Mrs. Phillips said of Brenda, "Michael kicked her out." And that was all.
Michael! The use of the first name pointed to some new attachment on Mrs. Phillips"s part, some new-or old-sympathy, something born of that "town" life-pub, club or hotel bar-which at one time might have involved them all, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips, Brenda and Les, and Michael Allen.
It was a good thing that the autumn was well advanced. No question now of Brenda"s having to show herself to anybody, to prove that she was unabashed and that life was going on. She could close her front door and stay indoors; just as Les could take out his tractor and hide behind the tinted plastic of his cab.
The farming organization that had brought these town people to the valley (and had in their own way remade parts of the valley) was fading, for reasons I didn"t know. With such ventures it was as with the military exercises on the ground or in the air that were so often with us: one saw a great deal, but understood little.
Les was looking, it was said, for another job. Three or four times I saw Brenda and Les on the road in their little dark-red motorcar. They had taken down part of the fence and the hedge to make a s.p.a.ce for that car in the garden. And the thatched cottage had indeed been no more than temporary shelter. To have invested more in it emotionally would have been a waste, more of a waste than Les"s evening and weekend work in the manor grounds.
The first time I saw them in their car after they had stopped coming to the manor there was some kind of half recognition from Les. From Brenda there was none. Perhaps there had been some trouble with Mrs. Phillips over my letters-the letters being put forward by her as a cause-and I had not been forgiven. On the later occasions I saw them there was nothing at all. Our brief acquaintance was over.
There was a van that I also saw, the van of Michael Allen, going importantly about on its central heating business. Country-town success! Michael had given me a glimpse of that side of things here. But Italy! Who would have a.s.sociated romance with that van and the name painted on the sides and the back of the van, painted in three places. Whenever I saw the van I thought of Mrs. Phillips"s words: "Michael kicked her out." How hard it must have been for Les and Brenda to live with those words, which others must also have heard!
The days shortened. The way below the yews from the public road to the manor drive and to my cottage, that way was so dark at four in the afternoon that when I went shopping in Salisbury on the mid-afternoon bus I needed to take a flashlight for the short walk back from the bus stop.
Country darkness! Big things could happen almost secretly. And one such thing happened in the thatched cottage with the straw pheasant on the roof.
It was Mrs. Phillips who gave me the news.
She said, two days after the event, "Brenda"s dead."
She added, and it seemed calmly, "Les murdered her."
"Murdered," the formal word, rather than "killed." We use formal words, even empty words, when events are big.
I thought of the way they had both appeared on the lawn during the pear picking-two birds in bright plumage. I thought of the face of the satisfied lover offering me the vegetables at the kitchen door, the gift of the happy man. Then I thought of Italy and the Michael Allen van going about its money-making business, spreading the name around-while Les was running about in his red car looking for a new job.
So hard to contemplate, the physical act, the setting, the finality, the body, just a few hundred yards away. I thought of the least intrusive question I might ask. "Where did he kill her?"
"Right in that cottage. On Sat.u.r.day night."
Sat.u.r.day night! Was it a night of drink and temper? It wasn"t what I a.s.sociated with them.
Mrs. Phillips said: "She taunted him."
And "taunted" I felt to be a technical word, as technical as "murdered." It had s.e.xual connotations. She, the Italian runaway, had done the s.e.xual taunting. She had not come back abashed. She had done the taunting, the goading. How often, to punish someone for her Italian failure, she must have "taunted" him! And it was hard not to feel that she didn"t have some idea of what she was provoking. And how, having started on the job of destruction-he had used a kitchen knife-having started on that, from which very quickly there was no turning back, however much in a corner of his mind he might have been wishing it all undone, healed again, how he must have struck, until the madness and the life was over! All in that little thatched cottage with the ruined garden.
Worker bees work till they die. When they die other bees clear the hive, get rid of the bodies. Because bees work and are clean. And so, without disturbance, without many people knowing, even people on the bus, the cottage was cleansed and cleared of its once precious life, its once precious pa.s.sions.
