One sunny morning, about coffee time, I saw Pitton standing outside the overgrown box-bordered enclosure at the side of the lawn, the enclosure once attached to the house that, as I had heard from Bray, had stood on the site formerly (and possibly had older, religious antecedents).
The weeds in the enclosure had grown tall, stalky with fine white flowers. But Pitton had cut his annual path through the weeds to the orchard, one swath up, one swath down. The path had been cut low, revealing level, tightly knitted gra.s.s, the gra.s.s in one swath lying at a contrary angle to the gra.s.s in the other, the two swaths showing as two distinct colors, one green, one almost gray.
And Pitton now, in the middle of the morning, was standing on the lawn just outside the enclosure, standing still, looking down at the gra.s.s. The overgrown box trees made an arch above the entrance to the enclosure. Pitton was framed in this wild green arch; behind him was the two-swathed path between the tall white-flowered weeds, like a pa.s.sage in a maze. He was leaning forward, looking fixedly down, legs oddly apart, as though he were standing on sloping or uneven ground. His woolen tie-winter and summer Pitton wore a tie-hung straight down; his tie didn"t rest on his paunch.
He reminded me of a man I had seen thirteen years before, a forest Indian in a new mission settlement in the Guiana highlands, in South America. The settlement was on the bank of a river, not one of the great continental rivers, but a narrow river of these highlands, with big boulders on the banks, and big smooth boulders, sometimes neatly cracked, in the riverbed itself.
It was a Sunday morning, and the Indian was dressed as formally as Pitton was now dressed. The Indian was in blue serge trousers and a white shirt. He had gone to the Sunday morning service in the mission chapel. The settlement was in a new clearing; the stumps of felled trees still looked raw; the forest still pressed on three sides. And now after that morning service the Indian was on his way back to his forest village, taking the path at the edge of the clearing, just above the river, which in sunlight was the color of pale wine, and at dusk became black. Night here made for anxiety. Daylight was always rea.s.suring.
Something on the path had caught the man"s attention, had alarmed him; and he had stopped to consider what he had seen, the thing that didn"t belong to the path-a twig perhaps, a leaf, a flower-and perhaps hinted at a terrible danger. For the Indians here there was no such thing as natural death. There was a killer abroad always, the kanaima kanaima, a man like any other in appearance, never known or suspected to be the killer; and he it was who eventually killed everybody. Stock still, then, the Indian on his way back from the chapel stood on the path above the river in the morning sunlight, in his blue trousers and white shirt, wondering whether (in spite of what the missionaries had told him and his fellows) the thing he had just seen on the path wasn"t a sign that the kanaima kanaima, who got everyone in the end, hadn"t finally come for him. It was a narrow path between big sunken boulders; the Indian didn"t make room for me when I got to him. I walked around him; he didn"t look at me.
It was with a similar stance and abstraction that Pitton stood outside the overgrown enclosure. But he knew he had caught my attention, and he was waiting for me to go to him. When I was almost upon him he lifted and slowly swung his left leg so that he stood upright. A stiff, deliberate movement-it might have been a wooden leg. But the face Pitton lifted to me was alight with pa.s.sion. I had never seen him so stirred. His eyes were bright, moist, staring; his nostrils were quivering. He was full of news. Bursting with news.
He said, "I"ve been drinking champagne. He called me to his garden and gave me champagne."
And more than the wine had made Pitton muzzy. It was the sunlight, the occasion, the luxury, the hour of the morning, the unexpected development of this bewildering summer, play piling upon play. If I hadn"t come upon him, he would, I feel, have gone home to share his news with his wife.
He said again, getting muzzier by the minute, contemplating the moment, eyes almost wild, "Champagne."
I heard another version of this event about a month later from Alan. The summer was over, more or less. Alan was wandering about the grounds in a matelot outfit, like a sailor figure of one of the earliest poems my landlord had sent me, in my first summer, after the poems about Shiva and Krishna.
Alan said, "He"s in great antediluvian form. I hear he"s been feeding Pitton pink champagne." And the idea so amused Alan that the full laugh he started on began to choke him. Recovering, he said, "Pink champagne at ten o"clock in the morning. He told me that Pitton was absolutely slain. Absolutely slain."
And I felt now that that other story, about Woolworth"s, hadn"t been improved on by Alan, but by my landlord. He had stored up the story of Pitton and the champagne, as Pitton himself (and Pitton"s wife no doubt) had stored it up. He had stored it up to tell it to visitors like Alan, people who knew and cherished his reputation as a man with a style of before the deluge. Yet the impulse that morning, the need to celebrate the moment, would have been genuine. Later would have come the ideas he had of his own romance; later would have come his wish to make the story, to tell the tale, to spread his legend.
After the long morbid withdrawal, the near death of the soul, he had revived. But what had also revived was the idea of who he was. That was shown in the disproportionately large and thickly lettered signature on his new drawings; it was even bigger than the signature on the printed poems he had sent me about Shiva and Krishna while he was still very low, pressed down into himself. The personality that had survived its illness now had a smaller area for play; it was also a smaller personality. It could play only with people like Alan-there were not many like Alan, not many who knew his, my landlord"s, legend now-and Pitton.
