of plenty and harvesttime and celebration.

Mrs. Bray had her own ideas. Towards the deep-freeze she was more squirrellike, h.o.a.rding, wis.h.i.+ng to keep the granary full. And when one day I met her at the bus stop-unusually: she was usually driven by Bray to Salisbury or Amesbury or Andover or to some special discount supermarket on the outskirts of Southampton-she was still inflamed about the deep-freeze. So small, so thin, so inflamed.

She said, the rooks cawing and flapping above us: "If you have a deep-freeze, you build it up. You don't keep emptying it." She spoke as though, in an ideal world, she would keep her deep-freeze full forever and never touch it. She spoke as though-in spite of the manifest hards.h.i.+ps, the absence of Bray and a car-the replenis.h.i.+ng of the deep-freeze was the purpose of her trip to Salisbury. She repeated, "You build it up."

At the end of the road-no longer hidden at its far end by the elms and the growth at the roadside between the elms-the red bus appeared.

She waited until the bus almost stopped. She said, "It's that fancy woman of his."

The words burst out of her. As though the arrival of the bus, the sudden darkening of the bus-stop area, the folding door opening back, the noise of the engine, had provided her with the correct dramatic moment for the disclosure, the abandoning of civility and talking about things she didn't absolutely have on her mind. And having taken her inflamed mood up several degrees, she stamped into the bus, slapped her coins down on the driver's little stand, and generally did as much as she could to draw attention to herself and her anger.

She sat in one of the front seats-such fuss, such commotion from such a small person-and paid no further attention to me. And I wondered whether in 1950, when I was eighteen and new to England, new to adult life, I wondered whether, seeing a woman of that age in a bus behaving in such a way, I would have thought it even likely that the anger of a woman so old and small and white-haired would have had to do with her husband's "fancy woman."