She "taunted" him-it was the verdict. And all hearts were with the living, the survivor, the man; as, had it occurred the other way, they would have been with the woman. The police were discreet, hardly seen, almost as secretive as the event itself. More information was to be had from the local weekly paper than from immediate neighbors. They had seen very little, and didn"t want to blame one partner more than the other: everyone drawn close at this moment to Brenda and Les, seeking to remember them, and responding to this very near event almost as to a family tragedy.
One local formality remained. Brenda"s "things" had to be collected. And some weeks later, before the winter turned to spring with the gales of spring, Brenda"s sister came to collect Brenda"s things from the unoccupied cottage, where there was no longer a dark-red motorcar.
Collecting the dead person"s things: it was like something from the old world-an aspect of the idea of sanct.i.ty, an aspect of decent burial, the honoring of the dead-and it seemed to call for some ritual. But there was none. The coming for the dead woman"s things was matter-of-fact. I wouldn"t have known about it if I wasn"t in the kitchen of the manor, settling some little bill with Mrs. Phillips, when Brenda"s sister came to call.
Mrs. Phillips knew Brenda"s sister. It was another indication of the Phillipses" "town" life, their life outside the manor and the village. Mrs. Phillips became much graver when Brenda"s sister said what she had come for. I was moved myself. And we all went, after introductions, to Mrs. Phillips"s sitting room with its view of the down and the river, the water meadows and the big aspens of the garden, the old stone terrace, the urns, the moss, the mottled stone, the seed bells for the birds, the lines of washing-the mixture of big-house garden and backyard domesticity which I had seen (through rain and mist) on my first day in the grounds when, hardly knowing where I was or understanding what I saw, I had called on the Phillipses. Thereafter I had seen that view only at Christmastime (those years when I was not abroad), when I called on the Phillipses to give them my presents.
Brenda"s sister was not immediately like Brenda. She was older, fatter. There was a quality in the fatness, the puffiness, which suggested illness, a clinical condition, rather than grossness. Brenda"s heaviness, in hips and thighs, had been different; it had suggested someone spoilt, someone who felt that her beauty ent.i.tled her to luxurious sensations and felt at the same time that her beauty could support a certain amount of self-indulgence. But then I began to see Brenda"s full lips and wild eyes in her sister"s face, saw those features lost or altered in puffy flesh; saw, too, the smoothness of skin and purity of complexion which would have given the girl, when she was a girl, a high idea of herself and her potential, but which was now part of the breathy wreck she had become. Things had not gone well for these sisters; in different ways their gift of beauty had turned out to be a torment for them.
Brenda"s sister lived in a small, newish town to the south, between Salisbury and Bournemouth, not town, not country, not the sort of desolate place she had thought she would end up in.
In the Phillipses" sitting room it was for a while as though Brenda"s sister"s call was a purely social one. But then she seemed suddenly to remember what had brought her.
She said, "You want to save everything. And then you want to throw everything away." Her voice broke; her eyes went watery. "She left so little. Her clothes." She tried to smile. "She was so particular about her clothes. But what can I do about her clothes?"
No ill will, no anger, no wish for revenge.
She said, "She was too much for him. He couldn"t handle her."
Mrs. Phillips allowed Brenda"s sister to talk on.
Brenda"s sister said, "She even thought he was queer. Did you know that? She told me he washed his hair every morning. Not in the evening after work, because he didn"t want to sleep on it when it was wet. But in the morning. He is like my son Raymond. I hope n.o.body thinks he is queer because he does that. Raymond does it for the girls at his school."
I had always a.s.sumed it was Brenda who had encouraged Les to dress up, and had thought that she had chosen things for him. This news about the washing of the hair suggested a lonelier and more desperate man.
Brenda"s sister said, "She expected so much from her life. My mother drilled it into us how much she suffered before the war, living in a little army house, hoping for great things to happen to my father. And that was all that ever happened to us. We lived in a little army house."
The story she told us was that her father, a simple serviceman with some factory experience, had had a fleeting moment of inspiration early in the war. He had hit on a new way of mounting guns in the tail of an airplane; and from being a simple serviceman he had been taken up by the authorities for a few months. He was not alone, though; there were many others like him, men with ideas.