"ISN"T IT nice to have rich friends?" Alan had said. But that was Alan"s own fantasy; that was the vision he preferred to have of the place where he came to stay. The Phillipses knew better. They knew how many things at the manor needed to be done; they knew how little could be done. nice to have rich friends?" Alan had said. But that was Alan"s own fantasy; that was the vision he preferred to have of the place where he came to stay. The Phillipses knew better. They knew how many things at the manor needed to be done; they knew how little could be done.
The manor had been created at the zenith of imperial power and wealth, a period of high, even extravagant, middle-cla.s.s domestic architecture. The extravagance of houses like the manor lay partly in the elaborateness of the modern systems-plumbing, heating, lighting-that had been built into them at the time of the building. Whatever their architectural style or whimsies, and though in certain particulars (thatched roof, use of flintstones) they might aim at local, rustic effects, houses like the manor were a little like steamships. They had been built with that confidence; not just the confidence of wealth, but also the confidence of architects and technicians in the systems they were putting in. And it was that industrial or technical confidence-the confidence which in other manifestations had created the wealth that had built the manor-that now made the manor an expensive place to look after. The manor had been built like a steamship. But like a steamship, it was liable to breakdown and obsolescence. A boiler exploded in the manor one day; another time a bit of the roof was blown off. Each accident would have cost thousands.
The plumbing and drainage systems were obsolete. When late at night water was used in some quant.i.ty at the manor and the cistern there began to fill again, the metal pipes in my cottage hummed, in the dead silence; during the day that humming noise was masked by other sounds. The metal pipes that had been buried in my cottage walls (such had been the confidence of the original builders in their materials and systems) had also built in such damp in the walls that the pipes were shadowed on the surface of the walls by lines or tracks of gray-black mold, which was like the fur a rat leaves in its nest or hiding place.
Seventy years and more of rain, rolling chalk and flint and mud off the downs, had clogged the drains in some places. The lawn was not the simple level ground it seemed. It concealed Edwardian drainage pipes, which were now broken underground no one knew exactly where. In the winter of the great flood a small hole, like a rabbit hole, suddenly opened in the lawn during a morning of heavy rain; the hole seemed to cave in on itself, melt into itself; and then out of that melting hole a brown torrent-at first looking only like a kind of animal activity: a mole kicking up earth very fast-gushed for half an hour.
From time to time we had a visit from the agent. This was a reminder that we were not exempt from the world where others lived; that there was a practical side to affairs: earnings, accounts, a need to balance income and expenditure.
It was from the Phillipses that in the beginning I first heard of these visits. In those days, before the Phillipses had become confident, they appeared to look upon these visits by the agent as inspections and they prepared accordingly. They didn"t overdo the zeal, but it was possible, from a certain amount of activity in the manor courtyard, and sometimes even from hints dropped to me about the drift of leaves against my north wall (impossible absolutely to clear: that wall was the natural resting place of beech leaves for two or three hundred yards around), it was possible to tell that a visit from "the agent" was expected.
But then the agent often turned out to be a very young man, a junior, someone fresh from school or college, someone who had just joined the firm and was using our estate to cut his teeth in the land-agenting business. Agents here handled mile upon mile of fishing rights, beat upon beat; thousands of acres of farmland, thousands of acres of woodland. Our few acres of wasteland, virtually untilled, though a world to us, offered no land agent a challenge or even a training. And it often happened that the young men who came, moving on quickly to higher or bigger things within their firm or another firm, never came again. It was hardly worthwhile, therefore, cultivating them or even getting to know their names. And from looking upon the visits of "the agent" as inspections we began-or at any rate the Phillipses began-to look upon them as occasions to ask for things, repairs here, a lick of paint there. And from making ourselves spruce to attract commendations (which might be reported at a higher level somewhere far away) we sought to look as ragged as we could.
After that wonderful summer of the motorcar drives and the flowers and the champagne we began to get very ragged indeed. Three of the beeches at the edge of the lawn were judged to be dangerous, liable to fall into the manor courtyard. And within a week they were cut down and their branches cut up and corded, some stacked in one of the outbuildings, some carted away by the tree cutters as part of their fee. So all at once, within a week, I lost some of the green shade, the green gloom by which I had felt embraced whenever I returned to the manor from any journey, however short or long.
Only the yews and beeches at the front of the house separated me from the road; and though the beech trees-big as they were-were not really a form of sound protection, I fancied after those three beeches went that the road noises were louder, especially after five-so that, for the first time here, I became aware of the end-of-day traffic. And I fancied I heard the military airplanes more clearly too.
How fragile my little world was here! Just leaves and branches. Just leaves and branches created the colors and the enclosure I lived within. Remove them-a morning"s work with a chain saw-and the public road would be just there, less than a hundred yards away, and all would be open and exposed.
How often, with Pitton"s mower, I had cut the thin, pale-green, straggly gra.s.s under those beeches, going right up to the end of the lawn, next to the overgrown yews, going right up to where the ground was not gra.s.s or lawn so much as old twigs and beech mast and old, light-starved dust. It was never satisfying to use the mower there; but it was necessary, because it completed the job, gave the complete, swept, cared-for effect all over, so that for a day or two after a gra.s.s-cutting it was a pleasure for me to look at what I had done, the swaths I had created myself in rich gra.s.s and poor gra.s.s, from end to end of the lawn.
