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 prong 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 grass 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. Grass now grew tall around the log piles, just as grass 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 grass of that lawn was cut — the area of the aspen fall never recovered, never returned to grass, 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 space, 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 spaces of southwestern England, for greater security a mass 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 associations 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 — sturdily 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 Saturday 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 passed 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.