"Always he was on his way to Ministry of Defence. Ministry of Defence, Ministry of Defence, I heard those words all the time. When I see the advertis.e.m.e.nts in the paper today and see the same words, it brings it back."
I didn"t think she was romancing. Her use of the words "Ministry of Defence" without the definite article-the the the that the average person would have wanted to add-was convincing; it suggested that she knew the words as well as she had said. that the average person would have wanted to add-was convincing; it suggested that she knew the words as well as she had said.
But nothing had happened to her father. Guns were changed; aircraft were modified or replaced; and the serviceman had become ordinary again. But his daughters had inherited through their mother a dream of glory together with a general pessimism, a wishing to hope and a nervousness about hoping. It made for temperament, frustration, self-destructiveness. It is as if we all carry in our makeup the effects of accidents that have befallen our ancestors, as if we are in many ways programmed before we are born, our lives half outlined for us.
Brenda"s sister said, "I can"t talk. I didn"t do so well myself."
She had married a builder who-when she had at last got out into the world, got away from the little army house-had seemed to her immensely prosperous and stylish; but had then seemed less so; had fallen on hard times, had done even worse when, trying to change his luck, he had set up in business in Germany; and had then been unfaithful with a younger woman, as glamoured by his manner as Brenda"s sister once had been. He had finally left home, left his wife and child.
An old story-that was what Brenda"s sister said; and that was the way she told it, playing down the drama. "As usual, Muggins was the last to know." All her care now was for her son; he was her sole interest; she had narrowed herself down to that.
So, though she didn"t make the point, there was a pattern to her life. Her father had been replaced by her husband, and her husband by her son. Her life had repeated; she had lived the same life or versions of the same life. Or, looking at it another way, almost as soon as it had begun, her life of choice and pa.s.sion had ended-as it had ended for her father, her mother, and possibly for generations of her ancestors.
All Brenda"s sister"s talk of herself came out without prompting; and her hysteria became noticeable. So it was possible, after her early calmness, even formality, in Mrs. Phillips"s sitting room, with the grand view, to see Brenda"s sister as an ill person, someone more marked than Brenda had been by their family past, the past that had really been the absence of a great event. And it was possible at the same time to see in her not only more and more reminders of Brenda"s looks, but also something-like another side-of Brenda"s pa.s.sions. Such varied pa.s.sions, so many roots, so little understood, even by the people who had become victims of those pa.s.sions.
Then the hysterical woman with the still smooth skin, the still un-blotched color, remembered her social graces. The call was over. She had to do what she had come to do: collect the things of her sister, who had left so little behind.
We left the sitting room. A corridor; thick walls, stone mullions in the window; a door to the big kitchen. And there at the portico Mrs. Phillips said good-bye.
When we were out of the manor courtyard and on the rough, stony drive, Brenda"s sister said-and it was sudden after her apparent trustingness in the sitting room-"I don"t think I will ever forgive Mrs. Phillips."
She was distressed. I began to walk with her to the road. As we walked below the yews she told me of Brenda"s flight to Italy.
Michael Allen had gone by air. Brenda had gone by train. During that journey-hearing so little English, talking so little to people-she had thought a lot about what she was doing and she had become afraid. By the time she reached Rome she had decided not to go to Michael. She thought she would go and stay at a hotel and get a message to Leslie, even send for him. She had a little money, enough for a few days. She booked into a hotel near the railway station. There was no telephone at home, in the thatched cottage. So she had telephoned the manor and asked for a message to be pa.s.sed on to Leslie.
Nothing had happened; no word came from Leslie. Then, swallowing her pride (because there had been some quarrel between them), Brenda had telephoned the people in Jack"s old cottage-the woman who drove fast up the hill in her motorcar to collect her children from the school bus every weekday afternoon and had never smiled at me; the woman who had leveled Jack"s garden. But still no message came from Leslie. By this time Brenda"s money had run out. She had then done what she had decided not to do. She had gone after all to Michael Allen and had been with him until, as we had all been told, he had kicked her out.
She had come back aggrieved, angry, in a mood to taunt the man she regarded or pretended to regard as a queer, not fully a man. She felt mocked by the romantic impulse that had thrilled and sustained her for a while in the hotel near the railway station in Rome: the girl in need, the girl in danger, the lover eager at the other end. Leslie should have done everything, sold everything, to go to her. But there had been no word from Leslie.