Now, in the openness after the three beeches had been felled, gra.s.s began even in the autumn to appear on that twiggy, dusty soil. And all that winter and spring, until the gra.s.s began truly to grow again, there remained, quite literally, impressions of the felled beeches on the lawn. The tree fellers had made them fall at a particular angle, so that in the new openness, the new light around the manor courtyard, the beeches, though they had ceased to exist, seemed for half a year to cast ghostly shadows.
The decision to cut the beeches was a prudent one. The gales were severer than usual in the spring. So severe that I stood in my cottage kitchen to watch (through a low window) the effect on the beeches in front and (through the gla.s.s at the top of my kitchen door) the trees at the back. It was strange, but for myself, in my cottage, I never ever feared. And I actually saw the two great aspens at the back of the manor garden snap, twice, a tearing-off near the top and then a fierce, short snapping-back lower down. So that, understanding the principle of the damage, it was a little like watching a human or animal limb break. I hadn"t planted those trees; but I saw them destroyed.
In the spring and summer the three aspens, planted perhaps ten feet apart, had created the effect of a great green twinkling fan above the garden wall. Now two of the three aspens had been snapped like twigs and showed-but on a magnified scale-that sort of twig-snapped damage. And their debris lay between the water meadow and the vegetable-garden wall, just beyond the brier wilderness of the old rose bed.
It needed more than Pitton and his hand saw to clear the mess. I tried to help him. But even when we worked on a smallish bough, there always came a moment when the saw stuck in the wet, sappy wood and became very hot.
Pitton would say, "It"s tying. We"d better stop."
"Tying, Mr. Pitton?"
I liked the word. I had never heard it before; but it was suggestive and felt right. Pitton became embarra.s.sed, as embarra.s.sed as he had been when I had asked him what was in the sand that was good for the azaleas he had been asked to plant. As embarra.s.sed as he had been when he told me my landlord had liked the pe-onies (rhyming with "ponies") in front of my cottage and, while feeling constrained to use the affected Edwardian p.r.o.nunciation of my landlord, had wished at the same time to show-without disrespect or disloyalty-that he also knew the other, more common and correct p.r.o.nunciation. (rhyming with "ponies") in front of my cottage and, while feeling constrained to use the affected Edwardian p.r.o.nunciation of my landlord, had wished at the same time to show-without disrespect or disloyalty-that he also knew the other, more common and correct p.r.o.nunciation.
The fallen trees were a great obstruction now if I wanted to go on the river walk. The jagged white wood of the aspen stumps-fifteen or twenty feet high-slowly lost its rawness; with the spring and summer there were even new shoots.
The planter or the designer of the garden would have carried in his or her mind"s eye the fan effect the three trees were intended to have when the seedlings or saplings had been planted ten feet apart. Far apart they would have seemed then, and for the next five years or so; but still too close together, as it turned out: the trees at the sides, as they had grown, had leaned away from the vertical. The fan effect had been seen by me. I had seen the three trees grow by many feet every year. I had also seen what the planter of the garden would not have cared to think about: the very second, not longer, when the two side trees snapped. The trees would have spanned, or been contained within, my landlord"s life. He must have seen that two of the aspens were no longer there; he must have seen the mighty debris in the back garden. But I had no word from Mr. or Mrs. Phillips that my landlord had seen or made any comment.
It seemed suitable, so ragged had we become since the autumn, that in the early summer we should have had a visit one day, in mid-morning, not from one but two men from the agent"s. And this time not just the standard very young men. There was one of those, but with him there was an older man, a taller, heavier man in his late forties or early fifties.
I saw the two men on the lawn with Mr. Phillips-Mr. Phillips shorter than the other two, but much more muscular, in his zip-up windcheater; the young man in his navy-blue blazer; the heavier older man from the agent"s in a well-worn gray suit, a country shirt, and an old-fashioned polka-dotted handkerchief stuffed into his breast pocket.
They looked at the granary. They opened the garages or wagon sheds next to the granary. They opened the farmhouse and looked at that. They wandered away, down the box-hedged enclosure; and a little while later reappeared. The young man in the blazer came in to see me. The older man went on with Mr. Phillips along the lane to the manor, past the overgrown yew hedge and the new openness where once the tree beeches had cast shade.
Talking about the dereliction he had seen in the back garden, the young man said, "It"s a cruel thing to say. But the best thing would be to cut down all the beeches and plant afresh."
It was a cruel thing to say. It would do away with the place and setting I lived in. But the young man wasn"t speaking with any great conviction or concern. His eyes were quite bright with pleasure. He had been slightly oppressed by being all morning in the company of his superior, the man in the gray suit; and now, in the cottage, he-younger than he looked from a distance-was oddly skittish and playful and relaxed. Not at all agent material, I would have thought. And it turned out, very soon, that his heart wasn"t in the business.
His comment about the trees was just something he had said because-perhaps-he had heard it said in various circ.u.mstances by other people in the agency. As was his comment, looking at the paddock where the dairyman from the neighboring farm had kept his pony, and where the once famous old racehorse had come to die: "You could put a couple of beeves in there and fatten them up."
