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 passed 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 passion 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 grass — 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 sturdiness. 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.
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 Saturday afternoons), and the opportunity for a little light work, was a blessing to the old man.