Brenda"s sister said, "Mrs. Phillips never pa.s.sed the message to Leslie. She did it four or five days later, when Brenda had left the hotel and was with Michael. She said she forgot. She said other things came up. She said she didn"t think it was all that important. But I think it was deliberate."
From the woman who lived in Jack"s old house Brenda"s sister said she didn"t expect anything. But this story gave a new character to the woman-and the shape and color of her car-racing up the hill to meet her young children off the afternoon school bus.
One day, late in the summer, walking past the old farm buildings and what had been Jack"s cottage and garden-the junk and ruins which had formed no part of Jack"s vision of a world ever renewed, ruins to which now, across the droveway, was added a burning pit in the chalk for industrial-looking rubbish, the fire of which occasionally singed the silver birches planted years before to screen the old patch of waste ground-one day, walking past the farm and its spreading litter and on up to where the Swiss rolls of hay had been stacked and were already going black and brilliant green with new shoots of gra.s.s, I heard the sound of a great fire behind the young wood-and that wood was no longer so young.
I heard the sound behind the trees; saw the smoke and, between the black of the tree trunks, the flames in the field beyond, the heat waves distorting the view like a pane of old-fashioned gla.s.s; felt the heat; and then very quickly was engulfed by the noise, rising fast to an amazing crepitation. And I thought of another sound I had heard more than twenty-five years before in the highlands of northeastern South America: the sound of a big waterfall. Water, fire-in great disturbance they made the same sound. And fleetingly to me, walking on the downs in that overpowering noise, it seemed that all matter was one.
On the way back-the fire quickly burnt away, finished, ashes in the field behind the wood-on the way back from my walk, then and afterwards, the thick patch of moss below the dormer window on the thatched roof of the empty house, a green that was shining, unnatural, that green, once part of the beauty of thatch, seemed to stand for more than vegetable matter.
So quiet the thatched house now; so ruined the little garden once neat with its hedge, scores of small roses in the summer.
And so quiet, over the hill on the other side, at the bottom of the valley, where an old, gra.s.sed-over field track led to a small abandoned farm building, all black and rust in a little dip in the land, so quiet when I saw them on a Sat.u.r.day or Sunday afternoon, in the silence of the empty downs: the children from what had been Jack"s cottage, playing amid the rubble (whitening, sprouting a few weeds with yellow flowers) and the tires of the silage pit.
AND THERE, perhaps, Jack"s vision of the valley as a whole place would continue; a vision without the decadence that was in my eye; a vision of childhood that would expand in the adult mind.
There were others who saw the valley and droveway as a place without decay. Walking one day past the old farm buildings, past the fresh litter below the birch trees, the fire in the chalk pit, turning up towards the new wood, I saw a figure in the distance.
I was used to solitude on the walk. The sight of a person in the distance like this, with the prospect of an encounter ten or fifteen minutes ahead, could spoil all the intervening walk and the walk back as well (because the person encountered would be likely to be walking back himself, usually to a parked car at the far end of the droveway, where it met one of the highways). I preferred therefore, if I saw a person approaching, to give up the walk and turn back.
This time, however, I didn"t. The person I was walking towards turned out to be a middle-aged woman. She was quite small. In the distance, and especially when seen against the sky, she had seemed physically imposing; people stood out in the emptiness. Her greeting just before we crossed was easy, open; we stopped and spoke. She was a working woman from Shrewton. When she lived at Amesbury, she said, she had regularly done the walk we were both now doing. She had come out now to look for the deer. So we had that in common as well. She said she had worked out the circuit of the deer; she knew roughly where they crossed the public road. And it was extraordinary, the survival of the family of deer in a piece of land bounded on three sides by busy highways and on one of those sides in addition by the army firing ranges.
No decay in that woman"s eye. Downs, walks, deer: the wonder of the natural world as available as it had always been.
And no decay in the eye of the old farm manager either. I saw him one day on a horse on the rising stretch of the droveway between the wood on one side and a treeless field or pasture on the other, before the hill with the larks and the barrows on the brow of the hill. In the old days he had seldom come so far on his inspection tours in his Land-Rover. But now he was retired and could roam; and he was on a horse, a further sign of leisure.