A couple of beeves-was that really his language, his style? It wasn"t; and that self-awareness or self-knowledge lay so close to the surface of his thoughts that it required only the beginning of conversation to bring it out. His father was a gamekeeper on a proper estate not far away. Through the recommendation of his father"s employer he had been taken on for a trial period by the agency; and he had accepted the offer-this thin young man with the smiling, blank, unformed face-to please both his father and his father"s employer. But his heart was elsewhere: he didn"t know exactly where. He would have liked service life, would have dearly liked to be an officer. But some physical disability-and perhaps also some examination failure-had kept him out of that.
He said, "You"re never one of them."
Them? Who were his "them"? The "them" he was concerned with turned out to be the other young men from the agent"s. At the end of the day they simply went home. There was no question of going to a pub with "them" or of "them" asking him home.
And simply, in his skittish, restless, shallow way, he bared his personality in a few minutes. And there was almost nothing more he had to say when the big man in the gray suit came to call with Mr. Phillips. The young man in the blazer then stopped talking and continued to smile in his friendly, empty way.
The big man sat down in my shabby armchair and he seemed genuinely tired, genuinely happy to sit down, happy to sip the coffee he was offered. He tried to suggest that, without looking, he really was looking; but I didn"t feel he was looking now; I felt he had seen enough already. He was puffy, a recent puffiness over a body that had once been st.u.r.dy and active. He was in his late forties; his breathing was difficult; and his hair was thin and flat and lackl.u.s.ter. The polka-dotted handkerchief in his breast pocket was an odd touch of gaiety.
He was not interested in me, my past, or what I did. He had ceased already to be interested in Mr. Phillips. He was already, though sitting in my armchair, far away, with himself, his solitude. What could interest such a man? What kinds of things had once p.r.i.c.ked his curiosity or caused him surprise? Perhaps now-he gave that impression-he was a little melancholy that active life had gone by so quickly already. Perhaps he had been moved by the dereliction of what he had seen in the manor and in the manor grounds; perhaps it had chimed in with his own mood, reinforced that mood.
He said, no doubt having been briefed by Mr. Phillips, "Nice spot for writing."
I said, "It"s nice. But I know it can"t last."
He said quietly, "No one can be certain of anything." And the words, though so ordinary, seemed to be spoken less to me than to himself and about himself.
All at once the inspection-if it had been that-was over. All three men left. They walked back to the manor along the lane between the cottage and the vegetable garden. The man in the gray suit walked heavily, carefully, making me aware of the hard lane, with chippings of stone or heavy limestone beaten into the surface; with water-carried drifts of beech mast and leaf debris in the ruts made by motor tires. They walked past the hidden garden Pitton had some summers before spent a week clearing-Mr. Phillips muscular and steady and already half-protective towards the heavy, breathless man in the gray suit on his left; and with the slender, frivolous, even slightly skipping, gamekeeper"s son in his blazer on the right.
ABOUT HALF an hour or so later, before lunch, Mrs. Phillips came to see me. She was wearing her blue padded cardigan or jacket that bloated her and suggested someone wearing an emergency life jacket-as in an ill.u.s.tration in an airline card about emergency exits and what to do when the aircraft came down in water. The dark skin below her eyes, the darkness and pouches of her nerves, had lost some of its gathers and fussy lines; had lost even some of its darkness. Though she still had the manner of an invalid, someone who needed to be looked after, she had long ago begun to heal. Her hair had gone thin, had begun to go back from her forehead, giving her the high white forehead of a lady in an Elizabethan painting. So there was in her face a mixture of coa.r.s.eness and delicacy. an hour or so later, before lunch, Mrs. Phillips came to see me. She was wearing her blue padded cardigan or jacket that bloated her and suggested someone wearing an emergency life jacket-as in an ill.u.s.tration in an airline card about emergency exits and what to do when the aircraft came down in water. The dark skin below her eyes, the darkness and pouches of her nerves, had lost some of its gathers and fussy lines; had lost even some of its darkness. Though she still had the manner of an invalid, someone who needed to be looked after, she had long ago begun to heal. Her hair had gone thin, had begun to go back from her forehead, giving her the high white forehead of a lady in an Elizabethan painting. So there was in her face a mixture of coa.r.s.eness and delicacy.
She stood in the kitchen doorway, not coming in. Behind her, the stony lane, the abandoned cold frames, the vegetable-garden wall with the tiled coping, and the blackthorns that had grown up in the past five years on both sides of the wall: flourishing on the other, sunny side of the wall, rising above the wall; but thin and long-stalked on my side, the side I could see, growing in a poor corner and dragged up mainly by light, it seemed. Those blackthorn seedlings, the flowers and then the fruit, had worried the Phillipses. Though they had lived here, in the region, all their life (and Mr. Phillips"s father had been born just a few miles away), their knowledge of country things was restricted. Far away, rising now from what more than ever had become a water-meadow wilderness, against the big southern sky which I loved looking at, there was the damaged, the mutilated, aspen fan, with the jagged torn stumps of the two side aspens clearly showing. It would be fifteen or twenty years before aspen greenery such as I had known would again shade and give scale to the view.
Mrs. Phillips said, "I thought I should let you know."
This was her nurse"s manner, which she shared with Mr. Phillips and perhaps to some extent copied from him. The other side of this manner, with Mr. Phillips, was his authority, his power, his irritability. With Mrs. Phillips it was her invalid"s manner, the thin dark skin darkening and gathering below her eyes, the thin veins getting blue and prominent, seeming about to rupture, suggesting with the very many fussy shallow lines on her forehead infinite suffering and fragility.
She said, "I thought I should let you know. I know you are close to him. They"re letting Mr. Pitton go." The "mister" was for my sake; that was how I called him and referred to him. She and Mr. Phillips called him Fred. "Of course," she said, a little more jauntily, "it"s been coming for some time."
And that was true, though I had never wanted to face the facts or to inquire too carefully into them, half wishing to believe in magic, in things going on as I had found them, believing-like Alan, to some extent-in the great wealth of my landlord and the ability of the people who looked after his affairs to perform great financial feats. But I knew that Pitton and his house were costing money; and the Phillipses were costing money; and the manor itself was very expensive to maintain, even in the way it was. And I could see that the estate-more a nature reserve than workable land-provided little revenue.
The great inflation of the mid-seventies would have cut cruelly into whatever income my landlord had. And the manor required too much attention. It wasn"t a place that could simply be let go. It wasn"t like my cottage; its scale was more than human; it exaggerated human needs. People had to be trained to use buildings like the manor; and that was why-like the ancient Roman villa at Chedworth in Gloucestershire-these buildings were perishable. People could easily do without them.
When the boiler exploded at the manor, and the ceramic or concrete or asbestos casing of the tall metal chimney against one wall had shattered into a thousand jagged fragments all over the manor courtyard, I heard-either from the Phillipses or from Michael Allen, the young central heating man, who came with his van and spent many days in the courtyard-that the annual heating costs at the manor were four to five thousand pounds. That might have been an exaggeration. Men like Michael Allen, entering rich houses for the first time because of their skills and trades, might have liked to exaggerate the importance of their county or gentry clients. Still, five thousand pounds as a heating bill-it showed how unstable prices, and our world, had become.
In 1857, in Madame Bovary Madame Bovary, Flaubert could write of the peddler"s six-percent interest charge as extortionate, bloodletting. Now we lived easily with that kind of charge. In 1955, when I was very young and new to London and trying to write, I wanted nothing more than five hundred pounds a year; and, more modest than Virginia Woolf thirty years before, I would have undertaken to pay for my own rented room out of those five hundred pounds. In 1962, at a lunch in a London club with a humorous writer and a cartoonist, I put my needs-the two other men had asked-at two thousand pounds a year: I had moved up from the rented room to the rented, self-contained flat. This figure had scandalized my fellow lunchers, older men, as far too low. And indeed, just three years later, when I had bought a house and taken on a mortgage, I would have considered five thousand pounds a year as just about fair. Now that was a figure that could be talked about as a heating charge. Not many fortunes would have been able to stand that kind of expense, one among many; and my landlord had retired from the world in 1949 or 1950, some years before I had thought five hundred pounds a year enough for my needs.
I watched for Pitton. He had the knack-sometimes it seemed, in spite of the steadiness and gravity of his movements, like a little game he played with himself-of reaching the white gate at the end of the lawn more or less on the stroke of one o"clock.
He would appear on the lawn in front of my cottage, his morning"s work done, four or five minutes before the hour. He would do what he had to do in the garden shed-put away tools, rea.s.sume formal clothes (if that was necessary) for the short walk along the public road to his house; lock up the shed; and then, adjusting his pace to the time in hand, start on the walk to the gate. Sometimes he would enter the lawn from the vegetable garden, through an old wooden gate (over-specified, pulled out of true now by its own st.u.r.diness and weight) in the garden wall. Sometimes, coming out of the summer bush as clean as a cat, he walked up from the overgrown orchard through the overgrown box-hedged enclosure.
This morning he came out of the box-hedged enclosure. He had only in the last week cut his first summer path through the tall weeds there, one swath up, one swath down. He was not wearing his plastic raincoat or his Wellingtons. He was quite formally dressed, without a jacket, but with a country shirt and his woolen tie. He didn"t have to change. What he had to do in the garden shed didn"t take long. His walk to the gate was his very slow, arm-dangling walk. Not the way he walked when he pushed open the gate at nine in the morning; not the way he walked when he worked. This very slow walk was the way Pitton walked when his work was over, when his time had become his own again. And there was nothing in his walk now that hinted at the end of a routine; nothing in his pre-lunch ritual that suggested an agitated man, a man in possession of the news Mrs. Phillips had given me half an hour before.
At two o"clock he was back. He unlatched the white gate that separated the short, dark, yew-hung lane from the open manor lawn; latched it behind him; and his walk, though unhurried, suggested a man who was at work again.
I thought that there had been a mistake; that Mrs. Phillips had misheard, or had pa.s.sed on to me as a decision something that had been only an idea, something that had perhaps been discussed and dropped. Pitton was so untroubled: I thought he knew better than Mrs. Phillips.
An hour and a half later, after my walk on the downs, past Jack"s cottage, up between the barrows to the view of Stonehenge, an hour and a half later, coming back to the grounds, I heard the shout of "Fred!" from Mr. Phillips, shouting to Pitton from the manor, shouting to Pitton somewhere in the back garden. There was no reply. This was normal. And then at five there was the ritual of Pitton"s departure-locking up the garden shed, and expressing in his very slow walk to the front gate the end of the day"s labors.