It was a big horse, of a beautiful color, white or gray spotted or spattered with red-brown. It was a difficult horse, he said. It was the gift of his daughter, who had married and gone to live in Gloucestershire. And that was what his talk was about: his daughter (so good with horses) and her gift of the horse (no trouble to her, that animal).
His suburban house at the very edge of the antique droveway; his neat garden; his daughter grown up and gone away; and now the empty days. How quickly his time had pa.s.sed! How quickly a man"s time pa.s.sed! So quickly, in fact, that it was possible within a normal span to witness, to comprehend, two or three active life cycles in succession.
That wasn"t what I thought about when I met him. When I met him on the horse that he was finding so difficult-he dismounted, with some relief, to talk to me-I thought at first only that it was true what some people said: that people who retired after active or physically energetic lives aged fast. He had aged; he had become bent; his walk was stiff (the walk in which, when I had first seen him and thought him to be an exemplar of the farmer "type," I had seen a "farmer"s walk").
The other thought, about the shortness of a man"s active cycle, his doing period, came to me afterwards, when I had left the manor and my cottage, when that section of my life had closed, and I had begun to feel, myself, that energy and action were things no longer absolutely at my command, that everyone had been given his particular measure of energy, and that when it was used up it was used up. These thoughts came to me not many years after I had seen the manager on his difficult horse, and seen the gap between us in age and energy and expectations. But middle age or the decline a.s.sociated with it comes abruptly to some people; and middle age had come as abruptly to me as old age appeared to me then to have come to the old manager.
I would have liked to hear the old manager say something about the new farm people. I would have then said-more in tribute to him as someone from my past, than because I understood what I saw of the farming around me-how much I preferred his way. But he wasn"t interested. So the solidarity went unexpressed. And it was just as well. Because eventually, mysteriously (at least to me), the new venture failed, after two harsh, dry summers, summers so harsh that the old mock orange shrub outside my cottage died.
During one of those droughts I heard talk-on the bus, and from Bray, the car-hire man-that water wasn"t to be brought to the cattle, but that the cattle were to be transported to where there was water, transported perhaps to Wales! Such was the scale and style and reputation of the new venture. I don"t know whether anything like that happened, or whether it was just excited local exaggeration. Soon, however, it didn"t matter. The venture failed. And even this failure-large as it was, affecting so many people, affecting the eventual appearance of so many acres-seemed to happen quietly.
It was some time before I knew that there had been failure. The machines were there; the cows were there; the men were up and down in their cars; the big trucks came to take away the grain from the metal-walled barn. But then gradually the failure, the withdrawal at the center, began to show.
The prefabricated cow shed next to the barn was opened, front and back, and cleared of its dung and straw; and it remained open and clean (though stained) and empty: the stalls, the concrete floor with its ca.n.a.ls, the slatted timber of the walls striping the sunlight, radiating it at many angles, and giving the shed an internal glow. The new milking building or parlor was taken down. So newly put up, its concrete platform-all that remained-still so new and raw-looking on the hillside. It was like Jack"s greenhouse; that, too, had left only a concrete floor.
Again, here, building had been on too big a scale, a scale too big for men. Needs had been exaggerated, had ramified, and had left a ruin. An empty cow shed that might eventually be taken down and sold elsewhere; a milking machine that no doubt had already been sold, leaving only a concrete floor. So small in the openness now, that floor, where the milking machines had hummed and hissed and dials had kept check of this and that; while the dung-stained cows, corralled into their iron-railed pa.s.sages at particular times, had waited with a curious stillness to give milk to the machines, after being walked up the hill to the cowman"s shouts (the only human remnant of the milking ritual).
The cows themselves eventually disappeared. Some would have been sold; but whether sold or not, what would have happened to them would have been what always happened to cows when their time was judged to have come: batches of them were regularly taken off in covered vans to the slaughterhouse.