But he didn"t appear at the gate at nine the next morning. He didn"t appear at half past nine or at ten. It was later, in the middle of the morning, just before eleven, that I saw him. And he was banging imperiously at my kitchen door, the only door I used, the door that faced the abandoned cold frames, the heavy timber-framed gla.s.s covers stacked up against the high garden wall, the nettles growing tall behind and between the gla.s.s, and, over the wall, some distance away, near the river willows, the tall middle aspen and the mangled but already sprouting stumps of the other two.
The foolish pride he had displayed when I had seen him in his house and complimented him on his hi-fi equipment; the pretense that he had a rich source of money quite separate from his gardener"s wages; the pa.s.sion, the staring, enlarged eyes, the quivering nostrils on the pink-champagne morning when he had stood awkwardly bent, the tie dangling from his neck, in front of the overgrown box trees and waited for me to come to him-all of that, the folly, the pride, the wildness, the pa.s.sion, was in his face. But instead of the surprise of champagne there was the bewilderment of anger, an anger that seemed to have taken him to a depth of feeling for which he was not prepared, anger that seemed to have taken him close to madness.
He said: "You heard? You heard?"
He was wearing no tie. The shirt of the day before, but no tie. I saw him without a tie only on Sundays sometimes, in the summer, when the ice-cream van pa.s.sed before lunch and tinkled its chimes, and we both went out to buy ice cream.
He wanted someone to witness and share his outrage; he could not bear to be with himself. But he had no gift of words, had never had. All the pa.s.sion came out in his face-it was like the champagne surprise, but twisted, and taken several notches higher-and in his abrupt movements.
I opened the door wide for him to come inside. But he, as though recognizing that he had nothing more to say, stayed outside. Abruptly he turned away and walked fast and jerkily-as though with some sudden clear purpose-down the lane between my cottage and the yew hedge and the "forester"s hut" on one side and the half-cottage against the garden wall on the other side, the half-cottage in which I stored coal and wood and other things. A little way beyond this half-cottage-and how well, from using the lawn mower in that neglected corner, I knew the uneven ground, partly built up from wood ash, and knew the tufts of rough gra.s.s-there was the tall gate in the vegetable-garden wall.
This was Pitton"s gate. It was chained and padlocked every evening, and Pitton had the key. The gate, as old as the manor, had a heavy timber frame, with solid boards in its lower half and vertical iron bars in its upper half. It had been pulled out of true by its own weight and st.u.r.diness. Whenever Pitton opened the gate he had to lift it slightly; and the part of the vertical iron bar which he had held in this strong lifting way four or five or six times a working day was smoother and much darker than the rest of the iron, which was rusted and rough and dry.
To this gate Pitton went, walking fast, jerkily. His own gate, opening into his own territory. But he didn"t have the key. That was in the garden shed. He crossed the lawn in his new hurried way to the garden shed built onto the side of the "farmhouse." Beside the green-painted, faded door there was an old climbing rose. Pitton pruned it each year; it produced only a few roses, but they were all big, cabbagy things, pale pink. Pitton had the key to the garden shed on him. It was attached to a chain; the chain was fixed to a loop in his waistband. He pushed the green door open. The shed was dark inside. He forgot about the key to the garden gate. He left the shed door wide open and walked across the lawn-that part which still bore the impression, like ghostly shadows, of the three felled beeches-to the openness of the manor courtyard.
The wide open door of the garden shed, left just like that, was unlike Pitton. A while later he walked past my cottage again to the heavy gate in the garden wall. Forgetting again that he didn"t have the key to the padlock; that he had gone for it to the garden shed and got distracted.
He was disorientated, his frenzy expressed in these brisk, jerky little journeys, half yielding to his old routine, his wish to look after his garden, to do the jobs he had planned to do that morning; and then awaking afresh to his loss. Like an ant whose nest had just been smashed, he moved about hither and thither. At some stage he closed the door of the garden shed; and then he went away-but not by the white gate.
At lunchtime Mrs. Phillips came to see me. She had a reproving hospital manner. She said, as though speaking to one patient about another who had behaved badly, "Your Mr. Pitton was quite another person this morning. He came and sounded off about everything under the sun. Accusing us of everything he could think of. As though we had anything to do with anything. He knew very well what was going to happen. He knew everything yesterday. I don"t know why he pretended not to know. It was just pretense, you know. He didn"t say a thing, not in the morning, not at lunchtime, not when he had his tea with us. That was typical Pitton."
She spoke as though Pitton"s refusal the previous day to acknowledge his notice or his news-when she would have been waiting for his reaction-was wicked, and deserved the punishment it got. She spoke as though this wickedness of Pitton"s made everything explicable, absolved us all of the need to feel concerned for Pitton and frightened for ourselves.
And it was strange, Pitton"s silence of the previous day. Had he not understood, had he not taken in what had been said to him? Had he simply not listened? Had the words of the man in the gray suit been roundabout? Had the news been too shocking for Pitton to believe it? Or was it his own form of magic? I remembered how when Jack had fallen ill and his garden had grown wild, and the chimney was smoking in the summer, and Jack was in his bedroom trying to get warm, trying to unfreeze the blocks of ice that his lungs must have felt like, I remembered how Jack"s wife had denied that anything was wrong with the garden; and her manner had even suggested that I had said something discourteous and wrong.
SO QUITE suddenly, from one day to the next, part of the routine of the manor I had grown into, part of my new life and comfort, my private, living book of hours, was snapped. suddenly, from one day to the next, part of the routine of the manor I had grown into, part of my new life and comfort, my private, living book of hours, was snapped.
I never saw Pitton unlatching the wide white gate at the end of the lawn at nine again, or walking back to it at one and then at five with the special slow step of a man who had done his morning"s and then his day"s labor. Were there personal things he had left behind in the garden shed-Wellingtons, a plastic raincoat, a jacket? Did he come back for these things later, or did he abandon them, with the garden-shed key? The key he had carried in that intimate way, on a chain that ran from a loop in his waistband to his right trouser pocket. That key he had to give up to Mr. Phillips.
And thereafter at odd hours the washed-out green-painted garden-shed door (beside the thick-stalked rose bush, now almost a small tree, that Pitton had pruned year by year) thereafter for long periods during the day that door remained open-Pitton"s shed exposed, Pitton"s territory no longer Pitton"s (neither shed, nor key, nor tools, nor the heavy, tilting gate to the vegetable garden). That open garden-shed door, which Pitton had been so particular to keep closed-I could see it from the window of my room, and it was unsettling. I wished to close it; it was like the wish to straighten a mirror or picture hanging crooked on a wall. That open door, together with other changes-it was as though the man concerned had died in some unsanctified way, and everything that had been his could now be treated without ceremony.
When Jack-over the hill-had fallen ill, his flower and fruit garden had grown wild; and his vegetable garden-created in the waste ground between the farmyard metal dump below the beeches and the beginning of the cultivated down-had gone to seed. Pitton"s vegetable garden didn"t go to seed. It was tended through the summer and its produce was gathered in. Many strangers now came to the manor grounds, to do irregularly, in bits and pieces, the job that Pitton had done with unhurried system, the job around which he had built his mornings and his afternoons, his week, his year, marking the end of each stage with his own kind of ritual. This fragmentation of his job was like a further downgrading of the man, downgrading him now, and downgrading all he had done and been in the past, all his careful routine.
Some of the strangers in the manor were casual workers, paid by the hour or the day and obtained by the Phillipses from I don"t know where, perhaps from the places Mr. Phillips had worked in before. Some were friends. One, who soon ceased to be a stranger, was Mr. Phillips"s widowed father.
He was much smaller than his son, and slighter. Physically he was of another generation, another world: one could see in him the physique of agricultural workers in old photographs. Since the death of his wife, Mr. Phillips"s mother, the old man had been solitary. This opening up of the manor grounds to him (where he had been only an occasional visitor on Sat.u.r.day afternoons), and the opportunity for a little light work, was a blessing to the old man.
He lived much in the past, and liked to talk of the past. He was sociable. Solitude was not something he had chosen. It was like old age: something he had had to learn to live with. He had been born not far away and had lived all his life in the county. He told me at our first meeting, just outside my kitchen door, that he had started life as a carrier"s boy-the carrier for whom he worked making a living by carrying goods and parcels for people living along the eight miles between Amesbury and Salisbury. The old man spoke of this job, his first, as of something indescribably rich and rewarding, an enchantment.
He dressed neatly, in jacket and tie, like Pitton, and unlike his son, who preferred more casual and "sporty" clothes. And again unlike his son, the old man wore very pale colors: it was as though the chalk of the downs by which he had been surrounded all his life had affected his taste in colors, had made him see tints where another person might have seen something neutral. The old man often came now simply to walk about the grounds; and he dressed for these walks in the manor bush as though for an urban promenade-in this he was like Pitton, in my earliest memory of Pitton. Sometimes, with the suit or the sports jacket and tie, the old man also walked with a staff, of a sort I had never seen before: shoulder-high, with a p.r.o.ng or fork at the top in which the thumb was rested: the carrier"s boy now walking freely, privileged as the father of his son, walking with his old-fashioned staff in the overgrown grounds of a big house that was being built while he was a carrier"s boy. Did the old man make the connection?
The summer jobs were done. The fallen aspens-about whose wide, tangled spread of broken branches gra.s.s and weeds had grown tall and dark, a separate area of vegetation-the fallen aspens were cut up with a chain saw and the cut logs piled up in the back garden. Gra.s.s now grew tall around the log piles, just as gra.s.s and the plants they attracted grew into a bush around the trunk fragments that were too big to cut up and stayed more or less where they had fallen, soon looking old, like old debris, suggesting the further advance onto the back lawn of the water-meadow wilderness. The gra.s.s of that lawn was cut-the area of the aspen fall never recovered, never returned to gra.s.s, and was abandoned to weeds and marsh growth-and the lawn in front of my cottage was cut. And the vegetable garden was looked after.
This garden was hidden from my cottage by a high wall. Beyond the half-cottage that was my outbuilding there was, set in this wall, the heavy gate with the metal bars. This gate hung unevenly, but Pitton had developed the knack of closing it. His successors didn"t have this knack. The gate, unlatched, dragged more and more and was eventually left open: Pitton"s garden, the scene of his secret labors, was now quite exposed.