I had seen the cows on the hillsides against the sky, heads down, grazing, or looking with timorous interest at the pa.s.sing man. And they had seemed like the cows in the drawing on the label of the condensed-milk tins I knew in Trinidad as a child: something to me as a result at the very heart of romance, a child"s fantasy of the beautiful other place, something which, when I saw it on the downs, was like something I had always known. I had seen the big eyes, the occasional mild stampede of the herd as, within their pasture, they had followed the walking man, thinking he had brought them something tasty or was to lead them to something they had been trained to like. I had seen the big, wet, black noses, the fly-repellent in the metal sachets clipped to the ears, which they flapped like heavy fans. One sees what one sees. Harder to imagine, unreal, what one doesn"t see.
It had taken me some time to see that though milk came from cows that had dropped calves, no calf was to be seen, except very sick ones: little, seemingly fluid sacks of black and white or brown and white on straw, creatures still seeming fresh from the womb. And no cow with its calf. No lowing herd winding o"er the lea here, as in Gray"s "Elegy"; no "sober" herd lowing to meet their young at evening"s close, as in "The Deserted Village."
Pictures of especial beauty at one time, those lines of poetry, matching the idea of the cows on the condensed-milk label. Especial beauty, because (though I knew that "sober" well-lovely, apt word-and knew the ritual of bedding down cattle for the night) we had no herds like that on my island. We didn"t have the climate, the pasture; the island had been developed for the cultivation of sugarcane. But there were cattle. Some members of my family, like other country people, kept cows, one or two, for milk, for love, for religion.
We were at the very end of the old Aryan cow worship, the worship of the cow that gave milk, without which men"s life would have been harder and in some climates and lands impossible. This worship was something our grandfathers had brought with them from peasant India; when I was a child, we still honored the idea for its own sake, as well as for its link with the immemorial past. Among us, the new milk from a cow that had just calved was almost holy. A special sweet was made from this very rich milk and sent by the cow"s owner to friends and relations, sent in very small portions, like a consecrated offering from a religious rite.
Our few cows (perhaps like Gray"s or Goldsmith"s herds) were poor things compared with the healthy, big animals on the downs. But these animals on the downs, even with their beauty, were without the sanct.i.ty, the constant attention of men, which as a child I thought cows craved. These cows in railed pastures or meadows had numbers scored into their rumps. No sanct.i.ty at birth, and none at death; just the covered van. And sometimes, as once in the derelict, mossy yard at the back of Jack"s cottage, there were reminders of a.s.sisted insemination or gestation going wrong: when for some days, isolated from the animals that had all come out well, oddly made cattle were penned up there, with that extra bit of flesh and hair (with the black and white Frisian pattern) hanging down their middle, as of cow material that had leaked through the two halves of the cow mold.
And now, with the disappearance of the cattle, there came to the old and new lanes and ways of the downs around the farm (whose life might have seemed to the visitor unchanging and ritualized) a moment of stasis, suspense. There had been great activity; now there were more ruins than ever.
The manor in whose grounds I lived, so many of its rooms shut up; the gardens of the manor, the forested orchard; the children"s house there, with the conical thatched roof, the thatch rotting, the thick stack of the damp reeds slipping out of the wire netting in one place, creating the effect at the bottom of a diagonal slicing of the reeds; the squash court that was not squash court or farmhouse; the old granary with the double pyramidal roof.
Beyond the renovated church, the old farm buildings had been taken down and replaced by the prefabricated shed, which was now empty; with the round convex silver mirrors at the entrance to the cow yard as reminders of the traffic that had once been. The pink house with the green-stained thatched roof and the shredding straw pheasant on the roof; its garden now a piece of waste ground. The new barn and the new half-slatted cow shed at the top of the hill with the windbreak of pine and beech, trees which had grown so much since I had first seen them. At the bottom of that hill, the silage pit with the thick timber-plank walls against the excavated hillside, the timber planks stained with creosote; the tires all around, bought in such number from people who dealt in such things, tires worn smooth from many miles on many roads; and the rubble of the excavation, hummocked and chalky white and full of gra.s.s and weeds.