Astonishing now, when I went in to look, astonishing as always, the different sense of s.p.a.ce, the openness on the other side of the garden wall. The wall on that side was warm, sun-bleached; old fruit trees had been trained and pinned against it. The wall on my side was damp, always in shadow, only summer weeds growing in the poor soil at its base. The wall that I saw from my cottage was a northern wall. The wall on the other side was Mediterranean: part of the grandeur of the original walled-garden design, with its paths, its nursery beds, its vegetable areas, its formal orchard. Pitton had been able to keep only part of the garden going; but he had honored its formality, design, and dignity. Now, after the bonanza of his vegetable garden, his successors were creating only an allotment.
A cycle in the life of the manor had come to an end. There might one day be the beginning of a new cycle. But for the moment or for some years ahead the great walled garden, calling for the labor of many hands, had returned to a modest human scale, had become the setting for a small allotment.
The wide white gate at the end of the lawn-the gate that had been Pitton"s gate-was padlocked, for security. And since the estates along the river were so little protected, so open, and the area now attracted many communities of dropouts and vagrants, a new tide of idleness washing back and forth over the empty s.p.a.ces of southwestern England, for greater security a ma.s.s of cut branches, rapidly going brown and dry and dead, was piled up against the gate.
I had replaced the idea of decay, the idea of the ideal which can be the cause of so much grief, by the idea of flux. But now, in spite of myself, the a.s.sociations of the manor altered for me. I saw Pitton"s hand in many places-in the "refuge"; in the vast leaf-grave he (and I, working together on some afternoons) had gathered for compost (now no longer needed); in that open garden-shed door; and in the heavy door in the garden wall that could no longer close. Yet I also knew that what had caused me delight, when I first came to the manor, would have caused grief to someone who had been there before me; just as what caused me grief now spoke of pure pleasure to old Mr. Phillips, with his suit and his staff, happy in the wild grounds and the small allotment.
The memories of Pitton, those lingering signs of his work, work to which the man himself would now never add, were like the memories of a man who had died. And yet he was still with us, still living in his improved agricultural cottage next to Bray. It was because of that cottage-the cottage that went with his job-that he had to go. The cottage had become valuable-st.u.r.dily built, not period in the accepted way but old enough and genuine enough in style to be interesting; and of manageable size. It was worth many thousands, a hundred times the two or three hundred pounds that Bray"s father had paid for his cottage; and the estate needed the money.
But Pitton didn"t believe this. I met him one Sat.u.r.day morning in Salisbury. He was at his most country-gentleman in appearance-the suit, the shirt, the shoes, the hat, the carefully studied outfit which consumed his money. Pitton"s Salisbury hat! So stylish, so elegant and gentlemanly the gesture with which he half lifted it off his head in greeting! The imitation was now so old, the gesture so habitual, that perhaps no idea of style attached to it in Pitton"s mind any longer.
The face the uplifted hat revealed ran counter to the stylishness of the gesture: it was still the face of shock he had shown me when I had opened the kitchen door in answer to his imperious, angry knocking. Still that expression on his face: as though our meeting-which by chance took place in a pedestrian shopping street not far from the shop where Pitton bought his clothes, and where clothes like Pitton"s could be seen in the window still-as though our meeting revived all the twisted emotions in him that could find no resolution or outlet in words.
He had been told, he said, that the estate wanted his house in order to sell it. But he didn"t believe that story. Who would want to buy a house next to Bray? It was an agricultural cottage, a tied cottage, something for a gardener, something that no one had particularly taken care of. And just as when I had gone to his house that Christmastime he had suggested that he had a source of income other than his gardener"s wages, so now when he spoke of the house where he had lived for twenty-five years and more, it was to suggest that if it had been another kind of house he would have looked after it differently; and it was almost as if he were suggesting that his real house was somewhere else. Yet he didn"t want to leave his agricultural cottage. And though many months had pa.s.sed since he had stopped working at the manor, he wasn"t really trying to find another job. It was as though he had begun to feel that if he didn"t start looking for another job he mightn"t after all have to find another job.
He was confused, pulled in many directions, helpless. He seemed to be proving the point made by Mrs. Phillips. She had been continuing to look for some explanation of Pitton"s dismissal that would make it easier for everyone to bear; and she had settled on the idea that in his last year at the manor Pitton had gone very strange, that he had been finally undermined by the solitude of his labor-a pretense of work, a kind of half idling-in the wilderness, and that he had "gone to pieces."
In her previous job, Mrs. Phillips said, she had seen any number of people who had gone to pieces; it wasn"t only people you read about in the newspapers who went to pieces. I had thought that Mrs. Phillips was straining too hard to find an explanation. But then, meeting Pitton at the bus stop in the valley and meeting him sometimes in Salisbury, and talking about his problems, which he kept on insisting were insoluble, I thought it was possible that Mrs. Phillips was responding to the odd mixture in his personality of pa.s.sion and servility and affectation and pride and independence.
He didn"t want to be a gardener again, he told me. He could do the job at the manor; but he couldn"t do it anywhere else or for anybody else-it was too undignified. Nor did he want a town job. The country gentleman in him, or rather the free country laborer in him, feared the anonymity, the nothingness of the town worker.
I would meet Pitton at the bus stop in the valley. We would talk then until the bus came. We never talked on the bus. We sat on different seats. We also continued to meet in Salisbury; and sometimes we met in the village on the public road when I was coming back from my walk over the downs. Our talks were circular. He would put ideas to me about what he might do; I would encourage him; and then he would reject my encouragement, returning to the idea of the "grudge" against him.