And these were set among older ruins. The small old farm building, perhaps from the last century, far to the right at the end of the overgrown track at the foot of the hill; and all the many farm buildings, old or very old, at the back of Jack"s cottage. Along the droveway: the beehives; the house-shaped old rick; the old stone house, ruined walls alone, surrounded by trees which, tall and overhanging the ruin when I had first seen them, were now ten years older: vegetable nature moving on, stone immovable.
And in the walk in the other direction, away from the old Land-Rover run of the old manager: the great Swiss rolls of hay still stacked in the s.p.a.ce between the wood-how grown!-and the hill of larks, with the ancient barrows at the top, part of the pimpling of the downs as seen against the sky: those rolls of hay now as black and as earthlike as the older bales that, at the other end of the droveway, had indeed, below their tattered plastic sheeting, turned to earth. Gra.s.s to hay to earth.
MY OWN time here was coming to an end, my time in the manor cottage and in that particular part of the valley, my second childhood of seeing and learning, my second life, so far away from my first. time here was coming to an end, my time in the manor cottage and in that particular part of the valley, my second childhood of seeing and learning, my second life, so far away from my first.
I had tried almost from the beginning to make myself ready for this end. After the glory and surprise of the first spring on the riverbanks-the new reeds, the water clearing to crystal ("freshing out," as I learned to say), but this water green and dark with olive-blue suggestions and with illusory depth where it reflected the thick, succulent growth on the banks, and especially below trees-after that first spring I would say: "At least I had a spring here." And then I said: "At least I had a spring and summer here." And: "At least I"ve had a year here." And so it went on, as the years pa.s.sed. Until time began to telescope, and experience itself began to change: the new season not truly new any more, bringing less of new experience than reminders of the old. One had begun to stack away the years, to count them, to take pleasure in the counting, acc.u.mulation.
One autumn afternoon I had a slight choking fit as I walked past Jack"s old cottage and the derelict old farmyard. The fit pa.s.sed by the time I had got round the corner, cleared the farmyard, and left behind the old metal and tangled wire and timber junk below the beeches. (Not the birches near the fire pit; they were on the other side of the way. These beeches were at the edge of the farmyard, big trees now in their prime, their lowest branches very low, providing a wonderful, rich, enclosing shade in the summer that made me think of George Borrow and his wanderings in The Romany Rye The Romany Rye and and Lavengro Lavengro.) Past the beeches and the farm, in the familiar solitude of the gra.s.sy way, I began to breathe easily again. Some irritation, something in the air around the farmyard, some pa.s.sing allergy, I thought, and did nothing about it when I went home. That evening the fit returned. It was like a continuation of the moment near Jack"s cottage; but this time it stayed with me, and within two or three hours I was seriously ill.
This was the illness that did away with whatever remained of youthfulness in me (and much had remained), diminished my energy, and pushed me week by week, during my convalescence, month by month, into middle age.
It was the end, for me, of the manor cottage as well. The downs, the uplands, the river and its banks-the geography here was simple. Water drained off the downs to the river. After rain, on the paved lane beside the windbreak, there were the little pebbled rivulets I had minutely observed running between the asphalt edge and the gra.s.s verge, down to the public road and then, over the road surface or through culverts, towards the river. Little rivulets like that, but charged with beech mast, now fresh, now old, ran past my kitchen door after rain; and left little tide wracks, almost, of beech-mast debris all down the path. My cottage was cold. The solid stone and flint walls which I loved-for the warm color of the stone especially-kept in this cold. The beech trees that embowered it also kept out the sun. Even in summer it never got warm; even during the summer drought that killed the old mock orange shrub I needed heat at night.
The beauty of the place, the great love I had grown to feel for it, greater than for any other place I had known, had kept me there too long. My health had suffered. But I couldn"t say then, and can"t say now, that I minded. There is some kind of exchange always. For me, for the writer"s gift and freedom, the labor and disappointments of the writing life, and the being away from my home; for that loss, for having no place of my own, this gift of the second life in Wiltshire, the second, happier childhood as it were, the second arrival (but with an adult"s perception) at a knowledge of natural things, together with the fulfillment of the child"s dream of the safe house in the wood. But there was the cold of the cottage, and the damp and mist of the glorious riverbank; and the illnesses that come to people who have developed or inherited weak lungs.
It was some time before I went walking again. I was working on a big book. At a certain stage in that kind of labor, energy becomes one: mental energy, physical energy, the use of one depleting the other. And when I was sufficiently recovered, most of my energy went on my book.
I was also, sadly, preparing to leave. Just a few miles away, on a dry down, I was converting two derelict agricultural cottages into a house. The cottages had been built eighty years or so before on the site of an old agricultural hamlet with a very old name. The old hamlet had disappeared; nothing remained of it except a few level areas, little green platforms or terraces, close to one another, in certain meadows. During my own building work, old brick walls and brick foundations from the last century and the black earth of old latrines were dug up where-with smooth green slopes all around-I had been expecting only chalk.
The walls and foundations of workers" houses: generations of agricultural workers had lived on the site. And even in the pair of cottages I was renovating, the cottages that had been built early in the century over the foundations and debris of the old hamlet, many generations of workers, or many different people, had lived. Now I, an outsider, was altering the appearance of the land a little, doing what I had been aware of others doing, creating a potential ruin.
(And later, after I had moved there, when old people came to look at the cottages where they had lived or visited, I felt ashamed. And once-when a very old lady, not far from death, was brought by her grandson to look at the cottage where as a girl she had lived for a summer with her shepherd grandfather, and was so bewildered by the changed cottage she found that she thought she had come to the wrong place-once I pretended I didn"t live there.) I should have made a clean break, gone elsewhere. But having cut myself off from my first life, and having had, unexpectedly, and twenty years after that earlier casting off, the good fortune to have found a second life, I was unwilling to move too far. I wanted to stay with what I had found. I wanted to recreate, so far as it was possible, what I had found in the manor cottage.
One day, perhaps nine or ten months after I had fallen ill, I went on my old walk. New a.s.sociations now, to add to the old. And, as if to match my mood, I saw, almost as soon as I began to go down the hill beside the windbreak, a greater change at the bottom of the valley than any I had known.
What had been the row of three farm cottages, one of which had been Jack"s, was being converted into one big house. The basic work had been done. The three cottages, or so it appeared from the outside, had been turned into a large living room; new s.p.a.ces or rooms had been added to this big central room. The roof of the house was being put on: new, red-blond rafters. The design of the house was not elegant. But it was going to be roomy and comfortable; and every window would give a staggering green view, of the droveway, or the slopes of the downs, the woods of birch and beech, or the lines of blackthorn and hawthorn along the lateral field lanes.
Most of the old farm buildings had gone. But some at the back were still there, among them the old barn with the high loading window and the projecting metal bracket where a pulley and cable would once have helped to lift sacks or bales from loaded wagons and swing them into place inside.
The builders were working on the roof, hanging slates fast. The van with the builder"s name was on the droveway, where once Jack"s geese had roamed. There was a radio playing loudly somewhere in the unfinished, hollow, reverberating building. The builders, town people, were more unwelcoming than the town farm workers had been.
How exposed a house looks when it becomes a site for builders, how stripped of sanct.i.ty, when a room, once intimate, becomes mere s.p.a.ce! Jack"s cottage (whose interior I had never seen until now) had been reduced-without side wall or middle flooring-to pure builder"s s.p.a.ce, and at this stage of building was still pure s.p.a.ce, like the s.p.a.ce within the ruined stone-walled house with the big sycamores further along the droveway. Somewhere in that s.p.a.ce Jack had made his bravest decision, to leave his deathbed for the last Christmas season with his friends, in the so ordinary public house not far from the end of the droveway. And that was the s.p.a.ce to which-with what illness, delirium, resignation, or perhaps reconciliation-he had returned to die.
I saw this new building going up in summer, in white chalk dust. But in winter, as I knew, the site had been one of mud and water, settling at the bottom of the valley, mud and water many inches deep. That was the source of the damp that had given Jack his bronchitis and his pneumonia. But now that wet and damp had been dealt with. All the ground that had been Jack"s garden and goose ground, and the gardens or gra.s.sed-over areas of the other cottages, all that had been concreted over, to create a forecourt for the big house.
At the back, the concrete floor of Jack"s greenhouse was not to be seen; the area had been incorporated into the new living s.p.a.ce of the big house.